Unleashing Innovation for Sustainable Success Feat. Peter Diamandis

I want to talk in the second part now about a bold and abundant mindset, and I want to start that with a video. My goal here is for you to up your game. My goal here is for you to think at a level that's uncomfortable. My goal is to have you think at, as Dan and Joe would say, a 10x level or 100x level. How are you going to touch a billion people on this planet? How are you going to take on the world's biggest problems and solve them? So let's watch this video and then come back.

The actual moonshot is wonderful, inspirational, poetic, beautiful, involved, great technical challenges, genuine heroism. It brought the world together. But think about the Polynesian islander on the dugout canoe deciding one day they were going to go that way. No one had ever been that way before. No one even knew if there was anything that before. It was amazing and it changed the world.

People can set their minds to magical, seemingly impossible ideas, and then through science.

And technology, bring them to reality.

And that then sets other people on.

Fire, that other things that look impossible might be accomplishable.

Galileo is such a hero, you know, in thinking big. And what he represents to me is both curiosity and wonder that humanity had that he had that pushed him and drove himself to invent and work on the first telescopes that allowed us to see the moon. And here we are. These aviation pioneers were figuring it out as they went. No one really knew how to build an airplane, right? No one knew how to fly an airplane. It was amazing and crazy and wonderful, and they wanted to explore. Many years ago, the great British explorer.

George Mallory, who was to die on.

Mount Everest, was asked, why did he.

Want to climb it.

He said, because it is there challenges.

In the world, and you could feel daunted by that, you know, and sort of oppressed by that. Or you kind of say, how might we think differently about this? Everyone else in the world is working on the next 10%. If you can be the one that delivers that 10 times improvement, you have a chance to really change things. If you want cars to run at 50 miles per gallon, fine, you can retool your car a little bit. But if I tell you it has to run on a gallon of gas.

For 500 miles, you have to start over.

You need a lot of courage in.

This work, and you need a lot of persistence. One of the things that's really critical is not only have the courage to keep trying every day or thinking big, even if you don't really 100% believe it's possible, like you might Think this might be possible? Have the courage to try. That's how the greatest things have happened. You don't spend your time being bothered that you can't teleport from here to.

Japan because there's a part of you.

That thinks it's impossible. Moonshot thinking is choosing to be bothered by that.

We choose to go to the moon.

In this decade and do the other.

Things, not because they are easy, but.

Because they are hard. Humanity's progress has been a series of amazing, audacious things, from the very small and personal up to the great big and grand. And we are a species of moonshots. And to me, that's like the really amazing poetic and inspirational thing. I think our ambitions are a glass ceiling on what we can accomplish. When you find your passion, you're unstoppable. You make amazing things happen. It's been true through all of history. I believe in the human spirit, and I believe that there are always going to be crazy people who get out of bed one morning and say, you know what? I think I can build a space elevator. And old school, do it. But I think that if we become afraid to take these great big risks, we stop inspiring people, we stop achieving things. And the biggest nightmare scenario is that we won't have what it takes to solve the really big challenges. When Kennedy said that we would put.

A man on the moon, it's about.

The fact that he. He said, we don't know how to do this yet and we're going to do it anyway.

And that sends chills up everybody's spine.

Because if that happens, what couldn't we do?

Yeah, it's great, huh? So the guy speaking in that video is a good friend, Astro Teller. He's the head of Google X and I interviewed him at length for my next book, Bold, and talk about the fact that we're living in a world where you can take moonshots. And his ethos is so true that when you're trying to go 10% bigger, you're competing with everybody else trying to go 10% bigger. When you go 10x bigger, when you have the audacity to say that and try that, it inspires an amazing group of people to come by your side and no one's competing with you there. And the question is, is it really a hundredfold harder? And the chances are that it's not. So I also, in Bold, really drill down into what the eight innovation principles are that Google uses. And then with Stephen, look at how Lockheed Skunk works maps onto that. So one of the most extraordinary companies and mindsets and how do they work? Let me share with you these eight principles. The first is focus on the user. Google's issue, and you'll see this again and again is focus on the user. What does the user need? Pretty obvious, pretty direct. The second is Open will win. You know, I bet ON Android over iOS for that one reason Open will win the ability for having billions of people to contribute to you instead of thinking that, oh my 10,000 employees are the best and brightest in the world, there's no competition there. The second is ideas can come from everywhere or anywhere. The whole notion of crowdsourcing, right, we talk about that at Abundance360. We talk about that at, at Xprize. At HeroX, it's the fact that you can crowdsource solutions from around the world to solve your problems. Think big, start small. So at Singularity University I constantly teach the students start with a product that has the ability to earn a dollar on day one, but can impact a billion people in a decade. That's the think big, start small. Never fail to fail. This is where big companies screw up, where they don't take risks. And you guys know that as entrepreneurs, never fail to fail. The rapid experimentation, launch early and iterate. My friend who's the CEO, Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn says if you're not embarrassed by your first product release, you've launched too late. And I believe that when you look for striving for perfection, you miss the whole benefit of this hyper connected world today. Be a flat, a platform, float all boats and then finally make it matter. Make it matter. Oh my God. Make it matter. So in bold, I talk about a concept that my good friend Salim Ismael coined, which is having a massively transformative purpose, an mtp. Do you have for yourself and for your company a massively transformative purpose that matters, that's going to attract people to work for you at xprize. It's making the impossible possible or solving the world's grand challenges. So here's the eight. We'll talk about these a little bit more. My question for you is what is the area of your business where you should be going 10 times bigger rather than going 10% bigger? I want you to reflect on that and think about that. Don't have time to do a session now, but ask yourself that question, please. So here's one of the first moonshot organizations. One of the first bold thinkers out there is Kelly Johnson, who in 1943 is called by the Defense Department, says we're losing the War against Nazi Germany. And we need a jet plane. Never had a jet plane before. In 143 days, these guys did not design a jet plane. They delivered working hardware. You can't negotiate a contract 143 days.

Today.

They also delivered the U2, the SR71s. The question is how did they do this? And so Inbold actually looked at how Lockheed Skunk Work did this, compared this against Google X and came up with some shared elements. And here they are. The first is having a compelling purpose or mission, an MTP that is uniquely yours. Google's is to categorize the world's information and if someone else came up with that mtp, that's Google's. So something uniquely that's yours that attracts the world's top people to come and work for you. The second that Kelly Johnson and Google X share is small teams, a passion around small teams. And this is the words from Kelly Johnson. The number of people connected to any project should be restricted in an almost vicious manner. This is Jeff Bezos two pizza rule, right? Teams under 10, ideally five or six, extreme isolation. Access by outsiders to the project and its personnel must be strictly controlled. Because if you're trying to innovate inside your organization of even 100 people, let alone 5,000 people and you're trying to do something that's disrupting your company, the entire immune organization is going to come out to you and say that's a crazy idea, it can't be done. If you do it, you can put us out of business. What are you doing? Come on, stop it. And so actually taking that skunk works inside your group and isolating it, right? It's Steve Jobs taking his Mac team to a different building with a pirate flag above. So how do you isolate your team authority and autonomy? The manager must have control of his program, create mutual trust and very close cooperation on a day to day basis. The notion that my team at PhD Ventures Abundance 360. It's five group, it's a team of five. It's like they're a self managed company. They have the authority and the autonomy to go and run on their own. I learned that from strategic coach. Of course. It's all good things. Flexibility must provide a very flexible drawing. So when they designed the fighter jets in the U2 and SR71, there was a drawing in the middle of the room where anybody could go and change the drawing. There was no sort of organizational hierarchy. I need to get this person permission. You could go and change the drawing of that airplane. And so it provided immense flexibility but also responsibility. Lives were at stake if you screwed up, but it allowed rapid iteration like never before. And then finally, testing and experimentation fail often fail early. Test, test, test the next part of the book. I actually had a chance to sit down at length with a number of amazing people. Larry Page, Elon, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson studied their work and came up with a series of eight. I'll share six. Thinking at scale, strategies, passion and purpose. Elon said, I didn't go and build a car company and a rocket company to make money. I'm not crazy. It was like driven by my passion. Thinking at scale and experimentation. Jeff Bezos saying, you need to have thick skin if you're not failing often. If you're not experimenting on a monthly or daily basis, you're not going to innovate. Larry Page saying, we need to be customer centric. We need to be doing stuff and touching stuff that people use every day. Richard Branson saying, we need to have risk mitigation. And again, you guys will get copies of my book. But specifically, entrepreneurs are ones who take risk but set it off to someone else. Long term thinking. Jeff Bezos with Amazon is a perfect example of long term thinking. And then finally, optimistic thinking. And Larry gives me credit on abundance often. But it's, you know, it's, we have a reason to be tremendously optimistic in the world today. And having that mindset inside your organization and your company and your family and your life changes how you think about the future.

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's freebook.com and you can get a copy copy there. What was it for you and how do you most effectively do that to someone else?

Yeah, that's beautiful. I want to, I want to kind of riff on some of the things you just said because you said so many great things there. I mean, sales is 101. You want to be successful in business and in life, you need to be able to sell. Now you can use the word sale. Sometimes we use a euphemism. We say enrollment. You know, enrollment conversation. You want to get your kids to brush their teeth, it's an enrollment. You want to get the homeworks. Enrollment, you want to have sex. It's an enrollment conversation. A little Bit different enrollment conversation, but it's an enrollment conversation. You're selling somebody on something. And I think one of the greatest shortcuts, because I think it's kind of cool if we give some little nuggets here of shortcuts for people that you can get into that heart space. That's the term I typically use, is when you say you're gonna show up for a friend and empathize and listen and coach and hold up a mirror and all the good stuff you do. If you were really a great friend, friend, not just enable them, but be a great friend to them. You're. You're really in your heart space. And that heart space for a person who's not your great friend yet is education. So to me, if you just teach, if you just go into teaching mode, that it puts you in that place. It's a shortcut. How can I teach them something? So here's your problem. I'm going to teach you about your problem. But actually, you tell me what your problem is. Right? Just you can ask, what's the biggest challenge you're having right now in your business or in your personal life? Right. They'll tell you.

Right.

You know, what's the solution? Because Socrates said all learning is remembering. So you just, you know, all new information comes from out there. You could be the genius if you want to be, but the fact of the matter is, they're probably going to have more of the answers than you'd think anyway. So just ask them. Right?

Exactly.

What's the solution? You know, what are some of the things that might help you to shift from that problem to that solution? Again, you can just educate them in the. In the process, as you're enrolling them, as you're selling them. I actually like telling them that's exactly what we're doing. You know, there's going to be something here that's going to be of interest to you. We'll get to that when it's time. But in the moment, I'd like to just share with you the sales process and how this works and how it works. So it's reciprocal. So there's a benefit to both of us in engaging in this way and how you can learn something valuable as you're also about to take action to change your life. Right? Right. And that when you. When you kind of pull the curtain back a little bit and you share that, that's what you're about and that's what you're doing, you're authentic.

Yes.

You're being in Your heart, you're teaching. There's an education to it. And at the same time, you're enrolling them.

Right.

I. E. You're selling them. Right. So that just trips me, you know, like, that's just great, I think, as a shortcut. And then you said that you first, you have to start with yourself.

Right, right.

Enroll yourself.

Right.

How do you change anybody else's life? How do you do anything different tomorrow than you did yesterday or today if you're not able to start off? By getting leverage over you.

Right, right, exactly. Is it getting leverage over you? It's a great term.

Yeah.

So to me, one of the cool things I love in the book, and I say this to people, is that the power of your life, excuse me, quality of your life is equal to the quality of your rituals and the things that you do consciously, repetitively, that you practice, that this is what's going to determine the ongoing elevation of your consciousness and your own personal unfolding. And so that starts with how you wake up and, you know, so you can go through a whole day's worth of rituals and things. But, you know, just what is it that you do to begin your day and when, you know, when does the enrollment start? When do you start selling you on you. I was with Stedman Graham the other night for the little party to launch, you know, Pivot, which was great. And he had. He gave a great talk. And one of the things he said that's the most challenging in the world, where he's constantly, through his philanthropic activities, coming across young people that are really challenged and are coming from challenged circumstances, you know, where they live and how they've grown up and who their parents, you know, have been, et cetera, and a lot of addiction, a lot of poverty, a lot of discrimination and things like that. And he said that the key to elevating yourself out of those circumstances, the way he was able to elevate himself out of circumstances where he was born in that same sort of situation, was knowing thyself like it sucked. It's that know thyself thing. But to. To really explore who you are until you have some sense of that, so you have a beat on who you are, it's impossible be authentic with anybody else. Which means you're never going to be good at selling because people can smell it. They can smell it when it is a fraud, right?

Yeah, totally. When you're second guessing yourself all the time, it's very hard to be engaged and connected and influential because you're constantly second guessing yourself. And One of the reasons that people don't go to higher levels is they do such a shitty job of persuading themselves and influencing themselves. And what your thing with rituals? I personally think rituals are everything. I mean, I saw this on the back of a guy's T shirt in the airport several years ago. It said Winners Find Ways. And it had something to do with some sports jersey. And I was like, that's a really great line. And I checked to see if the URL was available, and it actually was. So I registered Winners Find Ways. And at this point, I've still never done anything with it. But I love the term and I've thought about it a lot. Because losers Find Ways also. Now, I don't mean like a loser person. As a human, it's just if your life isn't working, there are certain things and certain rituals that you're doing that are causing it to not work. And if your life is working, there are certain things that you do in a way that's making it work. And I don't believe in good habits or bad habits. Not to debate semantics. It's just that I understand what people mean when saying, oh, I've got really bad habits. I mean, I can point to things that I've done or might be currently doing that aren't the highest and best use of my time. It could be done more effectively and that sort of stuff. But it's like if you wake up every day and you guzzle of five cups of coffee, smoke a pack of cigarettes, yell at your wife or your husband, kick your dog, and just have a really shitty attitude, you've developed really great habits about eating fast food, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes. I mean, you've really developed that. So when people have things that I can look at people's lives that are just a mess and reverse engineer what it is they're doing that's causing it to show up. That way I can look back in my life when it was just not working very well. And I could look and see. Well, obviously, because I was doing certain things in a certain way. And you can wake up and turn it all around. I mean, it may not be easy, but it is. Absolutely. That's why it's so great to see someone that has made a transformation. Because most people don't. But in reality, there's not a lot of real complications to some of the successes now. Some successes, yeah. There's a lot involved, there's a lot of effort. But I mean, sometimes if someone just changes their sleep, you can transform their.

Life, sometimes it's so simple that it would shock, you know, something shocking. It's shocking. It's shocking how simple some of these changes can be for folks. Because for the most part, you know, people, people think, you know, they're not happy, it's not the way I want and all that kind of thing, but yet they still play the refrain in their mind that they know what's best for them, that I know that kind of thing. And, and I sometimes say, you know, everybody in this room's an expert. How many of you believe you're an expert? Right? And you know, it's a few hands. And I said, no, no, everybody's hands goes up. So you're an expert. And here's why you're an expert. Because you're an expert at getting exactly the same whatever results you've got in your life. You're an expert at it. You're an expert at how to have the relationships you have. You're an expert at how to have the body you have. You're an expert at how to have the business you've got. You're all experts at it. Yeah. Oh, and I say, and the thing about it is that it really is.

A.

Just learning something new, being, being open to turning around those words. I know that. And saying instead, my greatest obstacle in life is not even learning, you know, learning more. It's unlearning. Some of the things that I think are true, that I think, that I believe, and that's truly shocking is how people will hold on so desperately to their beliefs, to their precious beliefs, which they often don't even realize. They're not even their own beliefs, they're someone else's. They're their parents, their grandparents, whatever. It's collective DNA of you know, generations or whatever. And they hold onto those, those beliefs like they're a life server, life preserver and it's the, it's the rock that's dragging them to the bottom.

Yeah, absolutely. Completely agree. What's funny with, with Genius Network, my high level group for entrepreneurs, I, I focus more. It's, it's, it's sort of a trick that I play with on really successful people because the type of clients that, you know, I have clients at all different levels, but the ones that I actually take money from are usually very successful running multi million dollar companies. And we give them strategies, we give them all kinds of things to look at, talk about their challenges or opportunities, the messes in their life. One of my favorite tools though is the not to do list, which we have a not to do list. We have a not now list we have. Which you may have great ideas, but it may not be great right now. And the thing that's hard to share with people that are pursuing more ideas and more strategies and always want to learn is that unlearning is infinitely more valuable than learning, because it's the shit that we need to unlearn that will make the most difference in your life. And I interviewed this guy about a year and a half ago on addiction named Roy Nelson, in his 70s, and he wrote a book called Love Notes from Hell. And we were talking in the interview about people that are in recovery because he'll help addicts, people at the very worst level that just have not been able to make any headway from rehab centers and all kinds of stuff. And he says one of the challenges with the way that some people pursue personal development is they're trying to learn stuff. But if you don't discard, if you don't clean out the stuff, stuff that, you know, it's like putting whipped cream on top of dog shit.

Yeah.

And he goes, and if you don't clean out the dog shit, you can't enjoy the cream. And that's how a lot of people pursue. I mean, you send an asshole to a personal empowerment seminar, you're going to have an empowered asshole. And so until you can get to the core of what's really going on, then that's how you do it. And so I want to talk about pivot.

So you do that. You strip away those layers because. And not to be. I mean, I'm from New York, right. So it's not like I don't have an edge. To me, we are all the same on the inside. And I mean, at the core, there's just one thing. Truth. There's one basic truth about ourselves. But some people have some scar tissue, and yet to get at that, it takes some doing. And there's a lot of layers of crap, layers of programming, of abuse, of all kinds of abuse, self abuse, abuse that came from other people. There's lots of mine files that kind of have to be opened up. You know, those dark closets that have to be opened and light has to come into them, fresh air has to come into them. Yeah, and that's. That's a process. It's not.

Yeah, well, it's. It's. Well, it's a serious process. And so like, to talk about, let's say, like, the comment of, you know, you send an asshole to an empowerment seminary of an empowered asshole. Now, it doesn't mean that is a terrible human being. It's just the way that they're actually showing up. And the hardest shells hide the tenderest meat. I mean, one thing that being an addict has given me is tremendous amount of empathy when I see people screwing up their lives. Because most people don't wake up every day and want to figure out how to have life not work that interesting.

They don't put their feet on the floor and go, you know, today I'm going to be a manipulative, you know, no integrity, you know, loser. Or I'm gonna be abusive and unkind to everybody I meet and have shit thoughts all day long. I mean, nobody wakes up in the morning, puts their feet on the floor and says that.

Right, exactly.

They all start out with great intentions.

Yeah.

You know, and it's funny because the results that people have speak so loudly. Right. That their intentions kind of fade away in the light of what they've produced so far in their life. Because that's. That says what's been going on. I mean, their best thinking, all the outcomes in their life have produced the results. All the outcomes were produced by their best thinking so far, which is, it's a moment of humility. Because everything that's shown up has been the result of your best thinking. No. Or did you just at some point go, no, no, I'm going to produce these results intentionally so that they're. They caused me pain, they caused others pain, it caused me suffering and struggle. No, we all set out every wanting to be rich, happy, healthy, all those things. And yet you got this mixed bag of things that shows up and you go, okay, how'd that get there?

Yeah, exactly. Well, there's a line, I have to borrow this from 12 subgroups where there will be someone that will show up in a 12 step group that's like really fighting it, very resistant, didn't want to be there. But of course their life is out of control. So they showed up in this room with a bunch of strangers and here they are. You know, if you, if you follow a 12 step model of admitting that your life is unmanageable and that you need some sort of help and you have to turn it over and there will be someone that will say, well, your best thinking got you here. And they're like, well, you know, and so your best thinking is going to get you out of it. So, you know, you look in the mirror every day and say, you know, good morning, let the stress begin, or you're going to say I'm responsible or I'm not. And so what you do with it has everything to do with it. I want to go a little deeper on it. How can people ultimately get clear on what they really want in life? And you have six steps for getting clarity. So can you kind of go through some of them?

Yeah, I mean, to me, the first piece of clarity, and it's a really big deal, is again, this process of unbelieving, of looking at your life and examining why you believe what you believe, where your beliefs come from, basically. So it's an awareness of where your beliefs come from, examining a little bit about why that is, and then making a conscious choice whether to continue to believe those things or not believe those things. Because we know that whatever you're believing is what's produced your, you know, created your actions. And now your results are the other fruit on the tree, if you will. And so recognizing that and then in the process, this is really important is letting go, is being able to learn the process of letting go. So, I mean, I love when I'm. When I'm teaching to refer people to books because books are great. It's a great way to learn in your own environment, right? My environment's usually like a hot tub. And one of the books I love is the Sedona Method. Hal Dwoskin, and he's part of the Transformational Leadership Council.

I went through Sedona Method in the early 90s.

Amazing, right? It's incredible. And when you realize that you can release stuff and you release shit and shit thoughts and all the stuff that comes out of that, you have, you're like, so you have so much more clarity to be able to create a vision, which is the next thing, you know, it's. The next step is, you know, when you have a clearer view of what you believe or what you want to believe even, and why you believe what you have believed, and you make a choice to maybe not believe some or unbelieve some of those things, you get to create a new vision for your life. And, you know, any, any CEO, anybody that's managing or running teams knows that you have to have a big vision that other people can be excited about. But that starts with you. You're not going to enroll anybody else in your vision until you know what.

Your vision is exactly. And you got to have one. And I mean, it doesn't need to be perfect, but there's, you know, the fact is there's so many people. If you don't create your own value system Then you spend your life adopting other people's. And a lot of.

Could you repeat that?

Yeah. If you don't develop your own value, you know, human happiness comes from developing your own value system, not adopting someone else's. Because if you. And most people, they'll read a book and they'll try to take that author's stuff and make it their own versus taking it and applying it and developing their own value system with it. And you're not ever you. If you don't develop your own philosophy, if you don't apply, apply it to your own life, your own situations, your own desires, and then you end up, you know, living someone else's life. Yeah. So it's. Yeah. Develop your own value system.

I think that's powerful.

Yeah, it is. It's worked well for me. I think about it all the time. What are some of the results you've seen people achieve after utilizing the tools that you basically teach in pivot?

That's really the coolest part of this is that, you know, we've seen people that have created massive money, you know, success in business and things, and, and that's usually what people say they want. It's the first question kind of, you know, what would you, you know, what would your life be like if you had no worries about money? And then all of a sudden they're, they're happy, they're healthy, they have great relationships, you know, that kind of thing. So they're after the money and there's nothing wrong with that. So. But what I've seen is that in addition to people producing wealth, what they've really been able to produce is a more peaceful life, a happier life, a more on purpose life. The kind of a life we don't worry about money at all anyway. And it's not because you don't care about it. It's because money flows as, you know, is a result that flows out of the way. You're showing up differently when you're a purpose driven person, when your intention is to serve, not to take. Money is a, you know, money is a fruit that hangs on that tree, the root, you know, it's the roots that create the fruits. And it's the root of that intention to serve and to help others and make the world better or to relieve pain or whatever it is that, you know you're going to be able to use your special gifts to add value.

Right.

That just produces a fruit that's called fulfillment, you know, And I love where Tony Robbins, early on when I started to read and Listen to him, he'd say, you know, success without fulfillment feels like failure.

Right.

And I've, you know, that was me, he was talking directly to me when I was a lawyer and I'm going, holy. So I've got plenty of money, you know, I've got power, you know, authority and all that kind of stuff. And yet I'm miserable. Why am I so unhappy? Yeah, well, because the key to happiness was missing from the equation.

Right?

Right.

Yeah. So the, the one of the great results that come from people reading a book like, hopefully like Pivot, but coming to a training and being in a space, a heart centered, you know, heart centered space for their own personal development is that they're gonna, they're gonna discover the truths about themselves. And some of those truths are, will shock, you know, to be shocking. It will be shocking to them when they discover what they really, really want in life. And more often than not, it's not really a money driven thing.

You know what's funny is when I was dead broke, carpet cleaner, living off credit cards and I would read Think and Grow Rich and the Power of Positive Thinking and many of the classic personal development books, it wasn't until I learned marketing to where in some strategies where I was able to actually make money. And I became a millionaire by the time I was 30. And I still, at the time I was thinking, man, if I just have the money, that will solve so much of the shit. Not realizing that money actually allows you to buy some pretty bad vices.

Money's a magnifier. I heard somebody once say, isn't it true?

It is true.

If you're a shit, more money can make you even a bigger shit.

Oh yeah, yeah. I've seen it happen at so many levels. And so what's interesting though, and again, I am never a person to poo poo money. I mean, if you don't have money, you don't have food, you can't get medical care. I mean, when people say money can't buy happiness, I think they're crazy because there's a lot of things that make me happy that I can buy with money. However, like Jim Rhone says, you can't hire someone to do your push ups for you. Your money's not going to buy you true peace of mind or relationships. It'll give you access to things, but how you interact with, with it is a really important thing. So I'm never a person to poo poo money. Money's really valuable in a certain context. Taken in the wrong way though, it could lead to a lot of self destruction. That's what you see happen with lottery winners. You know, they. Two years within winning the lottery, they're usually in worse debt than they were before they ever won it.

Exactly. And here's one little addition to that or plus two to that, which is that we dive in at, you know, in our training, we dive into why you want money to begin with. Because if you do truly want a lot more money, often that simple shift in that 5 degree change in your direction has to do with your motivation for money.

Right.

So if, when you're, you know, you brought up Jim Rohn, so he's got a great quote on this, which is the bigger the why, the easier the how. Yeah, you know, the how. The dreaded houses Mike, Mike Dooley would call them. Right.

It.

That's the problem that stops people because they're not really. They're not solid on their why. Yeah, it's just one little thing. But it's a major shift for folks.

And see the reason it's useful. From my experience, and I can only speak from my experience the reason, you know, people say to me all the time, why do you still go to seminars? Why do you read all these books? I mean, you, you know, because I've read over a thousand business books. I've got an incredible library. I've been to more events and things than most people that I know. The reason that I do it is not because there's something I haven't yet learned. It's just the whole process to me is kind of like working out. I mean, you don't just go and have a great workout and you're healthy or you eat one healthy meal and all of a sudden it's handled. It's just part of life. It's just something that I do and it keeps me in an engaged state. To me, it's just part of a process. And you live that way. And when I live that way, life works better. It just does. So it's one of those things that I do. The thing about money is when someone is broke and they don't have their financial needs, like they literally can't pay their rent, as an example, or they're deeply in debt, it's very hard for them to say, hey, you're going to get the peace of mind. You're going to do this, you're going to, to do that. I'll tell you, like when I learned from Dan Sullivan that there's five different ways you get paid for something. I used to Read all these books in the beginning of my career of how much is my time worth per hour? Am I spending my time, you know, making, you know, broken down to the minute, you know how much you want to make. And I would always like beat myself up because I would find myself focusing on activities that didn't always bring in the highest level of money. And some that were just didn't bring in any money, but they were just interesting to me. But I would always layer this compared to the stuff that I was reading about. Every minute of your working out day needs to be focused on the return. And it wasn't until my friend Dan Sullivan shared with me this thing called an opportunity filter where there's five ways you get paid. The first way is reward. You get paid with money. The second is appreciation. Another way you get paid is utilization. People utilize you. Another way you get paid is people refer you. And another way you get paid is people. It enhances you as a person. And until I actually realize that, for me, whenever I'm working with a person on a project, it has to, my number one criteria is, does it enhance me? Second, do people utilize me? I mean, I do not like giving advice, especially proven business strategies to someone that says they want them, could transform their business with them, and they don't use it.

Don't throw your pearls to swine.

Exactly. It's the Emerson quote, you know, you ask for a new idea when you haven't used the first one that I gave you. So when people don't utilize it, the third is people appreciate me. The fourth, do they refer me. And fifth, do they pay me? So I like getting paid. I do want money. However, that's only one way of getting rewarded. And so I go into my life now saying, okay, is this person going to. Is this person elf easy, lucrative and fun or are they half hard, annoying, lame and frustrating? So you can have an elf business or a half business. And I really think about stuff that way. And I'll tell you, operating that way brings me a hell of a lot of peace of mind and it keeps me out of a lot of success traps. Because when people get successful, success traps are harder to get out of than failure traps. Because when you're down and out and all you have to do is go up, you know, I mean you literally.

You could try anything.

Exactly. But when you have like built a business or a career, let's say the where you're good at it and you're making money, but it's draining the life force out of you, it's actually hard to give that shit up. It's really hard because you're not even. I mean, you're not even aware of it. So that's why. Getting perspectives from the outside. That's why I'm always saying, you know, read, like, read a book. I mean, read this book. It will change your perspective, it will give you strategies, and it's all in the more that you're into personal development. Love it or hate it, and certainly there's a lot of shit out there. There's a ton of people that are pontificating nonsense.

There's imposes for sure.

Yeah. You know, however, you know, the more you do this, the more, you know, this works for me and this doesn't. Because some things work for some people and don't work for others. But the point is, it is. It is a journey. So let me ask you. I'm rambling here.

I just don't think there's any limit to it. So like you said, I'm a lifelong learner and constantly reading. And. And it really is because there's a. I believe that to be a great teacher, which, as we said, to learn something is to teach something. So here's the circular nature of this, right? In order to be a great teacher, you must be a great student. And the day you stop being a great student, you stop being a great teacher. So then you stop learning what's the essential tools to keep evolving. So you just basically kind of shrivel up and die at that point or.

Something, or you start to suck more than you were. Like, there's a lot of authors that I know and a lot of speakers that when they were hungry and they were first starting out, I think were far better than they are. Once they got the ego, once they've got the fame, once they got the notoriety, the ones that I admire the most, I've done a whole podcast episode with Dan Kennedy, who I've worked with for many, many years, the grumpy marketer and Dan, we would talk about when you're first starting out in your career, you get paid for what you do. And hopefully your what is good. Like whatever you put out into the world, it creates value for other people. It's good. And if you do a really good job at what you put out there, then you become a who, and then you start getting paid for who you are. So a lot of people that become famous, they spend more time hooing than they do what ing. And when you become a who, but you're what that you're putting out there is still incredibly valuable or preferably keeps getting better and better and better. That's why a guy like my friend Tony Robbins, I mean, we're both friends with Tony. I mean, he has had incredible longevity because that freaking guy just works his ass off. He puts really good stuff out there. And so, you know, I mean, he's just, you know, he's Tony. And so the thing is, part of it is I really look at who's the what and then who's the who. And if you, if you actually get to the point where you start resting on your laurels because you've gotten some wind in your favor, that's the time to actually even look at. Okay, let's make sure I'm doubling up here. Because I actually think life is. You're on track, and then you get thrown off track, and then you kind of move yourself back on track. But some people, they've got momentum and then they just like, ah. Because I'll look at a lot of my clients when their business was really working well and they were kicking ass and taking names, and then they'll start getting into some messes. And if you simply ask them some questions, kind of what you said earlier, I mean, Socratic selling is more. Way more valuable than layering on all kinds of benefits. Simply ask people questions. If you actually inquire into people, well, what were you doing when life was working well for you? And they'll tell you, and what do you do? What are you not doing that you used to. What I've learned being in, in this business is a lot of times we're just a glorified reminder service.

No kidding.

I mean, you just, you just have to remind. There's some humility right there. Remind people you used to do this and you stopped and, you know, there are no gurus.

I, I don't even. I. I don't know. It's not offensive to me, but I just. The, the word is just an interesting word to me.

Oh, yeah. I don't like. I don't like the. Because I can't imagine, like, me, you know, even thinking to myself that way.

No, because it's almost like, there you go. I know something. I know that. And I think that's, that's, that's, that's at least one nail in the coffin when you think you know something.

Exactly. Exactly. I am very excited to be here.

And looking forward to this. Awesome.

Well, you know, I brought up that we're four months or so into the time we're Recording this. What perspectives about how entrepreneurship applies to not only navigating what's going on in your own world, but the world in general. And who are the people that are going to help bring solutions to a lot of the chaos, a lot of the anxiety, a lot of the fear? I'd love to hear both of your perspectives on this.

Sure.

I assume I'm going first, Dan, on that one.

You are. You're the guest.

Well, one interesting observation as a jumping off point is I find that you're either on the good side of this thing or the bad side of this thing. And so it's of sort fascinating when I look at all of my clients and the entrepreneurs I talk to because, you know, half are kicking ass and half are getting their ass kicked. So when you're on the good side, it's all about managing growth and capitalizing on these opportunities. You know, the question is probably more about the ones that are getting their ass kicked. And I find the ones that are getting their ass kicked, they fall into two camps. One is where they just have to do what we call a reverse accountability chart. And so if they were once a $10 million company, now a $5 million company, they just have to go back to pretending and acting like they were when they were a $5 million company and grow back to 10 million someday. And some are having to completely reinvent themselves. I have two clients with 100 locations that went to zero revenue. In that scenario. You're reinventing yourself. And so, you know, this is where the entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well. And if you are an entrepreneur at your core, which is one of the topics we'll talk more about when we get into entrepreneur elite, you will reinvent yourself. And it's all about taking a huge step back, helping lots of people, getting your ear to the ground, finding out what your customers and clients needs. I had one client that makes robot covers for painting robots that shifted to creating PPE equipment within days because they sew stuff. And their business went to zero because every automotive plant in the country shut down. So that's just one example. But there's my kind of long dissertation and jumping off point from a contextual standpoint I like, that's actually a really great way to name it. So, Dan. Yeah. What about, what do you think?

Well, I've got sort of a one sided view of it, the positive side of it, because we flipped really quickly. Coach. That's strategic. Coach the company. And I remember we were in Chicago on March 13, and this is the last in person workshop that I did, you know, where I actually had bodies in the room, and one of them was mine. And all through the day, Kathy Davis and Babs were looking at the attendance records from the previous 10 days, probably from the 1st, you know, 1st of March. And we were noticing we were already at 50%. We have 50% of people were not coming to their workshop. And we, you know, we call everybody when they don't show up. And it was mostly the pressure from their families, pressure from their teams, saying, you know, you're going to have to be quarantined if you go off to Chicago. You know, already, you know, some of the states and some of the countries were putting in rules. You know, if somebody comes back across the border, you've been someplace like that and you've been flying, you've been in airports and that, then you're gonna have to be quarantined. So after the workshop, we just had a brief huddle, and Babs and Kathy said, you know, we're. We're going to go back to Toronto. We have scheduled workshops for Monday and Tuesday, and we're canceling all workshops from now until the 1st of June. So, you know, I took that in. I didn't say much from it. And, you know, then we, fortunately we had, you know, no waiting for the flight. The fight took off when it was supposed to, and we were on our way back to Toronto. I remember, you know, taking off and just pondering the, you know, you know, what was life ahead. And by the time we landed, I said, okay, we're shifting and. And I said, we got to get Zoom skillful. We got to get Zoom capable really, really fast because we got to get back out there really, really fast and connect. And we're going to probably have to do three times more connecting during this period. And so by the weekend, Babs and the EOS team, so kudo for Gino, that we had gone live with EOS as far as having an implementer September of 19. And so we had had one meeting, two meetings, and we're just coming to our third meeting that would have been in the middle of March. And so they, they decided that they wouldn't. That they could get a hold of all the clients who are coming in for Monday and Tuesday right now and just say, you know, we're closing down. And it's. Three or four of them got caught in transit. But, you know, they were able to. It was okay, everybody. And they were actually relieved because they were getting the same kind of pressure. And then by Monday afternoon, our team had gone completely virtual. They were all at their homes. Everybody technologically was able to work as teamwork. And then a week later, we did our first two hour contact call, and I did about 60 of them during March, April and May. And then we went back to full workshop schedule. But Zoom and I just finished the first quarter and hands down, the best workshops in our 31 years. That's just terrific workshops, both from what the clients brought into the session and how we were able to handle it. So that's my report, and I would say 95% of our clients are just totally upbeat. And the ones who weren't and came to their workshop, they were upbeat when they left. So my view of the world is very, very different because I just celebrated on Monday two years without watching television. And I think that saved me a lot of bother.

You know, it's interesting what you had said, Gino, about having to reinvent because a lot how someone's kicking ass or getting their ass kicked, just some of its luck. I mean, some of it's the business you happen to be in, and there's some industries that, I mean, they just can't do it right. They can't do it right now. And who knows? I mean, all of the people that I know are that are in the fitness business, from gyms to yoga studios. I mean, even. Even when it comes back or how it comes back, there's a psychological fear that's instilled. So how do you think COVID 19 might be different for entrepreneurs and employees, if at all, compared to other people?

This certainly affects us. I mean, as entrepreneurs especially. I can speak for myself with an entrepreneur with add, we're constantly reinventing ourselves. We're constantly doing new things, trying new things. And I love the grounded approach of some of the things that we learned today. But, you know, I kind of look at my mind like a paintbrush, and I look at my life like a canvas, and it takes the same amount of paint to fill the canvas. And I can draw whatever image I want on the canvas with my mind. And so I always tell people it's better to move the mountains in your mind, and then you can move the molehills with your hands. So our mind is so powerful. So if we're constantly creating the future that we want, then and we move in that direction and we have faith. You know, in Sanskrit, the word is shraddha, which is unconditional faith, then we're actually moving these things. I mean, in reality, our mind can move things, but not Things that are in front of us, but billions of things start moving when we put our mind to something. And so as entrepreneurs, this is a chance for all of us, I feel, to really lean into the areas of our life that matter the most. It's a chance for us to reinvent ourselves. I mean, some of us, we're prob. Probably looking for an impetus like this to reinvent ourselves, to get ourselves to ask some really deep and meaningful and serious questions. I mean, do I want to make my life more complicated or is this a chance for me to simplify my life? So for each and every one of us, I think this is a really important time to come face to face with some of our demons. It's an important time for us to come face to face with what's important to us and a potential chance for us to even reinvent our business to suit our life. What I tell my clients, all my clients, is decide what your perfect life is first and then try to squeeze a business around it instead of trying to squeeze a perfect life into your business. Because if your business scales and sometimes it can squeeze the life out of you, but if you keep your values very strong and you build your business around that, then I think that's actually a life worth creating, in my opinion.

I love that line. Decide what a perfect life is and then squeeze a business in around it. Because it is the exact opposite of how almost everybody operates. And you get so caught up in success. Profit is only useful to the degree that you can use it. And if you build a lot of financial success or notoriety or whatever, but then you don't have the space to enjoy it and you can't really take it in, then it's kind of like a leaky gut, right? You can have the best food in the world, but none of it's able to digest. And so that's a very interesting thing.

But here, jumping in on the restaurant one, I just did a podcast with a guy who owns a restaurant in Georgia. And you know, same thing, people not coming to the restaurant, but they do, you know, Cajun style food. And we had them cook up home style things like cook up jambalaya and gumbo and all these things that you can do in a bucket that somebody could come and get to serve over rice to feed their family. And we did video Facebook video ads to in a radius, you know, just of their town there in the thing. Hi, this is Brett. I'm here at the restaurant. We're here right now. We're cooking up some really great Home cooked home style meals for you. We got jambalaya here, we got some gumbo here, we've got all these things that you could serve over rice and we're going to be putting them in these containers so you can just come and pick them up and take them home. And that was like a big hit for the community because now you've got that asset. But I wanted to talk going back about the root of what's going on in the restaurant thing because this was happening, the root of it before the coronavirus, before all of that. If we look at what's happened in the last few years of the restaurant world, we've gone from there was. I remember when it first showed up on my radar, there was an article about a venture funded group in New York that had what they were coining as ghost kitchens and ghost restaurants. The article was nine. Nine restaurants, one kitchen, no dining room. And this group was running nine different restaurant brands from one kitchen that only existed on grubhub and seamless delivery services. So they had a commissary kitchen in a low rent area. They'd cut out the most expensive and unpredictable part of the restaurant business. And that's become now a, a that became a thing. And in the three years or so, maybe four years that all this has been happening, it's evolved to the point now where the Travis Kalnick, the guy who was the founder of Uber, is like has 90% of his Uber stock sold and is in to this thing where he's investing in cloud kitchens as a service where now you can go. If you have a restaurant idea, you can go. And they serve. They're turning storage facilities with 10 by 10 things into commercial kitchens so that you can all get together. There's this line hallway of all of these commercial kitchens with a dispatch sort of delivery center. So if you want to start a restaurant brand, you can just rent this 10 by 10 commercial kitchen by the day, by the week, toggle it on and off whenever you want to show up on the app. This is really the biggest thing that's happening right now is we're on the cusp of this migration from the mainland into Cloudlandia. And in Cloudlandia there are no limitations. All of the geographic constraints, the friction, the layers of middlemen that it takes to distribute at retail, all of that is gone. And one by one you're seeing this cascading flow of business categories that are being toppled and that are coming and doing DTC direct to consumer. Where you get the mattress industry has been disrupted by numerous people. Now, where you can buy a mattress that comes in a box and unfolds and lays there for $1,000. Now you've got, you've got purple, you've got Lisa, you've got all of these ones that are doing the same thing. We're going to see unicorn after unicorn after unicorn, meaning billion dollar businesses that happen very quickly on the back of cutting out all the middlemen and going direct to consumer. If you've got a physical good that can fit in a box and is desirable and you know what it is when you see a picture of it on Instagram or Facebook and you can buy it because you saw some influencer talking about it, you've had the reach to them. We're seeing that just happen and happen and happen now. And then you're starting to see the layers of the services that make those kinds of businesses possible. We've seen in the last year, Kylie Jenner has become a billionaire on the back of, in three years, on the back of partnering with a white label manufacturer who does all of the technical, all of the difficult stuff of making the cosmetics, packaging them, distributing them, doing all of the logistics involved in it. Her mom's business handles all of the administration of it. And she's a billionaire with a team of seven people. And all they do is the creative work. They come up with the idea, what do we want to sell? We want to do lip kits, what colors are we going to do? Are we going to name the colors? All of that stuff handed off to the distribution or the white label partner to do all of the difficult stuff. And then she just lets her Instagram followers and everybody know that it's available and they go directly and buy it or they go through Sephora or whatever their distribution channel is, but it breaks the Internet whenever it comes out. So we're starting to see all of that. And often when I tell people that story, they say, well, Kylie Jenner, she's got every advantage possible. But then the greatest gift that we've been given in the last year to counter that is Lil Nas X and Old Town Road. Here's a guy with zero advantages. 20 year old college dropout living in his grandmother's, shipping around between his siblings. Found a free beat online on YouTube by another kid living in his parents house in the Netherlands and he makes this song, Old Town Road and starts pumping it out to the Internet. It gets picked up on TikTok, goes viral, gets on the Billboard country charts and Billboard immediately takes it off the chart saying oh, wait a minute now, we can't have that on there. And he tweets out, somebody get me Billy Ray Cyrus. Because what's more country than Billy Ray Cyrus, he gets Billy Ray Cyrus involved, he gets in the project, and it goes to number one in the world. Longest number one song of any song in the history of the Billboard charts. Not a Beatles song, not a Rolling Stone song, not anybody. Nobody's ever had a song on Billboard longer than this song. And that's all happening right now because of our direct access to every single person in Cloudlandia with a 1 to 1 connection and 0 friction to get to them. So our ability to see those opportunities, to assess what our assets are, because we may have assets that could collaborate with other people, we may have assets that could be in the right hands, a blessing, an opportunity for somebody else too. So you got to look and see. Do I have. These fall into three categories. Vision capabilities and reach. And we have assets in all three. So if we've got reach, if you've got access to relationships like Jay is talking about, to whatever level, if you're a restaurant and you've got access to whoever are your existing clients, you're a hairdresser, you're a. Whatever business you're in, you do have reach to your relationships. But then you start to think if you could have access or reach to somebody else's audience. I mean, at the core level, it's affiliate marketing. That's the seed of it. But what I'm talking about is something even bigger and more in depth than that is the spirit of collaboration is really what it is. I've been so just immersed in seeing all the subtleties of what's going on here. And there's so much to talk about. We should do another whole session at some point. Joe, you and I should definitely do a podcast about this too.

But.

Sorry to hijack this one, but that's the spirit of what Jay's saying is exactly what's manifesting right now.

What are some strategies and tactics business owners should be thinking about using to bring in cash, like right now?

Well, there's a lot of different ways. One of them is most people don't think about barter. I've set up lots of things for people, but if you have something you can create or you own that, you have margin in, or it's sunk cost and you. And it has. And it has value to anybody and you can exchange it for anything, that can either be cash converted, used in lieu of what you buy, or there's another word. I don't want to get too sophisticated, triangulated. You could. We've done, geez, I've done 50, $60 billion million dollars, excuse me, of barter. And I could tell you some great barter stories the other.

I've been to your house, you have a lot of art and shit there that you've bartered over the years.

I mean this is. I mean truthfully, I drive a gt. I got a GTS Mercedes I traded a day for. I got a. And I'm saying this just to demonstrate not to be arrogant. I've got a G Wagon, 63AMG. I traded two days for. Christie has a Porsche. We traded for, you know, my whole backyard I traded for. But it's understanding value perception. If you have something that you have in oversupply, expertise, for example, and that expertise has high perceived value and you can exchange it to somebody you can demonstrate needs it or needs the not yet. Because you're not really selling the expertise, you're selling the result, the saving, the money, the productivity, whatever it's going to be worth. And you can get anything. We used to do with car dealerships, just as an example, we would create barter profit centers. And I'll go through real quick because it's pretty cool. We would basically look at. And most people don't know it. If you have car dealers there, they know it. It's a very huge amount of volume that goes through not just volume of cars, but just buying, purchasing, you know, tens, hundreds of millions of dollars. We would go through everything they were buying. Got to keep my eyes focused on the camera. And then we would see what we could trade for instead of purchasing. But when you're trading, you can trade soft for hard on different multiples. And I don't want to get too sophisticated, but we would trade a car for two or three times the value in something else that we would normally pay cash for. So let's say we were going to buy chemicals and we needed cleaning chemicals or lubricating chemicals, we would go to that company and we trade them either automobiles that normally would have, let's call it a 15% margin or less, but we would trade it 2 or 3 to 1. So we would get margins of something like literally 60, 70% to our advantage for something we would normally write a check for. We would also trade for things I could liquidate on the open market for a multiple, excuse me, for a higher margin you can trade. I don't want to get too sophisticated. You can JV with People, again, if you have anything that you sell, you should ask what else do people buy right now, before, during, after. Instead, if it's still being purchased, then the next level is what else are my buyers buying? And if they're buying it from people they don't know and they're just basically trying to find them Anyhow, this goes back to relationships, Joe. You have the ability with the trust, the credibility that has been very hard won by the years you've served your clients or the value you brought your clients. That wasn't yours to say. Look, this is. And by the way, I have a concept that's called the Aikido school of marketing. And the essence, anybody that knows what Aikido is, it's the martial arts methodology that uses the power of the enemy against the enemy. If you use the problem to your advantage, you could say, look, it's a little unusual for me to be introducing you to blank, but I know that you're going to be purchasing or using these services or products now. And you probably don't know who to trust. We've built a very strong relationship where hopefully you trust us and our judgment. We've done a very, very comprehensive job and we've found what we think are the best providers. We've negotiated in behalf of all of our clients. A preferential price, extra terms, guarantees, bonuses. And if you don't know who to trust, we would like to very strongly recommend this. You can choose anybody you want, but we're also ombudsman. You can do things like that all day long. And I hope I'm not getting too rogue on you.

No. You know what I, what I like about what you just said? When I was a carpet cleaner back in 1990, one of the ways I came up with a free room of carpet cleaning was I heard a one of your I don't know how many thousands of dollars. You were the most expensive seminar guy in the world back in the 90s. When I first started listening to your stuff, I remember listening to one of your first set of J. Abraham tapes in 1992 was the first time. And you had some carpet cleaners. And I think back then you were charging like three grand an hour or something and they could not afford you, these two guys that owned the carpet cleaning business. And so they scraped up $2,000 to hire you. And I think you gave them 45 minutes for two grand. And what you told them is you explained lifetime value of a customer. And you are great at explaining the whole J. Abraham. You don't Know how much you can afford to spend until and unless you know how much a client is actually worth to you. And so you would explain to them, you know, lifetime value of a customer and go out and spend a month giving away carpet cleaning for free. Because what will happen is you will develop reciprocity and then they will refer you and they'll do business with you again. And so what happened is they went to churches and they trade shows and neighborhoods and just offered like an entire houses of carpet cleaning. And people would tip them and they'd refer them and things like that. I was like, huh? So I was like, what if I just gave away a free room of carpet cleaning? And so I started doing that. And then I created a thing called a carpet audit. Because I didn't want to do a free quote. I wanted to do something different. And I developed this system for myself. And then I went to a dry cleaner of clothing was my first joint venture, who was already had developed a relationship with people that were bringing their clothing. And I said, can I clean the carpets in your house or your. Or your dry cleaner here to show you the services I do, and if you like it, then can we talk about offering services to your clients? Because I wanted him to see my, you know, my services. And so he agreed to let me do his. The store. And so I cleaned the front entrance. It wasn't a ton of carpet, but it was the front entrance to this dry cleaner. Now what happened is I instilled reciprocity, but then over like the first year, he referred me and I gave him 10% commission of every job that I did. And he referred $25,000 worth of business to me that year. And what my offer was was a free room of carpet cleaning to all his clients. And another thing that I learned through you is that if you offer someone a gift, even if they do not avail themselves of it, you still get the benefit of the reciprocity by giving and you genuinely do it. You don't want to do it as a gimmick. I mean, if you are offering something to someone, you give it to them, right? And so what ended up happening was all of these people that stopped going to this dry cleaner. I asked after I did a few jobs and people reported back, I was like, can I have your list? And I will call them. I will. Physically, there was no Internet back then. This is like literally manual marketing, right? And putting postcards and signs on his store. I even got him to put little door hangers over the clothing that said, you know, Ask us about our free carpet cleaning. But here's the point as it relates to everybody is I then started teaching carpet cleaners to go out and say they're going to hire a landscaper, a pool cleaner, an electrician, a painter, a pest control company, all of these, you know, asphalt, like, everything, you know, and they're going to. You have a relationship with them, you know, different service businesses. And the fact is, like, why is your interior designer writing to you about a carpet cleaner? Why is your carpet cleaning writing to you about a real estate agent? And all of a sudden, it became this whole joint venture thing. And so every time one of my carpet cleaners wanted to add another hundred grand to their business, I would say, who is the joint venture? Or refer that you can develop and establish a relationship with. They can refer that business to you. And right now, that opportunity, I think, exists in greater levels than ever before because, you know, there's this anxiety and there's all these people trying to figure out and many of the comments that people have posted here with these ideas. I mean, I think that's just the way to look at it. And I only bring this up because I was a Devereaux carpet cleaner that was just trying to figure out how to learn marketing, still doing the carpet cleaning myself, and I still manage to build and grow my business doing all this sort of stuff. And now with that level of knowledge and how easy it is with the Internet and the spreading of messages, there's just such a great. And the need of it is such a great opportunity.

I'm going to reset now. And let's talk about the Turing unit. Did that land with anybody? You get some good idea on that. Okay, good. That's good. I love in the. Whenever we get a breakthrough or you get a thing. Let's go Batman style and put in the. In the comments there.

Pow.

Or kapow or bam or something like that. As we're going just see them randomly popping up that we know we're in the right space here. Okay, I'm gonna reset it now, and we're gonna talk about. We're gonna put on our during unit hat. Okay. During unit. We've got two profit activators to work with here. We're starting from the moment somebody says yes. I'd like to. I'd like you to help me. The experience that people go through. We want to imagine that as a guest experience, timeline. We want to think about it from the moment somebody says yes till the moment that the transaction ends or you're getting the result that the dream come true result that they want, and the midpoint of that now leading into the providing after sale service in profit activator 6. Now, the two things that we want to look at are, first of all, getting a really great outcome for people. That's the core of it all. We cannot scrimp on that. You've got to get the result for people. But what we also have is an opportunity to get a strategic result from that. Not just the. Not just the outcome, but to get a strategic outcome as well. So I'll use an example that we're all familiar with restaurants because it's a condensed customer experience. A condensed during unit. The during unit of a restaurant begins from the moment someone makes the reservation and ends the moment that somebody leaves after having paid the check. That's the during unit for most restaurants. Now, if we were to outline that in a timeline, that is, we're looking at what are the benchmarks along the way here that make up the experience. So if we look at it from the moment somebody makes the reservation, what next has to happen along that way? Where could it go right or wrong? Where are the opportunities for us to create a wow or create. Oh, and so when you look at it, that somebody arriving at the restaurant, that's the first opportunity that people have right now, when you look at it, one of the best episodes of I Love Marketing that goes really deep into this is an episode from the Wayback Machine. And it was with Anthony Melchior from Hotel Impossible on the Discovery or on the Travel Channel. And I did this interview with him right before his show came out on. On the Discovery Channel. And it's one of the best episodes that deep tracks. There we go. Gina says episode 74. And I laid out this idea of the timeline, the experience timeline. You can lay out the moment, the sequential timeline of when people. How it works, when people start with you and look for the benchmarks along the way. So in a restaurant experience, it could be the arriving at the. The restaurant, could be getting in, getting seated, get your order taken, the food comes out, you are happy with that. Maybe you have dessert or coffee or drinks, you get the check and you leave. That's the timeline of everything. Now you want to fire on all cylinders and remove any friction from that. We want to make sure that people have an amazing experience. And maybe what happens if you look at a typical restaurant, the result that we get is Maybe they have 100 people come through the restaurant, they end up with $3,000 at the end of the Night. And that's the during unit experience for that day. Now what could we do? If we look at this and see how can we increase the experience that we have for people now? If we look at it and we say, what if One thing that we could do is get contact information from people so that we've got the start of an after unit. Because how many restaurants even collect your contact information? Not very many, right? How many times have you been to a restaurant, you sit down, you eat, you pay, you leave, and they never know who you are. They never. You never hear from them again. You don't start any kind of a relationship with them. So what if you started thinking, okay, we know we're going to get 100 people coming through. What if we started a birthday club and we were to present that to people when the food is being prepared, where we look at the timeline and we say, when's the best time here? Well, this is, there's a little lull here from we get their order taken and then the food comes out. So we prepare the servers to come out when they're refilling the water. Your food's in, getting prepared right. Now, if you'd like to join our birthday club, we can celebrate with some birthday cake tonight. And you get a $20 gift card on your birthday and leave four cards for people to join the birthday club. Now, if you just do that for a hundred people tonight, you've had the same experience. You get 100 people, you get the $3,000 plus you may have 30, 40, 50 people who've joined your birthday club and it's the start of your after unit that now you've banked future business there that who's going to come back? What are these birthday gift cards worth when you invite them to come back on their birthday and they bring six friends with them or they come back because you've been able to invite them to come, or you randomly say, hey, if you look at the weather and it's cold and rainy and you say, hey, the chef's preparing chili. If you want to stop by and pick some up to go home as a takeout thing, you create all these opportunities. I could tell you so many different ways that you could do this in the thing. One of the best examples that you could do to observe it is to go to the Olive Garden. The Olive Garden is really one of the masterful examples of maximizing the during unit strategically. I mean, they've fine tuned everything to get you in and out as fast as possible. You've Got the tablet there, you can pay, you can do, you know, sort of if you can, Instead of getting 100 people in, you could get 120 people in efficiently. That's a great thing. But they also have the opportunity, and this was brilliant is while you're there, you can. I don't know whether they're still doing it, but they're. We're doing that. You could get $5 entrees to go. So you're sitting here tonight, you're eating dinner, and while you're here, would you like to get another entree to go? That's an amazing outcome that you could create for something. So this kind of thinking about your during unit is really about thinking what would be the big opportunities that you could create there. Let me look in my notes because I want to cover a couple of things here. This guest experience timeline. One of the things that you want to look at is how high is high. When you're kind of looking in your during unit, you've got the opportunity to provide the service that you want to provide, to serve the clients that you want to serve. And it's largely based on your ability. And a lot of times people make the mistake of basing their service on what they think people will pay or they've cornered themselves into a situation where they do online courses that are, you know, 400 or $500. And then they set a precedent of what a price is for something like this. I'm going to give you an example. There's, you know, you can set as, as there's no ceiling really on, on what you can do. When you look at the, you look at the marketplace, there's a, there's a company called Richard Mill and they have amazing watches, high end watches. I spend a lot of the summer in Toronto and in the Hazelton Hotel where I stay when I'm in Toronto. There was a watch store in the hotel attached to the hotel in Yorkville. That was a Richard Mille watch place. And here it is that the Richard Mille watches, there wasn't a single watch in that store under $120,000. Their average price is $185,000 for watches. This is the Rafa Nadal watch that Rafael Nadal wears that sells for $800,000. But Richard Mille, as an example of what his passion in the during unit is, is he wanted to create the best watch possible. That was his thing. He started it when he was 52. He'd loved watches forever, but his path was, let's create the best Engineered high perform like most of these expensive, beautiful, complicated engineering feats of watches there. The turbal on watches are very delicate and fragile. You can't, you know, they'll sometimes break if you sneeze wrong. They wanted these to be perfectly engineered and durable. And so his approach was let's build the best watch first and then let's figure out what it needs to cost. And what an amazing, interesting approach to take for you is what if you took your price tag off of what you do and you said, what would be the most amazing service that we could provide? What's the best thing that I could do for somebody? And then what would that have to cost to make that work? And you'd be amazed at how when you let people make the decision, you're going to find that you're going to be in a sweet spot of nobody else offering the full solution for people. Right. When you look at what Richard Mill found, there was they were alone in the market at $180,000. There's lots of 50, 60, $70,000 watches. There's lots of million dollar watches that are one of a kind or these, you know, ornamental or decorative kind of art piece watches. But there's nothing in the $180,000 range. And he looked at it. What other. Of course, the guy who's got a $20 million yacht, of course he's going to have $180,000 watch. The guy that's got six supercars that he can only drive one at a time, of course he's going to have a supercar that he can wear on his wrist. And they were, they sold $540 million of these watches in one year. And so that's an approach of looking at the market and seeing what could I do that could be a big breakthrough for my service? How can I really provide a dream come true for people? And what in my current timeline could be opportunities for me to take additional things and to take a multiplier mindset. You know, when you look at it, what if every time you did business with somebody, you started measuring what are the opportunities that I have to multiply this relationship, to multiply and turn this piece of business into more business and set it up as a metric for yourself, right? When you look at these, here's an example, this multiplier mindset, one of the things that we look at, I did a lot of work with the mosquito authority that do mosquito control. And one of the things that we established was a yard multiplier index. And so we look at for every new yard that we bring in, what could we do to multiply that so that that 1 yard turns into 3 or 4 yards? Or if you've got assets under management or clients, or do every time you take on a new client, what could you do to multiply that relationship so that those people turn into more? So we started thinking, okay, well the neighbors, the neighbors would be a great opportunity here. And so we did little postcards, we started doing postcards and, and let me move this here so I can see door hangers so that we could say there, this is the mosquitoes looking in at your door. We were staying over in the Linton yard but they called the mosquitoes authority so we had to get out. Can we stay with you? And then on the back we would offer a free mosquito treatment to get you the experience of having a mosquito free backyard. And knowing that once somebody experiences, experiences a mosquito free backyard, they're going to always want to keep that mosquito free backyard. And we would send, we offered there, once you sign up as a new client, we would send these golden tickets to view these postcards that were offering. See the one mosquito talking to the other ones. He's reading the newspaper. We haven't seen the back page yet. Absolutely positively no mosquitoes in your yard. Guaranteed. Period. Guaranteed. That can't be good. So we look at it and on the back we offer the free mosquito treatment there along with a note that sense encourages people to refer their friends. Now you can enjoy mosquito free living wherever you go. Let's face it, we've spoiled you. Once you get a taste of mosquito free living, it's hard to live without it. We've got you covered. Enjoy these golden tickets to give to any of your friends or family so everyone can be mosquito free wherever you go. Now that makes it so effortless for people to refer because they're bearing the gift of value to somebody. They're not saying, hey, you should try mosquito friend. Give a friend is far more powerful than tell a friend or bring a friend is far more powerful than refer a friend. Whenever you get the opportunity to let your clients be a hero and extend some value that they get for posturing to be able to give to their friends. They get all that psychic benefit of inviting somebody you know to do something that they wouldn't otherwise get to do. Okay, so that's a before or during unit opportunity. So in case we missed it during unit opportunities, we're going to create your timeline. We're going to look for the opportunities to create strategic Outcomes. While you're doing that, we're going to extend the level of service that you offer. We're going to maybe reimagine what would be the highest level of things that you do. What are you, absolutely. What are you capable of? What kind of outcome could you produce for people if they would just get out of the way and let you do it for them? Right. If you set that up and put a price on it, so many people are just going to want to take that. Some people want the highest level of anything that you offer. That's. And it's just your brave first little bit of courage to put that out there without a fear of being rejected. When you think, and you live with it and you think, when you're coming from a place that is this really offering an amazing value to people, am I certain that this is going to create an amazing outcome for them? Don't be shy, right? Be enthusiastic. Present it out. Give them the opportunity. You don't need to try and sell it or convince people of it. When I shed when I showed you the email, the only email I sent out about working one on one with people was an email that said, hey, I'm gonna start working with a handful of people one on one next year. Would you like to work with me? That's all. I didn't have to say, hey, get ready for the best opportunity you've ever had. It's limp. Supplies are limited. And I'm not trying to convince people to do it. I'm trying to present the people who already know that it would be a good idea that it's available. What could you do for people if they knew about it? What would be your advice to start if you were coming in to take over somebody else's business, what would be the kind of thought process that you, that you have, that you go through?

You know, it's funny for a lot of you guys are entrepreneurs, you're in it, you don't really think about how to teach it. But as I've been able to look back and been an opportunity to speak a good amount, you know, I've realized that there's obviously we look at most people trying to create customers, clients and vendors. We're trying to create fans. It's a different conversation. Customers are transactional, they come and go. But fans never leave. Most companies, they have conversations on how they can drive more revenue, create more sales. But how many companies have conversations and how they can create more fans? We have Ideapaloozas every single month where we get the whole team together and we say, what are things we can do to create more fans in every part of our business? It's a different conversation. And so from there, you know, we said, all right, if I want to break it down, if there's like, notes, I would say there's three E's that I think you can focus on, eliminate friction, entertain always and experiment constantly. And. And I think if you want me to, I can go through and kind of briefly do that.

I'm gonna. Let's do this too. While we're doing it. What I'd love is. This is fantastic. The time's just lying here. What I'd love to see in the chat here, put just type in the type of business that you're in so we can riff on some of these ideas. Kind of think, like, what. What kind of business are we talking about? And I'd love to hear your. While you're sharing those three, let's just kind of get that loaded up and then we can talk about it here.

So love it. I'm seeing a lot. Okay, beautiful. So eliminate friction. Starting point. What are the. What. What are the friction points in your industry? What are the frustration points? So we start there. What are the friction points? You know, and for us, we looked at baseball too long, too slow, and too boring. Number two, you get nickel and dimed. Number three, which many people might not see. I don't believe anybody in the world wakes up and wants to be sold to, advertised to, or promoted to. Yeah. When you go to a ballpark, what do you see all over the outfield walls?

Right?

Ads everywhere.

Because they've got that captured attention.

Let's bring in some revenue, guys. How can we create some more sponsorship revenue? Not how do we create more fans, different conversations.

Monetize these impressions.

Yeah, let's monetize. Let's make more money. And so we did the craziest thing at the worst timing ever. On February 25, 2020 two weeks before the pandemic, we announced we were becoming the first ever ad free stadium and ad free team. And we got ripped up heart by the industry. People were like, you traders. What are you doing? We threw away hundreds of thousands of dollars right before we went into a pandemic. But we said a, we don't believe people would want to be sold to, marketed to our advertise to. How do we create something, a better experience? The only person we work for is our fans. We don't work for our sponsors. And so when you come to our ballpark, you will not be advertised to. You will not be sold to. It's a time to escape and have fun. We made that decision. What happened, Dean? Merchandise went skyrocketed even more from all over the world. And now merchandise has become a seven figure brand in itself. And it's well outdone our advertising. But it was the courage to attack that friction point. So we're continuing to attack that. And I don't want to keep going here, but we're also attacking the game of baseball. We invented a new game, banana ball, which is two hours long. If fans catch a foul ball, it's an out. All right, you can start. Oh, my.

The fans get involved.

Yeah. Yes. Get the fans first. You can steal first. It's a two hour, fast paced game and you could search it. But we developed that because we realize we watch our fans, we videotape our fans in the crowd, and we realize every 30 minutes we take pictures. No matter how much entertainment, the breakdancing first base coach, the banana nanas, all that fans still leave early. And so we had to get better. So we're going to attack that friction point, that one more. And we did a banana ball game two weeks ago and 98% of our fans stayed till the end of the game versus 60% during a regular game. So anyways, eliminate friction. So whatever industry you're on, you know, put yourself in the customer's shoes. We go undercover every night at our stadium. I got next Wednesday, I'll take off the tux, I'll park with the fans, I'll walk in with the fans, I'll sit with the fans, I'll eat with the fans, and I'll take notes all night. Not on what we're doing. Well, on what the friction points are.

Ah, this guy's frustrated. Looks like with this. Or this is. Yeah, okay.

Yeah. Or this is a friction point. He's in line here. Oh, look at how he's acting. Oh, he's saying this to his friend and all those. When Walt Disney was alive, he said when he's going to Disney and said, whenever I go on a ride, I always ask what's wrong with this thing and how can it be improved? He was constantly attacking friction. So I know I've spent a lot of time on that, but I think anybody can look at their industry and put yourself in your shoes and say what frustrates me.

You've ever watched your watch that show Hotel Impossible?

I'm aware of it. I don't think I've watched it much, but definitely aware of It.

I had Anthony on the podcast years ago when the show first came out. And that's constantly. What he's doing is looking for friction is every episode of the show is him arriving at a new property with the eyes of somebody coming as a guest. Like, what would. What do you see? And he's observing as a hotel general manager. He's like, this sign is crooked. Look at these. Flowers are dead. This is. There's dirt here. He can tell just in approaching a hotel whether there's an engaged general manager. Somebody cares about this property by the way you arrive. He did one in Miami, and there was in South Beach. All the hotels are right up on the road, and there's parking off site. So he pulls up, there's a sign that says valet. And he pulls in and he gets out of the car, and he's waiting and waiting. And we've all been at valet parking. And if there's nobody there, any second, a guy in a polo shirt is going to come running around the corner. But they show the ticker. 12 minutes, he's waiting there, pokes his head into the entry and says, is there a valet go, oh, yeah, just leave your keys with us at the reception. And so now every single person arriving at the hotel is having some level of that. And how he solved it was he took a little rider, put it under the valet sign that said leave keys at reception. And now nobody's going to have that same confusion, friction. Just little things like that can make a difference in any business.

And you don't know. You don't know until you get in their shoes. And that's the thing.

Those eyes. That's exactly right.

My car bottomed out when I was undercover because I went to a parking spot where we don't normally park. And then as I walked in, we have parking penguins at every one of our games. People that park your car dressed up as penguins. It makes no sense, but we think it's funny. And they pass out freezy pops to little kids and say, stay cool tonight. But I pulled up and I was walking in, and our two parking penguins had their back towards me and the fans. They were eating burgers. All right. I took pictures of this. I was blown away because you had this perfect vision that doesn't always get executed when you put yourself in the customer's shoes. So that's very important for us on.

Stage, that whole Disney thing. Every time you're above the surface, you're on stage.

There you go. There you go.

I'm looking through what kind of businesses we're talking about just to spur some ideas. So there's finance and medical, spa, dental coaching, legal, teaching, English speaking, marketing, consulting, tutoring.

Well, finance is good. I mean, it's like, you know, I don't like to give names, but you know, my bank and we'll just call it bank of America. I don't want to give, I don't want to give any bank names away. But what do you want to do with your finance or bank? You want to be able to talk to someone and how many times do you call and say, listen closely as menu options are changed. Dial 1 for this, dial 4 for this, give your organ number for this. Like, what are they asking for? And so that's a little friction point. Anything that keeps you from being able to do what you want to with a brand is a friction point. And so like finance, you know, how quickly can people, you answer people's questions. And often that's just done on the website. You know, often it's, you know, it's, you know, so those things I look at from the first impressions, I love it. Legal, Legal. Literally paying emails. Like, I saw someone with legal, like, all right, hey, this email, 5 minutes is going to cost you this. 10 minutes is going to cost you this. So now it's like you want help but you don't want to talk to them as much. Like that's a broken system too. Charging for minutes. You know, I think a lot of those things are frustrations. If you put yourself in the shoes like, that stinks. I just wanted an email. Oh, it took you 45 minutes.

I'm not afraid of that. That you're 10 minutes and they're building 10 minute increments or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So then you don't have to do marketing because you create a better experience.

And you know, that's funny. Thinking about Richard Branson again, what they did with Virgin Airlines. Was thinking, what does everybody hate about travel? About flying? And what does everybody love about flying? Like, everybody loves new planes.

Yeah.

Everybody loves leather seats and everybody loves wide things and leg room and their own, you know, their own entertainment system and change tickets whenever you want. And yeah, all of that, looking at it, removing all of that friction, making the best things.

Actually the other e's, I think someone's saying, what are the other e's?

Okay. Yeah, let's go.

Oh, okay. Two elements. And this one, eliminate friction is kind of tough for me because you talk about the negative. The next one I love is entertaining always. And I think people have all you're in a yellow tux. You run a baseball team, an entertainment team. I'm in, you know, I'm a dentist, I'm a. In finance. I had to. I had to look up the definition of entertain because I'm like, oh, you're an entertainment business. The definition of entertain is to provide enjoyment and to provide amusement. Aren't we all in the entertainment business?

Yeah.

And it would hurt. Would it hurt that in addition to whatever you are, to also be in the entertainment business while that's happening?

I mean, yeah, I think if we think of everyone, that we're a host of a party at our house. No matter what we do, we're a host of a party. And you entertain people at your house. And so how do you treat them? You know, what's the experience? You take their coat. What's the last impression when they leave? Do you thank them? Do you give them a hug? And I think a lot of times, I think Shep Piken said it best. The last impression leaves a lasting impression. We look to entertain at every single touch point. And so to make it kind of, that's who we are. And I think we all have those. So, you know, when people have their last experience with you, is there something fun that's sent? What's your email signature? How do you enter invoices? Like, you know, we were bad at this for a while and invoices I think are a great opportunity to entertain. And I can share one of our bananas invoices if you want. I think that might be an example. All right, let's see. Let me pull up one.

We got Jesse permission to share here.

What's that?

I don't know whether.

Denise, maybe we'll have to give you permission.

Oh, I can't. I don't know if I. Well, I got it up on my screen.

I thought you were going to share the screen.

No, I can. It's actually. Well, it's got a name of a company on there, but I'll just read it.

Read.

Okay.

Yeah, I'll just read it. It's. Congrats, this is your day. The day you've been waiting for. Today is the day you get to pay. You may think you've had days like this. The day you bought your first house, the day you bought your first car, or maybe your first all inclusive vacation. But nothing is quite like bananas. Payday. So pull out your money. Order savings bond, bitcoin gold, cash, credit card or check and make that payment like we know you can. We believe in you. This is your moment now seize it. Your life will never be the same. Love, Jesse Cole.

I love that.

And so just the email that goes.

With it or is it the.

Oh, yeah, there's a body that has it. But this is the invoice that they open or if we ever mail it. And so again, you know, we get responses from our invoices, not just paying like, oh, that made me laugh today. Thank you. It's those little things that we think matter, and that's why I believe every company is in the entertainment business.

We love it. That's so great. Looking for those opportunities, like looking at all the assets that you have. Your. You know that moment when somebody gets their ticket with the video. Like you were Tonkin a famous cd, baby.

Yes. That's where we are inspired from it.

Exactly. And that's the thing is looking paying attention when you're inspired by something. I constantly observed this. I was in London, and outside of London, there's a place called the Cowley Manor Inn, which is this country spa that's an old, you know, English mansion that's been converted to this. And when I walked in and sat down at the desk to. To register, there was a little stack of cards, right? Like, you know, half of an eight and a half by 11 that said today's available spa appointments. And it had the times and what was available at the things. So I'm checking in at 2:45 and I see a thing that said massage 3:30. And immediately I thought, oh, I got. I can go drop my bags off and I can get a massage. And 100% of the reason that I got it was because it was there at the moment that I checked in. Now it's a little bit of a system for them to do that every day and print that out. And there's probably people that would argue and say, well, can't we just have a standardized postcard that says, welcome to the spa, here's our services. And you see, I mean, you're smiling because I know, you know, the difference in that, that the little bit of extra effort that it takes to make it today's or to make it personal is a big thing.

Well, I think another Disney thing, everything speaks and those details matter. Every day we paint our bases yellow. Like a little detail. I don't know how many people actually see it, but we paint our bases yellow. It's just to stay on brand and have fun. I love that team. I think one thing to think about is too, what's your s'? More? We all Know s'. Mores. And as a kid, we had him. The great scene in sandlot. We thought about this and actually put it into practical use. We said, we're going to have s' mores as a last impression, free s'. Mores. And so we set up all these little fires after our game, and we realized we could only service like 10 people at once. And their hands got messy and was playing with fire. It didn't actually work all right, but it was that extra idea. And so we said, what's our s' more here? What can you do? And so, like during games, we hire a mobile car wash and to pick one or two fans and just wash their car. So when they randomly, randomly we don't tell anybody, but at the end of the night, they'll go. We have a little note said, hey, thank you. Your car was washed. We appreciate you being a Bananas fan. And it's a little note. And so those touches. And now we give away banana cream, banana whoopee, the moon pies. And so you give away these free things. And it's that extra little s' more that they weren't expecting. And I think that's the last impression that we're constantly investing in. Not the marketing, but the time and the money to come up with those ideas.

What do you think holds people back? What do you think holds people back from succeeding like this? Like in doing, you know, coming up with two.

Two things, I would think, I guess it's direct roi. You don't see it. It's, it's. It's playing a long game as Amazon focuses on all the time. It's, it's. You don't see. I don't see the direct ROI of handing someone a banana moon pie or handing someone a free cookie at the end of night. And also it's fear of, you know, no one else is doing this. You know, we get. We get letters and emails from the league every day about things we. They say we shouldn't be doing because we pushed the envelope and. But I think it's fear of what happened. I mean, this, this was tough. Putting on a yellow tuxedo and speaking and knowing that people think that I'm like, you know, all about attention and all about, like, you know, it's all about myself. Well, actually, it's draw people into what we're trying to do. It's draw people into the message. And so, you know, I think Jeff Bezos said it best. You need to be willing to be misunderstood. And I think most people, when they Come up with something brand new or different. They are misunderstood. A dentist. There's a singing dentist. I know that I saw a dentist on here. There's a singing dentist who got national exposure. He was all over Good Morning America Today show. Most people were probably like, oh, that's fun. But some people were like, dentists shouldn't be singing. Do your job, dentist. Do your job. And that's it. But he got national attention and his business grew dramatically because he was willing to have fun. And I think that's the question that we want to have, is, does the message, does the purpose, does the impact matter that much that we're willing to be misunderstood, get some criticism and jump into the deep end.

I did a video in Toronto. I spend summers up in Toronto, normally, and in Yorkville. And there's a cafe. This great Italian guy, young guy, has a little cafe. The whole front opens up and there's just a little seating area in there. But you would you walk by, and he was calling out to people, like, he would be like, you know, as the ladies are walking by, he's going, ciao, bella. Like, everybody greeting everybody, right? With this, with these great things. And I sat there and they had a table that was sort of half in, half out of the thing. And I could see the ladies coming up the sidewalk before he. They're in his eyesight. And I could see them kind of like, you know, getting ready. And then when he comes, because they know what's coming and he's like, so. And I would call it. I did the video about return on enthusiasm.

Oh, I like that.

Is that this guy is just enthusiastic. You walk in and he's greeting everybody and smiling at everybody's like. And Italian itself is such a sing songy, happy kind of language that it's different than going to, you know, just a regular coffee stand or taken anything like that. It's. It's different, you know.

Oh, good. So good turn on enthusiasm. That, that's, that's. That's a key. I love that. Yeah.

Our friend Sally Hogshead has a new book coming out called different is Better than Better. And that is so great. I wonder, is she on with us? I don't know whether she was able to come on the call. She ended up having a. Broke her arm, which. That's a problem. So I know she's got a surgery coming up, but.

Odine, do you want me to finish the last E just to show.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah.

Just the last one we've learned is experiment constantly. And again, bezos our success is a direct function of how many experiments we do per year, per month, per week, per day. And so we actually judge our people by the experiments and the stories. We incentivize stories over sales. So what fans for stories are they creating? And that's mostly based on experiments. So everything we do when we meet weekly, monthly with our team, we said, what experiments are you doing in your department this year? What are you inventing on behalf of our fans? And so that is huge. And like, you know, for instance, we started doing a live stream of our games. We said, what are we going to do that no one else is going to do? What's normal? Do the exact opposite. And we said, well, can we mic up players every game? We have a drone flying during the game. Can we let our fans choose who's going to pitch, who's going to hit? And we asked all these questions and started asking, what if? And then we said, all right, what experiment are we doing today? What experiment are we doing tomorrow? Our director of entertainment, he knows we have to do one new promo every game that we've never done in front of a live audience. And most of them fail badly. But it teaches that idea of experimentation is how we're going to get better and improve the experience. We don't want people to say we're not relevant anymore or we're not enjoying the experience because they're not doing anything new. And so the experimentation, I think, helps build fans on a regular basis, I imagine.

Do you get everybody on the team, Players, staff, everybody involved in proposing experiments?

Yeah, yeah, we had to. I mean, lots of say, like, you know, oh, you got this one guy who's thinking about ideas. Yes, I do. Ten ideas every morning. I'm sick. But we get our team together. So, for instance, one example, we've never done it with our team until this year. Our actual players, we've always done it with our staffs and different marketing and operations, merchandise. We get our team together. All right, guys, again, we want to be the most fun team in baseball. I want this to be the most fun you've ever had playing baseball. I want this to be the best summer of your life. Let's come up with some ideas on how we can do that. First, let's think about celebrations. When you guys score a run, what's some unique ways that we can celebrate like no other team in the country? I said, everyone bring three ideas. And so you have 30 players, that's 90 ideas. We started putting them on a whiteboard. This is before, like, the game, it's ridiculous at like 4 o', clock. And one guy's like, all right, we're going to run through the crowd, the whole team. We're going to get a shopping cart and ship someone around the crowd. We're going to do the Lambeau leap. We're going to take pictures. We're going to bring a selfie stick. Take pictures. And they just started coming with ideas. And every night, they test a new celebration that they've never done before. It's because the players took ownership that what could they come up with? And now they're fitting on our brand. They're going crazy on TikTok. And it's just. They get to see that feedback loop is, you know, now We've got more TikTok followers than every Major League baseball team. So whenever they do that. Yeah, when they do one of these TikToks, they see you get 100,000 views and they're like, oh, it works. And so getting the players involved was huge. And it didn't happen until this year, to be honest with you.

That's awesome. Yeah. This whole. And then you keep the keepers and something becomes a standard thing. But it's that whole, you know, we always encourage people to look at that experience timeline as a living, breathing document that you can innovate within that. Look at the benchmarks, the categories, the where things are. First of all, looking for friction and then looking for opportunity. Like what you were saying about the car washes and those. Everybody in every business has that opportunity.

Well, I think it's what Annie Stanley said, do for one what you wish you could do for many. And that guides us. Every night, our players, we have 12 players go into the stands and deliver roses to little girls. They get down to a knee and they drop it down. And then we have one player go on a date with a fan. And one, it's usually a grandma, but sometimes it's like a little girl and they get to have dinner and only one person gets it. But it's an experience hopefully they'll never forget that will create a fan for life. And so I think often we say, how do we scale that? How do we do that for so many people? Well, just come up with some unique moments that could be special for one.

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