Don’t Rush Into Your Side Hustle with Scott Leese

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What up everybody?

Welcome to another episode of the live Better Sell Better podcast. This is your host Kevin Dorsey, AKA akd. And today I could not be more excited not only for the topic, but also for the guest. Because from a topic perspective we are going to be diving into on how to break the dependency on your W2 job. How can you make additional income on the side? How can you get multiple income streams coming in to support your lifestyle, your family and ideally your goals? But the person that's going to talk about this is probably the best person out there to discuss it, which is my good friend Scott Lees. Because he's done it, he has lived it, he has executed on it, he has done things well, he has made some mistakes, he has learned and he's continuing to teach these lessons to everybody else out there. So Scott and I are going to be diving into how do you break the chain? How do you become untethered in Scott's language to generate income and ideally eventually not be dependent upon your W2 for for your income stream? So Scott, my man welcome back to the show. Let's do this, man.

What's up, Kevin? Good to be here, man. Thanks for having me.

So. So let's. Let's talk about this. And the first question might be taking it a different direction, but this idea, you know, right now, it's like everyone's trying to be a consultant. Everyone's coming out with a course. Everyone's, you know, like, ooh, I hit quota. Course consulting. When should you consider starting to sell your services or knowledge? Like, what. What things should lead up to? Finally deciding, hey, I should maybe start to charge people for the information that I have in my head.

The. The tipping point for me is when people start coming to you regularly. So it's more. It's an inbound kind of thing. You know, if I hit my quota, but nobody's coming and asking me, you know, how I did it, or anything like that, then you might be able to make a few bucks pushing it out to people. But I don't feel like that's the right timing. One of the things that I get into is how everybody knows outbound is hard. It's no different as a consultant or a coach or somebody selling coursework or whatever, so you want to avoid all that. So if I'm a salesperson or I'm a sales leader, and all of a sudden I start getting messages and people asking me, hey, tell me about this. How did you do that? On any number of different topics, that, to me is a tipping point where it's like, maybe there's something here. Maybe I'm ready to put something together and push something out. John Barrows and I were having this conversation a couple weeks ago, and he asked the same question. And I said, when people start coming to you regularly, that's the tipping point, I think.

And what I love about that is too, like, because similar advice to people is like, are people internally coming to you?

Yeah.

Like, before you're trying to sell it publicly. Is anyone internally coming to you asking for this advice? Because they know you. They see you.

Right.

They know that day to day. So I love that as a benchmark, because you're seeing it. I'm seeing it. It's like everyone and their mom is charging now for, like, these little courses and these little pamphlets and everything else. And it's like, they do. They get a little splash and it dies off.

Yeah, that. That part is.

Is.

Is tricky. Like, I don't begrudge somebody trying to make a couple dollars, but I think if you're. If you're trying to get into creating and, and consulting and coaching and that kind of thing. I think getting into it to pay off a couple bills or to generate five figures worth of income or even low six figures, I think that's the wrong way to look at it because going to work for yourself is all of the wonderful things that everybody talks about. But it's also extremely stressful and everything is on you and it's very, very difficult and a lot of people fail. So pulling the trigger a little bit too soon just because you can make a few bucks. Well, what if you just waited? What if you waited and stored up this knowledge, accumulated this experience and this information, got better at actually coaching people before you sold a coaching course or whatever. What if you got better at writing and before you started selling writing courses and stuff like that? And this can take time, but if you delay a little bit and wait until you've got a body of work, consistent body of work, like not. I was a VP of sales one time. Here's how I crushed it. Here's how I was a VP of sales five, six times, not one time of hitting quota. Here's how I was a AE at such and such place and hit quota four years in a row. Then when you actually finally pull the trigger, I think you got seven figure potential. And that's a difference. A big, big difference. A whole other zero difference that I think a lot of people don't pay enough attention to. I didn't get into consulting to replicate what I could earn in a W2 role. I got into consulting and doing my own thing so I could add a zero on top of it. But if I would have tried to do that after a year or two of experience, I never would have made it.

And that's the clarifier I was looking for. Because I'm not against someone trying to make a buck. But we're talking about how to generate income. There's a difference, right? You can go out and you can make a buck, you can go out and sell it and you make five grand one time. But income is consistent. Income is providing that lifestyle that you're looking for. And I agree it's that delayed gratification. Because also if you've been doing it for four years, and this is, I think where you're going with this next is have you helped other people do the same thing? Because it's one thing if you've hit quota for four years, it's one thing if you led a sales org to hit their number. Have you helped anyone else do It. So how do you recommend people start that process of helping others achieve what they've achieved? Maybe before they're charging for it, maybe before they've created a course, like, okay, people are coming, then what? Like, how do I actually start to help others do this? How do I take what I know and make it repeatable for other people?

Well, I think it's. I think it 100% should be for free. Just to clarify and be real specific, it shouldn't be. I've done this thing. Now how do I monetize to your point? You know, I think of it like, you know, being a VP of sales or being a professional coach, even in a sport. Think about all the people that were your managers, Kevin, that are now in VP of sales roles now. Think about how many of them failed. Now think about how many of them made it. And the delta between those two is a sign of, well, how good is Kevin's, like, how to build a sales or kind of plan? How good is Scott's framework for how to. How to sell if his whole sales organization couldn't hit their target? Like, how am I gonna go teach people about the addiction model of selling if my own fucking organization couldn't hit their numbers through this framework? How am I gonna teach people how to build and scale sales orgs if the people who came up under me couldn't go do it and couldn't go replicate it on their own? But when you've got a handful of people who you've kind of mentored and guided, maybe who worked under you for a little while or alongside of you for a little while, and then they go off on their own and you see them blossom and they keep coming back to you asking for help. Hey, what did you do at this juncture? What did you do here? What did you do there? And you guide them, and now all of a sudden, in many cases, they've accomplished as much as you in those roles or even, God forbid, more than you and surpassed you in those in those roles. Now I think you know that this blueprint framework, whatever you want to call it, really works. Kevin's methodology of selling works, Scott's methodology of building a sales org works. I in building untethered. I've had many conversations with people for free for years. How to create side hustles, when to do it, why to do it, all this kind of thing. So I have people who, when I reached the course, wrote, wrote me or texted me back, and they're like, yo, I've been doing this already. Let me know if you need a testimonial, I'm like, you didn't even need to go through the course because you already went through the course for years. So I get it. And it's just so much more powerful that way. It's a different story to tell. That adds a filter of credibility on top of it, you know, and you can't fit. You can't fake that.

No, it's. It's other people. And that's what also, I think everyone seems to forget about a brand. A brand is what other people say about you, not what you say about you. It's what other people say. That's your brand. And if other people are saying, this guy's shit works. This guy helped me get here. They helped me achieve X this. Like, that's the brand that you want one of. Funny enough, one of my former managers who's now like a director, head of sales, wants to start doing consulting.

And I said, like, what's.

What's your niche going to be? He's like, I want to help level up managers. I was like, great. How many managers have you leveled up already? He's like, well, what do you mean? I was like, how. How many managers have you leveled up? How many managers can you point to and go, wow, like, I made that person significantly better. And they would say the same thing. Because if you don't have that yet, you need to go get that first. Right. So I hopped over to their LinkedIn, I looked at their recommendations.

Guess why?

I didn't see Scott, guess what? I didn't see that.

I know where you're going. I know where you're going.

Any recommendations from managers on their team saying how much they leveled him up? And I said, all right, you need to go get that. Because if your own people aren't vouching for how much you've improved them, it's not going to work for other people, too. And so as we keep going down this path, so I'm glad you called us out. That free, right? That free to start, like, just start helping. How long do you do that? Like, okay, so I'm starting to get some inbound. I'm starting to, you know, just help people for free. At what point do you think you start to say, all right, now it's time to start charging for this, and now it's time to start putting together, like, a package or program around this.

Yeah, for me, it was when my time started to get real thin. So I helped people and help people and help people with no real thought of monetizing until all of a sudden, I looked at my calendar one day and I was like, oh, you know, I have no time to go eat lunch, or I'm stressed trying to get to this familial stuff that I need to do, household kind of stuff, because I've booked myself to the point where there's no free time in the day. And when I got to that point, I was like, I can't do this anymore. I can't just give away all of my time unless I'm monetizing it. And I have a number of people, any number of people who would now say, like, to your point about brand to. Would now say, scott will help you sight unseen, doesn't know you, will reply to your messages, take your phone call, da, da da, da da. I have enough of reputation out there for being helpful and doing this stuff and enough people who've gone on to succeed that I have to put up a filter to protect my time. And then that filter became, I got to start charging for this. And that number was very, very small. Initially, I didn't throw a big number up. And you and I argue about this all the time. Even today, I don't throw big numbers around possibly enough. So I threw a small number up that would keep the barrier low to entry. But I felt like, you know, became reasonable for my time. And then that got flooded and then I raised the number, and then that got flooded and I raised the number. And so I just keep raising it right. And that was just how I gay. That was my gauge for am I ready to start kind of kind of charging for this. If I've maxed out helping as many people as I can, But I'm starting to eat into, you know, personal time and. And whatnot. Like, I gotta cut. I gotta cut back a little bit. And one of the ways to cut back a little bit, I thought, well, if I start charging people, it's not going to be 10 out of 10 people who say, yes, it's gonna be, you know, three, four, something like that. And that felt like a more reasonable kind of figure for me.

So where did you start, though? Because I think right now, in my opinion, I'm excited to hear yours on this. I feel like a lot of people have it backwards where everyone's starting with a course, but they haven't done any, like, coaching or consulting. You literally just came out with your first course course. You've had books, but that's your first course. You started with consulting, right? So talk about that journey there A little bit of like, okay, you started with coaching and consulting first. Is that your preference? Or if you would do this all over again, would you start with a course and then try to land.

Oh, God, no, no, no. I mean, my. Everything I'm all about is like, do all the work first. You can't, you can't do all these shortcuts for, for a lot of different reasons, whether it's credibility or, or expertise in what it is you're teaching or just from a dollars and cents perspective. Like, I'm not here to make six figures, I'm here to make seven figures. Plus. I don't think you can do that if you just show up one day and start releasing courses. So I was an operator. Excuse me, I was an operator for 15 plus years. I don't even know the exact number. I have to sit and think about it. Not just selling, but managing, leading, building and scaling, sales orgs, coaching, training, developing. I started creating, if you will, content regularly in probably 2015, 2016 or so. So maybe six something years ago is my guess. Doing it regularly. So now I'm experimenting with, with writing and being this kind of creator, if you will. I released my book in 2017, my first book. I started doing trainings live, not just like for my team, but for people who don't know me in Costa Rica at surf and sales. So I'm testing sort of my presentation skills, right? My training skills, my ability to gather a crowd or create some kind of micro community. That's 2017, 2020. I start this virtual happy hour with Justin Welsh and then he had to step away. And, and I've been running it with Amy Volas for two and a half years. I'm fielding questions live on the fly. I don't know where the, where these questions are coming from. I don't know what they are. Like, it's like feeling objections in real time and people are there to hear your answers and your expertise. So I'm working on sort of my presence, if you will, potentially my ability to think on my feet and answer things. I'm listening for themes that keep coming up. And one of the themes that always comes up is, hey, I'm thinking about making a move in my career. So that informs me content, that informs a, a direction. But I'm practicing all these things. Then I don't know what year it was. Maybe 2021, maybe I. You tell me about this thing called Patreon and I'm like, I'm gonna do that. And in like 36 hours later, I launched the thing, which is a whole other funny, funny story. But now I'm running a Patreon group where I'm charging a little bit, but creating content. I'm producing content, I'm interviewing people, I'm bringing other people on to my Tequila Tuesday show where other people like yourself are training individuals. I'm watching them train. Like all these things that I've been.

Doing.

I have built up to this place where I, I feel like I have dabbled in or executed very well any number of these different channels. To get yourself untethered and to break away. I've been an individual contributor. I've been a sales manager. I've been a VP of sales. I've been a content creator. I've run live events overseas and domestically and charge people for it. I've run multiple communities. I have trained internally and externally, God knows how many times. I have run small communities and brought other people in to study how they give trainings and deliver trainings. I'm relatively late to the course creation game. I didn't want to do it until I was ready, until like I said before, people are asking me for it and there's a pent up demand for it. So now when I, when I go out there, the hope and the idea is here's Scott going out there saying, hey, here's how I got untethered. And this is not me being six months out of a job saying, hey, I replicated my salary. This is me saying, listen, I was making VP of sales money and two and a half, almost three years later, actually three years. Now we're in October, three years later. I've done over $5.2 million in revenue with one employee. No employees for the first two years.

I was gonna say that employee is new too. JM's new.

I, I have, she's been with me for nine months. That's it. All the rest of the journey I was absolutely solo. So I, I really hope that people have a longer vision with this thing rather than the short term kind of money grab. And again, I, I don't want to begrudge people, you know, who have their own reasons for, for doing things and might need that short term money grab situation. But if you have the ability to think bigger and think longer term, I just think that the payout is so much more extreme in your favor that I would encourage people to hold off, you know, as long as they can.

And I think that's, I hope people are picking up on that. There's two key things here. So Far one is do it well and give it away for a long time, like a long time of helping other people exceed. Succeed in whatever it is you're trying to teach and let it build. Then you can turn it into something, a true income. That's what I really do hope people are understand. The difference here is there's cash and there's income. You can make some cash. You can, you know, to your point, you need. All right, you wanted to get a down payment on a home real quick or you had to pay off something. You're like, all right, I'm gonna sell something to make ten grand. Great, make it. That's not income yet. Like income is where it's consistent and it's coming in and through. So then when did you land your first consulting client? Right, because what I want to transfer then to is like, well, how do I do this when I have a job, Scott? Like, isn't that going to break the rules or do I have to leave to go through it? When did you land your first consulting paid consulting client? You still had a W2 at that time?

Oh, yeah, yeah, I had it for a long time. I mean, somebody just messaged me out of the blue on, on LinkedIn and was like, hey, I see that you've built a bunch of, of sales orgs. I'm trying to do the same thing. Would love to talk to you. And then I had a couple founders who I had worked for previously who referred their friends who were founding companies. And so I'd get these messages that say, hey, I, you know, went to business school with so and so and I know you were their VP of sales. Here's this business I'm trying to build. Would love to, you know, talk to you about it. So I started getting these inquiries like this, you know, direct, not, not, not tire kicking in. Inquiries like these were, I mean, more or less like lay downs. It's just like, you know, hey, I know, I know. Kevin, you helped. Kevin, I want you to help me kind of thing. That's so much easier because when you're, when you're in a full time gig trying to hit your number as a VP of sales or individual contributor or whatever, the last thing I want to do is run a fucking sales cycle on somebody. You know me in terms of like my ability to be organized or use some tool with all. I don't have time for all that. Right. And you also know me like I get overwhelmed and get stressed by this kind of stuff. Can you imagine me while I'm running VP of sales stuff at Qualia or Main Street Hub or Outbound Engine. I'm over here on the side trying to run a sales cycle, put people through a cadence, follow up with people the right way and all that. I didn't do all that kind of stuff because that's extra energy for me. That stuff I couldn't handle. So the things that came that were lay downs or like low hanging fruit because like we were saying, I had just helped people and helped people and helped people. When I finally said I have to put a price tag on this thing, the sales cycle was easy. So there was no stress in client acquisition. Right. And a big, big challenge for people who are working a full time job is the stress of how do I get new clients. Well, if you eliminate that stress, then all there is is the fulfillment. And the fulfillment is just a conversation, it's just giving guidance. Right. And that's pretty easy to pull off. Especially back in the day when I was commuting, you know, 45 minutes each direction, I literally would have my, you know, consulting calls while I was commuting home. It's like, I gotta do something on this drive home. Let's call this person. Right. And you know, I wasn't charging like an arm and a leg when I was first getting started. So nobody cared. They're like, yes, I have you isolated without distraction for 45 minutes on your drive home. Happily pay you, you know, X amount. Right. So again, that was me trying to figure out a way to not add any stress or burden and maximize time. It's like I'm already driving home, perfect time, or I'm already driving to work in the morning and I'm living in California and you're in New York. Perfect, let's do that. This is our time where we're going to do these. So these tiny little, you know, hacks like that allowed me to execute this consulting stuff on the side while still being a VP of sales without having my head fall off my shoulders.

And how did you navigate that internally? Because I know there's some people listening going like, well, won't like my CEO. And you've dealt with this too. So I think you can speak to this very uniquely. Like, well, won't my bosses be concerned that I'm doing something on the side? Like, what if they don't approve of me consulting and having a full time gig? Like, how did you navigate that internally? Or how do you suggest people navigate that?

Yeah, the first time I just didn't tell anybody and I just did it. I Didn't. I wasn't interested in anybody's permission or approval or whatnot. And then, you know, they kind of got wind of it a little bit, and they were concerned about my focus. And I said, well, let's look at the numbers the last couple months. So that's my focus. So, you know, in the absence of that, I could have been in big trouble. But if my team was hitting my numbers and nobody was complaining about my work product, I wasn't late or delayed on anything or missing deadlines on stuff that I was supposed to do. I sort of was like, I don't understand the problem. You're paying me to get this job done. I'm getting the job done. What I do on my own time is none of your business. But I learned from that. And then I moved on to this other gig. And in that gig, I told them up front, I was like, hey, I'm starting to have these things happen on the side, and I intend to. To do them, and I just want to make sure that, you know, that's going to be okay with you. And they were like, yeah, that's fine. You know, don't care. And they actually supported it a little bit. You know, like, I would get emails from my CEO introducing me to somebody to help, and then I ended up leaving that gig. And by the next one, I, like, contractually. See, so the second, the second one, the second example, I just told them, but it wasn't contractually in there. The third one, I contractually put it in my agreement that was like, Scott is allowed to run surfing sales, run his own business. He will be, you know, on LinkedIn, like, building his brand. And, you know, here's the reasons why, like, you should care. And you don't get to come after me for all this. Contractually put it in there. And there was a period of time where I was supported and got lots of, you know, referrals and help and whatnot. But there was also periods of time where they were like, you're spending too much time on LinkedIn. I'm like, how do you know that? You must be on LinkedIn, creeping and looking. What are you talking about? They're like, well, you know, we see these big. These posts, and, you know, I'm like, how long do you think it takes me to write that?

That's what always gets me, dude, is people like, oh, you spend too much time. Like, how much time do you spend? You see people on LinkedIn, they're not doing their job. Spend 28 minutes a day on LinkedIn. Like I, I'm, I write, I comment and then I'm out. Like this is not a huge time suck at all.

Yeah. And it's 28 minutes that, you know, you probably do at like 5:30, 6:00 clock in the morning or something like that where you're not expected to be doing anything for your job anyways. Right? I don't, I don't even spend that much, that much time. I mean, my content creation process is virtually non existent. I mean I, I got no sleep for the last week or so for a lot of different reasons. I went to bed early last night, I didn't wake up till 8:33 this morning and I'm on with you at 9 and I have no post, I don't have, I don't write over the weekend, build all these things up. I don't have some scheduled automated kind of thing. I got nothing. So by the time I sat down here, it was 8:57 and I have nothing to write and I'm just killing like two, three minutes of time. I check Twitter and I look at Twitter and these two tweets on top of each other just seem kind of funny to me. So I took a screenshot of it. I wrote like four sentences on LinkedIn today. And that's my post today, literally. So this founder type person, this archetype founder, didn't tell me I'm spending too much time on, on LinkedIn and it's distracting. No, what they really were worried about was I was surpassing the brand of the business in terms of who I am and people were coming to work for me, not coming to work for the business. And there's a little bit of ego involved, there's a little bit of threat involved with all that. Right? But that's how I handled it. I went from I told nobody and just did it to okay, let me tell this person and just make sure they're cool with it to I am contractually putting this in, that I'm allowed to do this. That was the progression.

And I want to call this out, Shell. You can only do that if you are hitting your numbers. If you are not hitting your numbers, AKA succeeding in the role that you are hired to do, all this falls apart. And there are people out there that I know that are doing this because they're not succeeding, right? They're not succeeding. And so that's why they're trying to generate side income. That's why they're trying to become coaches and consultants.

Yo, that backwards side income is not commission Replacement. That's not the way to look at it. I'm not going to make commission this month. So I got to do this side hustle shit to make. No, this side hustle income should be augmenting your full ote and your commission. You're definitely thinking of it backwards. If it's a replacement.

Yeah, that's. And it's happening, it's happening a lot out there where it's like, oh, I'm going to reply, I need to make more money. Not I want to help more people. Not I want to serve. Not I have value, I have, I want to make money and I'm going to do this thing to make that money. And so where would you suggest people start a little bit? I'll rephrase it. Because, you know, you have done, you know, you have six tours of duty, right? You have built three to four incredibly successful sales orgs. You have led hundreds of people, right?

So you have that under you.

So you also have been working on your brand for years now, right? So you have that inbound lead flow. If I'm someone now who maybe doesn't have a large brand on LinkedIn or, you know, I haven't been doing that side of it, but I've, I've been successful. I've done some things, but I'm not getting inbound because people don't know what I've done. They don't know that I'm good at these things. Like, how would you recommend I start that, that pipeline? Fly wheel? Or will it take a little bit of outbound to get started?

I don't think it has to take outbound. I really don't. And the challenge, though is how fast or how soon you want to generate, you know, this, this income. But the answer is in all the things that you're saying you don't have. In this example, you got to build your network. This is slightly controversial, I suppose, but I'm not one of these people that is like, you need to start creating content and posting shit all over the place. No, the size of your network matters. I'm not, I'm not a big proponent of telling people to go out there and create content that nobody's ever going to read because they have, you know, 500 connections. That's it. You don't need to do that right now. You should be out there trying to connect with anybody who's a peer of yours, anybody who would be your direct manager, anybody you might want to hire someday or who could hire you with consistency. Now you got to Be careful because it's not the Wild west anymore. You know, six, seven years ago, I could go out there and add a couple hundred people a day. Now they put you in LinkedIn jail if you move, you know, too fast. I don't know what the limit is anymore. But you know, I would try to tow right up against it. I would get consistent with connecting with like 20, 25 people a day, let's say. And then I would start commenting all over the place and engaging with other people's content, which hopefully that gets you inbound connection requests, which is a way for you to add more people. You know, every single day I would dive into all of the different micro communities out there. I get into Kevin's Patreon group. Kevin's Patreon. How much, how many people are in your Patreon group right now?

Four something, 400 something, 400 something.

I got 500 or so in in mind. So you just dump, jump into Kevin and Scott's Patreon. Maybe there's a little bit of overlap, but there's 400 people that you could message, interact with. Whatever. Kevin has live events. I have live events. Like there's a group you could go to. Free communities like Thursday night sales. I think there's 13,000 people who follow Thursday night sales on LinkedIn and a couple thousand people who are active in the Slack channel and a hundred plus people every single Thursday live on Zoom. There's a bunch of people that you can connect and interact with. There's communities like Bravado provides at the War Room or Rev Genius has out there that are free resources. There's other paid ones like Pavilion and things like this. You get active in all those places, you engage there, it costs you nothing other than some time. You get exposure. As you build that stuff up, people start to recognize who you are. And if you've got experience doing certain things, it's like, damn, dude. Kevin, you should, you should like keep going on this journey, man. You've, you've got a lot of good experience. Like nobody knows who you are. And then as the network starts to get big enough and there's some sort of tipping point now, maybe you're ready to start putting some of your thoughts out there. So when now you got those thoughts out there, that becomes a calling card to like who you are. You know, how this person XYZ thinks, how they think about sales, how they think about business, how they think about leadership maybe. And that will start to attract the right type of people towards you that may become clients or may know somebody who can refer you and put you in touch with somebody who may become a client. It takes a little while. But back to my point, you got to do this shit brick by brick, man. You can't, you can't skip these steps. You just can't. And if you do, it's just very short sighted because to your point, it's like, oh, you just made a quick five grand, ten grand, whatever. Okay. I mean, I get it though. There's some people that need five or ten grand right now for emergency reason, whatever. But for most people, the people that I'm talking to for the untethered blueprint, like, that's not what it's about, you know, I specifically, for my course told people, if you don't have a lot of experience, don't buy my. It's right on the homepage, don't do it. I'm talking, I'm trying to talk to people who have been succeeding who are making solid income every single year, but are a little bit tired of the machine and working for the man and want to figure out a way to not be so at risk all the time of some VC saying you need to fire 9% of your staff or whatever, or 40% of your sales staff, like somebody I know did the other day, right? I don't want to get caught up in all that. So how do I start to escape that? It's those people, right? It's people like us. It's people like us who only in the last three years, if you rewind the tape, four years. I'm a VP of sales. You're a VP of Sales. Justin Welsh is a VP of Sales. Colin Cadmus is a VP of Sales. Nikki Ivey is an individual contributor. I could go on and on and on. Those are the first four names that came up into my head, right? All of these people now could still go get those roles. We just have found a way that we feel is better for us, right? Oh, it's funny how, how fast things.

Change and it's fast and slow. That's the beauty of this. It's like it's three years. Three years is a long time to commit to something, to build it up, but then it flies by and it, your whole world is different because of sticking with it for three years and contributing for three years and giving it away for free for years, right? Like you do this, I don't know how much you do it anymore, but I know you did it for years. Hey, Scott, can you chat? Yes.

Yeah, I still try to do that as much as I can.

All right. Yep. And you help and you help and you help and you give and you give and you give and you give. And then eventually you can get to this place. But you do one, you got to be good at it. Because the whole theme of this, and I want to make sure people understand this when we say untethered, that's. That's why we're calling out this long game versus short game mindset. You can make 5k, 10k, but you are still tethered. That did not replace your income. You are still dependent upon somebody else. Whereas if you want to become untethered, you have to stick with it consistently for years to generate then a replaceable income. To say, okay, right, whatever else. Interesting enough for me, man. I feel like the side hustle shit made me an even better leader because I wasn't dependent upon that income. I had the side income coming in. And I think that actually made me a better leader because I never woke up thinking about what my commission was going to be.

Yeah.

Or what my bonus was going to be. I could truly focus on the team, the org, the go to market process. Because it wasn't like, oh, all right, well, if I don't hit 110% this quarter, then I'm gonna miss out on this bonus and I won't be able to. It was like, no. Like, I'm gonna do what I believe is best every single day and build. Because again, I wasn't dependent upon the income to make decisions.

Yeah. It. It allows you to be a lot more selfless in a way. You know, you're not worried about what it matters to you at all.

It's like, what matters to me? My people and doing the right things. Great. Right, Great. That was the big thing when Covid happened. You know, I had to live through this, man. Right. Like, we sold to doctors during COVID I lost 65% of my org during COVID 65%. Right. And I moved to Austin during all this. Right. This is when we, you know, we live a block or two away from each other. And when I moved to Austin, people were like, oh, like, you know, it's because he's leaving. He's going to leave. That's why he's moving. And it was the opposite. It was like, I'm moving to Austin so I can stay to get y' all through this. If I didn't have my side income during COVID I would have had to have left my role to find something new. And it allowed me to stay and give my team what I thought they needed.

Yeah. It allows you to push through lean times, you know, difficult challenges that a business might go. Might go through. Right. And it actually helps create an increase in loyalty, which is the thin line these days. But there is a little bit more, you know, because of it. Because they supported that move rather than giving you grief for it. Right? Yeah.

Yeah, It's. It's crazy out there.

So as we.

As we wrap on this, Scott, so real quick, talk to me about what's in untethered. Like. Like, so who's it for? What's in there?

Right.

Like, if I'm. If I'm wondering if this is kind of peaking my interest of, like, you know, what. Yes, I'd love to start to build something or who's the course for and what's in there that I would learn to help me kind of.

I mean, it's for people who have had sustained success already in their current role. This is not for somebody who's brand new, you know, into business and into sales. It's for people who've got experience, who sustained success and they can't quite figure out what to do, where to do it, when to do it, who to do it with, all this kind of stuff. So I just walk you through my journey and my experience, and I talk through things in a lot of detail, you know, from when to do it, how to land on a. On a topic or a subject, how to select a partner and why. Selecting a partner in ventures is maybe a cheat code, how much to charge. I get into that. How to structure the engagement contractually, I get into all that kind of thing, how to create this inbound kind of funnel and flywheel, the blueprint, if you will, actually, how I run my consulting business and the three steps along the way, you know, as you're trying to sort out, like, am I actually qualified to talk about this kind of thing? How do I know the difference between somebody who's just a learner to somebody who's a performer to somebody who's a expert and kind of a credible mentor, if you will. So, you know, I didn't want to make it like. Like the books that I wrote. I didn't want to make it this thing that's not digestible. So it's a little over an hour and a half. So you get in, you can get out. You know, you can crank it out in one day. You can crank it out over the course of a couple sessions. And I really wanted to make sure people came away with something tangible that they could take action on straight away. You know, I've already heard from a couple people, people that you and I both know by the way, who reached out to me and they were like, I've been thinking about doing this and I didn't quite know how to do it. And now I've. I figured out exactly what I'm going to do and who I'm going to do it with. And I already reached out to them and we're already started and underway. And that's the kind of person that, you know, is built for people who are ready to take action and just need to figure out a couple things with a tiny little kick in the backside. I love it.

I'm so excited. That's why I scooped it up right away. I was like, dude, I know I'm learning some shit in here, right? Like I'm going to learn different ideas and different tactics to go through it all. And so. Okay, I got one last question for you, man, before I let you go. I knew this one was never going to be 30 minutes. There was no way to keep it there. But I got one last question for you because I can't let you off the hook here because the name of the podcast is Live Better Sell Better. Because I also have this weird idea that if we took better care of ourselves, had more energy, had more fulfillment, things of that nature, the sales improve too. The leadership improves as well. What would your live better advice be.

For people listening right now? I live better advice. I mean, I think to focus on this feeling and thought of helping people. I mean, for me, when I feel the worst, whether that's my physical health or mental health or energy or whatever, the thing that always brings me back is making somebody else feel good and doing something for somebody else. Some favor, some piece of advice or whatever, it kind of pulls me out of whatever lull I'm in or whatever dark, sunken place I might be in, whatever self doubt or criticism or loathing that I have for myself. You know, when I get messages and somebody says, hey, I need some help with this thing and I'm able to help them. I've never helped somebody and felt worse, you know, so I think that would be my, that would be my thing. If we live better by helping other people, that has a. Comes back around me and it kind of energizes me and fires me up, gives me a little bit more confidence. Then I'm able to go out there and perform better for myself.

What a world that would be, huh? If everyone was out there trying to.

Help other revolutionary weird.

Weird what could happen there. So, Scott, my man, this. This was phenomenal, dude. Where can people find the untethered. What's the. The website. We'll drop it in the show notes as well. But what's the. The website for. For the course?

Yeah, it's the Scottlease.com backslash. The untethered Blueprint. And we'll drop. We can drop it in there for everybody. Yeah, the Untethered Blueprint. And we've got a newsletter that came out every Thursday. We dropped some knowledge. It's called the Untethered Blueprint. You can connect with us on LinkedIn. It's the easiest place as well.

Hell, yeah. Well, I appreciate you, my man.

Good shit.

Go scoop up that course. Y' all well worth it. Become untethered, Scott.

We'll chat again soon. Okay, buddy.

Cheers.