How to Figure out Where to Spend Your Time with Multi-Million Dollar Earner Tyler “ Sully” Sullivan

Welcome to this episode of the Million Dollar Mastermind. I'm Larry Weddell. And before we get started, if you want to know exactly how to win again and again, go to Wydell on winning.com webinar now to watch something I've put together for you. Now let's get going into this episode of Million Dollar Mastermind.

I'm having an exciting afternoon talking to Tyler Sully Sullivan, and he is the CEO and founder of Bombshell Golf. They are blowing it up in the golf world where everyone says you can't. A new company can't get started and have any success. 600,000 golf clubs sold over 15 million in sales last year. A tremendous underdog story of overcoming in the golf world. Thanks so much for sharing. Sully. This is really fascinating. I want to ask you, how do you find, tell people, how do you find the most important things for you to be doing with your time? Because it's one thing to work hard, but it really only counts if you're working hard on things. Things, the right things. You know, it's like it's not do you work hard or do you smart? No, you work hard and smart. And most of the time the hours are spent trying to figure out what is the smart part because you can always start working hard. But what, how, how do you figure those kind of things out?

I think that's. It depends on where you're at in your journey. Right? So like, you know, early days I did all the stuff and then I started to do less of the important stuff. So like for, I did it in steps, you know. So the first thing I handed off was shipping because that to me was I was at least adequate to do it. And that was the biggest bottleneck in scale was shipping product out the door. So I hired, I'm on my fourth 3PL, a third party warehouse that does all of our inbound receiving all of our outbound shipping. Now we do 300 orders a day. So I mean, there's no way I could do that. And I didn't want to have the overhead to do that. And I didn't live in the right location to have the optimized shipping location or prices. So first thing I did was find someone to ship it. And I kind of did this. Alongside was customer service where I started hiring people to answer all of our inbound inquiries. And again, going back to ego, you know, I thought, well, they're not going to do as well as me. And in reality, they do a better job because they're not, you know, I gave them free, free range to just do whatever it takes to make customers happy. So answering the phones, answering emails was the second thing. And then I think the thing that's the biggest lever outside of having an amazing product is the ability to scale marketing and that message in a profitable way. So I learned Facebook ads, you know, and I was really bad at it. But I was able to scale the company to over a million dollars on my own with Facebook advertising. And I was able to vet. And I've got a system that if your listeners want to steal it, please do so. Anyone new that you know, I want to bring on, I typically vet them for an hour and I will. So like, for my Facebook ads, I said, okay, I'm okay at this. I need to find someone better. And I actually found someone better. We scaled up from that year 1 to 4.2 million, then to 6 million. And I fired him like an idiot. And I fired him because I lost touch with what was important with ads. We saw a couple of bad months and it was because, because it was January, not because of his work on the ads. So I fired him, made a huge mistake, and it made me realize I need to have a system to know if they're doing well or not. So I had to learn Facebook ads enough to then hire or fire someone again. So I learned it enough. And now what I do is a one hour screen share where I pay them. If someone comes to say, hey, we will outperform you in some ad platform, Facebook, Google, tick tock, I don't care what it is, I say, cool, glad you're interested. Let's do a one hour screen share. I'll pay you for your time. Worst case scenario, I learned something. Best case scenario, I learned something and I hire you because you did a better job than me. So I actually did that with 14 people and agencies to find my current ad expert. But that process there of learning how to vet and save time and learn something has been instrumental in me getting into, you know, new opportunities. And now he's been with us for three years running our ads. But really I try to spend my time on at a high level. You know, I look at the P L, I look at the product line and you know, I try to come up with a couple new products or offers a year that are going to be evergreen, that will do well. But, but I'm almost, I wouldn't say totally irrelevant now, but I kind of let the experts in their categories do their thing and if, if they're not experts, they're fired. But if they're experts, I let them do their job. So for me, it's just the coordinating of those so called experts and making sure the P and L is on track to what we want to be and, and supporting them, whether it's inventory or whatever assets they need.

You know, hey, listen, there's a lot of information online, but there aren't a lot of people who have actually done something. In my case, I've actually built a successful business, has accrued over $5 billion in assets under management, and has done well even during trying times. Now, if you want to know exactly how I've done this, go to Whiteellumwinning.com webinar Now I've compressed a decade of learning into five short weeks. Just for those of you who want to give yourself an incredible advantage and are tired of waiting and watching others move up.

Well, Sully, I always found that when you're growing what you didn't have to be a rocket science to figure out what needed to be fixed next, you just had to look for the bottleneck. It appeared, you know, because like somewhere in the pipeline, you know, production is a pipeline and success is building pipelines that actually work. And then as they work and you grow, pretty soon one place or another in there is going to get overloaded and all you got to do is say, where are the orders backing up? Where are the people backing up? Where are the problems coming from? And then go fix that. You know, you, you increase capacity at that pain point, you know, and mainly you're trying to make things easy on yourselves. Like, I don't want to have to.

Deal with that anymore.

Let's fix it. Because that's what you want to do. The smart thing is to make yourself irrelevant to the normal flow of business. That way you are free to jump in when the business goes haywire or the business needs a new product, a jolt of energy of this, that and the other. But if you're wrapped up in the washing the clothes and folding the clothes and folding the towels and mopping the floors, then you're not going to have time to think about, hey, maybe we could move to a new neighborhood and get a new house and get a better situation for ourselves. And so it's, it's not that you make, you make yourself irrelevant to the minute by minute, day by day type things. And you know what? That is a business. It's not a business if all you, you know, you're doing everything all day long and it totally collapses. If you're not There. And so you figured that out. And folks, it's not rocket science. The thing is, grow what you know now and when things start backing up, that tells you what to fix next. But what's. We all need new prospects and you've got to have, you're going to have more consistent success if you have a game plan for outreach for finding those new clients. And you found that. Now you were talking about using Facebook, but how would you know? You said that you vetted people for an hour. Now how are you finding people to vet? Were you looking for people that. Did you run an ad saying, I'm looking to hire someone to expand or look for people who advertised that they could help you explode your Facebook advertising results? How did you find people to vet?

Maybe that's hard. I mean for, for Facebook ads specifically, this is kind of meta. It was in a Facebook group called Facebook Ad Experts and I said, oh, this is a good place to find Facebook Ad experts, right. I don't know if that groups are the best way to do it. That was just the way I did it. But really I think the thesis here or the concept is you got to know how to do any of these things, whether it's email, Facebook ads, assembling, shipping, whatever your business is involved in it. But get out of your own way and realize that even if they do it 80% as well, hopefully they do a better job 80% that frees you up to have the ideas and to, you know, do bigger lever activities. And I think for me, you know, every our biggest sales days we've ever had in biggest months, I'm not working and it's the complete 180 of what it used to be. So yeah, to your point, if you're stuck in the, in the weeds of the day to day and this is a conversation I have with my partner Chris at the agency we run because we work with Econ Brands doing their email and he's stuck in the day to day because it's still a young company. We're trying to scale it up and it's so hard. My whole job with him is I'm not in the company, therefore I can give him ideas and a vision and see what's going on in it to fix it. So but you can't do that if you're in the day to day. So getting on the day to day is the hardest thing to do and you can't really do it until you have enough skill and margin and profit to support that. Now most of what I do is Just mess stuff up. And I try to ping the experts. You're like, dude, you don't know what you're talking about anymore. So that's, that's the best place I can be, you know, so it's, I sometimes honestly get frustrated now. Yeah. Because I want to just sometimes get my hands dirty and do stuff that's like task based, like just reply to emails or take phone calls, feel busy. But it's like you can't do that. And so it's a, it's a, it's a weird thing. As an entrepreneur that wants to always improve and make things better, to not be busy in the day to day, it's like, what the hell do you do? So I try to really come up with whether it's a new marketing channel, a new product line, you know, a new angle or a new, new thing. But those ideas, you know, I may have, you know, lightning in a bottle once a quarter, but they should, if I execute on those big ideas, have a bigger impact, you know what I mean? So it's, it's a very different way to look at it. And for me, as a doer, working 20 hours a day, it's very hard.

You know, well, sully, you, you know, basically you stir the pot, you know, when you talk about going in there and challenge them and this, that and the other. But the answer to some of that is spending time with the people that are actually in charge and doing those things and brainstorming about ways that they can improve. And that's kind of a way where you can be involved, stay involved with all of the phases of your business, but keep them fresh, you know, keep them exciting, you know, where it doesn't get boring for the people that are doing it or they don't settle into ruts and everything. But this has been fantastic. I appreciate all of your insight.

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