0460 | Travis Steffen

Hi, my name is Travis Steffen, serial entrepreneur with eight exits and CEO and founder of Growthteam AI and you're listening to EA Interviews.

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Join Mario Ficcini for today's expert authority effect interview. We've all talked about growth in business and you see people talking about it all the time. Time.

Or do you want to grow your business?

You want leads, profit? We all do. And I'm all about that. And that is why I'm excited to have Travis Steffen on today's show because he is a growth expert to the tune of eight successful exits. And I'll let him share the dollar amounts, but it's very, very impressive and he's going to be sharing with us what he's doing and maybe if I can persuade him and get him to share some of the new stuff he's working on because it is absolutely mind blowing. Just the way he thinks and his personality. You're gonna love him. I'm gonna bring him up right after we thank our sponsor. Every business needs a book, including yours. And that's why I'm launching my new book to help you, regardless of where you think your current writing abilities are. Visit eapublishingmethodbook.com today to learn the seven steps to publish and promote your nonfiction, lead and profit generating business book in eight weeks. Once again, that's EA publishingmethodbook.com There he is, ladies and gentlemen, Travis Steffen. Travis, how are you feeling?

Feeling great. I'm feeling great. You're maybe my, you're my second interview of the day, but now I've got my, my warmups all done and ready to dive in.

Well, I, that's exciting to hear and I appreciate what you were sharing with me and I can't wait for you to just share with the audience about. I mean, most people want to do an exit, most people want to grow their business, maybe they want to do an exit and then there's a successful exit, let alone eight of them. I mean, I just got to ask, what's your secret?

Multitasking a lot earlier in my career is probably a big answer to that, which I would not recommend, folks do. I think the, the eight.

Why not?

Honestly, it's. I guess it depends on your aim. If you're like me and early on I didn't realize how impactful multitasking so often early in my career would be. It was the most accelerated form of on the job education. I've ever had and wouldn't trade it for anything. But there were people who were disciplined enough to just do one thing and stick with it for over a decade. And regardless of their ability as an entrepreneur, from an intellectual capacity, they were able to create phenomenal financial outcomes, outcomes for themselves. So if your goal is money in the bank, oftentimes deep focus wins. If your goal is to educate yourself to do something that's earth shattering and can change the course of human history, that's a really, really big problem. And you need a lot of reps to train yourself, then maybe doing more things early in your career is, is a, an enhancement.

It's a happy middle ground.

Yeah, I would imagine so. Getting involved in ecosystem as much as possible. I mean even outside of the companies that I built that, you know, the, the exits I can kind of take credit for to some degree. There have been others that I've, I've built that I haven't been the founder of that have exited or gone public. There have been ones that I've been part of that I've been the founder of that haven't done anything and that have completely cratered. I'm also a man, a mentor for some of the top accelerator programs in the world on the growth side of things. So the big Silicon Valley accelerators, I'm in basically all of them as, as a mentor. So being able to get involved in the ecosystem and just put yourself in a lot of different situations and see a lot of different scenarios play out, every one of them teaches you something. Every one of them is going to make you better as entrepreneur. And it is a rocky road regardless of how incredible you might be. If you're pushing the boundaries and you're doing things that are worth doing, it's, it's, they're going to be ups and downs. But I would say maybe a secret is just continuing to frame failure as yet another learning opportunity and framing the worst case scenario as an inconclusive test.

So looking at things as an opportunity, I had this great opportunity this weekend.

Yeah, think about it like this. I mean when we talk about growth, a lot of people will talk about tactical things like conversion optimization for example, which then dovetails into the scientific method. And if we look at the scientific method through just a very broad lens, it starts with a problem statement. This is exactly what is happening right now. And in, in a very simplistic case, let's say you're an E Comm company and your visit to purchase ratio is below industry benchmarks. And if you look at that as a problem statement. And your hypotheses aren't just, what can we try? Like most people have. It's more like, why is this thing happening? Let's seek to understand. And your experiments are ways to validate or invalidate that understanding. Your failed tests and your successful tests are both incredibly instrumental to your success because they allow you to iterate on your understanding of your customer a lot faster. The absolute worst case scenario is an inconclusive test where you've put in a lot of effort and you haven't learned anything. So if it steers you towards the correct path, then in my opinion, it's definitely worth doing as long as when you started doing it, you came in with the intent to learn something very specific and strategic.

Yeah.

I mean, wasting your time, energy, and money on something and not learning something at the very least is kind of. It sucks. But if you do learn something from it and you can refine the process further, I think it was. I don't know if Bill. If it was Bill Gates or not, but someone said, success is a horrible teacher. It seduces you to thinking you can never fail.

Oh, I love that. Yeah. Honestly, when I. It took me a long time early in my career to find mentors, I would say I didn't grow up in a business world. I didn't have any business education or anything like that.

So when I did find mentors, I found that the most profound learnings I got from them were from the mentors that had had significant failures as well as significant successes. So they were humble enough to know because of, you know, times in which they executed. Yeah, exactly. And there are always things to learn. There are things that work in some businesses and not others. And why is that? Right. And oftentimes it's because people skip modeling and strategy and they go straight to tactics because that's what's marketed to them. And. And the people who are marketing those things. Yeah. They have a direct financial interest in convincing you that that's the way. So that's. It's just not the way.

Yeah. I always love that when you. When you ask expert a, you know, what should I do? And it's like, oh, well, you should do this. And it's like, well, what are they selling? Let's say a funnel. Right. And then. And I hate to even name anything because I've had so many great people on the show that do have a good heart, but it's like, you ask a real estate expert, like, what you should do to invest your money.

It's not great stocks 100%. Yeah. And I think that's. It's pointed and I'll. And I'll say a name because I think I'm not. I wouldn't consider myself talking badly about this person. I just think it's. It's an interesting example. You know, a big, A big name in the space right now is Russell Brunson. Right? Russell Brunson is. He wants to tell the world that funnels are the way. Now, rewinding a little bit or taking a step back, Funnels are a tactic and funnels can work like, with a very specific focus. Funnels by themselves. And especially specific types of funnels.

Book funnels are.

Are. Yeah, exactly. It's like very specific applications that they want you to teach or they want. They want you to believe are the way that you succeed. And it can be sometimes, but you won't. If they're not, you won't know why. If they are, you won't know why. And because it skips several steps. Now, obviously he's selling a funnel product, and so he has a direct financial interest in wanting you to know that this is the way you start, this is where you end. Nothing else exists. This is everything. And especially since it worked for him, you know, he's going to passionately believe that. But if you look at some of the most prolific growth stories in the history of. Of of business, it wasn't just a funnel equation. It was a lot more. And funnels were a small piece of that puzzle.

And would you argue, I mean, if we're talking at the raw sense, I know that everything is a funnel. I mean, even if it's a physical store, you go to the fruit market, whatever the case is, you know, you get the ad, you go to the thing, it's all conversion. But would you argue that the funnels, in the sense that we're talking about it in marketing and congrats on your doctorate.

Would you say that it's really just Internet forward even early 2000s? Because Internet, I don't know anyone who is really spearheading, with the exception of maybe Jeff Walker and the launch system in 96.

Yes and no. I would say if you think about things from an analog perspective, I think Chamath put it really eloquently. One of the first talks I saw from him was, and he was the first head of growth at Facebook before there was a growth team on any business. Using that verbiage.

He boiled business down to three things. And I thought it was really clever and it was, and people have opinions about him. But I thought that a lot of his knowledge was very, very good. Step one, get more people through the front door. And a lot of people focus only there. And it's a mistake. Step two, get them to their first aha moment in that customer journey as quickly as possible. And step three, continue to deliver quantifiable product value as often as possible. If those three things are taken care of, then I think, you know, a lot of businesses can look at what they've done as a specific type of funnel, even if they're like in the analog world, right. If you enter a restaurant, there are going to be a certain number of people that walk in the door and a certain number of those people are going to look at the menu to see if there's anything on it that they want to eat or can eat. Some of those people will leave and some of those people will be seated. And you know, different moments occur along the way. Now you can digitize that into funnel software and things along those lines, but it really is just a series of micro conversions that you're thinking in terms of taking a user on a journey to taking a set of specific actions. Some will, some won't. And I do think that the funnel verbiage, like the word funnel is unfortunate because it really refers to a linear path. And I think most great growth stories in business do not follow a linear path. They can, they can be seen more as like.

Well, let's look at two scenarios really quick. One, you have a machine that, you know, you have pieces of that machine going along a conveyor belt, and human beings are putting together those pieces of those machines. And, and at the end of it.

You have Henry Ford with the assembly line.

The assembly line, perfect analogy, right? Let's say hypothetically though, that first machine that you build is intent on building other machines, and the second machine you build is also intent on building other machines. So every single aspect of what you're doing as a human laborer in the system ensures that every single effort spits off compounding returns. That's really the kind of quote unquote secret. That's really not a secret deep in the valley, in Growthland, but it is kind of a secret in almost everywhere else in the Internet marketing realm and everywhere else. So I just always found that really fascinating that that was absent. And one of my books is on very specific part of those kind of loops. Right. A lot of high level growth minds will refer to loops. And that book, Viral Hero, is all about viral loop and how customers can actually create those concentric, those compounding growth stories for you. But you can apply that same methodology in any customer journey type, whether it's inbound or outbound, whether it's online or offline. Exactly, yeah, all of those. If the economics are correct in those steps along the way, you know what your targets need to be for that to be a sustainable path for your company to continue proceeding over time.

Like for just going back to the example of funnels, when someone says we're going to carry this note for 43 days, but then we hit profitability at 45 and beyond.

Yeah, that's, I mean that's, that's one way to look at it. Sure, I would, I'll give a, an example here. Product that most people are familiar with in the business world is LinkedIn. Early days of LinkedIn, their model dictated they couldn't use the vast majority of channels out there. They were, you know, essentially a niche social network. So they could only use the channels that were available to them economically. I, E, B2C, virality and SEO. Like those two things had to be the way, so they had to build the product accordingly because you can't, you can't build a product like you have, you can't fit a channel around a product. You have to build a product for a channel so you don't have control of the channel. So for them, they realized, okay, how can we create network effects or catalyze network effects in the system? And here's where, when we're bringing you on, you're inviting your professional network and here's why, right? To make your status improved, which can be a direct translation into money in your pocket. In so doing, they also asked you to create user profile and a company profile and their company packaged, LinkedIn packaged those profiles as user generated content that then got indexed on search. So as those network effects, when you invite your network proliferate and you start to see certain of those like linear channels start to work, every single user that comes into the system creates these pieces of user generated content that get indexed when you search for their business or you search for their name. LinkedIn will come up. As you feed more people into that system, that breadth expands so much that it compounds and it compounds onto itself. It wasn't only until they saw that was as effective as it possibly could be that they added more, you know, to that growth machine in as much as they, you know, updated their business model so they could sell like business to business tools so they could unlock other aspects of their, of their growth machine and like add new, you know, superchargers to that engine, so to speak, meaning like their sales navigator or their like business tools and their job boards and things like that. So suddenly they can have paid sales reps in the machine, that batch acquires these businesses. But when they do those, and now they're enabled to do so by the economics because they're selling in mass. But as they do that, every one of those users who goes through the system still creates that user generated content.

And they're building platform out.

Exactly, exactly. And if you think about YouTube through the same lens, the, when people think about going viral, so to speak, it's not, it's not a video that ever goes viral. It's YouTube itself that goes viral. Like you're just a viral mutation. If you think about like the flu, the reason that everyone in the world isn't vaccinated against the flu, for example, is because the flu changes every single year and different strains pop up because it's its natural survival mechanism of that entity. Right. Of that organism. And so if you think about YouTube, if there was just one video on that system, everyone in the world would have been exposed to it, everyone would have forgotten about it by now, and no one would have ever gone to YouTube again. But because of the fact that people still continue to create content on YouTube and when they share that link or they embed the player or anything along those lines, people are still getting a new and fresh experience of YouTube every single time. So YouTube continually spreads virally and people can kind of piggyback on that through a form of direct response marketing in creating that content that kind of piggybacks on that existing audience. But through that lens that is like the platform is what's the virus. And we're all just kind of the hosts and the content we create are the mutations.

That's a really good analogy. And you got my wheels turning here, especially with the YouTube thing because, well, clearly I love video and it was actually my first book 10 years ago. But.

I think most people do look at YouTube as like, that's where we're like this container or bucket you're putting videos into. But I, I, there's such a great analogy because the reality is we're the ones keeping the social networks going. We're keeping the experience good. We're the ones making the experience.

Yes, exactly. So they don't have to. Right. It's, it's cheaper. Now think about Facebook. Right? Like they should be fine for us, right? Yeah, seriously, the platform is the Same. Their, their platform is designed to generate attention, but the mutation. You don't have the same experience in Facebook basically ever, because they've caught on to the fact that, like, for me, I'm, I'm on Instagram now. Finally, I'm actually on social media for the first time in my career because I'm actually like, trying to teach people how I've done some of this stuff. And I don't follow very many people. I only follow, like cute animals and like a couple people that inspire me and that's it. And it was very strategic because I didn't want to get caught in the addiction loop of, of some of the content on there. But what happens is very quickly, within like 10 seconds, my scroll is gone and now they're showing you recommended content because they know they want to keep the viral mutations alive to give me a fresh experience every time. So through that lens, if we look at, at our kind of growth machines as if we like, zoom back out. If we look at our growth machines as they have to be renewable resources for us to continue growing as a business, right. They have to be expansive and compounding like that then unlocks a whole world of new potential product value that we can inject. It's not just a linear flow. It's not just one of those situations where maybe you try. How often do you hear it where an entrepreneur is like, ah, I'm going to try this one method, or this company here is trying to sell me a webinar funnel, or these guys are trying to sell me like SDRs or, or Facebook ads or whatever. I'm going to just try everything, see if anything works, and then just throw.

Some mud against the wall, see what sticks.

Exactly. Exactly. And sometimes nothing does.

How do you even know it's the right wall?

You don't. Unless you have a, unless you have a growth model and a strategy, right? So like, and you can run different scenarios, you can figure out why things work and run cohesive sets of experiments to do so. And experimentation is pretty common topic, but I still find that 95% of companies that I run into do it, like, very, very wrong. It's like, what are we going to test today? Let's test buttons. Let's test headlines. Cool. It's just, you're putting on a horse race in that case, right? You're not learning anything. You're just saying we don't know how to make a decision, so we're going to do both things at once and we're just going to choose the thing that outperforms the other thing, and that's just the bad.

But what if it's the wrong thing for your audience?

What if it's the wrong thing? Or viewer. Audience. Or what if it succeeds and you have no idea why or how to take those learnings and put them elsewhere in your process? Or you don't know why it fails and you don't. And you can't use that learning to figure out why other aspects of your customer journey is failing. I think that's the worst.

Personally. It's like, okay, cool. It worked, but we have no clue why. Yeah, like, deconstruct it. We're not going to act like we know everything. Like, something worked. We clearly are in the ballpark. But I see a lot of people doing that and then teaching it, and I'm like, oh, how'd you figure it out? Like, there's this just air. I'm like, something's not right. And they're like, oh, you know.

Yeah.

If you can't articulate it, you don't know it.

Totally. Even professional conversion rate optimization firms, like, a lot of them still do this. So they're like, oh, we just have this, you know, internal battery of tests that, you know, something usually works, and they're able to, you know, make some money in that transaction by creating a good outcome for a customer. And that's great, but the customer doesn't understand why it worked. The company that did it doesn't understand why it worked. They just knew that some. Some things do. And when they try enough of them, they'll hit some home runs and they'll make some money.

Right. It reminds me of when I was acting and modeling the photographers, and it was like, there's photographers who would. And I worked with one of the best.

We would set up for hours to take five shots. And then there's other people and that. You see it on TV all the time. They're like.

Hundreds of pictures later, and they're like, that's the one. Oh, I love it. And it's like you had no clue.

Yeah, totally. I mean, that's a great example. Honestly, the worst thing that could happen for an entrepreneur is definitely an inconclusive result. Like, you can't. You can't take the mountain of effort and money that you just poured into something and know exactly why it worked or it didn't. So you can't reuse it again. You have to go through that entire process again. And we wonder why so many businesses fail. Yeah.

I was going to ask you earlier on how much do you think passion comes into play?

Well, so Tony Hsieh, when he wrote Rest in Peace, wrote Delivering Happiness. He outlined three types of happiness. The first one, the most fleeting one, is pleasure, right? And it's what feels good. The second is passion, right above pleasure, and it's what am I thinking about? What do I enjoy thinking about a lot. And the third one that is, is much more difficult to achieve. And sometimes you kind of sacrifice pleasure for. For purpose. In a lot of ways is purpose, right? And it's what was I put on this earth to do. The first one sometimes feels the best, but lasts the. It's the shortest duration. You know, passion is right there in the middle. And then purpose is the longest form, but sometimes hardest to reach. And so I think passion has a. Has like a very specific job that it can do. And I think it's. It's very useful to.

Get, like, to get curious enough about a specific area to do enough deep work to create great outcomes. But what I found are some of the things that I'm passionate about, if I try to turn those into commerce, I quickly lose the passion for it. Because the job that I was hiring, quote, unquote, that passion to do for me was to just be fun and interesting and be something else to think about during my day and didn't necessarily translate to the reason that I was put here. Like, I love fantasy football, but if I built a fantasy football company, I would be having a conversation with myself every single day on what I'm contributing to humanity, right? I was passionate early on in my life. I was a professional athlete. I fought professionally, and I played a professional online poker. And both of those things I was really passionate about. I was obsessed with. And then eventually had moment where I just sat down and was thinking to myself, what am I doing with my life? I'm either getting punched in the face for a living, or I'm trading money with a bunch of other nerds on the Internet. Like, what am I contributing to this world? If I died today, what would I like be remembered for? And it was basically nothing. So I think it has a job to do, but shouldn't be seen as itself in a vacuum. The outcome that you're hunting for, when.

Did you have this realization that.

I want to change things and leave a lasting impact or a bigger impact?

It's hard to say because I think when I was a child, I was arrogant enough to think that, I mean, there are, God, what is it, like 8 billion people on this planet and we're Here for just a very brief instant in time relative to how long other things have been around. And I was. I had the audacity to think that I mattered enough to leave some sort of impact on humanity and change the way things are done in some capacity forever.

I. It's a blessing and a curse to still believe that today, I will say, because there are a lot of really, you know, good businesses to be a part of, but there are ones that I have been a part of and I've left or ones that I haven't been a part of and maybe financially I should have or, you know, companies that I should have stuck with before selling them and just didn't align with that level of. Of impact and reach and how, you know, it could potentially impact humanity. And because of that, like, I just found it really difficult to give it my time. Yeah.

If you don't have that interest, regardless of passion, if you don't even have an interest in it.

Yeah. That's where purpose comes in. Right. That's. If I know that I'm put. If I. If I believe deeply that I was put here to change things forever for, like, somehow alter the course of human history, if I'm doing something that doesn't align with it, it becomes very, very difficult for me to focus for a prolonged period. Maybe I can. Maybe I can get myself to do that for six, seven minutes. Yeah. Well. And honestly, it's interesting because some of the most difficult times in my career have been right after I've sold a company and the deal indicates I have to be a part of the combined entity for a specific period of time.

Oh, like six to 12 months or something.

Yeah. But in some sort of subordinate role. Right. Where I'm like, just running a business unit. And those are tricky because, like, I kind of have to distract myself during that window by doing other things and multitasking and so forth, because I want to distract myself away from knowing that there's a ceiling on the impact I can create and the achievements that I can reach.

Yeah. I talked to so many people, and even before the show, I talked to a lot of people, and it was like, there's some people who I feel like they're so driven and they're fantastic. Like you said, they're making that financial impact. But what are you doing for the world? And a lot of. Some of them are doing both. It's not. But I see so many people that it's like, oh, no. If you have a passion, start a business. And it's like there's a lot of stuff I'm passionate about, but this ain't no joke. Like, I don't know if I want to deal with much more. Right, Right. And. But there's times where it's like, there's no way this thing would still be going if I didn't have the passion because that's the only thing that carried me through. Because nothing was working. Absolutely nothing. It was horrible.

Yeah. Yeah.

I could have walked somewhere. I could have walked across the country and been like, this is more enjoyable.

Yeah. I mean, if you think about. I like to steal an exercise from product management where they. It's this. Jobs to be done, exercise. And you think about what job are you hiring your passion to do for you. And like, for example, if we look at it as a tool, if we look at passion as a tool and we mimic that same analogy and say, let's say I have a hammer. This hammer has a job to do for me. It is to hammer nails in. It's the hammer. Like certain things together. I can't use that hammer for everything, but I do need it. Like, it's an essential piece of that. It's essential tool on my tool belt. But if it's the only tool I have that I'm going to crush a lot of things that. That I shouldn't have crushed. So, like, for me, it's a tool that is complementary with a number of others.

Is that why everyone is in businesses, like crush it? Because no one knows what they're doing?

You know, maybe. So that's a good.

I should say no one. It's tongue in cheek. But I'm just like, what does that have to do? Keep the hammer down. And I thought about that and I'm like, if you always kept the hammer down, you wouldn't be getting any momentum to knock the nail into place. It's just sitting right.

Yeah. And honestly, it's. It. I mean, I think there's something to that. Right. Like, it's. It's.

If I were to.

If I were to think about this through a different lens and I didn't have a hammer in that situation, like, I wouldn't get very far. Right. So I think it's. It's. Yeah. Let alone house. Exactly. Right. I think you have to have it. But you can't only have it.

I think you need to cut a piece of wood. Good luck with the hammer. Maybe.

Exactly.

The cloth back in the. Maybe get through it. Yeah.

I'm just going to shatter it into a whole bunch of different pieces, you know. Maybe.

So, yeah, that's great analogy about the tools, because.

I. I think there's this. I know a personality type. I need every tool in the toolbox, but they may not know how to really use. They don't know what the core ones are. They don't know when. They just know they need all the tools. And I'd say good for them for being curious, but at some point, refine it. And then there's for sure, the other personality type of every. Everything's a nail to a hammer. I mean, it's like, hey, can you help me install this window? Yeah, let me grab my hammer.

Let me grab my hammer. Sure. Yeah, let me install this, like, stained glass panel. Yeah, exactly.

I want to ask you, you're given so much good stuff, and I know people are taking notes and going, wow, this is really good. How can I do it?

So we're talking about, here's steps two, three, four, and five, and it's phenomenal. How did you start? When you're going, okay, let's do this YouTube thing. In my own business, do we look at the customers first? Do we look at our client list? Do we get reviews from them or ask for a survey? Look at the product line. Where would you say are, like, the top couple places to go? All right, focus on these. Because if you don't have this, none of this other stuff matters.

So it depends on where the entrepreneur's starting. Right. If they have an existing business, it's a different question than if they're starting from scratch.

Let's say existing business.

All right, so let's say it's an existing business. Right. The first place that I almost always go, like, from a growth perspective, is retention. Like, without question, it's the foundational metric. It powers every other growth metric you have. And it's unfortunate because retention. So the retention is a lagging indicator. You don't know if it's going to happen until it happens. So the precursor to that is engagement, Right? Customer engagement. So the place that I would go if I'm an entrepreneur with an existing business is, are the customers engaging with my product? To the degree in the way and at the frequency that our hypotheses indicated that they would. And this is what we get at. We get a number that we basically refer to as the natural usage frequency of the product. So let's say you have a product like Instagram and you've got, like, a natural usage frequency of, like, you know, hourly active users, something like that.

Right?

Because you have multiple uses throughout the day. You have another product on the opposite side of the spectrum, let's say Zillow, maybe somebody is using that to buy a house every seven years, something like that. It's tricky there in between because in like on the Instagram side of things, your natural usage frequency of a couple hours, you can build a habit. Whereas Zillow, with their existing model just selling homes, they cannot build a habit. Anything outside of a one month period is usually you have to reacquire that customer and pay to reacquire them every single time. So what they did is they basically created a few other value creation strategies within their suite of products, like their Zestimate feature where you can see the, the value of homes that you don't know what they are. And they also have content that they send you. And those are both different, faster natural usage frequencies, one's monthly ones weekly. So where I would start is engagement in the customer around what we expected when we built something versus what is actually happening, and then trying to get to the bottom of exactly why that's the case. Because every single thing that you do, if you're focusing on growth, is going to be about how do we add more value to this product, period, full stop. Everything else is a derivation of that and it's a single, a signal of part of that. For example, how well are we articulating our value feeds into how we can acquire customers, how often we're presenting a quantifiable view of that value goes into how we're retaining customers and how we're able to monetize those customers. So if you're thinking about things through that lens, and you continue to think about things through that lens, you're on the right track. But a method through which you're able to get really, really curious about that really quickly is just through structured customer conversations. I love this book, Lean Customer Development by Cindy Alvarez. I talk about it a lot. I don't know Cindy. I may someday meet Cindy, but I've recommended her book to almost every single entrepreneur I've met. Because when someone asks me if I have a new idea for a new product in an existing business or a new business, first thing I say is I try to forget it. Because it's my idea. And what I've found to be true is oftentimes when we as entrepreneurs act on our own ideas that we just are convinced are good ideas, it's just so much more likely to fail because of the fact that those ideas have not directly come from an unbiased look at customer information. If, however, Instead we do 20 or 30 structured interviews with no idea, and the job that we hire that idea to do for us is bring us to the table and get us interested in a specific type of customer, interested enough to have a specific set of conversations. And through that lens, if we're able to have 20 or 30 of those structured conversations that are strategically architected to not lead the witness, we're paying attention suddenly to what the user is saying the problem is, what the magnitude of the problem is in terms of value, how they're describing the problem, where they're telling us they would look for a solution to the problem, all of a sudden, I have all the answers. I know where I'm going to market. I know what my sales copy is going to be. I know what outcome the product has to create. I know exactly how they're describing the experience with the product. I know how much they would pay for the product and the value we create for them. Like, I'm getting all of those clues. I'm not having to make any arbitrary decisions that are based on random information that's unrelated and not causal. So through that lens, I would say, like, that's the biggest hack for both of the existing and the new entrepreneur.

Wow, that was a great masterclass right there. Seriously.

I'm going to go back. You're giving me ideas from my book, my training, everything. Like, man, I just spent like over a year refining it, but holy smokes, like, I want to refine it now. Is there anything that else is even a close second or just hone in on this?

You definitely want to build your growth model. Without question. You know, it's one of the things that, that we do at GrowthTeam. AI is we build growth models for companies. We train people as growth leads to place within companies that need growth, leadership, and so forth. So we place people that are trained in our methods with our tools, creating, compounding exponential outcomes. We have a process for every single decision that could potentially be made. If you're experiencing X, then do Y. If you're experiencing A, then do B, et cetera, et cetera. So, like, if you don't have a growth model and your strategy hasn't been birthed from that growth model, if you're skipping straight to tactics, you're just gambling at that point in time. And I've done that in my career, like before I was able to discover this sort of thing professionally. Professionally? Yeah. You're gambling with your entire business, with your livelihood. You're, you're, you might not think you are, but you absolutely are. Because a lot of these tools that you know are being marketed to us as potential solutions to these problems. First of all, the people that are serving me those ads have a direct financial interest in, in me seeing them. Right? Because every single click gets money in their pocket. Now those entrepreneurs that are posting those ads have a direct financial interest in me thinking that that's the truth. I need to see numbers. I need to make sure that I know based on everything that I know about my market, my model, my product, my channel. Like all those four things have to fit together. It's not just product, market fit. Like you have to look at market, model, channel, products. Right? All those things have to fit together in a very, very specific way and have to enable one another. And through that lens, I get an instructive view of what the path needs to be with a growth model. You know, to what degree every single step in your loops have to perform. And you get an example of, of how to generate different scenarios such that, okay, if I generate a 10 per 10% improvement on one of these steps, which step would I need to focus on to generate me the most profound returns at the end of the year? Like, you have an instructive deterministic system that allows you to do that. And so you have very, very clear whys behind your actions. It's not just, let's just try this thing because it worked for this other company. You know, you, you have like blinders that you can put on and you can actually answer the question, how does this company grow? Right. I can actually answer that question now. And I, everyone in my organization can answer that question very, very clearly. And when they have that specificity, if you have other people in your organization, suddenly you're actually utilizing everyone's full creative potential because they know, like Jocko Willink in extreme ownership calls it commander's intent. And that's like super applicable to business because things move so quickly that you have to adapt on the fly. And if you don't give people the lens through which to see the world in that context, they're going to be robots and you're going to die. Yeah.

Because if your team can't execute on the vision, what I'm hearing a lot is it makes everything more succinct.

Makes everything more succinct. It makes everything more specific. You know exactly why you're doing everything you're doing, you know, to what degree, you know, how fast the customer needs to follow the specific process. You know, like, for example, an Example here is, I hear a lot of folks, let's say in E Comm, they talk about the, the CAC to LTV ratio, customer acquisition cost to lifetime value ratio. Bad metric to look at because of the fact there's no time box, right? So if you have your CAC to LTV and let's say it's 10 to 1, if you have this other company over here and it's 5 to 1, but your 10 to 1 CAC to LTV happens over the course of a year and the 5 to 1 CAC to Ltv happens over the course of three months. I'm taking company B every single time because that loop can compound four times before this one completes once, right? And like that's the exponent in the equation, the cycle time. So all these things need to be accounted for, otherwise we're just randomly trying things. You know, some of them are with varying degrees of, of knowledge and some of them are just flat out guesses. But to some degree you're still just playing a probability game.

You're phenomenal. I have thought a lot of this. You are so well articulated with all of it.

It's incredible. I'm like, yeah, I get it. Yeah, I've done that. I get it. This makes total sense. And everyone else should. I've been saying this, but the way you say it makes sense. I'm like, stop it.

Sometimes, you know, it's funny, like there are certain things that click with us at moments in time. Whether I'm. I'm listening to a book or watching a show or something like that, and someone will say something and it'll just click. And I heard the other day there were two reasons that that click moment occurs. And either one, it takes something that's been kind of murky in your brain that you've known to be true, but someone is able to put it in words in a way that really boils it down and makes sense immediately. And the other one is someone says something that immediately challenges and counteracts a belief that I've held for a long time. That's just wrong. Right. And so I'm hoping that listeners are able to hear some of this and know in advance. By the way, listeners like, I didn't just happen upon this knowledge, like I've spent.

Yeah, you. I see a couple books behind you. What's that? Oh yeah, two or 300.

Those. Yeah, I mean all those plus a 500 plus audible. Library. Library. And there's other shelves in this room. But it's also 15 years in entrepreneurship, trying so many different things, failing. You know, I've gone broke a couple times. Once I was like a million bucks in the hole because I took such a big swing and bootstrapped, was able to climb back. But then after that, just, you know, getting involved in the ecosystem to the degree that you're seeing every single possible derivation of any problem and the consequences of doing things wrong.

And also, like, you know, I've tried to then get as much out of academia as well, so like, two graduate degrees, one pending doctorate, like all those things. I'm still a beginner in so many of these areas that I'm trying to find connections in, but if I'm able.

To awfully like a newbie.

Well, there, there are a lot of these areas that I've been able to centralize my focus in. But, like, every single conversation that I get to have with really, really smart entrepreneurs, I'm learning various ways to iterate on the kind of playbook that I've been able to build that we can now give companies that we work with.

That's phenomenal. Good for you.

I love the ongoing learning.

Yeah. It's honestly the biggest consequence I felt early on in my career, probably halfway through my career at this point in time, I found that one of the biggest breaking points for me after my fifth exit, I mentioned it briefly that I went like, over a million dollars in the hole and kind of wiped the slate clean on my entire net worth after that many years. And I had to start from scratch, below scratch.

Right.

And a big reason why was because I had gotten off on this thought that I was becoming an authority and more of a guru rather than a perpetual student. And that was like the vow that I made to myself in that moment. Like, I will never give up the role of being a beginner ever again. I'm always going to just be the person that's asking all the questions, why? Why? Tell me more about this, you know, tell me how this works, et cetera, et cetera. And even when I feel like my resume is, like, amazing, I don't want to get out of that seat. Like, it's. It's only been this year that I actually, like, allowed myself to go out and start kind of imparting some knowledge onto others again, because there was, like, a fear there for a while that the. The impact I was making that for them would feel so good that I would shut off the beginner's mindset in myself. Like, that's when we get into the pleasure right from.

I think it's part of you. I've thought that very same thought before too. Like, especially when I launched the show like a year later, like I know what I'm doing and I'm like, no, I don't.

Yeah, I think it's part of you. Because there's been times when.

Business, the show publishing, the software I created to build WordPress websites automatically in under five minutes, all of them, you have the startup phase, they start going well and then it's, oh cool, finally now I can relax like I've been wanting to. But then it's like, hold on though. Yeah, I don't think you need to go run yourself in the ground, but I think it's part of us. I wouldn't worry about it because I can tell you your personality and everything. I can tell you're a good person. You're. You're never going to turn into.

Anyone that we might make jokes about.

Much appreciated. Much appreciated.

Yeah, it might go a little bit here or there, but you have nothing to worry about. I think you just love learning that.

I mean that really is it at the end of the day, honestly being able to. And then you know, trying to kind of take an approach where.

I want for like, for any mastermind I go to or anything like that. Like, like, for example, I have a group, it's like a, an invite only group of, of like high growth CEOs and it's kind of like a goal setting and accountability and also collaboration group. It's not really a business at this point. We do charge a little money for it here and there, but basically the, the goal is for, you know, we boil down big time annual goals down into monthly, down to the weekly and then we kind of post about them and share them with each other and then at the end of the week share our progress, etc. And one of the items on everyone's list has to be helping someone with one of theirs. Right? And through that container, like I've tried to take that with me where, you know, if I'm, if I'm imparting some wisdom from somebody, I also want to keep my ears really open because no matter who that person is, there's something that they're going to be able to teach me without question and then I can use that in a completely different setting or iterate upon my knowledge or even try something that maybe they thought was successful in one setting but wasn't in another setting. And that learning becomes such a huge unlock for me. So, so yeah, I think you're, you're definitely on the right track there. It's like a giant video game, man.

Absolutely. I. I've. You. This is surreal. I got to be honest. I've used that analogy and I remember thinking one of the first businesses I started, I'm like, I'm going to do better than this guy because I make everything fun and it's a game. And I mean Super Mario. Who.

I mean, wrong there, there's actually an author. By the way, if you're into gamification.

I want to say it's Gabe Zickerman is his name and he has a book, Gamification Revolution, Gamification by Design, Game Based Marketing. And he's able to actually boil that principle down into like product value. His talks on YouTube, he gave a talk to, to Google. I want to say that's on YouTube somewhere and it just melts your face the kinds of ways.

Say his name again.

Gabe Zickerman.

Just a genius guy. He's. His whole shtick is all gamification. So, you know, taking the Super Mario analogy and transforming it into product management or buyer psychology or all these different areas that can be applicable to growing anything. And it's just a really fun sort of thing to dive into because you start to see all the connections that you wouldn't have otherwise. Spot modded.

It's. Have you ever seen the Office?

Sure.

Do you remember the episode one Robert California comes in and they're talking about how can we get growth in here? And Kevin's like using the vending machine example and he's like, oh, you're really just talking about candy bars. And he was like, oh, we need to put our top performers on the top and let's have a meeting about this.

Yes.

I mean it's, it's hilarious. But the reality is how many small to medium sized businesses do look at. I say inventory. Look at their inventory of what's your suite of products? How are you marketing it? What's the roi? What's the profit margin? Which ones you know? Oh, what do you sell? First off, they can't articulate it. Oh, okay, cool. I have no clue now.

Yeah.

What's your, what's your most profitable one? Why aren't you focusing on that? Right when we were doing videos full time for people ages ago.

What videos do you want to go out there? Oh, you can literally do anything. But where do we start? Same thing with publishing. You can do 15 books. But what's the first one? Why are you doing it? What's the mission?

I think on that note as well. There's something that you said that is a good reminder. The most common structure in business right now is that silo based approach. Right. Where you have different business units responsible for specific metrics in the business. Brian Balfour, the former VP of growth at HubSpot, now the CEO at Reforge, he uses this concept of a trade off metric which is such a killer for silo based companies where you have like let's say a marketer who's accountable for leads in and you have a sales team that's accountable for deals closed and you have a product team accountable for shipping features as quickly as possible. And with that model there's basically, you're creating an artificial ceiling on how quickly you can grow because you're prohibiting cross functional learning and you're also prohibiting cross functional achievement. Let's say, for example, if I'm the marketing director, I know my incentives are tied to the number of leads in. So I'm going to do a lot of different things to get that number up and sacrifice other metrics from other business units downstream because of the fact that that's what my job is.

Right.

And the same thing for sales. Like I'm going to close as many deals as I can regardless of how well their use cases fit the value we create because that's how I get paid.

Right.

And the same thing is true across the board. If we were instead all after one single metric together and our, our incentives were aligned around our ability to understand and create those specific outcomes. It's a completely different structure to run the business. And you're not having like you're acknowledging the trade off metrics that can occur. Like I don't want to sacrifice leads in for reduced sales or for increased sales velocity or I don't want to sacrifice deals closed for retained revenue. Like having worse churn figures is going to prohibit me from being able to raise money at the correct terms. Like all those different things by doing one thing and saying we're going to lift this metric because we have a whole team accountable for.

Is the lazy approach. People don't realize it's the lazy approach, but intellectually speaking, it's not the way. Right. So yeah.

And a lot of times the departments don't even communicate with each other.

Yeah.

Oh, that, that's a whole lot different. I've heard some, even this past week someone said we're the same company, but that's a whole other different division or department. Yep.

We don't, we don't do that piece and like, you know, for Example, if you ever had to have had a tech company, you have engineers more often than not. Like the engineers are going to do things or not do things depending on how much work it is.

Right.

It's just too much work. Like we're not gonna be able to do that. All right, well lean into it, do.

It because no one else wants to. And we'll have that advantage if I'm.

Aligning all of our incentives around a very specific metric. And we can see clearly that one of the ways to do that to achieve that is with a really specific feature, which is more often than not not the case, but let's say it is that engineer suddenly has a. Why they're not just being told to do something because like that's what the CEO said or the director product heard from the director of sales. You know, it's, it is in alignment with creating more product value for the customer and being able to like actually like share in the value creation process.

Yeah. And the customer wins.

Yeah. Oh yeah.

Or client or whatever you want to call them. But I mean, yeah, it's amazing to me how many large companies and it's nothing against smaller medium size because there's plenty of large companies. It's like how are you functioning? And I think there's 15 different departments on the hamster wheel. Just keep running.

Yeah. And that's one of the most often things that we run up against that growth team is actually.

Smaller companies that want to utilize us. We oftentimes have to tell them, hey, the structure of your business is currently broken because like for example, they may have employed two or three third party agencies. Well, those are deeper and more thick walled silos than even the ones that you've created in your business because their success metric is keeping you happy and paying. They don't necessarily care about the outcomes they're driving for you or the learnings that you're delivering. Let's say for example, you outsource your advertising. How often do you think that those people are sharing the learnings on what impacts and what, what drives that customer for you, your customer service team or for your product team or for the team that's in charge of financial modeling. Like they're not, they're, they're unless keeping.

As much of it as them extra well.

And they're keeping as much of it as a black box as they can. So you remain as reliant on them as, as possible.

Right.

Like they want, they don't want to give away their secret sauce which is their understanding of the customer. So all those things kind of go counter to what the outcome that the CEO or the founder wants to drive.

That's a really good point. I've thought again, you're articulating it so miraculously I've mentioned that to people. I go, you're really going to hire that person or that company to do that one thing? I'm like, you were already doing it. Oh, I just don't have the time. And I can tell it's like they're now getting 60% of that business. It's like, oh, it's saving me the time. It's like you just lost 68% of your profit. I'm glad you found someone to save your time. But there's a whole lot of people who can save you time and not, you know, whose business are you running? It's more like they're there and they have all these 15 partnerships.

Totally. So there's, there's been one really useful tool for, for me when like I found over the last several years building businesses early on, especially bootstrapped.

And so we'll, we'll think about it in terms of like steps in the process, right? If you're starting like if you want to start a customer success team, for example, and you have nothing like that's, that's the very first entry point into the journey. And if like the second step, right, is you have a, an in house hire that's running a team, the question becomes how do you get to that reality? And what I've often done is I've actually hired agencies to do a very different job. Rather than driving outcomes, I've actually hired them to say, hey, we're going to hire you for this period of time, but when we hire you, we want full visibility into the operational processes that you have such that we can begin to make progress. I can bring in a hire to start to run the process that you're driving and then we can compile pieces of our team around that pre existing process, push you off to the side, use you as, as like an advisor here and there for a little bit of money. But then we've created that bridge without, because otherwise your, your outcome is you go from nothing to full time hire. That full time hire has to build a process from scratch. During that six month period, you're making no progress whatsoever and you're probably not going to knock it out of the park with that first process anyway. So I think agencies can be used for a bridge strategy in that regard. But everything else, if you're Just trying to like outsource. Like if you're trying to outsource that entire business unit, you're actually abdicating as a leader. You're not actually, you're not actually like leading. In that case, you're saying this is something I want to focus on. So I'm just going to throw money at this problem and you're going to pay the tax for that.

That. Oh, that's powerful.

What have you had any pushback from we don't want to share the process or do you have to pay them more or do you just say if you don't want to share it at all then we're not going to go with you?

Yeah, we always hear it like we, we always hear that they don't want to share it and that's just not their normal process. And we say hey, this is like, this is specifically what we're trying to achieve. Like I'll just let them know from, just know uncertain terms. We eventually want to graduate from you guys. We want to build our own team, but I don't want to give up six months of productivity. So we can either do it with you and I'm happy to be NDA'd and not like go sell your process to other people. That's not our business. We just want to make sure that we're able to use you guys in a very specific way so that we can kind of graduate from you and bring the effort in house and get 100 full time focus. Because the problem with those agencies, they're really, really good at this one specific tactic. And if you know based on your model and your strategy, that tactic is right for you. Having that agency, you're only getting fractional focus. So like you won't get the depth and immersion into your business and your and your mind share that you want to buy.

So that's like an issue that you can run up against in any agency work at all. So being able to acknowledge that and say what else can we get from that, that's an asset. And if that asset is pre built process, pre trained team members, pre configured tools that we can then start to buy like you know, borrow from and, and learn from and implement, you know, as we phase in our full time team, that's the way to go in my opinion.

Wow, I so appreciate the insight. I, I want to just keep going with you for like another few hours. I have a couple more questions and everything. You have a few more minutes.

Sure.

I wanted to ask you about like how you got started in this. Were you, like, did you have this brilliant mind in middle school and high school, or was it something you developed in college?

Well, that's very, very nice of you to say. So I grew up in a really hyper, masculine culture in the Midwest, in Eastern Iowa. Being smart was not socially rewarded at all. So I did not acknowledge that part of myself for a long time.

And just got involved in sports because that was, like, the key to the top of the social hierarchy as a kid. And that was really the only thing that mattered to me at the time was, you know, for whatever reason, that was important to me. So that was what I want to engineer an outcome in. And so, you know, took that path and kind of pretended that I didn't know the things that I know and didn't even really explore and try to learn things a whole heck of a lot, because I was just, like. I was convinced that there was a different way. Like, this other way was not something that I wanted. If we think about what we're exposed to, TV and movies and things like that as kids, the athletes are almost always the heroes, and, like, they're like smart people that are the supporting cast members that are, like, nerds and almost are. Are always never brave and things like that.

They're doing the homework for the other person.

Yeah. So it was not something that was case modeled for me as something that I wanted. All my heroes were in sports or in, you know, something else, and never in entrepreneurship. I didn't even think that it was an option. So it wasn't until. So I went to college to play football. Pop my Achilles tendon, it tore, completely rolled up my leg, was not ready to be done with sports. So that's when I got into poker and.

Mixed martial arts, because I've been boxing since I was 12 and moved to Thailand and did that, and.

But I hated it. And I hated every aspect of athletics as well. And I didn't realize it until, like, just a very specific moment in time where I had the opportunity to go have, like, a big fight with, you know, a guy that ended up, years from then, ended up being a UFC champion. And. And I was afraid, like, just. There's no. No, no shame around me saying it. Like, I. I had seen this guy fight, and I'm like, there's just no way I'm gonna beat this guy. Like, he is an absolute freak of nature, and I'm just some guy, right? Like, I know things about the sport, and I'm, like, a decent athlete, but I'm not at this level and it just started to make me question, like, hey, I'm not thinking. Like, I think I should in this realm. Like, is this really for me? Maybe I. Maybe there's a different path. And one of my mentors in the sport at the time, like, I had the opportunity to go to grad school to get my first master's degree, and he was like, go to grad school? Are you kidding me? Like, why? Why would you be doing this? Like, look at where we are. Like, this is not what any of. If any of us had the opportunity to do. Some of the things that you have the opportunity to do, go, like, do those things. So that was a wake up call and a moment where I'm like, this person who I look up to as this, like, alpha male figure that's like, very famous. I am, like, getting this advice to do this thing that I didn't think ever this person would say I should do.

I did get some validation later on down the way that, like, I actually, you know, I went and got like, my Mensa card and stuff like that. Just. There's no utility in that whatsoever, by the way. Don't do it. It's really dumb.

Really?

Yeah, like, I have it. And there's. You get, like, a little brochure every month of, like, weird, like, word searches, and somebody's doing a lecture on string theory and someone else is doing a lecture on knitting. And it's just a very strange community. But, like, it served one purpose, and that was like, I could lean. I just wanted to know if I was as clever as I thought I was. That was the question that I had. And so when I learned that I'm like, I need to actually, like, become okay with who I am.

And, like, embrace this side of myself and just start to actually, like, put some energy into learning things. And it was the first time that I actually, you know, did that because I never went to class really in school or in grad school and just got good grades, never went to the library. So the answer, long winded answer to your question is no, I. I did not feel this way about myself. You know, to some degree. You know, I still think I'm. I have so much more to learn, but I'm starting to, thankfully, because of the uniqueness of the journey that I've been on, have been able to piece it all together through a specific lens and a specific methodology. And hopefully I can share that with. With other people.

I think you already are, and I appreciate you sharing it with my audience. And I mean, I even if it was just us, I'm blown away. I mean, I'm so glad we connected and everything.

I can relate to, like 98 and a half percent of that.

Amazing.

With the exception of the kickboxing and martial arts.

Long time.

I play hockey. Love rollerblading, stuff like that.

But, yeah, there you go. Hockey. I mean, I think those guys are crazy. So that's.

Different areas, man.

So you at least have a stick. You can hit something.

There you go. Sure.

True. So, one other question, couple. I mean, there's more questions, but this is something I do with everyone. It's called the Wheel of Whatever.

Okay.

This is.

Kind of a fun through line. I start. I had an idea like 300, 400 episodes ago. Oh, do you want yellow or black?

Let's go with yellow.

Okay, nice.

It just seemed like fun. I was joking around for a few episodes, and I'm like, I should try that. You know, same thing. Continuous learner. And I painted it one day and then did more and did more. And so now it's basically an excuse for to give me carte blanche to ask you whatever the heck I want. Notice there's no questions on it.

Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. Sounds good.

I'm debating between.

What is your favorite movie? Or. I've never asked anyone this, and you seem like you're pretty cool. If we were to look around your office desk, what type of food would we find that you enjoy?

Well, so the first one, Rounders is. Is my favorite movie, I would say. And then on my desk, watching clips.

On it three nights ago.

Ah, love it, Love it. Just classic.

On my desk, there's no food. But usually.

Like, if. If I. It depends on the time of day, man. Like, the first.

90% of the day, I have more discipline than any human on Earth. And the last 10, I have less discipline than any human on earth. So it really depends on the time of day that you ask me. But. But usually when I have willpower, it's, you know, meat, veggies, rice, you know, egg whites, things like that. And then the last 10% of the day, all bets are off. It's like M M's. And also peanut or regular. So peanut, definitely.

Right.

Oftentimes. And my wife is just like, God, there's like Red 40 in that stuff. And, like, don't do it. So I'm trying to. All sorts of different crap that I'm. Now you're like, but they're good. Yes, yes, exactly. And. And I. I know that all the people that are in, like, the Wellness field would, would skewer me for this because that was kind of like my professional identity for a while. But that's the real truth, everybody.

So I, I half thought you'd. We're gonna be like Teddy KG beans that have Oreos.

Well, I mean honestly, the.

I like if they're with M M's. Now we're talking.

Yeah, the M M's are actually kind of strategic because they come in like the little chunks and so I can kind of like, you know, make them last a little longer. If they're things like Oreos or things like that, they're all gone. You know, like you can't have a box of cereal in this house for more than six hours.

Right.

So we just don't have it around here.

Almond.

Almond milk. Cause my wife is, is lactose intolerant. So like I don't really mind. I, I'm a, I'm a fan of, of like.

You can do both.

I do whey protein for example. Like milk is like the most bioavailable protein source in nature, but it does cause some inflammation so you kind of have to counteract that in various ways. So trade offs.

Well, I appreciate the insight. We're gonna thank our sponsor and come back for the imperfect action round. And I thank you so much for everything you've already shared. But we're going to thank the sponsor and come back. You've heard me say every business needs a book, including yours. And it's true. And that's why I'm launching my new book@eapublishing method book.com so you can learn the seven steps to publish and promote your nonfiction lead and profit generating business book in eight weeks. But you know what, don't take my word for it. Take it from a few of my authors like Lori, I went from having.

An idea and a possibility to actually getting my book published.

Or Catherine, thank you for making my.

Mom number one best selling author.

Or Mary Alice, what he got done for me in three days regarding my book launch.

Unmanageable. John Cody. I've worked with Mario over the phone and online and he's been very helpful.

In getting me where I needed to go with promoting my books.

Rocio.

There's no way in the world I would have been able to do this with somebody else again. I've attempted it in the past. It didn't serve me. As a matter of fact, I ended up more frustrated than anything. So this has been a very seamless process. Adele, if you're looking for an amazing business coach I highly recommend Mario Ficini or Bill Benner.

I can't make a higher recommendation than.

To work with Mario Ficini. He has been great for me and.

Right now I won't work with anybody.

Else except for Mario.

Hey, their words, not mine. Visit eapublishingmethodbook.com to get your copy and I look forward to hearing your transformation as our next video success story. Once again, that's eapublishingmethodbook.com and we are back with the imperfect action round. Travis, are you ready to take imperfect action?

I am, yes.

All right, so the first question I have is, what is the fastest path to the profits?

Getting as close to the customer as you possibly can.

Number two, what is the biggest problem you see your prospects making in the fastest way for them to fix it?

Not having a self imposed delay of gratification, measure twice, cut once. But most people just want to cut. They want results instantly. They don't want to go through the process to get them. And what I would recommend is just get super curious because the path to wealth is definitely a deep understanding of the customer and their life story and what makes them feel things.

I love that answer. And I'm also going to bet you're going to say, don't try cutting with a hammer.

True. Yes, absolutely.

Number three, what is the best way to maximize customer lifetime value?

So in my opinion, the, the best way to maximize lifetime value is obviously just to, to charge more. Like, that's the, the fastest path is to find value that the existing audience wants that they're coming to you for and augment it as much as possible. If your North Star metric is, you know, specific customer outcomes through that lens, you know, I, I try to liken it to treasure map. If you can define what X is on the map and X is like, I mean, the easiest sale for me to make for you is like, here's $20, I'm gonna sell it to you for a dollar bill. You're gonna take that, that deal all day long. And now if I can take that 20 bill and I can bury it somewhere in this room and I can draw you a map to it, and then I'm gonna just be there with you, guiding you by the hand to that map and I'm gonna sell you that map for five bucks, like, you're gonna pay, you're gonna pay that, right? So if you can architect your customer journey in a very similar way and just more rigorously and deliberately quantifying the value, like the monetary value, you're Creating for the customer, even if it's indirectly, like you're gonna be able to charge more and monetize that customer more deeply. More often than not, the customer's perceived price and perceived value aren't indicative of reality. It's just down to how you've articulated both.

I love that because there's a lot of people who have problems. I mean, whether you're charging 50 bucks, 5,000, 50,000, or half a mil or what, 5 mil. I've noticed there's people that have issues going, well, I can't charge this, or it could be in the millions.

Yeah, yeah. And I would say there's. There's one other piece of that as well, is, you know, choosing the best customers. I mean, first and foremost, don't market to broke people. I'm not saying that broke people don't deserve to have solutions. I'm just saying that if they can't afford to pay you, you can't build a business around it. It's just. It's a fact. Right. So, like, first things first. You need to find a customer that is ravenously, like, hungry for. For what you have and say no to every other customer type and just more deeply serve that customer, you know, as much as you possibly can. The time you spend on the 20% of customers that generate 80% of your value is the most precious time you have, and the other 80% is almost a waste. So niches equal riches is the saying that I always, always, like here.

Love that as a publisher, I always ask about books, and you. I'm going to have to limit you to your first hundred recommendations, but I love that you have so many behind you. I wish I could see the other ones. What are a couple of top books you'd recommend? Expert Authority World.

So I mentioned one Lean customer development with Cindy Alvarez. I know we've briefly touched on mine, Viral Hero. So I'll skip those. I love Extreme Ownership. I remember the moment that I listened to that book for the first time, and I just thought it was absolutely brilliant and turned my world upside down in terms of, like, my entire life, essentially. There are other books that I really love for very specific things. Love Patrick Lencioni's books just because of the fact that they're all really easy to read. He does a great job getting you emotionally invested in the lessons because of the fact that it's in fable format. If you want inspiration. There are a couple books that I love. You know, I loved Arnold Schwarzenegger's memoirs that I read recently. There's a book by a friend of mine, Alex Benayan called the Third Door, which is incredible. And he just is a phenomenal, phenomenal storyteller. But at the end of the day, like it all comes down to Robert Greene for me, like he's my favorite author by far. 48 laws of power, the 50th law, I loved with that one. He co authored with 50 with 50 cent mastery, I thought was stellar. 33 strategies of war was, was great artist seduction. You know, I thought it was, it was fine. But it kind of got him to what he was doing a little bit after the fact, which was then 48 loss of power. So all of Robert Greene's stuff I think are just thought provoking, provoking philosophies and then anything and everything. Stoicism.

Thank you for those. I gotta ask, audiobook or book? Book.

Audiobook for sure.

I'm all the time.

I would say like 80% of the time. Sometimes I'll do both at the same time and I'll have an audiobook while I read the physical book. But I usually do that on a second read. I kind of have a system that I use. Like I listen to audiobooks on like 2.2x speed and if I listen to it once and you know, I didn't learn a tremendous amount, I'll move on. But if there was a lot of really good stuff there and maybe some of it was difficult to understand, like I'll go back and I'll give it a second read slower with the physical book. So the books that you see on the shelf are the ones that I did that with and the ones.

Wow.

And like, for example, I remember the first time I read like the wealth of nations, like Adam Smith, right. Or the first time that I tried to listen to Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. Very long, dense read. You're not going to get all the value from that book until you've read it 10 times and then another one. I think Don Beck and his work in spiral dynamics, just the most thought provoking view of the world in terms of a value based system. Oftentimes we talk about things like demographics and psychographics, but if you get into spiral dynamics, it's a rabbit hole that you just. It's one of those reads where you're like, okay, I need to retrace my entire life right now. Like, and, and so those kinds of things I think are so instructive in terms of the way that, that I view the world. And then, you know, you can go down any Single rabbit hole. If you're like, what's the best book for X or Y or Z? Like, that's a cue that I could probably go down a deep rabbit hole on.

Wow. So all the ones that I can see all around you, those are ones that were at least a second listen.

Or second read aside from mine? Yes, I would say so. Like, most of these have been at least a second read. I'm trying to think if there are any around here that I haven't listened to yet. There might be honestly one or two here that, that don't have an audiobook.

Associated with them, but most of them, yes. Like, I'll.

That's a. That's awesome.

I mean, and honestly, it comes at a price. A lot of people love music. I'm always listening to words. Like, I'll only listen to music if I very strategically wanted to get a. Get a very specific emotion planted in my mind. If I need energy, if I want to mellow out, like, I'll use music strategically. A lot of people just love music and like, please be that person. The world needs that. But for me, I'm only listening to audiobooks and podcasts like 100 of the time.

Well, I'm glad you're honoring yourself and doing what you know works for you. I love music, play piano and sax and all that, but love reading too. I'm kind of. I can do both.

Love it. Love it. I have a piano right next to me actually, like literally I can just turn my chair and start to play. So I'm right there with you.

I have thoroughly enjoyed this. I wish we had more time, but thank you so much for everything you've shared and can't wait to continue the conversation.

My pleasure. Yeah, I look forward to it.

All right, Expert Authority world, we have another phenomenal episode today. I'll see you on the next one. Have a great day and God bless. You're already the expert, but have you transformed your expertise into a tangible asset that will generate qualified leads while increasing profit for you 24 7? And if so, how well are you promoting it? With my new book, the Expert Authority Effect Publishing Method, I take you through my process step by step. Visit eapublishingmethodbook.com today to learn the seven steps to publish and promote your nonfiction lead and profit generating business book in eight weeks. Visit eapublishingmethodbook.com to get started. Now, once again, that's eapublishing method book.com thanks for listening to today's episode. I would love to know what you enjoyed most from it. If you haven't done so already, I invite you to connect with me on my new LinkedIn. You can go to it directly at eainterviews.com LinkedIn Once again, that's eainterviews.com LinkedIn. Lastly, check out the full eainterviews.com site for complete show notes, the full interview video experience, links to the resources we mentioned, and more. Have a blessed day and I'll see you on the next one. Thanks.