How to Build a Million Dollar Creator Business (Masterclass) | 128

track the outcome and make decisions somewhat focused on that. And you would be in the top 0.01% of your market.

If you're struggling to break through the $1 million ceiling in your business, this episode is for you because today I've got two million-dollar founders joining me on the podcast. Grant Baldwin built the Speaker Lab into a multimillion-dollar coaching business. Brian Harris has scaled Growth Tools past $2 million, helping coaches grow their businesses.

We just focus on first, make offer great and have a high-ticket offer, like start by needing the fewest clients possible. Because that eliminates most sales and marketing problems. And the second one is—

In this episode, Grant and Brian get into what actually unlocks that first million in a creator business.

AI is creating a new season, and whether that's positive or negative is kind of ultimately up to you and like what you decide to do with it.

Relationships will matter more than ever. Data will matter more than ever. We cover how to position an offer so the right people find you, why tracking customer outcomes beats any sales or marketing tactic, and what Grant saw when he asked himself, whether he still wanted to run the company he built. First, the focus on elimination is key to breaking through a million. Second is obsessing over the outcomes, like actually track the outcomes. And then the third is— Guys, welcome back to the show. It's— we have had a rare episode with multiple guests, and now you guys are the repeat guests.

Have you ever had— you've had repeat guests, but have you ever had the the same duo back.

It's the first time.

Wow. We're the first repeat duo.

Yeah.

This feels like when you, when people brag about their book on Amazon where they're the number one in like the 17th category.

The most obscure category.

We're the bestseller.

But I think people loved your episode because you were talking behind the scenes about scaling creator businesses to a level that most people haven't seen, or if they've seen it, they've only seen it from someone that's like a household name in the creator space where, you know, an Ali Abdaal or Alex Hormozi, who's very loud and out there and saying like, I'm very successful, you should, you know, copy this format. And I feel like you guys took the— have taken the leverage that an online business, a creator-type business gives you and then built just a fundamentally great business behind it rather than the typical I don't know, very loud and in-your-face style. Was that intentional to build? I guess to me it seemed much more traditional style businesses with this leverage. Or is it just— yeah, how did that come about?

I think some of it is like a preference. Like I think I heard one time someone say they would rather be the owner in the box that nobody knows than be the star player on the field that everybody wants to be around. And I think I think for me personally, like probably similar to all of us, I think we've all spent enough time together over the past decade or so of we all like, we like being around people, but we're also not trying to be the star of the show. And so there are certain businesses or models that, that almost necessitates that or requires you to be out front and to, you know, beat your chest or beat the drum or whatever that may be. And so I think I know for me, like as we've grown, the business is going, how do we build the business in a way that doesn't require that? I don't want to be the dancing monkey. I don't want to feel like I'm on the treadmill. And I think part of the fun of entrepreneurship leadership is everyone gets to build the business in a way that makes sense to them. Like, there's not a right or wrong way to do it. Like, everyone gets to design the game and the rules in a way that suits them. So from the beginning, I was really intentional. I would tell our team regularly, like, this is not the Grant show. This is not the Grant show, meaning like, if it requires Grant to do it, I'm not interested. Um, from like a, you know, star of the show, face of the whole thing, because it also just makes everything we do less valuable because I'm the the bottleneck to the whole thing. So yeah, some of it was like a preference standpoint and some of it is I think it's a— some— a business that's not solely dependent on one person is largely a healthier business, I would argue too.

Yeah, that makes sense. Brian, what about you?

I'm just an introvert, so I don't really want to be the loud guy out front. Yeah, but these businesses, these content-driven businesses, I mean, they kind of are that— these teaching-based businesses, there is a face. But from day one, probably via something you wrote very early on, the idea of putting my name as the title of the business was not interesting. So that alone is like an interesting little mechanical decision that can keep you away from being the person out front. Because Alex and Ali and all these people, even James, you know, having the name of the business be your— yourself sets it up to be a particular thing. Not that you can't work around that, but.

Right.

That's never been all that appealing.

There are some of those structural decisions that, that make a big impact. And I think people don't spend enough time thinking about the roles. And so you assume, okay, I wanna run a content business. I, I've learned the, the magic of an audience and the leverage that comes with that. And like, wait, we can sell digital products or coaching or any of these things and have incredible gross margin. We were just talking about, you know, the guest who recorded just before this is, uh, Will Goddard and Brian Canlis who are like legends in the restaurant space, you know, and We live at opposite ends of the business difficulty gross margin. You know, like—

They're real business owners.

They—

everything has to go very, very well for their tight margins. And, you know, we have a lot of, of leeway in selling digital products. Um, but in this, there's just— there's so many different styles of business that you can operate. And we don't spend enough time thinking about, oh, do I want to be the owner in the box? Do I want to be the, the coach who's responsible for the, you know, success of the season? Or do I want to be the player who has to carry the game?

But especially in the beginning of any business, I think the reality is, is even if we go back a decade for any of the three of us, like, you're not thinking that far ahead. You're just going, how do I get to next week? How do I keep playing the game? You know? And then I think it's, it's possible that you just get so far in And especially if you are largely a personal brand, it's hard to unwind that. It's hard to transition that to be something different. But a lot of it's that, you know, that Stephen Covey line of beginning with the end in mind of what's— if I stay on this path, what's that? What's the outcome of this? And what kind of business is this going to be in 3 to 5 to 7 years if I keep doing the same thing? And is that something that like, oh yeah, if this is the path I'm on and it leads to that destination, Cool. Let's keep going there. But if you look at that and you fast forward to someone who is several steps ahead of you and is doing that, you're like, I don't know that I would want their life. And like, you got to start to change course sooner rather than later.

Well, and I think all this assumes you know what you want. And I feel like it's going to— like going to college. It's like, I think I might want to be a doctor. Then 7 years in, you realize, like, actually, I hate this. It's really hard to change. So for me, it took a lot of experimentation. I didn't figure out— even feel like in the last year or two, I've started to learn not what I consciously am thinking about a thing because I can look at different people and like, like the idea of doing it that particular way, but like what actually works with the way I was uniquely wired. And for me, that's just taking experimentation to figure out what that is. Like the idea— I like the idea of being the owner in the box, but turns out I really like being on the front line making things. And like, if all I did was that, I would quit. So you got Elon, you got Bezos, and you have Richard Branson. And all of them, 3 of those work fundamentally differently on the day to day. All of it can work. But I don't know, for me, it's been 15 years of experimentation of what's my best way of doing it, what works best with me and is exciting and lights me up. Yeah.

And even though, like, I think we have a better idea today than we did 10 years ago, it may look vastly different 10 years from now in terms of like what you're interested in, what your ambition is, what your season of life is. Family, marriage, kids, you know, all of that factors into how hard do I want to be going, how hard do I want to be charging, and what do I want this thing to look like? You know, we— I give him a hard time because he would ask me regularly over the years, like, what do you want? I was like, I don't know, leave me alone.

Stop asking me.

What do you want? You know, you don't know either. Great.

You know, all I know is I want you to stop asking.

Leave me alone. And then one day you came home with a vision statement and I was I mean, multiple times I'd float out a vision statement and be like, I'd be like, I poured my heart into this. And he's like, nah, that ain't it. You know, I think there's only one that you're like, okay, that resonates.

You finally came with like a year ago, you came on like, that's the one.

But it's, it, I think it is like, it's hard to read the label from inside the jar, you know? And so sometimes figuring out what you want is oftentimes looking at other people who are a few steps ahead and going, if I continue on this path, and it looked like that, would I want that? And sometimes you don't even know until you're in it, you know?

So if we think about the, maybe the avatar that we're speaking to in this is the creator who is somewhere in that maybe $300,000 to $900,000 in revenue, who has probably bounced around, was blown away when they hit $300,000. Like, wait, I can do this? You know, and then $500,000, I'm making doctor-level money and I didn't spend 8 years in, you know, med school. Like, it's incredible. And then at some point you realize, wait, I feel like I can have a bigger impact. I feel like I can reach more people. And I— there's a ceiling somewhere here and I can't break through it. What I'm curious for both of you is what— let's talk about kind of that first year that you each broke through $1 million in revenue. What, what happened then and what led to it?

You know, well, one caveat there I would say is some of this ties into, you know, what do you want? Of there's people who are doing $300,000, $500,000, $900,000 a year. And I was talking to someone last week and they were doing that in a different industry. I said, you can do that for the rest of your life and there's nothing wrong with that. So again, some of this determines like, what do you want? You know? But I think—

Yeah, to be clear, like, you've won. Yes.

If you get your expectations right, you just want to wash, rinse, repeat that for the next 10, 20, 30 years or whatever. There's nothing—

there's $100 grand a year going into index funds. Like, that's great. You are, you are set.

You— yeah, you're, you're winning the game, you know, if that's what you define it as. Um, I think for us, we had like— one of the things that made a big breakthrough, um, was we had a whole bunch of contractors, a whole bunch of part-time people, and, um, we had like a part-time marketing guy. And, um, we— he— this guy, this part-time marketing guy was getting ready to leave, and we were getting ready to— needed to hire a full-time marketing guy. And this is gonna be our my first true W-2, and we were right at about $1 million or so revenue. And, um, he had referred me to this guy, and so I interviewed a couple different guys. I was like, oh man, this is, this is the guy we need. But it was going to be a six-figure salary. He wanted big profit share, and it was just like, I knew it was worth it, but all at the same time, you're like, golly, this is, this is a big investment. Um, but that Guy was one of the best hires, you know, we ever made and made such a huge difference in the growth. But I think that was one of the big shifts, was people and hiring and just going from a bunch of hodgepodge contractors that were good enough and could get the job done to go, okay, let's hire talented people, high-caliber people that can grow and are all in on our thing, which is just an investment. And so I don't think, you know, nobody's going to hear that and think, well, I've hire good people. I've never heard that before, you know, but there is like, there's so much truth to that adage and how, how much of a difference that that can make. And at the same time, like how difficult that is.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's a big thing of making the step function higher where it's not here's the person who I can pay $30 an hour to do, you know, 20 hours a week.

Yeah.

It's like, oh no, I'm actually bringing in a professional who in many areas knows more than I do.

Very much so.

Yeah. Yeah.

For us, it was just simplifying. So I think at the time, the year or two before breaking a million, we had 6 products.

Okay.

And the year we broke a million, we cut 5 of those 6 and focused on one. Um, like there's some weird— it seems intuitive that if one product took you to $200,000, $300,000 a year, the best way to do it, especially in these audience-driven businesses, is launch more things to those same people.

Yep.

But man, that's a trap, especially if— well, multiple, multiple caveats, but especially if you're— if your product is a low-ticket product because the amount of traffic you have to drive from that just goes up exponentially. But when we just cut the vast majority and focused on the one product that for us was the one that had the highest success rate and cut everything else and focused on one thing and doubled the team down and all attention down and all marketing down on that one thing, just everything got easier. And the fewer cycles needed to generate a customer, the easier it is to generate customers.

Mm-hmm.

So for us, that made a huge difference. I think we even wrote multiple blog posts about it back then, just talking to other people. They got stuck at a similar point, and when they just started eliminating things, eliminating people, in some case contractors or full-time people that are just dispersed amongst all these different products generating— there's like a trap when you have these audiences because you think you could sell anything. And we drastically underestimate how hard it is to put together a really good offer, position well. And when you have an audience of 5, 10, 15, 20, 100,000 people, you can sell anything to them. It doesn't mean you know how to sell it though, at all. Uh, and if you go down that road 5 or 10 years, you exhaust the audience with a whole bunch of these mediocre products and don't know how to sell to cold people at all. So for us, like, I mean, I think it wasn't some gigantically strategic thing other than selling 3 products hard, selling 6 products harder. Let's just sell 1 product, maybe that'll be easier. But in retrospect, it just simplified the whole business down. And we had probably mostly accidentally found product-market fit with that product and learned how to talk about it in a way that people at the time were very interested in. So just getting rid of all the other ones where we didn't really know the answer to those questions yet— people on our list would buy it, but people that didn't know us would not. Just simplify things quite a bit.

That's something that I see over and over again to the point that I've made illustrations on it of like build a skyscraper, not a strip mall, because I see creators time and again exactly say, okay, I made $400,000 with this product to these 20,000 people. And so then if I sold this product to the same list, maybe it's not the flagship, so then I'll make another $200,000 off of that. And then product 3 will make another $100,000 or $200,000. And before we know it, we've piecemealed our way to $1 million and that will work. And it almost, it almost always works in year 1.

For a little bit.

For a little bit of time. It almost never works in year 2 and beyond. Yeah. And yeah, I just see it endlessly.

It feels like there's 2 big things that seem intuitive and they're just wrong. Like they rarely work. One of them is create more products. And the second one is charge a lower amount of money because if we lower our price, it'll be easier to sell. Never works that way. The second one is if we sell more things and we'll value ladder people up and again, good luck. Like if you're Alex Hormozy or some elite level marketer, go for it. Like maybe you can crack it. Maybe. But any normal mortal can't. Like it's just so rare to stair-step somebody from a $10 product to a $500 product to a $10,000. Like it just is extremely difficult to do. And just overwork. I think that's one of the biggest mistakes I made was undervaluing— I think overvaluing sales and marketing skill and overdeveloping there and undervaluing how, how much weight having a really good offer carries. Okay. Meaning like, think about it, like you can cut down a tree with a dull ax. You don't need a sharp one to do it. You just work harder, you know, like For the first decade, I feel like that's what I did. Just harder and harder and learn more and try better and more effort. And it works. Like, you can get places, but you'll be exhausted in the process of it. And usually your products are crap too, because you spend all of your effort on the front end and no effort on the back end because you don't have effort to give there. Um, but you could just take time, slow down, need less, develop an amazing offer, like actually have the offer itself solve an acute pain and acute crisis in your market. And then your sales and marketing skill can be a lot lower because people actually need the thing and are actively looking for the thing. So I think I made both of those mistakes over and over and over and over again, just having too many things and overdeveloping sales and marketing skill and needing too many clients. Like if you need 10,000 clients to win or 1,000 clients to win or even 500 customers to win, there's a whole set of activities you need to do to get that. You need 50,000 people to know you exist, and that's a lot of humans. But if you need 10 clients to win or 10 customers to win, that's just not that many folks at all. And your sales and marketing skill can be a lot lower. So if I were to kind of start over from scratch, in fact, we've rewired the business over the past 3 or 4 years just to focus on need less people and sell less things. And that lowers the bar, lowers like the amount of humans you have to have in the company that are doing sales and marketing or the amount of your individual time you're having to spend on sales or marketing. Because I didn't get in this to do sales or marketing. I get in this to like actually help people.

Right.

But then almost all of these businesses become like— it's a bummer that creator businesses become a euphemism for people that make content. And if content is your product, cool. But if it's not, you should be a creator who makes products for people. Like, those are the things that actually do things, and all your content should lean to that if that's your marketing channel of choice. But it took me— it took a long time to see that, see that and spend way less time in sales and marketing, way more time with humans actually helping them.

So you talked about simplifying your offer, which is something that's easy to say. I want to know, like, what did the offer and the messaging behind it look like before, and what did it look like afterwards?

So we found our way— maybe I'll give you a link, you can put it in show notes or wherever it goes. Um, the most simple way we found to do this, we call it the positioning statement, and it's to treat it— most often we solve problems we've experienced, or you solve a problem that you've helped a lot of other people do. So we have a client named Ernie. He helps grocery store owners increase the profit margins. He's never owned a grocery store, but he's helped hundreds of them. So that's cool. But most of us, 80% or more, are just helping people with things that we used to struggle with. Whether you're in— had a terrible marriage, now it's great. Do marriage counseling or be a marriage coach or launch a marriage book or whatever. Pick your topic. So what we've done is— the exercise we walk people through is helping them catalog for you When was the last time you were in that crisis? So if you, you know, you're a personal finance coach or do something in that market, when was the last time your personal finances were a disaster? And go back to that moment, like literally name the date, the date, a month and year if you can. Go back to that moment and you have two options when you go to sell the product. You can try to convince people to want what you have, or you can find the people actively searching for it right now. So let me give you this example. We were with some clients about a year and a half ago. We had a lady named Kirsten there. We're all going around sharing, like, what do you do? And she said, well, I used to describe what I did. My old positioning was I help women who are anxious and overwhelmed not be those things. And like 3 of the ladies in the room raised their hand or like, I do that too. And if you're wanting to know how to position your offer and you say what you do and 3 other people say, I do that too, it's not well positioned. Like you're all at the farmer's market with the exact same sign. Nobody knows who to pick from. She said, but now I tell people, and this is on her website or in ads or emails, or pick your marketing channel. Now people ask what I do. I tell them I help women who just found out that their husbands have had a porn addiction their entire marriage, recover their marriage. And like the room gasped. And you can imagine like a woman who's just had that experience. She's texting her friends, she's meeting with people at church, she's Googling, trying to find like literally what does she do? She's struggling with shame and doubt and guilt and anger and looking up divorce attorneys. She's doing all of the things. So when she encounters Kirsten, Kirsten does not have a sales problem at all. Like, she can just tell that lady, hey, I've been exactly where you were. I was married for 35 years before I found out. And now, pause. I hear you. I see you. That's really difficult. And now our marriage is better than ever. And I want you to walk with me as I walk you through what to do with that. So positioning your offer, going back to Kirsten, the exercise she went through was looking back to, you know, June of 2006 when that happened to her. What pain were you experiencing? What did you want? And generating all of your marketing messaging around that. Not, not looking back now to that point, but when you were in the bottom of the pit, what happened? What did you want and what did you do to get there? And using all of your marketing language, talking to that person in that spot, because all Kirsten has to do is find 10 or 15 ladies like that a year and she's making multiple six figures. She doesn't have to have all this crazy stuff, all these bells and whistles. She just to find those ladies and those ladies are looking for her. Like they're actively searching. Anybody in crisis, whether your business just got shut down or you went bankrupt or a divorce attorney called or in personal finance crisis, like positioning your offer to people that are in crisis looking for help right now just solves most, most of the sales and marketing problems. And it starts with how you even look at your offer and how you look at what you do. So looking at it as an actual— it's morphine to the pain that somebody is in right this second. Is the starting point.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, that's a huge shift. Grant, you sold tens of millions of dollars worth of products at this point and taken a lot of people through the speaking programs. Did you have similar things as you switched up positioning and all that? There's got to be a lot of iterations of it over the years.

Yeah, I think we— I think one of the things that helped us a lot with growth is we largely only ever offered one program. And so it's just solving one specific problem. Problem for one specific audience. And that was one thing that we would tell speakers is they're going, I could speak about anything and everything. And who do I speak to? I speak to humans. Yeah, people.

Anyone.

Yeah, everybody. Which is not exclusive to speakers. That's true for anybody, you know, just going, how do I spread the net as far and wide as possible versus going, no, no, here's this very, very specific, unique crisis you went through and I'm uniquely equipped to help you solve that problem. And so it's counterintuitive, but the more narrow, the more focused you are, the easier it is to actually find the right type of people. So we, we would always tell speakers, and this is true for just entrepreneurs in general and, and, content creators is going, you want to be the steakhouse and not the buffet. The steakhouse, not the buffet. Meaning like if we're all looking, you know, we're going out for lunch and we're looking for a good steak, like we could go to a steakhouse where it's like that's what they do, or we could go to a buffet where steak is one of 100 things that they offer and they're all mediocre. So being the steakhouse is the thing that kind of attracts the right type of people, repels the wrong type of people. The tricky part and the irony is that Over time, one of the things that we started to struggle with is the business got to a size where that focus and that concentration almost became a liability because we became like this one-legged stool. If we solve one problem for one audience, but that's not everybody. And I don't know that we did a good enough job regularly enough to iterate and pivot and maybe broaden it, not massively, but to a little bit or kind of go to some adjacent categories or subjects or topics. And so, yeah, that concentration and that, that focus on one end can also become a risk and liability on the, on the other end.

You know who did a great job or is doing a great job of that is Chandler. I feel like they've gone after— I went to his website the other day and his fiction and nonfiction and memoirs and it's all books, right? But sub-verticals within the books. But anybody that's sub-million dollars needs to ignore all that vertical crap. That is all a gigantic distraction, right?

So you're talking about Chandler Bolt with selfpublishing.com?

Yeah, they're doing good underneath that umbrella of self-publishing books. All the subgenres of books, each one of those have millions and millions of people who have vastly different things that even want inside of it.

Mhm.

I think, you know, one other part to that is there's something about just doing the same thing over a really extended period of time. Meaning like it, it is far too easy to hop from one shiny thing to the next shiny thing. And let's do, um, you know, crypto, or let's do AI, or let's teach. You see people who ride that wave and you're like, 100%, weren't you the crypto guy last week? Wait a second, is this same guy? Okay. But I think there's something to, you know, what, what's Nathan up to? He's still doing email, you know. What's Chandler? He's still doing books, you know. So that longevity of just showing up doing the same thing builds a lot of, you know, track record and connection and rapport of people going like, all right, they're still teaching the same thing. They probably have an idea of what they're doing.

I think that's y'all— Speaker Lab's number one superpower is you've done the same thing for 10, 15 years.

Yeah.

And it took us a minute to figure out what that was. Just had to experiment to find it. But 4 or 5 years ago, like, lock in. I'm like, all right, we're just going to be here for a couple of decades.

Yeah.

I mean, go Dave Ramsey. He's been talking about personal finance for 30 years. He's answered every question that anybody's ever thought of in the topic.

Yeah.

And he's absolutely saturated the whole market.

But that's also an example of if he just was doing that, they would not be with the business that they are today. And so they are in all these other adjacent categories helping people beyond just personal finance or with other niches or verticals of, of personal finance.

I'd be curious. I, I, I doubt that. I think they've let— I think they get too shiny object syndrome, and they're doing a bunch of random stuff that make no sense, and they've given up the personal finance space. Like, other people like Bob and all these people have come in, but like, that's where it—

like, it depends what— if they just were doing the personal finance, you know, would they have the level of success that they have today, quote unquote? But also, it kind of depends, like, what does he— what does he want, you know? Um, so, which my understanding— I don't know, I've met Dave once, I don't know him personally, but my understanding is he's always wanted to be the Dave Ramsey that he's known as today. And there are people in this online space that they want to. So at some point, if you're just, you take a Gary Vee, what Gary Vee started as is he just talked about wine, this very specific type of beverage. And then that wine led to social media. Now he talks about anything and everything, but it started with wine. And so the same thing is, you know, Amazon. Amazon sells anything and everything they can ship to you, but it started with just books, you know? Nike started with just, you know, a very specific type of running shoe. And so oftentimes it starts very, very narrow and then it broadens. But any of those— Amazon could have just done books, Nike could have just done specific type of running shoes, and they would have been fine. But it kind of comes back to that, what do they want? You know, what does Phil Knight— I don't know. I don't know. But if you guys know, if someone could tell me, that would make things a lot simpler.

So, I mean, the thing that I noticed in both of you is that, like, breaking through $1 million, the most important thing was a single product and a single offer and getting to that level of clarity.

Yeah, just absolute focus. Mm-hmm. But not like— I don't think an action item from that can be, let me go away and decide right now what my thing is. Like, maybe you're somebody who has single-minded focus like Grant from the beginning, or maybe you're like me and you need to experiment for 5 to 10 years to figure out what it is. And I see those people. We got friends who we know well who've been around just as long as us, and they're still experimenting 15 years later. It's like, great, keep going. My favorite entrepreneurial question is, what's a problem so interesting you would gladly bet the next 20 years of your life on solving it? And just take whatever time you need to figure that out. We got friends whose kids are graduating college, and I taught our youth or our young adult group at church, like a bunch of 22 to 24-year-olds the other day, I was like, guys, I love y'all. Like, I'm just sick of adults. Like, we got so much baggage and so much stuff going on. Like, literally, y'all can do anything. And they're stressed and worried and they're looking at friends who think they know what they're going to do. And the friends don't know what they're going to do. It's like, I'll just get to experiment for the next 5 to 10 years or longer, however long it takes. There's no— like, you don't have to rush into this at all because once you find your thing, you can just ride that for a really long time. So for me, it took a while. To find the thing. And now it's like, all right, there's the thing, and I can just let all the creativity— instead of going horizontal with all the new things, just let it go within that thing and come up with all kind of creative ideas with inside of it, um, and solve really cool new interesting problems that people haven't solved before. Like, that's wildly fascinating. Um, I care more about that than the topic, but if you don't pick the topic and focus on a thing, then you're just keep on starting stuff.

That also kind of raises the question of like like a chicken-egg thing. Is it, you know, the audience or the topic that you're— that came first or the thing that you're obsessed with? Because like you mentioned, it may be— I'm, you know, with young adults have gone, I'm just obsessed with young adults who are in college who are trying to figure out what they're doing with their life, you know. So it's like, what are the problems that that audience has that I can help solve for them? And a lot of this is like speaking to— I know, like what, what helped start the Speaker Lab was what I wish I had when I got started. Of going, man, I'm looking for— I want to be a speaker, but nobody's out here teaching this stuff. And surely there's other people like me that are in the similar spot, or creating the email software that you wish you had when you were getting into the game, you know. So creating the, you know, the solution, whatever that may be, for either the person that you once were or for that, that segment of that audience of like, I'm obsessed with them, how do I make their life better?

However you get to it, you got to get to it, because otherwise you do weird stuff.

Like, what examples of, like, especially like this, somewhere between $500,000 and $2.5 million.

It just depends on how good you are at marketing. Honestly, you'll hit it where you have this like bastard ad suite of things that don't really coherently make sense together, but they're generating a business at all. And like, you can't maintain them all. They're way too spread out. You don't even have the skill set to grow them beyond. You really need to pick one and hardcore cut the rest and hardcore optimize on it. But if you don't know the problem you uniquely solve, or you could phrase that question different ways, but ultimately what is the thing you're trying to accomplish? Are you like, for us, we're trying to make it nearly impossible to fail for coaches to grow their business. But the number one small business problem is growth, like revenue specifically across all small businesses of every vertical, in-person, digital, online. It's like we want to solve that for that particular group. So how do we do that in the simplest way possible for them? And that just answers a lot of questions for us of things we're not even interested in at all. And takes a bunch of stuff off the table. And it— at the end of the day, the thing that wins is the best solution to the problem will win if it's substantially better than all the rest, because word of mouth takes over on that. If you're 5% better, then it's hard. But if you're 100% better, 200% better, and if you go a couple of decades in that direction, you just will be— because not many people are playing that game at all. Most founders, at least anecdotally, I can't read the hearts of humans, but the clients I coach and know really well and myself and my team, it's really easy to play the make the business big game. And that's just like, even if in your own selfish best interest you're trying to play the make most money possible game, it's not the best way to make the most money possible. The best way to make the most money possible is have the best solution to the problem that's ever been invented, and you'll win the market and you'll win the money as a result of that. But you have to be like completely obsessed on What problem are we solving? What's the next bottleneck? And solve it over and over and over and over and over again. Like, I'm curious about your space right now with like Lovable. It's a fundamentally different way for non-tech people to build wildly complex tools, right? And the other day I'm using it and I just speak into existence. It's like Genesis 1 in the Bible. Let there be app and there's app 5 minutes later. I mean, I've employed— I mean, you've employed way more than me, but, you know, multiple 6-figure engineers. This is better and 100 times faster like that. That changes martech and SaaS completely. Even the interface. Like, I wish I could say, hey, I need a, I need a new cart abandonment campaign. Or maybe we want to launch a new product. And 2 years ago we sent these emails out and Nathan sent that blog post the other day with this kind of launch sequence. Why don't you go hunt up the best subject lines we've sent over the past 5 years, pull those out, merge it with those 2 sequences and draft it all up and send it to a subsegment of like my most engaged people. So I can do a little beta launch and 5 minutes later have all that done because that fundamentally changes. Like as a user, I don't care what the interface is, but that's way better. Like I would rather not click and point and do things. I would rather just like brainstorm off the top of my head and the thing exists immediately. And that's a fundamentally— and somebody will do that. Oh yeah, it's only a matter of time. Somebody will do it and they'll win the market. Hopefully it'll be you. Hopefully it'll be. But like that will exist. So obsessing on like Oprah, she killed her show at the top of her game. She had the whole— it was like, be like Joe Rogan shutting down his podcast and going to start a pool company or something. It's like, like what? Like, it's shocking because she thought it was in her best interest of her people to serve them better. So like, if we obsess on that, I think it's Elon's superpower and a unique way he's wired. If he's like single-minded focus on best solution and then be okay at marketing. Versus amazing at marketing and all your products suck and then you're just really great at going into business quick. So yeah, you just— if you do that, it optimizes all actions that direction.

Okay, so you're talking about how SaaS has completely changed and I think this is going to be true and relevant to creators as well, where it's like, congrats, you have your downloadable ebook that you're trading for an email address. Nobody cares. You know, like you have to actually, the amount of value you have to provide as the bare minimum now has gone up 10x even before you're charging. So the hypothesis that I have for Kit is if all interfaces can be copied, prompted into existence, there's an element of brand trust and do you, like, is the deliverability there? Is the, will this company, Like, should I trust them with my business? We were joking before we started to hit record, you know, as both of you have been around Kit since the very early days, when you like sign up and the very, like the absolute basics don't exist. Like you, like you couldn't schedule an email.

Nope. Just send now or nothing. Hey Nathan, is this a feature that's coming soon or am I just missing this? Nope. We don't have that. Send now.

So like a bunch of our vibe-coded stuff that you know, we all make is going to be at that basic level. But it, for now, it'll get way better. My hypothesis is that the thing that ultimately matters and you can build a moat around is the relationship with the subscriber and the data about that subscriber. And so what we're doing is we're compiling everything possible that we know and making it through our app store and all our integrations so that you have the deepest view of exactly exactly who is in your list, um, in that you could ever want. And so what our product does now is it tells you the follower count of everyone on your email list. It tells you their bios, lets you search it with AI, lets the agents go through and say, hey, you want— your ideal customer is this. Well, 4 of them signed up for your newsletter last week.

What would you—

would you like to draft welcome emails? Would you like to get them on a call? All of those things. Because our hypothesis is that when we have that centralized data for the creator, that, that has a real moat around it. And ultimately all of our businesses are built around that relationship with the audience. I'm curious what reactions you both have to that.

It's hard to— like, I used Lovable at the end of January, and I don't know if I've ever had an experience quite like that, because I tried it a year earlier and it was good, but it would get lost really quickly.

And it was basically you could just, you could make a landing page or something at that level.

We got like fairly advanced dashboarding, but then as you tried to add stuff, it just got weird. And I was like, all right, this is a pain in the butt. But then late January, I don't know, the models updated something. I don't keep track of that stuff all that much, but, and I was like, this is a fundamentally different thing now. Really, it actually got hard. I'm coming back to relationship. It got hard and still is like, I don't, I can't imagine the future much now. I'm like, I don't, I this breaks so many things that I came up with. Yeah. Like, example, this would be a fun AI thing. We were doing that. I was— we were trying to do an integration between Circle and something else on our internals. I forget what the integration was, and I'd been deep in the lovable rabbit trail. I was like, I usually go to Zapier and the marketing team would do it, but I was doing it. So let me just go to Zapier. And they have a copilot feature that's kind of an AI thing that's okay, but a little janky. but I would just talk to it. It's so fun just talking to things. So I talked to it and it starts working. I was like, hmm, let me go to Lovable and see if I can just build the API connection direct while it's working. So open up another tab, gave it to Lovable. 15 minutes later, a direct API connection with a little custom app that Lovable hosts and everything is there. An hour later, Zapier is still working. And that has never existed. Yeah, that is shocking. So I go to Zapier and their rep had been emailing me because our Zapier bill is $800 a month or something like, hey, there's different things you can do. So I went to our usage chart and there were 5 Zaps that made up like 95% of that bill. So we just went in, you know, a 2-hour afternoon project and made direct API connections between those 5 apps. And we just don't need Zapier for those at all anymore. And I cut our Zapier bill from $800 a month to $50 to $100 a month. And the hosting cost of that stuff is, you know, under $20 a month. Right. That's just shocking. That's truly shocking stuff. And I'm sure that exists in arbitrage all over the place. So I mean, that little 2 or 3 day window, I was just kind of confused. What is even the future? I don't know what to do. Like, what does this mean for anything? And I got to a similar spot as you of if my view of life is even remotely correct, then the one thing that has to like as AI grows and using it for counseling, using it for all the things and many of which are really cool, really cool usage I love, and it's exciting. The thing that it has to create is more relational need because it'll force us into more isolation and more like instead of going to a counselor or a minister at church or whatever you would get help and support from, you'll go to talk to ChatGPT and it'll affirm you with a whole bunch of stuff. So all that to say, I don't know how you can go wrong by doubling down on relationship more and more and more, like real genuine human connection. In whatever way makes sense for business. So relationship between you and the client, like, it can't replace that because it's not human. Yeah, but I, I suspect it can replace literally everything else. Every mechanical function is just a matter of time. So for us, what's that look— what that's look like? And we run a coaching business. We walk beside people for a long time helping them accomplish like very difficult things. That tools alone can't solve. Tools have to be a part of it. But relational— because people's number one competitor is quitting. It's either quit or not quit. If we can get them not to quit, they will win. And ChatGPT, it's hard to imagine how it's going to help them do that in any variations. So we've just started adding more and more personal things like we do. We cut all of our recorded training, we do it all live every week. We teach 4 classes simultaneously every week. We have 6 live office hours every day. We just started a thing called Speed Matching where we ask people to do list swaps and we do it every day and there's 20 to 30 people on and they're matching and swapping 3 to 4 lists like every time. We do in-person events once a quarter now. We just add it and just like more and more, how can we get humans in a virtual room or real room with each other constantly? So relationship with lists, but like, how can you take it? Like how? Like actual human connection. It can't do that. But like even Claude Computer launched 4 days ago. It's a— nobody's done that yet. It can just control my computer as me. I had it open up our entire Circle account where we do— that's where we do all client interaction and open up the past 50 client posts that hadn't been answered by a coach, looked at all the other types that have been answered by a coach, and within 30 minutes and open up them all in tabs, drafted responses that were nearly perfect. Like, I don't know. That's a different thing. I don't know. No APIs, no connections. It just uses my computer to do that. So that's shocking stuff. But optimizing for relationship has to be like, I don't know how that's not the overwhelming thought. And everything else is commodity/free in not so distant future, especially in our worlds online. Yeah. So how can you do that? It can't do that. Everything else is— yeah, yeah, yeah. It's disorienting and dizzy, the speed it's moving now. I feel like just in the last 3 months, it's sped up drastically. Yeah.

Yeah, everything changed in December when the latest, like, OPUS 4.6, the latest models came out. Yeah, it went from being pretty good to absolutely incredible, which is exciting.

And there's an arbitrage in this next year or two of doing it. Like, I mean, 25-year-olds should be pumped right now. I mean, I'd be working 80-hour weeks coming up with everything I could possibly— there'd be a Zapier arbitrage project going and trying to take their business and building direct connections. Or there's a bunch of that kind of stuff that exists like right this second. You're in a uni. It's like the App Store in 2012 when iOS launched. Like, that exists right now in a really, really cool way. And I think a lot of these SaaS industries and like a lot of these things will be flipped upside down with interfaces and the barrier to entry so low. It's really exciting and disorienting at the same time. But relationship, like, you can't beat that. And that's the cool thing where we're at in our age and our experience and other people listening. Like, if you get people like right now using these tools to deploy against like actual relationship and solving problems. Like that's a unique thing that the 20-year-olds don't have. Like they don't understand like real-life problem solving for the most part. But that's exciting. How can you do that?

Grant, any thoughts on the future and, you know, whether we should have access to—

Let me look into the magic crystal ball here. Yeah, I think the, like in our group chat, one of the things we talk about is like we're— the three of us are really deep in this. And so comparing notes, what are you using? How are you doing it? Here's this new thing that I did, and here's this new use case, and here's what I saw someone on Twitter do. And, um, on one hand it's like, yes, it is incredibly exciting. On the other hand, you know, um, are we the 1% of the 1% of the 1%? So, um, you know, if I'm the owner of Kit, am I going, holy crap, is this going to take over my business? Or are there going to be enough people that are going to be like, cool, I can whip up my version of Kit in a weekend on Lovable, you know? But how many people are going to actually do that or to what degree, or I don't know, it's just kind of like the, the downstream consequences of all of this. It's just hard. I think that's part of what you're saying is like it's hard to know for any of us, you know, like we can look at this now at the end of March 2026 and go, what's it going to look like? 3— we're talking about, you know, 3 months ago when Opus 4.6 came out. What's it look like 3 months from now going forward or 6 months or 9 months? So it's— yeah, it's interesting. It's slightly— it's exciting and concerning and, you know, all of the above. How are you thinking about it? Like it, it in an education training content space, it creates some opportunities. Does it create excitement or anxiety or concern for you?

All of the above.

All of the above.

Well, I think about Uh, like Jeff Bezos talks about, focus on what doesn't change.

Yeah.

And so he, you know, the example on Amazon was people are always going to want lower prices, faster delivery, like all of those things. And so my hypothesis is basically that relationships will matter more than ever, that data will matter more than ever, and that those have to be incredibly accessible. So it's really exciting. But at the same time, to what you were saying, Brian, I, I don't feel like I can predict the future, you know, and we're so used to seeing solutions that are 10% better than the previous one, or you're like, something that we would all rave about would be 30% better, you know, and now we're seeing things that are genuinely 10x or breaking the paradigm.

Yeah.

Um, like, you know, it actually feels like magic.

Hey, what problem do you think Kit solves? How do you think about that? What's the fundamental thing you're trying to solve?

I mean, if you go all the way back, it's helping people earn a living and build a valuable business. If you come downstream from that, it's like doing it through an audience, you know, of people who know you. And so then you go one step past that and it's we help you reach more people and make money from those people.

One thing I think was interesting we do this annual houseboat trip that you've ignored us on many, many years.

I noticed that the invite didn't come this last year.

Yeah, I mean, I've been— we said just put Nathan on the—

we'll see you in Montana.

Um, Montana is way closer.

It is. That has worked out. That's become a new thing. So, um, uh, but we were last year, a year before, there was a guy that came and very successful in the online space, and they had built a big business, and then the business had major issues and just kind of imploded. And one of the things I remember him saying was we bought into the myth and the lie that we were just growing year over year over year, and we thought it would always be like this. And very interesting to like think about from that perspective of, you know, AI is a major shift, but there's always going to be minor shifts happening underneath us and the importance of evolving and changing. And so even I was thinking about when we were in Montana this past fall, we were on this fishing trip. The three of us were on with a group of other guys. I remember one night it was you and me and this other guy having this conversation and he— you were kind of talking through the lens of, hey, kids, my life's work. I want to be doing this forever. You're deeply committed and passionate to it. And for him, he was kind of talking about everything is always for sale and everything just has a— but he was talking about it through the lens of every business, every industry has a shelf life, everything has a season. And it's not that one's better or worse than the other. Again, you kind of decide what makes sense for you. But I thought that was a valid, you know, an interesting point of from both of these guys of saying, just because you've had growth doesn't mean it's going to continue to grow. And just because it's, you know, you've had some type of success doesn't mean it's always going to be like that. And so, I mean, this, you know, the idea of seasons can apply to anything of, you know, marriage or relationships or health and seasons that are strong and seasons that are a mess. And so AI is creating a new season, and whether that's positive or negative is kind of ultimately up to you and like what you decide to do with it.

Yeah. Okay. We have some really good threads going. I want to come back to seasons because you've changed seasons in your business. Uh, so we'll put a pin in that and come back to it in a second.

Do we need to do a part 3?

We might need to.

Part 4?

We'll see if the—

Can we just co-host with you?

Exactly.

Is that where we're headed?

Can we get some new graphics up here to just—

That would be— Starring, featuring Brian and Grant.

So when we were in Montana, uh, Brian, you were talking about the changes that you made in the business, and the one that stood out to me was talking about the— first was narrowing in on helping your clients do one thing, which is basically grow, instead of all the things you could help them with. And the second one was you're changing the number of playbooks that you offered. How many playbooks to help clients grow did you have before, and then what did you cut down to?

We had way too many. Um, we had around 100-ish.

Yeah, that's—

remember somewhere in the '90s? Yeah. Um, because the theory was each person is starting a unique point, and let's just craft a path for each human as they come through. And just, I mean, from early stage, one thing we've done for better or worse, probably been to our own detriment in some ways, is just track success rate. That's really hard to do, actually. Like, it's actually an interesting problem of its own to solve. Like, how do you know if somebody's being successful and how do you measure that?

And I think probably 95% of businesses don't track that metric, which is kind of crazy.

You get depressed really quickly if you think your stuff's good. Go track success. It's not. I promise you, it's not.

It's true.

Yeah.

And you'll get disenfranchised with product types. Like if you think you sell a book to help people, don't measure success rate, don't even measure open rate or finish rate or any of that stuff because it's really, really low. Or courses or memberships like, again, you know, 0.01% of people will find success, but you're not— almost immeasurable success rates. So that led us to coaching. And then as we started cutting everything else, which took a little bit of time to do that reasonably responsibly, we just started focusing on, okay, what are the things that have worked for us? Because we can't teach a thing we haven't done. And let's codify those. And then as people come in, let's look at where they're at, where they want to go, and look at the components we've learned and try to map a unique path for them. And we still do that to some degree, but I like the Basecamp guys. Like they have— I don't know how they described it, or maybe I'm using their words, but they have opinionated design. This is a way that we do project management. So this is the way you can do project management, or you can hire— you can use another piece of software that allows you to do whatever. But their software is opinionated. And I found that like when people hire a coach, that's actually part of what they want anyway. They want their opinion. You were talking about your flight instructor. You're like, just tell me what to do. Actually, I don't want an opinion. Just yes is the answer. So we kept it way too open because we thought there were so many different paths to get there. And that's not untrue. But as we started cutting those and just focusing on two fundamental playbooks, the success rate went up. The ability for us to train coaches and get them up to speed quicker went up. Allowed their coaching to get better and allowed the— like, the clients don't care. They actually don't care about much of anything as it relates to sales and marketing. Content, no content, have a list, don't have a list, YouTube, not ads, social, Instagram, TikTok. They don't care about any of those things. Like, we have specific things we give them and I tell them on day one, like, the win for you is you get clients. The win for me is you tell your friends about us and everything else is negotiable. So I don't care if you learn, I don't care if you get an dopamine hit, I don't care if you go 6 months and you haven't like got excited about like I like those things don't matter. What matters is fast forward a year, do you still have a client acquisition problem? So that's been our optimization point. Fundamental problem. Their business grows. What's the simplest path to get there? So we went from all these, you know, we covered 4 or 5 different channels, marketing, you know, ads and content marketing and some cold outreach type stuff. And now we just focus on first, make offer great and have a high ticket offer. Like start by needing the fewest clients possible because that eliminates most sales and marketing problems. Not all of them, but that lowers the bar drastically. And the second one is borrow other people's audiences to get exposure versus trying to go buy it or earn it or build it over time. Because all those, as the years have gone on, have gotten— all have gotten substantially harder to do. And a great arbitrage right now for the next long time is other people that have audiences need content. So just be their content. So we've simplified everything down to just those two things. What's a great high-ticket offer that solves a real crisis that you have experienced and can help at least one person with? Need 10 of them a year to have a six-figure business. And then to get in front of those 1,000 or so people you need to find those 10, just borrow the people's audiences. Give your best stuff away to other people. And that's worked fantastically well and gone from 90+ playbooks to 2. So we've been able to just get really, really, really good and super nuanced and weedsy. Isn't just our experience anymore, because if your brain works like mine and thinks like mine, great, that'll work for you. But if your brain works fundamentally differently and you have other lies and everything you have to overcome, like my stuff won't work for you. So as we practice that with hundreds and hundreds of people, we found a lot of the edge cases and nuances and have just like really getting good at those things. So similar to products, similar to marketing channels, if you have a whole bunch of them, you're just mediocre at all of them. If you're trying to teach a wide variety of things, like, just really difficult to master and to do really, really well to a high success rate.

So what I'm noticing in that is, first we're talking about niching down in the audience that you choose and then the products that you offer down to a single product. And then what you're even doing is saying, great, now once they've purchased I'm actually just going to niche down from 90 different ways that I can help them achieve their outcome to 2.

And think about that competing with AI because I type in at least right now with the current models, you type in a GPT and it's like, bro, can you talk with fewer sentences? Like, this is just a lot, right? And nobody wants more information, especially now. Now is unique as compared to 15 years ago. Maybe 15 years ago we really wanted a bunch of information, but now it's overly saturated. What we want, and especially the higher ticket you charge, but I think just across the board, give me the simplest path by a trustworthy person to get what I want. Every detail is fairly negotiable. 'Cause as a person in crisis, I don't even know what I don't know anyway. I don't really have much of an opinion. If my marriage sucks, is it reflective listening or do I need to go, there's a million things I could do. I don't know. If you're great at that, tell me and I'll do whatever that is. And I'd rather it be 3 actions as opposed to 300 actions. So just like the Bezos things, the quickest, like quicker is better. Same thing in training and coaching. Like the shorter the path, the better. So the more information is not the goal. The goal is a high success rate. And if you optimize for that, I haven't seen the scenario yet where you get to more modules and more lessons and more things. It's like always brings it down. But that's, that's like just like doctors have to practice. You have to practice in this stuff. I think that's a disadvantage, of course, of membership people. They don't have the feedback cycles. Like when you coach, man, like you'll know very quickly when your stuff sucks, right? Because you'll be staring the human in the face and they'll be viscerally mad at you that it didn't work. And you'll have to figure something out real time. And you get those visceral feedback cycles to know what to improve on and what to work a different scenario or different example or different template or different suggestion for. And you'll get better way quicker at your thing. So yeah, not more, just simpler path to success for every person that hires you, no matter the format of of product.

Grant, what you were delivering to at the Speaker Lab, it was that a similar thing of narrowing down, or I'm curious also if you tracked success rate and if that was something that you—

yeah, we started a couple years ago, and part of the challenge with speaking is, and this is probably true in a lot of different spaces, but it had to be self-reported. So we would find sometimes where someone would go out, they would do, um, like I remember a couple times I'd talk to someone or I'd meet someone at an event and they're like, I went through your program a couple years ago, I quit my job, I'm a full-time speaker. And you're like, Would have loved to have known that, you know, but most people aren't, you know, they don't think to— I should go back and tell them, you know, and give them a heads up. Hey, it worked, you know. So what we found was we were having to go to people proactively and just, hey, is it working? Can you tell us? And so we would track— we had a form where people would fill out and it created a spreadsheet where we could track how many gigs were people doing, how many, how much did they get paid for that. And it was also a fun internal metric that we could celebrate of like, wow, you know, in the past X number of months, we've had, you know, speakers that we've helped have earned over $1 million from speaking. And it was a— now it was again self-reported, so it's probably ideally a fraction of what it actually was, but it's something, you know. And so that's a way to like tangibly track that and celebrate it. But to your point, when you track it, you also find that like, oh, it's way low relative to the number of people.

Yeah.

And so which is, you know, you try to like balance the— all right, part of this is the nature of the beast. This is going to be the case. And part of it is going, how much of it is the nature of the beast and how much is it because our thing is just not good enough? And like, if it's really optimized, what would it actually be? What should it be? What's even realistic? And is it possible to push that? And I know that like for you as a— I think you're more of a product-minded guy. And so you're going, How do we get 100% success rate, you know? And I think for me, I go like, that sounds like a lot, you know? But I think for you, like, that, that's what you're wired to, like, figure out how do you solve that, you know? Um, and so again, some of this comes back to even the full circle of what do you want, of going, no, I want to make the best possible product to— that's going to get 100% success rate. And if that means I need to, you know, tinker with it to the nth degree, but to get that That sounds awesome. That sounds like a fun challenge worth solving. And someone else may hear that and be like, I don't know, that's— what is the good enough that I can go with, you know? And again, it's not that one's better or worse than the other. It's just kind of deciding what makes sense for you and what you're wired for.

There's a— I'll totally butcher this— is at the end of Good to Great, maybe in the appendix, it might be the last chapter. It's got to be on the last page or two. And Jim is telling the story about his— I think his— one of his main research students that helped him produce that book. Again, somebody go read it and fact-check it. But at the end, he said the guy's like, Jim, what if I don't want a great business? What if I just want a good business? And Jim was like— and this guy had spent hundreds of hours helping produce this study. So this guy knows he's not an outsider. He's seen all of the fruit of that and everything. And Jim's answer was something along the lines of nothing in all of his research has shown him that it's any more work or any more time to build a great company versus a good company. It's just different work and different time. And I think that stuck with me. I'm like, okay, well, if I could spend the next 40 years of my life working and building things of some nature, if you got to choose same work, same time, you have a great thing versus a good thing, I think I'd rather pick the great thing. Let's do the work needed to do that thing. So, and there's something, I think, innate in all of us that when we build something and it's good and we look at it and we're like, that's really cool. Like, you clean out your garage after it's been a mess, you just open the door like, that's really good.

You know, you clean out your car, you want to go find someone, be like, hey, the neighbor's walking by, come look at the garage.

Yeah.

So no matter what, this could be a huge, hugely pivotal company thing, a document you make. Like, I made a— I wrote a memo last week to a client that was in the fear loop like bad. And I hadn't been able to get him out of it for 2 years. I couldn't figure out what to do to get him out. And as I'm writing it, I know I'm like, this is like, this is fundamentally exactly— we need to pull it up above the waterline and show it to him. And at the end of it, I went back and reread it a dozen times because I was just like, this is really good. Like, it's just proud of making a thing. And it's not even a public thing anybody will ever see, you know. But there's something innate in us, at least in me, that I think all of us can feel when we do it. Like when our kid you know, is on stage and plays the instrument. They're just really good at it. They have the basketball game. You're like, you're proud of your child. Um, so if you could spend your days making great things or spend your days making good things, like, let's do this one and let's like call all of us to make better stuff. And my hypothesis is if we do that, we can like get way less good at sales and marketing and not be great marketers but be great people at making products that help people because that isn't it. Like, there's so few people. This is surpris— not that there's nobody, but there's so few people actually playing that game. Like, that there's just one Elon who's ruthlessly optimizing for end result and has done it for, you know, 30 years now. It's kind of sad that there's one of them. Not that other people aren't, but like, man, like, pure product people who are trying to make great things. The Basecamp guys— I was listening to Jason Fried interview the other day. He talked about, um, making the envelope as thin as possible. And he called the business the envelope. He's like, I want the envelope basically not to exist. Its sole goal is to contain the product, which is the letter inside of it. And again, different strokes, different ways, all that stuff. But I think for me, a thing is I've gone longer and longer. It's like, man, as little of this business stuff as humanly possible, as more as like the great thing that actually just helps humans.

All in on product, whatever that is. Yeah.

And everything else. And truly, ultimately, at the end of the day, You could have seminars on culture and seminars on all this stuff, or you could just like rally a team around making a thing and that generates good culture because you're not like doing all the trust falls or whatever crap you got going on, which is fine, like do that stuff. But like if the thing you're rallying around, like what if that needs to exist because you actually aren't focused on a problem and their heart is not in it and they're in it for the money and the bonus and the comp and all that stuff and not for actually serving human good in whatever area you're actually trying to help people in. Like, what if that generated all the culture? So I'd rather do that, like just optimize for that thing than any of this other stuff.

Sounds like in Montana this year we're not doing the trust fall.

Yeah, sure.

Exactly.

That one, you guys, we can't do it this year.

Brian went on a podcast, he had a rant and we're all—

Brian hates trust falls.

Sheesh. So, you know, I'm hearing a few things of like, first, the focus on elimination is key to breaking through $1 million. Second is obsessing over the outcomes. Like actually track the outcomes, which almost no one does. And then the third is really learn to iterate on the product that creates those outcomes.

Yeah, at minimum, track the outcome and make decisions somewhat focused on that. And you would be in the top 0.01% of your market.

Right.

Like, literally, I've never been in a single business conversation where really at the end of the day, the question was, how do we make the product better so more people will hire us? Ever. All the questions start with, we missed our revenue goal. What are the marketing and sales things that need to hit the goal? It's like, it's rare to get to the product conversation.

You know, what's interesting is I feel like I've known you— how long have we known each other? Like 14, 13 years at this point? Like it's been a long time. And I've known you primarily or originally as a sales and marketing person, right? And so as you're making the shift and I feel like you're always asking, okay, how do I make sales and marketing easier and more effective? You know what? You know, and then you get— then as you move more and more, you're like, you know what makes it way more effective?

A lot of it is just don't need it.

A great product.

Yeah, really. I mean, it really is.

And a great business model.

Totally. Yeah, I mean, that is, I'm getting optimized out of sales and marketing. Not that that's not needed. Like, there's a, you need to know how to take your thing to the market and get humans to know it exists. So there's a place of it. Turns out, like, the amount of effort needed there if you're just halfway trying over here over a period of time is not that high. Yeah.

I'm curious what mistakes you feel like you both made that you know, you'd want to like throw a flag out there and be like, hey, if you're on this journey, maybe you could avoid a few of these in that path to $1 million or even beyond, right? As you scale to $2 million, $3 million, $5 million a year.

I think one of the challenges is thinking long term and thinking strategically. Like it's just so easy to— what's the next launch? What's the next, you know, product thing that we can just spin up just to either make a buck or to— I had 2 people who asked me, you know, about this feature. So therefore we should spend all this time, you know, creating this thing. And so, yeah, really intentionally thinking long term, both from a place of the customer and the product and how you're solving that problem for the customer. But also, again, what do you want? You know, like I— hang on, hang on. We're coming full circle. All right. There's a theme here. Gather around, boys and girls. But me, like, for example, you know, we kind of touched on this at the beginning. We all like enjoy being around each other. We're all kind of introverted. I think it's safe to say on both of you. And so, for example, you know, we've had people who'd say, oh, as speakers, you should host some type of mastermind. And I was like, yeah, I don't want to do that. I don't want to. Are there going to be people there? I'd rather stay home, you know? And so again, it's not that one's better or worse than the other, but like when you look at all the different things of courses or coaching or consulting or speaking or books or you know, any number of the things, it's going, what is a way that makes sense for the customer in terms of what's the best possible way to solve this problem for them? But then also, what do I, what do I actually want to do? You know, I don't want to host a mastermind, you know, and there are people, someone throughout the day like, you should have people like come over to your house. I was like, I don't want people at my house, you know, I don't want you to at my house, you know.

Is that why I have my little— I've stayed at Brian's house.

But again, you, again, you get to design it in a way that makes sense for you. So, but that means you just have to think strategically, you know, both in the not just short term, but in the long term of going, is this decision leading to the type of outcome and the type of business model that I want to have?

Yeah, that makes sense. What was the mistake in there?

I think when you're just trying to do like a short-term thing. So like, yeah, just trying to like spin something up and going. So for example, we've done there was one, some little offer we did that we're just like, it was, I mean, it's probably an element of just like a money grab, you know, of just like, hey, let's spin this up and offer this. And then, you know, a couple of months later you're like, well, we did all this work. Now what? You know, now you're like back to the drawing board. I don't want to be that business that's just trying to spin up the next thing.

You know, what's interesting is the businesses that we operate function on leverage, like incredible amounts of leverage. You can have a team that lives anywhere, reach customers that live basically anywhere. You can write one email and it's the same amount of effort if it goes to one person or 100,000 people. You can— if you're doing group coaching, you know, there's an element of leverage like in all these things that are product fulfillment. There's leverage everywhere.

Yeah.

Which means that we can justify certain activities that we wouldn't normally do. So if you have an audience of 50,000 people and you're like, I'm going to spin up this product and I'm gonna do the huge amount of work to make a new product, but that's fine because I'm selling it to all with, you know, a launch sequence to 50,000 people. And so it makes a bunch. And I think it lets us get sloppy.

Yeah.

Where what you actually should have done is take the product that you already had, assuming we're past this learning and experimentation phase, and say, how do I take the leverage of selling one thing that's 10% better than it was 3 months ago and sell that to the 50,000 people and do a better job of it? Or how do I get in front of more people? And so, yeah, there's a lot of business fundamentals that we can get sloppy on because we're in such a great space.

For me, there are a handful. One, in retrospect, none of these— most of these aren't obvious, just experimentation. And most of these I could make a solidly convincing case that you should do them. And turns out they're really stupid. Uh, one is spending more than 20% of my time in marketing and sales, and specifically in content production. Um, like if you're, if your business isn't ads or direct revenue generated off the content, you spend more than 20% of your time in it, like I would highly question that. Like, what's your business? You should spend time there. Um, second one is, this one was a near, it's been the only near-death blow in 14 years now of business, and it was offering a refund-based guarantee in a highly relational product. Um, so we did— for 2 years we did refunds if you didn't hit a measure of success in a short time period with our coaching. And that was an extremely bad idea. I could be convinced— I don't know if I could be convinced now personally just due to the trauma during that time period— but to do it with like less relational products like books and courses and memberships and stuff like that, I think there's prob— even in agency land, I would totally do it in agency land where you control the variables, or the vast majority of them. But in coaching, where it's literally long obedience in the same direction over 6, 12+ months to get a very hard-to-achieve result, what you need when somebody's not winning is to drive them deeper into relationship, not the exit hatch.

Right.

So that one was tough. The third one—

well, just to dive in on that for a second, it sounds like such a good thing to do if you believe in your success rate.

Yeah.

And you believe in your product. Then of course, we believe in it so much that we have a money-back guarantee if we don't help you achieve this outcome. But what you're getting at is it actually, what I heard in that is it makes the product worse. Because as I go through it, you're coaching me towards this outcome, we're 3 months in, well, we're getting some traction, but it's really hard. You told me it'd be hard, but it's like really hard. And then we're coming up on the money-back guarantee. Do I dive in and like do everything it takes to make this successful? 'Which you told me I need to do.' Or do I go, 'Oh, let me put in less effort and see, you didn't do— provide what you needed as a coach. So actually, I'll just take my money back.' And we become misaligned.

Oh, it's total misalignment. Like, the interest or the— it's like gyms. They're not optimized for you to get fit. They're optimized for you not to come. Like, literally, if you came— if every Planet Fitness member came to Planet Fitness, they would shut down from overwhelm. Their business is for you not to come. They charge you just enough money to get your money and make you not come. Because if all of you showed up, there would be no machines or weights for you to work out on. Yeah. And the refund thing is, boy, it is brutal. It creates horribly framed clients who, when they— who don't push through the trough or the dip, Seth Godin calls it. Like when you get— like you will get to a hard part in any hard to achieve result. What happens when you get there? That's the entire question. And if you frame everything up when you're fulfilling coaching to tell them about that dip, talk to them about it ahead of time, get them before they get there, get them so much momentum when they get in it, it's still hard. They still might quit. But if they have acceleration coming out of it, like, they'll get through the other side. But boy, if you tell them you can have all your money back and it's our fault if you hit the dip, like, they'll take you up on it and blame you the entire time, no matter what. Right. And that's— that is brutally hard. We'd never had a reputation problem ever until those 2 years. And then we exit out of that, no reputation problem again. And that's our— that's me. Totally. Yeah, totally my fault. But I would say stay— if you're in coaching, never ever offer a refund. Basically, you can do guarantees actually, but they should push you deeper into relationship, not further away from relationship. I could keep going. I got a, I got a blog post I'm working on, on top dumb mistakes I've ever done. There's a couple of them.

When I got started as a speaker, I remember there's a mentor of mine who, who said, like, you as speakers, like, you're looking forward to the, the 1% of like, I stand on stage and I speak and people clap for me and they laugh.

That's, that's 90% of the business. That's awesome.

And he said, like, The reality is, is like, that's, you know, 5% of the business. And you have to— he said you have to fall in love with the process. And so the idea of, you know, from like a health or fitness or nutrition space, like we all want to like stand in front of a mirror and not cry and feel good about ourselves. But the reality is like you have to fall in love with like getting up early and lifting heavy things and eating kale and not cookies and like all these things. You're like, I want the end result. But that what you just described is not fun. That doesn't sound good at all. You know, so you can probably tell we worked out this morning. I can tell, you know, it's pretty obvious the pump stays for a little while, but it— where am I going with that? But it's one of those, like, I mean, even this morning, there's times you're just like, I don't want to get up, you know, get up at 4:45 to go lift and you're lifting things. You're like, are there lighter ones? Where are the pink ones? This is heavy.

You did find the pink band this morning.

It was so much simpler. Like, I don't know why we're not doing that. But like, if you want to be in shape and you want to stay, you know, not cry when you're looking at yourself in the mirror, like you just have to do the hard thing. And if you are building a speaking business or course business or coaching business or SaaS or whatever it may be, like there's just a lot of parts that just suck really, really bad. And so you just kind of have to fall in love with the process of going like, this sucks and it's still worth it. It's like marriage, you know, like we all have really good marriages, but it doesn't mean marriage is perfect. And so you just have to know going— we attended a wedding a week or two ago and you're watching these children get married and you're like, you don't know what you're getting into. Oh, it's going to suck, you know? But like, you just have to know, like, yeah, but we're in it and that's fine. Like, yeah, I'm going to do whatever it takes. I'm going to push through the trough. I'm going to push through the dip. I'm going to push through the suck because I know it's worth it to stick with it.

Well, that's the thing that I really respect about both of you and your businesses is the amount of time that you've done it, right? And so it's not just how we've all built businesses where it's more than our personal brand or the style that we've done or the teams we've done it with. It's like, no, we've been at this for a very long time and there's a lot of different— as you brought up earlier, there's a lot of different seasons that come within that. And so we get to be the examples of like, hey, look, there's staying power in obsessing over these problems and serving these people.

Yeah, the shelf life is just the owners and attention, right? I don't think there's a shelf life in these fundamental problems. It is like, do you want to keep doing it? If so, you can. Like, there's always a way. But if you get sick of it, that's okay too. You can just quit. You can move on. Like, that's perfectly, perfectly fine. Let me share one more mistake real quick before we move on. I think I stopped getting my hands dirty way too soon.

Okay.

I think I listened to delegation and I listened to a lot of that. And there's, there's, there's some little paradox here. Of the number of— like, we run a coaching company. And if you're a human at the company and you don't coach at a coaching company, you're probably at the wrong business. You're probably in the wrong business. Like, if I'm— I was actually watching this famous pastor guy about a year ago. And I remember watching, I was like, I really like you a lot. But then I had this thought in my head, very judgy thought. And it was like, but if you aren't working with married couples, when you get down, like if you don't have a marriage counseling session to go to on Tuesday, I would be really sad. If you're really just a great public speaker, like, that'd be a bummer because you're teaching from theory, not practice. Like, your hands aren't dirty. And I literally— that whole conversation happened in my head and I was like, crap. Like, the percentage of my time spent helping people do the thing, really low. So we've started changing internally. We're not all the way there yet, but we're close. Like, 80% of everybody's time, everybody's time should be spent helping people. Or the envelope needs to get thinner. Like, why do we need that?

That—

can we get rid of that activity? Can I replace that activity? Can we just— more time, hands dirty, hands on. And you can feel it in strategy meetings or planning calls or Zoom calls when, when people are talking about a thing they can kind of remember from 3 years ago. And that's another callback to Basecamp. They did this a few years back. Jason and the other guy said they were going to stop giving advice on startups because it had been 20, 30 years since they had started the company. They're like, we don't know anymore. I was like, that— major respect to that. Yeah. So like, I would keep my hands way dirtier. Like, more, more important than product market fit is product founder fit. Like, it needs to match you or just keep, keep in the experimentation phase as long as it takes to find that thing that you want to be hands-on with and then stay there and be, be hands-on with that. So I think I backed away way too quick, especially in a coaching company whose job is to actually help people. So I would change that if I could go back.

Yeah, I think that's so important because as you build a team of any kind of scale, which many creators listening to this are, then you're like, okay, you have to delegate. And we say all this, right? And you got to measure and you got to move up a level. You have to trust your team. And which is all 100% true. But you can get in a position where you don't understand the actual experience of the product you sell. You don't understand your customers. You don't understand how the market has shifted. And that was on the flight over here. I was reading Erik Jorgensen's new book.

Which flight? You have a couple to get here.

On the, on the short connection, on the short Atlanta to Nashville flight.

Got it.

Which I wish there was a direct flight. I was reading Erik Jorgensen's The Book of Elon. Where he's just got Elon, in his own words, you know, talking to us. And that man is operating at a scale so far beyond what we can even imagine and is like in the details. And to him, it's like, it's a sign of respect to his team of like asking, you know, they're not like, oh, you don't trust me. You're second-guessing what I'm doing. He's like, no, I believe in you so much. I'm fundamentally questioning, like, do you have, you know, is this how the physics work? Is this what, you know, Can we eliminate more of these parts or any of those things? And I think you have to be in the details and anyone who tells you otherwise doesn't belong in your company.

And there's some paradox in that. Yeah, because nothing wrong with delegation. Nothing wrong with having a couple of levels in the business as the business grows. Yet Elon, when there's a problem, he skips all of that, all of that infrastructure and goes to the frontline engineer and stares at the problem with him and they problem. He doesn't get a report to the report to the report up to him. He just goes to the problem and problem solves it with him. And that's like— it isn't like he goes in and says like, hey, I want to learn how everything works. He knows how it works because every day he's continued going to the front line. So he just by nature knows how it works because he's helped design it and is in the act of problem solving process. His hands are dirty, sleeps on the shop floor when there's an existential threat. It's like that. And if you're not willing to do that, like I don't know, like, are you in the right business? I would question like if you found product founder fit yet, if you just don't have an inherent drive to do your version of that. Not exactly that, but any of these creator businesses in the sub-million dollar range, like there's not that many of you anyway, but optimizing for getting out of helping people or out of whatever the active part of the business is like. I love that you do this show because it keeps you in. Like if you're not doing email marketing, using Kit, your product will be worse. But if you're actively using it and finding the dumb stuff, because there's— there has to be plenty of dumb things.

Oh yes.

And if you go use a lovable and you're like, this is magical, how in the world— like, it took me 27 clicks to send this newsletter. And I would love if you do all of that. You have no— like, just go do it all yourself so that you get to see what every creator goes through. It's like, if I could eliminate these 27 clicks by just talking to the thing, you're going to get that feature launch in 3 days. And now it's going to fundamentally change every client experience that ConvertKit customers have. Like, That feedback loop is, is huge. But you have to fundamentally like email marketing or you won't do any of that. And if you're optimizing for like getting out as quick as possible, like we all came up in an executive assistant heyday or virtual assistant heyday.

Yes.

When the goal was delegate every task you possibly can, but it disconnects you with the real user experience in a way that like I substantially discounted. And I think it hurt us for a long time.

There are these times where we want to obsessively solve problems or we're like Or we've talked about experimentation as a season and we've talked about this like focus to scale. And then we've all been at this game for a long time. And so there's nothing wrong with those different seasons where you're like, okay, it's time to, time to do something else. Whether that's a different business, whether it's to exit this. Grant, as you've looked at the next phase of the Speaker Lab, I'm curious how your thought process was of, um, like what, 13 years into the Speaker Lab?

Yeah, 11, 12, something like that.

A long time.

Yeah. Yeah. We, I think, you know, several things that you just said there, Brian, that when I got started speaking, I was like, man, I had a lot of people starting to ask me like, hey, I want to be a speaker. How do I do that? And so I was in the weeds speaking and then also starting to teach people, here's what I'm doing right now. I just did a gig. Let me tell you what's working. Well, you know, as the business got bigger and bigger, I was doing less speaking. I didn't want to be on the road. As much. And so, I mean, fast forward to today and like, I haven't done a keynote in years, you know? And so now we've had a lot of coaches and people who are like actively speaking and I'm pointing to them. This kind of goes back to like, I don't want it to be the Grant Show of going, no, no, this is why we have an Eric or Dan or whoever of— this is why they are on the front lines teaching the thing. But to your point, like, it's been a minute since I've been on a stage. It's been a minute since I've been doing the thing. And so, you know, to, to, you know, your point, your question, of we got to a point where last year we kind of hit a ceiling in growth. And I wouldn't say I was burned out, but I was just, I was just kind of tired and going like, I, I'm not as obsessed about this problem as I once was, and I don't really know what to do or where to go from here. And so, you know, we're kind of thinking through some of the different scenarios and options of like, what do we do? Do we sell this or do we just crash this into the earth or like, you know, what are the scenarios or options here? And we made the decision a couple of months ago to actually start to just wind down the business and feel like it— it— I was no longer as obsessed with it, with the solving the problem and going, I think I personally had done all that I knew to do. And so we were kind of on that path. We'd since sold the business to a couple of employees. But I think it goes to, for me, and figuring out how I'm wired of going like, what, what, what is the thing that I'm passionate about? What is the thing that I want to be doing? And is this the thing that I'm currently doing? Is there a different way to go about doing it? And, you know, where do we go from— where do we go from here? When you get to a point in your business, I think we've, you know, we've all been that to that point of going, is like a good reflective question I like to ask is like, is this a season or is this the way it is? And if it's a season, like, okay, you can ride that out and you can accommodate that and get through that. But if this is the way it is, then something has to change. And so, yeah, that was definitely like an introspective journey for me of just figuring out like, what, what do I want? And it's as simple of a question as it is. It's really freaking hard to answer and get clarity on.

Yeah, I mean, it's that, like, we're talking about you have to obsess over the product and the customer and all of this and to get to the next level. And so when you get to the point where you're like, actually, those aren't the things that I want to obsess over.

Yeah.

Brian, I'm curious, as you know, uh, you and Grant hang out a lot and all that, and you got to have a front row seat to this transition. It's like, what are the things that you noticed that if another founder, another creator is going through that, like, types of questions that you would suggest or what would come up? Or is there anything you notice in that transition?

In the hard part of last year for him, I asked him at some point because his growth was slowing. You know, there's a whole set of questions you ask there and they were working through internally and asked him at some point, I think this was like November, December, I was like, hey, this is fixable. Do you want to fix it? Because, you know, you for sure can fix it. Like it is a thing you can work through, you can get on the other side and you can be healthier and better and more profitable than ever. But like, this is what those set of activities are. We've run them one time. They're not super pleasurable, but like there's things you can do, like, and it totally, totally works. And Dick, do you want to do that? And he was like, no. I was like, cool, great. Like, that's clarity. Go execute. Yeah. And it was like, that was really— I think I've majorly respected that. And I think a lot of creators need to hear that. Like, if you're 10 or 15, 20 years in, maybe 5 years in, and it's like you're not in love with the problem anymore, you're not in love with the customer anymore. And it's just really, really hard. You can just shut it down. You can just say, I'm done, and just shut the thing off. And I think I don't know of another example of that. And y'all have sold to employees and all that, like it wound up with a really good ending to it. But I know very few people who have just walked away and said that and had enough emotional, like healthy emotional detachment. For me, me and Grant were wrestling with this together over those couple of months. I think I have too much identity in my company to just shut it down. And most people I observe and most clients I've worked with, there's way much part of who they are is that thing, right? And if it were to be gone, it's what a lot of people that sell experience actually, they sell the company and all of a sudden, now what do I do?

And there's a whole identity crisis.

Yeah, because that was a huge part of them. And I think Grant might be slightly psychotic because I don't think he has any of that. Or you're really good at hiding it. One of the two.

No identity crisis.

So no identity tied into business. I think that's hard to do, actually. And Grant's done it really, really well. So I think there's just permission to— you can just end it. That's okay. And it was liberating to me. Like, I don't want to end my thing. Like, I'm, I'm in. But like, there's a place in my mind of like, okay, well, if there comes a point, there's at least a data set of one now of somebody that did that in a really healthy way, didn't hide it, did not talk about it, but moved on to the next thing. So that's, that's really cool.

Yeah.

I think even when we were in Montana a couple of months ago, you know, one of these guys we were talking with, I was chatting with him a couple of months ago and I was telling him kind of similar of just going like, I don't know where to go from here. I'm not really sure, you know, what to do next. And he was telling me about, I think it was someone, a friend of his in the concrete business. And he said he just got to a point where he just didn't want to do it anymore and he just closed. And I was like, that's a thing you can do that, you know. But by contrast, I remember like over the holiday break, there's a, I think like an email newsletter or something I'm on. And a lady was building like a big media company or something. And I kind of loosely followed it from afar, totally different industry or space. But she sent out an email of saying like, Hey, I just had to file bankruptcy and like none of my employees are getting paid and none of my vendors and partners and customers, everybody screwed in the process, you know? And I was just like, well, we're nowhere near that, but I don't want to get to that point, right? You know, like there's just far— I think there's far too many entrepreneurs who think, you know, I am, I am so chained to— I heard someone describe it like you as an entrepreneur, you are on a road trip with a bunch of people in the car, but you're the only one that's handcuffed to the car. Car and you're stuck, you're trapped, you know.

Everybody else, they're like, we don't actually like where it's going, this car is kind of— and that's the junk, whatever.

There's something to be said for sure of the people who are like, I'm, you know, I got a mortgage to my house, I sold out my 401, uh, I did everything to like make this work, I'm all in. And like, that's awesome. And there's been seasons where I felt like, yes, I will do those things if that's what it takes to make this happen. And I got to a point where I was like, I don't feel that way. And I also don't want to— like, we're not going to file bankruptcy and we're not going to get anywhere near that. And I'm not going to jeopardize, you know, the healthy spot that we're in financially, you know, for our family. And so what, what are the other outcomes? What are the other options, you know, versus feeling like you're just stuck, you're just trapped, you know? And I think a lot of, a lot of entrepreneurs feel that way. And don't feel like they have any choice either from a financial perspective or from an identity perspective. And like all those things are like real factors, you know, for sure. And like the identity thing of going, well, now what? What does that mean? You know, and, you know, people ask you, what are you doing now? And like you've always had your token answer. And so now, you know, what does that look like?

Or what is it now? You're unemployed podcasting at 11 a.m. on a Monday.

It's not too bad, actually, you know.

I want to summarize this because I want to make sure everybody's tracking with the story. You've had a very successful business. You've been in the Inc. 5000 many years in a row, very profitable, big team, same topic for 10, 15 years. And then you had a hard year in '25 or '24, '25. In that period, you're looking at the problem and you're like, actually, I don't even want to solve it this time. I've solved it in the past versions of this, but like the problem is no longer for me, like majorly intrinsically driving. I'm not doing the thing actively myself. Like, I think I just want to move on. So you said, I think I'm done. And then a period of time played out and then you wound up selling the company to employees. Like, that's really cool. Like the business never crashed, the thing never fell apart. It's still profitable, still operational, still helpful. And you were so healthy with your dynamic with the company, you're able to walk away from and actually leave it in better hands. So anybody listening, you can do a version of that.

Yeah. And I mean, I thank you. I appreciate that. And yeah, I mean, we had like some hard months, but like we— the whole time we were in business, we never lost money on an annual basis. But the— I mean, I do remember the conversation at the gym where you're like, do you want to fix this? And I would totally agree that like every problem in business is fixable, you know? And it's very— I think you talked about it from like a marriage perspective of going, you know, if you look at your marriage and if you're in a bad spot, you go, do you want to fix this? Well, if you want to fix this, if mentally, emotionally you're connected and you're all in, you'll figure out a way. But if you're like, I don't really want to fix this, I want to move on, like it doesn't matter what the solution is, you're not going to do it anyway, you know? And so, yeah, I think I was at a point of going like, no, I think I think I'm good. Like, I've had a really good run. And so I don't feel any winding it down. I don't feel any regret or sadness or second-guessing or woe is me. I feel like, man, we had a really good run. We generated, you know, a lot of revenue, a lot of profit. We helped a ton of people. We made a big difference for our team members and our employees. We did more, you know, in our little business than a lot of businesses do. I feel enormous gratitude for that, you know, and at the same time recognizing like what a great run. What's next? You know, it's kind of like, you know, Steve Martin going from stand-up comedy to playing the banjo. You know, it's like, well, those things are different, you know, but he just—

I play the banjo.

I don't think so.

Flute? More of a clarinet guy. Pickle, pickle, pickle.

Oh, what an example of that is Daniel Radcliffe, who played Harry Potter. He is now— he has this one-man show that he does.

Yeah.

To a small theater. He's like super engaged. Like, he passes out props to the audience members to get them to interact and all of that. And yeah, like, you can add up— he's not making that much money off of it because it's not that big of a theater, you know, at least compared to movies. But he's like, I'm done doing that. Like, this is what I want to do right now.

And he has enough. Like, I wonder how much of what we do is based on we need more money.

Yeah.

Versus like Is that what you should be doing? Like if you didn't make money or an optimization point and what if you had enough now? Like, what would you do? Not if you had $100 million in the bank, because I'd probably jack us all up even more. But like now. But what if you had right now was enough? Like, what would you fundamentally do different? I love, I love that. I love Jewel. She tells a story on Rogan several years ago. She was homeless, sleeping in her car, playing like 8 hours a day at a coffee shop on La Jolla Beach. And then she got known, like people started hearing her and some DJ played her song on the radio and all of a sudden, like every day, another record label limousine would pull up trying to give her a deal. And this record label pulled up, gave her a million-dollar deal, and she turned it down as a homeless person sleeping in her car and wound up signing a deal a few months later and getting a great gig because they were going to own the catalog or however record labels work or whatever. But man, there's a part of that that like Man, if money isn't the number one thing and helping people is and producing great stuff is, the money comes. And I think it comes in way cooler ways. Like Radcliffe doing that is like my desire, my esteem of him just goes through the roof.

Yeah.

What was the quote? You just talked about this on the podcast. The comedian who's getting heckled and he said the how much money you have? 100 money.

Oh yeah.

And but his answer, Jimmy Carr. Yeah. His answer of if I had more money, it wouldn't change what I would.

I'd still be doing his definition of rich.

Yeah. Which is a great answer, you know, of like, if you, if you could do this thing for free, would you do that? And if you had infinite money, you know, would you keep doing that same thing?

Yeah, that's good. This has been super fun to dive into the journey and all of that and see like the full range of it. I appreciate you guys sharing that because I've had a front row seat to it for both of you. You guys have had a front row seat to me as I've grown up in all of this. One thing that I did ask you to bring, I was curious if you have them, is if there's any books, because we have this ability to like grab a book and dive into someone's mind. And we've quoted lots of books that have an impact on us, but any books that come to mind on that journey that have been particularly helpful?

I mean, the one I had in mind was actually one we've kind of loosely referenced here, but the guys from 37signals Basecamp, you know, it's an older book, 15, 20 years old, Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. They just talk about like counterintuitive ways to run a business and how to think about entrepreneurship. And, you know, again, it's 15, 20 years old, but it still holds up.

Do it on your terms.

Yeah, just again, goes back to what we talked about at the beginning of like, you get to design the rules of the game in a way that makes sense for you, you know? And so if you wanna build a SaaS company, you get to choose. You don't have to build it like, you know, fill-in-the-blank company did. And so yeah, that's a— A great one. I love that.

Brian, what about you?

Got two. One is Stop Guessing by Nat Green.

I've never heard of that one. I like that.

It's great. Like, I've never— yeah, I literally one day I was like, I got to teach the team how to problem solve. So I start trying to like, how do I problem solve? Oh crap, I don't know either. I just guess. And maybe my rate is 5% higher than that than the normal person. So I Google problem solving books and the first one on the list was this book, Stop Guessing. And it is, it is awesome. He tells a story in the very beginning. I'll try to make it short, but he tells a story of this manufacturing company. I think they make toilet paper and the marketing team has developed a new version of double rolls or something, 24 in a pack or something like that for the first time. And it sells extremely well. But this warehouse can't keep up production because the machine that wraps the toilet paper, you can't turn it up past a 5 out of 10 on the speed knob. Or it just, you know, shakes and throws toilet paper off the line. And literally they're having to work triple shifts and even then can't keep up. So they're going to have to start limiting volume of paper they sell because their machine— and they can't take the machine out and put a new machine in because they'd have to rip the whole warehouse apart. It'd be a multi-month process, cost $10 million, etc. So they bring these manufacturers in and the manufacturer of the machine in and the consultants in and all this stuff. This is the opening story of the book. You like go read this story because it will— when you talk about simplicity, it is fundamentally like rewired my brain in such good ways. So they bring people in, they're studying it, they're giving quotes and all these different super complex solutions. There's actually a line now we quote internally and to clients sometimes, and it is refuse complex solutions. And if you do that long enough, the utterly simple solution always appears. It's all— and it's— it actually takes a legit faith. Because you can't imagine what an incredibly simple solution would be to these persistent problems, like these complicated and longstanding problems. But once you see a few cycles of it, you always know it's there. You just got to wait and like actually make those things go away. So finally, they didn't buy the $10 million conveyor system. They didn't shut down the line. They didn't stop sales and marketing. This consultant comes in, Matt Green, the writer of the book. He did— my favorite part is he doesn't solve the problem either, but he's talking with different people, understanding the issues, looking at the machine and all this stuff. And finally, one night, like the overnight Nathan Barry, mechanic guy, is sitting there looking at the machine in the middle of the night, like trying to figure out what is the problem with this thing. So he shuts down the line for a minute and he gets a ladder and he climbs up on top and looks down into the machine, which you can't do when toilet paper is running through it because you can't see anything in it. And he's looking at it and it's running fine at like a 3 out of 10 on the speed scale. But as he turns it up to 5 and a 6, it starts vibrating a little bit. And as he turns it up to an 8, Every now and then he could see something kind of like poke out a little bit.

He's like, what is that?

So he turns it up to a 10, and by the time you get to a 10, the whole machine's rattling. Whatever this thing in there is, is like poking in and out all this. So he shuts the machine off, takes the side panel off, and he kind of gets his hand up in there and pulls out this little 1¼-inch bolt. And somewhere along the way, this little bolt had fallen off. If somebody had dropped it in there or whatever. Turns out the only reason they couldn't keep up with tens of millions of dollars of demand and had to run 3 shifts or about to spend $15 million was a 50-cent bolt had fallen off. And whenever this— at like 5 out of 10, the bolt didn't stick out, but at 6, 7, 8 out of 10 on the speed thing, it would stick out and grab the shrink wrap and throw the whole thing everywhere. Took the bolt out, slapped the side panel on, turned it to 10 out of 10, and the line run, run, run perfectly well. And the whole book is outlining like, all right, how do you do that? And it gives you a little bit of a framework and process to do that, to find utterly simple solutions to these highly persistent problems. They give a frame of most of us solution guess. We don't problem solve. An example he shares is like if a light bulb goes out in your house, what do you do? You go get another light bulb and put it in. That's a guess because you guess the problem was the light bulb burst, which is fine. Actually, it's a very reasonable thing to do. But if you do that in business or in other areas of life that have these persistent problems where your solution guessing hasn't solved it, you need another approach. And the book kind of outlines a really cool way to methodically go through some of these. And as we've done that in business, like it's been wildly cool to find these like incredibly simple solutions to these complex problems. So anyway, the book kind of goes through that.

Rework is really neat.

Stop guessing.

I like it. I like it.

He said you had a second one.

The other book is called Wealth, Riches and Money by Craig Hill. It's one of those books, if you look at, look super janky, self-published from the '80s, probably is all of those things. But there's a couple— two things I've seen myself and clients I work with, other founders struggle with the most is our view on money. And it comes out in ways that doesn't look like it's about money at all, but it is great for tearing that down. Like, I realized for myself about a year ago, year and a half ago now, that my— I didn't— this was not intuitive, not conscious, not obvious to me. Maybe everybody else it was, but, but my number one optimization point was money in business and life. If I were to strip and like get to really transparent mode, if I hit revenue goal, everything was great. If I missed revenue goal, everything wasn't great. And a lot of little distortions that never made it quite that clear. I would say the right words and probably halfway mean them, but this book made it really evidently clear. Like, yeah, no, money is your number one idol in life. Like, your number one optimization point is that. And that sent me on a journey over the past year and a half of just trying to tear that down. Like, money's— money's fine. Yeah, you fuel good. But how? Like, God's only going to give you as much as you can handle without detaching from him. and then it stops. Or the worst thing it could do is keep giving you the thing that's killing you. Fundamentally, those are the two things. So for me, that became really evident. This book helped with that and kind of gave some alternate ways of thinking about money, one of which maybe to share real quick is not getting— and this maybe goes to Grant's current transition— is not getting overly married to the channel that the money is coming from right now. That the daily cash flow is coming from. I would attribute the source of cash flow, it comes from God. Get married to that. And then if the current cash comes from this business or the current cash comes from this business or this passive income stream, cool. But know, like, it can change and that's okay. Like, the source doesn't change, but the channel that comes through is changed. So get married to that, not this. Or you'll find out really quickly if you have a money idol or if you've made money your number one optimization point, because let the channel stop. And see what happens. Sell the business for $100 million. Great. See what happens. Have the business shut down because it didn't sustain. See what happens. And I've had versions of all of those personally, and it reveals really quickly where my trust is, and it is in those dollars coming in every week and every month. And if that stops, what do you do? And what does your stress level and your anxiety level go to? Or even if business is going really well, but the bank account balance goes from this many zeros to one less zero. Or even the digit at the front goes from an 8 to a 4. What happens? And if the anxiety goes up, the stress goes up, the fear goes up. Like it's a— for me, I've noticed, and with clients I've noticed, it kicks the fear loop into just high gear. And when fear goes up, like literally your prefrontal, prefrontal cortex shuts off, your amygdala comes on, and your problem solving and creativity goes to crap. And it almost becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. So that book helped me kind of work through some dynamics of that in a really, really good way. And it's still a work in progress for me. I still fear with that is my number one trigger. You want to get me with going on fear and shutting down and everything like get the money and boy, yeah, those, those buttons are still there and will probably be like a recovering alcoholic or anybody recovering from any kind of, you know, abuse or whatever is like those are always things to keep on guard for me. So yeah, that's another, another book.

Money episode sometime. We've had multiple calls, the three of us, and we're talking about money.

Let's do it. We'll do a part 3 where we dive deep into all of that. So you guys can be the only guests to come back for the third time.

Let's go. That'll be good. Punchline of the book.

We just try to— I saw this at a Total Sign Up, uh, Nate Bargatze. Saw him a couple months ago. You saw him, right?

Yeah, I saw him as well.

Excellent. Um, he had an opener who tells a big story, great story. And then he says, if you want to hear the ending, I'm going to be performing at such and such comedy club in a couple of weeks. And you're like, oh, that was good. That was good. So yeah, he didn't finish the That's brutal. That was good.

Well, at least we closed all the— most of the loops that we opened. So there you go. Normally I'd ask like, you know, where should we go to follow what you're up to? I actually don't know the answer for you, Grant.

Grant@grantbaldwin.com. Shoot me an email. Yeah. And happy to answer any questions or help however I can.

Yeah. Brian, growthtools.com.

growthtools.com/Nathan. I'll put the— we talked about earlier the positioning statement and how to work.

Oh yeah.

I'll put a video lesson of me actively teaching that and some templates and examples of that. So anybody that wants to work through offer, wrestle with that, and really get down to core stuff, I'll just share some resources so y'all can go do it.

Sounds good. GrowthTools.com/Nathan. I have my own personalized URL on your site.

GrantBaldwin.com/Nathan.

We don't know where that joke was going. Guys, thanks so much for coming on.

You bet, man. Thanks.

If you enjoyed this episode, go to YouTube and search The Nathan Barry Show. Then hit subscribe and make sure to like the video and drop a comment. I'd love to hear what some of your favorite parts of the video were, and also just who else you think we should have on the show. Thank you so much for listening.