The Teams and Systems it Takes to Hit $10M+ In Your Creator Business

Oh man, this is one of those things that you shouldn't say on a podcast. Let's see how it goes.

Let's go.

You need to say it. Come on.

I had a realization. I think I need to bring more shit into my business. Okay. This episode is with Grant Baldwin and Brian Harris. Sometimes you get to listen in on a conversation that normally you wouldn't get to see.

One of the more impressive things about MrBeast, like, he started out as the dude, his face. Now he has a super legit operation.

Pick your heart. Like, being a solopreneur is hard and having employees is hard.

They've both built creator-focused businesses.

You need to sell to someone. How can you do that?

You have to fall in love with the process and then scale them into many million dollars a year revenue.

I've never seen a company who has a real team and real math behind client acquisition that went out of business ever. And you can't solve mysteries, but you can solve math problems.

It's a good time. I hope you enjoyed the episode. Let me know what you think. Thanks. Grant and Brian, welcome to the show.

I mean, it's an honor to be here. Uh, who knows where this is going to go, but, uh, we've been hobnobbing for the last several minutes before we hit record, so it excited what's going to happen at this point.

I'm just honored to be here amongst two aviation pros.

Yeah.

So for context, Grant and I both have an obsession with flying. We own basically the exact same airplane, just in different colors. Grant is a little further along in his aviation journey than I am. And so I text him for advice and all of that. And Brian just gives us a hard time about how much we love aviation and how honestly we'd rather talk about airplanes. Than anything related to business.

I've taken him flying. He's a great passenger, a great copilot. Maybe one day I'll convince him. We'll get him to come to our side.

Here's the thing about people with airplanes that just get airplanes. They're like CrossFitters that just don't CrossFit, or OMAD people. It's just all they talk about. But I came to join you all because I wore my aviation-looking jacket today.

Yeah, you're looking sharp.

I look more like a pilot than either one of you all right now.

You look the part.

At least We're not like vegans and pilots and CrossFitters, cuz that would be like the intersection of those three is you just can't stop talking about it. As much as I'd say like that's an unfair characterization of us, we did start the episode by talking about the fact that we're— so we just played right into your hands.

Stereotypes exist for a reason. Anyway. All right, moving on.

All right. So, uh, we've all been friends for, is it 11 years now? Something like that. Been a minute, Brian. You and I—

I want to say it was 12.

How old are you right now, Nathan? I need to know this for my soul. What is your age currently?

I, I don't know that you want to know that.

I do.

I am 30. I am 33.

Oh, good. Finally.

Yes. Okay, that's better than I thought. All right, for a long time I was like, man, I'm pretty sure he's still 22. Yeah. All right. 33 is close.

That means we would have met when you were 23 or something because you stayed at our house one day. You helped me change the tire on my Jeep.

I did. Yeah. So it was 2014, maybe 2015, somewhere. Early days of ConvertKit. I was— I'd gone to New York in order to meet with Ramit Sethi and like a few other ConvertKit meetings I was trying to make happen. And then I jumped over to Nashville I like booked this on points and I had spent most of my money on ConvertKit. I didn't have a lot of money and I was coming to Nashville and I was like, I don't have a place to stay. Did I post on Twitter?

Maybe, probably.

It was one of those things. And we had, we met at a conference before, or we met for the very first time.

I don't think we'd ever met.

So yeah, that just, if anyone wants to know what kind of guy Brian is, like we met for the first time and he was like, sure, come stay in my guest room.

And we DM Brian. He'll let you come stay at his house anytime. Open invite to the public.

Decently often.

I remember, Brian, I think you were too, like we were some of the first users of ConvertKit. Like, oh yeah, I remember like the first like 100 customers. Here's what I remember. Here's a fun ConvertKit story. I don't know if you remember this, but I remember like we switched everything over and we had drafted up an email and we go to send it and the only option was like send now. It was just, there was nothing. It was now or nothing. And so I remember texting you just like, hey man, if I need to schedule an email, which seems like a pretty basic feature, but I didn't see it listed in the feature set. And you're like, yeah, you can't do that. I was like, wait a second, we just moved everything over and it's just like broadcast now or nothing. So those are the early, early days of ConvertKit. You've come a long way.

Yeah, a 3-digit account ID, you know, in the first 100. It's pretty good stuff.

Those are the good days.

Grant, you and I met probably at Pioneer Nation, Chris Guillebeau's event in Portland. Yep.

Yep.

That was like 2014 or so, I was thinking.

Yeah. Yeah. I think that was super early. Uh, that was a couple of these events where I was talking to James Clear about this actually, uh, over the weekend where we were like, wait, what are the events that people are hanging out at now? You know, like World Domination Summit, Pioneer Nation, uh, MicroConf back in the day. Some of those, like a lot of people came together, came out of those events. Um, that, uh, I like to think Craft and Commerce, uh, our event is where a lot of people are, but it's just interesting. Yeah. I don't know. Now we're probably the old guys in the industry, so we don't know.

But, well, I'd also say, and I know this isn't the point of our conversation, but I would say like those in-person events where we each met, you know, you and I at Guillermo's event, Brian and I met, um, Well, we met briefly at Noah Kagan's office. Yeah, yeah. Super random, but really actually connected in person, you know, several months later when we met up here in Nashville, I believe. But just like the, the, you know, all three of us, Brian and I live here in the Nashville area. You're in the Boise area. And but the in-person time like changes the dynamic of relationships. And so anybody watching or listening, you can tell like, okay, these guys like genuinely know each other, like each other, get along, have history. And we've only ever spent like the 3 of us in the same room together no more than a few hours cumulatively ever. But that in-person time that we all have had together, like, just completely changes relationships. And so, you know, in an online creator economy, like, how important that is to like actually get out from behind your screen and be with people.

Yeah, absolutely. Let's give a quick breakdown of each of your businesses because the thing that I want to talk about is the business model and how you scale with teams, because you've both built substantial businesses well into the many millions of dollars in an industry where a lot of people either cap out at a certain level or they like start to scale and then, and then stall out. And you guys have built audience-focused businesses that— don't take this in the wrong way— they feel like traditional, scalable, like they just feel stable. So many creators, I said, don't take them the wrong way. That's actually a compliment.

I was like, when's that shoe going to drop here?

But like, I feel like so many creators are riding some hype wave of growth and they, you know, are saying like, this number is going up like crazy. And so we're scaling the team and revenue and profit, like everything else, it feels hectic. And spending a bunch of time with both of you, it's like you just brought all of the like traditional business best practices to a creator-focused business. And it's weird to say that that is like odd and unique, but it actually is. Like we were all, uh, watching this video from Matt D'Avella about how he went from scaling a team to going back solo.

And.

I feel like that's more of the common experience. So rambling intro, but where are you guys? Maybe Grant, we'll go with you first. Talk for just a minute about what your business is and the structure of it so that people can understand where you're coming from.

Yeah. So maybe for some quick background. So I used to be a full-time speaker. I was a full-time speaker for 8, 9 years or so. I was doing about 60, 70 gigs a year, really enjoyed it. And I got to a point though, I had a friend tell me early on, like speaking is a high-paying manual labor job in that you get paid really, really well to stand on stage, run your mouth. But the nature of speaking is you have to get on a plane, you have to leave your family, you have to go somewhere, you collect a good check for the song and dance that you do. But you got to go do the thing. It's like a surgeon, you know, a surgeon makes good money for doing surgery, but you got to go do surgery. So kind of just had my own epiphany of like, I don't really have a business, I have a job. It's a fun job. I like the job, I get paid well. But at the end of the day, it is a job. If something happens to me, or if I want to take a week off, like the money stops flowing, there is no business there. And I think that's just a really important distinction to make for people is that like, there's nothing wrong with you being a solo creator and, you know, that video that you alluded to. And if you're like, all I want to do is make videos or all I want to do is create content, like that's okay. There's nothing wrong with that at all. And so for me personally, I kind of got to a point where I felt a little bit stuck. I knew in order to increase my revenue, increase my impact, I either had to do more gigs or had to charge more. And neither of those sounded really appealing. And so one big like epiphany for me was, uh, I remember I was, um, talking with a friend of mine, kind of a mentor, and I told him I just kind of felt restless and stuck. And he said he gave me some great advice. He said, Grant, some people are born to be speakers. And he was one of these guys, like he absolutely loves speaking. He's like in his 60s today, still does a ton of speaking gigs. He'll do his own eulogy at his funeral. The guy is a phenomenal, phenomenal speaker. But for me, I was just kind of like, I like speaking and it's fine. But he said, Grant, I think you are an entrepreneur who happens to be a good speaker. And that like really resonated with me. That really clicked with me. And so, you know, fast forward today, And I do a little bit of speaking, but not nearly as much of it. So the core of our business, I run a training company called The Speaker Lab where we teach people the business of speaking. How do you actually find and book paid speaking engagements? And so at this point we've built up, we have a team of about 40, 45 people or so, completely virtual company. Learned a lot from you, Nathan, and ConvertKit in terms of building a virtual company. But we are solving a specific problem that people have. There's a lot of people, creators specifically, who say, I want to be a speaker. How do I do that? And speaking is one of these like mysterious black boxes. Is where a lot of people are like, how does this work? I've done some speaking gigs before. Maybe I've been paid a time or two. I would love to do more, but do I just sit and wait for the phone to ring, or do I have to cure cancer, or do I have to climb Mount Everest? Or how does this work? And so demystifying it and teaching a specific process and system. And even like you said, speaking is a long-term industry. It's been around longer than any of us have been alive. It's survived recessions, depressions, wars, pandemics, 9/11. It's not going anywhere. So regardless of what happens with technology or AI or whatever, like people still want to gather together to learn from and hear from a speaker. And so it's an industry that has a lot of longevity. It's an industry that has a lot of interest. It's a very aspirational career. A lot of people are interested in it, but don't really, aren't really sure how to get into it. And so that's the core of what we do. That was a long answer. Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. Oh boy. I'm going to put it, I'm going to put it and set it on autopilot from now on.

Keep the clock going.

For anyone just listening, Brian gave a watch wrist tapping motion to be like, wrap it up, buddy.

We're out of time now. Good times. This is fun. This is fun. I knew I had a lot to cover there. We had a lot to get to.

It was really good though. I like the, I need to transcribe that and work my story in that.

You're going to do a find and replace between.

GPT, make it for your business.

So, Brian, a little shorter than that.

What?

I'm going to do a short, short field landing for this one.

Oh, man. Aviation jokes. Here we go.

No, we help coaches get more clients by install— helping them install marketing channels in their business that actually work. So people come to us, they get clients, but they're all sporadic and they get 3 one month and 2 one month, a bunch of them referrals. And like, hey, we need consistent clients to grow. So we evaluate their business, we make a plan for them, and what it boils down to is like, all right, here's the channel suite we're going to install, here's what the marketing system is going to be, let's tackle it one channel at a time. Uh, and somewhere in the 3 to 9 months after they hire us, they have one channel that's crushing it, and we go install the second channel, the third channel, the fourth channel. Um, because one of the biggest problems that coaches and teachers have is not helping people— they're really good at that— but it is revenue, because they don't know how to actually do marketing. And they want to spend all their time in marketing and very few time actually iterating their coaching to make it more successful. So our job, take marketing to sales off the table, thought process off the table, hire us, we help you install those things and they actually work.

So are you like the, the sales and marketing—

sticks the landing, that was beautiful, butter.

Uh, so you guys are like the marketing and sales team for—

we're a coaching company, so we don't do it for you, we coach you how to do it. Okay, but that might be like typically, uh, the arc of a channel, like if somebody comes in there early on, one of the first channels we'll probably install for them is some version of partnerships, like doing lead magnet swaps or something like a podcast or whatever. Um, yep. So we'll start with usually the owner, if it's an early stage coach, uh, owning the channel. But 9 months from then, that channel is going to be mature. It's going to be bringing in 5 to 10 new clients a month, and these are typically clients that are $5,000 or more a month. And then they hire a channel owner to take it over so they can either go just do coaching full-time or start the second channel depending on whatever their goals are. So they run the first one, they get it to maturity, and they hire a replacement and they go do the next one. That's the typical flow that works well.

I like it. What's the price point that you charge on your service or what's kind of the different packages that you offer?

Yeah, so it's around a $5,000 to $10,000 setup fee depending on the stage of the business and $1,000 a month. So setup fee plus monthly.

Okay. That's a lower price point than I was expecting.

The higher the revenue of the company, the higher the setup fee and the, and the coaching. But like the core part of what we work on our main program is people in the $0 to $1 million a year range. If somebody comes at us at $5, $10, $20 million, which we have a handful of those, then it'll be significantly more because there's just a lot of team dynamics to work through and a lot of products to work through. But that's the exception. But for the core product, it's $5 to $10K setup, $1,000 a month.

Okay, nice. And how big of a team do you have?

20.

Behind the scenes. Nice. And Grant, what's the price point and kind of the packaging on what you're offering?

Yeah. So all of our programs are 6-month programs. I'm trying to keep this so concise so I don't hear from the peanut gallery. Yeah, we have, we have 6-month programs and they're anywhere from $5,000 to $25,000. And we typically do like small group cohorts. So usually groups of about 15 people. So a mix of small groups, some one-on-one coaching, and then some done-with-you, done-for-you components. So helping them with their finding speaking leads, their website, their demo video. So try to make it as dead simple as possible. There's still a lot of work they got to get done. But here is, you want to be a speaker, here's, you know, the steps you need to take. We're going to do some of it. You got to do some of it. Let's work together and get you some gigs though.

I like it. Okay. So for both of you, we, we all watched Matt D'Avella's video. We'll link to it in the show notes. The short version is wildly successful YouTuber, amazing creator, scales up team, bunch of revenue with that, finds it quite stressful. And then ultimately Um, finds that that doesn't drive growth and then scales back down to, uh, just him and builds profit up again. I think we've seen a lot of creators do this. I've seen it time and again in the industry. Give me your hot takes. What do you guys think when you see either friends of ours or people in the industry, you know, scaling teams and then ultimately, you know, scaling back to, uh, just them? Or, you know, or just freelancers?

Well, I'll go first. Uh, first off, if you are, it is totally fine to just make things yourself. Like, nothing wrong with that at all. People should do that. Also, at the same time, most every version of that story I've heard hasn't come from a place of strength and a core part of their identity, that they're Leonardo da Vinci in the garage painting and that's just what they're supposed to do usually is a fear-based decision in my personal observation. That doesn't mean there's people out there that shouldn't do it, but it is— it was hard and it was stressful. So let me go back to the version that wasn't hard and wasn't stressful. And most of the stories I find kind of lame, and usually those people pump up to the masses how being a solo creator is awesome. And hey, God bless you if that's your thing. but do it because you know that's who you are, not because leading was difficult. Like, do the same thing with leading that you did with the core art. Like, learn how to do it. Like, you don't have to be a super stressed out leader. Like, you don't have to. Those are not mutually exclusive things. You can have a team that's healthy with awesome people, and it can exponentially grow what you can do. Like, you can have way more impact. And I'm not talking about revenue. Like, have more revenue if you want. I don't really care what your thing is, but like, I don't know, most of the stories I hear They did it, they hired poorly, they led poorly, so all the people didn't like them, they cost a lot, and they quit. Some version of that, which is fine. Like, I have made— I can walk through many mistakes in hiring. It took me 4 marketing directors to find the right one, and there's one common element in that: it was me. Like, it wasn't any of the past marketing directors, that's just a Brian problem. So I had multiple choices. I could be like, I could do what a lot of people do, which is I could just take back over marketing, or I could say, hey, I'm not touching marketing. I stalled the company out 3 years of growth because I refused to take marketing back over. It's like, no, we either crack that problem or we die. But we're not going to keep like this limiting belief that like there's no good marketers out there or any of that crap, which is what you hear from most people that talk about it. So I don't know, it's like half the time I want to tell them, I want to tell them what you said Ramit told you in that meeting 10 years ago when you told him what your plans were and he looked at you and said some version of those goals suck.

Yeah, he— so we're bigger.

Like, most of these creators, like— and I don't know Matt, I don't know Matt at all. I've watched his videos and they're really good. There is a version of leading a team that Matt can do that would make better, better videos, more of them that are more impactful. He has to decide if that's a thing he wants, but there is a path for Matt to have a peaceful, high-production team that makes him enjoy what he does even more. That's for sure there. So I don't know his particular path, but like, what I don't love is these creators who do it, suck at it, stop, and then talk about how being a solopreneur is like the best route while they also have 20 contractors. Let me tell you, having 3 full-time employees is infinitely easier than 20 contractors. That's hell. Like, that's hard to actually do that well. So I don't know, I don't buy it most of the time. I think it's mostly limiting beliefs from people who quit.

Strong words. I think, uh, I mean, I largely agree with it. There are a lot of creators that I talk to, whether it's, um, like Josh Kaufman, who I believe is like, has built his ideal business in every way where he is a solo creator. He has just the freelancers that he wants to work with. Um, he's built up to many millions in revenue and he is like fine-tuned that business. So that it has as little overhead as possible. And there's a lot of creators who know what they want and pursue that. But, but I largely agree that a lot of times building a team gets written off as a creator because you just did it poorly to begin with. And like you were saying, that's not a slight on the creator in any way. This is like, you will fuck when you start, like for sure. It will be very, very hard.

You'll hire bad fits and you'll have to figure it out.

Yeah. Grant, what's your take?

Yeah, I would totally agree with that, actually. The—

Dang it, we needed someone in here who could disagree. Grant, take the opposite. No, I'm just kidding.

But here's the thing.

We'll just have a debate.

Like, we both kind of touched on it that there's, you know, there's kind of this line between on one end of the spectrum you have an entrepreneur, on the other end of the spectrum you have an artist. And it's really, really hard to be both because most of us were like, we're just drawn to, I just want to do the art. I just want to do the craft. I don't really care about the business. But like, you have to have both. Like, As a speaker, I noticed like that was often the case of speakers who are like, man, they were so freaking good on stage, but they just sucked at running the business. And that's the part where like you have to care about, you have to fall in love with the process of what that takes and what that, what is involved in that. And so I would say like, for me at this point, I would have, I would have probably believed the same thing that Matt was talking about in that video several years ago, that in order to grow a business, you have to hire people. If you hire people, that's stressful and that seems miserable. And why would you want to do that? Let's just all default back to zero and square one. But I I would say like on this side of it, fast forward to where I'm at today and I would say, okay, we've got 40, 45 team members, which again, I would have thought like, that sounds miserable, that sounds awful. And I would say at this point my life is better. Uh, my stress level is lower. I make more money. I have more freedom. I have more flexibility. I have more time with my family. I'm happier. Check, check, check, check, check. Now that doesn't mean that it's perfect. Like there's still 40, 45 people that are dependent on decisions that I make and, you know, the ramifications on their families and yada yada. And so there is like that weight there. And so, you know, Brian and I live like 10 minutes away from Dave Ramsey's headquarters and Ramsey has an office of like 1,100 people there. And so when I drive by that, uh, I'm just like, man, that seems awful. 11, that is a creator who built a 1,100 person, uh, business, right? And like a huge headquarters, huge headquarters. We've been there. It's like a legit place, but I walk, I go by there and just think that seems miserable. That seems awful. However, I've never had a business with 1,100 employees. You may ask him and he may be like, actually, 1,100 is way better than 40. Like, 40 probably sucks, but 1,100 is amazing. I don't know, right? Because none of us have this idea other than what we have built in our mind to think that like hiring people sucks, managing people sucks, uh, and therefore you shouldn't do it. When the reality is, it's just like, pick your heart. Like, being a solopreneur is hard and having employees is hard. So it doesn't mean that like you shouldn't do either of them. Like, you still have to do something. You You have to choose which kind of hard you want to compete in.

I like that. Choose your hard. For me, I remember the time that like ConvertKit being about 15 or 20 employees is when we got to the point where for just about every problem in the business, there was someone more capable than me to solve it. Before that point, I was bringing my laptop with me everywhere, right? This is part of selling software in that Like, it doesn't always go perfectly. Sometimes, you know, it goes down or there's an issue and you need to be able to solve it. But probably about that 20-employee mark, I realized like, oh, when I'd go to jump on a problem that came up, someone else who was more qualified was jumping on that first. And that's when I started to be like, relax a little bit and be like, oh, this is, this is easier. Was there an inflection point for each of you? Where as you built the team to a certain point, I don't know, maybe it was a tough grind from, you know, 5 to 15 or from, you know, 3 to 10 employees. But then beyond that, you actually started to figure out the staffing or the team structure, or did it go smoothly all the way?

I remember one meeting specifically, we were in Sedona at this team retreat and there were maybe 5 of us in the room, and that's everybody at the time. And I remember looking around and I just hired our first full-time engineer and he was awesome. In fact, in retrospect, he was the first like perfect fit person at the company. I remember in the discussions we're doing planning and whatnot, looking around the room, I'm like, oh, like all of you have to go. Like you're a good fit and no one else is. And it was just super clear. And that's happened at least twice. That time, I remember another time vividly. It might have been a third time. I think those two times I'm like, man, like the team has reached a level where there's just like a different kind of human here now that like to meet, man, there's some kind of limitation of imagination that, I mean, I see this in myself, but we also coach people and we see behind the scenes of lots of businesses from, you know, $0 to $25 million-ish is probably one of the bigger companies we've worked with. And it's like, it's the same stuff. It's the same exact thing. And one of the biggest things in team building for me has been expanding the imagination to what's possible in that role. Like, the world's a big place. Working with a customer right now, and they have an outsourced agency doing their ad buying. And through our discovery, like, all right, you need to replace that with a full-time person. You're actually paying the agency more than with a full-time person, and they're doing, you know, 1/10 of the work. Um, but they're freaked out about it. So when you see— like, there's something magical that happens when you have them on the team. But even before that, when you put out a job ad and have an A+ fit apply, and you can see it on paper, it's like The world quite literally opens up in a new way. Now you have to be able to lead them. And I proved to us, like, my leadership of our marketing sucked so bad, 4 of them left. And like, okay, well, like, I got to improve on that thing. So there's been moments where I've looked around the team and like, oh, there's a new benchmark that now we have to hire to and grow to. But man, I'll just encourage anybody who's thinking about a team, go try it. Like, it's not for everybody. So if you decide through a place of identity and strength that you are a solo person. Don't go trick yourself and saying you're solo and have 20 contractors, by the way. That's actually more work than having a full-time team, which is what you find if you dig under the hood of most of these businesses. They're solopreneurs, they get a bunch of contractors. Like, they're literally no different in these things, uh, practically. But, um, man, it's fun. I'll say, in my experience, having a legit team is extremely gratifying. Like, we are built to be in community. You're not built to be a hermit in the woods. That is That is an exception to the rule. Um, to be by yourself all day, every day, only doing stuff in isolation, like, that's very abnormal and strange. Um, so we're built to be in community, whether it's at work or at home or whatever. So I don't— yeah, there are great people out there that can make work so much more fun, so much more impactful, and can grow the business. And you just— like, I don't own all the pro— I own very few problems in the business, and that's way better than owning all of Go through what you were saying.

I mean, there's a, there's a lot of like big popular adages in the business space of like hire good people and get out of the way and work yourself out of a job and be the dumbest person in the room and on and on the list goes. I'm like, actually all those things have a lot of truth to them. And so I know, you know, like, like with, I think for all of us, like we have good leadership teams that, um, where oftentimes we're like, wow, you are, you and you and you and you, you are way smarter at all of these things than I am. And I would be screwed and lost without you. Now the challenge comes in, like, making that initial hire, uh, beyond just the contractors. I know for me, like, when you're asking about the kind of inflection points, that was a big one for us, was we had had a team of contractors. We got to, like, probably $1 to $2 million in revenue early on with no employees. And I was kind of probably wearing that same hat of just like, oh, I'm solopreneur and I'm doing it, you know, when in reality, like, no, you got a lot of people, like, working on it who are kind of half in, half out. And so, um, the, the marketing contractor that we had had, who is awesome, was leaving to go do his own thing. And so I knew like, okay, we probably are at a point where we need to hire a full-time marketing director. And side note, Brian sent us a great referral that worked out and is still with us today, 4+ years later.

Oh yeah, we did tell that story, by the way.

That is a good story. And so but what ended up happening was here's a guy who like had great experience in the marketing space. I know he was what we were looking for. He was light years ahead of everybody else we'd interviewed. But I knew like he's a full-time hire and that was going to be a 6-figure role. With like some profit share and eventually he's looking for benefits and all of just like the businessy stuff that you're like, I can we even afford this? Can we justify this? We hired him in January 2020, like 60 days later the world implodes. And you know, again, let's go back to like the nature of our business. Like we teach people how to find and book speaking gigs and all of a sudden the world's like, we're closed, we're not hiring speakers anymore, right? So there's like massive stress and panic. But I can also look back and say, That was a huge year, and each subsequent year has been huge years of growth. And he has been a huge, huge part of that. And one, like, he's very, very talented and great at what he does, way better than I would be. And two, I would say this is something like we could dig into, but the way he's incentivized and specifically his comp plan is massively incentivized where I don't have to babysit him, I don't have to micromanage him. He is massively incentivized to grow the company even though he doesn't necessarily have equity but he has— he's heavily incentivized on profit share. Like, more than 50% of his comp comes from profit share. So he's paying super close attention to it because it affects his— what his take-home is. And his comp has gone up significantly year after year after year after year. Uh, and so that's been a big thing as well, is again, continuing to add, like, great people but also incentivize them the right way.

Okay, we gotta tell the Chris story.

Let's hear it.

All right, so—

all right, so what happened was, uh, no, let me tell you, I had just hired—

let me tell it, let me tell it.

Okay, all right, so I've had—

I've had hire 4 directors of marketing. Again, that's a me problem, not a them problem. They're all great dudes. Um, and the first person I hired, um, Grant hired, started hiring a director of marketing just after, uh, I think I had hired him, or maybe like within a month or so. Our processes were overlapping. And, uh, towards the end, he didn't really have any good candidates at all. And this is 20— December 2019 or so.

Yeah, 2019.

And, uh, so I get a guy. I, I like to do my final interviews in person, so I brought 3 people in person. Me, um, Chris, the guy I hired, and I don't remember who the third person was. And I wound up hiring, um, my guy. And Grant's like, hey, do you have anybody else in the hiring process you would like? I was like, oh yeah, you should definitely talk to Chris, he's a great dude, uh, personality, whatever. I think maybe Drew will work out a little better. So anyways, he goes and hires Chris. Um, Chris has been at Speaker Lab for 4 years. Chris is an absolute baller. Chris has like— COVID hits and Chris pivots to virtual speaking. They absolutely crush and that would be an inflection point between, between the two businesses. And there's multiple things Grant's done extremely well because I'll contrast us quite a bit and think about, all right, what does Grant do well that I don't do well? And there's several things he does really well. And one of the primary things has been stability, hiring really good people and keeping them. His leadership team has had zero turnover in the 4 years it's existed, and we've like been a rotating door of directors of marketing. And hopefully that's stopped and I've changed enough to know how to lead that really well. But that whole time Chris has been there. So like my, in the worst frame possible, our leftover job applicant went to Grant's businesses and absolutely cleaned up and has done a fantastic job. And me and Chris are friends and hang out and we go to conferences and stuff. But anyway, good dude. But also I get to stare in the face of the person I didn't hire all the time and know they were an amazing fit for the role. So hey, if you're not up for that kind of stuff, don't even play because that's going to happen. Some version of that's going to happen. I just get the super of this role. Referral version on a daily basis.

That is a good story. Grant, you want to add to that?

That is an accurate telling of the story, um, and it's worked out how it's supposed to work.

It's been great.

So you regularly pay Brian his recurring referral commission on that as the executive recruiter that he is, right?

I mean, I can think of, uh, at least 2 more hires that, like, uh, we've come to blows over, um, which again, this isn't the top of the conversation. However, I would also say It has been incredibly valuable. I can speak for myself and I feel fairly confident speaking for both of you that like the relationships that the three of us have, you know, individually, collectively, the relationships we have outside of this call with other people where being an entrepreneur, whether you have, you know, whether it's just you or you got, you know, 20 people or 100 people or 1,000 people or whatever, like it's difficult, it's challenging. And there are days where you're just like, man, this is awesome. And I just want someone to high-five and celebrate with me. Or days where you're just like, this sucks and I don't really know what I'm doing and I feel way underqualified and over my head. And I am completely lost and I just need someone to like beat me upside the head. I know we're all like in different group chats with other entrepreneurs of just like comparing war stories of like, hey, I'm completely at a loss here. Oh, you are too? Great. None of us know what we're doing. And Brian, you even kind of alluded to this. Some of the consulting clients that you work with that are big names that everybody would recognize, but sometimes you start to look under the hood and like, oh, they're clueless too. Like they don't know what they're doing either. Like, okay. And like the just the reassurance that, that gives us as entrepreneurs, that we're all doing our best, we're all figuring it out, we're all putting our best foot forward. But at the end of the day, like, none of us really know what we're doing at our gig.

And hey, the ones I love the most are the ones who are very well known and popular. Nathan, I actually talk about you a lot. I don't think I ever said this to your face, but one of the things I think that you've done exceptionally well— and from— because you, you had success in really early in life, um, and ConvertKit took off in your mid-20s. And I think one of the most impressive things about you, at least outside looking in and talking to you occasionally, is you got advice and mentoring the whole time. And, uh, and I have a question for you about this, but even people that are further along and older in different spots, like, a common characteristic isn't having all your crap together, because no one does, by the way.

Way.

No one, not even kind of close. They do— companies that do it amazingly well do 2 or 3 things really well, and they do 50 other things terribly. Um, but what they do is get outside coaching and mentoring and advice of various sorts. So like, if you're a solopreneur who's tried to build the business, you're mad, or somebody in that kind of vein, and it's kind of crashed and burned or sucked, or sucked the life out of you, like, don't just write it off completely. Go talk to people who have done it well and learn from it and, and see like, all right, what could I do differently? Because like Grant has a team of 40 and he works less than he's ever worked and has made more than he's ever made. Like, what's the difference there? Because there are for sure learnings from Grant that you can apply. So like they learn and they don't let their limiting beliefs actually stop them. And I think that's something you've done really well on, Nathan. That's something Grant for sure has done a good job on. He has more mentors than I can keep up with. And it helps him. It helps him a ton because he gets to learn stuff. I tend to not do that, honestly. I tend to want to figure it all out myself. And that's not a positive. I don't think. I don't think it's a net positive.

Well, I love getting coaching. I think that's something that is easy to suggest for other people and not, like, take yourself. And I've hired an executive coach for the last 4 years now, I think. And then I'm always running ideas by friends. Uh, actually, I've noticed this habit in people often who are coaches themselves, who they won't like wrestle with a problem solo for very long before they want to call you and just chat through it. And, you know, I even got this, uh, from Dan Martell, uh, maybe a couple weeks ago. We were hanging out in Charleston, talked about an idea, and then maybe a week or two later, he just texts. He's like, hey, can you jump on a call with me and 2 people on my exec team, like we were a little stuck and we want to riff on something and we had a great time, talked for a half hour, I think got to some really good conclusions. And, and I just noticed that pattern where people will pull in someone with a different perspective or an expert in that one space and just use their network. Like the number of times where it's like, wait, you know these people really well and you're not. Willing to ask for their help.

Yeah.

You know, like, oh, they probably don't have time for that. I just, I love it. Like I was on the call today with a woman named Gretchen Leslie, who is like this amazing behind the scenes marketer for a lot of big creators. And we were just, I had a call scheduled to catch up. And she's like, hey, your positioning is wrong with ConvertKit. Here's why. And I'm like, can this be a Zoom call instead of a phone call? Because I need to record this. I'm like taking as many notes as possible. Getting like all of this great, you know, unsolicited feedback from her. And so I think it makes two things that I'd recommend. One is set a stance in public that you are open to unsolicited feedback. Like just tell people that, make it known in your friend groups. When someone gives you feedback, don't be like, Grant, you don't know anything about my business. Get out of here. Instead, go, okay, tell me more. What makes you think that? Like dig in and be curious because people, if you make it known that you're open to unsolicited feedback, then people will say like, oh, hey Nathan, that offer that you sent out, like that didn't really land. I would do this next time instead. Um, and then the second thing is like deliberately seek out help. If you're about to send your biggest marketing emails for the, for the season or whatever it is, like run them by 3 of your friends who are in a similar space. They'll happily spend 15 minutes and record a voice memo for you saying like, hey, here's what I think. I think this will actually work. I think it won't. Um, but if you do those two things, you'll have a huge impact.

Yeah. And to that end, Nathan, if you ever decide to change the name of ConvertKit again, if you could run it by me and Brian, we could, we could help you with that one.

Yeah.

Thanks.

Too soon.

You'll be first on the list to call.

Too soon.

It's been 5 years. Is it really too soon? Maybe at the point where I think for the first time that joke doesn't feel too soon.

That's good. That's good.

All right.

We tried to wait for the statute of limitations to wear off there. Half a decade later, we're doing it.

Oh, man.

Oh, Brian, did you have a— you said you had a question for me in there. Was there something you were wondering about?

I'll buy him time for a second.

Just calm down there, hotshot. Here we go. All right, here's the question. I wrote it down ahead of time. How— this is for both of y'all— how have you made sure your pride or ego hasn't got out of control as your business has grown?

Hmm. I mean, the first thing is, in the nicest possible way, my wife does not care about the business. And like, she cares a lot about the business, loves the people. Um, she comes to, she's been to a couple of our team retreats over the last, you know, 7 years that we've been having them. Um, but like when I'm saying, hey, we just hit $20 million a year in revenue. We just hit this, we hit 50,000 customers. She's like, that's awesome. Let's go to dinner to celebrate. You know, we're like, she's supportive in every way.

That's cute, honey.

Also, yeah, like I'm so happy for you. And there's none of that, you know, when I'm like, oh, but how are we going to hit this? She's like, do we need to hit that milestone? You know, just like very, very grounded. So I think that definitely helps. I don't know. I'll start with that one. Grant, what do you think?

Two things come to mind. One is like, yes, all of us started the thing that we do, but also when you zoom out on a day-to-day basis, we we have very little to do with the ongoing. Like at some point it has to be bigger than you, right? And so, and that's also part of the point of this podcast and the show is that like creating something that's bigger than any single one of us. And so I realize like when people are like, Grant, you've built an awesome company. I was like, well, I'm not doing any of the coaching. I'm not doing any of the marketing. I'm not doing any of the sales calls. Like I'm not doing any of the customer service. I'm not, you know, keeping track of this or that. Like there's people that do all those things. So Grant, you do, Yeah, but Grant's not actually doing things. They're moving the needle in a meaningful way. Now, again, none of this is like, I think for all three of us, like none of this is like a false humility. This is also just the reality of business, like our roles. Yes, they're important, but also we want to build something that exists and is bigger than us. So that'd be one thing. I had something else that I'm drawing a blank on.

While you're thinking of that, I'm going to take it the other way because I Oh man, is this one of those things you shouldn't say on a podcast? Let's see how it goes.

You need to say it. Come on, let's go.

I had a realization that I think I need to bring more ego into my business. Ooh, okay. And probably when I think about it, maybe it's not ego, maybe it's something else, but there is a somewhat— probably an actual humility, not a false humility— where I want to lead from the front. I don't want to be telling anyone to do a job that I wouldn't be willing to do myself. Um, any of those things, like, I'm gonna dive in, I'm gonna work right alongside you in all of this. And I've had more and more times recently where I realized that I am making poor prioritization decisions, um, and not valuing my own time because I'm not willing to say, I'm the CEO, that is not a good use of the CEO's time. And so it's not necessarily an ego thing, but I think that that, like, humility in business can take you too far, or you could end up like— the same ideal could get you off the other side of the path where you're saying like, oh, that's actually not good. So what I'm realizing is that in order to serve the business the best, to serve the team and the customers the best, there's a line that I need to hold where I say no, I won't do that. That is— if I were to take that on, yes, that would serve you as an individual, right? Maybe jumping on a call for an hour with, uh, someone on our support team, right? Or doing this other thing that would absolutely serve that individual, and it would be at a disservice to what I need to do overall for the business and the community. And so I'm trying to find that balance right now where I've actually— even though it makes me cringe internally, I'm like, someone says, hey, can you do this? I've actually said back, is that a good use of the CEO's time? And I'm like, even saying that, I'm like, ooh, that's, you know, but I think that's what's necessary for the business to grow.

That makes sense. I don't think that's a humility pride thing though. I think that seems like a different categorization of thing.

Probably is.

Because, well, you could do that out of a place of pride. Like, I'm big and important and you want me to send an email to customer support? No, I hired you to send emails to customer support. You could also do it out of a place of strength. And humility in that like, hey, let me walk you back through what your role is. Let me empower you to actually crush the thing and not need me as like your codependent relationship kind of deal. So maybe the same thing could exhibit itself. Maybe the reason behind it is the differentiator between those two, because what you just described doesn't hit me at all as like Nathan is full of pride and thinks he's the crap over there. Thus, don't ask me a question. Like, that's not the heart of what you described.

One of the things— so within the Speaker Lab, we have one of our core values is ownership. And so we always tell people, like, whether you've been here for several years or you just started, like, this isn't— I always say, like, this isn't the Grant Show. And so my name may be on the COVID of the book, I may do the podcast, you know, whatever. But just because you just walked in the door doesn't mean that you're any less valuable than anybody else here. And so we want your feedback, we want your input. Like, so, so often someone— if someone were to come to me and ask you know, Grant, what should I do in this situation? Or what would you do? A lot of times it's, well, turning it back on them. What would you do? And like 99 times out of 100 said, that sounds good. I think we do that. And even though like maybe, you know, there may be a few little tweaks of, you know, I would do that, but maybe do it this way. But the more you just let people feel empowered and rather than even just feeling empowered, but like they actually are empowered, the more confident that they're going to be like, okay, I know that Grant actually has confidence in me and he believes in me and that the team supports me and that, Even if I get it wrong, it's not— it's coming from a place of trying and making an effort and not feeling like, oh my gosh, if, you know, if I get it wrong, that Grant or whoever is going to be pissed at me or disappointed at me. No, no. Like, that's not the attitude at all. And so I think just building that muscle within people and that confidence in people, like, no, I— the reason you're here is to help make decisions. And the more decisions I have to make, the more of a bottleneck I become.

I use that question all the time. Just simply, what do you think we should do? And it gets me out of so much work. It's fantastic. But more importantly, it builds the system for the work to happen without me. And that's really important.

There's this idea, I don't know if I heard about it or, or we were talking about or something, but the idea of like strategic laziness, strategic laziness where like, yes, I care about my business, but certain things like I just don't care about, and it's just in the scheme of things, not, not that it doesn't matter, but, you know, my, my involvement in it isn't going to move the needle and isn't going to, you know, make a huge difference. And that's why we have great people to do those things. And, you know, if it, you know, if the, if the, the COVID art for the podcast should be, you know, option A or option B, my decision probably isn't going to make a huge impact. And so a strategic laziness of going like, I just don't care. Now, again, like you're thinking about how you're phrasing any of this and thinking about how you're communicating all this, but the strategic laziness of going again, is this the best use of the CEO's time? I don't know that I'm, I'm not saying that, but that's a thought process that's running through my head of like, what is the best way? Because the other thing is like, we're all three in new positions that we haven't been in. So like prior to getting into speaking, I was a youth pastor at a small church. There's maybe 10 people on staff. And then I became a speaker and then we started the Speaker Lab. So I've, you know, I'm 42. And so I've had a career for 20-something years. And this is the largest company I've ever been at. And so I tell the team regularly, like, this is all new to me. So I'm still figuring it out myself. So it's not like, oh, yeah, I've worked at a company of, you know, this many people or a company of much, much bigger. Nope, no experience there whatsoever. And so, you know, Nathan, you've never led a company this size, Brian, you haven't led a company of this size. So So also just giving ourselves some grace to go like, yeah, this, you know, if the CEO shouldn't be doing this, what should the CEO be doing? You know, like, because this is new to me. I'm not, I'm not totally sure.

One thing, one question I'm having real time is I wonder if part of the difficult part of creators building a team is caring about everything, like being a hyper-perfectionist so much so that you accidentally disempower the people you work with at the point where like like everything's going to be done Brian's way, so like I don't even know why I'm here. And you kind of just accidentally strip— because like they didn't get into this to build a team, so it's an abnormal path. They're the face of a thing typically, and they didn't get into it to like grow a company. They kind of found their self in that opportunity spot. But like leadership training, or you know, actually how to lead people, like that's just not there. That's maybe one of the more impressive things about MrBeast. Like he started out as the dude, his face, and now he has what seems to be a super legit operation led really well, producing high-quality stuff all the time. Like, that's incredible. The videos are cool, but like, the organizational and the growth of him that has to happen to make that happen consistently over time, like, that's by far more impressive and rare, it seems to be.

Yeah, because you have to figure out what's the thing that you're good at, and then where can you hire people who will carry that so much further, right? Like, even for me, design is something that, like, that is my score— my core skill. I was gonna say I went to school for design. I dropped out of design school to go try to be a better designer. You know, like, that was where I started. And I don't design things for ConvertKit very often anymore. I hired Charlie, wow, 8, 7, 8 years ago now, who's our creative director. And she, you know, is a way better designer than I will ever be. And so I actually delegated you know, and hired someone better for my core skill. And I think as you do that, then that really frees you up to amplify, you know, all these other things like hiring people for sales, for marketing. You know, at some point you even replace yourself in the very core skill that you used probably to build, you know, the first million plus in revenue.

Well, to that end, like the most businesses, um, start as like a personal brand to some degree, whether we're teaching or training or we create some type of thing. A lot of it's centered around us. And so over time, when you're trying to, trying to transition away from— it's not about me, it's about something that's bigger than me and this company and this identity that's more than just this individual personal brand. But still, so much of our personal brand is, you know, is carried into it. Then it feels like, well, everything has to be perfect because it's a reflection on me and my personal brand. It's like, but it's not your— you know, if it's going to be bigger than you, then it has to— you have to start to disconnect yourself from the business and like make intentional decisions. So for example, like we have other people who host the podcast and we have most of the emails are written by other people and come from other people and are from other people. And real quick, like realizing like, okay, whatever the area of the business is that depends on you the most, how do you pull yourself out of that the quickest and what does that process look like? And I think we've all done that of like finding and hiring people that, that pull ourselves out of, of maybe whatever that role is, whether it's sales or whether it's marketing or whether it's fulfillment or customer support or whatever it may be, so that we can focus again on the thing that we know ultimately helps the business grow.

I like that. One thing that I think has helped both of your businesses grow a lot is having recurring revenue. Now, Brian, I think, is everything in your business besides the setup fee recurring revenue.

Yes.

And Grant, what about you? What percentage of your products— like the book is not— nothing is recurring.

Nothing's recurring. Which is—

oh my God.

Yeah. What are we going to do? Oh, deep breath. Everything's going to be okay, big boy. So, yeah. So, so I mean, it is like it's a, it's a real challenge. There's pros and cons to it. You know, the— especially the nature of the business like Brian and I specifically are in is around coaching and like coaching typically typically it's going to be different in various, you know, genres. But as an industry as a whole, like most people don't stick around for like a long period of time. You happen to be in a product and a space, Nathan, where like it has massive, massive stickiness where people, once they get in, probably going to be with you for several years, most likely. That's typically, typically not the case with in the coaching space. And so we also recognize with what we do with speakers that speaking is a very aspirational career. A lot of people get into it and realize like Oh, this is hard or this is challenging or shiny object. I'm going to, you know, I said I want to be a speaker, but also, you know, I want to write a book and I want to do a podcast and I want to do a course and I want to do coaching and consulting. I want to do that. And so what we found was doing some type of recurring product was really, really difficult given kind of the nature of our audience. And so we, we were focused much more on the 6-month program, selling the 6-month program. And, you know, there's pros and cons with So that means each month, you know, we're recording this early January. And so January 1st rolls around and we start over. We're starting at zero and we got to climb that hill again. And so on one hand, I'm just like, oh man, it'd be nice to have some recurring. And we have like, like we have a lot of people on payment plans. So it's not like we don't have anything. So we get, if I had to guess, probably 15, 20% of our revenue is some form of recurring-ish. You know, it's different. But, you know, same idea. But at the same time, like our CEO, for example, he used to work at Stanley Black Decker and Stanley Black Decker is a multibillion dollar company and they sell a crapload of power tools. And so we were talking about this idea at one point and he said, he's like, yeah, like recurring revenue is nice, but at the same time, a lot of businesses, they start from scratch every single month. And at Stanley Black Decker, we had to get Lowe's and Home Depot to buy like $1 billion worth of power tools. Every month, every month. And you're like, whoa, that, that's true. You know, like most people aren't buying a power saw every single month. Or like Coca-Cola, you're buying and nobody's on like a recurring subscription. People buy Coke repeatedly, but like they start over, you know. People selling a, you know, at a car dealership, people buy a car and then it's like, I'll see you again in several years. Or if you're a realtor or whatever the thing is, like most businesses operate off of selling to new customers on a, you know, some type of regular cadence there. Now, I think like one thing that Brian's always been really good about, we— he and I were texting with a mutual friend of all of ours the other day— is just the ability to find those new customers on a recurring basis. Because for a lot of creators, maybe they switch from the personal brand to selling some type of product, service, whatever it may be, and they can kind of skim the cream off the top. Of the loyalists who will buy anything and everything they say. But like fast forward 6 months and you need to sell to someone who's never heard of you or just subscribed to the email list or just stumbled across the thing that you do. How can you do that and do it in a sustainable way for the next several weeks, months, years? That's a business. But just saying like I sold to my fans and now what's the next thing I can sell to my fans and what's the next thing that I can sell to my fans and you continue to like like just pawn them off for the next thing that you're shilling. Like, that's not a business.

The thing that, that makes me curious about is I see so many people ramp up revenue, ramp up the team, revenue then flatlines at some high number, say it's $1 million a year, $5 million a year, something like that. And they're making way less money in profit than they than they were before because now they have this giant team to support. And then they usually ramp, you know, down the other side. That's the, the bell curve that we go through. And I haven't seen many creators get through that unless they have recurring revenue. And so what I want to know about your business is how you're able to build to that scale and then maintain it really well. Is that, you know, without selling a whole bunch more to the same customers? Are you just really dialed in with like new lead generation and that deal flow?

Yeah, I think that's part of it. I think that, you know, there's a few factors. One is going to be that the, that industry, meaning people who are interested in the speaking industry, is a, it's a big pond. There's a lot of people that are interested in that, right? And there's always going to be new people that are interested in that, you know. So it's kind of similar to aspirational authors, people who want to write a book. Book typically also want to speak, you know, or some combination. There's just an aspirational thing. A lot of people would like to do that. And so it's a big pond of people that's always going to be growing and never going to be necessarily dying to nothing. So sure, that's a factor. I think the other factor is, yes, from a marketing perspective, like we have an email list that we utilize and we lean on and we're very dependent on, but we also say, okay, if the email list goes away, We still have to be able to find and sell customers on a daily basis. And so what is that formula, whether it's going to— like we do a lot with online advertising through Facebook and Google and YouTube and the various platforms, but also just trying to build up our SEO presence and organic presence. You know, one of the things that we haven't really touched on, but I'd say for all three of us is we've been doing the same thing for an extended period of time. And how many creators like just chase the flavor of the week thing of like, what are they up to these days? And I mean, there are people that are coming to mind right now, like, man, give it a year and they're going to be doing something totally different. But like nobody's sitting around talking like, what's Nathan Barry up to these days? Do you think he's still screwing around with that? Nope. He's still doing ConvertKit, still at it, you know, plugging away on it. What's Brian? Brian's still working with Entrepreneur. He's still doing the marketing thing, like still doing the thing for an extended period of time also gives you some like confidence in the marketplace and gives you some Um, uh, like just word of mouth, people like, actually they've been at it for a long time, so they, they can't be shady and they can't be, you know, that sketchy. Like they probably know what they're doing. And actually I know a couple people who have used them or recommended them, or you just start to build some track record within the industry. But it's just hard to stick with the same thing for a long period of time because there's so many other shiny objects that are easy to chase.

What I see people do, Nathan, is they burned their list out. They burned the audience out by overselling to it. They never mastered cold profitable lead generation. So two things cause the downsize. More so than that even is they almost always map the intention span of the owner. So like, course— like every year courses are going out of style. It's like, no, they're not. Dave Ramsey's building is a mile from my place, and that place is really big and is built on courses. Like, no people are still buying courses and they are not going to stop, but you just got bored of it. So like revenue will match the attention and creativity span of the owner unless you get a team and a real leadership team that actually lead the company, and then your attention span is risk mitigated in the business. So like I think conceptually that's one of the biggest factors in that, and I've seen it personally up close and in person many times. They're like, it's going out of business. Like, no, our business is doing great right now. And lady that we're helping, she just had her best launch ever. And like you're meanwhile in the same industry saying people aren't buying courses. It's like, no, you just like, you never actually got a solid business in place. So like conceptually, that's one thing. The other thing is they just burn out the audience because they sell to it. They don't fill it up as fast as they churn. And it just comes down to math at the end of the day. If you don't have new people coming in, your revenue will go down. And if you're kind of bored and don't like the thing you're doing anyway, well, like you're not going to put the intention in needed to solve the problem of lead generation. So like those are the two things I see that are like the biggest factors in creator-style businesses plateauing and falling. Never master leadership, thus their attention span is the growth span of the company. And then they never actually get lead generation in place, and they don't know the math of their business. They don't know how many leads they need in, they don't know what their close rates are, thus all client production is a mystery. It's not math, and you can't solve mysteries, but you can solve math problems. So when you get the math in place of like, oh, I need 100 calls at a 10% close rate to get 10 clients, that math works every time. And if I didn't get 10 clients this month, what number was off? Calls or close rate? Oh, it's close rate. Great. Let's go coach the sales team. And what sub-number of that was off? Oh, it's pickup rate. Pickup rate should be 60%, but it was 30%. Are we sending the reminders out? Do we have the calendar thing hooked up? That's pretty much it. And you fix those and close rates go back up. So like getting what you do in client acquisition down to just a simple math formula solves a good bit of that, especially with a good team on it that knows what they're doing. Because then if you get bored of it and that's not your skill set, it can actually grow beyond it. I've never seen a company in my decade— I'm not saying they don't exist— I've never seen a company in my decade who has a real team and real math behind client acquisition that went out of business, ever. It's one of those two things typically.

I think what you're talking about is probably some creators are like, yeah, absolutely. And I think a bunch of others listening are probably going, hold on, what? A sales team? No, no, no, this is a creator business. We just sell— like, if you can't buy it in one click, you know, on the website, we don't want to go down that path.

Yeah, but, but turn buying one click off a website into a math formula. It's visits to a website and conversion rate of the page they're on. If you only have 1,000 people a month coming to that page, you have a 1% conversion rate, what's the math on that? Like 10 people? Like, that's the max you can get. So you can do lots of things to sell more people. You could sell the list, or you could just like increase traffic. So So every sales conversion comes down to a couple of numbers and you can game that, not game it, but you can just like be intentional with your math formula to grow the business.

Yeah. I want to dive in on the inside sales part of it. Cause I think this is something that actually holds creators back because in their math formula, they might be relying on a 1%, you know, lead ultimately to sale conversion rate and they're looking to They're like, okay, how do I get that to 3%? You know? And so they're like, all right, if I send a whole bunch more emails, maybe I'll do that. And then, you know, you ultimately burn out the list. But I think what both of you do, Grant, you have an inside sales team as well, right?

Yep.

So what both of you are doing is increasing the, you know, the lead or visitor or lead to sale conversion rate by having an actual human for people to talk to and for it to be a really good experience and then, you know, lead qualifying and all that. So talk through that. How do you go about, you know, adding in an inside sales team and when would you think about making that switch as a creator?

I think Brian and I did this pretty much concurrently because we both started selling courses and at the time, again, this was kind of like, you know, again, we were talking about 2014, '15, '16 or so. This is a popular thing. And again, fast forward 8, 9, 10 years, still a popular thing. But at the time, thing that like, okay, I could see myself creating some type of course. I have a lot of people who are asking me about speaking. Let's create a course about speaking. And so we created a course called Booked and Paid to Speak that we sold for like $297 and then eventually raised it to, you know, $497 and $997. And so did that for like a couple of years of just selling the course primarily through webinars, automated webinars, live webinars, and just did that over and over and over ad nauseam. And then had a lot of people were asking like, like, um, hey, do you do any coaching? And I didn't have any interest in doing coaching. And so I was like, okay, I've been hearing about like group coaching, high-ticket sales programs. And so then we kind of created an iteration of that, which knowing like, okay, I'm going to do some of the sales calls. And so we had like a small cohort of like 10 people. I sold the first 10 over the phone, but quickly realized, okay, again, this is not the CEO's best use of time long term. I can do it to kind of figure it out, but then who do we need to hire? And so for a little while Brian and I both shared a guy who was a, like, kind of a pseudo sales director. And so we had like, we had like each had like a part-time salesperson and then another part-time salesperson. And some of it's just the numbers game of like, okay, we have, you know, 10 bookings this week, 10 leads who want to talk to someone who, who should do that. And let's find someone. Okay. And now we have enough bookings where we have, we need like another person, you know. Well, at this point, like, like, I know we have over 1,000 bookings a month. And some of it, again, is just a numbers game of going, okay, if the average salesperson can take this many calls per week, and the average close rate is X, and we can get this many bookings, if we get this many more bookings, can we add another sales rep, right? And if we can, again, like Brian said, which again, we all kind of like glossed over there, that was a great line, like, you can't solve a mystery, but you can solve math. Like, that's gold. Let's put that as the title of the episode right there. That's, that's a good one. And, but I mean, it's so much of that is true. Like when it comes to a salesperson, if you just know, like, okay, it takes this many people to get to this page and this many people actually book a call and this many people actually show up to the call and therefore, you know, we need this, you know, this. And so that's kind of how we have trickled up to the point where I think we have 10, I think we have 10 sales reps today and all we do is one-on-one sales. Like you go to our website, there's nothing to buy. You know, you have the podcast, you have the book, but like like in terms of like our coaching programs, there's nothing you can buy on the site yet. You have to actually talk to a person. And again, that's a sales mechanism that has worked well for us. Whereas like my guess is with ConvertKit, you don't necessarily have to talk to anyone. You can go sign up for whatever plan today on the website and that's totally acceptable and that's totally fine.

Yeah. Brian, what would you add?

I mean, if you're just going to nail that answer, that was pretty good.

You have things to add.

Yeah, that's the trend.

All right, overshot my landing point.

Yeah, um, let's see what I was gonna say. Oh, I mean, if you're selling courses, you don't need a sales team. Um, I think when your price point gets generally over $4,000, your conversion rates on emails and sales pages typically, almost all the time actually, go down so low that they need to talk to a human. And what you can charge then goes up. Like, the difference in a $4,000 offer and an $8,000 offer a lot of times is actually a higher conversion rate on the $8,000 offer to the same exact audience. We've seen that over and over and over again. You double the price when you get to that price point and nothing changes except your profit. So it's mainly price point driven, uh, when you need to sell something, when you don't. There's lots of challenges to that approach, but for us The driving thing for us in the whole business is the fundamental problem we're trying to solve is making it almost impossible for people to fail at growing their coaching business. And to do that, courses will not do that. Uh, the success rate on courses is somewhere between 5% and 0%, and our goal is to have a 90% success rate with our clients. Right now we're like a 45% success rate measured on the first 90 days. Uh, so it's a very strict measurement. And like, I know fundamentally a book will never get us there, a coach, uh, course will never get us there, a group coaching program will never get us there. But one-on-one coaching will for sure— well, is the most likely path to success. And I'm almost completely confident we can get there with that. So that just dictates that the price point is higher and that we have a phone sales team. So that's where it comes from for us. Um, and we had some good people luck early on in finding Sam, a guy we shared and then Grant stole Um, a few years later— no, I'm kidding. Uh, that was one of our disagreements there. That was a fun one.

That's a good one.

That's the next podcast episode.

That was a spicy one.

But without Sam, we wouldn't— I would not be doing phone sales because I do not want to do phone sales. So that's also something you can— that's one of the easiest roles to hire out because it's almost either very low salary, like $1,000 or $2,000 a month in commission, or just straight commission. Um, so I've helped quite a few clients just this year hire their first salesperson that becomes a sales director and hires a sales team under them. The main thing is just your leadership, but like the role is fairly easy to hire. Um, and I would say a good rule of thumb is when you're bringing in, on average over the previous 3 months, if you brought in between 5 and 10 clients, you totally can hire a sales team, a first salesperson that's part-time, and then let them go full-time. So if you're at 4 to 5 a month, like get that off your plate because that means you got to take somewhere between 20 and 30 sales calls. That's 20 and 30 hours of time in a month, uh, about 20% of your time in the month is talking to people on a sales call. So get that off your plate. That's just sucking up an inordinate amount of time. Um, so yeah, that's our general rule of thumb with it, and it works well. Like, you can totally do that.

I would say at this point, uh, uh, with our sales team, they're all still straight commission, and you only eat what you kill. And so again, people assume like, oh, in order to, you know, have a team, you can have a ton of overhead. It's like, no, no, we our sales team within payroll— payroll is our biggest line item within the business. Within payroll, our sales team is the biggest line item of that, and they're all straight commission. And so if we don't have sales, we don't have anything to pay you because you didn't generate anything. So it reduces the risk significantly for the business versus having some big overhead thing. The thing I was going to mention was in the creator economy, courses are really, really easy to like whip up and spin up. And so it becomes a really crowded market. And when you're doing something high ticket that's done well, and, and delivered well, it creates a higher barrier to entry, similar to software. Like, not anyone can just whip up, you know, like, I'm gonna make my email software over the weekend. Like, no, you're not. Not anything that's good.

And it just won't be able to schedule emails.

This is true. If you just want to send a broadcast out, apparently that can be spun up real quick, uh, and you'll get people like me to pay for it. Uh, but to do something like high-ticket sales, to do something like software, it can— to Brian's point, it can arguably produce a better result, but also it's just harder for people to get into and harder for people to to knock off versus like anybody can just spin up a course over the weekend. And we see a lot of people that do that.

If you're selling a $5,000 or more coach course type product, I mean, you can have an entire— you can have a full-time marketer and a full-time sales team that's producing over $1 million a year for under $10,000 a month of payroll. It is not expensive. Now you have to lead them well. You can be like me and go through 4 of them because you just suck as a leader in that particular role. Like that, that could be the case. But like, you don't have to pay a lot for marketing and sales engine for a high-ticket coaching business. Now, you'll pay that out in commissions and whatnot. You can budget around 20% of top-line sales going out in commissions between a sales manager and a sales team, or if you just have one salesperson, about 15%. Um, but like, you don't have to pay a lot for it. And those people, if they don't produce, they leave. So if you have— like, the way we think about it in a phone sales-driven business, The marketing department puts calls on the calendar, the sales team closes the calls, and if you're not hitting your revenue goal, one of those two people aren't doing their jobs. So they either bring you a plan and they execute it to improve those things, or they leave and you find somebody else. So if you have a 10% close rate, which is a good average, if you put 100 calls on a calendar, your sales team is gonna— your sales guy is gonna close 10% of those, and you're gonna get 10 customers at $5,000 each or $10,000 each, and you have whatever that revenue is. Um, so you don't— like, it doesn't have to be something crazy complicated. And that framework, I mean, it's taken us like 6 years of doing this to even think in those simple of terms, but that is what it is. Marketing is going to use some channel, partnerships or ads or referrals or email marketing. Those are kind of owned audience, like warm things, but you got to have a cold channel. Something has to put calls on calendars and those calls have to be closed by sales team and whatever that's putting calls on the calendars, ideally in the best wired system is fueling the list and the audience at the same time. Time. So like for us, our primary cold channel is running Facebook ads to a training. So we get calls booked for like $150, but we get people opted into the funnel for around $20. That number should be way lower, but it's $20. So we get on average, I don't know, 2,000 or 3,000 new leads via that channel to the list every month. 98% of those people don't buy. They join the list, they get nurtured, they hear podcasts, they get emails, and then at some point in the future, that channel converts them into an audience, into an owner. But if you didn't have that and all you have is this email list that kind of grows by magic, like, you're going to burn the thing out. Like, it's not going to last because you'll reach the sales capacity at which it churns at the same amount that you build it by, and then sales will go down. We did that too. Like, we killed the list after 3 or 4 years of hitting it hard. So like, we've done all the bad versions. But the hardest thing in marketing— and also it's not that complicated— is a cold channel that produces clients profitably and grows the list. If you have that, like And you have a director of marketing, director of sales, like the thing will grow, like just lead it well. So it's not crazy complicated. And those two roles are the fundamental disciplines of doing it right. Book calls, close calls.

I like it. Okay. That's a good place to leave the team structure and all that. You guys think about this in a much more systematic way than most creators. And I want to have this conversation so that people could like, you know, see inside that and be like, oh, No, I am not like that conversation is not happening in my mastermind. You know, that's not the type of entrepreneurs and creators that I'm hanging out around. And so hopefully that was a good little insight. As we wrap up, I want to maybe just dive into a couple examples. Who's someone that you follow, like that has an audience that's applying that audience in a unique way to, to build a business that has a lot more longevity, right? I think we've all seen the ebooks and the courses, great way to generate cash short term. But what's someone that you saw that audience come together and you're like, that is a smart, like, audience product fit, something that, you know, I really admire.

I got two that come to mind in the speaking space. One is a guy I think you guys are both familiar with, Phil Jones. And Phil is a very successful speaker, but also has written and published multiple books, Exactly What to Say, Exactly How to Sell. He's got kind of a series of these, Exactly What to Da Da Da Da. And he's really like carved out this niche with that to the point that he's incredibly, incredibly good with it, has sold a crapload of these books. I believe they're all self-published or hybrid published. But one of the things he started doing recently is doing some certifications around these, like exactly what to, you know, certified and using these kind of a similar way to almost what Donald Miller did with StoryBrand and kind of like certifying people to teach the content and to go out and use the content. Which, you know, again, Don would be another good example here. So Phil would be a good example. Another guy you guys may not be familiar with is a speaker up in Canada named Ron Tite. T-I-T-E. Ron is a very, very good speaker, one of the best speakers I've seen. Hilarious, incredibly talented. But Ron is also a partner and I believe he founded a major advertising agency in Canada. And so part of Ron's gig is he goes out and he speaks and he's kind of partly a rainmaker of then clients where he's talking about what's working, what he sees in the, in the industry. And they're like, hey, can we hire your agency? And so Ron is not the CEO of the agency. He's not running the day-to-day, but his job is to go out and speak. And then he drives business back to the primary breadwinner, you know, which again, kind of similar to what you touched on earlier with like MrBeast. He's not sitting around creating chocolate. He's like, I'm going to do the thing I really enjoy, which is making videos, but I'm going to tell you about this other thing. And Ron is doing the same thing of, I'm going to do the thing I really enjoy speaking, but I'm going to tell you about this other business and kind of linking the two together. So Phil and Ron would be two good examples on my radar.

I think that's interesting. It's like seeing what the backend of someone's funnel is. Like, I think we've all run into this when you're running ads for cold traffic and you're like, how is someone, especially in search ads, how is that person spending that much money? You know, like I can, I can figure out what you're paying per click for the search term. And it's way more than I'm spending. Like one assumption is like, oh, you're burning money. But the more logical assumption is your backend funnel is way better than mine. Yeah. And so in Ron's case, you know, let's, let's say he's getting paid, made up number, but $20,000 for a keynote. And he's thinking, oh, is it worth it to go here? Most speakers are like, okay, there's that. Plus I might sell these books or get this email list growth. And so maybe the net value to me is $25,000, right? You know, $20,000 from speaking, $5,000 here. He, Ron, in this case is probably going, let's see if I get 8 solid leads for the marketing agency, you know, then that's going to turn into all of this. Those could be $100,000 a year each. Like, absolutely. I'm going to go speak at that.

Yeah. And I'll give you one other quick example. There's a lady that we worked with in one of our programs who was, she worked with like high-end, high net worth families helping with like identity theft protection. And so she was wanting to get into speaking and she was looking at it primarily through the lens of like, how much am I getting paid per speaking gig? We're like, no, no, you're looking at it wrong. It's like, what's the, what's the lifetime value of one of the clients that you work with? And for her, it was substantially high. It was like tens of thousands of dollars because like once someone would start working with her, it was, it was over the course of like literally their lifetime and protecting their identity and high net worth families. And so I said, let's focus more on that. So I remember she went and spoke at a gig where she was paid made, you know, $1,000, a couple thousand dollars. It was very nominal. And she said, hey, I generated like 3 or 4 clients out of that. That's worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. And so like sometimes looking at the, you know, again, the primary thing that you're doing, and this is the case for a lot of speakers, we're like, that's not the primary way that you're going to drive revenue. The revenue is actually driven on the back end with something else, whether that be some type of product or service that you, that you have. So there's a lot of different ways that you can do this.

So I want to add this because one of my biggest mistakes I've made in 10 years is overcomplicating things. Having a 4-step funnel where you buy a thing and upgrade and ascend and tripwire and whatever is orders of magnitude more complicated and hard and likely to get screwed up than have one thing and sell that one thing and make really good money off the one thing. I have a long track record. I diagram out the fancy, crazy, stupid crap that I did that I thought would be great.

Great.

And you did just— you just didn't need any of it. That's one of Grant's superpowers. He keeps it very, very simple. And like, man, you can, you can get nearly any coaching business mechanically— like, you have the leader have to want this and whatever— you get nearly any of them to $10 million a year with one product, selling it for $5,000 to $10,000. You don't need more than that. And if you have more than that, it's decreasing your chances, I guess. Not— it might be adding revenue, but it's not increasing your chance of success almost ever. So I, I have have drastically overcomplicated things. Many of the clients I've been up close and in person with have drastically complicated things.

Um, so anyway, of note, uh, on that note, uh, years ago Brian was selling a— I think it was like a camping ebook in Nashville, best places to hammock, something like that, some type of ebook. And I was like, I'll support my friend on this. And so I bought through— what site was that through? What was the—

That was a launch challenge, actually. That wasn't a separate thing. It was just like, we're in the middle of launching. So we did the thing.

Yeah. But anyway, whatever the site was that we all used to use, uh, Gumroad. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Paid like, you know, $15 on Gumroad. I don't think I ever got that ebook. Uh, but that's fine. That's neither here nor there.

I'm Venmoing you right now. So I don't have payment.

We're just bringing it up years later on a podcast. Just buy me lunch.

That literally was 2015.

2015.

Yeah, 9 years ago.

Oh man, Brian, who's a creator that—

Hold on, I've been knowing him for a while.

I will—

Are you actually sending Grant a Venmo?

I will 100% block you on Venmo.

Also, to be clear, that Venmo that you just showed was for $10. Grant claims he spent $15.

I mean, once you start charging some interest and fees—

$17.

And inflation, like, this had better be at least for $22, $24. Brian and I work out together a couple times a week.

We're supposed to work out tomorrow morning. Morning. And so, uh, you can buy me a protein drink at the smoothie place and we'll call it even.

Uh, for me, okay, I got one that I was actually— I had to think about this for a minute, but there is probably my— I love it because they're actually pure creators and a nonprofit, but they sell stuff. So they have— and their creativity and level of work and art has just like exponentially grown. And they started about the same time I did. I think they're about 10 years old or so. It's called The Bible Project, and they started with explainer videos, and they're the— I mean, regardless of genre, they're just the best explainer videos that exist on Earth. They're amazingly well done, and they happen to be about the Bible. Um, and they have a podcast, amazing podcast, amazing explainer videos. Now they have these like equivalent of like these, uh, like scholar-level classes. All of it's free. All of it's crowdfunded, and it's all driven from the giant YouTube audience, giant podcast audience, and I'm sure significant, um, website traffic. I think I went to their website. They have like 45,000 donors or pledges or whatever they call them, um, something equivalent to Patreon, although I don't think they use that particular mechanism. I actually downloaded their— last year, their, uh, nonprofit does typically do those like end-of-year annual reports or something. I forget their revenue, but they have at least 30 or 40 full-time people on staff, like a full-blown animation studio, full-blown artist crowd, custom-developed iOS app where you can like, as they go through a podcast, like it's in it. It's, it's some of the most impressive creative work I've literally ever seen teaching anything. I don't think there's anybody even close on any topic, and it's incredibly good. Like, if you're into the Bible, Jesus at all, like, go check it out. If you're not, you're just interested in somebody doing amazing creative work, go check them out. And they probably produce more money than any of us. I guess seriously impressive.

I like that. I think so much of the success that I've had comes from taking something that works in one industry and cloning it into my industry.

Yeah.

Like one example is when I was doing design, you know, everyone was trying to design like some unique website and code it up in CSS. And so you'd go to these CSS galleries and look at like what trend was happening. And you could just tell that someone would design a great site, it ended up in a gallery, and then everyone would copy that and And trends would follow from there. And one of my favorite things was to go to clothing stores. So like Banana Republic or something in the mall and look at the colors and the fonts and the textures that they were using on their, like, you know, fall collection or the tags on their clothing. And I would copy that because that's, you know, that was looking at a different industry in a different space. And then, you know, my work seemed original as I brought that to the web. And I think the same thing was true in, uh, like living in the startup, like the design-heavy startup world and one foot in the direct response marketing world. You, you got to value like long-form sales pages, great copy and great design. And neither of those things were original. They just weren't commonly put together. And so I think in what you're talking about, Like I would go there and be like, okay, let's look at the art and craft of how they do it. Okay. Let me make that for speaking. Let me make that for Ruby on Rails tutorials. You know, let me make that for design, whatever topic it is. And then no one's like, oh, you're just another me too of the same thing in your industry. It's like, no, you came out of nowhere and you're world class. And it's like, actually, I'm a clone of this thing in an entirely different industry that you've never seen. Senior Hurt.

Yeah, like their app, for instance. It's the first, like, not B2C, you know, like, I need to use Uber to use— it's not a service. So the first, like, informational app that I've ever downloaded and actively used because it legitimately enhances the experience. Like, I'll listen to the podcast on the app and not iTunes or YouTube like I prefer because, like, as they reference all these things and mention other topics, like, it's just beautiful and it's super useful. Um, so yeah, I mean, that could be pulled into any industry. The level of explainer videos can be pulled into any industry. Um, yeah, anyway, so they're fantastic, and not, not a lot of people like in our industry know about them. Um, yeah, definitely.

I love it. Those are good examples, guys. Let's, uh, leave it there for now. Thanks for hanging out. Where should people go to, uh, follow you and check out what you're doing?

Uh, growthtools.com/Nathan. I'll put over two like bonus trainings that we only give to clients, how to book calls and how to close calls. So if you want to check them out, you're interested in that topic, go there. We'll have a page up where you can grab them.

I like it.

Uh, I'll give you generic links. Uh, sirius.com. No, I'm gonna go to, uh, nathanismyfavorite.com, and there you will find, uh, everything we do is over at thespeakerlab.com. Thespeakerlab.com. We got a podcast by the same name, The Speaker Lab Podcast. If you listen to this one, you probably listen to other shows. So check that out. We've had interviews with both these guys, nearly 500 episodes. So thespeakerlab.com.

Why do you do The Speaker Lab when you own Speaker Lab? What's the point of that?

I always think about the Social Network movie. Why the Facebook? Just Facebook. At this point, we've just kept it for a long time. So that's another fun story we should tell sometime about the time we bought Speaker Lab and then the people got pissed and tried to buy it back from us. Um, so that was fun.

Ooh. Okay. So what we're going to do is leave this episode here for now so that you guys can— are you going to go play video games after this? What was the thing? No, you're going to go work out.

I don't know what it is, but all the things.

We'll go let you do what you're doing and then we'll do a part 2 where we come back and jam on more topics. So if anyone's listening and says like, oh, I have these questions or I want to dive in more, uh, shoot me a note, just, uh, Nathan@ConvertKit.com, and, uh, we'll cover it in a future episode.

We'll make sure we tell the story of the time Grant stole our sales director that we shared.

There we go.

We'll use that as the teaser.

Wow, the amount of employees that— like, there's a lot of drama here. I'm surprised that you two are as good of friends as you are.

I've seen Rage Brian hashtag, uh, so we should talk about him one time. We will talk about the time he yelled, not just like spoke loudly to, no, no, he yelled over the phone to another online creator.

We'll leave their name out of it, but it was highly well known, but like his name was rising. The dude disappeared. I don't even know where he is now.

Like, ever since Brian screamed to him, that guy has gone off the map.

Anyway. Oh man.

All right. We're going to leave that there. Good to see you guys. We'll talk soon.

Thanks, buddy.