100M Business Genius Reveals The Formula to Get Clients Effortlessly | Ep. 18 Daniel Priestley

So in business, there are two types of entrepreneurs. The first one makes things look easy, while the second one feels like they're in grind mode, constantly working really hard to get incremental improvements in their business. There's a better way to do things. And that's why I brought in Mr. Daniel Priestley for today's episode. Daniel is an award winning entrepreneur. He's written five books on this topic. And we had a private mastermind where he discussed how to build a machine that generates business on autopilot.

Most entrepreneurs are not thinking about manufacturing demand. This concept of like actually building it like it's a product.

Everybody wants the easy button. Now, I know it's not that easy, but there are things that we could be doing to make our life easier in terms of getting clients.

People want to buy what others want to buy, not what others want to sell. And great marketers now, they don't ask people to buy anything. They ask for signals of interest.

The mistake I see so many people making is they're selling the thing that you just said people don't want.

I've got a magic formula. And the magic formula is the people.

In this room paid thousands of dollars to hear from Daniel and other experts. This was a private mastermind. So if you're looking to work smarter, not harder, I know you get a ton of value from this convers. Let's get into it. We are doing a live episode here with the Ford Mastermind. And you know, one thing that everybody asks me, Daniel, is how could we? What's the easy button? You know, everybody wants the easy button. Now I know it's not that easy, but there are things that we could be doing to make our life easier in terms of getting clients. Client acquisition, the number one thing that we need to do. So what I thought we could do today is like, how do we get clients effortless, effortlessly. Let me say this again. How do we get clients effortlessly? Why is it so hard to say that word?

Even? The word is hard. Even effortlessly is not effortless.

Yes, that is true. So I just feel, this is the thought that I have as entrepreneurs. I feel like we work on the wrong things. Yes, we should be working on the right things to make our lives easier. What do you think about this?

I've been connecting with entrepreneurs for 20 years and sitting down and having deep conversations with entrepreneurs for 20 years. And this is absolutely the case. Entrepreneurs focus on the wrong things. And it really boils down to what they teach you in day one of a economics lecture, which is that for every Business, there's demand and supply. And the demand is how many people want the thing that you've got, and the supply is how many people can you look after. And I would say that the very beginning is this idea that do you spend more time focused on the demand or the supply? So most entrepreneurs, they relate to their business through the supply side of what they do. That's how they relate to the business. If they're a business coach, they think about changing people's lives through coaching, which is a good thing to think about. If they're a web developer, they're thinking about building websites, and they think about getting more qualifications and learning more stuff about building websites. And they think, unfortunately it's not true. But they think that if I'm really, really good at the supply side, then the demand will be there. And it sucks, but it's just not true. The people who have really successful businesses, they're really good at generating demand. They manufacture demand. And most entrepreneurs are not thinking about manufacturing demand. This concept of manufacturing it, like actually building it like it's a product, like it's a thing that you have to build. And most people don't think about it in those terms. So they're not manufacturing the demand.

So you talk a lot about this in terms of you believe that if we take the people through a process, the first step is to make yourself famous. And we'll talk about what famous means here in a moment. But the second step would be then to create a model that manufactures demand. And that is basically, in other words, simply said, bringing clients in on a regular basis, a machine that's constantly bringing in new leads and qualifying them and presenting you with the best ones. So essentially a sales funnel. Right? And so what we wanted to get into today was this conversation of getting more traffic. But then the second conversation, which is just as important, is what are the bridges from online to. To your funnel? How do we get them from views and then into your business and eventually becoming clients? You talk a lot about this, Daniel. You said, like, growth right now in this world, 2024 world, is. Is different than it was years ago. And I feel like a lot of people don't want to take the risk of trying new things in marketing. But I don't know what your thoughts are on this, but I feel it's the least risky time to do this right now.

It's an incredible time because this is the first time you can reach out to a massive global audience. There's something like 2 billion people who can respond. They've got fast Internet, they speak English. So this massive global audience that we've got, but we need to know how to reach them and we need to know how do we capture their attention. Because a lot of people want to jump straight to landing pages and lead funnels and offers that trigger a $7 thing and all this sort of stuff. But it starts deeper than that. It starts down the psychological level and understanding how people tick. So one of the very first psychological things that we need to start with is the difference between a tiny, tiny, tiny little market or a massive market. And the difference is the difference called being problem aware or solution aware. So solution aware are people who know that they have a thing that they want to buy. And it's tiny number of people, problem aware know that they have a frustration or a challenge or an annoyance that they wish would be resolved. And one of the best things that you can do as a marketer is understand what it's like to be problem aware, but not solution aware.

Right.

Having radical empathy with people, getting in their shoes, placing yourself in that position. And if you can do that, you tap into a market that's hundreds of times bigger.

Okay, so practically, how could someone do this? You know, using the real estate example, what are the things like, what's that piece of content that makes the audience problem aware?

So problem aware is where we connect with people based on their frustration, not on the solution. So one of my very first, most successful campaigns that I ran in my early, early days as a, as a marketer when I was in my early 20s, was a headline that said, feeling crabby watching your investments move sideways. And I had a picture of a crab. And I was in charge of marketing and growing in this financial planning business. And what the financial planning business had been trying to do to win clients is they were running an ad, a quarter page ad that was $8,000 every time they ran it. And it was basically saying, we're an award winning financial planner. We're amazing at what we do. We've got a great team of qualified professionals who offer financial planning services. So that's the solution we're at. My ad was feeling crabby watching your investments move sideways. So rather than connecting with someone based on here's a solution that we can offer, I was connecting with how they were feeling in that moment, that frustration, that pain. And then we, I think they went from getting like six or seven inquiries a week to like 100, 200 inquiries a week. Just, just simply by connecting with that pain. Yeah.

And I think a practical way that I've seen us. You know, many people do this, and this is something I do all the time, is right into chat GPT like, hey, what are the people? So these are the people I serve. This is my product. So in this case, it could be like, I sell real estate in a 20. In the current market, 2024. What are the 10 biggest problems or frustrations or concerns that millennials have about buying real estate in 2024? It will literally tell you all of the problems, all the frustrations, all the frustrations, all the things, and then you can make content around those topics.

This is it. So if we were to connect with millennials, I mean, just the frustration of.

Prices being too high, prices too high, they feel like they missed the boat.

By the time you've saved up for a deposit, you know, the market's moved again. So you can connect with that frustration. You can also talk about, doesn't it suck how your parents put pressure on you to get into the real estate market and to be on the housing ladder? But it was so easy for them, and it's so hard for you.

I'm so glad you brought this up, Daniel, because I didn't realize I did this. I did this by accident. I made a piece of content that generated me so many leads on Instagram. The start of the video was, says this. It said, if you're. It was. So you're millennial and you're freaking pissed that you didn't buy real estate five years ago. You know what? I'm pissed, too. I wish I would have bought bitcoin five years ago. I wish I would have done this. I wish I would have done this. But you know what? Buying real estate isn't about the past. It's about what's ahead and what's ahead for you as a homeowner, and what's that like? And so you can't go backwards. Let's talk about moving forward. Here's what I would do next. And I spoke directly to that thing of like, dude, I missed out. I missed the boat.

You connected with where they are, not where you want them to be. And that's what immediately opens up a massive market. And there's also other things, too. Like, we think about real estate as a solution because you guys are in the real estate market. So you think about it as, like, the solution. And you think it's. Well, it's obvious why someone wants a house, but actually, in many cases, people don't want a house. They want a place to raise a family. They're frustrated raising a family in a rental property. They're frustrated that they can't change the property that they're in in the way that they want to change it. They might want to get pets, and they might want to get a dog or a cat for their kids, and they can't do that in their current property. Or they feel that at the moment, we don't even know where is a safe place to, you know, to raise a family. So they're worrying about those kind of issues. If you can talk about those issues first and connect on those, then offer the right piece of real estate. Now you've got a much bigger audience who are much more receptive.

Love that. And so we'll get into the call to action that's gonna work the best in a moment here. But the first thing I wanted to say was you tweeted this out recently, and I screenshot it because I felt it was really powerful. You said that you need to be famous, but famous isn't what you think it is. Famous means that you are. You have thousand people who don't know you or who know you and can connect with you. Can you talk about this concept?

It's this very simple idea that you have people who you've never physically met who know who you are and know what you're about. So, like, for example, like, let's go to the extreme example, Tom Cruise. If we saw him walking down the street, we'd go, my goodness, there's Tom Cruise. And it's like, I know what he does, and I know what he's about, and I know the kinds of movies that he's in, and he's always running in a movie and all that sort of stuff. So it's like, oh, yeah, I kind of recognize Tom Cruise and what he's about. So I am a person who he's never met, but I know who he is and what he does. So famous on a small scale is just this idea that maybe there's a thousand people who you've never actually physically met, but they know who you are, they know what you're all about. Then they know what you do. If they saw you walking down the street, they go, I think I know this guy.

Yeah. And they have some connection to you. Yeah. And so now you've got these people. So it doesn't mean that you have a 10,000, 100,000 followers. Doesn't mean even if you do, you. If you have 100,000 followers, you probably only have a thousand true fans. You know what I mean? Like you think about this segment of people that really connect with you, you.

Got to think about too. You got to stop thinking about people as numbers because a human being can only experience you as one person. So your experience, how many followers have you got on Instagram, for example?

Just close to 200k.

200,000. So your experience, what does it feel like to be you? Is, oh, there's me and there's 200,000 people following. But what does it feel like to actually be one of your fans? Or what does it feel like to be a follower of you? I don't care about the 200,000 other people, I just care about you. So I feel like you're either talking to me or you're not. So I can, I can only experience you as one person. You, you're the only one who experiences 200,000 people. Everyone else just experiences you as one guy. So when we talk to people on social media, we have to stop thinking about the numbers and just think the person I'm talking to can only experience me as a person. So for example, you don't want to say stuff like hey, everyone.

Yeah.

Right. Because that's, that's your reality. You want to say something like, hey, I know that you're probably really concerned about such and such. I am too. Now we're having a one to one conversation.

Yeah. So imagine you're speaking to one person.

Yeah.

And that works for email as well, I noticed.

And it also works on stage. Right. So if you're on, like there was this one time I was on stage and There was like 5,000 people there and I was, this was one of the first times I was going to be in front of a big audience and I actually started for the first time getting nervous, thinking this is really especially. The lights were so bright that I couldn't even see everyone. And, and the stage was set really back from the audience and all of those setups made me feel nervous. And then this thought hit me, which is each one person in that audience is just one person experiencing me as one person. And they can't experience me as a group. They've got one set of eyes, one set of ears. They're just going to listen to me and experience me as one person. I'm just having one to one conversations at scale and that made me feel calm. Yeah.

And it doesn't matter if there's 10 people, 100 people, thousand people, you can same thing.

They can only experience me as a single person.

Yeah. So good. So now we've got this content We've made better content. And this is the part that I think is really going to help people move the needle in their business is micro conversions. Like how do you convert them from content to clients? And you talk about bridges to conversion. Right. And how do you get them into your funnel? And I've always said this, Daniel, I said, you know, we have customers here or we have viewers here and then we have customers, clients here. And most people on social media are trying to get the customer to make the whole journey on their own. Like, let me know when you're ready to transact. Yeah, but so many people. There's a few people that are willing to do that, but the majority of people aren't ready. They need to be like prompted with something. And so you talk a lot about what's that step? What is that conversion step?

Can we slow down a little?

Sure.

Because there's a few steps that the funnel has changed. For starters, I hate the word funnel. I don't like any word that dehumanizes. I want to really try as much as possible to humanize the process. I'm dealing with humans, and humans don't necessarily like the feeling of being funneled. So if I'm creating a funnel, it might feel dehumanizing if I've got that as my mental model. So I might choose to create a journey, I might choose to create a guided path that people can follow. Right. Just having that as a mental model can humanize the process a little more. The other thing too is Google did some research recently called Decoding the Decision. And the research uncovered something called the messy middle. The messy middle is that they even said in that research that there used to be a clear funnel where people went top of funnel and then they were guided to mid funnel and then they were guided to bottom of funnel and then they convert. And what they said is that that ended a few years ago based on their big data set. And what they said is that there's now this middle, messy middle. And what happens is that someone might see you on Instagram and go, oh, he's talking some sense, follow. And then that's it. Right. So I'm not funneled anywhere. And then I build some awareness. I see you a few times and then I become aware, oh yeah, you exist on Instagram. And then I might see you on LinkedIn and then I might see you on YouTube and I might see some micro pieces of content, and then I might jump across to YouTube and watch a 15 minute, 20 minute piece of content, and then I might Notice that someone's written a review about you. And I might come back to that and that might be a few days from now. And then I might hear about the fact that you do a zoom call. I'll jump on that and have a little look. So there's this really messy path in the middle. And then finally when I feel like I know you like you and trust you, you talk in my language. Then I might go to the bottom part of the funnel or traditional bottom of the funnel where I'm getting ready to buy and I'm actually looking at reviews and I'm looking at customer testimonials and I'm doing all the pre purchase assessment and now I'm going to buy. But what Google's saying is that if you think that people are going to go in this nice linear step by step by step on this path that you've constructed for them that's rigid, forget about it. They don't behave that way. They, they get outside real fast.

And this is why you talk a lot about being omnipresent.

You need to be on different platforms and high octane connection is what you really need. You need to be connecting with people and connecting with people. Connecting with people. There's this mental model that I like to zoom into people's heads and I call it the situational model. The situational model is where am I now, where do I want to be and what's in my way. All buyers go through this process of discovery of where am I, where do I want to be, what's in my way? And the clearer they get on this situation, the more they feel ready to adopt a path of least resistance. And great content echoes those three bases. So you might put out some content that talks about the frustration of not owning the property that you want to be in. And you know the type of property. Doesn't it suck that people who are in their 60s who are in a five bedroom home, they're using one bedroom and there's four empty rooms and it should be a family home and that should be a place. Doesn't it suck that the only people who can afford a family home are people who don't have a family? Now that is gonna resonate with this current frustration. And then wouldn't it be nice if you could get your family into a dream family home, into a great family home that suits your work life and your family life? All of that would be suitable. That's going to connect. Let's have a look at what stops people from doing that. Let's have a look at the six, seven major reasons that people are not achieving that at the moment. So we'll go through those. So the more we go on that little content, Joe, where are you now? And what's less than perfect? Where do you want to be? What would that look like? What's in the way? That's the pre priming conversation that people want to have. So marketers who are phenomenally talented at getting attention, they do the groundwork of understanding those. They have radical empathy. They start with this big empathetic, open hearted look at the people that they work with and they sort of look for the themes. Where are they now? Where do they want to be? What's in the way?

That sounds good. Yeah. And this is like a format for a webinar as well.

It can be a format for a.

Webinar or a YouTube video.

It can be a short piece of content. Now getting back to what you were saying before was micro commitments.

Yes.

So we call these signals, right? The ability to generate signals of interest. So signal is where people give you a small signal that they want more, that they're interested in more. They're signaling intent, signaling interest. And great marketers now, they don't ask people to buy anything. They ask for signals of interest and they're able to detect signals. So you're going to see, classic example is you might be on Instagram and you'll see someone speaking about something. They'll say, look, if you want more information about that, put the word report into the comments below and then I'll send you this report that I've got. They're asking for a signal, they're getting a signal of interest. Imagine a silly situation. Imagine it's a hot day and you own an ice cream truck and you drive the ice cream truck into the park and you just open the doors and you just wait for people to turn up, right? So the binary decision that you've created is you can either sit where you are in the park on the picnic rug that you've got, or if you're 100% certain you want to buy something, you can come up to the ice cream truck and buy something. So you've created a binary situation. Buy or don't buy, sit there or come and buy something. So imagine instead that you actually leave the ice cream truck closed, the door is closed and you put the little board out that says we're opening soon. And you go for a little walk around and you say, we're going to be opening the ice cream truck. Soon it's a really hot day. And on a hot day, we typically sell out. If you're interested in having an ice cream, come and join the lineup. We're going to open up soon, and I don't want you to miss out. Come and join the lineup. So just joining the lineup is a signal of interest. And also it signals to the rest of market that there's demand building for something. So the rest of the market can see some tension. And they go, ooh, demand and supply tension. Now, as soon as you then go and open the ice cream truck and there's 30 or 40 people standing out the front, no one's gonna ask for a discount. No one's gonna ask you for, oh, can I get two for one ice creams today? It's like, I'd love to, but there's 40 people waiting behind you.

Yeah, right. That's huge. And so it's creating this supply, demand tension. You talk a lot about this in oversubscribe.

Yes.

But I feel like every have. Everybody has this almost desperation vibe in their content of like, they need the client. They need the client. And then when you do it this way, it just feels like you're just chilling. You know what I mean? Like, you're not. You're not worried.

People want to buy what others want to buy, not what others want to sell.

Yeah.

Right. So we need to flip the stakes. People want to invest in what others want to invest in, not what others want to raise investment for. When I've raised investment for my companies, I've gone out to angel investors, and I've said, we're going to be raising an angel round. And if you're interested, it's really important for us to know that you're going to contribute something more than just money. Money's easy. It's generic. It's just money's money. But our angel investors, we hold to a high standard. If you're interested in coming in, fill in this form. And they fill in the form, and they basically say, yeah, I'm interested. I just want to see the slide deck. I want to see the thing. And the only way to see all of our materials is if you fill in the form. And then what I typically do is I send it all back to them. And then I call through my list of angel investors and I say, look, I got good news and bad news. The good news is it's a really popular funding round. And, you know, people agree that it's a good, good business idea. The bad news is that we're only going to be raising, call it 2 million, but we've got 4 million worth of people who want to come in. And Neal, the one question I've got for you and feel free to just completely opt out, is would you be interested in coming in but half the amount that you initially said? So you said you'd want to put in 100 grand. Would you come in for 50 grand if we cut you? Cut you down?

Yeah. It's almost like you took it away from me.

And people are people like, wait a sec, I'm an angel investor. You're meant to be asking me for more money. It's like, no, no, no, I'm gonna cut you. You know, you said 100. What about 50? Now this is. People want what they can't have. So the only way you can get to do this is if you actually do signal collection. First get people to line up at the ice cream truck and then open the ice cream truck.

Yeah, I love that. And so I think about this on Instagram a lot. I'll make a post and then ask for signal. Say, hey, I have this guide. I have this checklist, I have this resource. I'm doing a webinar if you want to get access comment this word. I've noticed some of them either. For me, it's been more of like a feast or famine type thing. Sometimes it's a few, but when it gets past a certain point, it just take it tips and it just goes.

Yeah.

And I feel like nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd.

That's it. That's it.

And so for someone who has a smaller audience and wants to do this concept, I don't know if this is like a hack or, you know, if this is like, we should even talk about this on the episode. But like, what if you had 10 friends comment the word in a group? Like you talked about a squadron.

Yeah.

What if your squadron of friends on social commented. So that way the signal to other people who are seeing this. And I know you'd have to change this up in the future. You can't use the same 10 people.

Start this. You could, you could definitely do this. Having. Having transparency at that level is actually a little bit of a high risk move. There are some ways that you can de risk and still completely be not playing. Not playing a game.

Yeah, because I feel like people will tell me. It's easy for you to say, Neil, you have all these followers. Yeah, I've got 800 followers and I might only get two comments.

So here's what I've done. I've launched companies in the past where I've not wanted to use my following and I've not wanted to use my email list because it's early stages. And what I want to do is actually begin exactly the same way any startup would begin. And what I'll do is I will send DM messages to people who I know that they're interested in a topic, and I might send you a dm. And I've got a magic formula for how I send a dm. And the magic formula is, neil, I did something special for a certain type of person like you, and we got a remarkable result, and I can explain it step by step. Would you be interested in that? Now, obviously, it's an extrapolated version of that, but let me give you a real life example. So if I said, Neil, between 2015 and 2020, I launched a online assessment and 90,000 people filled in the questionnaire, the assessment, the quiz, and then those results went to our sales team, who made $20 million worth of additional sales. And we've analyzed how we did that, and we can explain it step by step. It's a really innovative marketing campaign that I think would work for your audience. If you're interested in that, let me know and I'll send you through the information.

Yeah, it's got me thinking.

It's good you're thinking. Now I'll send 3,000 of those DMs, 100 a day for 30 days. Now, what I'm trying to do is behind the scenes, I'm trying to get you lining up at the ice cream truck. And then at the end of 30 days, when I've done that. So. Hey, Neil, look. There's actually been 347 people who said they wanted the information. The easiest way for me to convey that is to run an introduction event on Zoom. Do you want to attend that? Would you be okay to attend that? And now you come and attend the Zoom event. You can see that there's other people. So I'm going through the process of warming up my marketplace with signal collection. Not sales, not making sales.

That's huge. I feel like people just overlook this whole concept of, like, the mind, the psychological, the psychology of the buyer. You know, like the mind. Like, what does mind space have to be in?

What's it like not to know? Yes, exactly. What's it like to be busy? What's it like to have no attention? It's like, how do I capture that?

And so in a noisy world, it's like this is the micro step that you can take.

These are the micro steps.

Yes.

Little tiny signal collection campaigns.

Okay, so let's talk about this. We're talking about supply, demand, tension, and we can get more into that depending on different things that we're doing. What are the bridges to get people off platform and into. Not your funnel. We're not going to say funnel anymore, but your lead journey to the journey.

To get them to signal intent. So there's a few. Let me give you my. My favorites. I absolutely adore a waiting list. A waiting list is just awesome. And everyone should run a waiting list. So while we're recording this, it's October. Launch a waiting list for 2025. Because a waiting list, someone only has to be 10% sure that they want to do something to join a waiting list, but they have to be 100% sure to buy something. So let's say you've got a conference next year. You don't release the tickets. You say, we're going to be running a conference in June next year, but we're going to release the tickets to the waiting list. Join the waiting list. If you want to come along to the conference, that's the only way to get the tickets. And then you promote the waiting list like it's a product. And then the goal is to get something like four to five times the number of. So if you've got a thousand tickets, you want to have 4 to 5,000 people on the waiting list. Then when you email back, you say, we've got. It's a little bit awkward, but we've got four or five thousand people on the waiting list. There's only going to be 1,000 tickets. They go on sale Monday. And just to make sure that only true fans get them, we're making them available from 5am you got to get up early. Right. We want the true fans to be there. And people are like, oh, it's a game I want to win.

So you're turning your little micro event into a freaking concert.

Yeah.

At this point, Right. People are lining up Coachella. Yeah.

Yeah. So that's. That's number one. Waiting lists are just epic. And then the second one is online assessments. Online assessments are so powerful. So these are quizzes. People love to self assess. They love self assessment. It's a bit unfortunate, but people prefer to talk to computers now than talk to humans until the very, very, very end. So if I was going to, let's say I wanted to run a marathon for the very first time, and I had the choice between taking an online self assessment, are you ready to run a marathon? And the self assessment was designed by experts or talking to a human, where I've got to make a time and I've got to jump on a call and talk to the human. Most people would much rather do a self assessment right here and now as a first step. So an online self assessment, super, super powerful. And once again, you can say we've had over 14,000 people take the assessment, but we can only work with about 1500 people per year.

Yeah, I love that. And so it's like the mistake I see so many people making is they're selling the thing that you just said people don't want, which is to talk to you. And it's almost like it feels bad. No one wants to talk to me. They do, but not yet.

Yeah. Right at the end.

They'll talk to you at the end when they need to upfront. They just want to do this on their own terms. So I feel like I love the quiz thing. We've used that extensively in our marketing and I didn't quite know why it works so well. I'll just give you a practical example. We had all these people opt into a funnel or a journey. I should say, I'm going to stop using funnel. All these people opt into our customer journey. And what they did was they wanted more information. They were just getting a guide, so we sent them the guide. In the guide, the prompt to move forward was to book a call. In the emails that went out afterwards, the thing to move forward was to book a call. Like, let's get the thing started. Let's start the process. I am ashamed to say nobody booked a call. Not one person.

Too scary.

I'm telling you guys. Thousands of leads. And me and Trevor looking afterwards are like, how many calls got booked on Cali? Nobody booked a call because these were cold leads.

Yeah.

They weren't warm yet. And so we switched the call to action to take this quiz.

Take the assessment.

Yeah, I got. I don't know, how many quizzes do we get? Too many to count.

A lot. Yeah.

Hundreds of people took the quiz.

Yeah.

And so this is the. This is the movement. This is the move for you guys in the room is like, we're selling the wrong thing to people who are. Aren't ready to talk yet.

That's it. That's it. People. People need to warm up. And it used to be in the 90s especially, first thing you want to do is talk to a human. I remember buying a stereo system for My car and, like, just going in and talking to the guy and talking to, like, two hours, looking at all the stuff. It never happened. These days, you'd watch YouTube videos and you'd take an assessment what, what kind of stereo system would be perfect for your car. There's four types of stereo systems. Which type of you, you know.

Yeah, I just think about this, like, in, in my life, I push buttons and things arrive.

Yeah.

Like, I push the button, the food gets here. I push the button, the Uber gets here. You know, and if somebody makes you call them, it's almost like you're upset.

Yeah.

You're like, dude, the restaurant is not on Uber Eats. You have to call and talk to someone.

Like, and there's also an age threshold where they just absolutely won't talk to you. They don't even talk to their boyfriends and girlf. Like, like, you know, they just texting.

That's like Gen Z.

They've never met their boyfriend or girlfriend.

You know, you don't really know. Yeah, just swipe right, swipe left, whatever.

Just texting away.

So in this world, I think, you know, this new digital world, and I think people just don't realize. Yes, digital marketing has been around for a while, but in the last year, it's changed a lot in the last couple years. And I think most marketers are not up to this new era, you know, and so that's. I love that, that we should be getting people into a quiz and then what's cool about quizzes? And you can talk more about this. I just love the fact that you're collecting data that's going to help you close the sale.

Oh, that is. That's wild. So the reason that we close so many sales off the back of the quizzes. So my quiz that I launched, the first one, was called the Key Person of Influence quiz. And it. The Key Person of influence. So it was a personal branding quiz.

And before you get into this, guys, this is the. Like, I had a call with Daniel a few months back, and when he told me about this, like, a light bulb went off my head of, like, the questions we could be asking in the quiz that would actually get the person to, like, almost sell themselves completely.

That's exactly what happens. So when someone would take the Key Person of Influence quiz, it would ask them 40 questions and then it would give them a score for five key areas of their personal brand.

And first of all, before you get into the questions, what kind of prompt would you say for them to take that? Because that's A longer quiz, we did a shorter one. But like, 40 questions seems like work to me. How would you practically get them to want to take that quiz?

The real answer for that was there were two main ways that I got people to take that. Number one, I would give away a free book. And the free book had a bookmark in it that said, before you read this book, take this online scorecard so that you know how to get the most out of this book. People loved that. Now, mind you, you could do that with someone else's book. You don't even have to write a book for that. If I was to create a powerful habits scorecard, give away the book Atomic Habits and say, before you read this, identify your strengths and weaknesses when it comes to habits, and then you'll get more out of the book. That would work. And then the second thing was I was doing zoom introductions or online webinar introductions. And in the lead up to the webinar, we'd say, to get the most out of the webinar, answer these 40 questions. It will tell you how to direct your focus so that you get the most out of the webinar. So it was. It was accompanying. It went nicely with these other pieces of content that we had. So we would get people to answer 40 questions, they would get a score for the five things, and one would always be a strength, and one would always be a weakness. So our sales conversation opened with what we ended up calling the seesaw technique. And the seesaw technique would go something like this. Neil, I just had a look at your quiz results that you submitted. It looks like you did phenomenally well at pitching. You're really strong with pitching. But I also noticed that your weakest link was creating partnerships. Do you want to talk about the strength or the weakness?

The weakness.

Let's talk about it. Let's talk about how to improve that one thing. Because if you've got that one weak link and we can solve that, you'll get an actual exponential result across the other things that you're strong at. So let's talk about what partnerships, not having good partnerships is costing you at the moment.

And this is really important because sometimes we're on a sales call, we're talking about the thing that's not even important to the person. Like, if you already knew their hot button, you could prepare.

You could.

Like, it's like, you know that movie with Mel Gibson, like, what women want, you know, I mean, like, imagine you could have, like that, like they told you the thing that's going to Close them before you're on the call.

Exactly. In the movie, he can read the read minds. So he can say exactly the thing that is of interest. And that's exactly what it is. Like with a quiz. Or another analogy would be if you went to a doctor and you know, they start randomly talking about your elbow and like, oh, you know, we can put your arm in a cast. And you're like, I'm not even here for my elbow or my arm. Like, my arm's fine. Why are you talking about that? Well, that's my favorite thing to talk about. I love talking about elbows and arms and Right. It's like, that's weird, right? But if you do an X ray and you go, oh, the reason you're here is because you got a broken toe. Okay, great, let's talk about toes. Right.

Like people like in lending, like, well, we have the best rates. Like, well, they didn't even know what rates were. They weren't talking about that. You almost created the issue.

Exactly.

Because you didn't know what they were asking or what their concern is. Maybe their concern was affordable payments. Maybe their concern was lack of down payment. Maybe their concern was something else. So I feel like practical example, doesn't matter what you're selling. You could use this. You could do it so many different ways. But let's just say for home buyers, it's a home buyer assessment.

Mm.

Like rate. You can self assess. How ready are you to buy a home?

Are you ready to buy your dream house? Are you ready to buy an investment property? Which type of property buyer are you?

Yeah. So whatever you're like, if it's a high ticket service like this, like purchasing real estate, that's one thing for mortgage, it's like, how ready. Like your home loan assessment. Like, are you people may.

May.

There's a big fear that people are going to get denied. One of the biggest fears we fear in lending that we hear from clients is they don't want their credit pulled. They're so scared to even start the process.

So you could create.

So you could take this assessment with no hit. So I noticed this. The biggest marketers in our industry, they deal with this upfront. They say, no effect to your credit, no hit to your credit.

This is a pre approval. It's a pre assessment. And you could say this assessment looks at the five pillars of successful property purchase, which without any impact to your credit. Impact to credit, totally discreet. But we look at the five pillars of successfully purchasing a property and in that you're gonna discover things like, you might ask, do you even know the location as to where you want to? Have you already found a property? Or are you just generally looking at locations or just property in general, which best describes where you're at in the process? I love what you just said about, like, a mortgage advisor might wake up every day checking rates, so it's on the top of their mind, but the person who they're talking to might be actually talking about. I just want to have a general conversation. I've never bought a property before, and I need to talk to you about just the general. What's involved, what's the process? And like, rates is just like, not even.

The most common complaint I hear from mortgage loan officers is I hate it when customers shop rates. Well, why did you bring up rates on the call? Yeah, you know, like, they didn't even ask you. I mean, sometimes customers come on the call. What's your rate? You got to. You got to have a. You got to be able to say this. But I feel like a lot of people bring it up because it's on their mind, but not necessarily the client's mind. So this is great. You could do this. You know, that was the example of real estate. But, like, think about. I'll just give you an example of, like, with Forward, for example, you know, this is kind of like we're selling how to build a personal brand. So you could take your assessment, like, how powerful is your brand? And you could use this with your business partners. Like, if you were helping your business partners build their brand. Take my quick assessment on, like, how powerful is your brand? What happens when you show up on Google? Have you been on somebody else's podcast? You know, what are the key points that build a powerful brand? And as they're taking the assessment, they're identifying, oh, my God, like, I'm not there, I'm not there. They're selling themselves on your thing actually.

Becomes like a little micro paper cut. It's like, oh, ouch, I haven't done that. Oh, oh, ouch. Okay, now I've got paper cuts.

Yeah. So we used to sell a content day where people would come out and, like, do content with us. You had to take a quiz to go to the content day. One of the questions on the quiz was, are you posting content daily, weekly, monthly? How would you rate your content? Most people rate their content, like one or two stars. Somebody put zero stars. So it's like you. Yeah, Mark Smith put zero stars.

There you go.

Right. And so they're just assessing to themselves. You Know, like, by the time they've.

Gone through it, they, they're now heightened in their awareness of why I need to do this.

Correct. And so this could be used. Real estate, mortgage, coaching. I don't care what business you're in, this process works incredibly well and getting people to take it. One tip I'll ask you about. I've seen a lot of this and I've used it. I'm not sure if it was a factor or not, but I noticed some of the best markers will put below their quiz. Join X number of people who have taken this.

Yeah. So social proof. So you can put that on there. Over 12,000 people have taken this assessment. Join over 12,000 people who have gained an insight about their financial readiness from this assessment. You can also make it compulsory so you can say, I'm really looking forward to having a call with you so that we can get the most out of the time that we spend together. Can you start by taking the assessment? Which allows me to zero in on the key issues that are most important for you as an individual. And that means that we're going to get so much more out of the chat, out of the conversation. Another way you could do this is you could say in the lead up, you could say, there's two options. We're going to have a conversation next week. There's two options. We can either have a general chitchat or I can really aim to just start providing you with value straight away. Which would you prefer?

The value. Let's go.

So I want the value.

My time is money.

So in order to get the value straight away, I'm going to need you to answer like 40 questions on an assessment and that way I'm going to be able to give you value straight away.

Yeah, that's huge. It's going to save us time.

Yeah.

Take five minutes now to save an hour later. Exactly right. And so you're, you're giving them back their time and that. I think that's going to get people, more people to take the thing because you're getting them into it. So scorecard marketing. This is huge, Daniel. I feel like this is the, you know, the best way to kind of move forward in terms of getting your clients out of, you know, just on the platforms and into your customer journey. Now, another thing you've talked a lot about is using events to sell your service.

Yes.

Okay. So you could talk about live events, we could talk about virtual events, webinars. I noticed last week I got an ad and I don't know if it was you or your team with Dent and it said, learn how to be a key person of influence or learn about this. And I signed up for the webinar and I got the email and it was a long email and it kind of. What was interesting about this was the email I received made me much more app like willing and made me just, it just increased the importance of the actual webinar. So I feel like most people send out just a confirmation, hey, you're signed up.

Congrats.

We'll see you on Thursday. The email resold me on why I need to be there.

Yeah, yeah, we empathize. We know that you're busy. We know that you've got. If you're interested in the topic, you're watching 10 different YouTube channels about that topic at any given moment. So we have to, we have to. We see it as our job to re. Win the attention every time. We know that you could just easily be clicking on other things and go talk to someone else. So we want to, you know, we know that you've probably forgotten that you even booked this thing. So let's resell you or re. Remind you as to why, you know, why you booked it. So really important, educate, entertain people when they're warming up, they need to, like, learn stuff regardless of the purchase. Almost any purchase that's more than a few hundred dollars, people want to have a little bit of education about it. And what a lot of business owners do is they forget what it's like not to know. So, for example, if you're a fitness trainer, you forget what it's like not to spend all day talking about fitness. Because if you're a fitness trainer, you're in the gym every day talking to people about fitness, talking to people about health. So you just forget what are the questions that people want to answer. And now when you go back to someone who's thinking about going on a fitness journey, they're going to say, how long is it going to take to see results? And what changes am I realistically going to have to make in my life? And what if I'm busy? Or what happens if I fall off the wagon and do this thing that, you know, what happens if I don't follow the plan perfectly? And which apps should I have on my phone? And all of these silly little questions. And as a fitness trainer, you're sitting there going, but these are so obvious. These are basic questions, but actually if you can just organize that information into a zoom call and say, the seven pillars of getting success, when it comes to fitness transformation, and you just cover the basic stuff. People are like, damn, that's. That's a really powerful reminder.

That's huge. Yeah, I think the, you know, getting people into a virtual event, AKA webinar, is huge. And I feel like you. Your business does this on a system. Like, it's a machine. We do, and it just keeps going. So there's recurring webinars and there's either ads or content running people into those webinars. They're getting a confirmation that tells them why they should be there. So getting the reminders, and then it just kind of keeps going.

I've scaled several businesses, and scaling is all about just repeat what works. Repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat. Have you ever been to, like, an amazing concert like Coldplay or Ed Sheeran or Metallica?

All of the above.

So, like, Metallica, they do three concerts a week every single week. And it's the same concept. Like, they're not coming up with a new big Metallica flaming M every time. They're like, whoa, we've got a new idea for this concept. It's like, no, no, we just go. We repeat what works. Repeat, repeat, repeat. So what we do as a business is we find what works, and then we just repeat it and repeat it. We do something called a perfect repeatable week, where we just go, what was the most effective week we ever did? Let's just repeat that and repeat that. Repeat that.

That's so good. Yeah, I love that. And one of those things for me has been webinars. Now, I'll admit something I've done wrong. And I think a lot of people make this mistake. My sales for all my. Both my businesses come in unevenly. So I ride this entrepreneur roller coaster, and you guys tell me if you relate to this. I have busy months, and I service the people and I put out all the fires to do it. And then I kind of don't do as much of the business prospecting, and then I'll be followed by a couple months where I'm off. Then I do more sales and marketing, and then it brings me back up, and I'm on this up, down, up, down, up, down thing. I would love it if there was a way for me to just kind of go steadily up and keep going and keep going. Right now, I'm just uneven. Now. The cool thing for me is when I do it, when I go up, it's really up. Like, I do a lot of business in those ups, and I feel like a lot of you guys do, too, but it's uneven. So how does the average person in this room create this steady ascent to where they're just growing quarter after quarter, year after year?

You're just asking me the easy questions now, right? Of course. Just solve this problem that everyone deals with. Okay, fair enough. Here's how we do it. We break the year into three parts. Part one is called the perfect repeatable week. And what we do with the perfect repeatable week is we try and create a series of lead generation campaigns that we can leave running all the time. So we want to have a waiting list, an assessment, a mini course, an introduction event, anything like that. And we just repeat. And the goal is not to knock it out of the ballpark. The goal is just to get to first base every single week. So for example, one of the very first times I ever saw this was with a financial planner that I worked with, where every single Wednesday night they did a boardroom presentation, Introduction to financial planning. And. And they had 12 to 15 people in. 10 to 12 showed up. And basically they just did it over, over, over. Same joke, same presentation, same same everything. Just every Wednesday night and they just ran the same ad. The ad didn't change, the presentation didn't change. On a Saturday, they ran the ad. And Wednesday night they delivered the introduction workshop. And they did that for 10 years and sold the company for 30 million. Wow. So this is called a perfect repeatable week. So what we're trying to do is figure out what are a few things that we can just repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat. Perfect repeatable week. Now, what will happen is you'll generate a ton of leads and a lot of those leads, nothing will happen like 90%. Nothing's going to happen with 90% of those leads. So once every three to four months, you run what's called a spotlight campaign. A spotlight campaign is where you do something big and special and you have a guest speaker or you do something that's out of the ordinary, something that changes, and you get all of these people to re engage to the spotlight campaign.

These are the leads that came in from the other campaigns.

Yeah. So the perfect repeatable week, let's say that brings in 500 leads every week, but 450 don't do anything. Many of them don't even show up to what they said they'd show up to. So then we re engage with the spotlight campaign. So the perfect repeatable week campaign is always based around connecting with where people are or where they want to be or any of that. So the spotlight Campaign is often about doing something with someone who's got a personal brand that's bigger than you. So three times a year, four times a year, you find a superstar hero and you put on a hero event that just kind of repositions you as being in that league. And that's a quarterly spotlight. And then annually we create what we call the 7114 line. So we've got quarterly spotlight, perfect repeatable week, and then the annual campaign, which is designed to refresh the 7 hours 11 interactions on four platforms that people need in order to feel that they continually know a brand. So this is where we create video content and we create long form posts on LinkedIn. So four different platforms, seven hours, 11 interactions, four locations, we've got that constantly refreshing. We take the spotlight campaigns, we throw that up to the 7114 campaign. We take good stuff that happens on the perfect repeatable week and we throw it up to the 7114 campaign.

So when you talk about the 7114 campaign, say that's a long form video. One of those things is a long form video on YouTube. How are you, Are you sending an email out to the lead saying check out this video?

No, that's all the messy middle. So the messy middle is we know you're going to just re bump into us online, so we're just going to have loads of cool stuff there. And then what will happen is that that will retarget you back to the perfect repeatable week and then that will then bounce you to the quarterly spotlight and then you'll follow us online and then you'll go back to a perfect repeatable week and spotlight campaign. So I've got seven different companies, all of our companies have perfect repeatable week, quarterly Spotlight, 7114 Campaign.

This is huge. And so creating a system and this is the machine that I was talking about that just keeps rolling and then your business continues to grow. Now one thing I'd really love to touch on is the average person feels overwhelmed by that process. You know, they're like all these campaigns, all these things going right, like how do we drill it down to like, what's that first step for someone who is not a digital marketer? They have an Instagram account. You know, what's the first step for someone?

The harsh truth is that business is a team sport. And in order for business to be an enjoyable experience, you got to have the right number of people on the team. So roughly speaking, a boutique that's a successful boutique is going to be three to 12 people and you're going to need on the low side, three people who are campaigning with you. On the high side, 12 people who are, you know, you're going really well. So a small business.

What are those three hires for the first.

So I like to have what we would call a key person of influence. Who's the face of the campaign that you're on video, you're the name associated with it, you're the storyteller. And then you've got an assistant salesperson who's either booking appointments or following up with people or closing sales. But you've got a salesperson. You've got what I would call a Swiss army knife. Swiss army knife is someone who can do 25 things, a little bit of everything. They're not a specialist at anything, but they're just a generalist, and they're a general assistant and then a customer success specialist. So when someone becomes a customer, they get looked after by this person who is a specialist in customer success.

That person helps them with fulfillment as well, like getting them through the process.

That's exactly it. It's fulfillment, customer success, fulfillment. So that's the fulfillment person. So you got a key person of influence, sales, Swiss army knife, and customer success or customer fulfillment. That's kind of like your minimum viable team. When you go up to 12, you tend to have a general manager, sales, marketing, operations, fulfillment, media, or IT and financial control. So you end up with those eight roles. And then my companies work on about 30 people each as our 30 main roles that we have. And this is where for me, having seven different companies, I centralize the CEO, CFO and CTO role and decentralized COO CMO into each company. And that's how I can do multiple companies. And the other thing too is everyone's like, oh, I feel overwhelmed. Personally, I would feel really overwhelmed making it up all the time. Like, I much prefer having a Roman army that just marches in and just delivers. Like, what I want for my businesses is I want them to be a machine. I want them to be like, perfect repeatable week, Quarterly spotlight, Annual big message, Quarterly spotlight, Annual big message, Perfect repeatable week. Doom, doom, doom, doom. And then I can go on holiday, like, once I know, like, I look at my businesses and just go, are we running a perfect repeatable week? Yes. Are we running a quarterly spotlight? Yes. Have we got good content going online? Yes. Forget about it.

Yeah. And I think so. The first action step for people is, like, right now, I'll admit it, I do a webinar when I feel like it. You Know, what if it's every week? What if it's bi weekly? What if it's just once a month? What if it's quarterly? You know, what is that schedule that you'll stick to where this is happening and it's just on the calendar. You're going to promote it, it's going to happen. It's not like, have you got an.

Assistant up for debate? Yes, you got an assistant. So how do you work with your assistant? Do you tell your assistant stuff or does your assistant tell you what to do?

It should be the other way around. Yeah.

Which way is it for you?

It's a little bit of both.

Because for me, I just do what my assistant tells me to do.

I tell them what to do.

No, see, I'm completely. I'm only here because Susie told me to be here. Right. I have a value proposition for my company, which is the big picture stuff, the vision, the marketing, the spokesperson role. That's my value proposition to my group of companies. And my assistant interfaces with my team to basically try and put me in wherever would be the highest value place at any given time. Yeah.

And just real quick note on this. I know you've talked about this, but when I reach out to Daniel about like, hey, how could we talk more? He's like, talk to Susie, talk to my assistant. And I feel like for anybody, even if you feel like, oh, I don't have this, I'm not a celebrity, I'm not a person of influence yet. Well, you are on a micro level.

Yeah.

I think that move of just like, you know what, check with this in terms of if people want to book you for things or if people want to collaborate with you, passing them off to your genuinely, it just creates more value for you.

I've had an assistant now for over 20 years. I couldn't even imagine how I would even begin to function if you were to take everything from me and I had to start from scratch. Pretty much the first person in my life is going to be an assistant.

Could this be a virtual assistant?

Yeah. I don't see Susie regularly. I probably might see her three or four times a year. And it's not actually important that I see her, but it's important that we're on the same time zone and that we can talk and stuff. But she sees all my emails first and tells me what I need to read. She sees any inquiries, she's getting back to them before I am. She's super organized. I'm not an organized person. I'm a visionary. My Head's in the clouds all the time. I'm completely off with the fairies. I'm just hoping that that saying means the same thing here. It does.

Yes. We got you.

Okay, good. Okay, fantastic. I'm in la la land, right. My mind is always drifting. And you said you don't feel like doing these introduction workshops. I don't either. Like, totally. I'm just like, I've got stuff to do today. I've got. Oh, I've got all these things I want to think about and books I want to read and stuff like that. Ah. I got to do a. Got to do an introduction event because Susie told me to. I like that's in the diary.

And also it's the freedom that that creates. So maybe, like, I don't necessarily get hyped up, do the intro webinar every month, but because I do intro webinar every month, my sales are more even volume's growing. I can take time off when I feel like it, you know, that type of thing. So I think that's important. So last thing, we'll.

I also bill my. My companies for my time at a very high rate. So my team have to factor in if they're going to put me on a call every week, that's going to cost that company a lot of money. So they have to make sure that it's worth doing.

And I love the fact that when you're doing these, it creates the proof, it creates the marketing for the next one. So for the. For example, when I do a webinar, I'll screenshot, I'll ask people for feedback in the chat. So is this helping you guys? Let me know. People will say, oh, that was so good, whatever. But you can actually prompt people to.

Give you the feedback.

Many times they keep it to themselves. Let me know what you thought about this. Please send us your feedback. I screenshot those. And then on the next monthly one I'm posting, hey, we have our upcoming webinar for xyz. And to join us, look at the feedback from the last one. Here's the feedback that we're getting.

You know, so you know what's crazy? You can take those feedback bits, you can take your last 10 webinars, run it through AI, run the feedback scores and the feedback back, and then have the AI tell you, are you integrating this feedback? Are there better ways to integrate the feedback? One of the things that we did is we run these weekly, so it's much faster to get results. But we just take all of our results and we feed it into AI with our actual sales results associated with each presentation so that AI can see this presentation got this result, this presentation got a better result. What are the common factors? One of the things that spat out last week is that this was a really high performing one because you did seven calls to action. And your average of the last four months has been three to five calls to action. But you did seven on this one. And it just said, like, you need to be doing seven calls to action throughout your 90 minutes, not four or five. Yeah, so then I integrated that. I did my next webinar where I drew seven circles on a piece of paper in front of me and then I just ticked off my CTAs every time I did one, I just tick. Ticked off.

You did them throughout the call instead of waiting to the end.

Yeah. So right at the beginning, 10 minutes in, 20 minutes in which I hate it feels too much, but the data says that's what works. So we did seven CTAs in 90 minutes. And then sure enough, we get like from a 25% conversion to a 35%.

Yeah, it's so good. Because here's the mistake I was making. Like, I'm just, I'm just personally in this conversation seeing all the mistakes I've made in my marketing, you know, and how I can make it better. But I was doing a webinar and I will always wait till the end of the webinar to ask, here's the next step, here's how you can move forward with us. Here's the product, here's the service, here's the booking, whatever. And at that time, there's less people on the call.

Yeah, well, straight away, just like a.

Moment and a lot of people are ready earlier in the conversation, you should.

Immediately close straight away. So when you start your webinar, start with some of you have been already spending time on our YouTube channel. Some of you know exactly who we are, some of you have spoken to our existing clients and you know that you just want to get started and you want to start filling in the forms and application. So here's the link.

Give it to them right away, right.

Away, like first thing you talk about. Now, for those of you who don't know who we are, let me give you a bit of an introduction and then about 10 minutes in. By the way, some of you have already said that you want to work with us and you just, you know, you just want to do that 10 minute thing. Or if you want to book a call, here's a link to book a call with our team if you want to talk about it. So just throughout the presentation, but don't wait till the end. Now, the other thing, if you want to massively increase conversions is ask for permission to do a hard sell.

Okay, how would we do that?

So you would. If you do get to the end, you say, look, what I would really like to do is I'd love to give it to you straight as to why you should work with us and let you evaluate that. And I don't want to have to, like, be awkward about the fact that I'm doing a big hard sell. So at this point, what I'd love to do in the webinar is just if you don't want to hear what we have to offer and what we do and all of that sort of stuff, and you hate, like, the whole hard sell thing, just drop off, no hard feelings. I'm not going to be offended, but if you stick around, I just want to go through exactly what it looks like to work with us, how much it is, what people say about us, all of that sort of salesy stuff. I just want to cover all of it. But it's only for people who are open to that.

Yeah, I love that. Because then the people who aren't interested are going to leave. But I think what, you're fine. Nobody, no one drops off.

But then you've got permission to say, now I get to go through. Here's how much it is. Here's what we do, here's how it's guaranteed. Here's what people say about us. Like, I just treat people as grownups, you know, and say, you guys are all grownups. You know what a sales pitch looks like. Let me just give you my sales pitch. But you don't have to do that if you don't want to.

So just be upfront. Yeah, I love that. So this has been so impactful, guys. Would you say this is helping you?

Yeah.

I think this has been incredible. You know, there's so much more that you can do with your marketing and just kind of final thoughts. Daniel, what would you leave the people with who are, you know, building their personal brand these days, and they want to take things to the next level. They know they're capable of it, but for some reason they just haven't done it. You know, it's like maybe their excuses, I don't have the time. Maybe the excuses, I feel overwhelmed. Maybe it's like, you know, I've been doing this thing for. I've Been building my business, and I've kind of been flatlined for a decade. And, you know, but I know I'm listening to this conversation and I want to do something different. What's that? What's the. What are. What words can we give these people?

Well, for starters, I totally empathize. It is overwhelming. The world's going through a lot of change at the moment. There's new technology out all the time, there's new markets opening up, and there's, you know, there's the two parts of every human psyche, which is I'm really excited about these incredible times that we live in, but I'm also overwhelmed by it. So I feel that I'm doing some stuff right, but I'm totally get overwhelmed with this at times. And I also benchmark myself against people who are doing more than I am and have bigger teams than I have as well. So I can totally relate. Here's what I would say, and I want to use an analogy or a metaphor that might be useful, which is, when I was in Bali, I climbed this mountain called Mount Agung. And we set off at midnight and we had to climb for six hours. And I thought, what mistake have I made? Why did I book this? This is stupid. Like, I'm climbing in the middle of the night with a headlight, and it's volcanic ash. Looked like a good idea from a distance, but this is seriously a dumb idea, right? So I'm scratching away, trying to climb, and I'm thinking, gee, I wish I could just cancel this. Like, can we go back? Which is how people feel with their entrepreneurial journey. Scratching with a little headlight. You know what a silly idea this is. Then we finally get to the top of the mountain at 6am Air is crisp. And the reason that I hadn't even put two and two together as to why we climbed through the night. But the reason you do this is so that the sun comes up at 6am and you're on top of the mountain when the sun comes up and you're like, oh, wow, okay. This is so cool. So the sun comes up and all of Bali is just lit up. And we shove these eggs into this volcanic hole. And the steam from the volcano starts cooking the eggs. And we're having volcanic eggs and. And we of Bali. And on the horizon is this mountain. It's this huge mountain. And I say to my guide, I say, what's that mountain over there? He says, that's Mount Ranjani. I say, oh, Mount Ranjani. Is that as big as Mount Agung. He goes, actually, yeah, it's about the same size. And I say, how do you get there? And he goes, oh, you got to catch a boat over there. How many days does it take to camp over there? And I start, like, thinking and planning about my next journey and all of this sort of stuff. And I'm asking him questions, how much is it? Oh, should I book that with you, or should I book that with the hotel? Blah, blah, blah. And he puts his arm around me, says, Mr. Daniel, you need to learn how to appreciate the mountain you're currently standing on.

It's huge.

And because I was standing on this mountain, I could see everything but the mountain. And I was getting overwhelmed with the thought of, like, how do I get over there? And he's like, slow down. You're standing on this mountain. So when I work with a lot of entrepreneurs, I discover that they're standing on mountains of value, but they're so anxious, worrying about what comes next, and what's someone else doing on the horizon? What's Neil doing? What's Dan doing? It's like, you need to learn how to appreciate the mountain you're already on. And if you want to kill overwhelm, and if you want to really catapult success, it's about appreciating what you've got so huge.

And there's so many things that you could be doing that are working right now. Yeah, look at what worked and just do more of that before you start adding the new things.

Totally.

All right, thank you guys so much. Thanks, Daniel, for being here. Appreciate you so much.