Leveling Up: How To Master the Game of Life & Business with Eric Siu, Leveling Up

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Term vision, long term thing, which is one of our core values. The second is staying within your circle of competence. Let's look at Warren Buffett, for example. He talks about the strike zone, so taking swings only when it makes sense. You hit more home runs that way. The third one would be your mindset. We live in a world now where it's really easy to change people's minds with information. So it's really important that whatever information that you have coming in that you're constantly filtering and you're editing and then adjusting your mindset to shape your worldview. We live in a world right now where it's really easy to manipulate people. So just have to be careful, take care of your mind and then think long and you'll be fine.

I need some traction. You need some traction? Let's get some traction.

Hey, what's up Innovators, entrepreneurs, visionaries and disruptors. This is your Traction podcast host, Lloyd Lobo. We're a community of over 100,000 people just like yourself on a mission to help you get the methods, the money and the madness to explode your business growth. Featuring stories and tactical advice straight from those who've done it before, like Shopify, Twilio, Asana, and many more Games are.

A way to to create engagement. Imagine if you are joining a new company and they designed your experience through the company as a game. You enter, you make accomplishments and you're getting rewards and you're leveling up. Attrition would go down to zero. Employee retention would be an all time high. Ultimately, everything becomes a job. Whether it's going to the gym or it's running a business, it becomes a job. Well, how do you make it more fun? And Eric's here to tell us all about that. How do you design your life and business like a game? Eric's been a great friend over the years. Years attraction speaker and just overall badass marketing guru, Eric, welcome to Traction. Thanks for joining us.

Yeah, thanks for having me, Lloyd. It's been a long time. We gotta catch up again in person. We're just talking about speaking at our conference in September. Yeah, man, just excited to be here and provide whatever value I can.

Yeah. And Eric, you've got a phenomenal background, right? You bought single grain for a dollar and then you $2. So you bought single grand for $2, grew it into a multi million dollar business. You have a number of SaaS, companies you run like Clickflow. And then you host two popular podcasts including Leveling up and Marketing School. And you got a unique background in competitive gaming and business. So give us your backstory, man. How do you get to where you are today? What drove you to write this book?

Yeah, a lot of people ask because of my marketing background. Because we have marketing audiences with Marketing School, Leveling up and our blog as well. Why don't you just do a marketing book? And my response to that is it's naturally the easy thing to do, but if I have a long term horizon on thing, what seems to make things, it seems to make a lot more sense to talk about my intersection of gaming and business. A lot of people aren't talking about that and just looking at life or even business as just a game because to your point, you mentioned it's a lot more engaging when you look at things like a game, right? So you talk about designing your culture to make it where people can go from zero to job ready to become a leader and have certain gifts or power ups along the way. That's how we want to be doing things long term. And so for the book, it's a very long term outlook on things too. Also looking at business too long term, it's okay. What's people talk about TAM or total Addressable Market all the time. And the Total addressable Market, I think there's over 4 billion people in the world now that have played a game. And so to be able to capture a subset of that and build a new audience and serve them down the road, I think that's really interesting to me. And so what I would say is to keep things short, ultimate failure growing up, almost dropped out of high school, almost dropped out of college. First year of college, I had six withdrawals and like one F I think. And then because I wanted to play World of Warcraft and poker and then got fired from two jobs, eventually worked my way up and then I was just like, man, I just need to Find something that feels like a game. And luckily I found this digital marketing thing and then it led me to the next thing. What else? What other games can I play in digital marketing? And then it's okay. How can I learn how to become a great manager? How can I learn how to operate a company? How can I learn how to hire amazing people? How can I then invest in. So there's like levels to everything, right? And there's no, you don't have to go fight the last boss. To Lloyd's point. You can just stay at the current level that you're at, and that's totally fine too. So no pressure at all. But we just want to design an organization where we have all the levels available to people. Like, we have a guy leaving this week to focus on his e commerce business and we're like, dude, more power to you. We love that and we encourage side hustles. So we're. It's. The flywheel is turning. That's all I can say.

So let's dive into it. So you acquired single grain for $2. Can you frame that in the model of leveling up and how you managed to go through multiple levels to where you are today?

Yeah. One of the chapters I have in the book talks about repetition and then also combined with endurance. Taking a lot of pain and not really enjoying the pain in the moment, but long term, understanding that the pain will make you stronger. Single Grain, I came into it. My podcast co host, Neil was a partner. His cousin Sujan Patel was the founder. And then there are two other partners, Heat and Shah was a partner as well. And then there's. There's one other partner. And thanks for posting a link. And so what I would say, at the time, Single Grain was an SEO agency. They weren't doing well anymore. And the way I looked at it was the four other partners wanted out and Neil, trying to protect me as a friend, saying, look, Eric, there's no brand equity in this. There's nothing here. You should get out. And luckily enough, I was talking to Sujin and basically was able to negotiate a deal where I would pay $2 out of pocket and the rest would be seller finance, meaning that the rest would be paid through a note for the next year or two. And I put in a contingency saying that if the company failed, I would own nothing. So that's nice and all that, but long term, why did I even make this bet? If one of the best marketers in the world is saying there's no brand equity here, there's nothing. Why even do it? And so the logic here was it's an asymmetric bet, meaning that if I made single grain work, if I was able to turn it around, my upside would be unlimited. And I could take all those cash flows from a service based business and go reinvest it into more durable or more exponential sources of revenue. And if I failed, I would have paid $2 out of pocket and would have been a very expensive mba. So to me it's heads I win, tails I also win.

I guess walk us through the first three levels here.

Yeah. What I would say is I don't know if that it would be that helpful if we walk through the entire book. Maybe I'll just walk through my favorite levels. If that works for you.

Yeah. But I'm like definitely not walking through the whole book. But like when you got single grain, if you had to frame it, what were the first three levels you had to go through?

Oh, man. Okay, so let me just look at the table of contents right here to make sure I got all the levels. So level seven is grit. A lot of grit. Because I'll tell you what happened. First year into taking it over, like I came from tech, right? So I ran marketing for online education startup and I thought that my poo poo didn't stink because I came from tech. And I kind of looked down on service based business because I worked in the agency world before. And so I came in, acted like I was the most amazing thing and I laid a bunch of people off. I shut down the office. I didn't build rapport with anybody. And we dropped all the way down to one employee. In fact, I read a book called Let My People Go Surfing from the Patagonia co founder and it's oh yeah, people don't want to be micromanaged. People don't want you to tell them what to do. So I was like, oh, this makes a lot of sense. So I stopped showing up to the office. So things went from bad to worse. And my outside accounting firm actually called me and said, hey, it might be time to shut it down. So we got down to that point and then at that point I was just like, you know what, I didn't really put my back into this thing and I didn't give it all the attention that it deserves. So let's focus on it. So grit, I would say, is a big piece of it. I would say the other piece is mindset. Just because you're going through so much at the time with any business really understanding that the pain is a ticket to success. And so to have that mindset, if people are talking down about you understand that it hurts short term, but you can reframe it into strength long term. I think it all has to do with mindset because your mind defines how your action, the actions that you're going to take. And then the final one I'll say is level 12 here, endurance, man, all the stuff that to have your outside accounting firm call you and then almost accept a job at that moment, that was a pivotal moment. And I actually was looking at apartments in Dallas because I almost took this job in Dallas. I had said yes and I just didn't feel it was right. I was like, I don't think I can go back to work anymore. So then yeah, those three.

Stress is the precondition for growth. And you. I feel like there's two kinds of people. There's growth minded people and there's fixed minded people. There's a high trajectory people where like they come in, they want a 10x and there's sort of high experience fixed minded people. And the high experience people want to keep doing the same thing, which is great. You can't 10x a business that way. And if you couple that high trajectory people with the concept of stress and leveling up, stress is a precondition for growth. Like bodybuilding, right? You can't build a better physique if you keep lifting the same weights every day. Otherwise every person that's a construction worker would be jacked to the nines like Hulk Hogan. But they're not, they're not ripped because you gotta get, you gotta keep doing a little more every day and it compounds and I love this concept. How did you get into gaming and what do you always get?

Gaming was really all I had growing up. It's funny, you talk about pressure, people talk about diamond hands right now. That's what I think about. It takes pressure to make a diamond too. But anyway, so gaming I started at about age 6 or 7 years old and I played a lot till 22 and by I was playing all the counter strikes, the world of the Warcrafts, Everquest diablo, like warcraft 3, starcraft. I think I mentioned Starcraft already. But yeah, I started at a young age and then that was the thing I excelled at. And I learned so much about not just gaming but like I learned about business, I learned about life through gaming. One of the angles we have with the book right now we're running ads for it is the angle around parents fighting with their Kids like I fought with my parents all the time. Just understanding that you can actually cultivate really powerful habits from the world of gaming. And then eventually you want to just convert all that into the world of business. And then it's a completely different story. And then you have an unfair advantage because all you're doing every day now is, is you're just having fun. Like I can tell Lloyd he's having a shitload of fun right now. I don't know if I can cuss with Boast and I can just tell his energy, it's just so infectious. And I think part of it is because he sees it as a game.

Life and business is a marathon, is not a sprint. Right. So Elise asks here is like too much loving this. Too much stress is death. And so the thing is this, you can't eat. The only way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. Right. More people die and companies die of indigestion than starvation. So let's say you're sort of fixed minded person is starving or somewhere in between. But then you come from this hundred x mentality and you're like, okay, I'm going to just do it all in one day. It's about designing it so you're doing little by little better every day versus trying to say I'm going to just eat the whole thing. And if you try to do that, you're going to, you're going to die. That is the definition of too much stress. I think if you design your life like a game, life and business like a game where it's like achievements that you unlock throughout and you get recognition and reward for it, you're invested. It's a concept of hooked. What is that?

This thing over here you're talking about just getting 1% better every single day. Or that's at least how I interpreted it. Too much stress equals death. And so I have this turtle in front of me because as part of an employee engagement survey, this was a long time ago, people were just talking about how sometimes it's hard to keep up with the pace. Right. And so this reminds me to slow down. Like, I talk fast, I write fast, which is why my handwriting's ugly. But there's no need to try to rush things and just understanding that the cliche is that thinking decades, not so much thinking in years because great things happen in decades.

Let's dive into the concept of level ups and how can people design their own level ups?

Yeah, so in the book I really only talk about 15 power ups, right? In there. But the thing is, these power ups, you can look at them as habits and in life, you're just continuing to look to collect positive habits. It's really just a starting point. Right. And this book is really designed for kind of my younger self to understand that, hey, like everything you're doing, just keep going. So what I would say is I have some core power ups in there. One of them is Thievery, which is one of the chapters that I enjoy the most because thievery.

Thievery meaning stealing or. Okay, let's dive into that.

Yeah. When I was 12 years old, I was playing a game called Everquest. It was basically the precursor to this big game called World of Warcraft. Without Everquest, there's no World of Warcraft. And so 12 years old, I was fighting for a championship. These are these one on one duels with people. I got destroyed in preliminaries, but I got lucky with the seeding. So I actually got to watch someone from our rival kind of team compete and totally destroy our guild leader, which is our team leader. And I was like, oh, I know how to do everything she's doing right now. So I'm just going to copy. And so I literally probably copied about 80% of that person's tactics. And then I integrated my own because I played a lot of first person shooter games and from there I barely beat that person. I was like within a hit of getting killed, but then I swept everyone else. I didn't lose after that, or I didn't lose from that point on. And that moment just taught me, oh, I don't need to be that original. I can just probably build on what other people are saying. So reading a book or looking at, listening to podcasts or by the way, when I listen to podcasts, people are incentivized to share their best tactics and then I can just layer on whatever's unique to us and then I have a brand new unique strategy. So thievery is special to me because I think that was a huge confidence lift for me at 12 years old to be able to win a championship because I hadn't won anything before. My mom was always complaining about how I didn't bring home any like trophies or honor rolls or anything like that, but that was my honor roll. And you look at the world of business. I don't know how true this story is, but people talked about how Steve Jobs stole from Xerox, right? Stole the mouse, stole the gui, stole all these different things. And even Steve Jobs himself said everything in life is just a remix. So that's what it is and what.

Part of it is like, because oftentimes people want to get into these NDAs and all kinds of things. But ultimately I feel that we're in a world where everything, every piece of information out there exists and it's just about finding it and drawing inspiration from it. And if somebody can out execute you, then you weren't. You didn't deserve to win anyway. So I want to go into a few of these levels now. Let's start with the newbie struggle and Level 2 mission. What do you mean by this? What are the challenges at these stages and how do you overcome and beat these levels?

Let's start with the mission first, because I think that's a big one. People talk about, oh, you need to have a mission. You understand that Google's mission as a company is to organize the world's information. Microsoft back in the day had a mission to, I think is put a PC on everyone's desk or something like that. So Microsoft seems to be a little more realistic. But Google's is unrealistic, right? Because to organize the world's information, there's going to continue to be information that comes at you. And so a mission to me is something that is supposed to be unattainable, right? Meaning that it's so big you'll never get there, but in your life, you're working a little closer. You're getting a little closer every single day. And I used to think a mission was like, it had to be very specific, right? People talk about smart goals and all that. So my mission, at least personally, is to level up the world. And I'll never accomplish that. Where did I get that from? My foreword in the book is Howard Marks, who is the. I know there's the oak tree. Howard Marks, the investor. This is not the investor, but also very successful. Founded Activision and founded acclaimed games. So like Mortal Kombat, Activision, Call of Duty, those types of things. And we had him speak at one of our conferences and he said, my mission is to help entrepreneurs achieve their dreams. And I was like, that's just a load of bs. I'm like, what? That's like, how are you ever going to accomplish that? And then right after that slide, he was like, and that's what a mission is. It's not supposed to be achievable. And that was like a profound moment for me. So my mission is to level up the world again. And I can do that in a lot of different ways. I can go Teach people marketing. I can go teach people. Certain I teach at school sometimes too. I can teach our team. Right. Or I can go figure out how to buy other businesses, level those up. So there's just a lot of I can just keep playing the games in different ways. And that's what a mission is. So I don't think, let's say you're starting out in your career right now. I don't think you need to have really aggressive mission. I think if I'm in my 20s right now I would be trying to figure out what do I enjoy. And then probably in my late 20s or early 30s or so, I might have something that's a little more concrete and then something I can work to towards for the rest of my life. That's what a mission is.

You said something very important there. Right? Or I drew from it is if you're passionate about your mission, then it'll transcend companies. It's not tied to this one thing. And that goes a long way because relationships and passion transcends company my mission, companies, my mission is to enable every innovator to change the world from vaccines to clean drinking water. And we do that through our product, giving you access to government incentives. But we also built this massive traction community to provide the resources to take it further. I think if you fall in love with the mission and not the solution, then the solution keeps evolving to drive that mission, but you'll never ever complete it. That's a good one. Let's dive into this newbie thing. What is this newbie stuff?

Yeah, so newbie struggles. That's when you're just starting out and just understanding that when you're a newbie, that your mindset, keeping that mindset, keeping that newbie mindset where you're very open to things. Marc Andreessen talks about strong views loosely held. And to me, the people that continue to have an open mindset like that, those are the ones that go the furthest because they don't have an ego that develops and they just continue to ask great clarifying questions. And I've seen it over time, those that develop an ego, they hold themselves back. So I just think continuing to understand or that you have to go through newbie struggles to advance, but also understand that having that little, that newbie mentality or having that open mentality goes a long way.

I think ultimately openness is the biggest and most indispensable enabler of growth. So let's jump to level six then. I'm just picking the levels that I liked apprentice mentality. And I think this ties to openness. To what does this mean? How do you combat this level?

Yeah, some people here might have heard of beginners mindset, right? It's similar to newbie mindset in, in terms of when you have a newbie struggles, but when you have a beginner's mindset, it's very similar to the openness piece. Like an apprentice back in the day. Like when you think about, let's say you're playing like a medieval game and you're trying to become a blacksmith, you start out as an apprentice, you're learning from someone else, and you're so open to soaking into knowledge versus when you become an expert. So it's very similar to it, to what I was talking about earlier, but when you're an expert. This is why I never want to be an expert. This is why I never want to be a guru, even though you called me a guru earlier. I don't want to be a guru or an expert because at that moment I start to think, oh, I'm good, or I'm better than somebody else. And so I don't want to think like that. I want to be open. Because what I look for right now is how can I learn from people that are more experienced than I am? And these people, sometimes they might be older than me, and then how can I also learn from people that are just starting out? So people that are maybe in their late teens or maybe in their early 20s, I'll ask them questions. What are you reading right now? What are you looking at? How do you look at the world? And so what I'm most interested in, for my imprinted mentality is what can I learn from other people? How do they see the world? And then how can I adjust my worldview according to what I feel is what resonates with me?

So now you've completed several levels and you find yourself at level nine, teamwork. How does this level differ? In order to succeed, what are the key skills and strategies leaders must use to achieve success?

Curious to get a show of hands here? Just hit the raise hand button if you have kids. But, you know, I didn't play sports growing up. I was in the drum line. That's about it. But I got a lot from games because I understood the value of teamwork. So when I was playing games like EverQuest or Counter Strike, to do the best things in the world, to do the most amazing things, the most remarkable things, I learned that you can go look if you want to go fast, you go Alone. If you want to go far, you go with the team. And I learned that I had to be part of the Uber guilds, right. So that the best teams in the world, same thing in the world of business. Lloyd right now, he's building an amazing team. Right? What I'm looking at with these people, like right after this webinar, I'm going to head over and meet a VP of sales candidate. I'm just most interested in now in building the best team and then giving the resources that they need. But I learned that at a young age of 12 that, that I needed to get away from like the team that's not performing and go to a high performing team. It's very like people sometimes compare business to being a high performance sports team. You want to have people that are in the trenches next to you that are A players. And I think it was what Guy Kawasaki that said, look, if you hire B players, they end up hiring C players and then C players end up hiring D players and it ends up becoming a bozo explosion. So that's what you don't want. So you want to make sure that you're working with an amazing team to go for.

And when you talk to founders who are not succeeding in life, where do you see the levels? Where or what are the levels that people lose at the most?

Yeah. When you say not succeeding, what's your interpretation of that?

Meaning they're just stuck in a rut and the business is not growing and they're miserable in life and business and you can get there. Honestly, there are times where I was there, right? Like we had this great run and then we raised a lot of money and I got Covid and almost died in the hospital. And then through that experience, I kept thinking, man, I wish I spent more time with family. For founders and entrepreneurs, family and personal life is always collateral damage. How do you design your life there? And the thing is, if you look at the most successful companies on the stock market, the biggest outcomes in tech have been founder led from Shopify to Twilio to Asana. So it's important founders take care of themselves. But how do you like, there are some levels there where as founders, they don't complete or they lose, which in turn impacts their wellbeing and their business.

Yeah. Yeah. So what Great explanation. A. So glad that you're alive. Right. That you powered through that. So you mentioned Twilio and you. So one thing that stuck out to me when you mentioned Twilio was that I share a coach with the founder of Twilio. Right.

I need a coach recommendation, by the way.

Okay.

Or drop it here.

Okay. So his name's Jerry Colonna and he runs a company called Reboot. So Reboot IO. Just check that out. And they have entire coaching stuff. And what I would say is coaching has helped me because it's a form of therapy, in a sense. But my coach has actually been there, done that. He's been a VC before, he's been successful as an entrepreneur. And I don't really need a coach to hold me accountable because I'm pretty accountable. But a good coach learns to ask the right questions and then guides you along the way. The coach doesn't necessarily give you the answers. So I think that at least today we're having a session and I really need that session today. So I would say that's one piece of it. And the other piece is I actually know of a really close friend right now. His business has been under six figures for the last three, four years or so. And so what I would say is a burn the ships, right? He hasn't burned the ships because he has a full time job right now. I'm like, you're getting too comfortable there. Number two, I would say is delegating. And what I would say is there's a post from Andrew Wilkinson, which I'm assuming you might have had here before, or maybe not, but he has a blog post called Lazy Leadership. And Lazy Leadership is basically understanding that, hey, just be lazy and delegate as much as you can. Your job is to recruit the best team and get the hell out of the way. I think those two things really stick out to me. And also having an open mind. I think it's first, having an open mind means asking great questions and then also taking action on those too. So delegation, having an open mind. And the biggest one is mindset. At the end of the day, a lot of people in the marketing world talk about mindset and they try to sell you like a course, right? But in this case, what I mean is that constantly updating your software. So your brain is software, right? You're constantly updating it, listening to webinars with Lloyd, listening to podcasts, reading stuff. And then your worldview continues to shift, right? And just under going back with that strong views, loosely held mentality. And I think you'll be fine, folks.

If you have any questions, drop them in the Q and A tab. We'll take them as we go along. Or the rabbi asks, rabbi, how can you delegate and hire amazing people when you are just starting a business and do not have a lot of finances.

So when you're starting out, the main thing you have to focus on is getting more money. Actually, I was talking to someone today who actually has an agency, he's trying to grow it and he's like, how do I get to 100k a month? And I was like, okay, look at all your clients right now. Like, how do you think you're servicing them? Right? On a scale of one to nine, he's like thinking about getting more and more clients. I'm like, okay, first before you try to. And I'm just focusing on services a little bit right now and even product too. How do you get your product to where it's a 9 out of 10 experience? Right where your NPS score is amazing, or same thing on the client side too. Before you think about scaling, I think it was Bill Gross that said the number one cause for death for startups is not Bill Gross. That one's on timing. But another cause of death is premature scaling. So people think about scaling too quickly. And so what people should be more focused on is the retention piece of it. How can I deliver not just a five star experience, but a seven star experience. And that's very aspirational. And then once you can do that, you're going to get more cash. And once you have more cash, you can hire more people. So it's really tough to delegate and hire. In the beginning, the framework I use was saying 15%. What are the 15% of things I can delegate every single quarter and get it off my plate. And then I also made a list of tasks by dollar amount. So what are my $10 an hour tasks? $100 an hour. Thousand dollars an hour. What are my hundred thousand dollars an hour task? So that could be like negotiating. That could be doing M and A deals or recruiting like a star team. $10 an hour might be like me doing calendar invites or me doing, just making things up right now, prospecting. So you want to ruthlessly take things off your plate and not act like you're Superwoman or Superman. Because at the end of the day, doesn't matter how good you are, you're just one person.

There's. And that's the thing I find is in addition to that, depends on what you want in life. If you have a big mission and you see yourself growing towards that, I would see my advice would be higher high trajectory people. And these are not people necessarily that come with experience because experience is secondary here. I think this is where people come with the ability to read through ambiguity and help you scale 10x right. And oftentimes we try to find people with experience. Like how many like job descriptions are the worst for this 10 years experience doing this one thing. But really what you need to identify is can this person be high trajectory where they can help you grow, put somebody in a role that can take that function and help you level up 15 in the shortest amount of time possible. And those people are not expensive, but they're more looking for a chance. And you got to as a founder, be really good at reading into those things.

You know what I would say to add to that the Jeff Bezos framework. Would I work for this person? Would I admire this person? Those are a couple of things. And I like what Larry Page does, I think is Larry Page, basically because if you're, if you're a founder, early days, you're trying to, you're getting on all these interview calls, might as well make the time productive. So if I'm interviewing Lloyd right now, hey Lloyd, what are you most passionate about? And then Lloyd, can you teach me that in five minutes? Because if they're good people like they like they have to be teaching other people. As you recruit more people, they have to be teaching the staff. And it shows how well they articulate themselves and how genuinely passionate they are about things. Sometimes people just half ass it and oh, this person's not really quite there. So I just don't want to work with this person. And then final thing I'll say is, great book we have everyone read when they join the companies. It's called the ideal team player. And basically it's three traits that you're looking for. How humble are they, how hungry are they, and how smart are they. I'll just leave it with that. And then Philippe said, weekly coffees with other CEOs help, that's great. And also joining networks like YPO or EO or like Mastermind talks or going to the launch conference.

So and just meeting people in general, just discussing things helps a lot. My, my superpower is building relationships. I think I can't do anything better than building relationships. That's my one focus. And when you're at a point of scale where you have amazing people, your job is a leader. Then just keep editing, not writing. If you're writing for any given team, that means that team's not doing well. Your job is what to align people around the mission, the vision, the values are important. So you don't do things that are evil and get out of their way. Right. And Then focus on evangelizing and recruiting. That's what you should be focused on, enabling others. Because by enabling others, you will be successful, is what I found. Now, with so much going on in your life as a founder, CEO, marketing expert, public speaker, podcaster, author, how do you stay? So what goals do you set for yourself and how do you stay on track?

Yeah, to your point earlier, it's just getting amazing people and getting the hell out of their way. But it's interesting because I think maybe we look at this 10, 15 years ago, like people say, oh, recruiting is the most important thing. It doesn't really resonate. And then as you start to work your way up, you start to realize it's everything. So you know, this guy's driving down from Big Bear today and we're going to meet up. And so what I would say is just getting amazing teams around you. And then if you can't hire experienced people, initially hire kind of people that have hire based on the framework that I gave you around the Jeff Bezos framework, I think initially, early days, like we hired people off of Craigslist, so you can get amazing people everywhere. That's how I'm able to do the things I'm able to do. And my focus just aligning with Lloyd as well, is I want to focus on high leverage activities. Recruiting is very high leverage. Producing content. This is high leverage because even though you're on a webinar right now, it's going to be pushed to YouTube and I might chop this content up later and put it onto my other socials as well. So to me, it's high leverage. Financing is high leverage too, right? Whether it's raising money or repricing things internally, to me, it's raising money, getting debt or whatever. Exactly. And then obviously the vision. And so as long as I can do those four things, super high leverage, I'm happy. If I'm doing other things, I'm probably hurting the company. So I shouldn't be trying to get involved or micromanaging people.

When I look at high leverage, I tie it to one thing. The job of a leader is build, inspire, and motivate our team to deliver. Deliver is a lagging indicator. So day in, day out, you're building, inspiring and motivating a team to deliver. There's two key parts there. One is communicating, clearly communicating and articulating the vision, the alignment day in, day out to inspire, excite and motivate people. If you just are writing, like saying things to inform people, then you may as well send an Email. Right. But your job is to do that day in, day out, because inspired, excited and motivated people can move now. And that is the leading indicator to building great teams. The second thing, a part of that is high leverage is unf ing the team or fixing the gaps. Right. Like you're in edit mode, you're not writing, so you're finding gaps and what to fix. And those two things should be the highest leverage. And that is recruiting evangelism, making sure the roadmap's on track. Like everything you outlined.

Yeah. Amen to that. To what Philippe's saying. And then I would also say not just communicating, but over communicating, getting to the point where it probably feels annoying to you. That's probably when it's enough. So.

Yeah, because you may say it once and then you realize you're always repeating it yourself because somebody or the other keeps asking and you got to keep saying it over and over again. And I think it's 20 times, maybe until it start becoming everyone's reality kind of thing.

Yeah.

In addition to, to these level ups, what are the top three pieces of advice? And I shouldn't say top three because you know, what works for somebody doesn't work for other people. What general pieces of advice you have for businesses to grow their companies and scale, then you can tie it to like first principles. Thinking it's not, oh, just person implemented. Put a growth hack in their signature. Like hotmail.

Right.

Like P.S. i love you use hotmail. 200 million users. I'm not talking about those kinds of things. I'm talking about like fundamental key learnings at the base level that you recommend.

Yeah. What I would say is I think if you were to look back 10 years ago, I'd be interested in the most recent growth tactic to your point. What's this growth tactic here? And then people started talking about growth hacking and then all the affiliate marketers started getting in. And then you realize that game will always change. But what doesn't change is I just realized, at least for me, this is what's worked for me. Whenever I try to go for something that's short term, it doesn't really work out. Which is why this book is for long term too. But I have this Pokemon card over here too. So I paid a couple thousand dollars for this Pokemon card store of Valley. It's a long term play or whatever. Let's say you invest in crypto because you think it's going to last a long time. So for me it's looking at the businesses right now and looking at other companies to potentially pick up. It's largely a buy and hold model. Right. And so it's buying and holding the companies, recruiting amazing people and then taking care of them for the long term and just looking at everything from a long term mindset. And that takes a lot of pressure off of me to have to perform short term, even though I'm very urgent with my actions. Again, if you look back at your 10 years, whoever's on this webinar right now, if you look back on your 10 years, you'll realize that a lot of amazing things have happened. So I think it's trying to stay patient that's probably the biggest one, the long term thinking aspect. So first one's long term vision, long term thinking, which is one of our core values. The second is staying within your circle of competence. Let's look at Warren Buffett, for example. He talks about the strike zone. So taking swings only when it makes sense. Hit more home runs that way. The third one would be a mindset. We live in a world now where it's really easy to, to change people's minds with information. So it's really important that whatever information that you have coming in that you're constantly filtering and you're editing and then adjusting your mindset to shape your worldview. We live in a world right now where it's really easy to manipulate people. So just have to be careful, take care of your mind and then think long and you'll be fine.

Share a story where you use these level ups to win the game. Maybe outside of single grade.

Yeah. Right now there's largely when I'm looking at the, some of these acquisitions that we're doing right now. So there's a SaaS company and then there's potentially there's an agency and there's another agency. I'm not trying to build the biggest agency in the world, but I'm trying to pick up the marketing talent so we can continue to help these more scalable companies. What I would say is it feels like a game because part of it is there's a teamwork aspect to it. There's puzzles. It. There's a level of complexity to it as well. And I do feel like very much I'm continuing to learn from each and every one of these companies. So I do have an apprentice mentality when I approach each of these companies, ask a lot of questions. And we're going through like an integration right now. We're doing some due diligence today on another company. I'm just like, it's just largely asking questions and understanding and also taking things slowly. There's like a bunch of lessons that go in there and not trying to rush things because when I think about the integration with Single Grain when I first took over, you want to do the inversion of what I did, right. Where again, I let go of a bunch of people, didn't build any rapport, shut down the office, changed things, made sweeping changes rapidly. So a couple things bottled into the little acquisitions that we're working on right now.

You got into this micro PE thing, right? Like acquiring small companies that are not doing well or like early enough and they have a product and you're bringing your network and your marketing prowess to help them grow. Why did you get into that? Because that is also a concept of leveling up. How amazing it sounds, right?

Yeah, it's just so fun. It seems to make a lot of sense. Warren Buffett's the best example of that. But also in Canada, you have Constellation Software, which I think they were buying software companies in 95 or something like that, and they just continue to do that. Those two are largely holding companies, buying and holding. Vista is private equity. And then you have Andrew Wilkinson, who's based in Victoria and he takes the profits from his web design firm and then just goes and buys wonderful Internet businesses. And largely it's a buy and hold model. So for me, if I have this long term mindset, I don't like flipping things just because it has a short term kind of connotation to it and I'm just not good at that. So I think it just makes sense if I'm enjoying the journey, just to keep building and building and keep playing the game. So that's what it is. It seems fun to me.

Yeah. So what was the hardest chapter to write?

Looking at it right now, that means.

Everything was easy, man. It was part of life.

I'll tell you what, it was a six year journey to finish the whole thing. It wasn't like it took six years to write. I was like. It was like on and off every year. And I got a little stronger every year too. It helped, I would say probably the first chapter with newbie struggles, because it does it. What I was reflecting on as I was looking at the book was it caused me to reflect on the early innings of my life where it didn't seem like I can do anything right and that parents, friends, like there wasn't. They didn't understand what I was doing. So I felt very much alone. So it brought those emotions up and now I Understand, like, look, these other people in the world that have played a game, like, they need to understand that what they've picked up, they can actually translate that and make a difference in the world. So that's largely a reason why I did the book.

What is level 15? What is the final level?

It's called Playing the Game of Life.

And tell us more about that. What does that mean?

I actually borrowed a concept from Nathan Barry from ConvertKit. So in the book, we actually illustrated this out from his blog post, right? How there are ladders in your career and there are ladders in life, right? So you can start out as a job, you can start doing consulting, Then you can start like an agency, then you can productize it, and you can build SaaS companies and you can become like a. You can build rocket ships later or build a network effects. I think it's just understanding that there are levels to everything and there's no need to pressure yourself that if the level is there, if you want to get to the next level, but you don't have to. But if you look at it that way, it's just, oh, like, I'm not where I want to be. What do I need to do to get to the next level? Then it's just, oh, what power ups do I need to go collect to get there? Maybe if I'm Lloyd, maybe I need to build relationships with a certain key person to get to the next level. That's what's required. And then it's just a lot more fun that way. And also understanding that this is all great, but a couple of power ups I've talked about in this book, that's just the very beginning. You have to continue to refine, you have to continue to collect other ones. You have to get rid of negative power ups. And then you just keep playing until you pass away. And that's it. It's a game that never ends and.

That makes life and business fun. Eric, you've got some fantastic podcasts that tune into leveling up. Just Google Search Leveling Up Podcasts by Eric Hsu.

And then you've got Marketing School with Neil Patel.

Okay, but you had another one before leveling up.

It used to be called Growth Everywhere. And then we rebranded it to level.

Okay, so Growth Everywhere rebranded to Leveling up. And then you've got the marketing podcast with Neil Patel. Follow Eric. He's got a lot of great marketing tactics. Growth tactics, business tactics. Eric, are you on social? Where are you most active?

Yeah, hit me up on Twitter or Instagram.

Ericosiu, Ericosiu Eric O S I u.

Yeah, Eric O used to be my gaming name so I just kept it.

So leveling up.com thank you so much. Great pleasure my friend.

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