The Future of Marketing with Ryan Deiss, Ralph Burns, and Kasim Aslam of Perpetual Traffic

Coming up next on Business Lunch, I.

Think it's going to be an absolute bloodbath. I mean, I think you're going to have so many of these agencies and consultants that just, they had their trick, right? It's like, like, oh, I can juggle. And in a world where people want jugglers, great. And now everybody's like, screw juggling. Juggling sucks. Like, it doesn't work anymore. You're out of business. And it's because they weren't actually marketers, right? They weren't actually marketers. They, they were, they weren't really even craftspeople like, or art. Like, they, they knew how to do one thing like, I can move this bucket from here to there. And so, I mean, they were, they were a mechanic that only knew how to work on a particular type of engine that no longer, you know, that nobody uses anymore. Right. I mean, that, that is what a lot of these folks were. Because marketing, at the end of the day, is the amplification of a.

Right.

That is what marketing and advertising is.

You're listening to Business Lunch with Roland Fraser. This is your seat at the table.

Hey, business lunch listeners. Welcome to today's episode. And today is a little bit of a different episode. We've been receiving so much positive feedback about having Ryan on the show, and he was recently interviewed on one of our other shows, Perpetual Traffic. If you're not familiar with Perpetual Traffic, it's another one of the Scalable Media Networks podcasts. But we recently featured Ryan on Perpetual Traffic, talking about the future of marketing and really the future of what we're doing at Scalable and some cool things that Scalable is doing to help businesses as well as the people that lead them. And so you may enjoy this conversation, but you might find yourself giving this episode to your marketing person, or you might find yourself having someone on your team listen to it. And if they enjoy it, they might also enjoy subscribing and listening to the Perpetual Traffic podcast, which is where this interview came from. We're going to get into the interview right after this quick break. Hey, Business central listeners. If you want to scale your business, you have to know what's working and what's broken. And to date, Ryan and roland have started 13 companies from scratch. They've funded a dozen more and directly Advise hundreds of CEOs and entrepreneurs on how to grow and scale their companies. And over the years, they've identified the eight key domains that allow a business to scale to eight figures and beyond. And they use those eight areas to help entrepreneurs and CEOs find their current strengths and weaknesses and understand the constraints that are getting in the way of them scaling. So if you want a quick and accurate look at what areas you can improve to scale your business faster, go and take our scalability assessment. It's an assessment that'll show you exactly where you need to focus to scale your business and achieve even your loftiest goals. In just five minutes, you'll know your exact scale constraints and you'll get instant, actionable steps on how to improve your business. So go to businesslunchpodcast.comScore to take the free assessment one more time. It's businesslunchpodcast.comScore.

Hello and welcome to the Perpetual Traffic podcast. This is your host, Ralph Burns, and this is episode 330. And today is probably my favorite day of the entire last three years, which is, I think, the last time we actually had him on the show, if I'm not mistaken, seeing how it is his show, we have no. Other than the guy, the guy that we always suck up to, kiss up to, talk about. I think it's actually in our agreement, custom that we have to, in every single show have at least like some sucky uppy comment about Ryan Dice. Isn't that true? I don't know if you've read the fine print.

That's what I. Yeah. Under pain of death, you must.

Yeah. Or it's off with our heads. Like, I think it's really. It's a pretty severe punishment. If we don't do it well today, we're going to do it right to his face, which is actually pretty cool. Which we're pretty excited about having the CEO of the scalable company, managing partner of Scalable Equity, CEO of digital marketer, queen and king of the reigning digital marketing community worldwide, everywhere in the galaxy, none other than Ryan Deiss. Welcome to Perpetual Traffic.

Thank you. I get to be both the queen and the king. I don't know.

You know, I'm trying to be politically, you know, correct. You just never know these.

Yeah, I like that. It's that it's not either or, though, that it's not even a matter of choice. It's that I get both. Yeah.

The Queen of England doesn't even have that. She's just one title.

Yeah. No, I like it. No, thanks for having me. It's good to be here. And I say that knowing that I basically said, hey, can I come on the show? Because there's something that I would like to shamelessly plug, which I know we're going to get to at some point. But we pretend like, you know, hey, thanks for coming on. It's like, oh, man, you're welcome. It's so great to have you. I. Let's be honest, I asked to be here. I asked for a phone.

Told is a better word. I informed you that I would be joining the league.

Yes. Here. Here I come, ready or not. And that's why I don't know how this is going to come out at the end, but maybe people were able to pick up, like, did they. Did they dub in the episode number? Was that dubbed in after the fact? And the answer is yes. All right. We don't know what episode this is going to be because I demanded full usurpation of the calendar. So you got this as early as it could go in. So maybe something else was episode. Whatever. We didn't care. All right. We just wrecked everything. So.

Yeah.

So we're going to see how that goes.

Well, the king and queen all together. You can do these sorts of things.

I can do these things.

Yeah. And I will say, for perpetual traffic, this is like a Guinness Book of World Records. Quickest guest ever. Like, Friday, we get the email today. Here we are, literally 72 hours. We would have done it on Saturday, but, you know, I don't work games.

Yeah. I don't work Saturdays.

Yeah.

Yeah. It's critical to me that I'm both inconvenient for everybody else, but that I make sure to maximize my own personal.

It can't be completely accessible. People do have to miss you. That's right. Well, absence has made the heart grow fonder here at Digital Marketer because we haven't had you on in such a long time, but we have been talking about you, like I said. And obviously there is going to be a shameless plug in this show here today, which, you know, ready for it. Perpetual traffic listeners. In fact, when we plug stuff on our own, we get the worst ratings on itunes. So hopefully you can, you know, create one of those for us here at least a one star because we've been just getting lots of four and five stars recently. You know, it's all going to our head. So hopefully the shameless plug will help bring it down just a bit. But one of the things that we had discussed many times in the last three, four weeks, ever since we all came back from San Diego at Traffic and Conversion Summit, was your keynote. And I. And we're plugging it so much. You know, Kassim actually put up his own money for traffic and conversion recordings, which I know you know, is sort of against. Against policy here, but because I know we love to give away free stuff and take it away from, you know, people who might deserve it. The point is, is that we loved your keynote presentation so much. We really wanted to have you just on, just for that here today. But aside from that, can you give us a little bit of a breakdown of exactly what it is that you discuss why it's so important and maybe transition a bit into, you know, some of the other things that we're going to be discussing on here in today's show?

Yeah, I mean, so I'm old. I know I look really young and just very attractive if you've seen me, you know that. But no, I have been so I've been in the digital marketing game. I made my first sale online when I was 19 years old. I'm now about to turn 41. So I've been doing this longer than I haven't been doing it. And so I've seen a lot of stuff change. You know, when I first got started, there was no Google. There certainly was no Facebook or Instagram or TikTok or any of this other stuff, right? And what, what I watched happen over kind of the first decade of my career is I watch it move towards our ability as marketers to target, right? Because what is, you know, what is marketing? What is advertising? It's putting the right message in front of the right person at the right time. Right, right message, right person, right time and everything. You know, there's been this push for the first, like 10 years and that where it was all about right person, right time, right? And we saw this early on with pay per click, right? The fact that if somebody was searching for something in Google, like I can actually have an ad appear that knowing if they look for this, then show them my thing that's right person, right time, right? And then the targeting that we were able to do with our advertising, right? Oh, so if somebody is interested in this or they went to this other page, I can show them this. That was a big deal. And I think the kind of the pinnacle of that is much of what we've been able to do with retargeting this idea that somebody comes to our site or somebody watches a video for a certain amount of time, I can now follow them around wherever they are. Right person, right time. And so this is what's been happening now, what we've seen really over the last, certainly the last few years in a big way is we've started to see a shift away from that. And it started longer ago when just frankly, stuff started getting more expensive, right? When things just started getting harder, right? SEO got harder. Not just were more people ranking for stuff and big companies getting into the game, but Google, you know, Google was like, hey, you know, you're number one. You rank number one for that keyword. That's adorable. You're still going to be above the fold because we're going to have position zero. We're going to have suggested searches, we're going to have all these videos and stuff. You could be number one all you want. Nobody's going to see you, right? There's going to be ads up there. So search has gotten harder. When we think about social, right? It's been fun starting in like 2007 when Facebook ads were introduced and you know, really over that like 10 year period from kind of 2007 to 2017, there was a new social channel coming out every other month, it seemed. And this was a new opportunity to get in early and to build your base and to, you know, build this following. We saw a lot of, you know, influencers come out of this time, like people who became legitimate celebrities, right? YouTube. And now what, what's happening, you know, on social, right, today it's real celebrities. I mean, the people that are out there crushing on social, they're real live celebrities, these YouTubers, they're more famous than some of the most quote unquote famous actors and actresses in the world. So social is no longer the opportunity for marketers that, you know, that maybe it once was. And then on the paid ad side, I mean, just over the last year, we've seen paid ads just straight up double. I mean, I know you all have talked about this, you know, on this show, but with the iOS 14 update, different things, I mean, for, for your average marketer only, just about all of us are spending more than we were spending last year. And if any of us think that any of this is going to get any easier, we're fooling ourselves. We saw, you know, a nice 10 to 15 years of things getting better and better and better and better. And what I think we're now doing, we peaked, we crested. And what we're now doing is we are seeing a shift back towards digital marketing, starting to look again a little bit more like mass media, mass media marketing, right? A lot of the things, our ability to put the right message in front of the right person, right time that we've had for the past 10 to 15 years, right person, right time, is slowly getting taken away from Us either through competition, through algorithmic shifts, through price, through simply just being priced out of some of these areas. And so what we're finding is that when all media becomes mass media, the message is what reigns. It's the message that matters. And this is no different. Like this is nothing new. Go and watch like Mad Men. You know that A and E show, right? All the magic of marketing and advertising was on the messaging side. The media buying that was just lever pulling, right? I think there's always going to be an edge. There's always going to be an opportunity. If you really are a student of this stuff, if people who are listening to this show like the tips and the advice that, that you guys are giving them for finding some of these, you know, areas of opportunity, it's always going to be there for the people who are looking. But the windows are going to be smaller, they're going to close faster and it's not going to be like it was quote unquote back in the day. And so that was kind of what I, you know what, I talked about it, you know, at TNC and really just how important it is, you know, as marketers that we are owning our message, that we're becoming copywriters again. So often, like bad copy would work. If your timing could be perfect, your copy didn't have to be great. If you could get the right message in front of the right person at the right time, the message could be just like y'.

All.

This thing, people are like, I do. What a coincidence, you know, now it's gotten harder. Also gathering more first party data is going to be important. And I also talked about the importance of building a media, you know, building media brands, something we've always been about. Email lists, stuff like podcasts, like what we're doing right now, communities, paid communities. I think that this is going to be the future of brands. And I'll say I've been talking about this for a while, started talking about this back at like TNC 2016, the importance of building community and building your own media. So that's kind of where we are right now. And it's not a sky is falling kind of thing, but it is a kind of the realization that if you think the stuff that you were doing, I've seen so many marketers who came on board, they got into this game in 2015, 16, 17. If you think those same playbooks are going to work over the next three to five years, sorry, you're just, you're fooling yourself.

So you just said something Ryan and I, I gotta think that you just walk around with a booklet of one liners and then you choose to pull them out at exactly the right time. Because this is worth the cost of admission as far as this podcast is concerned. In my mind, you said, when all media becomes mass media, the message is what reigns. And dude, that's brilliant. I remember I've told this story a couple of times on this podcast. I was in the Digital Marketer certified Partner portal in Facebook when everybody found out really what the iOS update meant. And you've got. And all of us are just, you know, everybody wants to be the smartest person in the room. So, you know, you get these, these 2, 3, 4 paragraph long diatribes as to people explaining this is what it means, this is a pivot, this is how it's going to work. And it's going and it's going and it's going. And then all of a sudden, here comes Ryan Deiss and I'm paraphrasing and I'm probably doing it poorly, maybe you can correct me, but you came in and said, may the best copywriter win. And it was a total mic drop moment and all the comments stopped. But it really brought home the fact that, oh, there is no fix to this the way that we, you know, the evil marketers fix things. And that was really impactful for me. And you're kind of doing it again with this. When all media becomes mass media, the message is what reigns. I think that we need to meditate on that for a minute because, man, that's just. That's so poignant.

Yeah. And I got to give credit where credit's due, right? One of my mentors in business marketing and really life, Roy Williams, who. Roy authored the wizard of Ads trilogy. And I would commend all of you, if you're listening to this right now, buy the wizard of Ads and read it. Because one of the fundamental themes of that book is it's the message that wins. The best message wins. And the reason that Roy knows this is because Roy has always done primarily mass media marketing, marketing through and advertising through radio and tv. Right. So there's only so much targeting you can really do there. And I remember Roy saying something that I at TNC in kind of my own way. But Roy basically said the most valuable target is the untargeted target that you target through messaging. Right. I'll say that again. I'll say that again in case somebody missed it. The most valuable target is the untargeted target that you target through messaging. Now, why is this true? Because every time this has been. This, by the way, has always been true in marketing and advertising. The more targeting that you bring into play, the higher the cost. All right, Going all the way back to like direct mail. If you're going to rent a direct mail list to do direct mail marketing, the more data points that you asked for, you literally paid more, Right. If you wanted to target down to like this really small local radio station, you're going to pay more on average, you know, for that than you would mass. Now, supposedly. Yeah, it's supposedly. You know, the way that in an ideal world, the way frankly that it has worked in digital for again last 10 to 15 years, you were willing to pay more because those people were better targeted, more likely to convert. It was worth the investment, right? It was always worth the investment and it always will be worth the investment in a lot of cases for people who actually know what they're freaking doing. That being said, that's always going to cap out. You know, if we're targeting the people who are actively in market, there are only ever going to be so many of those at any given time. In some markets it's millions. In some markets it might be dozens. Right. Depending on what it is that you are selling. Right. If you're selling engagement rings, there are only so many people at any given moment that are in market. Right. Whatever it is that you're selling, that's kind of who, you know, who you're targeting. If you can target them, then great. But where the biggest opportunity for the people who really understand messaging and they understand how to target through messaging. How do you call out? How do you have like a, you know, a dog whistle, Right. That only is going to make your audience's ears perk up and they don't even know why. Right. That is the holding of marketing and advertising. The ability to craft a message and to put it out to the masses, to be able to yell it from the rooftops and to have people who didn't even know they were in market perk up. Now, what you've done and the reason we say that that is the most valuable, right? It is the most valuable. It's the untargeted target. So you're not targeting them through traditional means, you're targeting them through messaging. So the most valuable target market is the untargeted. What does that mean? It means nobody else is talking to them about that because they're not in market. So you're marketing in a vacuum. You don't have competitors. They're not comparing, you know, your brand of soap versus their brand of soap and comparing features and pricing. Right. So they're the untargeted target. And the way that you're able to make them valuable is you're, you're converting them when nobody else is because you're the only one talking to them. That is the greatest skill that has ever existed and that will always, always work. In marketing, dog whistle marketing, we'd be a little bit careful because dog whistle very often means like, you know, bad stuff. Like I'm calling out to all the racists out there. So I'm definitely not referring to that. I want to be clear there.

It's actually not quite dog whistle because dog whistle is to just call out your already target market. What you're talking about is the untargeted target market, which is even more valuable because it makes those messages that much more broad reaching. And I forget the jewelry store, which he did this in the radio ads. Having taken a few Roy Williams classes and obviously read the books a few times, which is obviously homework for any of you. Listening to this, going out and getting that book, at least the first one, if not the entire series and reading it many times over. But it was finding the people that are with it, not even within like in market, but everyone who's on the edges and maybe on the outer edges and then even having consideration there of making a purchase when maybe they hadn't even thought about making a purchase. And like that's the beauty of Roy Williams and the understanding of how important like the messaging actually is. And I, and I do think that 20, 2015, 2016, let's say 2013 is when Facebook started putting ads in the newsfeed. We've been spoiled here. And if you started 25, 2015, 2016, you haven't known any different. You could get away with a campaign hack or an advertising hack or a Facebook ads hack without really knowing all these basics of marketing. So like, from your perspective, is there going to be a shakeout? Is there? Because I know there's plenty of like in our space. There's lots of ad agencies which started 2017 and they're just using these tactics and strategies and tips and tricks, but now they have to go back to Mad Men style advertising understanding. What's your sense of for the space, the digital space in general, the space around that digital space, which is like the agency space, what do you think is going to happen based upon this?

I think it's going to be an absolute bloodbath I mean, I think you're going to have so many of these agencies and consultants that just, they had their trick, right? It's like, oh, I can juggle. And in a world where people want jugglers, great. And now everybody's like, screw juggling. Juggling sucks. Like, it doesn't work anymore. You're out of business. And it's because they weren't actually marketers, right? They weren't actually marketers. They. They were. They weren't really even craftspeople, like, or like, they. They knew how to do one thing, like, I can move this bucket from here to there. And so, I mean, they were. They were a mechanic that only knew how to work on a particular type of engine that no longer, you know, that nobody uses anymore.

Right?

I mean, that. That is what a lot of these folks were. Because marketing, at the end of the day, is the amplification of a message, right? That is what marketing and advertising is. It is the crafting and then the amplification. And all of the emphasis has been around the amplification. That's what we talk about. We talk about traffic creation, generating awareness, right? So much of what we talk about as marketers is amplification. But amplification of what? Right now, in a world where you can have perfect, inexpensive targeting, the messaging can be, you know, meh, it can be okay. But if you show up at the right person right time, you're going to win more time. So you're going to lose, right? But now it's really. It's going to be all about the messaging. So I think the people who are going to win and why I said what I said, let the best copywriter win. It's going to be the folks who see themselves as copywriters first, as messengers for communicators first, and then the amplification. Well, we use radio, tv, the Internet, a megaphone, a dude spinning a sign in a gorilla suit on the, you know, street corner. Like, that's all just amplification. So, yeah, you got to know how to do that. That's table stakes. That's just. You got to know that to show up where the edge is going to be moving forward is going to be on the messaging side. And so that's. And most of these marketers haven't ever learned how to craft a message. They haven't ever learned how to dig in and figure out, like, what does this person really want? They only know, like, well, if somebody's looking for this, then I'll show it to them. Okay, that's great. That's somebody who is solution aware or somebody who's most aware. But if we think about markets as concentric circles selling to people who already know like and trust you and desperately want the thing that you have, man, that's easy. You don't need a marketer to do that. Just show up and say, hey, I'm here. You're welcome. Right? Going out to that next ring. Those folks who are, you know, who are, who are solution aware who are in market, they're actively looking for stuff. You're crazy if you don't target those folks. I mean, you're crazy if you don't aren't bidding on certain keywords and things like that in Google. Like yeah, you need to do it. I'm not saying that stuff isn't good and that it doesn't work. You have to do it. But that's not where the big gains are going to come from anymore. The big gains are going out to the problem aware market and even the generally unaware. That's where it's going to happen. That's where you got to learn to speak to people at their unspoken need, their unspoken desire. Things that they aren't even talking. So you mentioned Roy, the ad that he ran, it was for Justice Jewelers. And so if you want to Google Rolex ad Justice Jewelers, you can probably find it. There may even be a YouTube link, maybe we can drop it in the show notes. But the basic idea is Justice Jewelers, it was a regional jewelry company, I think somewhere in the Midwest, you know, maybe the South. But the basic premise was he tells the story of Sir Edmund Hillary, you know, on conquering Mount Everest and the idea of the watches like, you know, and when Sir Edmund Hillary returned, he was given, you know, this Rolex, you know, when you've conquered your own Everest, your Rolex will be waiting for you. At Justice Jewelers, he wasn't selling a watch. Right. The underlying need wasn't somebody needing to know what time it was. Right. And that's the kind of stuff that a lot of marketers who just get, oh no, we just need to focus on the features and the benefits and make sure that we're ranking really well for buy Rolex and make sure that we're there in front of them for all those keywords. They understood that this is for somebody who has conquered a mountain and they are looking for a way to celebrate it and they don't know how to celebrate it. And you just gave them a tool mechanism for doing that. You're Selling them that identity reinforcement, right? That's what great marketers understand. And that's what frankly, we've been talking about at Digital Marketer forever. Right? At Digital Marketer, we've been talking about copywriting before and after Grid Core, Message, Canvas. Like, these are all primary frameworks that we teach. We don't get into the. With a lot of our stuff, our workshops, some of our certs, we'll get into the mechanics because you got to know how to do it. It's just not where the edge is anymore.

Well, I think this transitions well into the other part of what we wanted to talk about here today, because I think a lot of CEOs right now are struggling with the transition to not only the new world that we now live, but also just in general transferring over from primary marketing person, being your own CMO to being sort of, you know, the one who does this through others. And in this world right now, it's. It's like you need the firepower. It's like you absolutely have to have it. And I tell the story about tier 11, I only relate it back because we're an ad agency. Like, we do this for a living. If you look at our payroll, like, our payroll when we first started was like 70 to 80% media buyers. Now it's like 60% creative and ad copy people. Because we've seen this sort of transition happen. Because the message is it never was not important, it was always important, but now it's more important than ever in digital. And we as an organization have sort of had to make that change. I know you've made that change internally, you know, not only at Digital Marketer, the scalable company, but also now you teach this kind of stuff and how to help with that transition to CEO. So maybe speak to that a bit in this particular time point where we're at.

I'll speak to that. I don't want to miss something that you just said there, because I think it's so important, because I said before, like, it's going to be a bloodbath, you know, for a lot of agencies, the playbook for how to make sure that you're not in the bath. Oh, blood. Is to do what you just described, Ralph. Right. Like, if you're an agency, get good at. At copywriting, get good at the creative side, right? That's where we're going to have to go the. Or just be 100% specialized in one particular marketing mechanic and partner with other agencies who get that creative side. Right. You need to do one of those two things and kind of be that thing for them. Because I know for us internally, we focus on messaging and for all of the mechanical aspects of a given channel, whether it's Google or it's Facebook or it's YouTube, we are working with external agencies, consultants, practitioners to do that. Because it's gotten so specialized that to think that you're going to be able to do it all internally, you know you're fooling yourself. And if you don't have those messaging capabilities internally, then you need to work with an agency or a group that has that messaging that can help you with the messaging and then ideally can connect you with the other practitioners who can, who can do the specific channel work. So if you're a founder, CEO, that's your playbook, right? Either build the messaging capabilities internally or work with an outside agency consultant who gets messaging. And you're going to hear that because they're going to talk to you about not just what are the keywords that people are looking for, they're going to get into the, what are those deepest desires? What's the transformation you want to create? Are we talking identity reinforcement? What are those things that we're talking about? You're going to hear some of this stuff and then they got access to the folks. If you're an agency, if you're a consultant, decide, are you going to double down and over invest in the messaging and partner with other agencies and consultants who can do the mechanical side, or are you going to be a specialist, a mechanic who gets in with these other folks? Both are great avenues. Understand what you're best at. But the idea that, oh no, we're full service, we do it all, that can happen. They're just massive. I mean, they're, they're massive and they usually have grown through acquisition and very often, not always very often, if they can do everything, it means they're kind of not that great at any of it.

Hey, business hunch listeners, we're going to get right back to the show, but Roland wanted me to invite you to a brand new training that he's doing on acquiring businesses with no money out of pocket. It's something that he's talked quite a bit about on the show, but he's doing a free training where he's going to walk through the entire process. So if you want to get access to that, go to businesslunchpodcast.com epic that's businesslunchpodcast.com epic and you can get signed up.

So that's kind of the playbook if you are marketing practitioner, right? If you're the agency, the consultant, that's your playbook. I want to talk to the CEOs out there, the founders out there. Though I said something at TNC this year that might be a bit controversial and that might even make our new partners at TNC on the clarion side, maybe a little bit grumpy with me, but it's true. And that is, I said to all the CEOs and all the founders, don't come to TNC next year. All right? You come, maybe get a ticket, walk the trade floor, look for providers, bring your team, bring your marketing team. Absolutely. A thousand percent. Like you should probably buy more tickets, but you should not be the one sitting in here and learning this stuff. You need to be networking, you need to be equipping, you know, your people. But as a CEO, to think that today you're going to be both the person running the company and the person marketing, all the stuff is not gonna. And I say that as the founder and CEO of a company called Digital Marketer. Right? I am a marketer. I identify as a marketer. I started Digital Marketer cause I love marketing and marketers. I don't market anymore. I'm not even in the marketing meetings anymore. I basically play a marketer on tv. All right, I will confess that here, what I am good at and what I still continue to focus on is the messaging. So as a CEO, your primary job is communicator. You're the communicator in chief, right? What is the message that we need to put out to the market? What's the message that we need to be driving internally?

Right.

That hasn't changed. But if you're, you're a CEO and you're still running your own Facebook and Instagram ads, it's time to hand, it's time to hand that off. And so we, we kind of made a decision back in, going into 2016. We set a five year vision for admission for Digital Marketer. We wanted Digital Marketer to be all about, you know, doubling the size of 10,000 businesses. And it was a really cool mission in, in a lot of ways. A lot of ways it was kind of a stupid mission because we had no way to track it. And so people have said, like, how did you do that? Like, our mission was to double the size of 10,000 businesses by 2020. Right? That was, you know, that was our mission. And people would ask us, like, how are you tracking towards that? And we're like, honestly, we don't know and so in retrospect, we should have picked a mission that we could track better. But what I'm very confident of is that we accomplished it. I mean, having seen the tens of thousands of customers that have gone through, having heard the stories, I do believe that we absolutely played a role in, in the doubling of 10,000 businesses, if only through the agencies that we've taught and trained and the companies that they've helped, you know, along the way. But going into 2020, it was time for us to kind of create a new five year mission, you know, have a new five year plan. And unfortunately, in 2020, we all know what happened, right? Covid happened. And we were like, okay, our mission is don't die, right? That's our, that's our mission for the next year is like, don't go out of business. We didn't know what was going to happen. You know, our, this little event we were doing TNC had just gotten canceled. The world's imploding, you know, all commerce is effectively stopped. Like nobody knew what was going to happen. And so we were like, we're not going to reset our mission. We finally were able to do that this year, right? We realized, okay, we're not going to die. We finally did it this year. And what we realized is that Digital Marketer needs to be about serving, enabling marketers, right? We need to simplify and systemize marketing so that marketers can freaking win and do their best work, right? So that marketers don't have to justify their existence, so that marketers are able to speak into, you know, wherever it is that they're working or whatever clients they're working with the value they provide. So Digital Marketer is all about serving marketers, marketing practitioners, marketers who work within companies, agencies and consultants who do marketing for others, marketing leaders. That's what Digital Marketer is about. What that meant is that we were no longer talking to the small business owner. It meant we were no longer talking to the founder, we were no longer talking to the entrepreneur. And so what we did in realizing that we weren't, and that's who we were talking to in the previous mission and vision at Digital Marketer. We knew we needed to start another company to do that. So we launched the scalable company at Scalable Co. And really, because that's who I am, you know, that's who I'm primarily talking to. And so what I'm telling founders there is get out of the dang marketing meetings, right? What you need to do is you need to be working with your team, right? Decide, like, help to document the customer value journey, right? The thing that we teach, like, make sure that how you create customers is documented. You should be involved in that. You should help to clarify, like, what does it mean for us to acquire customers, right? That's the first step. The second step, work with your team to develop a, what we call a growth scorecard, right? To be able to look at it and to see is our marketing working. Are we actually acquiring customers? We teach how to, you know, how to do this in our different programs. If you're working with one of our certified partners, they definitely know how to help this, you know, get you set up. But now what you're simply looking at is red, yellow and green lights, right? If things are green, thumbs up, right? So every week now, like my job as a CEO is I review our growth scorecards. And if I say green, if I, if I just see green, I send a slack message team saying, great job. If I see green for too long, then I'm going to say, hey, it's time to raise up our standards a little bit. You know, we're sandbagging. If I see yellow, I might ask a question. If I see red, I'm going to say, like, how can I help? What can I do? How can I help? But this is important. If you're a CEO, it's not your job to have the answers. It's your job to ask the questions. And then every 90 days, we do a, we do a planning meeting where we say, what are the big three projects we're going to execute this quarter that's going to turn red to yellow and yellow to green. That's now my job, right? That's, that's what I do. That's how I lead marketing and growth teams. I understand how customers happen. We have growth scorecards to track the progress. I ask, how do we turn red to yellow, yellow to green? And so kind of in realizing that that's there, that's what we teach and that's what we talk about at Scalable Co. And that's what if you are a CEO, that's where you need to get your role in marketing needs to be, not the person coming up with all the plans. You're the communicator in chief and you're the questioner in chief. And if you're doing those two things, then that's how you're kind of making that transition from I'm the marketer to I'm the one actually running the company. I know it's Hard. I know it's hard. As the person who started out as the marketer, it's a hard one to hand off, but you got to do it if you want to scale.

It's a great quote. As the leader, you don't need to have all the answers, but you do need to have and ask the right questions. And I think we're at the end of our time here, but I think that's a good thing for CEOs and founders to really think about, especially when it comes to your marketing and the ones that list listen to this show. This is an especially difficult transition because the chances are they're marketers to begin with and maybe that's one of the reasons why they're successful, why they've gotten to a point in their careers where it is time to make that transition. Certainly sounds like the event that you guys are doing and within the next week or so is geared towards these types of folks. Can you tell us a little bit about what you got cooking and Scalable Impact live.

Shameless Plug time now. So Shameless Plug, that's the theme song going into. Yeah, thank you. I almost forgot. The whole point of me coming on was to give this Shameless Plug and no joke, I almost forgot to do it. Yeah. So we are. We didn't just launch a new brand this year at Scalable Co. We also wanted to launch a new and this event again, a digital marketer is going to be for marketers and marketing practitioners and Traffic and Conversion Summit is going to be for marketers and marketing practitioners. And we needed a brand for the entrepreneur and the CEO. And we also need an event for the entrepreneur and the CEO. So yes, we are hosting Scalable Impact Live, which is the first, what will be an annual event for market for the founders and the. And the entrepreneurs. Now, this is not Traffic and Conversion Summit. We are not going to be talking about marketing. There literally isn't a single session about marketing. What we're talking about is what does it look like to scale your company to the next level? Because if there's one thing that I've learned as a marketer turned CEO is growth is not enough. I've had so many businesses that we nearly grew into oblivion because we grew without having all of the other pieces, the intangibles, the right operating system in place, understanding how profit actually happens. As a marketer, I was like, hey, as long as there's enough gross, there'll be some net hanging around there at the bottom. Not always. Not always. We had a business a few years ago that was on the Inc. 500 list and nearly bankrupt. I mean, we were in full blown turnaround, near bankruptcy mode 18 months, I'm sorry, less than 12 months later because we grew too fast and weren't watching some of the different aspects. So Scalable Impact Live is the new flagship event that we have at the scalable company. And it is for you if you're an entrepreneur, if you're a CEO and if you're thinking that, hey, maybe growth isn't enough here. And we do have both. It's in Austin, Texas November 2nd and 3rd. So just a two day event and it's single track. It's kind of old school. It's just, it's, it's me and my business partners teaching and walking through different workshops. Highly interactive. It'll be, you know, five or six hundred people, which is a little bit less than the whole lot of thousands that come out to tnc. And it is, you know, that I'm really excited about it. I'm excited about the material. We also have Marcus Lemonis who if you've watched the TV show the Prophet, he's gonna be coming out. Emmett Smith, if you're a football fan, it's going to be, is going to be coming out. We got, we've got a lot of Kendra Scott who, if you're familiar with Kendra Scott, jewelry, she started jewelry company, she's based here in Austin. Yeah, sold it for like a billion dollars. She's going to be coming out. But aside from those three, you know, it's mostly me and my business partner Roland Frazier and Richard Lindner kind of sharing and walking through, walking through different exercises. So come confused and frustrated and leave with what we call a scalable impact plan. It's going to be great. It is in Austin, Texas November 2nd and 3rd. So that is my utter shameless pitch. Check out scalableimpactlive.com get tickets and come hang out. I'd love to have some, some perpetual traffic peeps there.

Yeah, absolutely shameless. But you're allowed shameless plugs here. And you know, something like this is completely in line. This is a natural evolution, I think of a lot of the things that we talk about on this show because I mean, having done it for five or six years now, a lot of these folks have evolved into what should be now a CEO. And this is sort of the next logical step for that. So we'll leave links in the show notes here over@perpetualtraffic.com which is where we're sending people Right now we're pretty excited about that. But we'll have links in the show notes for everything that Ryan talked about here on today's show. But Ryan, I know you've got other places to be, other people to talk to today, so we want to be respectful of your time.

Yeah, I actually don't. It's just important to me that I maintain that, that, you know, that, that just that general brand and that theme.

Yeah, you're bumping right up against lunchtime. I think that is. You gotta block that out. You gotta get a, you know, food is important. That's important. But no, we really appreciate you coming on and it's been great. Custom didn't really grill you all that much. I'm kind of disappointed because usually he does that with guests here, but I don't know, I think he's just in full suck up, dope mode.

That's my strategy on this, is to talk and to ramble so much that nobody has a chance to, to get in and to question anything that I say. We'd have to go back and look at the, at the clock. But if, if this thing was like 45, 50 minutes, I bet I talked for at least 48 of them. If not, we just let 60. Yeah. So, yeah. So apologize to everybody for, for. My wife says that I am prone to monologue and she's right. I'm doing it right now. All right, I'm going to shut up. All right, guys, thanks so much. Thanks so much.

That's a long Jewish goodbye right there. That's what my wife calls that. She's like, oh, my. Or a Catholic goodbye. Those are pretty bad too. But anyway, yeah, well, we, nonetheless, we appreciate you coming on because I know you have other. Probably it's a golf game actually today. I know where you're going. It's either that or lunch. But either way, we need to make it short but sweet. And I think you've packed in a lot of value here and brought us back to where we ultimately should be from a marketing perspective, back to basics. But also, if you're doing too much of your marketing, you got to start looking and feeling and actually acting like a CEO. And I think Scalable Impact Live is going to be a great place to do that and some pretty awesome guests there. So definitely check that out. Like I said, we'll have all the links in the show notes over@perpetual traffic.com for my amazing co host Qasem Aslam. Until next week, everyone. Thank you, Ryan Dice, for coming on. See ya.

Thanks Joel.

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