Close the Gap: 90-Day Solopreneur Goal Achievement System

Welcome everyone to Close the Gap. This is a workshop that you have signed up for, so you are probably a subscriber to the Creative on Purpose Substack. You may have seen a post on social media that directed you to a calendar invite link that gave you all the details for how to be here. So that, that is why you are here. You're here because you took responsibility to invest a little bit of your time and attention into leveling up in your ability to get closer to what you want in life and business. You're in the right place if you have some sort of solopreneur venture. Maybe you're a coach, maybe you're a consultant, maybe you're a course creator, maybe you're a teacher, a healer, a creative. But if you are— we'll talk a little bit in a second about, you know, what my definition of solopreneur is. But if you are one of those kind of people that are trying to make a better living by making a bigger difference, doing some sort of work that matters online, in person, uh, then you are in the right place if you want to, uh, build a fulfilling part-time business that funds and fits your ideal lifestyle. So I've already shared that the best thing you can do right now as we get started is get out something to take some notes on, on camera so that you can be an active participant. Again, fair use disclaimer: portions of or the entire replay of this session will be used for educational and promotional purposes. You don't have to worry about being on— will be in presentation mode. So as long as you don't speak up, you shouldn't have to worry about whether or not you're going to be seen and diminish your reputation by being, uh, seen in a Zoom room with the likes of me. Um, I want to, uh, this is where I need to slow down a little bit just to give you a couple of resources. So in today's session, we're primarily going to be talking about, uh, philosophy, and explain what I mean by that in just a second. Um, oftentimes people come to things like this because they're looking for tactical solutions or tools that will give them some sort of quick fix or provide some sort of hack for getting whatever it is that you want to get. Um, that's not my style. And I, although I have and do share tools, tactics, and strategy, um, because we're all here from a variety of, um, different disciplines and enterprises and at various levels in those things, uh, I'm provide you with philosophy and principles that apply broadly to anybody at any point in their journey as a solopreneur that wants to create, generate more revenue in less time, doing better work with the more of the right kind of people. And I will be referencing— did I just send that to you?

I did.

I sent it to to Dr. Ángel. I want to send it to everyone. There's, uh, this link will take you to a list, uh, it's basically a curated curriculum of content that I've created. Most of it is free. Most of it also has, uh, downloads, worksheets, uh, or specific exercises that you can do. Um, so if I reference some sort of tactic or strategy or article, it will be in— you'll be able to find it in that link. I mentioned a second ago that at the end of the presentation, we are going to go into closed session with the Catalyst Club community of paid subscribers to do Q&A and implementation. If you are not, we a lot of folks here are members of that community and would like to test drive what it'd be like to hang out with cool people doing cool things, then you can click on this link that I just dropped in. That will give you a 7-day free trial. And if you sign up for that before we're done with the presentation, you are welcome to stick around and join us for the Q&A and implementation session. And then everyone that's been here before knows that it's not— this is not one of those presentations where I give you a bunch of information but leave out the important bits so that you have to sign up or purchase something from me. That's, that's not my style. I'm going to give you all the tools and some strategy tools and tactics that will help you close the gap between where you are and where you want to be in terms of building a fulfilling business that funds and fits around your ideal lifestyle. Um, if you would like some help with, or some of my help in implementing this material, and you would like to do it with a community of, uh, fellow travelers that are people like you doing things like this, then you can check out the Close the Gap program. It's my newest and lowest price coaching offer. And, uh, we get started this Wednesday. And so if, if the ideas that I'm sharing here resonate and you would like a little bit of help for a very, very reasonable price, you can click on that link and learn more about the Close the Gap program. And that is my one and pitch. All right. So let's dive in. So when we are talking about closing the gap, we are talking about how do solopreneurs, like people like you in this room who are coaches, teachers, healers, course creators, maybe you are creative that has, you know, some, some art to sell. Maybe you're a freelancer, like a copywriter or graphic designer or a musician. I was a musician, professional musician for 30 years. I consider myself to be mostly a freelancer. If you are looking for a way that you can make a better living in less time, with less effort, with greater ease, and you want to collapse time to target, then, you know, that's a lot of the times what people that are solopreneurs are initially starting their business to do. So a solopreneur for me is just basically a one-person operation, some sort of service or product that you are promoting in the world and, and selling to make a living. Maybe you're— you have a cause that you're promoting or an idea that you're trying to spread. That would also qualify. But, you know, and maybe you have a virtual assistant or maybe you have a a very small team, I would still put you in the solopreneur category. But here's the dilemma. Most of us start our solopreneur enterprise because we want to be fully in control of how we spend our time, where we spend our time, who we spend our time with. And we have this dream that we're going to take this expertise that we have or this thing that we've created and we're going to productize it or monetize it so that we can make a living doing work that we love to do, making the change that we want to make with and for people that we care about. And, and we don't have to get a real job, right? Get a straight job, work for, for someone else, or be in a cubicle all day. Is that most solopreneurs in my experience, and I will speak directly to my experience, you know, I started side hustle as a coach during my time at Akimba Workshops. And the dream was I was going to retire from my career as a professional musician. I was going to close my lesson studio. I was going to become basically a digital nomad. I was going to coach from exotic locations all over the world while my wife and I were traveling the world. The reality is that I ended up going from a fairly lucrative part-time job as a coach and a full-time head coach at Akimbo Workshops and as a professional musician to basically working 10 hours a day, 7 days a week spending 80% of that time trying to attract clients, trying to close clients, and 20% of the time actually doing the work that I signed up to do when I started my business. Just as a show of hands, you can raise your, your actual hand, or you're welcome to hand conditions that you are engaged in that feel like you spend more time than you would like in marketing and sales activities as opposed to doing the kind of work that you would like to do. One person, two people, okay, three people. Is everything okay? Just checking in. Is my internet okay? Am I freezing up? It looks to me like I might be freezing up from time to time.

Let me—

so bear with me for just a second. I'm going to switch to my hotspot if I can. And my hotspot isn't even showing up. So I, if I'm breaking up a little bit, looks like my Wi-Fi is good. So if you are indeed spending more time marketing and selling your product or service than you are actually engaging in the business that you started your business for in the first place, you are not alone. This is a very common dilemma that I find amongst all solopreneurs that I work with. So what I want you to consider is when we start our business, we are starting our business because we are trying to fund some sort of idealized lifestyle that we had, have, and we are wanting our business to fund that lifestyle. How many people feel they are absolutely clear what lifestyle they are trying to fund and fit their business around? Bear with me for one second. I'm going to switch venues so that I am not freezing up on you all. Give me one second. I apologize for that.

Okay.

So we start our business to fit around this idealized lifestyle and fund that lifestyle. How many people here are absolutely clear about the lifestyle they are trying to fund and fit around? Awesome, awesome. For those that aren't, or for those that are— have found that that dream that they had is not actually being realized, I want to recommend a couple of exercises. Both of them can be found in Nick Peterson's book Bumpers. A lot of you here are familiar with Nick and his work through the Guardian Academy and other things. This is, this is the ex— there's an exercise on page 50 of this book, and I just dropped a link in that will allow you to get a free copy, free digital copy of Bumpers. And I know most of the people in the Catalyst community, Catalyst Club community already have this. But if you turn to page 50, there's basically an exercise that has you kind of audit your standard week. Where are you spending your time and where are you putting your attention day to day?, in an, in your average week, and then challenges you to frame the week that you would like to have. If you look at the post that I put out on Monday of this week at the Creative on Purpose, uh, Substack, you'll see an example of what my weeks used to look like and what my week currently looks like. So my challenge to you is get really specific. Like when you say that you want to to fund and fit your ideal lifestyle, what does that actually look like on a weekly basis? The other thing I challenge you to do, uh, and this is also an exercise you can find in Bumpers, is actually clearly and specifically define what success looks and feels like to you. Most of the time, people will attach a money figure or an amount of free time to that definition of success. I would challenge you to avoid doing that because as human beings, we are kind of hardwired, programmed, and conditioned to believe that more money and more time is going to solve all our problems. Well, I don't know how many of you know this already, but nobody has figured it out how to create more time. There are 24 hours in a day. We all have the same amount of time. How you spend that time is actually your responsibility. And if you don't know where all your— how all of your time is being spent, then there's no compass that I can give you and no roadmap that some guru can give you that's going to get you what you want. Because your definition of success and your path to achieving that is as unique as you are. And so you have to define for yourself, what does success mean to me? What is the destination that I'm actually heading to? So rather than think about how much money you would like to make or how much free time you would like to have, What would you do if you had the amount of money that you would like to have? What would you be doing if you had the amount of time that you would like to have? That's what you're actually aiming for. We are very bad most of the time. Most people are very challenged to clearly and specifically define what success means to them. Does anybody want to volunteer a reason why that might be? You're free to come off mute if you want to.

I would say, Scott, because they don't know.

Possibly, possibly. We're gonna talk a little bit about how you can if, if, if you are— if you actually don't know for yourself, I'll, we'll— I'll give you some ideas for how you might do that. Here's, here's what I find. If you clearly define what success means to you, you by definition have also clearly defined what failure means to you. And human beings are programmed by biology and conditioned by society to have a paralyzing fear of failure. We would rather stay where we are than take a chance on getting what we actually want. And so my challenge to you is to clearly define what success means to you. And instead of, um, letting fear dictate whether, how, whether or not you go for it, or, and, and how you go about it, to understand that something that we say quite frequently in the, the Guardian Academy and, and then some of the programs that I'm in with, um, Laurel Portier and Nick, uh, Peterson and Dr. Jeff Spencer is the process is the shortcut. If you are, if you are engaged in a journey to get closer to what you want to achieve, your definition of success, and you are engaged in that journey with intention and integrity, that everything that you do is done with, for, and on purpose and in alignment with who you really are, what you're really good at, where you really belong. And that you're adhering to your guiding principles and values, you are already successful because almost nobody is doing that. If you look around the internet, everybody's offering tricks, hacks, blueprints, roadmaps, cookie-cutter solutions to problems that are highly idiosyncratic and unique. Nobody else is roadmap is going to get you to your destination. Roadmaps can only take you where other people have gone or other people want you to go. You need a compass so that you can wayfind your way to your destination. And so to MJ's point, the first thing that you really have to do is you have to spend some time knowing thyself. You have to know who you are, what you're good at, and where you belong. You have to know what your personality is, what your preferences are, and what your actual talents are, and what is the unique way that you make the difference only you can make. Because the difference only you can make is the difference you can make in the way that only you can make it. And so in the list of resources that's in that link to, um, The, the Ultimate Guide to Solopreneur Success, you'll find at the very beginning is an article called Start with Who. It has plenty of resources that will help you clarify or refine or dial in what your actual values, talents, and, you know, where your scene is. And, and if you already have some idea, it will help you clarify and refine that. So the next thing I want you to consider, and this is also in that, uh, that article, is I believe that there are basically 3 rules for success in any endeavor, personal or professional. The 3 rules are receptivity, restraint, and responsibility. Receptivity. Human beings crave certainty. And because we crave certainty, most of the time we believe what we believe simply because we believe it. And we believe it often in the face of contra— evidence to the contrary, or scientific evidence that disproves what we believe. If, if you already knew everything that you needed to know to succeed in life, you wouldn't be on this call. So receptivity— there's many, many ways that you can get from where you are to where you want to be. There are other, other people will have other, other priorities and other pathways.. And you need to be a little bit less dogmatic and a little bit more scientific about the way, and keep an open mind, what we call open loops, about how you are clarifying your destination and how you are getting there. Restraint. Restraint is the ability to understand that just because you can doesn't mean you should. We live in a very, very, busy, noisy, distracted world. Everybody everywhere is trying to sell you something with that promise that it is the silver bullet, the panacea, the magic pill that's going to give you what you want. You're not going to have to work too hard for it. It's not going to cost you too much. And it's, you know, people like the people in this room, you know, you're here in part because you're learners and people that— and if you're at all like me, you've probably already bought a lot of programs. You probably invested hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of dollars in coaching, in masterminds, in courses and programs. We're kind of hardwired for that kind of activity. But not only do you have to show restraint about what you do, you have to have the restraint to continue to stop doing things that you shouldn't be doing. And so restraint is just the ability to, uh, pause for a minute. Don't make emotional decisions, uh, don't let your feelings drag you around, don't let fear and overwhelm and, um, anxiety and all that kind of thing drive your decision-making. Make sure that you are making reasoned choices and that you are only doing the necessary things that you need to do to achieve the goals that you want to achieve. And then responsibility is just what it sounds like. Everything in life, except for two things that I'm aware of, are completely beyond your control. You cannot control what is happening in the world. You cannot control the environment that you're operating in. You cannot control, um, other people. You cannot control outcomes. The only things that you have control over are how, how you perceive yourself, your situation, and other people, and what you decide and do next. The good news is that's all you need to control to live a prosperous life and make progress toward the things that you want, because by controlling how you see things and what you decide and do next, you can actually almost engineer certainty that you can collapse time to target, that you can get closer to the things that you want. And if you maintain that intention and integrity as you go, the journey in and of itself is its own reward. So here's the main course. When we are talking about closing the gap, we are talking about 3 essential things. And for those of you that have seen the COVID of the new book, you've actually already seen this in terms of philosophically and principally, like, based on, based on your belief that you can achieve developing, delivering, uh, building this business that fits and funds your ideal lifestyle. The 3 things that have to go right, the 3 principles are clarifying your direction, crafting your path, and collapsing time to target. I've been writing about these things quite a bit recently. Again, the list, the curriculum will give you plenty of additional resources. I'm going to cover just a couple of things under each of these 3 steps. Uh, to help you. The, the first is that when we're talking about clarifying direction, we have to use what's called reasoning from first principles or first principles thinking. You can't find your way to a vague or unclear destination. This is why things like, I just want to make more money, or I just want to have more time, are not great destinations. Number one, You can't make more time. So, that's a false destination. That's a delusion. And more money is not the solution to anything. Clarifying direct— direction means specifically, and again, this speaks to what I was saying earlier, what's the lifestyle that I'm actually optimizing for? I'll weave a little bit of my own experience in here. I was a person that was chasing more. I just want to make more money, more clients, more money. And somehow, miraculously, this will translate into more time with my family and more time for travel and the other things I want to do. The forcing function for getting me to rethink my destination was when my son and daughter-in-law announced that they were pregnant. My wife and I decided we wanted to be daycare, and we realized immediately after we raised our hand to be daycare, that we could not possibly be full-time grandparents when we were both working 10 hours a day, 7 days a week. That forced me to clarify what does my weekly schedule have to look like so that I can spend 9 hours a day with my grandson. And so that became my destination. That became my, my definition of success. I have to be able to make a full-time income, which for me is not a huge ridiculous figure, working a few hours a day every morning, doing the things I have to do in my business and using my flex time in the afternoons when my wife and I can trade off daycare responsibilities to actually do what I started my business to do, which is making a difference with the clients that I have. So whatever your definition of success is, figure that out. That's what you're optimizing for. Here's the thing. A lot of people that I work with actually have a— can come up with a pretty good idea, pretty clear idea of where they want to be. Almost none of them know exactly where they're starting and what they're starting with. When you go to the list of resources, um, there's, uh, uh, an article and, uh, a replay of the Be a Blessing Marketing and the Get Clients Now workshops that both have workshops that will actually help you define where you're, you're starting from and what you're starting with. What you need to do is you have to take an audit of all of your assets, all the things that you've already spent time creating and all the places where you are spending your time on marketing and sales activities. We always— what I always find is that people have way more assets, more than enough resources to create a pathway to succeed in their business in a lot less time with a lot less effort. It's less— there's nothing that you will have to add to your to-do list. What will actually help you is to eliminate all the things that are actually not giving you any return on investment and focus only on the 2 or 3 things that are actually helping you close the gap. So clear destination, clear starting point, and clear, clear assessment an audit of all the assets that you already have and then clarifying which ones actually are working for you. The other, the final piece around clarity of direction. Well, let me just back up for one second. When you have enough clarity of where you're going and where you're starting and what you're starting with, you have just created a vector. You have direction. You know where you're going. When you don't have clarity of those two things and you just keep doing more and more things hoping that somehow this one will be the magic pill that makes everything work, or that some sort of miracle will happen if you just follow this guru's program or process, you're actually getting further and further away from what you want. We'll talk a little bit about that in, in the Craft Your Path piece. But when you are clear about where you're starting and where you're going, you've created a vector, and you've established the ability to craft a path that will get you there with some degree of certainty, or at least some confidence, and a path that you can start to collapse time to target with. At the same time, you have to enter this approach with a reserve clause. I reserve the right to change my mind. When we put a point on the horizon that we're heading towards, we can't know all the other opportunities that we have never considered that come across our path. We cannot know all the obstacles that will cross and impede our path that we could not have foreseen, some of which will be opportunities in disguise and some will provide a reason to course correct. What I have found over and over and over again is that almost nobody gets exactly where they said they were going to go at the beginning, but they always get somewhere even better because they are holding their destination loosely. They're holding it with enough grip to provide that direction, but holding it loosely enough to course correct and get where they really, really want to be, really need to be, where life is calling them to be. So reserve class— this doesn't mean like just quit because things aren't— don't, don't work right the first time. It just means hold all these things loosely because they will be refined and iterated and improved over time. That brings us to the craft your path piece. In order to get from where you are to where you want to be as a solopreneur in terms of building a better business that makes you a better living while you're making a big difference, the Be A Blessing marketing will give you lots of strategy and tactics for how to do that in a way that lets you do more of the work you love and less of the marketing and sales stuff that you hate. Generally, That path requires just a few things to go right enough to start getting traction and making progress to your goal. You have to figure out what those 2 or 3 things are. Again, the more things you add, the farther away you're going to get. Is everybody here familiar with system reliability or system thinking? If you're in the, if you're in the Catalyst Club, you probably have heard me bang on about this quite a bit. Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets. If you have a very, if you have a very glutted system full of lots of unnecessary components, you have created a system that is very inefficient and very ineffective. If you have created a system that is lean, that only contains the components that are necessary and you spend time improving the least, least efficient or effective component, you will close the gap between where you are and where you want to be in a lot less time with a lot more or a lot less effort. And so honestly, the first step in the process that I go through with clients is When we have the clarity of destination, when we have a clear— the clarity of where we're starting and what we're starting with, we go through and we eliminate everything that is unnecessary, or at least put it on the back burner. We focus on the 2 or 3 things that we know we need to close more clients. If you have been in business for any length of time, especially if you've been in business for 2 or 3 years, if you've ever actually succeeded in making a sale or closing a client, the rearview mirror provides you with everything you need to know. What you need to do is do more of the things that worked in the past and improve those systems and stop doing all the things that you added since you did that thing that works. And that's kind of goes against our hardwiring as solopreneurs. We're always looking for the new thing. There's always something better and more fun and interesting out there for us to try. It's, it's not sexy to just take something that worked and iterate and improve it until it is sexy because it actually works better and it gets you where you want to go faster and it gets you better results. So stop adding, start subtracting, and then it's always dial in the 2 or 3 things that need to go right. And then it's always about just take the next right step, just do the next right thing. And that really boils down to making decisions better. It is impossible to make better decisions. There is no right answer. You can make really bad decisions that get you really good outcomes. It's, it's dangerous because we make a bad decision, we get a good outcome, and we say, well, we should just do that again. But bad decisions over time will eventually, will eventually blow you up. You can make really good decisions that turn out badly, and that can be really dangerous because you say, well, that didn't work, I should never do that again. Well, that's actually the one thing that you should do over and over again, because over time, good decisions compound and you will win more than you lose. I'm dropping a link to get a free copy of my book, Onward. It's basically a book about how to make decisions better. It gives you the 3 steps that you need to take to make decisions better. And so this whole idea of crafting your path is once you have got the 2 or 3 things that need to, that need to happen, that needs to be optimized to guarantee that you're going to get what you want. Then it's a matter of making decisions better and better and better, making each decision better than the one that preceded it. And that ensures that you will make progress towards your goal. And then the final piece, and this is, this is the, the main feature of the Close the Gap program. Um, you know, the Close the Gap GAP program begins with an onboarding call that helps you clarify your destination and where you're starting from, what you're starting with, and craft that path. But then for 3 months, we meet every week and we identify the next, the next most immediate constraint, the next most immediate obstacle, the next most immediate limitation, because getting from where you are to where you want to be is about creating flow. And trying to deal with constraints that are 2 or 3 steps away from where you are is just a waste of time. Because if you take care of the most immediate constraint, you've actually, by definition, increased your flow, which will help you identify the next most immediate constraint. And sometimes if you take care of the, the limitations in the right order at the right time in the right sequence, some of those limitations further down the line will actually sort themselves out. So identifying the next most immediate limitation or constraint to your progress is— that's the thing that has to happen so that you can start to collapse time. Um, which brings us to the final piece, which is this whole idea of collapsing time. So We talked a little bit about one of the features of collapsing time, which is what I call the recapture and reallocate process. It's something that I learned from Nick Peterson and Dan Nicholson. Dan Nicholson wrote a fantastic book called Rigging the Game that I recommend. So the idea here is recapture and reallocate mean is that process I alluded to before, like actually taking an audit of all your assets and take an audit of where am I spending my money? What am I spending it on? Where am I spending my time? What am I spending it on? Where am I paying attention? What am I paying attention to? If you audit where your most precious resources are already being spent, you will find an incredible amount of redundancy and waste. All the lifestyle apps and the business apps and the streaming services and the software, most of it is unnecessary. My most successful offer ever was built with a Google Doc and a PayPal link, period. I just simply sold it to a warm audience that was— had already said they were eager to work with me. And instead of doing more of that, I bought all the apps, bought all the software, spent all the time building all the email sequences and building the YouTube channel and the podcast and the broadcast and all those things. And all it did was get me further away from what I actually wanted. So Recapture and Reallocate is simply a process. And again, there's a, a very detailed exercise way that you can do this in the curriculum. Where are you spending all your time and attention, money and effort? Where is the waste? Recapture that, and now you have plenty of resources to rededicate to the things that will actually get you closer to you want, to optimizing the system that will get you closer, faster to what you actually want in life. The second piece is optimizing, and this is where a system— again, this comes from Dan Nicholson and Nick Peterson— called CASE: Collect, Analyze, strategize, execute. And this is what the whole Close the Gap program is built upon. Week to week, we are collecting the data, analyzing the data, defining what our next step is, and then executing that step. Give you a quick example. For a lot of coaches and consultants and freelancers, the way that we get business is by getting people on, onto some version of a sales call, discovery call, whatever you want to call it. In order to get someone on a call, you have to have some sort of direct communication with them. Maybe it's on Messenger, maybe it's through your email list. And in order to get into that conversation, you have to start the conversation with some sort of content strategy. Maybe it's email, maybe it's social media. It doesn't really matter, but you're, you're putting out a certain amount of content to start a certain number of conversations that, that get into a more direct one-on-one kind of situation so that you can get them on a call so that you can close them as a client. That's your system. How much content do I need to generate in order to start the number of conversations necessary to get the number of calls necessary to get the number of clients that I want? And once you've dialed that in, or once you've dialed in a system that where you've got at least one client coming out at the end of that sequence, that system, then you can start working on optimizing the system. You know, if you're getting 10 people on a call, but only one of them turns into a client, guess what? The most effective and efficient thing you can do is get better at the call. If you're not getting any calls or not getting enough calls, the best thing you can do is get better at those direct conversations. And if you're not getting enough conversations, the best thing you could do is get better at creating content. So the CASE system allows us to identify the most immediate constraint. And strategize the next step that we need to execute to navigate through, past, around that constraint. And then the very last piece of the collapsing time, and again, this is one of the, the, the more tactical things that I promised I would share, is another thing that comes from Dan and Nick that has been a total game changer for me. It's called the Four Lenses. When you are trying to decide, you know, whether or not to try this, you know, this new marketing thing or this new sales thing or put out this new offer, then apply the 4 lenses. The 4 lenses are: does this save time? Does this save money? Does this make money? Is this a forcing function? Forcing function is, is something that makes you do something that you need to do anyways. Volunteering to be full-time grandparents was a forcing function for getting my business under control. I couldn't be a full-time grandfather and run the business the way I was already doing it. This Workshop is a forcing function. I am creating content that I had to create anyway, but I'm doing it in real time with a group of people that will provide me with immediate feedback on how to iterate and improve this. So when you're applying the 4 lenses, what you want is it has to tick at least 3, 3 of the 4 lenses in order for it to be a viable enterprise worthy of your time, attention, money, and effort. So again, just to use this as an example, okay, I'm thinking about creating this Close the Gap program. Is anybody interested in this idea of closing the gap? I don't know. Let's find out. Forcing function. Host a workshop. Will it save me time? Well, it will force it. I'll create content in an hour. That normally would have taken me days or weeks to create on my own. Will it make me money? To be determined. Uh, but well, since I've already got 3 people enrolled in the Close the Gap program, it's already made me money. And my guess is that more people will join the program as a result of either this call or some of the other promotional things that are going on. So Saves me time because I'm doing it in 1 hour instead of days and days and days. Saves me money. Forcing function makes me articulate the ideas that I want to share in the program and probably going to make me money as well. I ticked all 4 boxes, therefore I decided to do this thing. That's how, how you can apply the 4 lenses and you can apply that to anything that you want to do. Creating a new offer, creating a new workshop, creating content in general, you can think about the 4 lenses as a tool for determining whether or not this is a good idea right now for you to invest your time in. So that is the end of my little riff rant again. So what we've talked about here is the importance of getting clear and specific about the definition of success that you're aiming for. What success means to you, getting clear about who you really are, what you're really good at, where you really belong, and optimizing around your personality and your preferences and your unique set of skills and talents and values and guiding principles. We talked about, um, the 3 principles that will help you achieve anything in life, which are— is receptivity, restraint and responsibility. And we've talked about the elements of the Close the Gap process, which is clarify your direction by clarifying your destination, starting point, and what you're starting with. Craft your path with just the 2 or 3 things that need to go right enough for you to begin to get traction. And then collapse time, increase momentum, uh, collapse time to target by refining the system and by raising the floor on the least effective or efficient components of your system. So while, uh, we're wrapping up the, um, presentation portion, I'll just drop these links in one more time. The entire curriculum with all the resources and worksheets that I've referenced is in this link, uh, It's called The Ultimate Solopreneur Success Guide. We're about to go into the exclusive closed Catalyst Club session. If you are not a Catalyst Club member, meaning a paid subscriber, and you would like to test out what happens behind closed doors, there is a link to a 7-day free trial. If you have any interest in the Close the Gap program, which is officially starting on Wednesday, then you can learn more about it there. And if you would like— well, I'll just go ahead and ask. Normally the replays for this, these presentations, are only for the paid subscribers. Is there anyone here that is not currently a paid subscriber that would like access to the replay? And is there anybody that is, um, a Catalyst Club member that would like access to the replay early? If so, I posted, uh— whoops, just sent that to you, Tanya, because you just emailed me. If you would like early access or access that is normally reserved for paid subscribers, click on that link and leave a comment on the chat, and I will send you a top secret link to the unlisted replay, which should be available about an hour after, uh, we drop off from this call. And with that, I'm going to invite everyone that's not, uh, a member everyone that's not a member of the Catalyst Club community to see yourself to the exit. And for those of you that are Catalyst Club members, uh, let's hang out and, uh, let's— I will do my best to, uh, help you apply what we just talked about to your unique situation.

So, uh Scott Perry, thank you for going through all this. Um, I, uh, the more I hear it, the less overwhelming it feels to me. So I will—

that's the goal.

I'll just— yeah, I'll just put that forward. Um, I guess what, what I have a question about is the asset audit. Um, okay, what exactly are you considering to be assets?

Oh, that's a great question. Okay, assets. Um, assets are anything that you've already created. You know, every social media post is an asset. Your books are assets. Every post you do on Substack— and by the way, if you're not on Kim's Substack, she writes some of the best poetry on that platform. Thank you. Thank you. I call it noodle candy.

I love it.

She always shares noodle candy with me. It makes me think about things. What I find, Kim, is that, you know, because people generally kind of jump into you know, the whole business development thing, um, kind of half-cocked. Yeah, is that they, they just create a bunch of stuff. I mean, I'll just— instead of saying most people, I'll just use myself as an example. Sold my first— sold out my first coaching program with the Google Doc and the PayPal link. Immediately invested in a website creation platform. Immediately created lead magnets and an email sequence to go with it. Immediately started a YouTube channel, a podcast, um, made sure I was on all those social platforms, started generating content for all those platforms. And I don't even— and then, you know, how many books have I written? I can't even count. Those are all assets. They're not all assets that are getting me closer to what I want, right? So the audit is here are, or the assets are all the things that I've already created that I'm probably actually underleveraging. Yeah, because, you know, like every once in a while I remind myself, oh, you know, I actually have talked to some really cool people and I like repost a link to a conversation, a broadcast with Seth Godin or Chip Conley or Martha Beck or, and I've had the privilege of talking to a lot of people way smarter than me. And every time I remember to repurpose that asset, I get more and more and more subscribers, as opposed to sitting down at the computer every morning and saying, oh crap, it's a new day, I need new content for social media, what am I going to say, what am I going to, you know, and getting on Canva or doing, or getting on video or whatever. It's like assets, leverage the assets you already have and leverage them until they start working or stop working. And then even when you think they've stopped working, leverage them a little bit more just to make sure. I don't know how many of you were on the call with Sandra where she talked about our we, we worked together for 3 months and the whole point was, Scott, I've exhausted my list. I, I can't sell this thing to my list anymore. I was like, okay, well let's find out because you've built an asset, you've built an email list, you have a program. And we actually, you know, we, we worked on Be a Blessing marketing campaigns, Be Helpful campaigns, Night Word emails and all that. She sold out the program again to her exhausted list because she leveraged the asset that she had already built. We just made sure that we were testing, trying, and tweaking whatever was missing, broken, or needed work in the way that she had been doing that before. Is that— that was a lot. Does that answer your question?

Yeah, I, I, I think so. Yeah, I mean, it's not Those were some of the things that I listed, and I guess, um, from those I then pick the 2 or 3 that are really producing something.

Okay, so some, some of that is, some of that is a guessing game, but some of it is you can look— it's the case, right? Collect the data. Like, yes, this is why I'm so bullish on Substack. If you write a piece of content and share a piece of content on Substack, whether it's an article or a note, and it starts generating comments, those are potential conversations that can lead to buyers of your book or whatever else, your coaching program or whatever. So, um, you know, there, there is information already available to you. Like, what's the content that's generating comments, right? Make more of that, or make sure that you reshare that, right? Or ask your warm audience to help spread the word.

Yeah, I think that's where I I think that's where I fall short. I have a hard time asking for help for anything.

Well, can I share one more thing, Kim?

Yeah, please.

You have no problem answering asks for help because I have asked you for help and you have helped me every single time, and you're still here. So I haven't like burnt out, burned through all the goodwill that I've earned with you. Oh, you know, I don't ask every day, I don't ask every week, but, you know, from time to time when I have something that I need to, you know, boost to get it above, you know, to boost the signal to get above all the noise, I ask my most valued contributors to this community, hey, if you have a second, please comment on this post. You know, Bree is another example. Bree is not only always liking and sharing and commenting on my stuff, um, Elizabeth is another— well, almost everyone here does this, um, you know. But Bree is also like taking the things that I teach her and repurposing them and sharing them with her audience and, and giving me credit for it. That's a huge boon. I didn't even ask her to do that. So the reason I share that, Kim, is because people actually want like We are all so tired of, you know, the apostles of grit and grind preaching, you know, work harder, work faster, you know, do more. We're all tired of the gurus and the digital marketing scam artists that are, you know, using clickbait and all sorts of neuroscience and whatnot to get us to click and buy things. You know, when, when people find someone that's actually making a positive difference in the world and sharing value, they want to support that because they want more of that and they want less of the rest. So another way to frame it is it would be a disservice for someone like me that actually wants to make a difference to not ask for people that are eager to help to help.

Yeah, yeah, thank you. That makes sense.

Other questions or other, you know, specific ways that some of this could be applied to your situation? My wife doesn't get home for 2 hours, and I can get into all sorts of trouble in 2 hours. Angel's smiling like, yeah, I feel that. Well, uh, oh, go ahead.

Yeah, my mic is there. Okay, uh, I am actually working on closing the gap a little bit as you're talking. Well, I've heard a lot of this before, but now I'm in the, I'm implementing it. So I'm looking at my assets as we talked about before. I'm looking at my courses. I'm looking at my videos. What can I use to repurpose it, you know, to, you know, get it back out there because you also said, you know, probably only like a few people saw it originally. You know, my posts, uh, why not put them out again? I mean, I've realized I have so much material. I just need to maybe say it in a different way or highlight another part. And so I'm working on that. I'm also working on looking at my email list. Okay. What, what emails are they reading? Which ones are they not reading? Uh, my recent post got a lot of engagement.

Why?

You know, why is that? So, yeah, I'm working on it. And just, I'm inspired by this to keep going.

Yeah, for you, Bri, one thing to consider. Well, I appreciate all of that, first of all, but, and Seth Workenheiser, one of our members, is, he and I are threatening to do another, you know, Substack-related workshop. You know, one of my assertions is like you could really amplify your efforts with just a very few pieces of content on Substack. And for those that aren't already, you know, don't already have a Substack publication, you can set one up in less than an hour and you can just bring over an audience that you already have, if you have one, and certainly content that you already have. And if you actually approach it strategically, you know, I, I think that with 3, 6, 9, 12 pieces of really good content, you could have enough to repurpose and reuse and recycle. That would be all you need in terms of content. Um, one of the things that I love— Seth was on the call Friday and we were talking about this a little bit. Seth, for those that aren't familiar with Seth Workenizer's, um, Substack, it's really good. It's called, um, The Social Media Escape Club. And Seth knows that, um, I've made two failed attempts to escape social media. The gravitational pull was too great, and I got back on. And, you know, in full disclosure, I'm leveraging Facebook ads, a $5 a day Facebook ad spend to continue to grow my Substack. And I'm able to actually fund that ad spend with, through the sales that come on the back end of the Onward book and the Bumpers book. So I'm actually leveraging Facebook for free right now. Um, so this idea that Facebook is evil, Facebook ads are evil, um, like, they're tools. Tools are only as good or evil as the person using them. And the purposes that they are employing them for. You can use Facebook and Facebook ads to scam people and trick people and hurt people, obviously. I mean, that's why Facebook ads are so expensive right now, because the political campaigns are going at it. They bought up all the bandwidth. But you can also leverage any tool as a force for good. I— there's a, a woman that I worked with that refused to get on Substack because someone wrote an article about Substack has a Nazi problem because evidently there's a couple of Substacks that are dedicated to spreading neo-Nazi ideology or whatever. Substack has a neo-Nazi problem, or is there a neo-Nazi problem and they use every available platform to spread their hateful ideology? Because they're everywhere. They're not just on Truth Social, they're on Facebook, they're on LinkedIn, they're everywhere, you know. So don't, don't get too dogmatic and don't have a fixed mindset about what tools you're using, and have a, a, a more, um, receptive mindset about how can I, you know, number one, restraint. Should I use this? But, um, more importantly, if I decide to use it, how can I use it in a way that is ethical, done with integrity, fulfills whatever intention I'm using the tool for? Um, so all a long-winded, over-explained way of— Briev, take a look at that, um, little curriculum that I created, because as someone that's creating a lot of content and a lot of workshop type stuff like that. One page, by get directing more traffic to my curriculum, I have gone from getting a couple subscribers a week to getting, uh, at least a couple a day, and far more engaged subscribers to boot. Because my, um, you know, the two numbers um, that I'm tracking. You know, one is the opens and the other is— I can't remember what the actual, um, metric is called, but there's, um, just pull up my Substack real quick. Yeah, my 30-day views have gone from 10,000 to 12,000 in the last 30 days, and my open rate has gone from about 33%, which is low for me, to 35%. So that is rising too. And I used to keep my subscribe— my open rate high by deleting people that weren't opening. But what I'm finding is, is by just holding on, that dormant subscribers are actually starting to open emails. So, yeah, repurposing and reusing and recycling content that you you already have. That's the name of the game.

I like that. Yeah, I have that on my list. I need to add, um, like a tight— not a title page, but a curriculum page to direct people. Sounds good.

Table of contents is another one. Like, make your welcome page a table of contents page, like send people to what you want them to, read so that they can have a better idea about who you are and what you do and what you can do for them. Sounds good. Yeah. Clay, you, you, you just joined us. You and Tanya— I mean, well, Tanya's a repeat offender. She and I have— we've danced this dance several times over the years. Any, any questions? Any, anything that needs to be clarified or sorted, or any specific application that you're looking to optimize?

Well, I've, I've already been getting rid of things, uh, turning off web page— web pages that don't, you know, for things that don't apply anymore, or that I don't think apply anymore.. And so I have only what's on there now is my podcast. So really, if we're talking assets, what do I have now is the podcast and my email list. And my focus has shifted somewhat. And so anyway, so, and then what's my forcing function? My parents' health is not well, and I need to be around more. Than have the commute, you know, than be what I'm doing for the, you know, the day job. So, um, and so that's my forcing function right now. That's really pushing.

Perfect Day exercise and Bumpers is a total game changer. I literally credit everything that has gone well and gotten better to starting with that exercise, because I— that book was given to me by, um, Laurel Portier, who I was working with at the time. She sent me a copy of the book before it was rewritten, um, so it was actually a really challenging read because Nick was not a good writer then. He's a much better writer now. But, um, I almost gave up on that book, but when I got to that exercise and completed it, it changed everything because it really helped me clarify, oh, this is what I have to— this is what I have to achieve. This is what I have to accomplish. And then everything— once you, you have that dialed in, now everything you do is, is getting me closer or further away from this schedule that I want.

Yeah, thank you.

I'll give one last call. Oh, Scott Perry, we used to always— oh, go ahead, Jerry.

Oh yeah, I just wonder if you remember your conversation with Lukasz Raszewski about the Clarity hierarchy, you know, because he identified something that you hadn't realized. Do you remember that conversation about your priorities?

Yeah, yeah. So there's, there's actually a way that folks can— you, you can all get Lucas's— so there's a Clarity Hierarchy, um, article, but, uh, in, in my— in that curriculum. But Lucas has, has his— he's working on a book that's going to be fantastic. But what I remember from that conversation is, you know, that— I mean, I I thought I was optimizing first for one thing, and Lucas helped me see that I was actually wanting to optimize for the other, for something else. And that's true for everyone. Like, if you are trying to do any of this in isolation, you have a very good chance that you're going to aim in the wrong direction and op— start optimizing for the wrong thing without even knowing it. And you will travel a fair distance before you wake up and recognize that you're not heading towards what really matters to you. Um, but the, the other thing that your question sparks for me, Jerry, is when we talk about like, what are we trying to accomplish? What's the priority that we're striving for right now? Priority is singular. Like, yeah, I get it, we all have multiple things that we are trying to achieve, um, but if you try to get them all at the same time, it's going to take a lot longer. And the longer it takes, the more things that can go wrong, because time and randomness are actually the undefeated players on every playing field. And if you are, you know, for me it was, uh, my wife and I, after we were red-rigging the game, it was okay, um, the, the three priorities are, um, we want to, um, we want to fund a vacation, we want to, uh, we want to purchase a home, and we want to eliminate our debt. But the one that was most important to us was fund a vacation. I can live with dying in debt, and I can live without owning my own home. If I don't have a fucking vacation soon, I— life is not going to be worth living. So we just determined what it would cost to go to the beach for a couple of weeks and said that's the number one priority. We achieved that one first, and once it was achieved and locked in— money is in a separate savings account sitting there waiting for November so we can go— then we waterfall down to the next priority, which was funding a purchase on a house. And once that's locked in, then we'll start chipping away at the debt. But, you know, something for all of you to think about is when we talk about what we're trying to accomplish, it's the one singular thing that's— we're trying to accomplish next that gets us closer to the lifestyle, the ideal lifestyle for us.

Scott Perry, I've got a question for you. I'm curious if you follow Gary Vaynerchuk, and he's pretty big with social media and things. And one of the— I really kind of like some of his approaches and things. He's very much about like, try to be happy, whatever it is you do, whether You know, try to, try to be happy with what your life is. But he, uh, he talks about, uh, something that he thinks is beneficial is, is, you know, and I think you mentioned this a little bit about generating content and not being worried about, well, is this, you know, is the lighting right? Do I have the best microphone or whatever? But just, you know, he is a big advocate of just posting, you know, a lot, even if it's mundane things. Um, I just was kind of curious about what you might think about that?

Yeah, I, I read his book, whatever it was, you know, Jab, Jab, Right Hook or whatever. And, um, and I resonated with the premise of that because it's basically be 3 times as generous as you are with transaction, right? Um, I'm less personally I'm less aligned with this, you know, share your entire life online type of thing, or post— like, I— the, the bottom line is, again, in my experience, and again, if you are strategic about it, it actually— there's very little— you, you don't have to post very much or very often on social media to take advantage of social media. Um, if you are committing to, you know, sharing a lot, sharing your life on social media, it's like, what are you optimizing for? Well, um, I don't want to work— I don't want to work for Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg. Like, I'm not— my game is not creating more content for those platforms. I don't mind sharing a small amount of content that is strategically getting people to connect with me and my ideas, um, and when I have earned enough permission and trust, gets them to subscribe to my Substack. So, um, and I don't know that— I mean, Gary is a— I mean, he's, you know, obviously he's, he's, he has very brilliantly defined the game that he wants to play, and he plays it all in and full out, and he is obviously killing it. Not everybody wants to be, you know, a celebrity or, or a brand, like, you know, a personality, um, and that kind of influencer. I mean, his, his approach works, I think, really well if, you know, if you think that influence is going to get you closer to what you want. I don't think, um, that's— I talked a little bit about like, know thyself. What's your personality? What are your preferences? Um, you know, what, uh, you know, what, what are your values? What are your talents? I mean, if you're not— if you don't like social media, you shouldn't be on social media because you don't have to be on social. Like, Tanya could actually make a very good living leveraging two assets: podcast and email list. I've— because I've worked with clients that have just used a podcast as a client generation attraction system. It's entirely any, anything, any, any platform can be leveraged as your client attraction, you know, because what you need is to generate awareness, earn attention, earn permission and trust so that, you know, some people become good fit prospects that become good fit leads that become good fit clients. It can be done on any platform and it can be done entirely offline as well. So I do, I do think it is worth, um, pausing and, um, being cautious when it comes to anyone that says here's the formula for success because, um I think Gary is— I don't know if you've ever seen the exchange between him and Seth Godin, but it's freaking hilarious because they couldn't be more different. And they— and Seth definitely is not a huge Gary fan. Um, and you can't win a game you don't want to play. You can't win a game if it's not your game. And that's the whole point. Like you have to figure out the game that you want to play, and then you have to learn to play it to the best of your ability until you're ready to go all in and pull out. And then you're winning, like you automatically are winning, because if you are playing a game that you find enjoyable, and it's now an infinite game, not a finite game. So, um, anybody, you know, Gary's one of those kind of influencer types, gurus that I tend to warn people against. He is selling something he actually believes in, um, and he believes in it because it worked for him and it worked for him in the past. The problem is anybody that's buying into his approach is not considering the fact that they are not Gary and it is not the past. They are them and it is now. And everything that Gary is promoting as a solution to success is playing Gary's game that is optimized for things that used to work that probably don't, because in the digital world, the shelf life of any digital online strategy is very, very, very short. So I would just say Not that he doesn't have a lot of great ideas. He does. Not that he isn't successful, because he is. You know, there's certainly things about his approach that I would pay attention to and glean and steal, but I would never buy one of his programs. I was actually at an event where I watched Gary sell a very expensive program to people that definitely could not afford that program, and he had no compunctions about taking their money, and I thought that was not cool.

I think there's a great analogy in Rigging the Game and Dan Nicholson's book, Scott, about, you know, about going back to your childhood and how you played your sport, you know, or, you know, or what sport you played and how you played what position you played, and then transfer that into your, into your business. And that would, you know, highlight your authenticity and who you are as an individual. And I think that would resonate. Is that right?

Yeah, I think that's a great exercise that comes from Randy Massengale. Not everybody is sporty, so like, you know, I think you can broaden it out— to something I've been saying for years before I collided with that exercise of Randy's is your becoming lies in being more of what you've already always been. And if you reflect back on your childhood when you were less socialized, um, and, um, not corrupted by institutionalized education and occupation that was built on, you know, being forced to do things the way that other people want you to do them and to fit in and to compete and all that type of thing. You know, just what are the things that really lit you up? Um, you know, when I kind of created that idea, um, I ran through the exercise myself and was like, okay, well, I remember always being really, um, loving to draw, loving to create stories, loving to build things, loving to put on a show. You know, I created a little summer business when I was 13. I, me and a friend made a bunch of Muppet-style puppets from patterns that were in my mom's sewing magazine, made a stage and put on shows for the neighborhood kids, charged them, I don't know, 50 cents, and sold pop— my mom sold popcorn out of the kitchen window for quarter. Um, it's always good to get really cheap labor when you're a kid and building a business. Um, you know, but when I looked at all of these things, how much I love to just be in the woods and explore, and, um, you know, how much I enjoyed physical activity, and like all these things inform and inspire the way that I approach everything I do. Um, and so I love the exercise. I think you can broaden it out beyond athletics, like of all the activities that you engaged in, because we are at, you know, just to get a little woo-woo, this idea that's getting more and more mainstream and popular around it's all one thing, that everything is one thing and we're all just little, um, facets of that one thing. We are our— we are at our most connected with the cosmological truth of everything when we are kids. And we are all born sufficient and whole, possessing everything we need to succeed in life. We have already demonstrated that we can do impossible things because the act of becoming, uh, you know, of being a non-talker and learning to talk, of being a non-walker and learning to walk, of being a non-reader and learning to read, of being a non-bicycle rider and learning to— I mean, these are impossible things when you think about everything that has to happen. For those things to be achieved. They are impossible, and yet we did them. And how did we do them? We did them, um, we did them fearlessly. We did them, um, without fear of shame. We did them joyfully most of the time, unless you, you know, happen to fall down and skin your knee, um, and we can apply that childlike sense of wonder, adventure, playfulness, learning by doing to anything else that we want to do. And that's actually the fastest way to get anything else that you want in life. We just— all we have to do is loosen our grip a little bit on the scrutiny and expectations of, um, of society, but also the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves, which are probably the biggest impediment to our wanting to achieve the things that we want to achieve.

There's another question, Scott Perry. I was just wondering if you're still using the Laurel's 3x5 matrix, you know, the 15 pieces of content, the stealth influence thing.

No.

So if you purchase, when you go through, when you when you get your free bumpers book, I think there's a way that you can get into the stealth, um, influence, um, content. You can also look it up on the Guardian or the, uh, Man Bites Dog publication. Um, I used Laurel's, um, system to the letter while I was working with her, and it did help me achieve my first $10,000 a month. It did help me really dial in an offer and an audience that enabled me to consistently earn, you know, the dream of, uh, consistent monthly income. Um, I also found that, number one, I was spending way more time creating ads and spending time on social media than I actually wanted to. I also ended up, you know, creating an offer that I knew I could sell, but I wasn't really excited about fulfilling. And I ended up fulfilling that offer to, um, to an audience that I didn't really enjoy working with that much. So I was in a way a victim of my early success with her. And I'm not— I mean, her system is beautiful and it works. When I needed to, when I just like, when I decided to halt that offer and figure out what do I really want to be doing, um, I stopped using ads for a while. I, I didn't use any of her tools or tactics or strategy around content creation. Um, and that helped me, helped me realize that the game I actually wanted to play was less about being a technician and trying to, to sell strategy tools and tactics, and that I wanted to be the kind of person that just shared the philosophy and principles that apply broadly to all sorts of people in all sorts of domains. Which means, you know, it's really hard to sell a power offer if, if it's not, if your audience isn't niched down, your offer isn't niched down and all that. But what I, once I got enough traction by talking more broad about a broader range of topics with a broader audience, once I got enough traction with that, I was able to leverage the low, low-priced ads part of her system, um, and a lot of the, you know, just the audience, Facebook audience creation and, um, all that, um, to do content the way I want to do it. And so for me right now, Jerry, I've got a, I've got an invisible list, a warm audience that I've created that I am able to retarget my Substack content to. And so I'm able to direct people from Facebook to my Substack. They become subscribers. And once they're in this ecosystem, you know, I get it right now. Everybody in this room is a member of the Catalyst club.

I'm—

I have been able to make a very comfortable living with people that, um, come from this community of paid subscribers because I've earned authority, trust, goodwill. Um, we have the shared language. You have clarity about who I am and what I do and what I can do for you. And so, you know, when I put out something, um, generally I'm able to fill that just from, just from the warmest market of all, which is the people that have already paid me to have a direct connection to me. Um, and that's worked way better, you know, just to close the loop on the whole Facebook thing. Like, my— I was speaking to this while I was talking about the conversation I had with Seth Workenheiser. I, I am never on social media now. And everybody says, well, wait a minute, Scott, I see you on social media all the time. It's like, no, you see my stuff on social media, but I am not there because I can go from Substack and I can share to X, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram, which are the only places I currently am. I mean, the only platforms I have an account with. And I'm just sharing my Substack content. So the only thing you can do if you like what you read in my Facebook post is click the link that takes you to my Substack, and once I get you there, you're where I need you to be if we're going to develop the kind of relationship that will eventually lead to working together to help you close the gap. Um, and I can leverage Facebook ads to do what I want people to do. And so, um, you know, if anybody out there is considering Laurel's program, I couldn't endorse it more highly. I mean, she's a friend, and I've done her system, and it works. Um, it works best if you're kind of a technician, tactician, have a very niche audience and offer. Um, but you can take some of the principles that her system is based off of and, and leverage that in a way that gets you closer to what you actually want, which may or may not be, um, in the realm of power offers and so forth.

Yeah, that was fantastic. Yeah, yeah, I was going to say, great way to, to—

oh, go ahead.

Oh, I was just going to say that, you know, it was a great first foundational step, you know, but once you got traction, you know, and started to play your game, you know, you took what you needed from the program, you know, which was small pieces, but then evolved from there. So, yeah, good, good evolutionary process.

Well, it's a case, right? I collected the data, I analyzed the data, I strategized what I wanted to do next, and then I executed the next step. And over time, I found my way to leverage ideas that were someone else's, um, but was able to repurpose them in a way that allowed me to get closer to what I actually wanted. So we have almost gone 2 full hours now. If you're not tired of me, I'm getting tired of me. Um, any final questions before we, we wrap up? Um, if you, if you, if you want the, the replay, comment on the note. Everyone that comments on the note that I shared will, um, I'll share a, a link to get the replay right away. It will be repurposed, um, on the broadcast, uh, podcast on Thursday. And if you want to wait till then, that's fine too. And if you don't need it, that's, that's also fine. Are we good? Are we complete? Sounds like it. All right, everyone, have a— thank you for the gift of your time and attention. I hope that this was helpful. And, um, yeah, I will look forward to seeing you, uh, on Monday's call or Friday's call or Wednesday's call or wherever I'm going to see you next. Thank you, thank you, thank you. You're very welcome.