Episode 169 - Dr. Travis Zigler Says You Must First Serve Others To Achieve Success And Happiness

Hey, everyone. Welcome to the do the Thing podcast. This is your host, Stacy Lauren. Well, I'm excited about today. I got to see my next guest at a conference that I went to a year and a half ago, and I heard him and his wife speak, and I was just blown away by him, their story, and just what they're doing in the world. And since then, I've been following around on his journey through his email list and his Facebook group and getting to see all the amazing things that he's doing not only for himself, but for others. And I recently got to catch up with him again at the same event, but a year and a half later. And it's been amazing just to be a part of seeing him do the thing. And he not only does the thing, but he helps others do the thing. So I'm so excited to get to meet him and hear his story. So I'm welcoming Dr. Travis Sigler to the show. Hey, Travis.

Hey, how are you doing? Thanks for having me on.

I'm good. I'm so excited.

I'm just realizing I get to actually talk to you about all this stuff, which is cool.

I am as well excited to be here. So I'm looking forward to giving back to your audience and seeing what we can. We can generate out of them.

I'd love to just start off and have you share your story.

Yes. So we can go back all the way to my ebay years back. And no, I'm not going to do that, but born an entrepreneur, been an entrepreneur my whole life. I actually had my own lawn mowing business, which sounds pretty typical, but I actually mowed lots of lawns and I had partners and a lot of people in it. So I learned delegation from an early age as well. But we'll go back to 2010 when I graduated with my optometry degree. My wife and I are both optometrists, and we practiced here in Columbus, Ohio, where I'm from. And we practiced here for a couple years. But I just felt this itch of something that I didn't feel right. I was doing what I went to school for, and there was just something off. So I did the three things you're not supposed to do. I quit my job. I moved across the country from Ohio to South Carolina, and I started a business. And my wife and I started two practices in South Carolina, and we were running those. And I went from seeing six patients an hour to one patient an hour. And so I was bored out of my mind. And it was because we took over two Practices that were actually failing. And the doctor that we took him over from was an alcoholic. And his practices were starting to go downhill really fast as a result of just not showing up for his patients. And so we took those over. We actually ended up taking those from about 160,000 a year. Two practices doing 160,000 a year is nothing, by the way. It was a very small practice. And so we took Those from about 160,000 a year to when we sold them, they were doing about 600,000 a year. But that really got me into entrepreneurship, learning how to run a business. And I say that's one of my superpowers, is that since I'm a doctor, a doctor doesn't answer the phones. A doctor doesn't help you pay out glasses. A doctor doesn't pretest the patients. We have techs that do all that. And so we interpret the data and we decide what to do next. And when we moved into this e commerce space, which I'll get to in a little bit of how we did that, a lot of people ask me how I delegate and trust my team. It's just. That's what I've always done. I'm a doctor. I have to do that. Because your job as an entrepreneur is to analyze what's going on and figure out next steps, not to do everything in your business. But back to the story. I was seeing one patient an hour. I was bored out of my mind. And something came across. My inbox called Amazing Selling Machine. It's a course on teaching you how to sell on Amazon. I took that course, followed it, and we were going to come out with baby products. And I was like, but we don't have a baby. This doesn't make any sense. So we followed the course almost to a T, except for the fact that we decided to come out with something we knew about, which were sunglasses. And we launched our own sunglass line. We built that up to about $3 million a year when it was at its peak. But we took the profits of the sunglass line and we actually started. Because you don't really make a big impact with sunglasses. You're just selling pieces of plastic to people. And yeah, they help you with the sun and everything. But we couldn't really figure out an audience to build around that and to make a bigger impact. So we actually took the profits of that and started building an audience around dry eye and dry eye care. Because we saw so much dry eye in our practice and saw the need for it, and we were selling lots of Products around dry eye. We were selling sprays, wipes, masks, all these things to help with dry eye. And then we were at a conference, at a conference that you're very familiar with. It was actually a tribe summit is what it was called back in the day. Very similar to probably like a capitalist pigs meetup that you know of now. And somebody was up on stage and he was a doctor selling all these things, and they're like, well, you're the doctor. Why don't you sell your own version of all this stuff? And that was when the light bulb came on to focus on this dry eye thing. And then all the products we're selling around dry eye to our patients in our practice, we started coming out with those one by one. And the very first product we ever came out with was a product that we were selling probably 7 to 10 of them a day in our practice. And the company raised the price from $30 a month to $300 a month. And so we were just kind of like, that's an odd price raise. And then a patient came up to me and said, hey, they just increased the price of this by 10x. You're an entrepreneur. Figure this out. So I started looking for manufacturers, found a good one. And we were literally in private label production within a week of that patient coming in. And that product turned the tables for us. We completely didn't shut down the Sunglass brand, but stopped focusing on it. I know it sounds crazy to just kind of shut down a $3 million business, but it wasn't our passion, and it wasn't hard to shut it down because now we had this new product that we believed in that we were pushing to the market. And we ended up getting that to about 150 sales a day. And I think one of the key things about that was conviction. Conviction sells over anything else. And we were extremely eye on this product. And believe me when I say it's not an easy product to sell, because with dry eye, they're in pain and they've tried everything. And so now we are coming to the market with a semi new product saying, spray this on your eyelids and it will make everything better. And it's called hypochlorous acid. And so they're like, wait, you want me to spray acid on my eyelids? So that's kind of our circle of how we got into dry eye. And then we just started building our audience from there. And as we built our audience, we just kept asking them what else they needed. And so then we'd come out with that product and that product. And then we ended up building that business up to about $4 million when we sold it in 2021. We worked for the company still for about two years after that in the corporate environment. And we were in the corporate environment for a little bit. And then they sold half their business to private equity. So then we were in the private equity environment. So I've worked all sorts of facets of business, private equity, corporate, owning my own business. And then here we are today. I'm actually out of that business. It's past my time of working for them. And I'm no longer running my old brand that we sold. And now I run an advertising agency called Profitable Pineapple Ads, where we help people with Amazon Management. So Amazon, ppc, dsp, Google Ads to Amazon, but we also do a whole nonprofit side. So we help you start a nonprofit, build your nonprofit, and take advantage of getting a Google Ads Grant, which is $120,000 in free advertising for your nonprofit. And then we have an inventory management software as well.

Yeah, there's just so much in your story that I love. I mean, starting with you starting out with the landscaping business, because you're immediately getting to see this idea of delegation and hard work and following through. And I actually, I was trying to remember, I read this book and it was huge book. It was like this big. I'm trying to remember the name of it, but he actually talks about how all of his life lessons were pretty much born from him doing landscaping and then managing people in that way. So it's interesting that that's your starting point.

Yeah. And you remember justice from last year's Cap Con, Right. So justice was a minister in Dallas at another stage of his life, and he actually took a bunch of inner city Dallas kids and started a landscaping business with them. And that's how he taught them a lot of life lessons and got them out of that kind of inner city environment and taught them a lot of life lessons around that to help them propel their lives forward so they wouldn't get stuck in that kind of negative mindset of the inner city.

Oh, wow. I didn't know that about him. That's amazing.

Yeah.

I would love to also hear when you got that itch and you quit your job and then you went to South Carolina and you were able to just kind of get into it. How did you guys make that decision to be able to do that?

We sat through three miserable winters of driving to and from work saying, we need to get out of this. We need to get out of this. We need to get out of this. And finally there was just a point of reflection. We were in Palm Springs visiting my brother in law who still lives there. And we're sitting there, it's a December afternoon, beautiful, 75 degrees, and we're like, this could be our winter. Why do we live in Ohio? And then when we went to fly back to Ohio, our flight got canceled because it was negative 40 degrees in Ohio. And so that was kind of like an inflection point where we're just like, I think this is a sign. I think it's time to go. And when we looked at practices in the summer of 2019. No, go back further. 2014, the summer of 2014, when we started looking at practices, this one popped in our radar that had two practices for sale. And we went down and visited this guy and he's like, yeah, I just don't have time anymore. And he was going through a divorce, he was an alcoholic. And so we made an offer for him for both of his practices and for his house. So we bought his house and his two practices and let him walk away and move back to Oklahoma, where he's from and where he wanted to go back to. So a lot of things lined up. And I think when you learn to kind of surrender to what's being thrown at you instead of resisting everything that's being thrown at you, the universe, the world, God, whoever you believe in. I believe in God, but is speaking to you at all times. And if you open up your heart to receive it, then it will lead you to places that you, you never thought possible and to challenges that you never thought you could overcome, that you overcome. It will lead you to triumphs that are the best of the best. But you also have lows in that time period as well. But I have loved every second of my life since I moved away and listened to that itch over three years burning inside me and then finally making the commitment to do it. And we haven't regretted a second since.

I think the other thing that's really cool about that part of the story is that you realize that that wasn't your end goal. When you bought those practices and you realized that you wanted to get out. I think a lot of people would have then just stayed. Right. Because it's familiar. And you heard he had increased it and grown it to, I think you said 600,000 from 150,000, which is remarkable. And how did you make that decision to move away from it? And just to give you more context, doing the thing, it's going after the big goal, but it's also leaving the thing that you thought you wanted, because I think a lot of people are scared to do that.

So I think to kind of go over that, and I'll probably forget that question. So you'll have to remind me here in just a little bit, because I like to ramble. I have to go back to 2008 for it. So in 2008, I was in my third year, going into my third year of optometry school. Jenna was in her second year, and we went on our first mission trip together. And on this mission trip, I met a guy named Angel Riviera. And he was on our third day, I think, and we were in Ecuador, and he was in the front of the line. You could just see he was in pain. He was just kind of keeled over in pain. And we brought him in, and his pressure of his eye was 80, and normal pressure is about 20. And so you could imagine you have your eye, it's a globe, circular. It doesn't have anywhere to go. So if you increase the pressure inside of it, it's pushing out. And so you can feel that pressure when it gets that high and it hurts, it's. It's painful. And so we took about half the day to bring his pressure down in our clinic. And. And by clinic, I mean dirt floor, lawn chair, and that's where we're working. And brought his pressure down to about 30. It took his pain away. Unfortunately, he couldn't see anymore because glaucoma had taken a hold, and he's permanently blind. But we took away his pain, and he literally dropped to his knees, hugged me, and started crying. And he started saying, God bless you, God bless you, God bless you. In that moment, I still get goosebumps to this day telling that story, because in that moment, that was when I realized that my life's purpose was not just to see patients in the U.S. it was to help the 1 billion people that are blind due to lack of glasses in this world. And so however I can get to that mission and helping that 1 billion eradicate it, eradicate the 1 billion people that are blind due to lack of glasses. That's what my goal is. So with that being said, going back to your question, why didn't we leave the comfort of practices and the golden handcuffs of making 600,000 minus expenses ended up being about 300,000, which is still a lot of money. And why did we leave that? Because when we looked at the three businesses we had at the time we had our online business, we had our private practice, and then we had a practice inside of Walmart. And we looked at all three of those and we're like, which one is bringing us the most money? Online business? Okay, score one for that. Which one's bringing us the most stress? Private practice. Okay, minus one for that. Which one do we not mind the Walmart, because it's just low management. There's nothing really to. You just go and see patients and you leave. And private practice, you're managing a whole optical section where you get glasses and contacts and everything. So there's a lot more to it. So when we looked at all three of the businesses together and then we thought, which one is adding value to our life? Which one is taking away and which one's going to get us to our end goal the fastest of eradicating 1 billion people that are blind due to lack of glasses. The online business was the route. We grew from 80,000 in year one to 1.2 million in year two to 2.5 to 3.2. So we were growing very quickly in that. And so we're like, that's the route to go. Our practices were growing, but it was a steady line instead of that hockey stick type growth. And so we sold the private practice first, and we sold that in June of 2017. And so then we had the online business of the Walmart. We were having a kid that November, our first kid, and we're like, okay, do we want to keep this practice? And the answer was no. And so we ended up working on selling that, and we ended up selling that in January of the following year. And then we didn't really have any ties to South Carolina, so we sold everything and we just traveled for a year with our newborn. And so that allowed us to focus on the online business full time. We traveled with our newborn and we just had fun for a year. We just kind of traveled around the US but to go back to your question is, how do we get to the mission of our life and what can get us there and whatever can get us there faster? That's usually the route we're going to take.

There's something so huge about what you're speaking to right now that I want the listeners to notice. We can get so caught up on what the thing is, but sometimes it's just picking the route that makes the most sense to you at the time because that can get you into the thing that really matters. And I love that idea of how the sunglass business was kind of almost like a lifeboat for you to get out of the thing that was pulling your energy so then you could actually get to where you're meant to be now.

Yeah. And another part of that story that I didn't mention yet is when we were in the practice, we were struggling with infertility and we went to infertility doctors and they pretty much we tried everything except for IVF. And they said IVF would give us about a 17% chance to get pregnant. And so the day of our IVF appointment, I said, this isn't for us. I've felt a calling to not do this. Like I said, surrender to the. I don't always surrender, but surrender to God or the universe and listen and it will tell you exactly what you should be doing. And it was telling me that we should not do ivf. And so we ended up pulling off our IVF appointment, canceling that, and we actually scheduled Eastern medicine. We started exploring Eastern medicine instead. And we ended up getting pregnant in about three months. Exploring Eastern medicine after doing three years of western medicine. And the funny thing is the day of our adoption meeting to start adoption process is when we found out we were pregnant. So that shook us because we're western medicine trained doctors and western medicine just completely failed us. And eastern medicine succeeded. And I was like, what if there's something to this with dry eye? And so what we started doing is we started teaching people Eastern medicine. Not exactly Eastern medicine, but more like functional medicine. So like green smoothies for breakfast instead of eating everything else that's inflammatory, drinking more water, learning how to deal with stress, learning how to sleep better, very simple things that aren't easy, but they're simple and what to eat, what not to eat. And we sent thousands of people through this program we just created out of nowhere and the results were better than any prescription medication out there for dry eye. So with those two things happening and our kind of mindset around western medicine being completely shaken, that was another reason why I felt like we had to step away from practice because we didn't believe in what we were doing anymore. Because it's hard to prescribe medications for dry eye when you don't believe in it as much because you've seen the results over here. But you can't sit there in a 20 minute exam and explain to the patient, you need to drink more green smoothies, you need to drink more water, you need to stress less, you need to sleep more. Because it's a whole program that we put together with videos and everything. So we still have the program out there today. It's still running. It's called Rethinking Dry Eye Challenge and we still run it. It's. It's now part of our charity instead of the business. But yeah, just really listen to what's going on in your life. And if there's a repeated lesson over and over again, that's usually God telling you that you need to make a change and this is the direction you need to go. And so I believe I answered your question. I probably just went on a rant there as well.

But I think also the thing that's cool, there's a lot that's cool about that. But the other thing that I wanted to point out is that when you started the Amazon business, you did the training and then you started the business. You were originally thinking of the baby products and then you did the sunglasses. And you didn't get caught up in getting paralyzed in what you were selling. You immediately made a decision and then you got that up to $3 million to be able to then move on. I was just kind of curious what you could share about that in terms of being able to just keep following your intuition.

It sounds like you're never going to find happiness selling anything. You're going to find happiness with serving other human beings. And if you continue to just sell plastic crap online, you're never going to be happy. And when you serve somebody online or serve somebody in person, crazy concept. I know if you serve somebody, you're going to be happier than you've ever been. And when we shifted our focus from just selling stuff online to completely serving the person, that's when everything changed for us. It's when people started coming beside us. It's when we also got a lot of haters as well. So we knew we were doing something right, but we just served the Dry Eye customer. That's all we did. That's all I do in our agency is we interview you to see if we want to work with you. And we completely switched the sales model on their head. And I turn down more people than I say yes to, because if I don't like you, number one, I don't want to accept you to work with you. But if I don't believe that your product's ready for our system or your business is ready for our system, I'll tell you that. And I'll tell you next steps of what you need to take to get to the level to be able to come into our agency for it to be successful. Because we're not cheap. We're not an inexpensive agency. We're not the most expensive out there, but we're not cheap. And in order for you to be successful, you have to have certain ducks in a row in order to be able to get to that next level. And so it still amazes me how many people apply to work with us that are just selling plastic crap. Another Me Too product on Amazon, and it's like, I don't think you get it. This is going to fail. And I've had talks with friends of mine that are like, my business isn't working anymore. I don't know what to do. I was like, it's because you sell another Me Too product on Amazon. There's no differentiation in your product. You have no audience. I was like, I'm sorry to tell you this, but hiring us is not going to help you. It's just going to make you more frustrated because you're paying us. And I don't want to take you on, because then that makes us look bad because we can't bring your business back from the dead like, you think it's going to happen. And so when you switch to focusing on serving humanity, serving someone, you're going to be happier. Your business is going to take off more than you ever thought. Which is why we started the nonprofit of our agency is because it does two things. It brings people into the agency, into my ecosystem, that actually want to do good in the world. They actually want to start a nonprofit and do something with it in the world. And it's funny, because people have come out, they're like, I'm so glad that you're doing this, because I've never had the courage to come out with it, but I see you putting it out there, and it gives me the courage to put myself out there as well. And so you're seeing people come out and start nonprofits that are. They would have never thought about doing it. And now they feel like they've been given the key to open up the door, to be able to do that now. And so just really focusing on service and focusing on other people is what's going to take you and lead you to more happiness than you've ever had.

I would love to also hear a little bit more about profitable Pineapple and who the people are that are. Because they're doing the thing right. Because by you being able to take them on as clients and then helping them increase their sales and then also then creating these nonprofits, have you noticed anything in common about the people that you've been working with.

Yeah, there are people that have soul, there are people that have a bigger mission in life. There are people that are fun to work with. Do I get it right? 100%? No. We work with some people that we don't like and we actually end up firing them. We end up like, hey, this isn't working out either. The missions didn't align and we thought they did initially. But one of the questions I ask on an application to work for us is, what is your why in life? Why do you want to build this business? And so many people put money and it's like, sorry, I'm not going to work with you because your. Your sole ambition is money. And so therefore you're always going to be breathing down my neck about money. And it's just not fun. But when I get these long, drawn out paragraphs about how they something happened in their childhood so they want to pay it forward because of this and that, that's the people I want to get connected with and to work with us. It's not necessarily a revenue thing. We just use revenue as kind of an indicator of where you're at in your business and where we can take you. It's also, it's all about the mission. So we had somebody come to us in October of last year and she didn't have a business started yet. She had an idea and she's like, this is my idea. This is where I want to take it. This is why I want to take it here. And I loved her energy on a Zoom call. And so afterwards I was like, hey, we don't usually do this, but I know you're just starting out, but let's do it. Let's do this together. And I think we gave her the first month or two free just because I want her to focus on bringing her inventory to the market. And now we've got her up to this is she started in October, this is at the time of this recording, seven months ago. And she's now doing 40,000 a week.

Wow. Oh my God.

That's amazing energy. I could feel it. It was contagious. And I was like, this is going to be something. And we worked together and it took off. And I'm not saying it's because of us. It's because of us combined. It's because of her energy, her enthusiasm for the business. And then our strategies mixed together have taken off really well.

What do you think it is about that energy and the enthusiasm that helped it just take off so quickly?

So there's a couple things that I see when businesses take off fast is the reason why they take off so fast is because that made sense. But the first reason is they come out with a lot of skus right away. So she's got about 15 SKUs already. So she's come out with a lot of different products. Initially, we have another client that is doing about 5 million a year and they've only been in business for about 10 months. They have 350 SKUs. So SKU count if you can release more products and at least have some knowledge of knowing how to launch a product, the more you release, the more you're going to fail, but the more you're going to succeed as well. And when we sold our business, to give you an example, we had 16 products, 16 SKUs. When we sold, we'd had released over 200 in the full time of that business. But so many had failed that we were down to 16. But those 16 succeeded. Actually, out of those 16, I'd say five were very successful. And so the more you put out there, the more you're going to fail, but the more you're going to succeed as well. And so that was the number one thing is sku count. The number two thing is audiences. So they have an audience built up already. And so when they release, it releases right away to a happy, raving fan base and they buy it up right away. And so those are the two big things that I see successful companies do is audience building and sku count. So just increasing how many products you.

Release and then going back to your superpower of being able to interpret the data, you're able to see easily which ones are failing fast and which ones are the winners.

It's very easy. But we tend to get married to products and tend to ignore the data. And that's where we come in. Because we're objectively looking at things because it's not our brand, we're not married to it like you are as a brand owner. And so we'll be like, hey, this product should probably go. Another example of this is we took on a client in February. They were spending $140,000 a month on advertising. And it just didn't make sense. I looked at, I do a brief analysis of their advertising before I jump on a call with them. And I was like, something is off here. And it's hard to tell it just from a spreadsheet, but you can tell a lot from it. And I was on the call with him, I was like, this may sound crazy, But I think we can save you about a hundred thousand a month from just switching to our system. And I didn't know if I believed it myself because saying that it's kind of crazy like going from 140,000 to 40,000amonth and spend when we onboard with them, we took them down to $25,000 a month in spend. So we saved them $115,000 a month and their revenue only dropped by $20,000.

My gosh.

Because their roas went up so much and their profit went up by, I think it was close to like 115,000. So revenue dropped, profit went up by almost a hundred thousand. It was crazy. It was the craziest cases. And I was like, I don't know what was going on here, but I think they were pushing a lot. But the agency was that they were working with was just, it was very irresponsible with the money unfortunately. I don't like to bash agencies, but this was just a case that I was just like, I don't know what's going on here, but I think we can save you a lot of money.

What gave you the confidence to be able to say it?

It's just data. It's looking at data and just seeing things that just don't make sense that I've never seen before or that I've seen in my own life. And so it's just about being exposed to a lot of things. We have a lot of clients and so I've seen a lot. But then I've also run a business myself, so I've seen the other side of it too, being the CEO. And so it's just a matter of exposure and just getting exposed to a lot of accounts over time.

I'd love to also hear more about your non profit. So are the non profits that you're creating connected to your non profit or is it all just separate?

No, they're all separate. So each non profit is its own entity. So think of your business as an entity. So non profit is as well and nobody owns it. So it's run by a board. So president, vice president, secretary, treasurer, whoever else you want to have it, trustees and they get to vote on what happens. So usually if you start the non profit you're president. So I'm president of ours, my wife's vice president. So we have two voting rights right there. So it's going to be very hard to overrule us because unless we die and then if we die, it's its own entity. So it goes off into its own. And the rest of the board does whatever they want with it. But when we. Our nonprofit itself is called the I Believe Foundation. It's all about eradicating the 1 billion that are blind due to lack of glasses and an I, by the way, eye not like the letter I. I love that. So we donate money from our businesses to our nonprofit and that does two things. It helps us save on taxes. So what we were doing before we had our own nonprofit is we were donating money to other nonprofits, not our own. And you don't know what happens to that money. Whereas now I can take a big lump sum donated to my own nonprofit. It's a tax deduction right when I donate it. But we can let the money sit in that bank account because we don't have to spend it all right away. So now we can accumulate money in the non profit and use it as we want to. So we use it to donate to other nonprofits. We use it for our mission trips. We've been on 13 total in our life. Going on 14 this year in the Bahamas. And then we do a scholarship for somebody that aligns with our mission at Ohio State. And so they're actually going to go with us this year to the Bahamas where we're doing our mission this year. And so we get to distribute the money as we want to, not as we're required to. And so you get to hold on to the money longer, but you still get that tax write off right away. So the year we sold our business, we did a big chunk to the charity so we could pay less in taxes. But going back to your question, the other nonprofits, they're run by whoever starts them. They occasionally asked me to be on the board and I occasionally will say yes. It depends on what the nonprofit's about and if I believe in it. I was asked to be on the board of a nonprofit for somebody that was at capcon. I'm not going to mention who that is yet, but he was on stage, he opened the whole thing. So that's something I'm pretty excited about. And I said yes to that because I believe in what he's doing and he's spreading a very Christ centered message and he's doing acts of kindness and so you can't beat that. And that's something that I loved every part of his message. And when they asked me to do that, I said yes instantly because it was something I believed in. But yeah, each nonprofit is its own entity run by that person. We just help them stay compliant. And then we run the Google Ad site to them.

How did you guys even get that idea? How did that even come up?

Because I had a nonprofit and somebody said, did you know you can get a Google Ads brand for $120,000 a year? And I was like, no, I did not know that, but I'm going to look into it. And I looked into it and I was like, I literally get $10,000 a month in Google Ads. This is amazing. And so I was like, what if we brought this and did the exact same thing we're doing for our nonprofit in our business to others? And that's when we came out with the service. We actually just launched the service in this month, May of 2023. And we did a soft launch at the beginning of the year and we got about 10 people to do it. And then we officially launched it last week and we got 35 applicants right away. So we've been busy.

I think you're onto something.

It's. It's one of those things that, like I said, people are coming out of the woodwork and wanting to do more good in the world.

Okay, now this leads to what we talked about right before the recording started, where you mentioned the new thing you're working on. Do Good.

Shit. I've been working with a mindset coach around repositioning our agency and how we want to build it. And I've been writing a book called Radical Generosity. That's the working title right now, and it's Servant's Guide to Building an Eight Figure Brand. And it just talks about how we are building. This is not even close to being out yet. And I don't even know if that's going to be the title, but it's pretty much how we built our brand. Focusing on service and step by step process around that. And we're, we were struggling one day and he's just like, just think of slogan. Just think of something that blah, blah, blah, like just think of something that encompasses this whole thing in one sentence. And I'm just like, yeah, that's easy. That's really easy. And I was like, I don't know. I. I just help great people do good. And he's like, that's it. And I was like, all right, so we want to come out with a nonprofit probably around called like Do Good. And it's gotta be very similar to kindness videos. So just doing kind acts for one another, doing good things for other human beings, and just helping each other and recording it and inspiring the next generation to do it. Because when we met Jimmy Darts at capcon, did he not inspire you to do something kind as well? And that's what kind of led me to be like, we should do this as a nonprofit and we should record it not to brag, but to inspire the next generation of people to do that kind act. Because kindness spreads. People want to be kind, it's just they're met with the news and negativity of social media. And when you put kindness on that and that goes viral instead, then people are going to be more kind because whatever we put into our bodies is what is going to be put out. And so if you can spread kindness and get people to watch kindness videos, that's when things will really start to take off. As far as kindness in the community, I live in a neighborhood that I moved back to Columbus, Ohio, even after moving south for eight years. And I just was a sucker for the winners, I guess. But we moved into a community that I've never been in a community quite like this. It actually feels like a community. Everybody looks out for one another, everybody helps one another. We meet up at the playground all the time and everybody's always out and about. And it's completely different because these are all very successful people, high level people that want to help other people. Maybe not everybody, but for the most part, the community has been a really great community to live in because people just are taking care of each other, they're being kind to one another. And that's what we want to spread with the, the Do Good Shit nonprofit.

I was involved with this organization called Kids for Peace a while ago and it was right after Sandy Hook happened. So it's been like 10 years. And they did the kindness checklists in the schools, getting kids every year, it was like one day a year to do kind acts. And I got to see firsthand what that does for people when you're able to focus on something like that, it just changes the whole vibration.

One thing I loved about the discussion that was going on with Jimmy Darts at the Capcom conference was everybody else was chiming in as well. And a couple of the ideas that I really loved was for like your kid's birthday, they get a hundred dollars, but they also have to give a hundred dollars when they're shopping with that $100. So they're in Walmart, they're, they have a hundred dollars to spend on whatever they want to spend it on. And then they have to give a hundred dollars to somebody in that Walmart as well. And so they get to do that. Kindness act there. Another one I really loved was the hundred dollar dinner idea, which was we pay for dinner. So we invite a bunch of people to dinner, we pay for the dinner, and they all have to tip a hundred dollars. And so then the server gets an act of kindness by getting a 500, $600 tip. And so those are some cool ideas that I saw that were inspired by that discussion. That discussion was really cool because it was all these people doing KYDEX that are probably usually hidden in underground, but they're coming out and it gives other people ideas to do the same thing, which then helps out.

Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like the idea of brainstorming. Right. Where you're getting to see it, and so it gets your mind to think at that level, and then new ideas spurt the portals open, is what I like to say.

Exactly. Yeah. And just doing kind acts like that just encourages other people. I was at a conference, and this is kind of tooting my own horn, but it's to spread awareness of kindness and to inspire others. So I won a contest where I won a lot of money as a speaker at this conference. And instead of taking the money and just using it myself, I actually gave a bunch of money to other people at the conference if they bought food for the homeless around Austin. And so we went out to the food carts, bought a ton of food, and we were just spreading it out to the homeless people. And it was really cool because it was like late night Friday on Dirty 6th street, and we're just buying a bunch of food and handing it out. And it was. It was a good time. Everybody had fun. We, instead of being in the bars drinking more, we just were handing out food. Wow.

I would love to hear what your number one piece of advice is for people on doing the thing.

I think we've discussed it thoroughly, but serving other humans is the number one piece of advice, and to go away from that a little bit, though, is be persistent with whatever you're doing. And so persistence is key with anything in this life. And if you're going to work on something, work on it for at least a year, if not longer, to really see if it is successful or not. And I think that's been the biggest key to our success, is that I will do the same thing over and over and over and over and over and over and over again in order to be successful. And you just never know. It could be, if you were doing it for six months, it could be the next day you were gonna have your breakthrough but then you gave up. And so most people fail because they give up too soon.

I have a few questions on that. So with serving others, for people that are hearing the stories and they really wanna start doing that, what do you think would be a good way to just kind of get started?

You have neighbors, I'm sure everybody's got neighbors. So most people have neighbors. But just ask what you can do for them. And once you get the feeling of serving others, then that's when it becomes contagious in yourself. You want to do it more and more and more because it how made you feel. And so if you're looking to build an online business and you want to serve others, figure out a problem that you want to solve in this world. Ours is dry eye. And figure out how to reach the people that are trying to solve that problem and just focus on serving them. Don't worry about what product you're going to come out with. Don't worry about any of that. And so when people come to me and they ask me what product I should release, I say, what person do you want to serve and how do you want to serve them? Don't worry about the product. Because if you can build an audience with no sales in mind and just focusing on serving them, they'll be more raving fans than if you're trying to sell them right away. And so figure out who you want to serve, why you want to serve them, what problem are you trying to solve for them? Is it a problem that you're passionate about and then serve them? Mine is now it's entrepreneurship and helping other people become financially free so they can uplift the world through nonprofits. And so that's what we focus on in our agency. So what is yours? It doesn't have to be some incredible slogan. Like I said, it took me forever and finally came up with I help great people do good shit just because I was frustrated and I was like, that's what I do. And he's like, that's your slogan? And I was like, okay, great. But what is it that you want to do? And focus on that. Focus on serving that. There are people out there that want that solved and solve it for them. Figure out how to solve it for them.

And with the persistence piece of this, when do you think is the right time to keep going versus giving up?

If you're having fun, why would you give up? So if you're doing something, if you're solving a pain point that you want to be solving and you're persistently Solving this problem for other people. Why would you want to give up? It should be so light and easy that it shouldn't feel like work. And if it feels like work, that usually means you're doing something that you shouldn't be. So an example today we're coming out with another brand and I'm not leading it. I'm just kind of like investor, board seat member, blah, blah. They were having their meeting today discussing it and they got on a call with somebody else and said, you need to be doing TikTok. You need to be doing Instagram reels. You need to be doing both those things to build your audience. And the CEO of the company was just like, I hate TikTok, I hate Instagram reels. It gives me anxiety just thinking about doing all those things. But he told me we have to do it. And I said, who cares what he's told you what he had to do? I was like, it doesn't matter what they want to do. That's how they grew their business. It matters what you want to do. And if you don't want to do it, it doesn't matter how good your videos are. They're never going to get followers because there's no authenticity behind it. And so don't do something that you're not going to be able to stick with. I love videos, so I've always built my platforms on videos and I hate TikTok. I like long form videos, so I've built both my brands on YouTube with long form videos and Facebook, Facebook groups with long form Facebook lives. That's how I've built both brands. I've built two multimillion dollar brands as a result of doing that. That's what I enjoy doing. If I start to notice I'm burnt out, it's because I'm doing stuff that I don't want to be doing. So I've noticed burnout come into my life lately and so I have been shifting my responsibilities to somebody else and delegating more and more and bringing on new team members to help me get things off my plate that I hate doing. In order for me to be able to stay opened up to doing things like this.

I'm just blown away this whole conversation. I would love to hear what's coming alive for you after our conversation today.

It just furthers my mission more. It makes me, I love what I'm doing. I love the nonprofit beast. And it's brand new to what we've just released it to the world and it makes me feel good about it seeing the reaction of you and hopefully the reaction of your listeners as well about that whole piece because it's something I've believed in for a long time. I just haven't put out there. And now that I'm putting it out there, it's good to see the reaction. And the 35 applications that came in right when we released it was huge. And that just shows me that we're onto something here. We're onto something bigger than what we thought. And the funny thing is we haven't even released it to our audience yet. That was just being released through a JV partner. And so we're pretty excited. We're going to bring it to our audience next after we get through these 35 applicants and then see where it goes from there.

And please share for the listeners how they can find all about you, your agency and all the good shit you're doing.

So, yeah, thank you for allowing me to do that. Profitable pineapple.com is our website. Profitable pineapple.com and you can apply to work with us there. We also have a free Amazon PPC masterclass that goes over our strategy and we have an audience building class that shows you how to find the problem that you want to serve and how to build an audience around that problem. And so it's those are absolutely free. There's no strings attached. If you want to learn more about the charity side, go to profitable pineapple.com forward/charity and that will take you to the application for the nonprofits. And then, yeah, I'm on pretty much all the socials, Facebook and LinkedIn and all that. So you can reach out to me there.

Thank you so much for doing this with me, Travis. This was, I mean, I don't even have words, honestly. It's been so good.

I appreciate you having me on.

And for the listeners, do the thing, don't wait for opportunity, create it.