Why Most Freelance Copywriters Shouldn’t Launch an Offer w/ Nick Verge

Foreign.

Welcome, Stefan, to the Truth Room.

Hey. Thank you, Nick. It's good to be here.

Such an awkward introduction. It's just like I don't like podcast introductions at all. It's always the weirdest thing. Let's just get started on it.

I guess that's fine with me.

So I. I hit you up because I saw your post that you put in that was about offer owning and how most people aren't ready to own an offer. Most people aren't ready to go down that route. And it caught a lot of traction, caused a little bit of drama, and I felt that it was a really well articulated point, that I had my own experience, my own recent experience on it, and I felt everything you said was entirely true. And so I wanted to reach out to you to record it, to give more context, because I was seeing other people talking about it, and to me it felt that they were taking your one. I guess you could look at your post as like one crystallization of thoughts instead of like, hey, there's a lot more going on there that you just can't fit into one post. Otherwise a thing would be 60 miles long, and it was already 50 miles long.

Yeah.

So I wanted to talk about it because I think the discourse back and forth over it would give people a lot more content. It'd be really valuable for them to hear the truth behind offer ownership and what it's like.

Yeah, for sure. And to your point, there's of course, all kinds of exceptions to what I wrote. There's qualifiers, all that sort of stuff. But I'm also trying to write a fairly succinct post, and that post was still like 2,500 words long, which is a long format, you know, long form for Facebook. So for those who don't know the context of this, it was essentially saying a lot of freelancers, and especially freelance copywriters who think they want to be offer owners, because that sort of come into vogue again, where it's like, I want to be an offer owner. I want to start an offer. And it never was not in vogue, even in Copycarter, which I started in 2019 with Justin Goff. Like, we had people wanting to be offer owners from the get go, because you see these people who are running funnels and making, you know, seven figures, eight figures, sometimes nine figures, and they were like, who doesn't want that? Right. And sort of when you're a copywriter, you're trading time for money. And even once you start making a good amount of money as a freelance copywriter 15, 20, $25,000 a month, sometimes even more, 30 or 40. You know, you're still always trading time for money. So of course there's a. There's a burnout, there's a fatigue, there's a feeling of, hey, I can never really be free from my business unless I, you know, do something else. So I think that's a very reasonable and fair urge that people have. Yeah. But I think a lot of time they then look at offer ownership as a solution. And my point of my post was essentially like, it's a lot of fucking work to actually start and, you know, scale an offer. I've done it multiple times, but I also. The first time I tried to do it, I spent a year sort of as like the head of marketing for a large information publisher and writing all the copy. And I built a team out underneath and I started learning data. And even then, the first year, we did a million in revenue, but lost 250,000. I was the most stressed I've probably ever been. My health was not good. I was constantly worried about, you know, making payroll and having to fire people.

Was this the Romania thing?

Well, that was successful. But then I started the health supplement company, Holy Land Health, which was like the, like, Christian biblical supplements and things of that nature. And so. But I just. There's just so much stuff I didn't know, so many mistakes I made. And like, you know, and I still had mentors and people helping me, but, you know, once I started, one of the reasons I'm so passionate about masterminds is once I started going there, things started to turn around and I actually, actually got some traction from affiliates and things like that. But. But it was just really tough. And so my. My point was simply like, that isn't necessarily the best course of action for a lot of people. And really what I've learned through my experience and seeing other people try to start offers is often maybe doing a joint venture. Becoming a partner in an already successful offer or company that has traction is going to be a better bet because you can focus on your zone of genius like copywriting, you know, funnel building, optimization, whatever it is, and you'll learn about the other parts of a business, but it's a better next step for people.

And that's the route that I went down. That's why the post resonated so much with me, because this is the exact thought process that I had. And I think it even goes a layer deeper where a lot of people, when it comes to I want to start an Offer. Okay, but what do I want to teach? Most of them default to, like, what I defaulted to. I'll just teach copywriting. You, first of all, are competing directly. Then with Stefan, that's like your number one competition. You've already set, like, a solid, you know, grasp on the market. You also then set yourself up for. What I kind of found was you're going to answer the same question 50,000 times for people, and it's you more so become like a sales coach than you are like a copywriting coach. Because eventually that's really the main issue that guys are having. I. I saw on all my calls, very rarely was someone coming to me and saying, like, hey, I really need help with this lead. They were like that. But more often than not, it was that they needed help with sales and how do I get a hold, how do I close this deal and stuff like that. So I think people definitely, obviously, they need. They need help with copywriting. There's no doubt about that. But most people jump to, like, the skill set. And what you said about it being a cash grab, that's usually what it is for the most part. I think there's some people who've done a fairly good job of taking that and actually create an offer and creating it continuously. For me, I realized I don't really want to coach biz op. And what I started to think about was how could I create an offer that I actually cared about? Like, I cared about my guys that were in the group and that I was working with. I cared about them. But the side of talking about copy all the time and talking about just business and sales, it didn't, like, really get me excited to go and launch an offer and scale something up. And I know not everything in business needs to be super passionate, but, you know, if it's something that I'm going to dedicate the next 10 years to or five years to, I'd like to at least enjoy it and not be like a, you know, the equivalent of me running, like, a carpet cleaning business or something like that. So I decided, okay, I don't really want to teach on this. I want to figure out what would I want to coach on, what would I want to create an offer on. And in the meantime, I'm going to go and do exactly what you said. I went in and I stepped in as a creative director, slash cmo, Whatever. We didn't, like, set a title on it. It was just that I was in charge of a lot of the marketing for a dating offer, and I was Doing everything from like VSLs, building out offers, helping with emails, consulting on so many different aspects of it. And I got to see all of the different parts of the business from the sales team. How do we run the sales team? Here's all the problems I noticed with the sales team, with our guy that was running the emails. He has all the problems that I saw with him over and over and over again. I saw all these different areas of problems and inefficiencies. And what it showed to me is that everyone is thinking it's literally just as simple as throw up a funnel, throw traffic at it, throw up. Easy as that.

Sure.

For the cash grab lemonade stand, yes it is. But if you want to have a real business that offers you stability because realistically, why people, you know what you said, they're lured into the, oh, the offer owning like dream that sounds so nice is because they think it's more stable and a little less work. It's the exact opposite. When you go the simple route, if you go the simple route, what you're going to end up with is something that is extremely chaotic and just random in terms of flows of cash. And then also it can easily be copied by someone, be taken out by someone that has like 10 times the ad spend that you have. So if you really want to be able to survive in an, in this dynamic environment, you have to create something that has systems in place, that has, you know, the teams in place, team building. And all of a sudden now what you started off with, your main skill was copywriting. Now you're stepping into being a business owner and having to lead people. Most copywriters are not effective leaders. They can't really even effectively lead themselves. So, so they think that, oh, I'm gonna go and I'll run a team and everything like that. It's, it's a completely different skillset. So that's why I was like this, to me is what more people need to hear, is that when you step into that role, you will start to see, okay, here's what I'm really good at. I, for me, what I saw is I'm really good at looking at systems and seeing all the problems with it and coming up with creative solutions to fix them. And that's what I think will help more people, I think create maybe more of a career out of what they're doing rather than this is just me freelancing, you know.

Yeah, for sure. I think there's a lot of really good points and mostly where do I, where do I start? With that, because there's a lot. So one, one thought a couple of things. Okay. One is when I'm talking about like an offer, and when you're talking about an offer, we're generally talking about stuff that people want to scale to like, you know, anywhere from 20 or $30,000 a month to potentially millions of dollars.

Anywhere from seven to 12 figures.

Yeah. But like I'm, you know, like there's, I think about like Jake Blue. Blue, who's in copy, excited. And he has like an offer which is basically like, hey, we're going to go on cool guided adventure tours. We're going to Alaska. Do six people want to come with me? And like, he's selling, you know, basically the expense of the trip plus a little bit of profit, and he's getting people to do it. To me, that's, that's dope. That's to me, not like an offer like it is in a way, but like, you know, it's more like a passion thing. He enjoys it.

Yeah.

He's finding a way to like make money following his passion. I'm like, that's, that's great. Right? I'm thinking more about, kind of like you said, the lemonade stand approach, which is what I think a lot of the people are also thinking about. And even there, where you're like, all right, throw up an offer, have the copy, get the landing page built, throw some traffic at it, make some money. But even that's not. It's a lot of work if it's just you. And then it ends up like, evolving into more complexity because it's like, all right, let's talk about traffic. So you're the one running the ads because now you're, okay, you're not a copywriter, you're a full time media buyer. Oh, no, I don't want to do that. Let me hire an agency. Oh, now you're looking embedding agencies. Oh, most of them, like, aren't great. So you're having calls with them, you're trying to work with their team on it. You're realizing, well, you know, this agency would be better if I provide ads up. I need to hire copywriters. So now you're hiring copywriters and you're managing them. Or maybe you're like, I'm a good media buyer, but now I want to hire media buyers and train them. Oh, somebody's got managed media buyers, you know. And then like, meanwhile, if you're talking about physical products, there's like merchant processing. You see that to your Point new competitor comes on with a more complex funnel. But like, like systematically or tech wise warehousing. Yeah. Like now people are talking about interactive sort of VSLs, which I think are powerful. You know, Alex Katoni did1 for numerologist.com or numerology or whatever. It was like several years ago and it was a crush for them. And I'm like, this is brilliant. I talked about it years ago being like one of my favorite VSLs. And just recently people started being like, oh, wow, that's a cool format. But I know like Scott Mills from Copy of Sara just finished one, an interactive one in the personal development space. And he was like, it's a shit ton of work because you have to write all these different, like 13 VSLs. Exactly. And then from techies, like the, the people who are doing this spent like a year developing like the tech to be able to like actually run it. Yeah, smoothly. So it's like, are you. Well now that comes up and you have to compete with that. So are you going to just go spend all that money? Do you have to hire developers? Like, it really rarely stays to where you've just got this nice little offer and you run a little traffic and you make a little passive income. It's like not what happens. You end up for better or worse, you end up increasing and adding layers of complexity and bringing on more people and more costs. And to the point you made most people who are doing this, if you're a copywriter or freelancer, whatever, really anybody, unless you're an experienced business owner and manager of people and builder of teams and builder of systems and processes, you quickly discover that there's a massive learning curve. It's the same reason why lots of agencies suck in the first place. Because the classic agency thing is that a freelancer, it gets really good at their craft. People want to pay them, they're tired of train time for money and they're like, wow, if I got other people to fulfill and I could just do the selling, that part's fun. Having people give me money, that part's really fun. I can do that all day. Right. And then suddenly they realize they've got a bunch of people underneath them and they're not hitting deadlines or the work's not good, or like the client onboarding process sucks, or they're like, oh shit. Right now I'm a business owner, so it's kind of the same concept, but people don't think through that enough.

I feel like, well, I understand the benefits that that come with offer Ownership. Something that someone said that I liked was like, well, if you have an offer, you can pull like 100k out of your list, like in a day.

Yeah.

You know, you can do that. To get to that point, though, is where it's different. And there's. The grass is always greener on the other side. There's benefits and there's, there's, you know, downsides to every single type of way that you're going to make money from, like what I said earlier, having a carpet cleaning business to, like, being a freelance copywriter.

The.

There's pros to that business and there's pros to this business. The pros to the carpet cleaning business is everyone in America needs it.

Right.

Not everyone needs copywriting, but copywriting, it's like you, you need your specific market. So I think. What do you think maybe is the better question that copywriters need to be asking? Cause that's where I think this is really leading to. Cause they're thinking it's, oh, I want to become an offer owner. But I think there's a better question they need to be asking themselves.

Well, I think we could probably start at values. And when you talk to most copywriters and you're like, why did you get into freelancing? Why did you get into entrepreneurship? You know, the, the most common and popular answer is freedom. Yeah. So, you know, some people replied to my posts and they're like, no. Like, we're a, you know, hardworking, like, bunch, and we just want to, like, we love the grind. It's bullshit. Like, yeah, shut up. Like, you know, some of you do. I'm not like, you know, so actually shout out to Sam Novak because she said that. I'm not saying that. Sam. That's not true for Sam. I don't want. I want to make that really clear so she doesn't watch this.

But then go work in a factory.

Passive aggressively taking a shot at her. Because I'm not. Yeah. But I think that's very much the minority of people who really want to go grind. I mean, coached and trained thousands of freelancers at this point. Most of them want. And entrepreneurs too. Like, they want freedom, Right?

Yeah.

So I think that's like, the value. And so if you look at that as your value, then you think like, okay, not having a boss, that's a layer of freedom. So I became, when you take the leap to being a freelancer, you don't have a boss. Like, that's the dream we all have. Right. I can work on a beach I can set my own hours. I don't have an alarm clock waking me up. I can take days off. And then of course people come into the freelancing lifestyle realize like, oh, actually it's a lot more work than I expected. But they eventually gain levels of competency. Yes, and, but they're not free because they're trading in time for money. So then they think of like offer ownership as this next level or layer of freedom. But if your goal is like freedom, the real reality is you can get a lot of the same benefits by again partnering with a company that already has all the infrastructure in place and you know, still adding value, but get it to where it's, it's cranking along and then, you know, go for that. I mean, if you really want like true, true, true, like true freedom on a financial level, like really doesn't come from offer ownership. All the, even the high level offer owners I know are almost all like grinding and working hard. I mean like Steve Gunn is an example, like works his butt off. You know, Emily Lark at a CA thing talked about how all those people, you know, eventually some of them have good periods where they, they can take the foot off the gas a bit and then they realize things start to fall apart, they have to come back in. So excelling a company, you know, is a great way. You have like a windfall, I think. You know, it depends. Like, I was just with a guy in LA this weekend who sold his company for or in Salt Lake City, but he sold his company for like $400 million. Right. And what he did the next day, started an NFT company and done $70 million in NFT sales over the next four months because that's what the guy loves doing. But you know, if you really want that kind of financial freedom, then build and sell a company. But if you've never done that before, that's his own crazy journey skill set. There's no guarantee. So, so being more intentional about like what do you really want?

And yeah, yeah, well, I think what, what Sam was saying, and I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, but how I at least interpret it, like I like working. I think it's that you like actually having a purpose. You don't just want to sit around and do nothing all day. I think that's a lot of what also people need to redefine as freedom looking at the definitions that we set for things. So you had this, Most of us came from like a 9 to 5 or like, you know, some sort of job Background with it. Once you've experienced that and you don't have control over your own schedule, you know, you don't really like the people that you're hanging with. You don't like the things you're doing. You. Then you kind of dive into the world of freelancing. Now you have control over your schedule. I think everyone kind of ends up in that spot where they're. Maybe they're using that freedom to just do nothing or chill out or chillax, play video games, play, watch movies, smoke weed all day, whatever it is, like, chill out. Obviously, I'm projecting on what my things were that I was doing during it, but I. I think that once you experience that, then you're like, okay, I don't. For everyone, it's varying lengths of time. You eventually like, okay, this is kind of getting old really quickly. And then a new definition of freedom comes in. For my. Mine's different and I can. I can speak on mine, but I'm interested to hear yours. What is your definition on freedom?

My definition of freedom and personal.

Personal, like, not like country. We don't need to get turned into a political podcast.

Yeah. I feel that freedom is a. A process and not an endpoint. So I think that when we talk about freedom, most of us can't actually define it and most of us don't actually want, like, total freedom. Right. If you look at total, like, what I'll say is I want to help as many people as I can to achieve as much freedom as they can experience in their lives. Without becoming. Yeah, without becoming. Assholes is really important because if you had complete total freedom, right. Then it means like, okay, you don't have. You're not beholden to your children, to your spouse, to your community. Like you, you basically, you owe. You don't owe anyone anything.

There's no responsibility.

And that's a very, like, lonely isolate, you know, isolating and tough place to be. So I don't think there's ever some place you get to where you're like, oh, I'm free now. Right? And that's. That's like the crisis that the many of the super rich, you know, maybe or even really highly successful in a field kind of may end up at. Right? Like, oh, okay, I'm a billionaire. I'm still not happy. Right? Because you're like, well, if I'm a billionaire, I'll be free. No, I'm not. I'm actually encumbered by all this stuff and blah, blah, blah. So. So I think freedom is. If we look at it that, you know, any actions we can take or creating a life, if we, if freedom is a high value for us, that sort of move us closer. It's like a Platonic ideal, right? We're never, it's not. We're never going to experience it, but we can get closer to it. So if we're moving kind of towards closer towards like that, that freedom with our actions and the things that we do, I think that's really the goal and purpose for someone who is striving for freedom, but it's also the recognition that they'll never actually achieve total freedom and that they wouldn't want to achieve total freedom anyway. And then that probably, you know, facilitates an examination of other values besides freedom.

It's interesting we're talking about values because I literally wrote a sub stack article about values on subjectivity versus objectivity of values. And I was talking about Nietzsche and Jung. So Nietzsche basically believed that values, like the world was valueless and it was up to man to be able to create his own values and then kind of become this ubermensch and then, you know, act it out into the world. Whereas Jung said, you can't create values. They already exist. You have to discover your values. And this is where I think a lot of people, they, when they end up in this thing of, oh, freedom is entirely subjective. Values are entirely subjective. They'll. They'll end up in that place. It just leads to this, oh, I'm just gonna go do whatever. I'm just gonna go Pleasure Island. And this is where you find people. Just no responsibility whatsoever. I don't need any responsibility. I'll work on my clients, work for two, three hours a day. I'm gonna do nothing but hang out and just go to restaurants and cafes and go out and date girls. And again, this is guys perspective. Date guys, whatever the heck it is. We'll make it, make it gender neutral for everyone. All the, all these different things that are just basically you in a nutshell, off the entire time because you, you don't want to take on the responsibility side of things. You don't want to settle down somewhere. You don't want to settle down with someone. You don't want to have like the responsibility of pets, the responsibility of owning your own company, the responsibility of working for a company and being on a strict schedule. All of these things. Because responsibility, maybe some people just aren't ready for it. They don't like it. But to me, I think responsibility is what brings meaning to life. Especially like in a masculine Sense. I think your job as a man is you should want to take on responsibility and be able to be someone that people want to bring their problems to. In terms of, like, they need help from you. Hey, how do I get help from you? And then on top of that, also people that can go to you and terms of just emotional comfort, emotional support, that this guy seems to be handling everything and I'm not right now. How can I get advice from him? That, to me, is the ultimate kind of standard to set. And that means you have to be someone that's capable of, like, Atlas, this guy over here has a tattoo of it on his arm right there. Being able to hold the world on your shoulders. So more responsibility, in my opinion, is better. Would you agree?

I would agree.

There is a point of diminishing returns on it, though. They will say that you can put so much in your shoulders that you collapse.

Well, I think that's why someone like Jordan Peterson resonates so much with especially, like, young, younger men. And he. Because that's like the. The knocker, the thing on him. It's like, oh, a bunch of, like, angry white, young, white men like Jordan Peterson. But it's like, that does seem to be, you know, a part of his demographic. But I think one of the things that people resonate with is. Is young people, I guess, Mormon, but, like, go out and experience this world of. Of kind of without value and where there's more, you know, irresponsibilities and the things that maybe like, mass culture tries to tell you is valuable, like, like fucking and, you know, like, consumption and all this kind of stuff, right?

Jordan Peterson's like, clean up your room. He's like, and you've been hearing that piece of advice since you were five years old from your parents, and you were like, shut up, parents. And then Jordan Peterson says, yeah, clean up your room. And you're just like, wow, genius makes so much sense.

But, you know, but it is like he's someone who, for whatever reason, he resonates with a certain group of people. But, like, but it's true, because again, if you live that life, I mean, it's like we've all had those days of feeling empty and hollow. And I think that the. Some of us, you know, realize, wow, like, I. If I don't want to keep feeling this way, I have to change my. My actions and my mode of being, right? And then so we do. But again, that runs contrarian to what a lot of, like, mass culture, you know, really, honestly, mass capitalism. And I'm like a capitalist, like I would say. But like there's all that sort of like consumptive, like hyper capitalism that's like consume, consume, consume and you'll feel good. And you're like, no, I won't. Right. And that means consuming not just physical goods, but consuming bodies, like, right. Sexual. More.

It's a science of more and more.

And more, more, more. Right. There's all this kind of like self help kind of stuff around it, but really like you realize that if you don't have internal values and you're not like grounded and you don't have things that are deep and important to you, freedom being one, but others being also important, then you're going to end up generally being deeply unhappy and unsatisfied and restless.

You'll look, everyone will think that your life is amazing. We were just talking about this in our last podcast because when you're living that life on Instagram, it looks amazing.

Wow.

He's traveling all the time. Wow. He's around all these beautiful women. Wow. He has all these cars and everything like that. And then when you're by yourself though, what do you really have because you're just by yourself. I talk to so many of these guys and we'll go to this topic for a second, then we'll leave it. But it's guys that are doing like the casual dating and that when you're sick, no one's there to care about you. You know that none of these girls really truly care about you at the end of day. For, for most the guys that are doing the casual dating thing, when you are in a committed relationship with someone, you know that person cares about you. You know that person will take care of you. And hopefully the goal in that the dynamic of the relationship is you're being selfless and, and caring about that person and they're being selfless and caring about you. But when it is a casual thing, it's entirely transactional. You give me this, I give you this. They're like, you give me this, I give you this. And people would argue that that's a relationship. No matter what, you're always going to have that. I think that when it's true love and you actually are connected with that partner, you don't need anything from them. You're more focused on how can I provide for that person? And that's what I'm saying. The way that dynamic works is both people think that way.

Yeah, no, I agree with that.

Yeah. The only reason I, I feel like I can articulate this stuff is.

I've.

I've pondered it so much. The guy that I was talking about earlier that's sitting right here is Kyrie. You're heading out? No, I've. I've. I've, you know, worked with him for a while, and he's articulated. It wasn't until I experienced it, my own life with the casual dating stuff, that I started to see that, hey, like, this is super fun. And, like, I just want to voice this to all the people that are out there that have. Especially the younger guys, because a lot of our demographic in terms of copywriters are young guys. They see this fast, fun lifestyle, and they have a goal of. Let me get to that. I want to get to that. I want to create that. And they visualize that. They have. They have the dream. Did you do a dream board ever?

I mean, I don't think I ever actually made one, but I. I mean, I might have, but it wasn't, like, a huge part of my life.

Yeah, you didn't really. You did it once then, like, I.

Didn'T, like, keep it up and, like, look at it all the time. I had stuff written down. I had, like, affirmations, dreams of. Well, I mean, I just knew things that I wanted or, like, houses. And. I mean, I remember being young and broke and buying lottery tickets in California and being like, I'd buy, like, a nice house, like a Porsche Cayenne, a Chevy Silverado, and a Corvette, and I'd be like, oh, man. And then I'd be so happy if I just had that stuff paid in cash. And then I'll think about how it's like, I have four. I have a Range Rover, a Bentley, a Dodger, and 1500 a Boxer. I have a $3.5 million house. Well, this is my point where I'm going. This, like, $3.5 million house, like a $2.5 million creek house. I've got land. I've got, like, all this shit, right? And it's like, none of that actually makes me happy.

None of it. You know, it doesn't increase your life quality at all. It, like, it. It's, like, fun. But then eventually there's that. What's the term? Hedonic adaptation. Yeah, you eventually just get used to it. So what I was getting to is the guys that are. You have that on your goals. I'm telling you, like, you're not going to listen to me. You won't be able to even hear what I'm saying right now. Go and achieve it. But Just try and remember this point when you're in it and you're probably six months into it and you realize, I thought this was going to make me happier. I thought this is going to be more. This is the point where you now need to reconstruct the values. I don't buy into the philosophy that your values never change. That's, to me, total bs. Your values do change.

Oh, definitely.

Yeah. I don't. There's no way in life that your value, I mean, for some people, they stay the same the entire life. And that's kind of a sad reality that it didn't change or very impressive reality. That means you started out a monk and you ended a monk. Like, that's, that's, that's impressive. But it to me is like, you need to have that point where you actually see, okay, this isn't worthwhile. This is like, this is just like dopamine. This isn't happiness. Actually, happiness is serotonin. This is just dopamine.

Yeah. And I mean, I want to be clear that I think being motivated by, you know, like, material things is not always a, like a bad thing or a problem. Like, there's definitely been. There's different phases is all. There's phases of growth and things like that too, right? So, like, I think you have to get some of those things that you think you want and then realize, okay, like, now that I'm realizing, these truly don't make me happy. Well, why is that? Right? You have to, if you can examine it and you're like, well, because my values are not material things. My values are things like for me, currently, it's impact at scale. Now that was like a decade ago, my highest value was freedom. Experiences were really high. And then comfort was really high value. Right Now, a decade later, it's like impacted scale, helping as many people to achieve freedom in their lives as possible without becoming assholes. Freedom. So freedom is kind of sub, you know, within there, but it's like it's below. It's part of impact. And then even comfort's like, not really that valuable to me. Like, I am comfortable. Often it's nice having nice things and stuff. But I also, you know, like, oh, discomfort is important. You see that a lot of, like, very successful entrepreneurs, especially men that once again take their, their 30s and 40s and suddenly they're into like ice baths and like Spartan races and all this other shit and because then they realize, like, oh, God, if I'm comfortable, if I'm too comfortable, I'm not growing so the point is that what you value will change. And then. Yeah, you know, I'm sure when I'm 60, I'll give you different answers and I'll be like, my goal is imparting wisdom or some shit like that. You're like a white beard and all that. But it. But it changes. And so. But I guess to tie this back as a thread for those who. Who watch or listen. I mean, this is all relevant to the offer ownership thing we started with, because it's like, people go to an offer, but, you know, it's going deeper. Like the why. Right? Start with why. Simon Sinek. I mean, God, he's had some bad content on Twitter lately.

No, no. What's been going on?

Yeah, these things where he's like, marketing, like, is like the. The goal of marketing is to, like, speak to a market and, like, share your, like, words. And you're like, okay, Simon. Like, yeah, like, that's something that's not exactly what it was. But there's some really tautological, very, like, like, repetitive, basic stuff that he was getting blasted on.

He maybe hired a ghostwriter or something.

It's definitely possible. And so, you know, I'm not. I've never met him. Not. Not shading him, but anyway. But, you know, the whole why thing was very important.

At least I thought you were gonna say that. He was gonna say something. Like he was saying some Marxist shit or something on Twitter or something like that. Yeah, no. Okay, good.

Solid. No, but, yeah, but. But it goes back to, like, your. Your real why. And again, like. And, you know, people also, what are other drives, right? Go to, like, Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And then there's, like, stuff around, like, the need for, like, recognition, accomplishment, autonomy, which sort of ties back into freedom, all this stuff. But it's like you. I've just seen so many. And also there's. There's. There's idealism and realism. And I kind of address this with, like, people who were unhappy with my post. Right. Yeah, because it's like, sure, in a perfect world, we should support everybody and be like, follow your dreams, and if you can dream it, you can do it and all that. But it's like, I've just seen it too many times where people. It's like anything else. Right? Even, like, freelancing, copywriting, starting a business. Like, 95% of all small businesses in America fail. Right?

Yeah.

Does that mean that you. And I was not saying in my post, like, nobody should ever try to start an offer. Yeah, like, just, like, I was Saying.

Which some people took it as that.

That'S, that was bizarre to me because there's no point would I say, don't do it.

I didn't read that and think Stefan's like trying to shoot people down. I thought Stefan's giving a very realistic worldview. Most of you guys should with training wheels before you go and ride the bike.

Yeah.

And the truth is that if you go and ride the bike, what's going to happen for most these guys is they're going to go and try and run an offer. They're going to completely abandon their follow up, their prospecting, their sales process entirely of getting clients. They'll abandon their clients or maybe keep one client and then they'll go all in on this thing, it won't work out. And then they're going to come back three months later or four or five, six months later and have to start from scratch again because. And now they're probably even in debt at some point. Maybe they took it out on credit cards or something. You're in a worse position than when you started because you didn't keep the consistent behaviors that actually got you to where you're at. And this is the main thing that I think most copywriters don't realize. And I've. The only reason I can talk about this because I've experienced it myself. Otherwise I'd just be saying a load of crap. You have success, you see an increase in revenue, and then you see that and you attribute the revenues because of me. I'm just fantastic. I'm the best copywriter ever. But then really what it is, is, no, it has nothing to do with you. It's the actions that you took that got you there. And part of it is luck. Right place, right time, you met the right person and they remove those actions and then they kind of coast. They do the deliverables on those like offers and then they get down at the point where, okay, now I need to go back out and I need to prospect again most of the feast and famine that I see copywriters go through and that I've even gone through myself. And I'm sure you have as well. It comes from neglecting those actions that you need to take, which is networking, being known, getting eyeballs on you, talking to people, making offers to people. And that may include cold outreach as well. It's just part of the process.

Yeah, I want to go back to like this, this business analogy of like 95% of small businesses fail because an offer is a business. You're becoming a business owner. We use the parlance of like offer owner. But like in Salt Lake City this weekend for 100 million mastermind, they, they usually bring investment opportunities to us. And it was one for a company called Skin Tea, which is like a beauty drink with collagen in it, other good ingredients like zero sugar to very low sugar, low carbs, tastes great. I didn't invest in it and I really want to, frankly, I'm just not that like liquid right now. I've. I'm liquid but I have other investments, committed all this other stuff. So I'm still debating. I still wanted to honestly want to invest in it because it tastes great, all this. But the one of the three co founders is three women, right? The one who was there, Basima, super cool, was like high up in Coca Cola where she was basically like, you know, at like a VP level. Then she was working for like Sarah Blakely and like Sarah, who's the founder, billionaire founder of Spanx and like Sarah's like right hand woman for like years and has like all this other kind of experience. And then now she started this company with like two other women who both have like, one's a doctor, one. I forget what the other woman does. They're like a very like well versed group. And then now Basma has people on her board of advisors. Like you know, the like former president of Coca Cola, the former like head of, I think maybe current, current head of like the Air Jordan brand. Like Sarah Blakely is an investor advisor, right? All these people because she took all this time putting these dudes, like learned all this stuff about how the business worked and now she's doing a startup and she's raising money and there's still no chance or not, there's still no certainty that, that it will succeed.

Yes.

But like right, like, so okay, now compare that to like your friends like sister who's like, I'm going to start a cupcake company and like I think I'm somebody like, you know, shark tank. And it's like not that it won't succeed, but the chances are way lower because they just don't have that holistic view and understanding and they haven't put in the time. And now I come back to an offer owner and it's like, okay, yeah, you, you get copywriting, like that's great. But like you haven't actually like mentored or apprenticed and this, what's cool though is with that skill where you're so lucky is like if you're really good at it. And you do have to be good. That's like one of my assumptions is you were assuming that this person is very good at copywriting and can add value.

Yes.

Right. Then like you can go get equity and upside and you don't want equity. Rev share, profit share, whatever it is. But you know, like just through virtue of what you're already good at. It's sort of like if like the same woman who's gonna start a cupcake company like you know, could go to like some baking start. I'm not talking about women baking cookies because I'm trying to be sexist and thinking about Shark Tank.

And again, this is about men making steaks.

Yeah. Men making stakes. I'm thinking about this like you get. It was like, I remember for a while in Shark Tank it was like they always had a baking thing on there because it was like so many people were like, oh, I can start a baking business. I like to bake. Right. But like Brienne. But imagine then some like, you know, startup being like. Or like a successful bakery that's doing 5 million or 10 million a year being like, oh, you're like a big man. We really need a good baker, so we'll give you a percentage of our company. Right. That would never happen. But as a copywriter you can actually have that happen.

Yeah.

Or as a good marketer. So to me it's like almost like an unfair advantage and something like, why would you not like take advantage of that and then learn all the, again, all the ins and outs of business. And then at that point that's when if you really decide you want to start your own offer, you should. And I probably should have put that in the post is like, I'm not saying again, at no point did I say never start an offer. But also once you've partnered and JV and like learned the ins and outs and seen all of this stuff and had hands on experience, the probability of success is going to be so much higher. When you go to start like your own offer, like completely solo if you choose to do that. I think most people still probably don't really want to and shouldn't and can. Like I've learned that I don't really actually like, you know, running my own businesses especially I think like direct to consumer. It's like I'd, you know, part of me is always like, I could probably crush it if I did it. But I'm like, it's also really great just coming in. They have all the infrastructure and I can just provide like yeah, that was.

The best stuff like that, right? Equity in my company that it was just like gonna say my company, I've left it recently. So it's like when I got equity inside of it, I, I got to have all these systems already built out. And like I said, I was able to look at them and how do I improve all this now? And so I started doing it with like, okay, we can, we can do these promos. We have to improve this VSL. We need to get these YouTube ads. This agency I like, you know, they had my thoughts on the agency and all these different parts of it. That to me is so much better because you already have momentum that you're tapping into.

That's.

That's the hardest part of really getting anything to work is building up the momentum.

Yeah.

And to quote, he's not late, but he is great. Donald Trump, who said that momentum, when you have it, you got to keep it. And that's what he said it was all about, momentum. I think that is such a valid point that most people don't acknowledge at all. They think, I'll just start it and then within a year, I'm one funnel away, right? I'm one funnel away. And part of this is, I think we've been. The culture of marketing has been sold this dream and for some people, hey, you know, they do hit it out of the park. But for every one of you that hits it out of the park, 150 of you completely just like, you know, be backtracked your success entirely.

And also, like, Russell is like one funnel away tagline. I mean, if you look at click funnels, it was so genius because it was taking, you know, direct response type marketing to a lot of like service professionals where it's like, you know, like lawyers, doctors, accountants, bookkeepers, things like that. So for them, again, it's not even really. They were actually the funnel wasn't create an offer as much as it was like, hey, get online and sell your services online too, and you'll be able to bring in more customers and more revenue. So even that, because I thought about that too, if that culture. But I don't even fully. I mean, it's not like that tagline, actually it's a great tagline firstly. Right.

It is good.

It is good, but it's not even. That's like you're only one offer away is a totally different thing than one funnel away from a service professional.

It's like you're one funnel away. You're one offer away.

Yeah, exactly.

Way longer. Yeah. And I don't know, for some people, I think they don't really care about what they sell. They're like, I'll, I'll sell dog food. I don't care. I don't even have a dog, you know? Or they don't care and they'll just sell something. I'll sell dog training. I don't even have a dog. And they just will use like, PLR and stuff like that. We have a friend who, he doesn't give a flying crap what he sells, and he'll just sell whatever. And he sold everything from like, I won't, I won't go into details, but he's just sold all these different things that I just don't want to talk about it. So I, I personally don't like that. I can't agree with it. I don't want to do that. So for me, it's like, what do I really like talking about? I like philosophy, I like psychology, I like personal development. I like talking about relationships, and I just like helping people. Okay, that kind of looks like a personal development, like, men's coaching offer is what that looks like. Okay, well, if I want to do that, I don't want to be a fraud. If I want to do that, like, I want to be someone that's authentic. I have, like, my best friend literally does that. And I see he, he is everything that he says that he's doing. So for me, it's like I have to become that person in the process of me becoming that person, literally building the product. In a sense, I am then also at the same time learning all of, like, what you're saying, that apprenticeship, which is lost. Like, it used to be you were a blacksmith. You go and learn underneath the blacksmith. But you go and do that, you are then learning all the businesses and all the, all the different business components. I mean, and then you can plug in that skill set or that offer that mindset, whatever you want to sell, actually, and create your own systems and infrastructures around it. But if you're missing that, you're not going to get far.

Yeah, for sure. And I think that the passion thing is interesting because, like, I have a friend, slash, former business partner. I'm trying, I'm going to be careful this next part, but does 75 to $110 million a year selling all products that he doesn't believe in or care about.

Yeah.

But first of all, former, like, equity partner slash, like, you know, executive level with a company that now has like a. I think it's like A billion dollar plus valuation that start to consumer. So. So, like, knew a lot about that space and loves the game and the art of, like, sort of selling through direct response now. Not like. Cause I think when you go to, like, stuff you're not passionate about, like, you. And by the way, actually with him, he and I were partnered back in. Oh, God, be so careful about this. Basically, like, what do you. We were partnered in some stuff.

We can always do the cut thing where it's like, Stephan said something he's.

Not supposed to say. I think this is okay. But basically, the first stuff we did, like, we did revenue very quickly, but it actually, like, blew up. And, like, we ended up, like, owing, like, a couple million dollars because, like, our merchant processing exploded.

Oh, it didn't blow up in a good way.

No, no, no. Blow up in a bad way. I mean, it was like we were selling, like, a ton of stuff. But, like, basically, we. We. No, no. We were selling, like, CBD before you sell cbd. And so basically we had approval from, like, up the processing company. We're like, hey, we're selling cbd. Is that okay? And they're like, yeah, it's okay. We're like, all right, great. And then suddenly the head of that merchant processing company went and met with his banks that were underwriting it, and they were like, that's illegal. It's drugs. So the guy freaked out and froze millions of dollars in profit we had in an account. So then we couldn't get that back. When you run an offer at scale, your money's being floated, right? So affiliates are sending you traffic, things like that. You pay them in 14 days, 30 days, 70 days. You're getting inventory floated. So suddenly we owed, like, literally, God, close to a million dollars, at least, if not more. And, you know, we didn't have any money because we had. All the money was frozen, and we basically tried to sue. And the person was like, I spend, like, a million dollars a month on my legal fees. So already, like, you know, have at me. It'll take years, and I'll cost you millions of dollars. Like, you know, have a blast. And we're like, well, shit. And so, you know, we. And we never got that money back. We basically had to run more offers to, like, get enough money to eventually, you know, we'd be paid everyone back. Which is one of the reasons I have a good reputation, is I've had shit fall apart, but I've always, like, made good, and I don't give up when it gets tough. But now the Guy's doing really well, but that's the whole. Right. So how many people really want to go through that and have, like, the stomach and the resources? And this was after. This guy was already an executive in a really successful company prior to that. But he also loves the game. That was my original point. And I think a lot of people might say they love the game. But do you love the game when all of your money gets frozen and you are like, you know, now you have to work for. Basically for free for the next year to, like, try to pay off, you know, to pay back people or. Because if you don't, your reputation's gonna be shot and you don't get to play in the game anymore. Do you really love the game then? This guy does, But I think that's actually very, very rare. Yeah.

That's why I say you should really. It's not just about the game itself. I think there's also that element of, like, you should love what you're actually doing and what. It's just my own personal opinion. I know that people don't care. Like your friend, he doesn't care. He'll sell whatever he's selling for it. It's just. For me, I guess, I've. I've removed the currency that it's just about money. Obviously. I think that if it was their money plays a part in it. But if it's like a pie chart. What it used to be for me is that money was like. Like, you know, the big majority of this. And it was that, that amount. Now it's more about, like, doing something that I really care about. Because that, to me, is the ultimate fuel. When you wake up in the morning, I can't see myself jumping out of bed and being like, oh, boy, like, ready to attack the day. Let's go sell some dog food versus, like, oh, boy, let me help some guys, like, change their life and, like, create a legacy for themselves. That, to me, is something I can get excited about. So I think a lot of this starts again, like what I said earlier, with the right questions you need to be asking yourself. And I would say the best book on this. I don't know if you read it or not. That I've been reading recently. Is the Road Less Stupid. Have you read that one?

I have not read it, but I've heard of it.

Yeah. Joe, what's the guy's name? That's the Genius Network.

Joe Polish.

Joe Polish recommended it to me, and I didn't read it for a while. And by the name of the book title. I maybe should have read it when he recommended it to me. But it's just so great because it talks a lot about thinking time and asking the right questions. And that's where I think most freelancers would save themselves a lot of time. So I think the first question is, what do I actually want? Starting with something like that and just giving yourself 60 minutes. And if you could sit still for 60 minutes, like, you should definitely do this, is just write it out, get it out on paper, what do you actually want? And ask yourself, does an offer necessarily provide all this to me, or am I equating the offer with what I want, versus if I just maybe made some tweaks inside of the way I'm running my freelancing business, I could probably achieve this as well.

Yeah, you know, yeah, I agree. I think the money point you made is really important because I hear that from you always hear very successful people saying, making money is easy. Right. But Bob. And you know, it cannot feel that way. But once you start getting a really high level of mastering proficiency at certain skills, then it does become true. I mean, I recently had this where I'm like, man, I need to. I want to start doing like, like a warm Traffic offer or 2 per month to my email list. And I could probably make an extra, I don't know, 50 to 100k. So, ooh, I'm creating offers. We'll come back to that in a second. But. But then I'm like, I've been putting off because I'm like, oh, actually too many options. Like, well, I can do like this profit fixed formula thing I created. I can do breakthrough advertising. I can focus on rnbc. I can do this, I can do that. But it's like, I don't have actually, like, it's not a casual problem, though. It's just me focusing on attention. But because I have the skills and the mastery and things like that, I can do it. And again, but when I talk about creating those offers is after selling a billion dollars worth of copy, starting my own supplement company that went from, you know, a million and losing 250,000 to 23 million being partnered with the other guy. I mentioned where we were gross. We were at a run rate to do. We were doing, God, 650, $700,000 a day for a period of time. I mean, so our run rate was like $150 million. And like, then everything just blew up in a bad way. Right. But I have that experience starting an agency in 2018, which also did not go well, went really well and then went really badly. Copy accelerator, rnbc, being partnered in different companies, investing in multiple ventures that failed, all this kind of shit. So none of that's to say other people, if you want to just, hey, with no experience, jump in and do it, go for it. But the point is, as you get more proficiency, making money does become a lot easier. But also I think a lot of people will be better served just focusing on getting world class of their craft.