Your Marketing Does Not Have to Suck, Here is How to Fix It | Lee Pepper

If you want to be successful, you have to be transformational, not transactional. You have to be thinking, okay, well, how am I transforming my business? How am I transforming the relationships? How am I going to transform your listeners on this podcast? People, when they look at marketing, they think there's some tricks.

Come learn the secrets to this and the ninja hacks for that.

Yeah, there you go. That's what. Yeah. Back when I was younger, everybody was, oh, the Internet's going to do away with all our jobs. It didn't. And AI is not going to do away with all our jobs. We may be doing a lot of it.

Seems like it's clickbait.

I think you're right. Google rolls out updates three or four times a year. Google wants to reward quality. AI is the same thing that every podcast ever produced is being indexed. And so it does have an interesting opportunity with AI, just because of the vastness of the supercomputing power. Like, maybe you will have some leverage over just people who are just spending money in paid search, so to speak. And that can't be necessarily as easily mimicked or gimmicked, I should say.

Yeah. Hey, guys. Welcome back to Build. Steven Scoggins, here again, your host, as always, coming to you to help you rise, lead. And last. I got a special guest today. A phenom in the marketing world, served our military, has been part of several exits totaling about a million. About a billion. No, a 1.5 billion. See, I must mess this all up. Too many. Too many zeros for me to get this right. But you're going to love this conversation, especially if you're trying to figure out how to market yourself in a way that's actually effective with principles that actually work based on somebody who's actually done it. So with that being said, welcome to stage, Mr. Lee Pepper.

Thank you so much, Stephen.

Oh, it's good to see you, man.

I am so glad to. To be able to sit here in your home and just this beautiful part of North Carolina. Yeah, I've never turned her an opportunity to come to North Carolina.

Well, in that case, I just. Just keep inviting you back for different things.

My son's only in school for another. Another semester, so.

Okay, just make it quick. I hear you. All right, I got you. Well, look, obviously we got you. Got your amazing book here on. On the table here. Never outmatch modern marketing Battlefield. I would tell you, at least from my perspective, especially in the. The thought leadership world, this personal development space never has it been more difficult to market a voice. And I'M saying that from my own own experience helping other thought leaders market their businesses, the market seems like it's. I say what I, what I see on those are. Seems saturated. A lot of content seems inauthentic. I think people now fully understand they don't. That they're being marketed to on a regular basis. They don't quite like it. Almost like they're being sold rather than actually getting, being given a solution. Ad spends and investment dollars have gone substantially up to acquire a customer, to have a healthy cac. And yeah, I just, I really want to, you know, break it apart. Tell me where we're going wrong. Tell me where we're going right. And like, you know, obviously the book's amazing. It needs a highlighter, it needs a notebook to go, to go with it, to really kind of comprehend not just the concepts, but more importantly like the strateg to implement them. Because I think it's. While it's not one size fits all, it is very specific and I think there's, there's something in there for everybody. So can you help me understand what's broken with marketing?

I think the first thing, as you were just speaking there, Stephen, it's. I believe that if you want to be successful, you have to be transformational, not transactional. And I think that that was something that we, that I learned front and center when I was at Foundations Recovery Network, which was, you know, behavioral health, drug and alcohol, substance abuse disorder treatment. And when you are talking to families, if you got people calling in, you cannot be transactional. They're wanting their lives transformed.

And I think their lives are at stake.

Right. Or their lives are at state. Absolutely. And I think that that is when you, when you're trying to set yourself apart, like you have to be, you have to be thinking, okay, well, how am I transforming my business? How am I transforming the relationships? How am I going to transform your listeners on this podcast? I mean, that's what you have to be thinking about. And unfortunately, when you're dealing a lot, private equity, we were speaking off camera, that sometimes gets boiled down to the transaction.

Yeah.

And so that was one of the reasons I wrote this book was to try to help younger marketers, younger leaders understand how you can apply some of these strategies that I derive from my military experience to be able to arm yourself so that you can resist some of this pushback you'll get.

Yeah, well, I think that's the, I think that's the most interesting piece because I, as someone who's trying to be successful and Actually help people. Right. Know that in order to have a healthy business, you have to have margin. If you don't have margin, as Dave would say, there's. When there's no margin, there's no ministry. Right. And I believe I've seen that be the truth. And I know that as a person who has worked very hard, even have an exit and have a retirement kind of like scenario, basically, that I can't continue to spend my own dollar dollar. A dollar dollar of what I've already worked hard because that exit already happened. Right. So at least for me, I'm trying to figure out how to. And if we workshop this, which would be really fun. I oftentimes feel outnumbered and outmatched.

Right.

So I'm outnumbered in the. It's. In this world of saturated voices. I feel like you're saturated voices and outmatch. There's people who have more marketing dollars than I do to acquire the same person, and they may not have the same service of intent. So I'd love to maybe, just maybe even touch some basic principles of. As you've mentioned, how to set the stage for an early marketer when again, you know, I. I love Alex the Hormozi to death. I mean, he's awesome. But he. He put $4 million towards his book launch. Just an ad spend.

Yeah.

Like, I don't have $4 million.

Right. I didn't. Yeah.

You know what I'm saying?

So it's like just so the audience knows, I'm not paying Stephen $4 million to talk about my book today.

We're still in the negotiation. You know, we're still. We're still working on that. But no, I mean, like, what. I mean, obviously, you successful launch so far. You've also had a very successful career. Our mutual friends absolutely love you and adore you to death. Would personally tell me behind the scenes that the things that you taught them how to do and even modeled for them and teaching them how to do things were transformational. So how do we. How do we bridge the gap? How do we become transformational if we can't even get in front of the person we're looking for?

I think that what's really important is that we can't get stuck just running from tactic to tactic to tactic, which is, I think, one of the. The things that I point out in my book and I want to give you one military strategy or listeners. One military strategy, I think kind of helps really highlight this narrative. It's the anvil and hammer. And this is something I write about in the book, that is a very ancient strategy going back to the Romans, the Greeks, and it was used most recently by Norman Schwarzkopf in the first Gulf War. And just to give you a little bit of the military history, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, when Schwarzakoff got all of the allied forces, he lined up the majority of the forces there on the Saudi Kuwaiti border. That caused Saddam Hussein to do the same. But that was not, that was not, was, was not set up to win. He won by having the, the 7th Corps and the 101st Airborne sweep around from the western side and outflank Saddam Hussein. That was the hammer, the anvil, where all those other forces lined up. I applied that same strateg my marketing. So I would be in a budget conversation. And you've got the finance team is sitting there looking at everything like they're supposed to do, and they're trying to reduce your cost per whatever cost, per acquisition cost, per lead. And they might look at one of your channels and go, you know what? This, this is not performing as well as this over here. And so I use that strategy to explain that that is my holding pattern, that is my Anvil. I may be spending money in paid search as an example to be able to get leads, but it's really to cause my competitors to have to. If I'm in paid search, guess what? They have to be in paid search. I'm going to win either by social or by SEO. That's the hammer. And if you're not careful, a lot of your finance team or your other leaders, they want to cut the Anvil. Well, they say, well, why can't we just win with the hammer? Hammer doesn't win without the Anvil. So I like to use as an example to young marketers so that, because that's how they're thinking, they don't have the language to explain it to their C suite or their board. And we were saying off camera, I never really had that problem because when I would start quoting these strategies, you know, our CE would go on clause events, okay, we're done. But I think part of it was that they all of a sudden I translated these strategies into a mental model that they could understand. Now all of a sudden they agree, whereas before they were stuck in we want to make decisions, you know, for you, even though they don't know marketing, but they're just looking at a spreadsheet now. I was able to put that into something that they could understand. And I was left alone. And thank goodness, because then we Had a, you know, we had a lot of success, whereas if we had cut that, we wouldn't have had the success.

See, the interesting thing is I think I've been on both sides. Like I've been the, the founder and CEO. I would say I was probably the founder before I became a CEO. The CEO was learned. Learn trade.

Yeah.

Skill set.

Right.

Very big difference between the two.

Yes.

But early days, I think I would get shiny object syndrome. Right. I would say, well, this is working for so and so. Yeah. To your point, I'm gonna go try it.

Yes.

It wouldn't necessarily work for me. I would take my eye off the prize. I would actually dilute the dollars I was investing in one location that was actually working, even though it may not be working as well as their one hit wonder over here. So I start. I struggled with that. Then I would have my salespeople come to me and say, we need to be marketing over here on this channel or this channel or this channel. And then, you know, there's, let's, let's say there's $10,000. Right. That I can apply regardless of how well I've got. But they've got me four different channels to choose from. So I would. Back in the day, Well, I got four channels. I'll take $10,000, I divide it four ways to see what wins.

And here's the funny thing is. See this, I write about this in the book. This is a cognitive bias because no offense to you, at that time, you weren't necessarily trained or sophisticated in these areas.

Yeah.

And that's what I write about. It's called the Dunning Kruger effect. And it's, it's when people who don't have experience in one particular area, they kind of overstay. Right. Their ability to make decision. And so what ends up happening is, and this is not, this is not every, you know, cfo, but, you know, you, you'll have a CFO that's looking for some savings. And so they.

Especially if their bonus is tied to it.

Yes. And I write about the misaligned incentives too.

Yeah.

I mean, this is another. It's a cognitive bias. If we don't call it out, then all of a sudden, you know, somebody who's a younger marketer or younger, you might be a young founder, young CEO, and you've got private equity that thinks they know better.

Yeah.

And it's just, it's a cognitive bias that you have to call out and explain.

Yeah, I see this. I think this is what makes, it makes marketing so tricky for so many. You know, I'm sure we'll get into this in a few minutes, but AI has changed the way we market like SEO. I'm very fortunate we found out because we're. Because we're tracking the data.

Yes.

We, you know, we're starting to get recommended by chat and perplexity. Right, Right. Which is amazing because we're still very much on the surface if we just let traditional SEO purposes.

But you've probably architected your site. Whether it was on purpose or accidentally, you've got an architect.

I started asking chat and I say, hey, how do I get you to recommend me? I did that like seven months ago, and we started applying the things in there. And by. By word, it's working.

Yeah.

So. So it's like, have you checked out my servant Stephen? So it's that kind of thing. But no, I think. I think that's the. I think that's the key fusing part. The other thing I was even sharing with Sara was here for a few minutes before you had a chance. We had a chance to get started. Who's a master copywriter. One of things I shared with her is like, I'm tired of building the thing that works right now, but won't work by the time I finish it.

Yes.

Like, and so I feel like marketing in general, it's. It's not cyclical per se, but it's very seasonal. Like, for a season, something will work and then it won't work again. And then I'll give you. I'll give you a perfect example. We were building out a large community group, and we'll still launch it. It's called the Lion's Den. It's amazing. We're super proud of it. But we built one mechanism that was working at the time which was going to be essentially a solution of we're doing a live event. We'll share about the platform at the live event, we'll show all the features and benefits, we'll talk about who it's for, how it works, how you get access to me on a regular basis, all these kinds of things. And so we built a funnel structure off of that. By the time we got the thing, like, finished and ready to launch the live event, all of a sudden that methodology, especially with. With ads, wasn't working. And all of a sudden webinars were working again. You know, I was. You probably know Amy Porterfield as well. I know she's in the area as well. And when I saw her last time, I was like, amy, what is actually working. Right. And she's like, well, first of all, you have to realize that trust is hard to earn and it's easy to lose. Right. So either you're, you're of, of service or you're not. Either your solution is geared towards helping that person have a solution or it's not. And then you need to know that you're going to have to give away a lot more free things to build the trust to earn the right to share your offer with people, you know. So like one of the things she did recently is like we do a webinar and then we turn around and do a strategy where we do another two day event either at low cost or no cost and then we'll typically, I'll let them have access to my program. Right. And you know, granted her a lot of her features now. She's done incredibly well, of course, and she's a master at what she does. She's absolute master. You know, but six months earlier I was, we were going to do something very similar, but yet it wasn't working. So I don't, at least I'm just being, speaking like, honestly.

Sure.

As someone who's trying to figure out how to market in a responsible manner, like we don't want to be known as a guru, we don't want to hurt people and stuff like that is. I'm not even sure how to navigate what to do to create the force multiplier.

I think one of the big problems that we have is that we're constantly thinking about this next customer. When what I tried to do at foundations and especially Care in the Meadows was, okay, we're going to have this, we're going to have this cost to get that first customer. But then it's imperative that I have systems set up to maintain that relationship. And maybe it's easier in healthcare because once somebody comes into a program and they get sober and they find, they find, they find safety there, then it's a little bit easier to kind of stay in touch with them and not just them, their families.

Yeah.

And I, and I wonder sometimes, like those of us that are like doing books and coaching, we're always like trying to get that next customer, which, okay, there should be part of that. But what are we doing to maintain these relationships here? Because that's where we sometimes, I think we still sometimes get stuck on the transaction when, wait, we've got customers that we may have had a year ago, two years ago, six years ago, like, what are we doing to really stay in touch with Them, because that's where you really get. Everybody talks about lifetime value.

Yeah.

But do we really?

No one really applies it, though. Yeah, no, I think it's definitely gaping hole. And yeah. You know, it's funny. I teach a methodology called the five drivers. So it's ideation, which is roles, responsibilities, core mission, core values, mission, vision. It's essentially the glue, right. It's like, what do you need to make the machine work?

Right.

And then you got your sales pipeline. Who, what, when, where and how? Like, what are you selling? How are you selling it? When are you selling it? What's the. What's the mechanism of selling it? Then you got fulfillment. How do you deliver that product? Good or service with excellence? Then you got the finance piece, which is like, you know, how do we maintain revenue? How do we maintain profitability? How do we watch our cost? Because I find that I've shared this before entrepreneurs, the one thing we're really weak at is not paying attention to where things are going, cost wise. Yeah. And the first thing Sean Anthony, a good friend of mine, asked me, so what's the number one thing an entrepreneur should do and to make their business more profitable? I was like, well, they probably need to go make sure their costs are in order.

Right, right, right.

Like, I would pick up on average, three. Three to three and a half percent a year. Yeah. In cost repairs. You know, just, hey, this system's outdated. This thing's out. Anyway. I said all that to say that the fifth one is what I like to refer to as raving fan retention. Right. Our mutual friends Roy and AJ Vaden are fantastic at this. And I know they've been studying Will's book, Unreasonable Hospitality.

You're gonna get it. Yes.

You know, if I.

Something. Hospitality.

Yeah. Is there Unreasonable Hospital.

We're gonna put that in the show notes, Right?

Yeah. And, you know, so that. And they're learning. I know they love Will to death. So. Dara. And again, like, it's like you're. There's so much interest and focus on getting the first customer, but I think you're right.

And then here's the other thing, too, Stephen. A lot of the companies that I. That I worked with or I still consult with, reviews are always a big thing, especially in healthcare. If your hospital or your. Or your practice or your rehab center gets negative reviews. And it's directly correlated to how well you're caring for those people when they graduate the program, like when they're in it. Yeah, we're always doing great, but what are we doing to really care and feed after they leave. And that's where alumni programs come in. And the ones that aren't doing a great job at that are the ones, I think, that suffer from negative reviews. Think that that's something too. Like, we're always trying to figure out how do we get positive reviews and how do we get all this affirmation. Well, are we in putting some dollars there?

Yeah.

Are we investing some stuff there? But what happens is we say, well, no, I'm not. I've got to keep going after the next customer. The next customer, when maybe if we just care and fed they.

I mean, statistics say it's more expensive to obtain a customer is to service a customer. Yeah. And there's more of a value of having a lifetime customer than a, a new customer.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

I don't know how it is in your business, but I know for me, and, and you know, I, I'm not, you know, I, I, I'm not a hu, I'm not as huge like in the coaching business. I, I keep a handful of clients.

Sure.

In the behavioral health space.

Yeah.

But I don't advertise for them.

Yeah.

I might go some months without any prospecting calls, and I might get a dozen one month. But it's all relationships.

Yeah.

It's people that I have known for 15 or 20 years and, and that's served me.

Yeah.

You know, and I, and I really honor. But, but there is work I have to do.

Yeah.

You know, I do go speak at conferences. I'm always willing to take calls, and I don't charge for everything. But that's part of me, like, trying to feed that.

Yeah. No, I think that's genius. I, the other thing too is like, what's the purpose of, of getting a thousand calls when, when only maybe 10 of them are qualified?

Yeah.

So we actually put a mechanism in place to basically take five or six questions and try to figure out if they're a fit for us to try to figure out if they get to the call stage. If they don't get to call stage, we have other things for them so they can continue to carry on their journey. A lot of tools. We'll call it conditional logic. Right. So it's if this, then that, you know, philosophy, if, you know, they score X, then they go this step or they go to that step or they go to this step, which helps optimize time, you know, And I know you're a real big believer in making sure that the time is optimized because we only have so Much of it in a day. So what have you experienced and what are you seeing in your frameworks?

I think one of the. One of the things that we have to be really aware of, and this is how I first met, you know, Rory and Amanda was, you know, when you get that lead. So from the digital marketing perspective, okay, I can generate leads all day long. You give me what you're willing to, you know, with the. What the budget's going to be, and we'll go out and we'll create. Build the engine to create that. But at the end of the day, who is answering or servicing those leads? And that was how we. I think I told you off camera when I first. When I first took over our inside sales, our call center, I couldn't even make it worse. Yeah, that's when I knew we had a problem. I can't even make it worse. Forget trying to make it better. And that's when I researched and we got connected with Rory and Amanda, and it really just changed the game. But I wonder then sometimes, like, when I come in to do a project, you know, I will. They'll say, oh, yeah, we're getting this. This many lead forms. But they're terrible. They always complain about the web forms. But then I'm like, okay, well, how are you? And what will end up happening is it'll be like, well, they sit over here in this queue for sometimes three or four days before somebody gets to them.

Good Lord.

I even had one client without. Without naming. I had one client that they would get their. Their web forms, and they would pin them up to this string, a little clip, and they would slide it down like it was at a restaurant.

Was it five guys? I think it's like.

It's like that.

And.

And what was happening is. And I said, okay, well, what's the. Well, when people have time, when they're not on the phones, they get up and they go grab the next ticket. So I went over there, and they were three or four days old. And I'm like, that's the problem. You know, it's. It. It's not.

By that time that leads. That leads so cooled off, they're probably going to answer the phone.

Yeah. So I think sometimes that founders are guilty of this a lot because they will assume that's being taken care of. Yeah, I've hired this agency or I've got this intern doing this, but if you're not really experiencing it yourself, like, you got to wonder it. And I talk about this in the book. We have to get out from behind the spreadsheet. And when I work, I was fortunate to work for Ross Pro for many years, and he had a personal ethos of management by walking around. And he. Even as a billionaire, you would see him in the hallways, and he might just walk into an office and go, hey, Lee. Ross Perot, nice to see you. What you doing today? Like, he would do that. And I mean, it was just he. He always had his pulse on what was going on. And yeah, somebody might say something stupid or they might, you know, they might say, oh, I don't like the food in the cafeteria today. And then that would create a whole thing. But I think that's. I think for leaders, I think sometimes we get stuck sitting in our desk, and now they're working from home. I mean, that's got to be really frustrating, I think, in how you navigate that. But you have to, like, maybe go have lunches and go have coffees or go to somebody's house and have, you know, meetings. Like. Yeah, it's really super important.

Yeah. No, I couldn't. I couldn't agree with you more. I know Dave is a big fan of walk energy by our walk management, walking around, as he calls it. I didn't realize it came from Ross Stove. Next time I see Dave say, hey, man, did you give Ross credit for that?

Yes, yes.

But I know I'm a big believer of that too. When I was running a larger. A larger team, in some cases, I would intuitively know things just because I could. I could walk around and just pick up on there. You could watch somebody's countenance or their face down. They up. Are they. Do they. Do they come across as diligent versus disengaged? I think one of the things I've had a hard time with, with marketing in general is not knowing what I don't know. You know, I would say that you mentioned the. The founder. Right. So I'm like, well, how does a. How does a founder look at marketing versus how does a competent CEO look at marketing?

See, this is where I think I'll give you a personal example. So I came from, you know, political science, and I got into it. And then. And then, because it was at that crossroads of all of a sudden, the Internet came up. And when I was first starting as a cio, digital marketing was infrastructure. It was a line item along with printer servers. And it. So it was in my bucket.

Yeah.

It wasn't in mark, because marketing then was yellow pages. Marketing was business development.

Congratulations on the 10x talk by the Way. Thank you.

Thank you. And so for me, it was really, it was really transformational for me that I had that IT background kind of moved to market. So here's. So we had four conferences that we ran nationwide when I was at foundations, and we had a whole team that would come and they would present. And when I first got involved in the conference piece, the graphic designer would come and lay out eight or ten ideas. You know, they have all the boards and stuff, the idea boards. And our CEO, he would comment, oh, I like this, I don't like this, I like this, I don't like this. So when they said, hey, league conferences are now we're going to roll those under you, I said, okay, we're not doing that.

Yeah.

I hired the team. The graphic artist knows more about color theory than I do.

Yeah.

Why am I commenting on it? I want to hear a good pitch.

Yeah.

I want you to sell me on this is why we're doing it this way. And I want to know that that sounds good from the business perspective, but I'm not going to overrule them. And that's where I try to tell young marketers, do not go in and ask for permission. You need to go in and sell them. So if you're gonna, if you're gonna have a campaign that you want to show them. Yeah, great. You present it.

Yeah.

You're not showing up saying, can I do this?

That's so good.

No, you've been hired.

Yeah.

And I, and I tell young leaders, they say, well, I'm not sure that they really listen. The board in the C suite, they, your biggest fans are the board in the C suite. They want you to succeed.

Yeah.

Do you think they want to do your job?

No.

No. But yet we somehow we have this imposter syndrome sometimes.

Yeah.

And we have to, you have to get. And that's why I titled the book Never Outmatched.

Yeah.

I mean, when I was a young officer, I enlisted, then I went to officer candidate school, then I went to armor school. And when you're a young 22 year old lieutenant and you know nothing about armor, about armor strategy, about, about an M1, and they put you inside an M1 and you've got a staff sergeant who is, you know, 15 or 20 years older than you.

Yeah.

You outrank him.

Yeah.

But you don't really. And when he's barking at you and he's drilling into you, he's wanting you to be successful because he knows you're going to be leading these other troops and that's I think that's why I was fortunate to come up through the military because that was just natural to me.

Yeah. No, that's awesome. Now, now I'm even more curious. I would, I would agree. So as a, as a founder, CEO, what do you want to call it? Right. And I use this terms interchangeably in this context. Leader of the organization. It's probably a better context for this, for this one. I can tell you that if someone can show me how they plan to get a return on that investment. Yes. With diligence, with thought, why something works, how we're going to get there. Nine times out of 10 we're going to get their funding.

Yes.

Nine times out of 10. However, to your point, I have sat in many a meeting where it's like, this is something I think we should do. I kind of want to do it ever. Our competitors are doing it. Like there was no real, there's no plan.

Where's the numbers?

Yeah, exactly. Where's the plan? You know, everybody's.

I, I would always sign up like we gotta, we would have a, you know, we have our cost per admit in behavioral health. It was cost per admit was one of the big numbers. So if, for example, if, if my budget is predicated on a three thousand dollar cpa, that's what I'm signing up for. I'm going to figure it out. I'm never going to be, I'm going to figure out how to do it. And if, if there's a month or a quarter that doesn't work, it doesn't mean you're getting fired. Yeah, but I am responsible for figuring it out.

Yeah.

And I have to have the ability to mover and, and pivot. I think that's where a lot of people sometimes don't really understand how innovative and creative the military is.

Yeah.

Because you have to, it's a, it's constant pivoting and, but, but I've signed up for, for that, for that number and I have to communicate it and I have to, I have to be responsible.

Yeah.

For it. And maybe that's where some young leaders get nervous because they kind of have, they kind of feel like maybe they have the responsibility but not total autonomy. So as a founder and a CEO, you've got to give your leaders.

Do you think the fear comes from also going to be, hold accountable to whatever number they put in there?

Yeah, could be.

Yeah.

I always built our budget. I've heard, I've heard from some of the people that I've coached. Well, they just Gave me the budget. Well, that's not going to work. I mean, you, you have to, you have to have. Now you're going to have one shot.

Yeah.

Here's the budget. Okay. So you need to either say, I, this is not possible. Yeah, See the possible. Not possible. Like, you have to, you have to, like, you can't just say, well, that's.

All they gave me. Yeah.

Well, did you accept it?

Yeah.

We wouldn't do that in our personal life.

No, no. Well, I mean, I think if we, if, if we really, if, if we're really passionate about the outcome and the needs. I underestimated the way ad spin works. I didn't realize you have to train a pixel for a number of months really, you know, between two and two and three months before it even knows what client you're looking for. And unfortunately, the only way to train the stupid thing is to spend money on it.

Yeah.

Which is interesting. Right. So, you know, so you. We were able to get, I want to say our customer acquisition or not customer acquisition. Lead acquisition cost was bumping around 16. We got it down to 11 and 1111 and some change, 1150. And when I looked at those numbers, then you go to, okay, what does it take to turn that same lead now into a client or a customer? And now it really becomes more of a sales process. So this is where for me, marketing moves to sales. Is that, Is that potential going to a sales call that's going to generate essentially a customer, a new client customer.

Yeah.

And then it goes into the fulfillment bucket, which is. Okay, how are we going to make sure this customer never wants to leave us because we're so. We treat them so well. They get so much value for what we do. Etc. Now, you mentioned setting up your own budgets. I find that the budget is the hardest thing to set because at least if you're using SEO or ad spend, you don't know how. What it's going to take to get eyeballs.

Well, here's what I, here's the way I approach it. In, in most businesses, everybody's going to have a different. Like, like what are you willing to spend as part of your net revenue?

Yeah.

In behavioral health, for, for most of my tenure, we were willing to spend 10 of net revenue in marketing.

Okay.

Now, so that's how we built our budget. I knew what we were willing to absorb from the private equity investors, you know, from the cost of, you know, all our clinicians and all that. We had 10%. It's my job to understand, okay, how am I Going to divide that 10 up because to your point about talking about, you know, meta and pixels and there's so many different channels and maybe for your business, maybe, maybe meta is not good for you right now.

Maybe influencer marketing or referral marketing, but.

You'Re responsible for deciding that. And you can't blame, you can't blame the CEO or the business or finance that you didn't get enough budget. Now you have to create a budget to fit within your business. And so, you know, for us it was, it was, we were about, if I remember right, we were about 40% business development relationships. These are people out in the field calling on therapists, outside sales calls outside. Yeah. And then another 40% was digital and then we had another 20% was alumni. So that's how we divided it up. And then on the, on the. So if somebody, if somebody wanted to hire another BD rep, okay, well we have 10%, you've got 40% of that. You have to divide that up. And so do you either pay somebody more or do you maybe hire two junior people? That's for them to decide. Same thing on the digital. How much was I going to put toward SEO, toward social, paid social, you know, paid search. I mean that's, I have to figure that out because each channel's different. But I was also responsible for educating the C suite, the board, the finance team as to how each of those channels were performed because I was not going to have them deciding what I was going to spend money on. Yeah, not if I have signed up and created the budget.

Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I mean that doing so otherwise would, would undermine the responsibility or accountability you would have. That you would have.

And I think it's important market for you. Also, I believe in an integrated marketing team. So as chief marketing officer. So you know, we had a VP of business development, we had a digital marketing manager, we had an alumni coordinator, conference manager, you know, the call center manager all reported that to me. So guess what? That took away all the arguing and the finger pointing. So a lot of times when I get into consulting projects now with behavioral health, you know, they'll have the call center manager reporting up to the CFO and they'll have the digital marketing report, you know, maybe reporting directly to the CEO and then they'll have the business development. Well, you know, they've been there a long time. So they report to coo. Well, no wonder they're not getting any trash because everybody's blaming each other.

Yeah.

Why are the numbers not working and Then they're also trying to. Well, that's my lead. No, that's my lead. But when you have one team, it takes away all the argument.

Yeah, no, that's so true. It also has me thinking about, you know, we were joking around a little bit off air or about our mutual friend Rory and wanted to copy you and have dashboards everywhere, monitors. I heard AJ Mention it too.

Yeah.

Which is interesting to me because first of all, I love that idea.

So it's transparency.

Yeah, I love transparency. I love data. It also showcases to me when you're able to get to the point, because, you know, if you're looking at a founder that's less than a million bucks, they probably may, may have a contractor. Contractor or two people trying to get marketing working and firing on all cylinders. But one of the things that I struggled with early on, before I understood more about it, is actually knowing what I like. So we said, we've set the budget. It. We're going to delegate so much towards ad spend, so much towards affiliate marketing or referrals, and so much towards what I would, what I would refer to as events. So I'm not sure if Rory and AJ still use KEEP or not, but I know that KEEP will invest so many dollars into an event that somebody else is hosting as a sponsor for so much access to an audience, and they have a back end mechanism to figure out, okay, we think we're going to get X number clients.

Right.

And of course, it's because it's a technology platform. They're pretty sticky. Yeah. Right. So the com. The platform I use, I've thought about switching before, but I don't want to go through the headache.

Right, right.

So I, I instead I choose to contact them and work. Work through the issues. Right. Which makes them better anyway. But where I was going with it is one of the things I've had a challenges with in times past, and I'm saying this for the benefit of the audience, is understanding once all of that's been set aside, is how to actually measure the people who are measuring. The thing that I've now invested in, like, and try to figure and try to back my way into that with the model that you just expressed, it showcases very early what's working and what's not working.

Yeah. I think that one of the things that I. Is a common complaint that I hear is I work with a lot of agencies and well, the agency is not giving me this data or the data is different. And so part of that is, well, I find it's the owner, founder's fault. The agency is working with what they have. They may not have all the information in your business, so you have to really work to get them aligned. But I think that the. The owner, founder needs to understand what are the data points that are important to me. And every other software, every other agency, every other contract, they have to adapt to that instead of you. Well, this is what the agency gave me, and it's meaningless data.

Yeah.

You know, because you'll. You'll. You'll get these reports. Oh, look at all these impressions.

Yeah.

Why do I care about impressions? You care about impressions. I care about phone calls.

Yeah.

Or I care about leads.

Y.

And so that's where the owner founders, they need to understand. And this is where they get confused about marketing.

Marketing.

Oh, well, I just thought marketing just did this.

Yeah.

No, no, no. They. You have to adapt to the business.

Yeah.

And so that's where you have to decide, like, what are your. I don't know, 5, 8, 10.

Yeah. I mean, I would say if I just, If I just. If I just did this off of my head. Impression, slash, page, page visits.

Yeah.

You can track that. You can heat map that.

Yeah.

Then to CTA acquisition or CTA clicks.

Yeah.

Right. And click either. We can track that.

Here's what I would say, as you're saying that, Stephen, is that. Do you, as the owner, founder, care about that? I would say, why do you care about impressions? Because what does that tell you? You might get a million impressions or Maybe you get 10, but did those 10 call you instead of.

Yeah, that's. That's a great question. Because I feel like what would happen is. And at least where I was going with it is once the machine is up and running, I care about all those numbers because it tells me about optimization.

Yeah.

However, if it's a new machine, then I care about phone calls.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, I said your marketing team should care about that. Your marketing team should care. Care about the cta, the impressions. But you, like, as I'm thinking about, as I was a CMO, phone calls were number one. That was our 85% of our.

So essentially, take the total budget divide by phone calls. Now, how much it costs to get.

A call we had.

And everything else in the middle is digital marketing.

We had all that cost per impression. We had all that stuff. But what did I care about? I cared about phone calls.

Yeah.

Now, we also had web forms and live chat, so we had a call sport. We had a cost for all of that.

Yeah.

But that's What I care about. Because if I get too involved in the impression. Okay, what now I'm applying my cognitive bias. Now, I come from a digital marketing background, so.

Yeah.

Yeah, but I. Why that. That's what the. That's what this. That's what the digital marketing manager's responsible for understanding.

Yeah.

Because again, I. It's. BD is another good example. We would have some BD reps. We had to be really careful where you place them because our treatment was all either out of network or private pay. All right, no offense to rural areas of Alabama, but why would I have a BD rep calling in a rural area of Alabama that can't utilize our services when I needed to? So this is. Again, though, I needed to not apply my cognitive bias. I have to trust that my VP of Mark of business development, that they had a handle on that and they were, they were getting back to me the phone calls, which then translate to leads and admins. That's right.

I guess if I use that same frame of reference, one of the things that comes up is if the impressions are a byproduct of creative. Right. So better the, the better the creative, the better the impression.

Yeah.

Impressions are a byproduct of visits or page visits or opt in forms or some kind of like tool to kind of figure out did they do that? Yes or no.

Yeah.

And then they book a call. So you're right. I think using that, I'm just using the very summarized framework. But it's still. If these things are getting better and better and better than my cost per call is still going down. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Yeah. And that's where, you know, like with Rory. Rory and Amanda, I love their brand builders.

Oh, they're amazing.

And I love the, the, the amount of work product, like when they help, you know, and they. I published my book through Mission Driven.

Oh, yeah.

That imprint Forefront. I love the work product I got. But I wasn't applying like they would say do this, this and this. I wasn't like, trying to like. Well, why would I. Okay, I don't want to do this. I don't want to do this. I, I trust that I, them, they know what they're doing. I think that, that sometimes as owner founders, we fall into that because we built the business.

Yeah.

That we know everything about the business, but that doesn't necessarily include that you know everything about marketing and it like all of a sudden you know everything about data security.

Yeah, you're. I mean, you're right again. I, I'VE said this before. It's like, if you're not a master in any given area, hire the one that is.

Yes. And hold them accountable.

Yeah.

That's the other thing, too. We're. I'm big about holding people accountable. That's. That's another thing with smaller businesses, we tend to not move quick enough. And that's. My TED Talk is about indecision. And indecision in the military gets you overrun, and in business, it gets you killed. Business, you can get you killed, too.

Yeah.

And. And a lot of times we are slow, you know, to make decisions when we need to be, like, fast.

It's funny because that's. That seems like a little bit of a dichotomy because I, I've been in seasons where I make decisions too fast, and I've also been in decisions where I make decisions too slow. So I'm not even sure what the right kind of cadence is now. My decision process is the bigger the decision, the longer I take.

Yeah.

So in essence, if it's. We're making a marketing decision, I want to see a budget, I want to see what the plan is.

Yeah.

And then I'll make a decision on the. Essentially as.

But that stuff shouldn't take, shouldn't take that long.

Yeah.

You know, I, When I left specialty care and I went to the Meadows, they. The, the chairman, who was one of the founders, you know, he said, I don't want you to make any changes in the first 90 days. And I use the example in the book.

When are they going to hold you accountable?

For the first 90 days. I want you to get to meet every. They were hiring me as a change agent.

Yeah.

And so, but yet they're saying don't do anything for 90 days. You know, and so I, I use the example in the book that, you know, when, when, when Eisenhower replaced Major General Fredenhall after the, the, the Allies loss in North Africa at the Kazarene Pass, he put patent in. Within 90 days, Patton and Montgomery had ousted Rommel from North Africa. Nobody said, hey, we're hiring you, Patton, because they knew he was a change agent.

Yeah.

You know, he's a pain in the butt.

Yeah.

They. Nobody was saying, don't do anything for 90 days.

Yeah.

But yet we sometimes handcuff our people. And so I think that especially with all the tools we have today, I think you can get budgets, I think you can get plans, I think you can get them faster and maybe even, even, even more thorough than we could have done, you know, years ago.

Yeah. Yeah, no, I think it's great. I think, you know, I'm, I want to be careful because your experience is extensive and well earned and well fought for and you've been very successful. And I know what we're talking about right now. Talks to the people. Actually understands our verbiage and our lingo. Right. Cmo, cio, like all that kind of stuff. Let's talk to the entrepreneur that hasn't broken a 7 figures yet. Like if you were going to. And they're, and they're operating, I don't know, a 10 person team, I think.

They'Ve got to not get too wide. Sometimes when I go into a small mom and pop treatment center, you know, maybe 10, 12 beds, they're doing tick tock, they're doing meta, they've got a BD rep, they've just hired. They're, they're sponsoring conferences all over the country. Like, whoa, time out.

Yeah.

Because it, all of a sudden, no wonder you don't know what's working. You got too much stuff.

Yeah.

So I think that my advice to, to people that are, that are just approaching that level is to don't, don't get so wide that you can't understand and know where your expenses kind of like. We should talk about the expenses.

Yeah.

Like you're not. And also you need to understand the competition. If you're not at that seven figures. Do you really think what you're doing in TikTok is going to break through right now? Probably not.

Not unless it's a main channel. Yeah.

You know, at foundations, you know, we were spending at one point almost a million dollars a month in paid search.

Yeah. Yeah.

And I'll have clients today, Stephen. Like I want to get into paid search. Okay, well what kind of like look at this, look at your marketing budget.

Crap out of me.

Well, and they'll say, oh, I've got $5,000. Okay. Do you understand you've got these companies here I was part of. They're spending a million. You think you're going to break through on five now we. There are some certain things you can do hyperlocal.

Yeah.

Which it totally makes sense. But I, I worry that sometimes it's that fomo.

Yeah.

You know that. And also it's the tactics I heard Bill down the streets doing. He's doing TikTok, you know.

You know what's really funny is I, I've done this now at four different events where I'm speaking. I'll say, hey, by show of hands, if you're a Business leader, founder, entrepreneur. Show me. Raise your hand if you feel like you should be further ahead than you actually are. Without fail, 100% of the hands go up. Without fail. And what that did was that brought light to one of the things I call the five constraints. It was like, you know, there's elements, so there's arrogance, ignorance, fear, insecurity, and then impatience. Right. Almost every dumb decision I made was more of an impatient decision. I'm not saying not don't take action, but impatiently. To me, impatience leads to comparison. Right. Because you're, you're, you're comparing yourself to what you see around you. Therefore you're like, I'm far behind. I'm far behind them. Yeah, they have the nicer house, they have the nicer business. They have the, the trucks with the logos on them. They've got the big website, they have the chat bots. They created like, like the, the new AI bot for themselves. They, they have all these things. I can't compete. I can't compete, so I got to do it all. Yeah, but they have more money than me. Right. How do we, I'm a big believer in slow. I'm, I'm now a big believer, and I'm saying this in the last 24 months really of slowing things down if things speed things up. And so what I mean by that is not waiting to make a decision, but taking time to make an informed decision. Right. So if we take the, the early stage entrepreneur, how do we help them segment and figure out what, what the lane is?

Well, I think it's, I think it's a fair to have the conversation if you're an early stage entrepreneur. Okay, let's, let's just say you were, you know, you were going to do a million dollars this year. So do you honestly, you want to do 10 million next year?

I've done that before and. No, you don't want to do it.

That's what I'm saying.

Too much growth in a year.

Right. So let's, let's. I mean, that would be crazy.

I had, I had a five year stretch for my company, literally doubled in size every year.

But wouldn't people just be thrilled if you went from a million to 1.25? 1.5.

I would be. 30% growth is strong.

I know. That's where I think sometimes we have to say like, okay, let's really level set where you're at.

Yeah, right.

Because I think sometimes we get, we get, we get trapped in this. Well, I want to go from seven to eight you know, it's like.

Okay, and the question is, why?

Right. Well, and when we went. I was at foundations 10 years. I was there when we just had received our first $25 million investment from. From a Chicago private equity firm. I was her first CIO. So when I exited, you know, 10 years later, we had gone through two. You know, we sold for 350 million. We didn't do that in the first year.

Yeah.

And we went from having me and a digital marketing manager, and then we had an IT guy and an EHR guy. Then when we left, there were 30 people in marketing. I didn't build that overnight.

Yeah.

We did it on sustained growth. And I think that your systems can't even.

Your systems can't even take on that growth.

Right.

Yeah.

And so I think sometimes we get. We get stuck in this fomo. We get. I think it's same thing in. In. In personal. Like, my boys are now, you know, college age, but, you know, they would come home from school, oh, so and so's got. Got that. That new car, that new thing. I'm like, well, did they pay cash for it? Yeah, be careful.

Yeah.

Because you never know, like, how things are financed and how things are looking. And that's what I'm. I always tell folks that I consult with when they're. When I come in and. And they're like, you know, I want to do this. I want to do this. And why. Well, so and so is doing it down the street.

Yeah.

I would hear all the time. Well, that outpatient center, they're full.

Yeah.

Okay, let's. Okay, I'll take that. They're full. How do they get full?

I don't know.

They could be. They could be losing their shirt on paid search.

So. Dude, funny story. So funny story. But not so funny. Funny story. Not so funny story story. I'll just say a company that I was a part of, when I would go sit down with them, their. Their numbers came in a few times and were kind of underperforming. And so I would. I pushed back. It's because I, you know, I had ownership or had equity in. In one of these companies. Obviously, I've had. I've got bits and pieces in a few companies, but I had a significant investment in this one. And, you know, so I'm, Like, I said, well, I'm. Wait, let's dig in. And we. And we built very complex dashboards, like our dash or we had, you know, we knew what revenue, what units, all these kind of. We. Very complex. And I. Because I helped build them originally. It was easy to read them. Right. So I was looking at them and I was like, okay, what's going on here? And they kept bringing up the competitor. And they were like, well, the competitors doing this, the competitors doing that, they, they added this many people to their team. They, they're soliciting customers at below cost essentially, and they're getting business and they're garbling up market share. And I told them, and I said, that is unsustainable. It is unsustainable and you don't want to compete with them. Yeah, right, go. And this is my advice for them. Let's go compete on value. Offer more value for whatever the investment is. So if the investment is X and they're beating you by 10% or 20%, then offer 20 or 30% more value. Right, right. In customer service and, and how you show up, like most people don't fully understand that you can get more money without having to drop the. Your top line revenue simply by giving someone a spa feel.

Right, right.

It's like going into Walmart or going into a spa.

Yeah.

Like when they walk in, get Rory and AJ do this with their kids.

Yeah.

Had dinner with them, you know, a little while ago, walked up to the house and first thing, Jasper meets me at the front door with a wet towel.

Yeah.

Yeah. I'm like, this is walking into their house. Yeah. You know, and that kind of thing. And I was like, I was trying to help them encourage. And sure enough, yeah. There was a meeting that not long ago, and the company that they been competing against had a massive layoff, had outsourced a tremendous amount of their business to overseas. You know, specifically in the procurement side of things. That was already starting to show itself as the signs of mess because you can't take a specialized industry and sub it out into an area that doesn't even have the industry in the, the environment.

Right, right.

And I told them, and then I said, that shows signs that they finally have hit their breaking point.

Yeah.

The fact that they're making that drastic of a decision right now shows signs that they're. They're in trouble. Prepare to win.

Yeah.

Just for holding. Being great at what we do, holding your service, holding your capacity. And I believe there's also this, this element of knowing your worth. And I think it's where the pricing comes into play. I know we've already been chatting for a while, but I'm very curious. I want to hear the breakdown of how you see the force multiplier as relates to marketing, where it meets the, obviously the terminology that we have in the military.

You know, the force multiplier. This, this is a concept from Carl Von Clause and without boring the audience, they can read about it. And there was really.

The book's awesome, guys, pick it up. Seriously.

It was really the first chapter I wrote. The force multiplier basically is a way that you can take one piece of content and you can put it on all these different platforms. And so the, the way that I leveraged that in, in my marketing experience was that it became very budget friendly. So if I wanted to do like podcasts, this is many years ago we started probably, I think it was the first behavioral health podcast, like going back, way back. Well, we didn't have a podcast producer. I didn't have Quest help us.

He is pretty awesome.

Yeah, he has been great. But so, but we had our copywriters and our editors. They're writing content, SEO content for our website. Well, one of our writers, David Kondos, he was also a musician in Nashville. He's like, he goes, I think I'd like to try my hand at podcasting. So it was a stretch assignment for him. I don't write about this concept in the book too. So it's like, okay, we're going to let you. We bought the equipment. It was a very minimal investment. And the basis of those SEO pod blog articles became topics for our podcast, our naystamp podcast. Oh, oh. And while we're going ahead and talking on the podcast about these SEO articles, let's throw two cameras up.

Yeah.

Now we had the video.

Yeah.

Oh, and now we can clip it and put it on some of the social channels.

Oh, and link back. Yeah, yeah.

And all of a sudden this became very budget friendly. So instead of going to the, the finance team and say, hey, I need to rework my budget, I need to hire this, this and this. You know, we force multiplied it and we prove the value. And so that became a very way for me as a, as a younger chief marketing officer, like, it was a way for us to prove the technology without betting the farm. And then that's how we went from three people to 30.

Yeah.

Because when I left foundations, we had three videographers. Like we had one. Still had one full time podcaster. You know, we had drones. I mean, we. But we didn't just go out and say, well, I think I want to do this. We proved it through force, multiplication.

It's. Yeah, that's awesome. It also reminds me just the basic business principle.

Yeah.

Develop your Proof of concept first, right? Yeah.

I'll tell you another good one that I like to talk about is, okay, HR and recruiting, human resource recruiting. They always need help with improving retention rates at your company. And also hiring people, especially in healthcare. Hiring a nurse within budget. Yeah.

Because it's easy to throw money at people, right?

Yeah, it's super expensive. So they're. They're not marketers, but every now and then they'll come, hey, could you help us do this? Well, we were able to get a certain percentage of the HR budget into marketing so that I could have staff to help them.

Oh, that's good.

And I think that's another important point. When you're in marketing, everybody wants you to help them.

Yeah.

Oh, can you do internal communications? Can you do stockholder communication? Can you do HR and recruiting? And they never pay for it. So your team becomes really. And your team's meanwhile trying to get leads.

Yeah. Yeah. So they come, stretch too thins, not enough to execute. Shoot.

Yeah.

And then eventually have an implosion.

Yeah. So we took percentages of these budgets. If you want to help, we want to help. We've got the pros, but we're busy trying to drive business.

Yeah.

If you want us to help, we want to help, but we've got to have some budget room and you got to hold the line on that.

Yeah. Dude, that's. You're a genius at everything. I. I just want to.

No, no, thank you. You're too kind. You're too.

I do want to talk about this next wave because you mentioned to it in Your, your. Your TEDx, which I'm excited to watch soon as I can get my eyes on it, about the influence of AI in the marketing space. And I see a lot of people that are running from it. I'm trying to figure out how to make it work for me or work with me, I should say. At the stage of the game, it's all. It's all but shy, if not already got his own, like, brain. Yeah. And I guess I just have questions around how you see it playing out currently based on the data and the information you have. I know it's shifting day to day, month to month, week to week, but.

I think there's two things. I think AI, We. We hear AI, but to me, I'm looking at it obviously in two different paths. I'm very interested in how it's impacting search. So, like the things you were talking about earlier, how you went into chat, GPT or whatever about you and, and you said well, tell me how I can show up.

Tell me exactly what to do.

Yeah, because it's there and it's already disrupting search.

It can be timec consuming to a degree to get it going, but it's still worth it.

Yeah, well, you know, one of the easiest things is just doing FAQs. Like most websites have FAQs, but they're terrible. What's the address? Yeah, what's the. That's not, that's not the kind of FAQ that AI is looking for. So. And, and it's already impacting search because if you go into Google, you'll see Gemini right there. I mean, and there it's already. And pretty soon that little button will go away and it'll all be Gemini Search.

Yeah.

And so now we're in this situation. Like as an example, website impressions meaningless now because AI is giving you the answer right there. You're not even having to click. So if you're not careful, you might be getting, if you were using it as an example, the impression as a way to judge your marketing. Well, that might, you might say, oh, well, they're doing terrible. Fire them when it's really not them. It's like, you know, you might be really set up well, but it's just being answered in as that's where you got to. How are your leads really doing or your phone calls, most important. So I think search, you've got to really be paying attention. It's going to just like when Google rolls out updates three or four times a year and we've heard all, you know, Panda was a big one years ago, you know, so you hear about these. Well, this is the same thing. AI is almost like an algorithm update.

Oh, it is, right.

And so everybody, yes, everybody's getting freaked out. But this has happened before and we will navigate it and we will turns.

Out the invention of the car, the.

Invention of the refrigerator, then the second part. Are all these tools.

Yeah.

And so I'm not afraid of the tools. I mean, I was telling your guest earlier, before we came on, I mean, I graduated college, the Internet wasn't around. I typed my senior thesis on a typewriter. So I feel like, you know, when I got the foundations, their biggest line item in marketing was yellow Pages. So back when I was younger, everybody was, oh, the Internet's going to do away with all our jobs. It did.

Yeah.

And AI is not going to do away with all our jobs. We may be doing a lot of.

It Seems like it's clickbait.

I think you're Right. But I mean, we may have some different jobs.

I mean, I mean there's going to be some things that change.

Yeah.

Right. But this is where, this is where the astute person is going to learn and evolve to a certain degree. Right. So either you can learn how to use AI or partner with it in some ways to help you benefit and grow your business, or you're going to be bypassed by those that do.

Yeah.

It, to me, it is, to your point, the yellow page. It is the Blockbuster moment.

Right, right.

You know, Blockbuster should have bought Netflix.

Yep.

And listen to Netflix, you know.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Yes. I think, I think your audience is wise to, to become familiar, to not be afraid, you know, and you can, you can a b test things.

Yeah.

You can see right now where you're showing up in, in, in natural search and you can see where you're showing up up in AI search. And that should give you some pause to say, huh, I wonder why my competitor is showing up in, in AI search. But I'm not. Yeah. Okay.

Well, most people don't even realize that, that they, I think they're aware of. Now you can do search with AI, but most people are quietly using a search tool.

Yeah.

When I say, when I say the user is using the search tool to find said answer said information. The business owner, from what I've seen with the people I've talked to and I've talked to over 300 business owners in the last probably three months.

Right.

The vast majority of them have yet to do any type of SEO preparation via, via, via AI tools. You know, and I'm like, this is, you're gonna get, this is a, this is one of those chances where the unknown entrepreneur can become a well known authority in the market marketplace and supersede the, the, the, the incumbent that's been there for a decade and whatever. Right. This is that disruptive of an environment.

Absolutely.

Where if you will take the time to do your due diligence and to your, to your point, kind of like understand more about how it works and, and, and put the things into practice, you could do very well.

Yeah. I think sometimes people, when they look at marketing, they think there's some tricks and I've never approached because the market's.

Like, come learn the secrets of this and the ninja hacks for that.

Yeah, there you go. So yeah, there is a lot of that in there. And I think for me it's, I never approached it that way. I always looked at our marketing, that it was an investment. I always preferred SEO over paid Though we did both, because to me, SEO is more owned versus rent. But it was all based in quality because Google wants to reward quality. AI is the same thing. Now we're seeing some weird stuff in the, in the big startup stages of AI, but. But they are. It's all going to be based on quality. And I think the power of the way those, These amazing supercomputers, they can bring in so much more information now. So, like, they just announced that. Yeah. That every podcast ever produced is being indexed. Okay, well, now that's fascinating to me because I believe that that's going to give us not only just the SEO value of what was said in the transcription, but now all of a sudden they're also getting the signals of when did somebody stop it? When did they like it? At what second did they comment? And all that's feeding into the quality of that podcast, the quality of that material. And so it does have an interesting opportunity with AI, just because of the vastness of the supercomputing power to. I'm going to use the word democratize. I think the audience understand what I'm saying. But all of a sudden now, if you're a smaller player, like, maybe you will have some leverage over just people who are just spending money in paid search, so to speak, if you have the quality and you. And you have that. And that can't be necessarily as easily mimicked or. Yeah. Or gimmicked, I should say.

Yeah, no, that's great. I was just, Just thinking now, I think if it's already indexing podcast, too, it'll also pick up podcasts that are still ongoing.

Sure. Versus absolutely.

Essentially a shutdown, which I think's a really important move. You know, we're almost 300 shows in.

Yeah.

You know, and I know lots of people that got the seven or eight shows stopped. Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, so I think that's interesting. I think before, you know, I know we're.

No, absolutely. Yeah. You've been very generous with your time, so.

Oh, no. Appreciate it. You're amazing, bro. I'm, I'm. Yeah. I'm not trying to kick you out by any stretch of the means. First of all, where. Where can everybody go to learn more about you in the book?

So, yeah, they can go to never outmatched.com. the book's available at all major retailers. The publisher just told me it's going to be in. In airport bookstores in December. And I was like, okay, that's a big deal. Deal. Well, apparently that's the month when more Travelers. And unfortunately, people get stranded. So what, they wander so we can fly again soon? Yeah.

Yeah.

But yes. And I'm, I'm gonna be my TED Talk. I just did it. It'll be out on TED in two weeks. So late.

Appreciate. Because. Yeah. You're brilliant, bro.

Thank you. And I'm going to be speaking at. I, I do a lot of work with veterans groups. Obviously, I'm a mentor in our, in our veterans treatment court. I'll be speaking at the Veterans ready summit in D.C. be on December 11th. And I'll be in Scottsdale, Arizona at a treatment center conference on December 9th. So I try to get out and speak as much as possible. That's kind of where I've positioned myself now is I do want to write another book.

Okay.

I've got some stuff that I left out of this one, but, but I do want to do more writing and speaking. So that's kind of the what I'm focused on these days.

Well, if anything, we need to support that.

Yeah. Thank you so much.

I'll be happy to. I guess one, one final question as we wrap up and extended answer is more than fine. It should, should it be needed. Is there a specific chapter of the book that you are super attached to? Is not the right word, but you were, that was super important for you to write one. You know, because obviously there's a lot of meat on the bone. And I'm just curious. I find that when I write books, the book calls me to write it and there's typically one to three chapters that are like, really important to me.

Yeah.

Yeah. And I was curious if they know if that's the same for you and if so, what is it and why.

I think, I think for sure when I, you know, I, I, I went about this book process probably backwards. I, I wrote the book.

I did too. I wrote 80,000 words. And now they're going back. Now we're going backwards.

But then I went and tried to find an agent and, and a publisher and all that. But I know the people and the, and the editors that work with me after I got it. I know they, they kind of position they, they felt like the strongest chapters, you know, kind of in that order. But I will say that there are, are a couple of very interesting things I think in the book. One is I write about allies. And I think for, for business owners, I think sometimes that we're always looking at relationships with other businesses as marketing relationships. And what I advocate in my book is that, no, you need to be looking for Allies. And I use the example of GoPro and Red Bull.

Okay.

They are allies versus just being product sponsors of each other.

Aren't they owned by both owned by Disney now?

Well, they might be. I don't know about now, but back in the. They were supporting very similar markets and they just loved each other's business.

Yeah.

And they started cross promoting without ever any contractual relationship. And they were rooting for each other as much as they were rooting for themselves.

That's awesome.

And I find that that resonated with me because in recovery was the same way. There's a. There's 17,000 treatment centers in America. It's not cutthroat.

Yeah.

And we always were supportive of our other treatment centers in our area. It didn't mean that we didn't want to be full. Yeah, we want to be full. Cool. But we're just happy that they're out there trying to get people help too, because there's all different levels of pricing, there's different kinds of programs. And we always felt like we were friendly competitors, we were allies. And I wanted to see. And I think that if businesses can find those companies that are allies that want to see them succeed as much as themselves, like that's a lot better longer term relationship than just saying, oh, can I sign a marketing agreement with you? Or we're going to co promote here based on this contract. Like that's kind of, of that's transactional. I want transformation. It's the same thing here. Like meeting you. I mean, Rory and Amanda were so generous and saying, you need to meet Steven, you know, and it's.

And vice versa. They told me, you need me, Lee.

Yeah, I think.

And I'm glad it totally happened.

Yeah. Yeah. And I, if I can refer somebody to, to your work, I love it. I don't, I don't even need to be be paid a referral bonus or if I'm just happy for you because I know you're doing the good work. Just like I always, always refer people to Rory and Amanda because I know.

That I'm the same people. I'm the same.

And I feel like that there's a, there's a whole community of people, you know, thinking like that.

Yeah, it's really interesting. Rory has this. That was awesome, by the way. Thank you. Rory has this saying. He says the best time to build a relationship was before you need it.

Boy, isn't that true?

Oh, man, it's. And it's really interesting. You know, I've. I have a tendency to connect Great people to great people. Just regardless, I've done it this week. I did it last week, I did a week before that.

Yeah.

You know, if I feel like there are people that can add value to other people's missions and the missions are meaningful.

Yeah.

Like I have a hard time helping those that just want to get more money or like from the greed aspect.

Right.

I have no problem helping people actually want to impact the marketplace in a, in a positive way, then that drives. To your point, positive transformation. Right. And I've always loved that. And I'm, I'm hoping, you know, I'm just, I'm saying this now because I'm not even thinking about it that when it comes time to, to formally launch one part line and one part lamb.

Yeah.

My next book.

Yeah.

That they'll be there to, to help me absolutely orchestrate the. A massive launch.

Well, you know, I'm going to grab my book here.

If I just can't take it with you. That's.

Yeah. For sure. But you know, I was, you know, when I, when I wrote this book, the top two people that, that did that did pieces for me, Daniel Amen. I did a small project for him years ago and when I reached out to him, he was so generous. I thought, oh, this Dr. Amen. I mean he's got big business, he's got all these specials, you know. And he was in the army himself. Oh wow. And he was the first one that replied. I mean literally within a day, you know. And then Mackenzie Phillips, people say, well, how did you get Mackenzie Phillips? I did her first interview about recovery.

Wow.

This is going back 15 years plus years ago. And I hadn't really, I mean, you know, we stay in touch on social LinkedIn but I hadn't really seen McKenzie in a long, long.

Yeah.

And when I, when I emailed her, yeah, she got right back and she was so. And I'm like, that's where I, I had, I had that the hay was in the barn.

Yeah, that's right.

I had already kind of just, just because they're just generous. I wasn't asking for.

You never, you never go wrong just being good to people.

Yeah.

It never. That never bites you in the butt. Unless you have some serious self abandonment things to work through. That's a whole another show. Lee, I can't thank you for taking the journey to come out here.

Love what you're doing. Love what you're doing. So glad to get to meet you in person.

Yeah, likewise, man. This has been amazing. All right. Hey guys. That's going to do it for this episode of Build. As always, please like subscribe, share and comment. And if you learned anything about this from this particular show, I'd love to hear it in the comments. I'd love for you to go out and support Lee. As you just saw, he's an amazing human being. If I'm being honest, I wasn't able to get all the book because it's so meaty. Like I needed a notebook, a paper and a pen and a highlighter and I'm just, I was so honored to be to spend time with him today. So make sure you go pick up the book. We'll make sure that Link and the TEDx talk are in the show notes upon release. And until then, we will see you on the next one. But share this with a friend. Peace out. Hey guys, I hope you enjoyed that amazing conversation. And if you want more just like that to help you level up your life and your business, you're not going to miss this next one. Check it out.

You know I was low on my protein and I ate fast food or.

Whatever the case may be and I didn't feel good.

But when I'm hitting you know what you have prescribed for me, I feel.

Great and my workouts are great and we're sharper. I mean we can go down the.

Rabbit hole of peptides also.

But I I do smorla. I have some more. I love it. Yeah I don't do GLP1 cuz I don't need to lose any weight. Yeah.