YEAR VLOG CHALLENGE DAY 1 | "I'm becoming a content machine"

Here we go. First video on the channel. The first of many. I'm making a commitment here right now today that I'm going to shoot a video every single day. A video every day, at least one a day. You know, I'm seeing guys like Sam Sulik. I think that's how you pronounce your last name, bro. But I'm seeing guys like you just create content, just be absolute content machines. And it's really starting to make me think, you know, the only barrier point of entry to get me and my business, my brand, where I want it to go, where I think I need it to be for me to accomplish the goals that I want to accomplish, is for me just to whip the camera out. That's it. That's all I gotta do is just whip out the camera and just start filming. So unapologetically, here we are. I'm gonna make this happen. It's a goal of mine. So welcome to the channel. Um, on my commute to work this morning, have a couple of thoughts I want to chat about. First and foremost, let's go through the day because today's a big It's actually what we call the Business Accelerator Conference. We have the privilege of participating in these conferences once every month. Last year we did actually, I think, 10 of them. So we didn't do one in November. I don't think we did one in June or July, but it's really awesome because, you know, as you may know, one of our biggest partners, referral partners at Syndicate Marketing, my marketing agency, is Tax Hive, and we actually help them with their marketing. My business partner partner actually has been running their ads for 2 to 3 years now, which has been awesome. So it's been a great relationship with them. We love the guys over there. Um, and they actually are Kevin O'Leary company. So that's what's great about what they're doing is Kevin O'Leary is actually one of the main guys over there. So it's fantastic collaborating with them, working with them. Obviously, you know, they have a large database of people and business owners that they've helped and they specifically go after business owners. They're not doing, you know, just normal consumer taxes. They're doing tax planning, tax strategy, tax preparation, bookkeeping, and some estate planning for business owners specifically. So their kind of ideal target customer is our ideal target customer, which is pretty awesome. Man, by the way, my— I'm gonna be driving to work this whole time holding up the camera. Oh my gosh, my delts are about to get the burn of their life. I gotta buy one of those like, you know, things put up on the windshield from Amazon. I have to start switching hands here a little bit. But anyways, back to TacTime. So their ideal customer is literally like our exact ideal customer, which is pretty fantastic because, you know, as we participate in this conference, they're gonna get about 50 to 60 decision-makers, business owners in the room. They'll travel all in from across the country to participate in this conference. And, you know, I'm actually one of the main keynotes. I speak tonight, Monday night, and then I also speak Tuesday afternoon, again, as I'm speaking tonight, Monday, about about marketing and, you know, kind of what we call the Syndicate Marketing Pyramid, kind of our approach to marketing, setting up paid campaigns, kind of the steps of how to go about doing that for, you know, kind of any business. And then tomorrow I'm talking about AI, specifically AI prompting and using AI to help you create and launch your first marketing campaign, which is super sick. I freaking love that keynote. That presentation is just awesome. I'll maybe upload that to the channel one of these days so you guys can check it out. And then the third day, I'm also going to be participating in kind of like a marketing panel. So it's great. I'm going to get a lot of touchpoints with these business owners. I'm going to be able to get a lot of, you know, let's do this. There we go. Other hand for a second. Oh, got to get this baby. So yeah, I mean, this shoulder is kind of weak. I actually got a shoulder injury. What was that? September of 2022, I blew my shoulder out at Cabela's being a freaking idiot. And man, the shoulder's never quite been the same. So I definitely need to get one of those video mounts. But, um, yeah, I'm really excited for this conference because I'm gonna get a lot of touch points with them. I also schedule these consults throughout Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, um, because we're actually holding this conference at the Tax Hive headquarters where Syndicate Marketing's office is at. So what's really cool is, uh, we'll just pull people back into our office, you know, into my, into my office over the next 3 days, do consults, hopefully close a bunch of deals. The goal is to do probably probably, you know, a handful of websites, handful of, you know, funnels and setups, maybe some consulting packages that we can sell. And then obviously can convert a ton of people into our AI program that we're doing right now, which is called the AI Revenue Renaissance. It's a $495 program. And then I'll ultimately sign everyone up, convert every one of those into kind of monthly retainer marketing clients where we're actually running their ads for them. You know, ongoing optimization to their funnels, reporting, setting up dashboards for attribution, attribution on all their campaigns so we can actually track the performance really well. 'Cause that's something that, you know, a lot of marketing agencies don't do super well is attribution reporting. And it's tough. It's because you're never gonna be perfect at it. But as much as possible, that's kind of what we believe in. So anyways, really excited about that today. What I gotta do is as I head into the office, kind of the plan is to check my emails, going to get caught up on everything that I need to do. I actually just got back back from a golf trip as well. I was out of town for 5 days last Monday through Friday at Bandon Dunes. So I'm a little bit behind on some work stuff. So I think kind of the first part of the day is going to be me catching up, me, um, responding to emails, me responding to some clients. Got a couple client calls and then also a couple sales calls as well. And then I actually would love to build a— kind of work on this funnel that my partner and I have been talking about now for a couple months. It's time to just execute. It's time to freaking get out our own way and just freaking make it happen. Some of the initiatives we're working on right now is we really, really, really want and need our own acquisition funnel that's consistent. Obviously, you know, we get tons of referrals and tons of leads just kind of word of mouth through our referral partners, companies like a Tax Hive. They'll send us deals, they'll send us tons of clients, but we want to be able to really scale our own acquisition up. So that's one of the main points of focus, I think, over the next couple of weeks and months to dive dial in our own funnel, get that cranking, really scale our spend there, and, uh, start to get much more leads. Ready to scale. We got the bandwidth for it. Uh, we've had— we've made some really great hires over the last couple of months. We feel like our team is in a really good place. And yeah, we're ready just to freaking dump gasoline on the leads and the client acquisition. So that's kind of a main point of focus as well. Um, let's see what else I can chat about this morning. I mean, hey, beautiful day today. That's what's That's what's great. I mean, maybe I'll pan around and see. I mean, look at these clouds, got the blue sky. It's been really gray this year. I mean, Utah, we normally get quite a bit of snow, but it's kind of been a weird winter, like a brown winter, kind of a, like a gray winter. Um, not a ton of snowfall here in the valley where we live. And you know, they— we're getting pounded up in the mountains, so hey, we still got great snow for guys that like to ski and whatnot. But it's just kind of been a little bit of a long winter for me. So I'm pumped because this is like the first day of the year. I mean, like like 47 degrees right there. I mean, it's 8:56 AM, so it's gonna get up to like 55 today, maybe 57, maybe we might even touch 60 at some point. Sun's gonna come out, got some blue sky. This is kind of like the first day of the year where it feels more spring than it does winter, and I'm stoked for it. You know, you can see those trees too are like kind of starting to bloom over there. Pretty sick. So So I'm fired up about that. Also, let's talk about golf for a second because if we're not, you know, golf's around the corner. I gotta get my game figured out, guys. Like honestly, I have, I freaking sucked up in Bandon, dude, this last week. The other thing too is, you know, we had 36 holes on Tuesday morning, then we played another 36 holes on Wednesday, and then we were just gonna play 18 holes on Thursday, drive back to Portland, fly home Friday. Guys, I gotta tell you, We got it. We flew into Portland Sunday night, drove down to Bandon on Monday. I'm gonna rest my hand here. I gotta get a little break. Drove into Bandon on, let's see, Monday morning, which is like a 4.5-hour drive. Freaking gorgeous, by the way. Oregon is unreal. I loved it. Some of the most beautiful scenery I think I've ever seen in my life. But we got in there. We played that little par 3 course there. That was kind of fun. We had horrible weather, which was kind of, I guess, what you get going to Oregon. In February, but it's hit or miss. But guys, the next day, Tuesday, when we played Sheep Ranch and what was the other course that we played in the afternoon? Oh, Pacific Trails. Dude, by the afternoon, my Achilles was barking. Like, I've never really had Achilles pain before, and I was like, what is going on? By that night, I could barely even walk. We went to this little restaurant after we played, sat down, kinda cooled off, and I'm not even kidding you, I tried to walk back the car, it felt like somebody took an 8-iron right to the back of my heel. And then the next morning it was crunchy. I was, I was only able to play 18 in that afternoon, so I ended up playing Bandon Dunes that afternoon, which was spectacular. That course is beautiful, uh, for all my golfer fans up there, highly recommend, even though we had crappy weather. And then guys, I've just kind of been battling this Achilles injury for a bit, and I don't know what it is, but I My wife thinks it's something called Achilles tendinopathy with some crepitus. Never heard of it, never heard of that before. But apparently what it is is it just means that your tendon is damaged. You got some sort of damage to the tendon. And then crepitus is where it gets like all crunchy and crackly. So that's probably the worst part of all. Like every time I step to go up the stairs right now, it's like crunching and cracking. I'm a shell of myself. I'm a shell of myself. I'm in the prime of my life. I go on a golf trip and I can't even walk 36 holes without my Achilles just freezing up on me and getting crepitus. So, you know, I gotta, I gotta work on that. So major goals right now professionally: build that funnel, really scale up our client acquisition. Simultaneously on the personal side, I gotta really work on my mobility. I got to get back back in the gym, stretching, getting flexible. Like, this is the year I've got to learn how to— I've got to get to the point where I can touch my toes. If not, it's never gonna happen. And honestly, I've never been able to really touch my toes, not even when I was like a kid. I've been so inflexible my whole life, but I'm sick of using that as an excuse, okay? I'm not gonna freaking just sit here anymore and say, hey, you know what, I just got tight tendons. No, I'm gonna freaking make these puppies buttery I'm going to turn this Achilles and my body into just a buttery, beautiful blend of mobile joints and ligaments that can just swing a golf club into my 90s, maybe hundreds. We'll see. We'll see where technology is going at that point. But anyways, that's a big goal. Some interesting thoughts this morning during my morning formula, which is kind of just like my little ritual that I do. I try to read it. I'm not freaking perfect at it. I, you know, ideally I'd like to read read for like 15 to 30 minutes in the morning. Sometimes it doesn't end up happening because my wife and I were binging something on Netflix or we get to bed late and then Archie, you know, my little baby starts crying in the morning and I got to get up. But I did do a little bit of reading this morning and, you know, some study and really interesting concept. It's by a guy named Rick Rubin. If you haven't heard of Rick Rubin before, Rick Rubin is one of the most iconic music producers of all time. I mean, He's been the genius behind some of the Red Hot Chili Peppers' greatest albums. You know, he's worked with really like every type of industry, you know, R&B, hip-hop. He actually started out in hip-hop, believe it or not. You know, he's done pop, he's done classical. He doesn't, he doesn't, you know, confine himself to one genre of music. But what's really interesting about what he was saying and kind of what I took away from this morning was where people get in trouble trouble with their creativity, with their creation, with their, with their projects that they're working on, with their businesses. Whatever you're doing in life is you start to create and you start to do based on what other— you think other people will like. And it's an interesting concept because as I'm starting this YouTube channel and as I'm really starting to build my brand, you know, one of the main things that's, that's held me back is I've been thinking about creating stuff that I think other people will like. And it's directly kind of like going against the grain a little bit because you're not really being yourself. You're trying to be somebody that you're not in an attempt to create things or create content that other people will like. And so for me, it was like the light bulb just went off because as I think about it, all of the stuff that I really love, the greatest albums I've listened to, the greatest musicians I like, the art that I like, the movies that I like, when I started to think about it, you know, I don't know the exact ins and outs of everything, but what I had, what I have studied, it's pretty clear to me that the stuff that I enjoy the most was created by the artist out of just what they enjoyed. They were trying to find fulfillment in the process of doing what they love most. And as a natural result, I love it. And a lot of people love it. And that's exactly what Rick Rubin says, is that as you focus on creating and doing what you think, or creating based on what you love the most, not what other people will like the most. Naturally, what happens as a result is it becomes your best work. It becomes the stuff that actually is most commercially successful. And you know what's really interesting is he had a story from Anthony Kiedis. The way I found out about Rick Rubin, by the way, is I'm a big Red Hot Chili Peppers fan. And I was watching the Joe Rogan podcast with Anthony Kiedis, the lead singer from Red Hot Chili Peppers. And he was talking about working with Rick Rubin on, you know, Stadium Arcade. Stadium and some of those albums that were just absolute hits. And, you know, one of the things that Rick Rubin did is, you know, him and Anthony Kiedis were hanging out. Long story short, you know, he kind of came across this poem that Anthony Kiedis had wrote, which was essentially the beginnings of Under the Bridge. And he's like, hey man, play it for me, sing it for me, sing me the melody. Like, let's work through this together. And Anthony Kiedis had never felt like this is something I'm going to share with the world. This is never gonna be something that I share publicly. This is kind of like a personal poem or ode or something that's just for me. And in that moment, Rick Rubin's like, dude, that's your best song by far. That's your best song that you have made to date. And this will be the best song on this album. And there's some freaking bangers on that album. I mean, Stadium Arcadium, going back to it, that's gotta be one of the greatest albums, rock albums albums of the 21st century, like hands down, not even close, maybe all time. Um, but anyways, ended up being the greatest song, their greatest song today. I think it's their most commercially successful song, and it just all started with Anthony Kiedis creating something for him, something that was cathartic for him, something that was deeply personal for him. And anyways, going back to it, that's kind of something that's going to be kind of a North Star for this, this channel. The content that I'm creating, what I'm trying to do is just create stuff that I would like. What is the stuff that I would like to see? What is this stuff that I would want to see, like behind the scenes of running a business, of doing different hobbies, of, you know, things that I enjoy doing? So that's what this is going to be. That's what this is going to be about. And hopefully as I continue to do that, I'll find my ability to I'll find my ability to create greater impact and I'll be able to tone in my skills a little bit more. You know, 'cause this is awkward, I'm not gonna lie. Like sitting here this whole drive, I don't even know, it's 17 minutes, 17 and a half minutes going on right now, talking about random stuff on my way to the office. It feels weird, it feels awkward, but guess what? Like this is what you gotta do. This is what I'm prepared to do. Until it doesn't feel awkward, until it doesn't feel weird anymore. And you know, this is what's required. Man, what a beautiful day today, honestly. Freaking great. I hope that the audio is good. I gotta buy another mic too. That's another thing I gotta buy. So here we are, boys. All right, so I'm just rolling up to the office right now. Probably set you guys up, going through my day as I start to plan out the different tasks that I got. So gonna be freaking great day. Let's go get it. Time to get into a flow state, people. Let's go. Gotta get my tunes going for the day. What am I feeling? I could go back to some of my roots. Uh, let's go with a little bit of some Rush today. Throw a little rush on. All right, let's get after it. Set up my desk for the day. Here we go. Going to open up my emails. Also got some Amazon packages. Don't really know what these packages are. I can't remember. I never remember what I order from Amazon. That's kind of the beauty of it, to be honest with you, because when you are buying so much crap from Amazon that you forget what you actually bought, when the packages come to you, it's It's like Christmas morning every day. So here we go. I think this is a book. I've been ordering a lot of books recently, trying to build up my library collection over here. Oh no, not books at all. These are the LucTerm 1917 squared binders that I've gotten. I actually really like these. So every single morning, what I actually do is, you know, here's my, here's like an example of what this looks like. Like. But I go through and I plan all of the calls, plan all of the tasks, plan all of the to-dos that I've got for the day. And, you know, I check it off, I cross it off. We use Monday and a lot of project management softwares. I've used Trello in the past. And you know what's funny is I just keep coming back to, um, just writing it down myself. I feel that when I write stuff down, it just gets— it just gets done. Instead of like, you know, being online digitally, I just feel like it gets done. And I actually can take some time to to put all of the crap down on paper that I need to do, and I can kind of mull through the most important tasks and kind of rank the tasks in order of importance, and I can just get a lot more stuff done. So those are more of the Luke term. You know, Moleskine's another company, but I really like these ones. I like the squared too, that come in different squares. Uh, just kind of sweet, helps me write a little bit better. I think, I think it makes my, my penmanship a little bit more legible. Incredible. And then right here, let's see what we got. Another package. Oh, nice. Confessions of an Advertising Man, David Ogilvy. So yeah, I mean, I actually got another book by David Ogilvy here recently that I've been going through, which is Ogilvy on Advertising. And why I like this guy, if you don't know who David Ogilvy is and you're an advertiser or a marketer you should know who David Ogilvy is. You need to learn about David Ogilvy. He's essentially one of the greatest direct response copywriters of all time, responsible for some of the most successful sales letters ever written. And you know, this, this book here is kind of just like, um, a collection of his approach, breaking down different advertisements across different industries and countries, what works well, what doesn't work well, what he likes about about certain ads, his approach to advertising, his approach to copywriting. And it's a really interesting take because this book was written in, let me see here. I think this book was written in, let me see, 1983. So this book was written in 1983. I mean, this is like, I don't even know how long before the internet even came around. I mean, their advertising was billboards. Words, newspapers, magazines, direct mail, um, you know, TV. Like, it's this old-school traditional stuff. So kind of taking his approach, the found— foundational elements of good advertising, the fundamentals if you will, and applying it and thinking as you're reading how you can apply this to modern marketing. Really interesting stuff. So I'll read this, I'll let you know how I like it. Uh, next thing I've got here to kind of kick off my morning Oh my gosh, I've been obsessed with these. I'm a big milk guy, okay? Big milk guy, unashamed. Slate Classic Chocolate Milk. Now we're out of the vanillas. I think the vanilla flavors are even better, but these classic chocolates are unreal. The thing I like about it too is if you look at this here, it's got 15 grams of carbs, but 12 grams of that is allulose, which essentially is like a sugar alcohol, so your body doesn't have a blood sugar reaction to it, so it's not spiking your insulin and spiking your blood sugar. Sugar. So you truly got, you know, 1 gram of net carbs here. So like, well, once again, I'm not a— I'm not a nutritionist, I'm not a doctor, but I, I think what that means is you don't have to worry about the crazy sugar spikes and also the crashes. Kind of keeps your blood sugar at a level, which is important. That's kind of what I'm trying to do throughout the day with my productivity, keep my blood sugar a little bit more regulated so that I can, um, you know, be more productive. The other thing too is it's got— how many grams of protein here? 20g. 20 grams of freaking protein. Are you kidding me? And it tastes— it tastes amazing. So highly recommend you check out some Slates. So with that being said, next step here is we're going to plan out all of my tasks for the day. I'm going to get into my Luke Turner binder and we're going to get in here and we're going to plan out what I've got to do. Yo, quick afternoon check-in here. So far we've had a great day, had a couple good calls, have had a couple team meetings, met with my business partner really quick on some internal stuff. And then now actually I've been going into our Zoom recording account that we have, and there's a bunch of webinar recordings I've done, a bunch of webinars that I've hosted for some of our partners and some of the people that we've done just kind of pro bono, trying to educate, provide value to our community. So what I'm actually gonna do is I'm gonna download all of those videos now and try to edit them and polish them up a little bit. I'm actually gonna post them into the YouTube channel channel. And there are trainings on, you know, websites, how to create high-converting landing pages, you know, kind of introduction to Google Ads, introduction to affiliate marketing programs, how to set up a Google Business Page, Google Business Profile, and kind of local SEO, how to set up an Amazon store, Amazon kind of FBA basics, just some kind of marketing tactics, digital marketing kind of fundamentals. So hopefully, I mean, there's some videos in there that you probably find useful. I also do a lot of ongoing webinar recordings meetings kind of week to week for different people. I'm speaking quite a bit, so I'm going to try to record those as much as possible, add those to the channel. Hopefully we can provide as much value as we possibly can, and that this can become an amazing resource where you guys can learn a ton about everything that is marketing. So I'm going to dive into that right now. The other thing that I'm going to be doing for the rest of the afternoon is kind of studying and doing some research on some content that I want to create. One of the things that we're thinking of doing, kind of just as a little bit of a plug here is some faceless automation channels. So things where we're creating content, creating YouTube channels, creating a bunch of content, creating a whole assembly line of these videos, and we're able to publish them and post them into different languages on different channels to try to create monetization through Google AdSense revenue. So that's kind of one of the side hustles that we're kind of experimenting with right now. And over the next couple of hours, I'm going to dive into that research and, you know, hopefully kind of learn a little bit more and get some more ideas about what type of channel we want to start, what type of what content we can create, kinda what the strategy might be, what the path to monetization might be on that. And I might provide some information there in this video today, maybe some other videos there. So definitely some food for thought. All right, so I just went through and hammered out a ton of things here, a ton of videos. And actually, let's take a look at what I've done here. We'll actually give you kind of a state of the union on where my YouTube channel is currently at, go over some of the views and whatnot. And hopefully a month from now, 2 months from now, we'll see a ton of progress. So let's get into it. So here's my YouTube channel currently. I mean, nothing to write home about, that's for freaking dang sure. Let's see, we're at 58 subscribers, 94 videos. I could get into the watch time and different things like that, but it's so minimal, it's not even worth showing you. I think the best performing video right now, I don't really have a single video on my channel, it's just basically Shorts that have been uploaded. But I mean, 11 views, 5 views, 5 views, 6 views. I mean, it's literally horrible. However, there were a couple Shorts here that popped off. You know, this one right here got 10,000 views. I mean, for me, that was fantastic. Fantastic. You know, 2,400, pretty good. I mean, most of them are, you know, 2,200, that's another outlier here. Most of them are gonna be like, you know, 55, 23, 54, 18, 17, 600, 16. I mean, really nothing great here. So that's kind of the state of the union on my channel currently. Now, what we've been doing over the last hour or so is I've actually been taking all of these community events, these private webinars I've been doing, and I've uploaded them. I filmed intros and outros for each. There's gonna be about 6 or 7 videos videos here that I was able to download from a Zoom cloud recording that are gonna be posted. And then also, you know what we're doing, just so you guys can kind of see how we're going about the vlog, is in this Google Drive, I've actually got this vlog folder as well. So we're gonna be creating a new folder for every single day, and I'm actually AirDropping the stuff from my phone. I've got this camera right here that I'm also filming stuff at my desk from. I'm actually gonna take that SD, stick it into my laptop here inside, bam, import and upload all of the videos at the end of every day, which I will then send to my video editor, the guy that we've got in-house. His name is Bruce. I'm sure you guys will meet him a little bit later, but the goal is to every day have a ton of different videos uploaded here. Bruce can then work on editing those, and yeah, we're gonna be posting those to the channel, and hopefully we start seeing a bunch of growth here, and just hopefully you guys get value out of it, man. Also check out the whip right there parked outside. That's the motivation. Also, that little guy right there, I, I'm mesmerized by that. If you just stare at it for long enough, oh my gosh, it's unreal. So there we are, guys. What I actually think I might do before I dive into kind of the YouTube automation stuff and some of the other stuff I've got to do today is I might go smash like a quick set of pull-ups, push-ups, just kind of get my blood, blood pumping here. I've actually been sitting down at my desk for a long time. And listen, like you already know from this morning that I've been living that sedentary lifestyle for too long. It's time for me to get up and get moving. And so hopefully, you know, I'm working on a couple of different things. One of those. So here we are. This is the Iron Paradise. You're probably going to see me in here a bunch as I'm, you know, throughout the day, whatever, smashing some pull-ups. But I'm going to hit some pull-ups here. Honestly, I'm kind of a wuss right now. My goal is to get like 10 pull-ups. And honestly, the last 5 probably don't even really count. I mean, the form is so bad. I'm like lifting my legs up and like, you know, they're not real form, but that's what I'm trying to do. I'm also going to hang, so I'm kind of hanging right now from this bar. PR currently, dead hang, about a minute 15 seconds. Just got back from that golf trip. I ate like absolute crap. I had Sour Patch Peaches, you know, those, what are those called, Bobo's Oat Bars. I was eating those like they were going out of style, man, on the golf course. I've been eating like crap. My goal is to try to get to a minute today on the hang. Hopefully we can get there, and then I might finish it up with smashing, you know, some dumbbells in here, some shoulder raises, maybe some bicep curls. Just kind of get that blood pumping, and I'm going to get right back into my office, be super productive in preparation for the event tonight. I've got to have everything ready to go— my presentation, all of the training for the Business Accelerator tonight, which we're gonna be hosting back there in that conference center. You can see through the glass. Maybe I'll give you a tour of that a little bit later. But I gotta have everything ready to go for that about 6 PM. We also have to do a partnership meeting at 4, 4:30. So yeah, I've got about an hour window from right now until our partner meeting. I'm gonna follow that up with some other work getting ready for the presentation. So I got, you know, I gotta kind of cram. I gotta cram crush. But hopefully I'll see you guys back here in a minute after I hit smash this set, let you guys know what my PR was on the, on the bar, how many pull-ups I actually did. Um, maybe we'll actually get my video guy in here to shoot some stuff too. I don't know if you guys want to see my horrible form, but, uh, yeah, let's, let's dive into it. Let's go. Oh my gosh, yeah, you guys didn't definitely want to see that. Honestly, the hardest part about hanging from the bar is the hands. I don't care what you I say, man. It's the hands and you start feeling it, forearms. Look at that, got a little forearm pump going. Little baby pump. It's pretty bad though, guys. I only got 56 seconds. That sucks. I got to get that up. I got to get back into it. I got to get going on it again. But yeah, sucked today. So here we go. Here's the space for the Business Accelerator. You can see we've got all these business owners here. Stage. We got MC in the back corner. Obviously Syndicate HQ and our offices go way back there in that corner, but it's a really cool little space that we've got here. We're gonna have probably, you know, 50 to 60 business owners here tonight. We'll be talking about all things marketing, AI over the next couple of days. Got a couple other speakers doing some keynotes. It's gonna be a great time. All right, heading back home after a great day. Um, pretty good day, pretty solid day. I think I did okay in my presentation, just Back to the Business Accelerator conference. I felt the energy in the room was a little bit low. I probably could have done a little bit better job to engage the audience. You know, some of the questions that I gave strategically, I felt like they were a little out of place, a little bit open-ended. I need to work on my ability to do what's called a tie-down, which is ask a question and get a response in a way that keeps people engaged. In the presentation. So I'm actually going to link to the presentation that I gave live tonight, um, and you guys can actually go watch and see the presentation I put together. Um, and we might be able to even do a training on why I put the training together that way. This is actually a training we've been doing, like I said, for about the last year. I've given this presentation, you know, 2 to 3 dozen times probably live and have kind of perfected it, and it's worked really well well to do a couple things. Number 1, provide value to the audience. That's actually key. They've got to feel enlightened. They've got to feel like their eyes have been opened, that they maybe have a new approach or new mindset that's been unlocked as it relates to their marketing. But number 2, you know, since this is a 3-day conference, you know, and the call to action at the end of the presentation, it's not a sell or anything. It's just to meet with me Hey, schedule a consult. The goal is in that consult that I can then ask a really simple question at the beginning and say, hey, listen, you know, based on the presentation I gave yesterday about your marketing as it relates to what you want to do, are you looking to do the marketing yourself or are you looking to, you know, work with somebody else to do your marketing? And because of the presentation, the way that it's teed up, the sheer value that I provide, almost Every single person that I meet with, these business owners, they say, "I would really like to work with somebody." And I'd say, "Great, well, if that's the case, I'll kind of customize this conversation to be a little bit more of a sales presentation about who we are and how Syndicate Marketing, I think, can help you get to where you wanna be and get to where you wanna go. And if we both feel at the end of this conversation that it's a good fit, then, you know, I'd obviously I'd obviously like to extend an opportunity to work with you. Does that sound fair? And just doing it that way, leaving it open-ended and kind of teeing up the conversation in that regard has worked really well. So this presentation is like a little bit of a two-step close. This is kind of the set. And then I come in, they schedule a consult, I meet with them in person and we close deals, we close business. And honestly, it's been, been really great. We're getting to the point where we're closing probably, you know, 15 to 20% of the room in some, some way, either with, you know, a website or a funnel or paid ads, you know, maybe email marketing, or maybe they just pay for a coaching consulting program with us. So it's been going really, really well. But some other things, some other thoughts that I had today as I wrapped up my marketing, I I didn't have a really great time to dive into the YouTube automation like I wanted to, and that's okay. But my business partner and I had a really good meeting. And I think that's something that's really important as a business owner, someone who's running multiple businesses, is to make sure that you and your partner are on the same page. And I can't say it enough. I'll dive into a little bit of my backstory story here if you guys don't know it, but for 2 and a half years, maybe more, maybe 3 years, my business partner and I actually kind of went our separate ways. We had started an agency together in October of 2018, and, you know, we actually, after about a year and a half of that agency, decided to go our separate ways. We decided to split up, and part of that was the result of making some bad decisions. We kind of had a little bit of a shiny object syndrome. Like we were like freaking bouncing all over the place. We were not focused. And anytime we got momentum, you know, when it was hard, hard to get revenue, hard to get traction, hard to get momentum, we would immediately go to the next thing and jump ship and say, oh, it's probably easier for us to make money this way. And that ultimately led to our needing to kind of go our separate ways. But when I kind of went and did my own thing, I actually started an agency called Smith Digital and did that for, you know, 2 and a half years. Excuse me, bless me, wow. Started Smith Digital, did that for like 2 and a half years. And then, you know, he actually went and worked for one of our mentors did all the media buying. He really leveled up his game. I really leveled up my game. And we continued to work on another business that we had, which was an e-commerce business. So we kind of stayed in touch, but we finally decided to come back together and start Syndicate Marketing. And the reason why I'm kind of giving you this whole background story, it's a little bit long and I'm kind of rambling, but the reason why I'm giving you this background story is because it's so important to have good business partners. Partners. And I felt like when I was on my own, I was kind of just in my own little world. I think you get something that's called like island syndrome, where you're not able to see different viewpoints, you're not being challenged to see and communicate, to explain maybe why you want to do something or spend money a certain way or make a certain strategic pivot change in the business. And just having someone to bounce ideas off of and explain your reasoning and talk through things has been so helpful. So one of the big things I'm thinking about on my drive home today after I'm wrapping up the day is that, you know, our partner meetings were really, really productive. And we've made some, I think today, some really big breakthroughs on what we want to do with our agency. Some of the things that we want to do with building our our funnel, building our acquisition funnel and kind of dialing that in, which I talked about at the beginning of the day as well. That's one of our main areas of focus right now, as well as kind of things we want to do with our team and how we want to structure. Another thing we really talked about is, hey, how can we diversify pieces of the business better and in a more productive way? Is there a way that we can focus on what you're best you're best at, Tanner, and what I'm best at, and how can we specialize and make sure that we're getting more done collectively and there's less tasks that are distracting us from doing what we're best at. And going back to it again, I just want to reiterate, if you're currently a solopreneur or a freelancer, that's great. And maybe you're a lone wolf, man. Lone wolves out. I don't know. But like, if that's you, great. But I like being in a team. In a wolf pack, right? Like you can be a lone wolf or you can be in a wolf pack. So I'd highly recommend that if you are that freelancer, once again, creating content, providing advice that I would have liked to hear. I mean, I'm giving advice for myself 2 to 3 years ago, go partner up, find a good business partner, find someone that can have your same vision, that can be aligned with you and your goals, and you can both push each other and have complete and total transparency. Transparency and trust in your relationship. And honestly, I promise you, you're gonna go a lot further. It's just, it's just gonna happen. It's naturally gonna be the result of, you know, having a great partnership. There's like that, what is that, uh, uh, like African proverb? It's like, if you want to go fast, go alone. Uh, if you want to go far, go together, go with a group. I mean, I don't know I don't really agree with the fast part. I mean, it might be faster to do small tasks and go 0 to 20 or 0 to 30 miles an hour, but I don't think you can ever really get 0 to 60 or 0 to 100 by yourself. You for sure can't sustain that type of speed for very long. I mean, I had months as a solopreneur freelancer doing my own thing like crushed it. And I was just loving life when I was able to process the payment and close the deal. And then the reality of the situation set in that I now had to go fulfill on all of the work that I just sold. And what that does is it immediately takes away from the sales for the next month, and it immediately takes away from my ability to, um, you know, have a work-life balance and to specialize and focus on doing the things that I want to do, which is create content, build a brand, build relationships, you know, create impact, you know, have more touchpoints with my customers. All of those things are negatively impacted because as a freelancer, solopreneur, it's like up, down, up, down, up, down, and it's just this roller coaster of emotions. So definitely some food for thought there. Oh yeah, I gotta let you guys know this, this gas station right here, is my jam. That's probably the best gas station I've ever been at in my life. I'll probably film a video filling up there with gas in the near future. But as someone who's a germaphobe that doesn't really like touching other people or other objects that have been handled, manhandled by other strangers— I don't know where that hand has been— that gas station has taken the initial initiative to provide gloves that you can literally, when you're filling up at the pump, put gloves on so you can touch the pump filled with your gas and not feel like you have to wash your hands after. It's about the little things. It's about the little things. Which brings me to another talking point here, which is why I've never gone to that 7-Eleven gas station, because they don't have the, the gloves, right? So as it relates to your ideal prospect in marketing, sometimes, you know, focusing on the little things with your customers can go a long ways, especially when it comes to lifetime value. I might fill up with gas at that 7-Eleven one time, maybe twice. Maybe I'm in a pinch, maybe there's just, you know, something happens and I'm like, hey, I'm feeling like it's a 7-Eleven day. Great. But the little details that create a good experience are what adds to your lifetime value long term. And it's the simple things. It's sending a birthday reminder. It's sending, you know, a free, you know, gift. It's thinking about your customers. It's going the extra mile on a return. It's going the extra mile in simple ways. It doesn't have to be big. You don't have to move heaven and earth here. But think about ways that you can just do simple things at scale that people will really appreciate. Appreciate. And honestly, I think if you do that consistently, you're thinking constantly of your prospects, thinking constantly of your customers, how to provide a better value to them, and you're open to feedback, I mean, you're gonna have a very healthy business. So perfect examples today, we actually had a couple of calls with some clients, and you know, as an agency, you make mistakes. It happens. You're managing a team of people, there's a lot of projects, there's a lot of things going on, and it is what it is. I mean, no one in business is perfect. So we had, you know, checking calls with these clients and they provided some feedback for us that, hey, you know, there was something that wasn't clearly communicated to them, that they had an expectation, uh, we had an expectation on our end. And anyways, they felt like something slipped through the cracks a little bit. Now, it wasn't a big thing, but You know, the fact that we are in the mode of constantly trying to improve and find ways to increase our lifetime value and to go the extra mile, I think that's one of the biggest lifts we've seen with our agency because the most expensive thing that you can do as a business owner is acquire a customer. Acquiring a customer is probably your biggest line item expense by far. If you really look at your business besides payroll. And by the way, payroll is important. You have to have the ability to fulfill on your services that you sold. But if you can't acquire a customer at scale and you can't actually, you know, get the customers to begin with, then what's the point of having payroll you can't fulfill anyways? So, you know, as it relates to your business, it's a lot easier to retain your customers than it is to, you know, do a bad job, do a poor job, not fulfill feel hurt that lifetime value, um, and kind of sever that relationship, burn the bridge, and then go and try to acquire a new one. So anyways, that's my thought, sticking to it. Coming up here to the house, just pulling in. Um, been a good day, long day, but we'll see you guys tomorrow. In the meantime, go crush it, go kill it. Hope you guys, um, have enjoyed this very first vlog. I hope that I I look back from this in a year and I just laugh, and I hope that my videos get a lot better because honestly the quality of this one kind of sucks. Anyways guys, peace!