Ep 576: Managing Your Emotions, Energy and Environment for Long Term Success with Jason Stacy
AJV (00:01):
Hey everybody. Welcome to the influential Personal Brand podcast, AJ Vaden here. And I am, uh, going to be having an amazing conversation with a new friend of mine, Jason Stacy. And, um, before I formally introduce him, as I always do, I wanna kind of let you guys know what this episode is all about and why you should stick around. Sometimes I have hyper-specific episodes that are really for those of you who are trying to write a book or launch a book, others who are building their speaking career, or, you know, you’re trying to build a coaching community. This is not one of those episodes. This is one of those episodes that is about how to succeed at life
AJV (00:56):
So I wanted to let you guys know upfront that, uh, occasionally we have these universal kind of conversations. It just applies to everything. Um, but I think this is a really great and important topic about managing your energy, emotions, and environment, and how being the master of those things helps you succeed at life. So that is why you need to stick around. Now, before we get into this amazing conversation about all these things, uh, let me introduce you to Jason. Stacy. We are gonna talk about his journey from homelessness to high performance coaching. Uh, and I think all I really, really, it’s gonna be, it’s God conversation about his testaments, uh, to resilience, adaptability, and unshakeable foundations, and how we can all build those from learning about these things. Now, over the last 20 years, he has worked with elite athletes, business leaders, and high stakes professionals, helping them not just reach the top, but more importantly, sustain their success once they get there. And his philosophy centers on mastering energy, emotions, and environment, because true success isn’t just about achieving greatness, it’s about sustaining an growing it wrong term. Jason, welcome to the show.
Jason Stacy (02:11):
Well, good morning everybody.
AJV (02:16):
Well, you know, I think it’s one of these, and why I thought you were gonna be so great for this show, um, is I think a lot of people talk about how to get success. How do we reach the top? How do we do all these things? But very few people actually talk about what do you do when you get there and how do you keep it, and how do, how do you sustain it? It’s one thing to do all the work to achieve these things, but is it really what it’s all cracked up to be when you get there? And what do you, what do you do to maintain and sustain when you get there? Um, so I thought this was gonna be an, an amazing just topic for our particular audience. Uh, but before we get into that, uh, I have a burning question,
Jason Stacy (03:17):
Wow. So to start off with a small question, I see
AJV (04:00):
Oh, wow.
Jason Stacy (04:02):
So weird.
AJV (04:11):
So what, you went home from a babysitting gig
Jason Stacy (04:13):
And how Yeah, that’s where I was staying. I was for a few weeks. I was like there for a while, like for a few weeks, like with these people. And these people were messed up too, as it was a, it was a terrible environment. It was, it was. Yeah. I can’t even believe some of the things, if I would ex explain to you or tell you some stories, like you wouldn’t believe it. It was just blowing my mind. But anyway, so yeah, I like, look, I ended up being, you know, homeless and I was by myself for a few years there for most of that part, finding ways to survive, to just all kinds of different things. And, you know, I was, I did try to go back to school. I officially, I finished eighth grade was the last grade that I finished, you know, like, you know, as far as school, school goes.
Jason Stacy (04:45):
But wow, I was trying to go back to school. I was having people, I was like doing things for, to help pretend like my parents to sign things and just doing stuff like this. But anyway, how I ended up getting back off the streets was in this neighborhood, which was a pretty crappy neighborhood really. It was, um, a, uh, martial arts school, like a, it was in between like an adult bookstore and like a old tavern, you know, it was like a, in a pawn shop. It was just a, it was a crappy little place, right. Um, you know, the area itself. And I used to walk by this martial arts because I was, I was born in Japan actually, and I, as a young child, I started martial arts from when I was a little kid. And I was just always a big part of my, like, identity in my life, you know, before all this, you know, sort of mess happened. And, um, I, uh, I mean, I would go in there sometimes and just watch and sit and watch and, you know, eventually the owners, but there was like a lot of like police officers and military guys kind of training there. And, um, they, uh, uh, eventually let me train there, even though I had no parent to like sign things, this and that. And
Jason Stacy (05:41):
I would say that’s probably, uh, geez,
AJV (05:51):
Wow.
Jason Stacy (05:52):
So I haven’t talked about that much in a while. So,
AJV (05:56):
You know, um, my, my good friend Ben Klarik always says that tears are truth tellers.
Jason Stacy (06:02):
Jason Stacy (06:39):
It was a big part of that, obviously, you know. And then obviously the actual training, you’ll learn how to manage your emotions, about managing your mind, about being more aware of yourself, about your surroundings. And it was very, for me, just, I just got obsessed with that. And I got really like, hyper, you know, focused on being curious, asking lots of questions, wanting to understand how and why people work and the way they work. And I, I learned a lot about coaching, a lot about humans, a lot about people. You know, I was pretty young at that time. I was probably 19 or 20 years old, and I was like teaching guys twice my age, you know, about, about certain things. And, you know, I just, uh, the, my coaches and senses, they, you know, probably from my other experiences, you know, I had like a good sort of sense of, of these things.
Jason Stacy (07:17):
They just sort of naturally kind of went with that. And now, you know, from there I had some, we had some students who were like physiotherapists and massage therapist, and I would talk to them at night. I had a roommate. She was, you know, her and I, uh, got a place together as a roommate and she was a therapist, you a massage therapist and physio. And I’m talking about all these things about how the body works. And that’s, and she’s like, how do you know all this stuff? She’s like, you know, more than like, my teachers do, but you just don’t know the words of it. Like, you don’t know how to describe it. So it kind of like got me interested, like, Hey, you know, maybe I’ll go learn how to do this as a, as a career or a job. ’cause you know, I was still kind of floating around.
Jason Stacy (07:49):
So I put myself through like massage school and then sports therapies. And then I became a personal trainer, then a strength coach, and then athletic trainer, you know, the guys that kind of run on the field and do all that, you know, emergency care stuff in sport. And I did sort of just built up my own education from there, you know, and the one thing I, I noticed though, as I was doing that, a lot of the physical stuff just came natural for me. Like my kinesiology, all this stuff, I graduated honors, all this, I, it was, it just sort of came natural maybe from all the martial art training and understand human body and all that and the mechanics. Um, but one thing I noticed when I started working more, whether it was in gyms or clinics or, or on the field, is that there was a lot of very knowledgeable people, right.
Jason Stacy (08:27):
A lot around me. Most of ’em had much more experience. They had all their degrees and I had none of these things, you know, I just worked my way through it, sort of very non-traditional ways of getting educated. A lot of it was self-educated, which is I guess a bigger thing now, but back then not as much. So I had to really dig deep and figure out, find a way to learn these things and be in the right environment around the right people to, you know, be able to have access to this information. But one of the things that I did notice that people just didn’t quite get was the people part. Hmm. The building trust, the communicating, the connecting with people to get them to, you know, one of the biggest things that I really push and talk about with my coaches and other trainers and whatnot is, is, and even my clients, it, it’s, it’s that difference between people doing things because they have to versus because they want to.
Jason Stacy (09:12):
Hmm. So like a commitment over compliance type of thing, right? Mm-hmm
Jason Stacy (09:47):
But a lot of it was just like, I was just curious. I asked lots of questions, not in a disrespectful way, but to understand like, Hey, why are we doing this or that and this way, or what, why don’t we try this instead of that? And really just understanding these things. But the biggest part was, you know, everyone I worked with knew that I’d always give a hundred percent no matter what I was doing, where I was at, I was always a hundred percent engaged. And I never pretended I knew something I didn’t know. I didn’t have to be the one with all. So lemme
AJV (10:13):
Ask, I ask you a question about that really quickly because this whole concept of are you doing it because you have to versus you want to, I love that you said that, you know, is this a compliance thing or is this a commitment thing? Uh, I think it’s really important to something you just said is, you know, no matter what I did, I always gave it a hundred percent, right? Yes. Um, and I don’t think a lot of people do that.
Jason Stacy (10:37):
I agree.
AJV (10:39):
I tell you this, hear your take on, I’d love to just hear you. ’cause I think a lot of people are listening of going like, am I really good giving what I, whatever I’m doing 110% and is my team, or, you know, are people like missing their potential? And how do we get ourselves to give that level of commitment? How do we get our teams to do that?
Jason Stacy (10:58):
Yes. Well, I, I mean, I can answer, there’s a lot of, uh, answers to that question. I mean, one of the first things I would say is, you know what, if you’re asking that question more times than not, not always, but most of the time you already know the answer. You know what I mean? Like, if you’re asking, I go, am I really doing the what I could do? I mean, again, this is the same thing I see over and over again as everyone likes to lie to themselves. Mm. Kind of pretend, you know, we don’t have to just have that look in the mirror and go, Hey, you know, and, and I would say, um, how, how we go about doing that. Obviously, my, my first step is always looking at yourself. You know, yes, you’re right, your team, all these different things. But, you know, one of the biggest things about are you really, you know, doing it because you have to or because you want to.
Jason Stacy (11:35):
I mean, there’s so many variables there. There’s something you said that made me think of something. I, I forgot what you were saying, but, um, you know, for me, the biggest starting point is looking at yourself. You know, if you’re asking yourself that question, obviously, you know, there’s something missing, right? Mm-hmm
Jason Stacy (12:22):
Because sometimes we kinda like bring ourselves down and we end up not getting anything. We kinda get stuck. So I think there’s this, this, this process of you kinda need to have some vulnerability to be open for these things. Have that balance of being so, you know, being honest with yourself and being direct with yourself while still having some sort of self-compassion, knowing that you are, you know, doing what you need to do. And then that kinda leads into being a bit more mature, a bit of maturity of understanding. Maybe that comes with the experience of doing that, because it does take, it does take work to get there, you know what I mean? And, and I mean, I suppose there’s a lot of different layers here. You know, it’s kind of a big thing to
Jason Stacy (12:56):
But I, I, I think the biggest part for me, I always to try to help coaches understand and, and, you know, people I work with, understand is it’s, it, it’s really about you. I can’t tell you, you know, this is how it is or not how it is. You have to know, you have to find a way to stop lying to yourself and stop sort of like pretending to hide behind some facade of like, oh, you have a system that you follow, or here’s my 10 steps to this, or here’s, you know, we all get busy doing that. We all like, you know, we’re like trying to sell ourselves constantly, you know? So I think we have to always kinda have one foot in, one foot out, you know? And then that kinda also leads to the people around you, you know, are they feeding you? Are they a little yes. Men kind of thing? Are they feeding you, you know, bs are they being honest with you? Are they, you know, are they doing the best that they can? There’s a lot of layers here. So I’m not sure what part that you wanted me to break down, but, you know,
AJV (13:42):
Think, I think the biggest part that I think a lot of people really struggle with, and I am, you know, thinking a lot about, you know, the old saying is like, they’re just not quite reaching their potential. Sure. And I guess my, my real question is, you know, and we forget the teams for a second, and if we looked at, you know, all of us in the mirror and says like, yeah, I know I’m not giving it a hundred percent. I know I’m not doing my best. Why, from your experience, why do you think that is? And what, what would be some like tactical, tangible steps of going, Hey, this, this is what I have to do to be better. Right? And I think, I think there’s a lot of that just out there. And I don’t think this is new, right? I think everyone wants the easy road to success, right? It’s like, we all want it right now. We don’t wanna do the hard work to be fit, to be, you know, have healthy financials or healthy relationships or to be successful. It’s like, like, what’s the quickest way I can get there? And true success doesn’t happen like that. Yeah. But that’s, that’s the truth. No one really likes to talk about
Jason Stacy (14:51):
Sure. Look, I I would say, you know, when you first started speaking, uh, somebody go back earlier, I think one of the biggest problems we have is there’s too many distractions as well. So it’s very easy to kind of think, you’re know, being busy doing all this and that, being very distracted. So you have to learn how to focus. So I would go to take a little step back. The, the how do you, how do you do what you need to do and be committed to it is that you have to learn now. And I, I don’t remember why I learned this, but I know it’s from someone else. I’m stealing this for sure. I just can’t remember where it was a long time ago, but I’ve been using it for decades now, is that, you know, the definition of focus, right? Focus is making the most important thing, the most important thing.
Jason Stacy (15:26):
Mm. And what is the most important thing is whatever I’m doing right now, like, you and I are having this conversation, and I just look at it as like, you and I, you and aj, Jason and AJ we’re just chatting, catching up, getting to know each other a little bit better. You know, I’m not worried or thinking about what I have to do after this. What just happened before I got on the call? What, you know, what my kids are doing, what arenas doing what this, none of that matters. Like right now I’m here like nothing else matters, period. And I’ve trained and conditioned myself to make sure that like, this is where I am, and if I ever catch myself slipping, I pull myself right back in, straight away. Right? So I think that’s a big part of being able to like, develop that skill.
Jason Stacy (15:59):
Now, what keeps people from d doing this? I think, you know, like you said, looking in the mirror and saying these things and you, you know, that you’re not really what’s, what’s stopping people? Mm-hmm
Jason Stacy (16:44):
Like go out there and put yourself out there and it fail. Obviously we don’t want that. You know what I mean? We don’t want to see like, we’re trying our best and it doesn’t work. ’cause then it hurts our identity. So people lock in too much of, you know, their identity with what they’re, you know, they’re doing, whether it’s success or failure. There’s, nowadays it’s even harder because everything on social media and online is about, everyone’s so successful, it’s so easy. And here’s your, I did these three steps and now I have everything and all this kind of, you know, this facade of, of how things work. So I really think there’s this fear, and, and the, and the issue is, and this is something with arena, you know, the, the tennis squad I’ve been working for years now is, and a lot of them actually is, is the, the thing that gets them past.
Jason Stacy (17:20):
And that next level is them realizing that it is fear that’s stopping them, right? There’s this threat, this fear, right? Versus, you know, that kind of threat versus challenge kind of concept, right? So most people are in this, in this threat state where their, their fear of whether it’s fear of failure, whether being seen a certain way, whether of, you know, it is a bit scary to do something new. You know, there’s a lot of layers of fear. The, the, the main part is you have to learn how to deal with fear, right? You have to face fear. You can’t wait for it to go away. You can’t, um, you know, get busy doing other things to think it’s gonna get, you know, kind of work your way around it. There is something that all of us know, all of us know that’s holding us back, right?
Jason Stacy (17:59):
Everyone knows may, maybe it’s hard for them to see it right now, but deep down inside, if they really be honest with themselves, they know what’s holding them back. What are they worried about? What are they scared about? And if they’re having trouble doing that, find people around them to help them realize what those things are. And then they need to face those things. They need to turn around, open their eyes and go through it. The only way to get through fear and to get to that next level is to go through it. There’s no going around it. There’s no waiting, there’s no, you know, buying a bunch of little mini courses or doing this little thing or doing a little of that. You know what I mean? Like, that doesn’t work. It doesn’t work. Just like you said, you’re talking about getting fit and healthy and diets.
Jason Stacy (18:33):
I mean, how many seven step programs to making a million dollars or your bestselling book, or your diet or your work app, there’s thousands of them. And if they all worked, and then why are there thousands of them? Why do we keep buying more and more every year? Well, because they don’t work. And I mean, they might work, but they don’t work because people are missing first this element we’re talking about, like, are they really being honest with themselves, that commitment to doing and committing to doing these things? The other is those three elements that you mentioned about, what I really focus on is managing your energy, your environment, and your emotions. Like for me, those are the things that, that’s the glue that holds all that together. That’s the fundamental stuff that people don’t work on, right? Mm-hmm
Jason Stacy (19:12):
Like commitment over compliance, you know, that vulnerability, maturity that, you know, understanding, you know, how you work that self-awareness, those three elements, without those you can buy and do every course you want. You could do all the steps and you might get some success, but you’re never gonna sustain it. You’re gonna be a one hit wonder, right? And that one hit isn’t gonna hit what it should have. And it could have because you’re just copy and pasting, you know, you’re just typing into something, see what chat GPT told you, and you’re just gonna follow the steps and hey, ta-da. It’s all magic. And again, some people might get a little bit further on, but they’re just gonna go right back to where they were. They’re not gonna keep growing. They’re not gonna keep going through this because it’s just, it’s not real. It’s not coming from inside from them.
Jason Stacy (19:51):
You know? It’s that, that analogy of like, you know, before you ever drive a stick, a manual, right? You, you know, you have the knowledge of what you’re supposed to do, right? You know, pushing the clutch, you know, the gears and all that stuff. But it doesn’t matter how much you memorize it, you know, it, you can recite it, you can explain it a hundred different ways to like 10 different languages. As soon as you get behind the car, the first time you’re jerk and stalling, you know, and you’re, you’re killing the engine and you’re, you know, ’cause that’s a different level of understanding. That’s experience and understanding. And so that’s the part that gets missing. And, and though I honestly believe over my own personal experience, my professional experience and all the different people I’ve helped become, you know, world champions in sport who’ve, you know, started businesses and became successful, all them, the main focus wasn’t here’s the details system that you need to follow.
Jason Stacy (20:33):
Like we find some that fits you, right. Find a system that fits you and your environment and where you are right now, right. And your resources and things that connect with you. That’s great. Find that. But that system’s only gonna go so far if you don’t know how to manage your emotions. Mm-hmm. Because that’s part of that commitment over compliance part, isn’t it? Right. That resistance, that fear that whatever the hesitation that you have or maybe that like, you know, oblivious thing that you think everything’s perfect and you’re amazing and you’re not really Right.
AJV (21:21):
Yes. I have a question about that. So, because I think this is a really big topic in a lot of different, uh, circles right now. Sure. What would you say are the best things that you’ve seen work to help people manage their energy?
Jason Stacy (21:36):
Sure. I think, I think the first thing, I mean, the first thing is obvious, always acknowledging it. Like it’s actually a key thing. You know, more than your, your systems and your time. I, I would say I always start with the physical things, right? Because the thing about doing something that’s more tangible and physical that is in your control, no matter what your mood is, right? No matter how you’re feeling right now. So I’ll give you an example. Like, let’s say it’s a very simple example, how I breathe mm-hmm
Jason Stacy (22:15):
I, I can explain how that works later if you want. But, you know, having like longer exhales, it becomes more parasympathetic. You’re more in that rest, relax, you know, digest, you know, you’re more sort of aware of where you are. You’re more aware of your body or your surroundings. So we can spend five minutes just breathing nice and slow. Now how are you gonna feel at after we, if we do this breathing for real, you know, if you just switch off everything, no noise, no distraction, and you just breathe real slowly, how you gonna feel? Are you gonna feel fired up? Like you’re ready to go? Like, fight Dante on the world? You jumping up and down screaming, of course not right? You gonna be like, just calm and relaxed. Ah, and that was just from changing how you breathe. If I get you breathing really, really fast right now, just even just on your own, just breathing really fast and all crazy, are you gonna feel all relaxed and calm?
Jason Stacy (22:57):
Of course you will. Yep. Yeah. Right. If I have you take a deep exhale everything and hold your breath as long as you can, and keep it, keep holding as long as you, as long as you can, you’re gonna be calm and relaxed, you’re gonna be stressing out. So just by some physical thing, simple as breathing, it’s gonna change how you’re feeling. This makes sense. Mm-hmm
Jason Stacy (23:33):
Afterward, right. My state, my energy, my focus, my intention is all gonna be in a different place based on how I just, what I did with my body. And, and the reason I like to talk more about that is that is again, like how I feel doesn’t matter, right? I need to get something done. Mm-hmm
AJV (24:18):
Good. Yeah.
Jason Stacy (24:19):
So it just takes a little bit of discipline to do what you need to do regardless how you’re feeling. So I would say the managing energy part is just being aware. There’s a lot of things. I mean that I, I, I know I harped on that for a while, but, you know, the breathing’s a big part. So at the end of the day, I do a thing called legs up breathing. So with all my athletes, all my people, at the end of the day or end of a match or after end of like a, maybe you have an intense session of like some new thing with your business and you guys have just been going for hours and you’re just, you know about to your, your head’s about to explode and you’re exhausted. Just go lay down, throw your legs up on the couch, you know, or up on a wall and just breathe and just, just try to let your head and relax your neck, relax, get it sink into the floor and focus on having really slow long exhales.
Jason Stacy (24:57):
Just sit there and anything goes in your head, just let it come, come and go. Don’t try to think about anything. Don’t not think about anything. Just let it happen. Whatever happens, and just sit there for four or five minutes, two minutes if that’s all you have, right? And that just resets a lot of things in your body. Gives you a moment because it works and kind of recharge one with your legs up. It takes a lot of stress off your heart, off your system. You getting on that blood flow back. You know, two, that breathing, that, that slower exhale for example, is, that’s one example. Is it you become more parasympathetic. So you know, that sort of more relaxed and calm sort of state versus fight, fight fear, which is probably what you’ve just been doing for the last two hours. You know? So you’re kinda resetting your nervous system kind of going, okay, let’s just reset for a moment. And if you do those little mini breaks throughout the day, those things add up. So if you have those little, whether you can pull your legs up or not, but even just take that time out to breathe, to slow yourself down, to get off your phone, to switch off your head. Even if it’s two minutes, you know, I’ll, I’ll tell you a quick story. Um, if I’m going too fast, lemme know. ’cause I get very excited about this stuff.
AJV (25:58):
I think this is great. I think, you know, I think with the, the biggest kind of takeaway that I’m pulling from this, and then I want you to share, uh, the quick story. But it’s like, so much of this requires you to pay attention to yourself.
Jason Stacy (26:09):
A hundred percent. Thank you. Oh my God, that is so amazing. Exactly. All of everything that we have to do, and everything I talk about it starts with you or looking at yourself in the mirror, you know, like that, that self-awareness and there’s ways of developing your body tells you a lot of things before you realize it. There’s even studies now that have shown that our brain is reacting to something before it actually happens, right? Before it actually happens. Almost like we’re in this like weird live TV delay thing where our brain is just, just a moment before something happens, it’s a responding to it. So you know what, the more aware you can become of what your body’s telling you the be and, and, and, and of your environment, which we haven’t even broken down that at all. But like, the environment’s a huge part, you know, of being able to know how to manage your energy.
Jason Stacy (26:49):
So managing energy, I think is start with the physical, tangible things. You know, you understand that how you move your body and how you breathe is going to either use energy or restore energy, right? It’s gonna recharge you or it’s gonna drain you. It’s gonna put you in a state of alertness and hyper, you know, readiness or it’s gonna be calm and more relaxed. Like all these different, I mean, go on and on and on. And so again, you have control of that. And so the quick story I have is, I, I remember I had this space for a couple years. I was teaching a couple different schools and universities. I was coaching on the side, I was doing mentoring, I was teaching juujitsu, I was doing all these different things. And um, plus I had all my kids and they’re all very busy. I’m always very, very engaged with those guys.
Jason Stacy (27:24):
And, um, you know, I would, I had this little thing, and I have this issue with sleeping. I sleep a couple hours a night, you know, like sometimes even when I go to sleep, my body doesn’t like switch off. I have some things I have to work on with that. ’cause it’s, it’s not great, but been that way for a very long time. And I would do something instead of having like this monophasic bit of sleep. So like one big block of sleep and every, you know, we all do, like the nighttime we have our seven to nine hours is I wasn’t getting any sleep. So throughout the day I’d have these little mini breaks. Hmm. So let’s add like four different places to go to that, you know, for work, for teaching, coaching, et cetera. And before I got there, I’d say I’d drive to the plates, I’d sit in my car for, I’d turn everything off.
Jason Stacy (28:00):
So it’s just quiet. And I’d sit there for however much every time I have two minutes, five minutes, 10 minutes, and I would just chill, just breathe. And I try not to think about anything. And if I do, I just let it kind of float in and outta my head. And then I, and I, I had this visualization in my head, like, okay, whether I had an alarm on in case I fell, fell asleep. I, i soon as I had to get outta the car, I opened the door. As soon as I closed the door, it was like a light switch in my mind. I go, boom, boom, and I’m ready. As soon as I walk in the door, I’m just so on fire, so focused. I’m just, I’m a hundred percent just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And then I get to my car afterward and I sit there, I’m like, oh my God.
Jason Stacy (28:29):
I’m just, I’m just done. I’m exhausted. And I, I’ll spend two minutes there before I drive, and then I drive to the next place and I do the exact same thing before I get outta my car. I reset, I breathe, I chill, I have a, a nap. If I had 10 minutes, 15 minutes, whatever. And then as soon as I walk in the door truck, close my car door, it’s like a light switch, a click, everything turns off and I go, Hmm. Because again, nothing else matters except for what I’m doing right now. If you like, you and aj, you’re spending your time to, you know, let me come and talk and share and all this stuff. Like how could I not be 100000% here for you right now? Like, how disrespectful is that to myself and to you and to everyone else. Like, it has to be that way. And so for me to have the energy, I had to find a way to fit in those little gaps to like kind of reset, recharge so that way I was a hundred percent engaged with whatever I needed to do. You know,
AJV (29:12):
Sorry for you really quick. Something just dawned on me. Sure. Um, because there is such a systemic problem, I think, in life. Sure. ’cause it doesn’t matter if it’s at home or at work
Jason Stacy (29:27):
Yes. Yeah, yeah.
AJV (29:28):
Right. It’s like we’re so busy that you can’t just do one thing. Sure. And I’m just curious like how much of that is what’s draining our imagery? Because it’s like if you, if you really had the ability to only be like, Hey, what’s the most important thing? It’s the thing I’m doing right now, and it gets all my focus. Sure. And it seems like your entire body, your entire being can go in one direction. But if you’re trying to do this, like, I was just thinking of like some of my days where it’s like, I have the kids in the back, right? I’m doing business calls on the phone, I’m driving, like I’m, I’m doing a hundred things at the same time. And then it’s like, I’m like, huh, I’m so tired
Jason Stacy (30:06):
AJV (30:07):
So much of that is because it’s like I’m not doing any one thing at the same time. And I’m just curious, like how much of that is a, a real stressor for your energetic being?
Jason Stacy (30:20):
I think all the above. I, I, I think, you know, look, the reality is, especially when we have families and businesses and, you know, obligations and all these different things, I think the, the first part is just to understand like, there’s obviously gonna be times where that’s how it is. You know, you gotta call, you have to take, and you just pick the kids up from school and there’s this sport thing and there’s this and that. And like, you know, sometimes it, it’s gonna happen. So I think that’s a big part of just being able to manage your energy is understanding like, look, that’s how it’s gonna be that way sometimes. And, and this, there’s gonna be these moments where it is gonna be a bit more chaotic. There’s gonna be things that’ll come up that weren’t in your control. The timing was off. And so instead of, you know, having that be like a burden, you know, and it’s a weight, you know, you can save some of that energy and that resource by not stressing that you’re stressing, right?
Jason Stacy (31:01):
Mm-hmm. Not stressing about the fact that you’re doing this thing. Because that often I think is the worst part is, is the, the thought that we know that we’re doing something or that we know that it’s too much or that, you know, we overthink this a little bit. So I think that’s a big step of managing your energy in that sense, is just accepting the fact, look, sometimes it’s gonna be this way. Yeah. Now the next thing though is going okay, it doesn’t mean you just allow it to happen and don’t have control over that and don’t, you know, create the environment where you can have your moments at least, right? Where that is your time to, to be able to switch off again, it takes practice. You have to learn how to do that, right? And, and, and so, you know, if you go and say multitasking, we have to do all the a hundred different things, that’s great.
Jason Stacy (31:38):
But I’m sure you’ve heard this before, it’s like, well, are you looking to just get something done, like half as it get it out, tick a box like everybody else, right? Or are you trying to be the best at what you do? Are you trying to get really good at what it is you’re trying to learn? Or what you’re trying to get to? Are you wanting to really be seen as like, you know, and even the thing is, this goes back to lying to yourself. If I’m just half-assing on a bunch of different things, right? And I kind of glued it together really quick, right? When it comes down to the, the big moments, right? Of, of knowing and believing in yourself. Like you already know you’re full of. Excuse my language. Like you already know, right? Because you know, you’ve can, you know, you’ve kind of half-assed in this.
Jason Stacy (32:16):
You kind of put that together, you know, you didn’t give it your best, right? Mm-hmm
Ep 575: 3 Traits of Successful People | Shawn Lemon Episode Recap
RV (00:06):
Welcome to the Influential Personal Brand podcast. This is the place where we help mission-driven messengers, just like you learn how to build and monetize your personal brand. My name is Rory Vaden and I’m the co-founder of Brand Builders Group, a hall of fame speaker, and New York Times bestselling author. And this show is to help experts learn how to become more wealthy and well known. I know you’re gonna love it. Thanks for being here. Let’s get started.
RV (00:34):
Three things that make successful people successful that I don’t know that we hear enough about, or that we maybe we take for granted, or we’re not sure that they, they are really there. And so, as I was listening to Carrie’s story and also thinking back on my own life, and then thinking about so many of our successful clients and where also where we’re going, these, these three things really jumped out to me to go, you know, if you wanna be a successful person, these are three things that I think you really need to commit to, and you need to ask yourself on the front end, am I willing to commit to these things? Because if you’re not, no matter how skilled you are, no matter how talented you are, no how much, no matter how much head knowledge you have, I think these are the things that are, are more invisible, they’re more hidden, that really hold people back from success.
RV (01:28):
And so the first one is to crush it where you are at. And this is one we definitely don’t hear enough about when it comes to success. Everybody talks about like, Hey, start the side hustle. Hey, do the next thing. Hey, you, you know, figure out what your vision is. And all of those things are good. But I think too many times we overlook the importance of being successful. Not just successful, but being very successful at the thing that is right in front of us. Meaning the best way to set yourself up for success in the next thing is to be successful doing the thing that you’re doing right now. Lemme say that again. The best way to set yourself up for being successful at the next thing is to be successful at doing the thing that you’re doing right now. And I think that many of us embrace this lie.
RV (02:31):
We live in this fantasy land that once I’m doing the thing I want to do, then I will suddenly make the sacrifices it takes to be successful. Once it’s my business, then I would, then I would pay the price, then I would put in the work. Or once, once we get past, you know, once I get this certification or that certification or, or once I got a new boss, or once I got promoted, or once I made this much money, or, or once I had kids, or once I didn’t have kids, you know, like once they were grown and outta the house, like we so often convince ourselves that we will really turn it on. We’ll really pay the price. We’ll really put in the work. Like we’ll really show up and do what it takes to be successful when the external circumstances change. And that is a lie.
RV (03:24):
I mean, if you can’t turn it on now, if you can’t pay the price, if you can’t make a sacrifice, if you can’t endure some short-term pain to be successful at the thing you’re doing now, why do you suddenly think you would be willing to in a different situation? And I guess there’s times where maybe that is true, right? Where you go, man, I hate my job. I hate my boss. I’m not giving this company one lick of more effort. You know, I’m gonna work just hard enough not to get fired. And maybe that is true, that if it was your own thing, maybe, maybe you would. But I think we overestimate how easy that is. The reality is that, like Vince Lombardi said, winning is a habit.
RV (04:05):
Being a winner is something in your character, right? People who are winners win at everything. Like they win at all the things they pursue, not just winning on the scoreboard, or not just beating other people, but, but creating excellence, doing excellent work, showing up powerfully, serving people, making a difference, making an impact, right? Making contributions to the teams they are a part of. That’s not something you do once in a while. That is not something you do when the conditions are perfect. That is a character trait that you have to decide and commit to embracing that I am a winner because I’m always a winner and I’m gonna succeed because I, I, that’s what I do. I succeed. We’re gonna be excellent. ’cause That’s what we do around here. We, we make excellent things. And yeah, it’s hard at times. Yeah, it’s inconvenient. Yeah, it’s painful.
RV (04:59):
But that is the price of admission to being excellent. That is the price of admission for being great. That’s the price of admission for doing anything that matters. And so if you wanna be successful at your next thing, don’t wait to start developing the success habits until you’re doing those things. Start developing them now. And in my life, you know, there, there’s been a couple times where my life direction has abruptly changed very, and, and, and, and a couple times very unexpectedly. And I think the reason why we were able to pivot so quickly to the next thing was because we had done everything in our power to make the current thing succeed. And it’s sort of like, you know, it’s like jumping from the top of one mountain to the top of another mountain versus having like to be on the, if you’re on the, if you’re, if you’re halfway up a mountain or you’re on the bottom of a mountain, you have to like, go down that mountain and then go up the bottom of the next mountain.
RV (05:58):
But if you’re on the top of a mountain, you just jump from the top of one mountain to the top of the next, to the top of the next, you know, maybe not from top to top, but you know, near the top. And then you climb back up to the top. And this is what successful people do, right? They’re successful in everything. So don’t convince yourself, don’t lie to yourself that, oh, I would really be successful, you know, if I had a different this or that or whatever. Maybe that’s true. But, but the reality is that most of success comes down to you making that decision to be successful regardless of your circumstances. So do that now. Crush it where you are at. And that is concept right out of take the stairs, you know, from years and years ago. Hasn’t changed. Second thing, second thing that I don’t think people talk enough about when it comes to being successful, specifically at generating revenue, right?
RV (06:52):
So when specifically at, you know, building your personal brand or selling your course, or selling your keynote, or getting a promotion or, you know, let’s, let’s just say sales in general, generating revenue. I think what we don’t hear enough about is that when somebody succeeds at something, a lot of times, like most of the time it’s because they have banked up all of this trust first, right? So when, and I’ll, I’ll, I’ll use this. I think this is a great example. You know, we, we were fortunate to, to be a, a very significant part of Ed Mylet book launch in 2022. And we made a major contribution. We did a lot, we worked very closely with Ed, and we brought the best that we had to offer in terms of strategy and relationships, and you know, we did what we did. But, you know, and we helped Ed pre-sell 117,000 copies of his book.
RV (07:52):
You know, and just recently, we, we, we helped Lewis Howes and Amy Porterfield both, and, and they both became New York Times bestsellers. All in all, we’ve now helped 13 different clients become New York Times, wall Street Journal, USA to that bestsellers. But with Ed, you know, he pre-sold 117,000 copies of his book. Did we have a lot to do with it? Sure, we had a lot, we had something to do with it, right? We, we helped Ed, we helped Ed. The reality is we get far more credit than we deserve. The reality is, ed had banked up so much trust with his audience, so much reputation, right? Did some of our stuff help? I, I hope so. I like to think so. Ed is very gracious in saying that it did. But the reality is that we taught Ed the same thing. We teach all of our clients, right?
RV (08:40):
It wasn’t like we gave him some secret that we didn’t give anybody else the difference in his results, right? The difference in what Ed, ed Mylet experience was not because we did a better job with him, or because we taught him something, we don’t teach everybody else. It’s it’s case in point that what happened was it was his trust that was banked with his audience before he asked them to buy. Trust must always take place before there’s a transaction. Trust must take place before there’s a transaction. When Ed did his book launch, he had years and years of trust banked up. Now we showed up, we were lucky enough to get introduced to him. We were one part of a team of people that were all working together to support him. And we might have helped him maybe, you know, optimize efficiently the, the, the quote unquote extraction of that trust in the form of book sales.
RV (09:29):
But he was the one that banked the trust. And so when we get extraordinary results with clients, you know, I don’t think we could take, like, we cannot take all the credit for it by any means. Even when they follow our formulas, even when they use our exec stuff. And similarly, when clients don’t succeed, it’s not because of us. It’s because of them, right? We know our formulas work. They’ve worked for us. They’re working for lots of other clients, the biggest personal brands in the world, all the way down to intermediate and novice people who are just starting out getting extraordinary results. We know what we do works. The difference is you, the difference is how much are you willing? How hard are you willing to work? And how much trust have you banked with your audience? Trust must take place before there’s a transaction.
RV (10:16):
And too many people want to come out and just sell right away. Too many people wanna come out and just like, oh, I’m gonna launch something and go, I just wanna sell to a bunch of random strangers on the internet. Well, it’s not bad to do that. It’s not necessarily wrong to do that. But I think the reason that people struggle to succeed right away is because they think, oh, there’s some technique that I need to develop. There is, there’s some strategy. And if it didn’t work, it’s ’cause Oh, I got bad advice from, you know, this person or that person, or brand builders group, or this course didn’t teach me. And the reality is, is because you didn’t have enough trust banked up with your audience, you have to build trust before people are willing to buy. You have to build trust with people.
RV (10:58):
You have to add value, you have to give first. You have to help them. You have to pour into them. And so if your launch failed, it doesn’t mean you failed. It doesn’t mean you got horrible advice. It doesn’t mean that the thing that you’re doing is bad. It doesn’t mean that people won’t ever buy it. It probably means more often, it means that you’re just too early, meaning you are trying to extract revenue before you have deposited trust. So I don’t think we hear enough about that. And I think, you know, I think people like us, you know, wanna take credit because we do. We, we wanna, we wanna have a part of people’s success. We work really, really hard for it. And you know, sometimes you’re hard on yourself when you don’t succeed, or you’re hard on the people around you. And the fact of the matter is, a lot of success has to do with trust.
RV (11:48):
And trust comes from adding value to people in your life that they see you, they learn from you, they know you. You’re giving to them, you’re teaching them. And that’s why our entire content marketing strategy, right? Everything we teach, which, you know, can get very sophisticated, but it all boils down to like our entire content marketing strategy is this simple, teach everything you know, for free, but in small bite-sized chunks and all random miscellaneous order. That’s how we do our whole, our whole content strategy for podcasting, for YouTube, for social media, right? Like, I mean, we’re teaching everything we know for free, but in small bite-sized chunks, in all random order, because we, there’s two things we believe. First of all, we believe that people don’t pay for information. People pay for application. People don’t pay for information. They pay for organization, and they pay for application.
RV (12:41):
So even if you teach everything, you know, what they’re gonna hire you to do is they’re not gonna hire you for the knowledge. They’re gonna help, they’re gonna hire you to help them apply the knowledge to their own life and their own business and their own situation. But the second reason why we do that is because we’re automating trust. What are we doing here on this podcast? We’re automating trust. That’s what we’re trying to do. What are we doing on my blog? We’re, you know, rory vaden blog.com. I, I mean, I feel like I’ve given away a master’s degree in free content on my blog, like for free. Like if you actually sat and went and read all the hundreds of articles, it’s like equivalent to a master’s degree, like probably better in some ways in terms of the ability to help you generate more income for your life immediately.
RV (13:27):
And it’s all there for free because we’re automating trust. We want, we want to add value to people before we need something, right? We we’re, you know, we don’t particularly need anything. Now, what we do hope you do at some point is you, is you go to free brand call.com/podcast and you say, you know what? I like these guys. I like what they’re about. I like their style. I like their guests, I like their information, I like their knowledge, and I think they could help me take my small business to the next level. I think they could help me grow my reach, grow my revenue, increase my sales build my personal brand, build my audience, build my impact, and I wanna talk to them, right? So that’s why we do the podcast for free. That’s why we work so hard at it. We’re automating trust.
RV (14:10):
That’s what we’re trying to do. You can do the same thing. That’s what we’re doing on social automating trust, teach everything you know, for free, but in one small bite-sized chunk, in an all random miscellaneous order, all right? That accounts for a lot of your success, like more than you realize. So if your last launch failed, give yourself a break, right? Like, if your revenue’s not climbing as fast as you want it, welcome to the club, right? If your audience isn’t taking off and you’re not getting the kind of reach that you want, welcome to the club, right? That doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong, it means you’re just early on the journey. That’s it. And that leads me to the third thing. The third thing that I don’t think we hear enough about when it comes to success. I mean, you do hear about this some, but I don’t think that we index it enough.
RV (15:03):
I don’t think we appropriately weight this enough. And that is simply that you have to make a decision to stick with it, most of succeeding in the personal brand space. Okay? So if you wanna become a, a bestselling author, a world renowned speaker, if you wanna become a world renowned coach, a high paid consultant, if you wanna just make it in this space, in this business, a huge part. Like most of it, probably 80% of it, it’s just sticking around
RV (15:55):
And so they give up, or you know, sometimes they have to, right? Something changes and they, they run out of, you know, money or somebody gets hurt in their life, they gotta take care of ’em, or you know, whatever, whatever. Like, there’s life situation, but they, but they ultimately, they just, they, they quit. They, they, because either they choose to or they have to, they stop pursuing the dream. And I think 80% of achieving a dream is just not giving up on it. Like 80% of you achieving your wildest dream is just not giving up on it. It’s just pursuing it is sticking with it. And, and the reason why I think this matters, especially for small business owners, especially for entrepreneurs, and especially for personal brands, but I think this, I would round this out and say that this applies to all small business owners, right?
RV (16:39):
Because this is, here’s what it means to be an entrepreneur. Like, ultimately people think what are, what’s the criteria that it takes to be a successful entrepreneur? We think, oh, we gotta have a great product, or we gotta be good at sales, or we gotta have the gift of gab. We gotta be good with people, or we gotta have, you know, good time management, or we have to have, you know, good systems or good at marketing, or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. None of that. I mean, all of those things help. None of them are the predominant criteria for a success. Successful entrepreneur. You wanna know what the number one most predominant criteria for a successful entrepreneur is? I’ll tell you, I’m a hundred percent convicted that this is the number one most important criteria for being a successful entrepreneur.
RV (17:23):
You have to be willing to get kicked in the face over and over and over every day and keep coming back for more. That’s it. Like, you have to get punched, you have to get kicked, you have to get hit, you have to get beat down and be willing to come back for more. If you wanna be a successful entrepreneur, that’s the job. That’s the job. It’s not secret strategies, it’s not mentorship, it’s not this personal development book, that coaching program, the perfect product, customer experience sales. It is that it is going, what is your appetite? What is, what is your threshold for getting kicked in the face, for getting beat down, for having problem after problem, rejection after rejection, setback after setback in your personal life, your professional life, people quitting on you, losing clients, thought you had the gig and you didn’t. Getting zing with a, a tax bill from the government.
RV (18:19):
You weren’t expecting the product breaking down that you thought was perfect. The marketing thing busted. Having people run off with your money. Like it’s, it’s, and then it’s, it’s managing all that, right? While in your personal life, you have chaos going on. This is the story of our life, like in the last few weeks, right? We’ve had unexpected surgeries. We have kids throwing up in the middle of the night, someone drove into our fence, right? On accident, we, we knocked over our fence. We’ve had people bump into the car. We have had gas leaks in our house where we had to tear open the walls. We have so many things, kids writing on the walls with markers like the, the kids’ teachers getting sick, and now the kids are home. Like, all of that is normal. That’s the job, right? So you go, can you manage all of that simultaneously while getting kicked in the face simultaneously, while trying to like, make an impact in the world? That is what it takes to succeed as an entrepreneur. What is your threshold for getting beat up? What is your threshold for, for getting hit? How hard can you get hit and keep coming back for more? How many times can you be told no? How many times can someone let you down? How many times can you be taken advantage of? How, how many times do you have to fail, but, and, but you’re willing to iterate and keep coming back? That is what it takes.
RV (19:50):
That’s what it takes. So if you’re going, if you’re having a hard day, if you’re having a hard day, don’t, I, I feel for you, right? I don’t mean to be too hard on you. I know it’s freaking hard. It’s hard. And if you have kids, you have young kids, it’s freaking hard. And if you have a team and you’re managing people and you’re dealing with the gossip and the relationships and their personal life and their, you know, traveling and this and what, and they let somebody down and they didn’t show up, right? I, it’s hard. And I know you don’t have the, you don’t have as much money to hire the vendors and you hire and then you hire a vendor and they let you down, or they don’t do a good job, or they ghost on you. We had a vendor ghost on us recently. $6,000. We paid them. They disappeared. $6,000 gone disappeared. I know it’s hard.
RV (20:48):
That’s the job. Like, that’s the price of admission for success in this business, in this game of entrepreneurship, of being a small business owner, of being a world changer. Do you think things were easy for Martin Luther King Jr? Do you think things were easy for Mother Teresa? Like, do you think things are easy for the people who change the world? Like, if you wanna change the world, that’s the job. You wanna own your own business. That’s the job you wanna make. Unlimited income, that’s the job you want freedom. That’s the job. You wanna be well known. That’s the job. You wanna make more money than anyone in your family has ever made. That is the job. What is your appetite for getting kicked in the face?
RV (21:34):
I’m not saying I like it, I’m just saying that’s the job. So if today’s a hard day, welcome to the club. You’re on the right track, right? These are the things we don’t hear enough about, but they are the truth. In order for you to succeed at launching your next thing, you need to crush it. Where you’re crush it with the thing you’re doing now, crush it where you’re at. In order to succeed and make money and generate sales, you have to bank trust first. Trust must take place before a transaction. And if you’re gonna succeed as an entrepreneur, as a small business owner, as a personal brand, or as anything else, you just gotta increase your threshold for getting kicked in the face and keep coming back for more, because that’s what it takes. But if you’re here listening now, if you’re still listening by this point, if you found your way here to us and you found your way to this episode, and you’ve found your way to this moment, and you’re still here, here’s what I believe.
RV (22:50):
I believe you have what it takes. I believe you have what it takes. I believe that there’s a calling on your life to do something so big in the world that that calling will outweigh the, the, the pain that you have to go through. That, that long-term calling that purpose for your life is to make such a positive impact for other people, that you will be willing to endure the pain. So you’re on the right track. It’s okay to have hard days. Just realize that’s the job. Keep going and keep coming back for more. We’ll catch you next time on the Influential Personal Brand podcast.
Ep 574: Creating more Digital Organization with Shawn Lemon
RV (00:06):
Welcome to the Influential Personal Brand podcast. This is the place where we help mission-driven messengers, just like you learn how to build and monetize your personal brand. My name is Rory Vaden and I’m the co-founder of Brand Builders Group, a hall of fame speaker, and New York Times bestselling author. And this show is to help experts learn how to become more wealthy and well-known. I know you’re gonna love it. Thanks for being here. Let’s get started. Well, earlier this morning, I spent about three hours trying to get AJ’s computer updated with patches and the most recent versions, and backing up file storage and just getting things operating. And it was a fresh reminder and ironic timing because our guest today is Shawn Lemon. Shawn is a friend of the family because he’s part of my good friend Michael Hyatt’s family. He’s married to one of Michael’s daughters, and that’s how I got to meet Shawn.
RV (01:07):
But Shawn has built an incredible business with a very specific expertise. He is the founder of the digital organizer, and so for the last 17 years, he’s been helping individuals get better at using technology. So the heart of it all is trying to keep up with how technology changes, but I would describe it as basically getting rid of your digital clutter, your digital dis if you have digital clutter, if you have digital disorganization, if you have digital chaos, if things are, if you can’t find files, they’re not named properly, you don’t know who has the most recent version, you lose the passwords. You don’t have naming conventions and syntax. All of these kinds of things that are little micro cuts of slowing you down and making your organization bleed from an efficiency perspective. Those are the kinds of things that Shawn.
New Speaker (02:01):
is an expert at talking about. And we’re gonna talk about some of them today. So, Shawn, welcome to the show, man. Good to have you.
SL (02:07):
Good to be here. Thank you so much.
RV (02:10):
This stuff frustrates me. There is nothing that makes me more angry. I don’t get angry at politics. I don’t get angry when people say mean things. I don’t get angry when someone cuts me off in traffic. I get angry when I lose time ’cause I cannot find something on my computer. I get the stupid spinny ball of death. I have to spend 30 minutes looking for something. Or something is not working, something is broken. That’s when I get furious when things are not working. So can you help us with that?
SL (02:50):
Absolutely. I would love to
RV (03:11):
So I was gonna ask you why does this happen? Yeah. But I think I know why it happens. Yeah. It happens because we’re all moving too fast. We’re too fast to stop and think about how to name things, where to store ’em, having a file structure, you know, and it’s just like, I just don’t have time for it. I never have time for it. And so it just gets w worse and worse and worse and worse and worse. And then one day it just like explodes. Yeah. so the so how do we prevent that? Like you, you mentioned before there’s four main areas that you support people with. Yeah. Can you walk us through what those four areas are? Yeah.
SL (03:52):
So everyone has three components of their digital world. We’re only four. We’ll focus on the third one first, and then we’ll hit the fourth. And that’s communicating. I mean, we’re using our technology to communicate to create and store files. So managing assets and keeping track of tasks and projects. And all three of those things are intrinsically connected. We get an email that has a file that needs to go into file storage, but instead of putting it in file storage, you’re trying to organize your email, or we get an email that’s part of a larger project and we need that critical piece of information or that deadline. And so we leave it in our inbox instead of grabbing it and putting into project management. So we’ve got tons of overlap between them. So really we’ve chosen to focus on those three things. And then the fourth one, which gets everyone irate, which is passwords and not being able to get into an account. Oh my gosh. Or you’ve hired someone else to do something. No,
RV (04:50):
You annoyed the passwords, dude. Like 70 bazillion passwords. Yeah. They want me to update it. Don’t use the same one. It’s like, dude. Yeah. And then you use, like, we use OnePass, which is mm-hmm
SL (05:22):
Yep. And then passwords to, to bring it all together, because the fact is, it’s just extremely important. You can get away with using fluffy 1, 2, 3 and variations of that until you can’t. And then, like one of our clients, he had, he brought home $500,000 a year in profit from a partnership for his marketing company. The whole thing imploded because his developer was using some simple password. The account got hacked, they got into all of their client stuff and then and started buying ads with their company’s, their clients’ company, credit cards. Whoa. I mean, it is just insanity you know, to try and operate remotely with other people if you’re not using a good password manager. So that’s the piece that really kind of pulls it all together.
RV (06:08):
Okay. So where do we start with managing all this chaos? And, and I’ll speak for my audience here and say, we don’t have time to deal with this. We don’t really want to talk about this. So how can we do this efficiently?
SL (06:22):
Well, to do it the most efficiently, you can hire someone to help you
RV (06:27):
That’s not, that’s that. I, I, that’s a good option. Many of us would like to do that. So consider, consider, consider yourself interviewing for the job
SL (06:36):
Yeah. Okay. So really there’s a few different ways to approach this. You can go with a course, you know, the school of YouTube, you can find somebody who’s got a course. You know, I’ve got materials on this that you can buy. There’s a lot of different ways to go about it. The fact is, you know, it’s single digits of people who actually finish courses. And then you could also hire somebody to do this for you. They’re promising that they’re gonna go in, you just tell ’em what your stuff is and how you want it organized. Then they’ll go in and do it, but they’re really creating their system and not one for you. And so, almost always, those people will have to keep going back to the organizer over and over again. Or you could choose a hybrid approach where you’re working with someone to co-create.
SL (07:18):
So basically, and that’s what we do, is we’ve got our resource library, you know, basically the course and the framework that we take our people through. And then we do it together. And so, you know, we want a very systematic approach incorporating, you know, how we’re communicating how we’re storing files and task management all in our, our master plan so that we have clear demarcation lines between each one of ’em. And that’s really designing from the front end. What tools do I want to use and what part of those tools should I not be using? And I think that’s a really big part of the process, is understanding what you shouldn’t be using in some of these apps. So
RV (08:00):
Where do you start? Do you start with storage? You start with passwords? Do you start with project management system? Do you start with communicating and email inbox? Like
SL (08:09):
Where
RV (08:10):
Do you, what’s the starting point?
SL (08:12):
Most of the time, the starting point is email. Okay. Because the majority of people are drowning in email. And, and while some people recognize how much anxiety and stress it causes them, some people don’t because it’s ubiquitous. Everyone’s dealing with email overload and marketers hammering their inbox and, you know, and trying to just stay organized with that. So if we can actually start with email and calm down the noise and be really strategic about how we approach emails so that we’re not having an open all day and reacting and be more strategic, that gives us so much more time and mental energy to start strategically tackling how we’re approaching project management or how we’re even planning the work we do, and how are we going to do our folder structures and things like that. So that’s a great starting point. So
RV (09:08):
Let’s start there. So let’s dive in mm-hmm
SL (09:22):
Yep. Yep.
RV (09:23):
I, I, I like that a lot. So what are the principles that we need to know or follow mm-hmm
SL (09:32):
Yeah. So the first thing is you should do so much less organization and email than you think you need to. Huh? if, if I had my way, you’re not organizing any email. Email should be a communication platform. We send a message, we receive a message. Now we may send someone a file or receive a file, but it does not belong in email. We take that file, download it, and put it into our folder structure so that we can find it. When we’re looking for a file as a part of a project, we should never have to go to our email to find that it should be where we’re working on that project. And that’s where we need to store things. So it’s not necessarily we’re keeping all presentations together. It’s, are we doing a presentation for a pitch for this company and we’ve got all of their logos, the research that we’ve done for that, et cetera.
SL (10:25):
Well, the file for that presentation goes together. So stop organizing in email. We, you can use some automation tools. I like Sandbox and Sandbox allows me to create a couple of folders. I only use two smart folders later for newsletters that I truly read. And if I find that I’ve, I’ve, I’ve been deleting a few newsletters, it’s time to unsubscribe. And then I got another folder for financial and shipping. And why I like using this tool is when I get an email from Amazon, I drop it into financial and, and Sandbox will make sure that anything sent from that specific address gets to my receipts folder or my financial folder. So everything skips my inbox, and I have a focused inbox that just has communication from people by ruthlessly, unsubscribing, getting rid of these newsletters, coupons, and lists that you’re on. We’ll really help. And then we can start filter out other things that we need that really shouldn’t hit the inbox that we do want to keep. And then we start triaging. So that’s really the starting point. And then you can go deeper into how do you approach processing the emails from real people?
RV (11:38):
Love that. I, I, I will tell you, you know, I’ve, I’ve hired so many assistants over the years Yeah. And every new one comes with a new way to want to organize the inbox. Yep. And I have always pushed back on it because I’m like mm-hmm
SL (12:13):
To, to We wanna do it manually. We do it manually if possible. We want to do it mainly if we get pushback from that. Sandbox has a feature called the Black Hole. And anything that you put in that folder from that sender, they’re automatically gonna be put in black hole marked as red and it purges itself after seven days automatically. Mm-Hmm. So if you don’t want to go through the trouble of unsubscribing, stick ’em in the black hole, that’ll take care of it for you. And I, my preference would be to manually unsubscribe, because you don’t know how many lists that that company has added you to. It might be 20 different lists. If you, you know, sign up for under buy something from Under Armour, you’re gonna be on 10 different, 10 different brands lists that could be 50 subscriptions just from one simple signup. So if we go in and unsubscribe it, then we know we’re not gonna get it into a future. And if I want to get rid of Sandbox later I can get rid of it and my inbox isn’t gonna be overflowed.
RV (13:10):
Yeah. There’s also something, there’s a mental purging that happens there where you go, I’m, it does, I’m deliberately choosing, I don’t want this to come into my world anymore. I think that’s powerful. Mm-Hmm
SL (13:42):
So we want to get rid of things that are older than 30 days. So if you got 20,000 emails in your inbox, what are they doing there? Like, they shouldn’t be there anymore to They’re
RV (13:52):
Storage. That’s what they’re doing. Like, I, I could answer that question. Yeah. They’re, we’re storing things there that are like old emails of like, I might need this one day. Right.
SL (14:00):
Right. And that’s fine. You can keep it, it just doesn’t belong in the inbox anymore. Like Gmail, when you hit archive, it just takes it outta the inbox, but it’s still searchable and you’re not gonna browse through 20,000 emails. So why leave it in the inbox? Let’s clear it out. So and if you sign up for this file organization guide that I’m gonna tell you about at the end, I’m gonna send you a couple of videos on how to actually do the purging, unsubscribing, and setting up sandbox. So all of this stuff that I’m talking about, I’m gonna send you videos of how to actually do this practically. So you don’t have to memorize this process from the podcast, but we want to get rid of those everything older than 30 days. We need to purge the newsletters. And 30 days is a good starting point.
SL (14:44):
And then you keep up with it from there. And then after that, let’s archive the things that are taken care of. Let’s delete what we never need to see again. And now what we’re left with are things that we need to deal with. And it’s time to take a look at how do we do these tasks? Like what are we getting and when should we be doing them? Because we’ve got stuff that needs to be dealt with right away. We have things that need to be dealt with. Just we maybe a group them together ’cause we have a number of bills to pay, for example. Well, maybe we can snooze all of those for Thursday morning when we have time set aside to do that. Yes. And then we’ve got items that are part of a larger project that shouldn’t really belong and, and email anymore. Let’s get, let’s copy the information, let’s put it into Asana where we’re keeping track of those tasks so that I can archive the email and move on and have the information that I need when that task comes up for a due date in my project management system.
RV (15:43):
Okay. So I love this because that’s, that’s the other reason why items are in the inbox, is I’m using it as my to-do list. Yep. Right. So I’m going, crap, I need that email. ’cause That’s, that’s my reminder to do. Mm-Hmm. The thing, and you’re saying if you’re doing that, you should maybe not do that. You should take that out of there and put that onto your task management or project management management system mm-hmm
SL (16:26):
Yeah. How do you, and when do you do one versus the other? Right. Right.
RV (16:28):
Yeah.
SL (16:29):
Yeah. So if, if it’s a communication thing and that you just, you need information to come back at a certain point, something along those lines. I like to snooze emails. I don’t wanna put it all in Asana to check Asana to then go back an email. So I will snooze an email to pop back up at the time that I have set aside to actually do that thing. And if I snooze it multiple times, then that’s a trigger for me of, okay, am I actually going to do this? Do I need to knuckle down or do I just need to say, Hey, this isn’t getting done, I’m sorry. Or just, you know, delete it and move on and let go of the thing. So if it has to do with communication and it’s not really part of a larger project, I don’t want you to have to store that somewhere else just to come back to email, snooze it for the time that either later in the day or or for next week or even next month. Or if you, you know, said, Hey, I need to hear back by Thursday, you know, at three and it’s Thursday at at noon and you haven’t gotten, you know, you wanna give them some time. Maybe it comes back Thursday at noon in your inbox to let you know, Hey, the deadline’s coming. You might wanna ping them one more time.
RV (17:43):
Okay. So now I’m moving files. We’re getting rid of spam stuff. Mm-Hmm
SL (18:05):
Out of the inbox. It’s still, still still searchable in email. ’cause That’s really where you’re gonna wanna look. You need to leave them there. We’re not gonna turn emails into files.
RV (18:14):
Is okay. So then are we kind of done with the inbox? Like does that kind of go pretty much now, now everything that makes sense to me. So now everything is sort of where it belongs.
SL (18:29):
Yeah.
RV (18:30):
My new problem is now I have, what was a hundred emails. I now have 76 tasks to complete in my, in my project management tool. And is, would you consider calendar calendaring as part of project management? Or how do those overlap?
SL (18:47):
Yeah, so a lot of people want to say incorporate their project management into their calendar. So if they create a task there, then it shows up on their calendar. Or they’ll use their calendar for task management to, to show them what items they’re supposed to be doing. I like to chunk it and say, this is the time for this type of work on Thursday mornings. And so then I open up Asana and I’m looking at either that project that I know I’m supposed to be working on, or I’m looking at my, my tasks for the day to start knocking out things that are really all, all scheduled for that day. So I’ve got the time set aside for it. So my calendar tells me where I’m supposed to be working, and then I’m primarily working in Asana to process that stuff. And maybe I’m doing some documenting. Maybe I am gonna send a quick email or something along those lines. But that’s the place where that’s really directing the work for that period of time.
RV (19:45):
Okay. So you’re using, you’re using your project management tool in your case, Asana mm-hmm
RV (19:51):
As your to-do list and the like to direct your work every day.
SL (19:55):
Yeah. Yeah. And I clear out my inbox and get to inbox zero by snoozing because it’s just not practical for us to deal with every single message as they come in. And we can’t answer every email in a day, every single day. So snoozing has to happen for when we actually have the information. It’s
RV (20:16):
Just funny ’cause when you’re saying workload is snoozing mm-hmm
SL (20:51):
Right? Because if you are caught in a, in a dopamine loop of email of you’re sitting there, you’re solving problems, you’re answering things, then you find yourself kind of chained to email and that’s what makes you actually feel productive. And then it makes, and because the email is a to-do list and there’s constantly things coming in, then you stay in that spot. And it’s hard to let it go and truly focus on the important thing that needs to get done that you’ve been procrastinating on if we’ve got this big list. But if you go in and clear those things out, because it’s really not, not necessary to do this item right now, and I have more important things to do, and you snooze it, it’s not in your view anymore and it’s a heck of a lot easier to go move on and do the things that are actually important to you.
SL (21:45):
And yeah. And if you snooze things multiple times and you don’t get it done, you pr procrastinate multiple times and it’s not done, then that’s your red flag. Should you even be doing it in the first place. This is in my drudgery zone. I need to delegate this because I just don’t want to do it. Or I need to stop doing this task. So
RV (22:02):
Talk to me about project management. This is good. This is good. Good. Shawn I’m follow, I’m following you so far when I get into the project management mm-hmm
RV (22:14):
How do you think about an approach that list? ’cause Now you just, you have a list. Is, is there, is there anything big there that changes in our thinking about how we tackle the projects or how we organize them or label them or name them or code them or like mm-hmm
SL (22:35):
Yeah. So I would say the biggest mistake that most people make when doing project management is they do big list dumps and they get this new app and they take all of the things that they think that they need to do and consolidate a bunch of lists and just create this massive task dump. And it feels really good and you get a massive sense of satisfaction for it and can, can start some momentum, but then it’s just this big dumping ground of a lot of possibilities and things that really aren’t strategically placed there. So I like to kind of flip this around and say, I actually wanna do my list dump in a document and I’ll call this the back burner list. And that’s actually what ours is called. It’s a Google doc called Back Burner. And so it’s very easy to search and pull up and that’s all of the things that I would like to do and that need to get done and everything in between.
SL (23:33):
And then we strategically look at that list quarterly. And sometimes when we finish something early, then we go back to the, to the the back burner list and we decide what is the most important thing that needs to get done. And we turn those into projects and build out our system and our schedule around what we really, truly intentionally need to get done. And that creates so much more focus in your project management tools so that you’re not exposed to a lot of other things. And and that alone can really help create a lot more focus and make project management less overwhelming.
RV (24:15):
Okay. So you’re, if you’re using your project management tool, you’re, it’s like you’re only using your project management tool to, to have tasks that are related to big projects, not just random one-off tasks.
SL (24:26):
So you use it. And well, also recurring things too, like your taxes, you got quarterly taxes due multiples at the beginning of the year, you know, different deadlines for that. That happens recurring. So we gotta, we’ll factor that into, there’s recurring stuff and then there are also projects.
RV (24:43):
Okay. And then what about, so you’ve got recurring things and projects on there mm-hmm
SL (25:09):
Yeah. So it really depends. I kind of a approach those individually on where it’s at. So if I got the RSVP in my inbox, so if they emailed me an an R rsvp, it’s quick enough
RV (25:21):
To just do it.
SL (25:23):
It’s quicker to do it. Or we’ll say, well add a complication, I gotta check my wife’s schedule first and we need to discuss if we even can go in the first place and who’s gonna watch our child and, you know, all of those other things. So I can’t RSVP right now. Well, what do I do? I, I tell my phone, remind me at six 30 to talk to Madeline about the birthday party. And then I snooze that email for tomorrow morning so we can have the discussion tonight, come to a conclusion, and then tomorrow when I open up my email, then I can go ahead and RSVP for that. So I’m gonna snooze that for tomorrow and it’s gonna pop back in at you know, at 9:00 AM.
RV (26:01):
Gotcha. anything else in the project management space? I mean, is it basically like blocking time to get stuff done? A
SL (26:09):
Lot of it’s blocking time, but another huge mistake people make are they create tasks out of projects. So they think, oh, you know, put the Christmas lights up is a project or it’s a task, you know, and that’s just one thing. Well, like if you just moved into a new house, putting the Christmas lights up is not a single task. You gotta figure out a lot of stuff. Do you have everything? There’s a, a number of pieces involved in that. So, so often we really need to break down a task and think, what are all of the steps that I need to take in order to complete this task? And you might find you’ve actually got a project on your hands. There’s a lot going on in this. And so by creating a task that’s impossible to get done in one sitting, it really sets you up for failure because you’re like, God, I didn’t, I didn’t even make any progress on my to-do list because you couldn’t check that item off. We need to break things up into bite-sized chunks with due dates attached to them so that when we actually make progress on it, we can check it off and get that sense of accomplishment and see I am moving in the right direction. And that can really help to create a lot more momentum instead of feeling like you’re never making progress.
RV (27:34):
So I, I like that. What’s the difference between a task and a project?
SL (27:41):
A project is a whole lot of tasks.
RV (27:44):
Yeah. And, and just, just like, basically if it’s more than five or something, then it’s really a project.
SL (27:50):
Yeah. And you can use a milestone or, or really, so Asana is broken up into, I like Asana ’cause it’s on Rails versus Clickup. It’s, you know, it’s totally loosey goosey. It’s choose your own adventure and you create it. So if you really know what you want, that’s a great platform. So Asana’s broken up in teams and then teams have projects, then projects have milestones and then tasks or sections, milestones, tasks, and then subtasks. So if your project is huge, that’s why project management is really different than task management. You’ve got a lot more layers to it to be able to manage all of it. So if I’ve got a task that has five things to that go along with it, then I might just create five subtasks. So create the tasks and then add the subtask of that’s gonna consist of these five actions. But if they’re all being done on different days, I’d rather them not be subtasks. I’d rather them actually be tasks. Just visually it’s different. And I wish I could show
RV (28:59):
You, but you’re saying projects, so teams, projects, sections, milestones, tasks and subtasks.
SL (29:04):
Yep.
RV (29:05):
Gotcha. Mm-hmm
SL (29:09):
Yep.
RV (29:12):
In a, in bird’s eye, bird’s eye view of a week
SL (29:16):
Mm-Hmm
RV (29:17):
How much time should I be spending in meetings versus communicating versus doing work versus like, you know, and then, you know, marginal time to like place wherever. ’cause ’cause I’ve, I’ve realized it’s just like it takes time to answer an inbox. It takes time. Mm-Hmm
SL (30:15):
RV (30:16):
Any thoughts high level on that? Or like for a of a, of a week, how much, is there like a limit or rule to how many meetings you should be in? Or do you not really do it that way? You just kind of let your inbox drive to your project management, which drives to your tasks?
SL (30:31):
It’s more intentional, but there’s no rules. So each person has to approach this from a, a little bit differently because we all have different roles and sometimes those roles fluctuate and we are having more what Michael Hyatt would describe front stage work, meaning actually like this would be front stage work. We’re both having a conversation for the public. This is, this is part of what we do of delivering our stuff. And, and then we’ve got backstage work, which would be downloading the file, renaming it, doing all of those things. So there are times where we are doing more front stage work or our role requires that of us and then more backstage. And then we also have off stage work, which would be free time, time with family re recharge and things like that. So kind of thinking of it from the high level of do I have enough backstage work to support me for, to do my front stage?
SL (31:39):
‘Cause We can’t just only do meetings and never have any processing time. So it’s just recognizing what your needs are. And this is what’s really nice about having an ideal week where you take a look at your calendar and say, ideally I wanna spend Monday catching up, planning, doing administrative work, and really setting me up for the week. And if I need to, I can slip some meetings in, in the second half of Monday, but the be, but the first half of Monday is sacred and I’m not letting anyone in on that. So that’s all backstage work. Whereas Tuesday and Thursday and then the second half of Friday, I just need a lot of time for meetings. Right now my job is podcasts, sales calls, and occasionally some really technical work. So I need to make sure that there’s plenty of time for that. But then I still have other administrative stuff.
SL (32:35):
So that’s where in the middle of the week, Wednesday is primarily deep work, really trying to make a lot of progress on projects and I’m trying to protect that from meetings. And then Friday morning, kind of same thing, get focused before wrapping up at the end of the day. And maybe I’ve got some meetings on the second half so you can see I’m chunking and having kind of overarching ideas of when I’m doing things. And then that can flex as needed. But I have kind of a starting point of plenty of time for front stage, plenty of time for backstage, and I will flex those as needed.
RV (33:15):
Mm-Hmm
SL (33:37):
Yeah. Okay. So when we’re in business, there are certain things that you really do not want to cheap out on. And that’s gonna be business file storage. Mm-Hmm. So when we’re working in Google accounts you know, you can bootstrap with Google Drive in, in a Gmail account, but as soon as possible you’ve got to get set up with Google Workspace. Or if you’re a big Dropbox user, you need to get on Dropbox business When you start collaborating with other people, because these business subscriptions give us a different type of folder. We’ll take Google Drive for example, in Google Drive, we have my drive and that’s how everything started where I can create a folder and Rory, I can invite you to my folder so that we can collaborate anything that you put in my folder, you still own. So if you decide you’re done with this account, maybe you were freelancing for me and you were doing this same thing and you created a Gmail specifically for that freelancing gig, you delivered your stuff to me and you decide this isn’t for me anymore, and you delete that Google account, it deletes all of the files you created for me and put in my folder from my folder because you don’t own it.
RV (34:53):
You lost me.
SL (34:54):
Okay. You lost
RV (34:55):
Me. You’re, you’re basically, you’re saying if you’re using personal accounts to do business, then who, if you hire like a
SL (35:02):
Vendor, whoever created the folder or whoever created the file owns it. Not wheres it at, but who created it? Owns the file.
RV (35:13):
Gotcha.
SL (35:14):
So you hire someone from the Philippines to start creating documents for you, managing different things, creating some spreadsheets, keeping track of all of this stuff, and then they don’t work for you anymore and you’re not using the right folder and they delete their account. Everything they created for you goes, bye bye.
RV (35:31):
Yeah. That’s happened to me. It happened with about 165 blog videos that I recorded that we turned into blog posts. Okay. And they just literally vanished out of Dropbox on, and everyone’s like, where did they go? Yeah. How come we don’t have them? It was this exact thing. There was a overseas VA that was handling stuff and apparently they, you know, cleaned out their Dropbox to save money on their account or whatever. And I mean, is that what you’re talking about? Where basically Exactly.
SL (36:05):
They,
RV (36:05):
They, they had, they had, they had, that’s
SL (36:07):
Exactly it. And how much money, how much time, like all of those resources. And this is because we didn’t upgrade to business and or we didn’t use the right type of folder. If you use Dropbox for business and you created a team folder and invited that VA to the team folder, anything that they put in your folder you own. And on Google it’s called shared drive. So we have to be on the level that as of today is $14 a month, or T 12 or 1440 depending on if you’re paying yearly. And
RV (36:40):
When you say own it,
SL (36:41):
You’re saying able to get access, full
RV (36:43):
Access to it. They can’t delete it because it’s your business folder.
SL (36:47):
Well, what happens is, but it’s not
RV (36:48):
Like IP ownership or is it both? Yeah.
SL (36:51):
Or it’s, it’s file ownership, not ip. Okay. So it’s just purely technical. Right. So the
RV (36:58):
First, right. But it’s like what good is IP ownership? If you hire a graphic designer to hire file and you own the ip, but then they delete the file because Exactly. You don’t have the file. It’s like, oh, I own IP on something that doesn’t exist. Yeah.
SL (37:08):
Yeah. So if you use the right folder, they put the file in your folder, ownership transfers to you mm-hmm
RV (37:31):
Yeah. And so you’re saying that’s called Dropbox Business. If you use Dropbox or Google
SL (37:37):
Shared drives in Google workspace, shared drives instead of my drive. So a lot of people confuse those ’cause they think, oh, I shared that folder with someone else. It’s a shared folder, but it’s not a technical shared drive. And then, you know, and then we can choose what level of permissions this VA has, can they add but they can’t delete. So we get to set those permissions,
RV (37:59):
Uhhuh,
SL (38:18):
So you’d have to download all of that stuff and then put it into your drive so that you actually maintain ownership. So when working with somebody, you wanna create the folder. And this is where you’ve said you’ve hired multiple VAs over the years and they all had their own systems. That’s why it’s important for us to create our own system. I’ve got somebody in another country dealing with, or you know, handling all of my social media, creating stuff for me, all of the rest. But I said, when you work with me, you’re not gonna create a folder. I’m going to create a folder for you and I’m gonna send you a video of how I want you to use it. This is where you’re gonna put posts in that you’ve created for my approval. You let me know. And then I put it in a folder called approved posts, approved reels. Or I comment on it to say, you need to change this. You missed the point, change the graphic, whatever it is that gets done. And then I can move it into approved. So I’m creating the system and they can use whatever Gmail account they want. And I maintain all control.
RV (39:21):
Mm-Hmm
SL (39:35):
It is,
RV (39:36):
They don’t make that ridiculously clear. At least
SL (39:39):
It’s no. And the thing is,
RV (39:40):
They haven’t made it idiot proof enough for me to figure out the difference between like a shared folder and a shared drive. Like that’s a big deal. That’s a really big deal.
SL (39:48):
This is the frog in the pot, you know, all of this technology is, is we’re building the plane while we’re flying it. So Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, all of these services started as consumer products and then these problems appeared and then they created business level subscriptions and started solving the problems. But are they marketing? This is what you need to do and here’s the technical answer and all this stuff. No, they’re just pitching the solution, trying to get the next subscription, not choosing to educate the
RV (40:21):
People on how this works when they’re, you wanna pay $99 a month to be able to share your folders. I’m like, I already can share my folders. I don’t think I wanna pay $99 a month. Right.
SL (40:30):
Right.
RV (40:31):
And then all your files disappear one day and you go, what happened to my files? Those were my file. Mm-Hmm. Like yeah. Anything real quick on passwords?
SL (40:43):
Yeah. So use a password manager. I love one password. You gotta set it up fully. Yeah.
RV (40:50):
It’s not set up fully.
SL (40:52):
You gotta set it up fully. You know, when you set it up on your iPhone, you install the app, you gotta inst you gotta go into the password section and, and turn that on. You want to turn off Safari so those aren’t competing, then you need to turn the extension on. In Safari you have three distinct things that you need to make sure that you get done on every iPhone that’s logging into that account or or iPad. You know, the Mac, you gotta set up the extension on all of your browsers so that it really works. And then in Safari you gotta tell it turn off Safari Auto Save. So those two aren’t competing. Chrome just does it automatically, but for some reason they don’t with Safari. So it’s those sorts of considerations we really need to put in place is when you do the password management, you gotta go all the way and then it’s phenomenal. And nobody has to bug me for two step verification text messages ever because I integrate that two step login into the login itself in one password. So if I’m sharing the password with you, you also have the two step verification code that’s automatically generating in that login. So that completely solves the problem.
RV (42:02):
So you’re saying you can share the two step validate validation code
SL (42:07):
Part mm-hmm
RV (42:13):
Hmm. That’s pretty cool if you have other people logging into certain accounts.
SL (42:17):
Yeah. Yeah, a hundred percent. ’cause You want your social media accounts super locked down. I think Shalene Johnson had her Instagram account hacked. They started posting hardcore porn on her account. She lost a third of her audience, cost her quarter million dollars, all in all to get everything under control, do all of this stuff, and then had to rebuild her following again, because of a stupid account password being hacked. We cannot afford to not use strong passwords on our social media accounts. Especially if you have an influential personal brand, you need a strong password and you need two step verification set up.
RV (42:56):
Uhhuh. Yeah. I got a call this week from a client who had their Instagram hacked. It’s the second, second time this year. We’ve had a client that was like, my Instagram account is gone, like, just disappear. Oh my. Because someone hacked the password. Yeah. what they really do is they hack into your email and then they email the password and then they get it and then they reset your password and they lock you out. And then they hold you ransom for your, your your, yeah. It’s terrible.
SL (43:24):
There’s like 30, I think it’s 34% of ex-employees have the login accounts for their previous employers, even after they’ve left the company because they’re sharing this spreadsheet with variations of fluffy 1, 2, 3 for all of their accounts. And then sharing that in amongst the company and someone leaves, they just know what that password is.
RV (43:49):
Yeah. Yeah. So to go all the way, you’re saying you need to download the app on your phone, you need to install the extensions on the browsers, and then you need to go into your phone settings and disable safari and turn on the, somewhere in the security settings of the phone.
SL (44:11):
Yeah. And you, you should also import the lists. So Chrome’s probably been saved in login. Safari’s been saved in logins. You can export that list and import it into one password. It is very easy to do. They have guides to do the whole thing and they’ve made it very simple and then clean up the logins and, and go through it from there. So it’s not really tough to to get things up and going. You just wanna approach it as a project set time aside to do it and make it happen.
RV (44:39):
Mm-Hmm
SL (44:54):
It’s truly the, the ROI is massive, but it’s just, it’s those tiny little minutes and the frustrations and the things that we don’t think about. This creates capacity for you. It’s not generating revenue, but it creates more capacity you know, more creativity, all of the different things and in a better working environment. Just, it’s like if we were to make our digital workplaces physical, you would never tolerate that. You know? And that’s what people are, are struggling in and dealing with day in and day out. They’re working in a super messy house. It’s hard to get things done. It’s not very fun. And and so if we can make that super easy, approach it as a project, yeah. It’s gonna take you some time to do maybe some money to get some help to, to get it done. But when you do, I mean, it’s just so nice having this dealt with.
RV (45:45):
Hmm. Brother, where should people go to learn more about you and what you’re up to? Yeah.
SL (45:51):
The best thing to do is go to the digital organizer.com/ipb. This is the infin influential personal brand podcast ipb. So go to the digital organizer.com/ipb and you can download my file organization guide. So if you want to get your files organized, you want to consolidate things from a bunch of different areas, I’ve got a step-by-step process to take you through it with videos, examples of the whole thing. When you do that, you get added to my newsletter and I’m gonna send you a few emails of getting your email organized and other things like that. So there’s a whole path for you to go down and I’m gonna give you so many resources you know, just on the front end. And then if you wanna stick along for the newsletter we’d love to see you there and you can reach out. If you wanna talk to me, you know, you can have a discovery call with me.
RV (46:39):
Really Cool. We’ll put that link in the show notes. Of course. So you can hit those. Check out, Shaw. n go find him on social and leave him a comment if you’re listening so that he knows you’re there and say hello and thanks. So generous Shawn. Really, really helpful. And my friend, we just, we continue to wish you all the best and I’m sure we’ll, we’ll talk to you again soon.
SL (47:01):
Same to you. Thanks so much.
Ep 573: What Makes a Great Offer | Zach Hesterberg Episode Recap
AJV (00:00):
What makes a great offer. If you’re thinking about scaling your high ticket offers, then this is something that you need to think about is what makes people buy, and more importantly, what makes people buy from you. So let’s talk about the elements of what makes a great offer. When you’re thinking about offer structure and the compelling reasons IE the benefits or the payoffs of why people would transact with you. There’s a few things that you need to be thinking about before you begin this endeavor. First and foremost, right? Through all of the, the systems, methodology, methodologies we teach at Brain Builders Group, you need to know what problem do you solve? Who do you solve that problem for? What is the, the root cause of that problem? What is your unique way of solving that problem? IE what we call your message. What is the uniqueness that you provide that only you can provide because it’s you?
AJV (01:05):
And then it, we get to the payoffs, right? That is what we call a brand positioning statement at Brand Boulder’s Group. This particular little section is really about what makes a great offer IEA compelling reason why someone would give you their money in exchange for products or services. And in our language in our brand positioning statement, we call those payoffs, right? What are the results? What’s the destination that people are going to experience as a result of working with you? First, you need to know what’s their pain. That’s what we call their problem, right? Once you know that, then categorically speaking, we can talk about how do we solve the problem and what do they get as a result of solving that problem. Those are benefits. IE that’s the offer. Now, if we wanna talk about this, categorically speaking, at a very, very, very high level, there are four primary quote unquote offers that all people want, and the benefits or the payoffs can come in a variety of thousand different shades, right?
AJV (02:14):
If we think about this in one of the analogies we use, like, there’s only three primary colors in the color wheel. However, from those three primary colors, there are thousands of shades of those colors, right? You can have red, or you can have rose or magenta or fuchsia, right? There’s all, or violet, all these different shades by combining the colors. What we’re talking right now is at a very high level, what are probably four of the biggest reasons that people would buy from you, right? And here they are. They want better health, they want better relationships, they want more money, or they want more time. So, categorically speaking, when you think about what makes a great offer, you have to know the human desires and most realms are gonna fit into, and this is in, you know, industrialized countries here, okay? But those are, those are the four main categories.
AJV (03:13):
I want better health, better relationships, more time, more money. So if we know that those are the high levels, then you can literally, categorically stick all the payoffs and benefits in those, right? If people are going well, I just, you know, I just, I want my I don’t wanna exchange time for money, right? Like, I hear that all the time. I wanna figure out how do I make money while I sleep, right? Ultimately, you’re saying I want more money, but more, you’re really saying, I want more time. All right? I don’t wanna exchange time for money, right? When people are going, I just, you know, I wish I had better communication. What are you really saying? I want better relationships. Also, probably I want more time ’cause I’m spending too much time trying to fix relationships or explain myself because my communication isn’t very good.
AJV (03:59):
If you’re a leadership coach, right? People don’t want leadership. What do they want, right? They, they want a trusted person that they can follow. They want better communication. They want better training, better results, more accountability, right? These are all the things, right? Those all fall underneath these high level four things. It’s, well, better relationships, better health, more time, more money, right? And the best offers, right? I the best benefits, right? The best things we can do for people are have a combination of offering several of those things, right? And so it’s not just one of them, but it’s how do they connect, right? By having more time, well, you have better health and better relationships probably by having better health. Will you have more time and better relationships and more money? Probably right now, more money doesn’t mean better relationships or better health or more time, right?
AJV (05:03):
That one doesn’t necessarily work that way. It can, right? More money can give you more time, but more money can also give you less time, right? But a lot of these we wanna share is how do these high level categorical human desires relate to what we can, what we can offer people, right? Are people looking for more notoriety, more credibility more influence? They all fit underneath one of these high level four categories of what makes a great offer. What you have to figure out is what are the shades of those human desires? And what does your audience want that you can deliver on? ’cause If we know, if it’s relationships, health, time, and money, then underneath that we just have to go, what’s the particular nuance, the shade of that color that my audience wants, that I can provide to them? Them. A quick example in the, in the world of brand builders group, right?
AJV (06:01):
The problem that we solve for people is obscurity. Now why are they obscure? It’s because they’re distracted. They’re trying to do too many things all at the same time, right? We believe that focus is power, and that diluted focus gets diluted results. So why are people obscure? It’s because they’re doing too many things and they haven’t become known for any one good thing. The message that we have is simple. Teach people what you know, right? Give it all away for free, right? Tell ’em everything you know, but then charge for the how, but it simply teach what you know, the uniqueness and how we do that is through the lens of service and our payoffs, our trust, influence, impact, notoriety, money, time, right? Legacy. Those are the payoffs. And much of those, again, fit up underneath that. So, although none of our payoffs are necessarily just more money or just more time, it’s like they’re all nuanced underneath that influence has to do with relationships, right?
AJV (07:09):
Impact has to do with time and relationships. Notoriety has to do with time, money and relationships. They’re all nuanced underneath there. And so if you’re having a struggle of going, like, what’s the offer I’m really trying to make? Then by taking it up 10,000 feet and looking at these in a, you know, four, four main categories that’ll help you go through a a underneath the health category. What are the payoffs I provide underneath the relationships category? What are the payoffs I provide underneath time? What do I provide underneath money? What do I provide? That doesn’t mean you have to do all four. It’s pick and choose based on who you serve, what audience you serve, what problem you solve, and the unique way in that you solve it, right? But I think what what happens to a lot of us is we get caught up in all the details of what the offer is actually about, and such as it includes this many course hours, this many calls a month, this many, this, that, many that, and we get this long laundry list of all the stuff it includes and we forget that’s, that, that is the vehicle of how we get there.
AJV (08:19):
But people don’t buy the vehicle, they buy the destination, right? If I’m going to take an exotic trip to Bali, right? I’m not signing up for the 23 hour plane ride and three layovers, and that’s not what I’m signing up for, right? That’s what I have to do to get there. But I am signing up for Bali, right? I’m signing up for palm trees and clear waters and relaxation and peace and sun and beauty and nature. That’s the destination, right? Those are the benefits, those are the payoffs. But I’m gonna have to go through some,
AJV (08:55):
You know, potentially middle seat, long flights, long layovers too many baggage fees. That’s, that’s the vehicle to get there. Don’t focus on the vehicle. Focus on the destination. That’s the benefit, that’s the payoff, and that is what makes a great offer.
Ep 572: Using Paid Virtual Events to Scale Your High Ticket Offer with Zach Hesterberg
AJV (00:34):
Everybody. Welcome to the Influential Personal Brand Podcast. AJ Vaden here. Super excited to have this conversation today, one, because I know Zach and I believe this is going to be of immense value to everyone. But two, I’m also super excited ’cause I shared this with him before I hit record. I’m so selfishly invested in learning this information that this to me is like, I’m just over here with like, like a, you know, a girl on the first day of school with her pen and notebook ready to take notes. And so should you as I always do here’s who this podcast is for, and this is why you should stick around. If you would like to know how to test and offer before you invest time, money, energy and resources into it, this is the episode for you, right? If you wanna know how to sell high ticket offers could be coaching, consulting masterminds, communities without taking one-on-one sales calls or big, or building a huge sales team.
AJV (01:34):
This is the episode for you. If you wanna know if you should be hosting paid events versus free events, this is the episode for you. And if you wanna know what the biggest mistakes are with hosting live events today, then this is an episode you do not want to miss. So let’s get right into it. Let me introduce you to the one, to the only. Zach Hesterberg. He is the founder of paid events, helping high ticket coaches, consultants, and course creators scale through paid virtual events with nearly a decade in marketing, Zach has helped generate six and seven figure paydays while selling over 15,000 event tickets. Y’all, that’s awesome. Unlike traditional funnels that rely on unreliable sales teams, his paid event method attracts high net worth premium clients, increases conversions, and creates predictable revenue without burnout. Who doesn’t want that? Zach, welcome to the show,
KH (02:33):
Aj. I am so excited to be here. Thank you so much for having me, by the way. Fantastic intro. You are a fantastic podcaster,
AJV (02:40):
Well, you know, if all else fails, I could always go into MCing, you know,
KH (02:45):
That’s, that’s fair. That’s fair. I’ve always said, I’ve always said, if I had a, if I had a secondary life, I’d always wanna be like a radio DJ or an mc. So I’m, I’m right there with you.
AJV (02:53):
That’s never too late. Never too late. Yeah. All right, well, just to help our audience get to know you a little bit I’d love to just start with, how’d you get into this?
KH (03:04):
Yeah, so paid events specifically that came probably 2020 I was doing, so I already had a marketing agency. Been doing that since 2015. Started in college, just kinda working with some local businesses. And 2020 came around and I was working with a couple clients more so just optimizing their sales process. I was, people were coming into us for help with Facebook ads mm-hmm
KH (03:50):
It was called the Wedding Photography Summit. And he reached out, he said, Hey, I know that you do a lot of stuff with sales processes. I’m selling $7 tickets for this upcoming summit having a hard time scaling up ads. And I also have some like order bumps and, and one click upsells that have a really low take rate on, could you help me out with that? I said, yeah, no problem. So for the next eight weeks, help them scale up ad spend. Got the, the cost per ticket sold like the, the CPA down pretty low got the order bumps swapped out, and it started working really well. We sold over 8,000 tickets. That was my first ever virtual event. Wow. And a week before the event, well, actually it was the week of the event, it was our last call of our consulting engagement. I said, so Jai, what are you gonna pitch during your event? And he said, I wasn’t planning on pitching anything. What do you mean? Like, I was just, I’m hosting a, a paid event. Like I don’t, I don’t wanna pitch anything like these people have paid to be here. I said, brother, do you hate money
AJV (04:44):
I was like, you’ve got 8,000
KH (04:46):
Of your best customers coming to you to learn how to build up their business. You have a coaching program for 2K, you should at least offer that. Like, because an event is only a catalyst to get someone transformation after the event’s over. Like, there’s so many people that will go to a live event, whether it’s in person or virtual. They get all hyped up, they’re excited, and two days, five days, few weeks after the event’s over. Yeah. Nothing. Yeah. You’ve not taken action on anything. And typically that’s because there was not a real transformation that occurred during the event. You got excited, you got into a great emotional state, but there was no action that was taken to hold you accountable to seeing that transformation through after the event was over. So that’s what I pretty much told him. And he was like, all right, well, cool. I’ll give a quick pitch. And he made another quarter million dollars in the last second. And yeah, that’s, that’s how I got started with it. And so I’ve, I’ve taken on quite a
AJV (05:37):
Bit more. Well, that’s a good entry into the business, Zach. Yeah,
KH (06:34):
KH (07:23):
Most theologians would say there were probably 11 to 12,000 people in that crowd that day. And if you do the math and you say, well, if he was working eight hours a day and he had one hour appointments with people, eight, eight, yeah. Eight appointments per day nonstop back to back to back a hundred percent show rate. And you know, not taking any breaks, it would take him about five years and three months to have met with that many people. But he just did it in one afternoon. And it’s not, it’s not that like, it, it, it’s actually not impersonal to do that. It’s actually almost better because he, he’s doing a disservice if he has to have people meeting with him one-on-one. People want to hear from him. They don’t have to have a one-on-one with him. And so anyway, I was like, man, yeah, he used events to be able to start his ministry and even his disciples.
KH (08:16):
‘Cause Some people would say, well, you know, he had a disciple. So that’s his sales team. No, no, no. Most of his disciples were also doing sermons. It’s a far more efficient way to spread a message. And of course, you’re not gonna have a hundred percent conversion, but you could still have somewhere between a 10 to a 20% conversion pretty consistently when you’re speaking to a group of people at the same time, it’s kind of pitching in a one to many fashion. So that’s my, my inspiration behind some of this. I love that. But yeah I mean, happy to dive more into it. Like obviously there’s sales strategies that you have to deploy and you have to make sure that you’re pre handling objections and, and pre-framing people for the right reasons. But yeah, you could absolutely scale. Like I, we’ve seen the, the virtual events that we’ve hosted, we’ve seen them successfully sell anything from as low as a thousand dollars offers as high as $30,000 offers directly from virtual events where people are paying seven bucks for $9 for like really cheap. So it’s a loss leader model. You don’t, you don’t make money on the front end, typically you’ll lose money after the cost of acquisition, but you make all of your money in that backend sale.
AJV (09:17):
So this is so fascinating. So I would curious to hear from you, like, why do you think that these sales call funnels, like the call booking funnels, why do you think they’re becoming a little less effective as time goes on? Yeah.
KH (09:32):
I think it’s twofold what maybe threefold. In general, the, the reason I said twofold is because people are more sophisticated than ever before, and they’re also more skeptical than ever before. So sophistication is like they
KH (10:18):
People have made some investments that really weren’t the best fit for them, or maybe they didn’t get taken well or taken well care of. And so yeah, the, the skepticism and the, the sophistication, it’s like, it’s just really hard to sell to. And in the past you can, when those were both lower, you can easily have a quick 62nd ad that someone watches on Instagram, they watch it, they’re like, oh yeah, this is interesting. Then they click it, they opt in, they watch a quick 20 minute VSL or maybe a 90 minute webinar. They’re like, cool, yeah, I’m sold. I wanna book a call. They book a quick, a quick hour long sales call and they’re gonna buy no problem. But it’s just not happening at the rate that people would like to see at this point. And so, I, I, I always say that lead generation is easy. It’s really easy to get a lead or someone interested in working with you, but the conversion part is much harder. And that’s because most people skip the in-between step, which is the lead nurture. And so I’m finding that, and this is just my kind of hypothesis a virtual event or in-person event doesn’t really matter, is one of the most efficient ways to nurture a prospect and truly gain that know, like, and trust factor that they truly need before they’re ready to invest with you at a higher rate.
AJV (11:29):
So I have a question for you. You mentioned like seven to $9. Why so cheap? Like why not $20? Why not $50? Yeah,
KH (11:38):
Great question. Great question. I haven’t seen a whole lot of data on the 20 to $50 range. I’ve tested all out a, a good few on like the 97 to 2 97 offers, and people still use those. And so I’m, I’m not gonna sit here and say like, one is better than the other. The only reason we’ve done seven to $9, and, and actually here in about three weeks, we’ll be hosting our own event. We’re actually gonna we have the hypothesis that we think a dollar will still work, so we’re gonna do a dollar ticket because I think there’s just something powerful in the 16 digits being exchanged of, of the credit card number. But yeah, the seven to $9 came up from, honestly, that first client, Ja, he was already selling it for seven. And then the very next week I had a client, her name was Christian Boss, and she said, Hey I I, I’m curious about hosting this upcoming three day virtual event.
KH (12:26):
I was gonna make it free. What are your thoughts? I’m like, I have another client we just sold 8,000 tickets for, for $7. Like, do you wanna do that? And she did it. And a month later she had 3,500 tickets sold at a $7 price range, and she made a quarter million dollars from that as well. And I was like, huh, yeah, maybe there’s something to it. And so my hypothesis, like I’ve, I’ve tested out once again, other price ranges, but my hypothesis is that the lower the price range or the, the, the lower the, the price for the ticket, the easier it is to make that quick impulse purchase. And we’re not in it for profit on the front end. We’re in it for buy-in. And there’s a significant difference from a free event versus a paid event of any sort on the show rate as well as the backend conversion rate, because these people
AJV (13:07):
Are sure you better have some skin in the game, right? Yeah. Something.
KH (13:09):
Yeah. So, yeah, I, I don’t know, the seven to nine I, I’m open to being proven wrong. Like, our motto is, we don’t care to be right. We just wanna make money. So that’s why we’re gonna try the dollar tickets. And then we’ve tried some $27 and $47 events, but they just, the sales page conversion rate quite literally just has not been as desirable as we’d prefer. And at the end of the day, we want that cost of acquisition as low as possible.
AJV (13:32):
So that leads me to another question then. So clearly you’re not doing it for profit. Are you trying to do it for break even? Or are you fully prepared to take a loss? Oh,
KH (13:40):
Yeah, yeah. Fully prepared to take a loss. So I’ve
KH (14:22):
Yeah. Yeah. Literally on the spot. So it’s, they’re like, okay, well we can, we can float that cash. So yeah, you can absolutely try to break even. You can add in some order bumps, some one click up sales. But most of the clients that we work with, they’re busy. Like, they’re usually multiple seven figures, oftentimes in the eight figure range. They don’t want to have to come up with new products to sell just for a funnel. Like they’re, like, at the end of the day, they, they only care about the backend profit. So as long as you have the cash to float, great do that. But if you’re really cash strapped, you could of course add in some extra one click up sales and you could try to increase the average order value.
AJV (14:57):
So then it’s Okay. So walking through this process, for anyone who’s listening to who, okay, if I had a little money to put some, you know, money into some ads, had this low ticket offering, what are you seeing is the most successful formula for the event itself? Is it a full day? You mentioned three days. Yeah. Is it a half day? Yeah.
KH (15:15):
Great question. So it does depend on your market a little bit. For example, myself, if
KH (16:08):
The reason why is, is honestly just because if you can deliver a really powerful shift on perspective in their mindset on, on day one, they’re sitting in that for another 24 hours before they get to hear from you again. And then they’re now eagerly waiting for day two, because as long as you kind of create some nice open loops that don’t totally get closed on day one, now they’re super excited for day two and you’re taking up their brain space and their mental bandwidth over the next 24 hours, and that’s only a two day event. If you wanna do a three day event, great. Now you’re, you’re kind of taking up mental bandwidth for about 72 hours of time, and they’re getting to spend in their mind, they’re getting to spend multiple days with you, but really it’s might only be an hour or two per day. So really it’s not much different than a quick little two hour session or a three hour session. But if you could break that up into multiple days, there’s a, in my opinion, a pretty strong correlation on the, just, just the experience that the customer’s having.
AJV (17:02):
So That’s so interesting. So you find that it’s better to have shorter sessions over multiple days than having all together on like a half day full day. Yep.
KH (17:11):
Yeah. By it. I guess my, my rationale behind this, and once again, I like, I could be wrong on this, but my rationale is that the bite size information is easier to digest for sure, as compared to making someone absolutely just drink through the fire hose.
AJV (17:26):
Yeah. And then their brain is so full they can’t think. Yeah.
KH (17:29):
Because if, if their brain is twofold, they can’t think, and they feel like they’ve just drank from the fire hose for four hours straight, the last thing they want to do is now go buy a multiple thousand dollar offer that you’re pitching them because they feel like they just got so much information they need to take action on that before they invest in your offer, because that would almost be poor stewardship of the information they just got. So give them bite-sized, digestible information and still, like, I would say more so radically change the way they look at whatever the area of life is that you’re helping them, whether it’s business or marketing or health or finance, whatever, like help them out with some mindset shifts. Don’t teach too, too much of the how’s. And it’s not manipulative. It’s just like if you teach too much of the how’s, they will then feel like they have to go implement all of that.
KH (18:13):
Yeah. And we all know, going back to what I just said earlier, if they are so focused on the how, and they’re focused on implementing all of that now, they’re not going to actually buy. And if they don’t buy now, they’re, they’re not actually gonna get that transformation and the accountability mm-hmm
AJV (18:44):
Fascinating. And so next question I’d have is for the person listening you know, I think this is a really, you know, a big deal because first of all, you gotta have, you know, if you’re listening, you gotta have some money, right? To put into paid traffic. So is that if they don’t have any money. Yep. So this model still work, what’s just trying Absolutely. Trying to drive it organically. Have you seen that work?
KH (19:05):
Absolutely. Yeah. There’s, we have kind of four core ways that we’ll drive traffic to any event, whether you have a big budget or not. Obviously yes, ads are probably the most scalable. However, you can also leverage your email list or SMS list if you have those. If not, no big deal. I’m sure you have a few emails you could still send send invites to. But then you can also leverage your organic traffic, obviously go post on some social media. Go let your, your word of mouth network know. And then lastly, any JVs or affiliates mm-hmm
KH (19:52):
And so they, they’re financially incentivized for a different reason. We have seen a fun little hack I guess you could call it on the thank you page. There’s some, there’s some extra real estate you could use after someone buys a ticket on the thank you page. Instead of just saying, cool, here’s a receipt. See you there. Check your emails for more information. You could put a video on that thank you page, and you can now actually leverage that as a way to get some new traffic immediately. We’ve seen this done in two ways. Number one, we’ve seen it done where that that video is actually inviting them there. You could have a form directly below that to sign up to be an affiliate. Yeah. And you could get an affiliate code and immediately you could actually start making money. You could maybe give them a hundred percent of ticket sales a hundred percent of the proceeds of the ticket sales that they generate before the event starts.
KH (20:39):
They can potentially even have a little bit of an ROI before they even get to your event. That’s kind of fun. But the other way is just simply leveraging the power of relationships and reminding them of, Hey, look, congratulations on taking this investment, getting your ticket. I just wanna be really clear, we’ve all been to events where nothing changes after the event’s over. Mm-Hmm
AJV (21:40):
Yeah. I love that. I, I love that. Thank you Paige. ’cause That could work, not just for this event, but for anything, anything you have
KH (22:29):
Okay. just wanna make sure that we’re super on the same page. You’re talking about the in event experience, or are you talking about leading up to the event?
AJV (22:38):
My, like the in event experience? Yeah.
KH (22:40):
Okay. In event experience. I think your first question was what’s some of the biggest wins or like, things that they’re doing well,
AJV (22:46):
Yeah. But what should we be doing? Yes. Okay. And then what could people stay away from? Yeah. Like biggest mistakes.
KH (22:51):
Yeah. I think it’s gonna be, what I tell you to do is also the opposite of it is the mistakes.
AJV (23:35):
What’s this leading up to? When’s it coming? Yeah. Yep.
KH (23:38):
And then the second type of
AJV (23:38):
Person that’s me. I’m always like that at the events. I’m like, when’s it coming? What is it? Hurry up.
KH (23:43):
Yep. Yeah, I’m, I’m right there with you. And then the second type of person, they’re there genuinely thinking that their life is about to be entirely changed over the next two hours. Whether it’s one hour per day or whatever. And you can address both of these people in the same statement. You open up and say something along the lines of, Hey guys, I’m so, so excited that you’re all here today, guys, as promised, we are going to teach A, B, and C over the next few days. Whether it’s today or over the next two days or three days, whatever. It’s gonna be extremely powerful. There’s gonna be a lot of shifts in thought that you might have never had before. There’s gonna be a lot of just kind of knowledge bombs that are getting dropped. Like make sure you’re ready to take notes.
KH (24:20):
But I wanna make sure that we’re all on the same page with something. We’ve all been to events and we got some you know, value and it was exciting and then you left and nothing else happened. And so to make sure that I’m not just leaving you hanging there, just, just to call what it is, I’m going to give you an offer at the end of this event. Not gonna sit here and try to say, I’m going to like, it’s not gonna be a bait and switch. I’m actually gonna give legitimate value. You guys paid to be here, unlike a webinar you have paid to be here. Mm-Hmm
KH (24:55):
You’re gonna be off to the races. You do not need to work with us. Fantastic. I’m so excited you’re here. The others of you, you know that you’d much rather have someone holding your hand or some sort of support after this event is over. ’cause You’re genuinely serious about seeing a transformation in this area of your life. Guys, I’m not just gonna leave you hanging. I will absolutely give you an offer if you’d like to continue working with us. I can tell you more about that on the last day. No big deal though right now. I just wanna let you know there will be an offer. So hope that doesn’t offend you all. Feel free if you I’ll even give you a heads up before I give the offer on the last day, if you guys would like to get out of the room, if that would offend you, you guys can go, go ahead and leave.
KH (25:30):
I I don’t wanna pitch anyone that, that doesn’t wanna hear our offer. Yeah. Is that cool with everyone? And you could actually have everyone say, yep, sounds good. They’ve, everyone’s, everyone’s guard just totally dropped. So that’s one big thing that you could do. And then now they’re not, they’re not like surprised when you give them the pitch. I think a lot of people will try so hard to give this incredible amount of value on the front end during their event, and then they try to switch into the pitch and people are like, oh, wait, I wasn’t expecting that. Or like, there’s just kinda an awkward gap. Oh yeah. But if you open up like
AJV (26:02):
That, it, it went on. I love you to, oh no, you’re just selling me. Yeah, yeah. Like that.
KH (26:06):
Yeah. But if you open up like that on the, whenever it comes time to do the pitch, it’s like also, I, I learned this specific from Russell Brunson in one of his 10 x 10 x growth con presentations. He gave an ask and he said, is it cool if I take the next 15 minutes or so to tell you tell you guys about a special offer I created for you all today? And so he actually had kind of a, a question saying, would you be willing to let me give the offer mm-hmm
KH (26:48):
And you actually wait for everyone to say yes. Like, drop in the comments Yes. Or whatnot. Cool. Now they’re literally giving you permission Yeah. To give an offer and pitch them. So that’s gonna be helpful. And then lastly, I would say there’s, I mean, I could continue talking on this, but I don’t wanna ramble. Lastly, I would say keep engagement high. There’s a lot of people that will focus so hard on just rambling as I’m doing right now. And they
KH (27:34):
You could even share like have people share wins or a ahas after a certain session before you jump into the next session. And that way people are now jumping in and they’re actually reminding everyone else in the room of what they just learned. And so like when you do that, people are actually much more engaged. They’re not just gonna be jumping up on Facebook on a, on a different tab of their computer and start scrolling because they see that they are engaged. They are a part of this event. They’re not just watching someone teach.
AJV (28:00):
Yeah. That’s good. Now in terms of the offer, you said that you’ve seen as low as $2,000 mm-hmm
KH (28:13):
Yeah, probably like low end $5,000 higher end 15 k is probably the sweet spot. Reason being, there’s a few ways that you could pitch on the how to actually get the conversion. So you could pitch direct to checkout. My personal favorite. You could technically pitch to, you know jumping on a sales call. I don’t like that because once again, that now puts man hours at the bottleneck of how many people you could serve. And then there’s a third option that I’ve seen work pretty well which is you could pitch a deposit and say, Hey, this is exactly how much it’s, you don’t owe that right now. You actually owe X amount instead. I’ll give a direct example. The client that I mentioned, they’re, they they spend about 30 K right now per day. They have a $6,000 offer and their offer, they could go straight to checkout on this with no problem.
KH (29:04):
But theirs is very specific to a type of individual and some financial criteria. It’s, it’s kind of a a credit based offer and that you have to have a certain amount of credit in order to be able to leverage what they help you with in the backend. And so they, to make sure that they’re not taking on the wrong clients, they’ll say, Hey, look, our offer is six K to you today. Normally it’s 10. Which is true if you go book a sales call with their team, it’s normally 10 K and they say it’s, it’s six K this week. However, you don’t owe that today. It’s on day two. They say, you don’t owe that today. You’d actually only owe $500 and it’s a totally refundable deposit by putting $500 down today. We’re gonna do a bonus q and a day tomorrow, answer all of your questions on whether or not this is truly the right fit for you or not, because not everyone is perfect for this strategy.
KH (29:50):
And they’ll tell you, like on the pitch, like, who, here’s who it’s fear, here’s, here’s who it’s for, here’s who it’s not for mm-hmm
AJV (30:48):
Yeah. So now this is so fascinating and, and so helpful. What, what, what do you think makes a good offer? Like if you’ve been doing this for a while? I listen to it. I’m fascinated with offers. I sign up for all kinds of funnels. ’cause I just wanna see how they work. ’em, I love listening and some are really great and compelling and others are like, I can’t believe anyone is buying this right now. Mm-Hmm
KH (31:14):
Okay, so I, I wanna make sure, I would imagine you’re asking the general question, but just to make sure I’m not misunderstanding. Are you asking about backend high ticket offers or the front end offers?
AJV (31:25):
Yes. It’s for a high ticket offer. Yeah.
KH (31:26):
Great. Okay. In general, it’s gotta be like, I would say categorized under a few different key transformations. So
KH (32:23):
People buy the masterminds because they want the networking. There’s also dating coaches or Sure. People like that. So there’s that. And then also if you could sell, like, anything that’s investment related, that’s you know, it’s going to be an appreciating asset or there is a certain value to it that, yeah, I mean, I’m, it’s like a, a a, just a super high quality or super high service, like a high quality service or high quality product. If you think I’ll, I’ll, I’ll give the best example. The best offers incorporate multiple of these all at the same time. So Rolex, for example technically high ticket offer, you don’t really think of it though. It’s not really a coaching space, but Rolex is a perfect example of a high ticket offer. They’re charging 10 to, I dunno, 50,000, probably more than that for certain watches and what they’re selling.
KH (33:13):
Number one, it’s a high quality product. You know, that if you buy a Rolex, it’s not breaking a month later, it’s going to be around for decades and decades and decades. Also, high quality service, if you go on in, they’re gonna walk you back. Whenever you’re picking up your, your Rolex from your ad, they’re gonna walk you back into a private room. They’re gonna do a special unboxing thing, they’re gonna give you some drinks while you’re there. Like it’s a really nice prestigious service. Additionally, it’s an asset. You’re buying a watch maybe for 10 K that you can walk out if you really needed to. You could walk out and probably resell it to someone else for 15 to 20 K depending on which one that you’re buying. Additionally they’re selling ego
KH (33:59):
So like that’s a perfect example of a fantastic high ticket offer because they’re selling so many different benefits all at the same time. Correct. A bad offer would be something that is just hard to grasp. Like, I had a client not too long ago, incredible, incredible leadership consultant. He helps people with, you know, seeing leadership breakthroughs within their organization. And when I say that leadership breakthroughs, it’s like, why would I buy that? Like that’s, I don’t know, it sounds good, but I’m not ready to just go pay $20,000 for a leadership coach. I think I’m a fine leader. How do I know if I’m a bad leader? Like, you have to, you have to solve for specific pain points such as like, Hey, I’m going to help you get out of your day-to-day operations, or I’m going to help you hire a COO to, or Yeah, that would be even more specific.
KH (34:47):
I’m, I’ll help you hire a COO to get you out the day-to-day operations or a CEO if you get outta the day-to-day operations. Or I’m going to help you turn your team of task doers into business builders. Mm-Hmm. And they’re actually gonna start focusing on revenue driven activities. Or I’ll help you deploy systems that SOPs so that everyone can leave the office at 5:00 PM rather than working until nine or 10:00 PM every day. So like, you have to get way more specific there. So you can’t just say, I’m a leadership coach. You actually have to say, I help with X, Y, and z Kind of an esoteric high level conversation. But does that make sense? A few of those examples I’m giving.
AJV (35:23):
Yeah. I think that’s great. And I think for a lot of people, this comes back to do you know the benefits Yeah. Of your offer. Yeah. Right. This comes back to the fundamentals of what we do at Brand Builders Group with finding your brand DNA. It’s like, what problem do you solve? Mm-Hmm. Right? What’s the cause of that problem? What’s the unique way in which you solve it? That’s your message. Mm-Hmm
KH (36:08):
Yeah. It’s, it’s helpful. I, I love the way that you kind of reframed all of that, so it’s really helpful to understand Yeah. The pain points that you’re solving. ’cause I, I’m sure most of the people listening to this have already heard this before, but there’s only two core human motivators in life running away from pain or running towards pleasure. And so if you can understand your audiences, both of those, what specific pain points and symptoms are coming up in their life or in their business that they’re trying to solve for, and what specific desires are they trying to achieve? Mm-Hmm
KH (36:50):
You actually have to be able to point flaws or like kind of poke holes at Yeah. If you know them well enough, let’s say you’re a health coach and you help people, I dunno, lose the last 10 pounds of, of their little bit of belly fat, if you know that most of them are trying a certain solution and they’re not getting a result, you should also talk about that as well. So it’s like, Hey, I know you have the belly fat, you’re struggling to lose it. I know you want to have six packs, but here’s what you’ve keep. Like here’s what you continue trying to do, which is X, Y, and Z. Here’s why that’s not working. And now, and now you’re setting yourself up for why your specific solution is working well or why it can be the, the solve, like the, the true solution to their problem.
AJV (37:32):
Yeah. I think that’s so good. And that kind of comes back to one thing, and then I know that we’re almost outta time, and I have one really big question that I wanna hit before we do this, but before I get to that, it kind of comes back to a question that I meant to ask earlier. And I was just looking at my notes. It’s like, do you find that for these, you know, very low dollar paid events, that it is better to have a super niche specific targeted topic? Kind of like what we were just talking about? Yeah. Or do you think it’s better to Yeah. Okay.
KH (38:03):
Going broad is not the way to go get as specific as possible. And that’s where people actually make a, a lot of mistakes is that they’ll try to make their event or any of their marketing in general, in general, so broad to be all encompassing, but when you try to talk to everyone, you talk to no one. Yeah. So make it really specific to solve a very specific problem.
AJV (38:20):
Yes. Our favorites not our favorite. One of my, well, it’s my, maybe it’s my favorite, but one of our sayings at Brand Builders Group is so cheesy, but you’ll never forget it. It’s the more specific, the more terrific
AJV (39:04):
But if you’re one of those individuals who’s like, I don’t, I, it’s not that I don’t wanna build a team, I don’t have a team, right? I have to figure out something. I am the sales team. I think these are, these are the great options and why I wanted Zach to come on the show today. But he also has this awesome playbook called the paid events playbook. And you can go to paid events.com/playbook. And in that it’s gonna cover high level overview of how to plan for your event, how to fill your event, and how to convert attendees at your event. Zach, is there anything I’m missing with that?
KH (39:39):
Not really. I, I mean, you, you covered the high level overview for sure. Yeah. It’s, it’s more in depth than most people would think. And obviously if you have any further questions, you could either go jump on chat GBT and go find information, or if you want direct help, sure you can reach out. But that is a really good overview of yeah, how to plan for your event, make sure it’s actually gonna sell and attract the right people, how to host it, keep people engaged, and then how to make sure, you know, it’s, it’s not really helpful to have a hundred people there if no one buys in the end. So how to make sure you are getting those backend conversions.
AJV (40:08):
Yeah. So again, it’s go to paid events.com/playbook. Yep. Get it, read it, use it. All right. Now before our time runs out I have one last question that I think is universally applicable. And I mentioned this in the very beginning during my intro that we said we were gonna talk about how to test an offer Yes. Before you invest into or invest too much time, money, or resources in it to make sure that it’s an offer that will work. So Zach, how do we do that?
KH (40:40):
KH (41:24):
You could use it totally free. Everybody jump on there and you can make an account and it’s a, it’s an AI essentially presentation builder. And you can give a quick one sentence prompt and say, prompt and say, give me a presentation that, or like, give me a PDF that teaches X, Y, and Z. And so let’s say that you’re a health coach and you’re like, give me one that’s like, lose five pounds before your wedding. And then another one that’s like, how to gain five pounds of muscle in the next six months for bodybuilders or whatever. It’s all like, maybe you have a few different ideas, jump on there, create a PDF for all of them, and then we put together a quick Facebook lead form and Facebook lead forms. You can instantly have a download be given to the person, like without even having to set it up with your CRM.
KH (42:10):
And so we had a, we, we had the lead form for each PDF, we tested out a few different PDFs. And on the PDF, or I’m sorry, on the, on the lead form, we were asking name, number, email no, I’m sorry, not even number, just name an email company name. And then we wanted to know not just what was gonna get the lowest cost per lead, but what’s gonna be the highest quality lead. And so we had some custom qualifying questions in there, one of which I said, which of these describes you best? And that question changed depending on the lead magnet they were opting in for mm-hmm
KH (42:53):
And it was like, I’ve never hosted an event trying to create my first one. Second one was I’ve hosted them, struggled to convert. And third one is like, we crush events, we’re just looking at scale. And then I also asked, where’s your company revenue at? And I think that was it. And so I was asking the revenue question for all of our PDFs, and then I was asking a different kind of intention or sophistication level question for the other PDFs. And so what I did, I set it up for about a hundred dollars a day, and within 24 hours I had very crystal clear data.
KH (43:49):
So that way I was minimizing all variables except for the actual lead magnet. And then I was, I, I was like, well, I don’t care about the cost per lead. I wanna make sure these people are actually qualified
KH (44:25):
And they specifically had a, a, a unique experience with real estate investing. We’re like, okay, cool. That helps us out with the pain points and the desires. And anyway, you can do this. Literally go set it up for $300, go come up with two to three PDFs and I mean, you don’t have to spend much more time than two or three minutes on the PDF I beef mine up a little bit. But yeah, do that. Then go set up a lead form, ask some sort of questions for how qualified they are. I’d say like, a financial qualification is probably helpful. And secondly, what’s their sophistication level around what you’re helping them with? And now you’re gonna have way more intel of like, clearly our lowest cost per lead is coming from this type of offer, and here’s the majority of the leads. Here’s their core desire, core pain point, and we actually know they’re qualified. Great. Let’s actually start putting some bandwidth into creating a more robust offer around that.
AJV (45:15):
That’s awesome. Love that Gamma app.
KH (45:19):
Yes.
AJV (45:19):
Love it with Facebook forms, what AI saves the day.
KH (45:24):
It really does.
AJV (45:25):
Right. love it. So, so good. Zach, if people just wanna connect with you or follow you on social media, where should they find you?
KH (45:33):
Yeah Instagram’s good. Just my first and last name, Zach Hesterberg or YouTube. We’re starting to treat quite a bit more seriously. And YouTube a lot of it’s going to be biblical based content talking about events and selling high ticket. So if you want long form, go to YouTube. Short form, go to Instagram
AJV (45:49):
And we’ll put both of those handles in the show notes. Zach. So good. So many good insights. And I think also just a, a good reminder of like, Hey, just because everyone around you is doing it this way, doesn’t mean there can’t be another way. And I think this is a good reminder for all of us who’s like, you don’t have a sales team. You are the sales team, but there’s other ways to still reach the masses and help scale your business without having to scale your team. So this was such a worthwhile conversation. And everyone who’s listening, don’t forget to stick around for my recap episode, which will be coming up next. And Zach, thank you for being here, everyone else. We’ll see you next time on the influential personal brand.
Ep 571: Who to Hire to Build an 8-Figure Business | Jen Kem Episode Recap
RV (00:06):
Welcome to the Influential Personal Brand podcast. This is the place where we help mission-driven messengers, just like you learn how to build and monetize your personal brand. My name is Rory Vaden and I’m the co-founder of Brand Builders Group, a hall of fame speaker, and New York Times bestselling author. And this show is to help experts learn how to become more wealthy and well known. I know you’re gonna love it. Thanks for being here. Let’s get started. There’s an African proverb that says, if you wanna go fast, go alone. But if you want to go far, go with a team. And if you are an entrepreneur or you’re a small business owner and you’re trying to grow your business, you are definitely going to need a team. And in this video I’m gonna share with you exactly who should you hire first. As one of the most common questions that we hear from people is they say, I don’t know when to hire and who to hire first.
RV (01:08):
And what I’m gonna share with you may surprise you because I’m gonna say that the first people you should hire are gonna be people that support you in your personal life more than your professional life. So you’re gonna need people to work inside of your company too, but you’re likely gonna need to start at home first. Now here’s the high level concept. A high level concept is that you need to hire people who will take things off of your plate. So if you’ve ever felt like I’m doing so many jobs, or I’m doing four people’s full-time jobs, you probably are. That is what it means to be an entrepreneur, especially a solopreneur. And so, as fast as possible, you need to get those jobs off of your plate. But the simplest and most direct positions to hire for are the ones that I think we hear the least about, and that is hiring people in your personal life.
RV (02:02):
So who would you hire in your personal life? The very first hire that I would make is a house cleaner. These are easy to find. There’s a lot of people who offer this service. If you are still cleaning your house, then that means that’s time that you’re spending there instead of spending it on your business. And that’s the big idea here, is anything that’s taking your time, we have to get off of your plate. We have to outsource it, we have to delegate it to somebody else. So I’m looking for the most tangible and tactical and practical things to get off my plate first. So I would start with the house cleaner. It’s also something that you don’t have to be a millionaire to hire a house cleaner. And you can use platforms like care.com, which is one of our favorites. We use care.com to hire, uh, house cleaners, pet care, elderly care, and childcare.
RV (02:51):
Um, you can even get people to cook for you, right? So you go, what, how much time am I spending on mowing the yard? I need to get someone to do the landscaping. How much time am I spending doing handy work around the house? You can, you can use, uh, Thumbtack or, you know, there used to be tackle. I don’t think they’re around anymore. But there’s, there’s all sorts of, uh, platforms and apps you can use to hire these people locally. Not only do you free up your time, you get them a job and you’re providing income opportunities for the people around you. So anything that is taking time around the house, I would start with first. ’cause that’s gonna give you your peace of mind back. And many times those are some of the most tactical universal skills that are the easiest to hire for next inside of your business.
RV (03:38):
The very first thing that I would, the very first position that I would hire is an assistant. You need an assistant to do basic things for you. Like, um, schedule flights, you know, these are people who can do expense reports, they can filter your email, they can schedule appointments on your calendar and deal with the back and forth with that. They can take the, all the things that come into your inbox that don’t really need your attention, and they can start processing those. In my case, my assistants have access to my inbox. I’ve always done that. And you go, well, what about privacy? And I go, well, if it’s anything that’s super private, then, you know, set up a private email inbox for that or a text message. But, uh, your business email
RV (04:34):
Like, that’s an important part of the job, but it’s, it’s not rocket science to solve that problem. But you need an assistant, you need someone to filter out spam and, and just everything. And also a personal assistant. So this could be the same person, or it might be someone else, someone to do your grocery shopping for you, someone to run to the dry cleaner, someone to do go buy Christmas presents, somebody to wrap the presents, somebody to meet, meet the maintenance man, take the car to get an oil change. All of these things that suck up your time, that is time that you could be spending either on your business or with your family or doing hobbies. Those are the easiest things to hire. After you get your assistant, then typically the next person that you hire in a, in inside of your business, I think is someone who can do marketing for you.
RV (05:22):
So marketing is another tactical skillset that you, that takes time and it’s things that people can learn, right? It’s a very straight down the, the path. There’s things you need to learn how to do. Now as you get lar bigger and your brand grows, or your company grows, you may need multiple marketing people. Specifically, there’s three skill sets you need. You need someone who can write something, copywriter. You need someone who can graphically design something, and then you need a video editor, somebody who can edit videos. Those are really, really common roles. Um, but in the beginning, you might just have a marketing assistant if you’re posting on social media or they’re helping make updates to your web pages, or they might even just be a project manager who’s managing your vendors. When you’re first starting out in your business, chances are you can’t afford a bunch of a bunch of employees.
RV (06:11):
So what you do is you hire contractors, you hire vendors, but you try to have one person who is on your team who can project manage multiple vendors until you can scale up and afford to bring people on your team, which is expensive. And then they want raises, and you want to give ’em raises and they need benefits and like they have to provide for their families. But you, you grow together, but you don’t have to wait to be able to afford employees to start delegating and hiring things off of your, your plate. You can do that right away with all of these apps. You can do it with, uh, hiring contractors, but you kind of do need somebody at home. It’ll start as an assistant. Then maybe there is an, a marketing assistant. Um, another early role that you’re gonna hire in your company is gonna be an accountant, a bookkeeper, right?
RV (06:57):
You’re gonna need someone to deal with quick QuickBooks or whatever software tool you’re using to keep track of your expenses. A lot of times you can, you can find, uh, retired accountants to do that. You can find people who know QuickBooks. You can find people with, you know, basic level education, maybe not even a college diploma, but who have experience in accounts payable and accounts receivable. It’s a great side job. And you’ll notice that all of the jobs, all of the roles that you’re hiring early on are tactical, not strategic. Strategic roles tend to be more expensive. They tend to require more experience and they’re more artistic. The easier roles to hire are the ones where it’s like, it’s a task and here’s a task and here’s an instruction manual for how to do it. And you can just like put anyone in that, in that seat.
RV (07:46):
As you grow, then you need to bring on more strategic people because there’s complexity that will be added to your organization, um, after you hire a bookkeeper and you get that in place, the next thing that I would be looking to hire is what we would call delivery. Somebody who can actually do client work for you so that you don’t have to do the work, right? In any type of business, even if I’m a, you know, if I’m a high school kid, starting a a, a, a mowing, a yard mowing business, there is delivering the service and then there is selling the service. And you have to separate those two tasks. You’ll make more money if you’re selling the service than if you’re delivering the service, right? So you go, I can make more money selling people $10, a $10 service to cut their yards, and then I can find people to mow the yard for $5 and then I’m gonna keep the five.
RV (08:40):
That’s how you really become an entrepreneur, and that’s how it starts. So in order for you to be able to sell more, you gotta open up your capacity, which means you need more people who can deliver. So you gotta get other people trained to do a good job. And that becomes a really hard part. The, the more people driven your business is, right. And so services like ours at Brand Builders Group, we do personal brand strategy. So the people that we hire are personal brand strategists. They have to learn our curriculum, our methodology, our philosophy. They have to hold our values and we spend a a lot of time training them. And, and we also look for people who come in with some experience so that they can work with clients at a lower rate of pay than somebody would have to work with me or my wife and our CEO my business partner aj.
RV (09:26):
Um, so you need to get delivery off of your plate, and that is where the business starts to become scalable because you can sell more and more and more as long as you can deliver that service and you have other people who can deliver it after that. The next thing that we typically start to outsource is sales. Because when you start the business, you are usually the top sales person, but sales is a tactical skillset and it is something that can be delegated and it can be farmed out. And this is something that we did in our past life, was train salespeople. We have inside of brand builders group curriculums for both how to sell and for how to recruit, train, hire, manage, and motivate salespeople. Um, the other thing that’s great about hiring salespeople, and sometimes salespeople you actually can hire earlier, is salespeople often can and want to be paid on commission.
RV (10:18):
If they’re good, they’d rather be paid for their results and they’d rather be paid a percentage of the business they bring in than a flat stable, um, stream of pay, like in a salary or an hourly rate. Well, when you’re starting a company, salespeople can really be great because you don’t have a lot of consistent revenue. You can’t take the risk of hiring employees. But if you find a salesperson who’s willing to work on commission, you can hire as many straight commission salespeople as you can keep up with because it’s on them to go out and sell and you wanna support them and help them. But commission-based salespeople can be one of the very first, uh, positions that you hire in the company. After that, it starts to get more strategic. Uh, in brand Builders group, we have a curriculum called Eight Figure Entrepreneur, and we talk about how do you grow your business from a six figure business to seven figures, multi seven figures, and ultimately eight figures.
RV (11:13):
That is something that my wife and I have done six times. Six times. We have started multi seven figure businesses and twice we have built eight figure companies completely from scratch, from zero, uh, with, you know, no, no venture backed money. We don’t use bank debt. We’ve built it from revenue, from customers in graduating the teams up. Now, when you get to that level, we talk about the eight departments of every business. Every single company, whether a small solopreneur or a Fortune 100 company has eight major functions. Marketing, sales, delivery, customer service, HR, operations, and IT administration and finance it. Every business has those functions. The reason you’re overwhelmed as an entrepreneur, as a solopreneur is ’cause you have to do all eight of those things. Marketing has to generate the lead, sales has to sell, the lead delivery has to fulfill on that, uh, promise and deliver to the customer.
RV (12:17):
Customer service has to deal with any customer service questions or cancellations. HR has to hire all of the people to do of those things, operations. And it has to create the tools and the systems to support all of those people doing those roles. Administration deals with the, the strategic, uh, parts of the business as well as the legal parts, um, and, you know, taxes and legal structure and filings and all that. And then, uh, finance deals with counting the money of all of those things. Those eight functions exist in every business. And as you start to scale, you’ll start with these early positions, and then over time, you’re gonna need someone to head up each of those departments. And then from there, the sky is the limit.
Ep 570: Building the Team to Launch Your Brand with Jen Kem
0:00
One of my favorite interviews we’ve ever had on this podcast is from a woman named Jen Kem, who we’re going to hear from again today.
0:09
0 minutes 9 seconds
Now, when she came on before, she was kind and generous enough to share a lot of secrets about how to monetize events and structure your events in a way to sell high dollar offers.
0:21
0 minutes 21 seconds
And it blew my mind.
0:22
0 minutes 22 seconds
Like literally things that are so significant and monumental.
0:27
0 minutes 27 seconds
So I was like, we have to have her back.
0:28
0 minutes 28 seconds
And part of what we’re having her back for is she has a new book that is coming out.
0:33
0 minutes 33 seconds
And so let me give you the full the full rundown on Jen.
0:36
0 minutes 36 seconds
So she has been named as a top brand strategist by Forbes and she specializes in sort of like just launching innovative ideas with high performing teams.
0:46
0 minutes 46 seconds
And she’s done that for big companies.
0:47
0 minutes 47 seconds
She’s done that for personal brands, but she has what she calls the Unicorn innovation model, and that’s been used by iconic brands like Oprah Winfrey Network, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Oracle, and a number of New York Times best selling authors and keynote speakers and other thought leaders.
1:04
1 minute 4 seconds
So she knows our space really well.
34:15
34 minutes 15 seconds
I love it.
34:16
34 minutes 16 seconds
So I got one last question for you before I ask you that.
34:21
34 minutes 21 seconds
Just where do people go if they want to learn about the book and keep up with you and, and you know, for more info on helping build their own Unicorn team?
34:31
34 minutes 31 seconds
Yeah.
34:31
34 minutes 31 seconds
So number one, I mean, obviously the easiest thing to do is go to Amazon.
34:35
34 minutes 35 seconds
Most of us like go there and the books available in all the booksellers online.
34:39
34 minutes 39 seconds
And if they’re not, if it’s not in your local bookstore, ask them to order it for you.
34:44
34 minutes 44 seconds
Like it.
34:44
34 minutes 44 seconds
It’s available wherever books are sold, Amazon being the easiest place to find it currently.
34:50
34 minutes 50 seconds
And then if you want to know more, you can go to unicornteambook.com.
34:53
34 minutes 53 seconds
It gives you a lot of like other things that I didn’t get to share here that tell you what the book and tells you also all the places you can get it.
35:01
35 minutes 1 second
And then my favorite places to hang out, if you will, to kind of chat and and talk anything Unicorn is LinkedIn and YouTube specifically, but on Instagram is definitely me in the DM.
35:15
35 minutes 15 seconds
So if you like, you know, find me over there and you want to ask a question, it’s actually me responding over there.
35:21
35 minutes 21 seconds
I love it.
35:22
35 minutes 22 seconds
I love it.
35:22
35 minutes 22 seconds
So my last question for you, Jen, is just to go like, if you think about personal brands applying this sort of leadership energy to their futures, what, you know, what’s the biggest mistake you see them make that you would encourage them not to do in this particular area around finding the right people, finding the right idea, activating, you know, their energy of all the people, Like what do you think is kind of the biggest mistake that you would just say like just don’t, just don’t do this.
35:55
35 minutes 55 seconds
I’d say don’t abandoned your identity in the relationship to team, especially as people are telling you to scale and grow, which you you probably want to do.
36:07
36 minutes 7 seconds
But scaling and growing, if you abandoned yourself in that, it’s going to be difficult for you to have the energy to go to the next level because as I like to say, you’re going to hit the next level.
36:19
36 minutes 19 seconds
You’re going to meet a new devil and when you meet that new devil, you need to know what to deal with.
36:23
36 minutes 23 seconds
You need to know how to face that devil, and it’s really about you feeling that energetic strength to push through the right heart thing for the next right thing.
36:31
36 minutes 31 seconds
And so don’t abandoned yourself.
36:34
36 minutes 34 seconds
A team includes you.
36:37
36 minutes 37 seconds
That’s the bottom line, and you are the core and the nucleus of the team as the personal brown and as the founder of the ideas that you’re bringing into the world.
36:46
36 minutes 46 seconds
I love that.
36:46
36 minutes 46 seconds
I think I’ll that’s what will I, one of the things that will stick with me from this is just doing the things that give me energy and good permission to keep those things and embrace those things and not think, oh, as we grow, I I have to do these other types of things.
37:04
37 minutes 4 seconds
So that’s really, really powerful.
37:05
37 minutes 5 seconds
Well, you know, I’m a huge fan of you.
37:08
37 minutes 8 seconds
I’ve learned so much from you.
37:09
37 minutes 9 seconds
I’m so excited about this, the book, all the things that you’re up to.
37:13
37 minutes 13 seconds
And you know, when we get around to like doing our events and bigger events, it’s like you will be on that Unicorn team.
37:21
37 minutes 21 seconds
It’s like I got to call Jen because I know she she just knows how to activate, you know, an event.
37:27
37 minutes 27 seconds
So we wish you the best.
37:29
37 minutes 29 seconds
Thank you for letting us be a part of the journey.
37:31
37 minutes 31 seconds
Thanks for the time today and keep crushing it, friend.
37:35
37 minutes 35 seconds
Thanks, Rory.
37:36
37 minutes 36 seconds
I’m so grateful for you.
37:37
37 minutes 37 seconds
Thanks for being a Unicorn in my life too.
Ep 569: Redefining Work for the Long Term | Caleb Guilliams Episode Recap
AJV (00:01):
Are you working just to retire? Now, the reason I ask is I think it’s important to share the actual definition of retirement. The actual definition of retirement is to be taken out of service. So knowing that that retirement means to be taken out of service. Let me ask that first question again. Are you working just to retire? Now, if I had asked you that the first time, you would say, yes, I totally plan on retiring. I think most people in the United States plan on retirement at some point. But do any of us plan to be taken out of service? Are we saving all of our money so that we can just no longer be useful one day? I don’t, I don’t think that we would say yes if we were asked in that way. When people go, Hey, are you saving for retirement? What if we were actually asking people, are you saving so that you can no longer be of service to your community,
AJV (01:09):
I don’t think most of us would say yes to that. I don’t think most of us are planning and saving to no longer be of service at age, whatever. And so I thought it would be important to talk about where did this concept of retirement come in? And there’s no judgment being passed here. If you’re retired or you’re about to retire, or you do wanna retire one day, this is not a judgment call. This is a redefining what work means and redefining retirement. So it’s not this thing that we work for and work towards one day to be taken out of service, but it’s, it’s a rea, it’s a reallocation of our knowledge, our skills, and our time. But I think some of the, the hardest walks that I have walked through with friends and family are the people who have lost themselves, lost their identity, lost their purpose, lost their passion lost their excitement and life after they retired, or post-business sale.
AJV (02:15):
Now, I think that that is a dangerous thing that I’m not I’m not promoting that your identity should be tied to your work. I’m most certainly not saying that your identity is not what you do, but I think there’s another component of it that we as human beings, were created to create. We were created to work. Now we were not necessarily created to toil. And in my beliefs as a Christian, that happened after the fall, right? That happened when sin entered the world that we would toil for the rest of the days of our life in this current earth. I don’t believe that’s how it was meant to be. I don’t believe that’s how it will be one day. I do, however, recognize that is how it is today, but that’s not how it was meant to be. We were built to create and cultivate and to rule.
AJV (03:07):
That is, that is what our job is. We were created to be of service to one another and to the planet, right? So this concept of retirement has always been a little foreign to me. I, I, I think I was very fortunate. I, I consider myself very privileged to have been raised by several generations of entrepreneurs. My grandfather worked into his eighties and as soon as he did retire in his eighties, it was a sharp decline in his health. And I, I think it very much had to do with he lost touch with service and serving his company and his team, and his employees and his family. My dad is now in his mid seventies, and I, I hope that he never retires fully. His workload definitely looks different today than it did 20 years ago. He might disagree with that, but I think it’s really important that he has purpose and enjoyment in his work.
AJV (04:03):
And that is the purpose of this email is to, to enjoy what you do so that it doesn’t always feel like work, is that you’re living into what you were created to be and to do and to provide for this world. And I just, I come from an upbringing where I got to see my family of business owners actually contribute to the community and to our team members and to each other, and doing it in a way that was life giving, not life taking. I know not all jobs can be life giving all the time, but I do also believe that that’s a decided choice that we make. We get to make the choice to be excellent at what we’re doing no matter what that job is. And I have had jobs and the hospitality and restaurant industry to you know, pay commission, only pay cold calling, selling tickets, traveling full time to leadership roles and sales management roles, and you know, being paid to speak.
AJV (05:04):
There’s a large variety of roles that I’ve had over the course of time. And it doesn’t matter what your role is. It’s a decision that we all get to make, to go regardless of what I’m doing. I choose to be the best at what I’m doing right now. It’s a decided decision of excellence, of being good at what it is for the sake of giving it your best. Because we can learn something and grow in every season and in every role that we have in our life. Now, I also wanna get back to what I started with is this concept of retirement and where did it come from and how has it snuck into our culture that gives people an out to no longer create and cultivate in the way that we were actually created to do. And so I thought this would be a really interesting history lesson super quickly.
AJV (05:58):
But in the pre-industrial area pre-industrial era, most Americans worked as long as they were physically able. There was no formal retirement. A lot of that was physical labor, right? And so maybe those years were shorter
AJV (06:50):
Depression, and it established a government funded pension to provide social security for older Americans, right? Much of that due to the, you know, time of life that we were in with a great depression and needing more ways to support those in their older age. Not a bad thing. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, that’s a good thing. Then we get into the 1950s and sixties and company pensions became way more common. Not as common today, but very then, but this is where the whole idea of retirement and no longer having full-time, working hours began to really kick in. And retirement was really seen at age 65, right? Then we get into the 1970s and the 1980s that is when 401k started to come on the scene. That wasn’t until the eighties, like that’s when I was born. Like this is not something that has been around for, for a very long time.
AJV (07:47):
And I think this is really important because if you just high level, go back, it was not until the fifties and the sixties that retirement was even a thing, right? That’s not even a full generation ago, right? That’s my dad’s age. My dad was born in 1951, so at the time of him being born, IE that’s why my grandfather worked until he was 80. Retirement wasn’t a thing, right? You worked until you were no longer physically able. And one of the things that has been coming up a lot in our family, and we have aging parents and friends and who have aging parents, and a lot of talk about retirement. And here’s the thing that I just wanted to share with you guys in a long about way to be honest, is find something that you can do for the rest of your life.
AJV (08:37):
Find a way to be in service to a group of people for the rest of your life. And retiring from a, for a formal nine to five is one thing, but retiring in general so that you can golf and play video games that, that, that’s not being of service. That’s, that’s not the goal of retirement. The goal is not to work your whole life and not give back. The goal is to work until you can find more time to give back to the younger people, and to develop the next generation, and to create new leaders and to use your skills and experience to educate and inform and help develop an entirely new generation of people who will come after you. I find it odd that our most experienced workers, leaders, employees, the ones who are retiring, are the people we have the most to learn from.
AJV (09:27):
They’ve seen it all. They’ve been around the block. They’ve been through different economies and market conditions and recessions and depressions and life and death and marriage and babies. And they, they have so much to give. These are not the people we want leaving our workforce. Y’all. these are wildly experienced and important people in our job force. This is an very important part of our workforce. Now, the working hours look different. Can they look different? Should they work different? Sure. Those are all things that are good and fine. I’m just encouraging you to not work for retirement, but find a work that you can do for the rest of your life so that you are never taken outta service.
Ep 568: Building Better Wealth with Caleb Guilliams
AJV (00:00):
AJV (00:56):
So I invited my friend Caleb, onto the show to talk about money today because I think he’s got a really unique perspective, a young, fresh perspective on something that I would say most of us are looking for the gray hairs in the industry to learn about financial peace and financial wisdom. And Caleb is not that in fact, let me give you a little bit of his background. Caleb Williams is the founder of Better Wealth, and not only is he the founder of that he founded it at 21, the Age of 21, right? So, again, when I say Young, fresh Perspective, he’s not 21 today, but he started it at a really young age, and I think that’s a really important component of the conversation of how do we look at it in a new and fresh way, which is what you’re gonna get today. He’s also the author of the bestselling Bug, the And Asset. He hosts the Better Wealth Podcast and The Better Wealth YouTube channel. He also speaks to thousands around the world on how they can be more efficient with money and have more intentionality in doing it. So, Caleb, welcome to the show.
CG (02:07):
Hey, it is a pleasure to be on here, and I’m just so grateful to spend these next couple minutes with you and your audience, and we’re gonna have a lot of fun today.
AJV (02:15):
It’s gonna be great. And I have to tell you too, it’s like, as you, you know, we’re really big on titles at Brand Builders Group and Better Wealth is such a great title, right? One of the things we talk about all the time is, does it pass the I Want test and back to this importance of this universally applicable episode of, I think we all want better wealth, not always more wealth, but better wealth. And that’s it. The huge, honestly, it was one of the key foundations of why I wanted you to come on the show today is, you know, I think, I think sometimes we think about wealth and money as how do I get more of it? Yeah. And I’d love to kind of reframe some of that today for our audience, audience. But before we do that, I do wanna help everyone get to know you just a little bit. And as I mentioned you got into the financial world at a really young age, then you founded Better Wealth at 21. Yep. How, how, how did you do that?
CG (03:13):
I’ll, I’ll, I’ll make this quick, I’ll make this quick, but I, I think context is key. So I’m the oldest of six kids, grew up in central Wisconsin. My dad’s a PhD molecular biologist. My mom was a nurse. Talk about opposites of attract. My dad has no friends, very smart. My mom loves people. I, and she’s also smart, but in her own way. And I grew up homeschooled and, and, you know, grew up dyslexic and like, wasn’t sure what I was gonna do, but I was always fascinated around business and money. I got a job at a, at a chicken farm when I’m 15 years old, I apologize to all the vegans. So if you’re a vegan and you get offended, get off right now. But I, I literally gutted chickens. Oh my. And I made a dollar for every chicken that I processed.
CG (03:56):
And 15-year-old Caleb was given two books, good To Great by Jim Collins and The Richest Man in Babylon. Hmm. And those two books, especially being someone that reading was really tough. I forced myself to be a student of those concepts. One of the books is about level, level five leadership and like this idea of like, rallying people. And if you get the right people on the bus, you’ll be able to go to new heights. And at 15 years old, I’m like, I love this. And then the Richest Man in Babylon is like a parables of how anyone can be wealthy. And just going back to the basics of you gotta pay yourself first and all that good stuff. And so I remember, you know, being 15 years old and being like, I wanna do something in the money space, which led me to get a job at a bank when I was 17 years old.
CG (04:37):
Now, one thing you gotta know about me is I look young today, but if you’re not watching on YouTube, like I have kind of what you could maybe call a beard. But you know, when I was 17 years old, I’m the oldest of six kids. My younger sister was taller than me and looked way older than me. And, and again, like I looked like I was 12 or 13. So working at, at a bank was, had its own challenges to begin with. But what I did and what I committed to, and maybe as the first writer downer, is like I wanted to defer on money and learn as much as possible. And working at a community bank I became an HR nightmare because I would sit in on meetings, they gave the 17-year-old the, the ability to open the bank and close the bank.
CG (05:15):
‘Cause I would, after clocking out, I would just stick around and work and go to networking events. I would talk to the CEO of the bank about how we could be more profitable. And so I was definitely, I took that opportunity and ran with it and learned a ton about money. At the age of 18, I got to work in our investment department. And then at 19 years old, the person I was running our inve investment department at Community First Bank took, took another job. At 19 years old, I became the youngest person to step into the corner office and to many people’s horror
CG (05:58):
And people, for better or worse, saw me grow up at this bank. And they knew that maybe I wasn’t the smartest kid, but I would work my butt off to serve them. And so there’s a lot more to unpack. Stephen Covey, I’ve been indirectly impacted by him so much, made a mission statement, which simply read to help people see and reach their highest potential. I realize that money is not the number one reason why people get divorced. It’s up there though. But it is, it is the thing that if you don’t master, if you don’t understand it is, it’s a tool. And most people are using the tool not properly, and they’re living to a fraction of what their God-given potential is. And I think that’s a shame. And so it was like, I wanna do everything that I can to help people with that.
CG (06:39):
And so through that journey, learned from a ton of people. A big blessing in disguise was I didn’t have a direct mentor. So I didn’t learn like, maybe like an average way to think about money. I really got to stretch and be stretched. And through that process, I realized that I’m gonna die someday.
CG (07:22):
And people thought I was crazy. It’s like, you look like you’re 15 years old who’s gonna meet with you on the internet. And ignorance is bliss. And now we are, we’re, we have clients in all 50 states, and we have coaches in every time zone. We, we do insurance, we do invest, we have an investment arm, we do tax planning, and we have a fractional family office arm that helps six and seven figure entrepreneurs be more efficient with their money. And that’s the story in a nutshell. And there’s a lot of lessons that we’ve learned. We can talk about anything that you want, but there’s a lot of lessons. I currently now live in Nashville, Tennessee, and so grateful to be neighbors with you.
AJV (07:55):
You know, I love that story for so many different reasons, but what I love it most is it just feels like you found your calling in life at a really exceptionally young age, which gives you such an amazing opportunity to make a profound impact on the space that you’ve decided to be in. That’s, that, that’s like such a, that’s such a gift, right? Yeah. And I also love that you’ve done some really hard sucky jobs. Like, I don’t know, gutting chickens for a dollar chicken might be the worst job of all time. It might, it might be. I
CG (08:34):
Loved it. That’s the weird thing. I loved it. And I would go back to it tomorrow if I had to because it, I have so many memories, and actually some of the ways I think about money are going back to those jobs of like trying to be efficient. Yeah. And realizing that some of those universal principles are, are how we use money. But I, I’m with you. I’m, I’m, I’m not complaining about doing what I’m doing now,
AJV (08:57):
But, but I love, I, I think, and genuinely speaking, I’m a mom of two little boys who are five and seven, and we’re constantly talking about like, how do we ensure that our kids know the value of hard work? And, and I think it’s just so important. So I love that you kind of have that background and history. And then also just like the importance of reading and books and learning and all of the things. There’s so many things I love about your story, but one of the things that you said in there, and this is where I wanna start our conversation today, is you said money is a tool and most people just aren’t using a properly. So I would love to start there, like, what do you mean by money as a tool and how are people using it improperly?
CG (09:42):
Yep. We’re gonna, we’re gonna start with two words. I’m a big framework person and it’s wealth efficiency. And so when I, when I get the opportunity to speak to people, a lot of, a lot of times, you know, having a company called Better Wealth, a lot of people have mental thoughts on what wealth is. Usually when I say wealth you think of net worth being rich, having money in the bank account. And one of the, one of the different reframes that I try to encourage is asking the audience, how do you define wealth? Because if you, if your definition of wealth is foggy or not clear, then how in the world are we supposed to accomplish something that we’re not really clear on? And so the, the story that I used and I ask is, would you trade places with Warren Buffet? Warren Buffet at the time of this recording is worth over a hundred billion dollars.
CG (10:27):
And he’s one of the world’s wealthiest on paper, if we’re gonna use that definition. Men. And yet majority of the people watching and listening to this podcast, do you really think about it, wouldn’t even think about trading places with Warren Buffett because he’s also over 90 years old and not gonna live that much longer. And so there are things in our life that we value potentially more than money in a bank account. And so on a macro level, we get it on a micro level, if you actually believe that you’re disrespecting or, or not being true to that definition of wealth. And so our definition of wealth at Better Wealth is intentional living. You, you cannot be wealthy if you’re not intentional about your life. And the way that I think of Intentional Living is a couple categories. It’s your God-given skill sets. It’s how you use your time, it’s your relationships and how you use your resources.
CG (11:17):
There’s obviously more to that, but at the end of the day, those are like the four categories that we look at. And we, and we really try to identify like, what does an intentional life look like? And, and that’s where we start. And so you can’t be wealthy if you don’t live intentionally. The beautiful thing is it, an intentional living looks different for me than it looks like for you, but my encouragement to you is, is get really clear about like what what brings you a lot of joy in what you get to do. Like, you’re totally right. I have found something that I love. I don’t love all the aspects of my job, but I love the mission that we’re on and that I, I wake up excited and I want that for everybody. And so that, and then the, the, the relationships that you have and how you use your resources and how you use your time, super key.
CG (12:01):
So wealth is really key and, and we wanna make sure that we wanna lean into that intentional life. The second word is efficiency. It’s interesting because efficiency sometimes gets a bad rap. Even your husband who has a, a TED talk, that with five million views uses efficiency. And a lot of times people, sometimes the efficient thing is not what you should do because we are maybe not, not figuring out the right end goal. But the way that I define efficiency is, is something like this. It’s getting to your desired result by removing all the friction. And so to be efficient, you need to get really clear about that desired result. I would agree that if without the desired result, just removing friction to remove friction is, is not gonna help anyone. And that’s what a lot of people look at when it comes to money.
CG (12:45):
You should do this, you should do that. But it’s like, why? And so when we are trying to be efficient, we have to get clear about what we’re going or what our desired result is, and then removing any of the friction that’s getting in the way of that. And so what is the desired result? It’s that tangible, intentional life. And so the example is, I, I live in Nashville, but if I wanna get to California, I’m really clear about where I want to go. I could walk there and it would take me like a long time
CG (13:38):
And let’s eliminate that because the intentional life becomes the standard, becomes the metric that I reverse engineer everything by. And I think that is the first thing that I wanna encourage every, everyone to, to have the freedom to do is don’t let a financial advisor, don’t let me, don’t let someone on TV tell you the most important thing. Get really clear about what that looks like for you. Retirement is not biblical. It’s actually, it’s the definition of retirement is to be taken out of service. I don’t know why retirement’s even a goal for any, I don’t think any of your audience wants to be inspired to like retire someday. And so let’s get that out of our vocabulary. Let’s figure out what we want, like what that God-given calling is for our life. And then let, let’s that be the thing that we’re reverse engineer everything else by, and we can get into some of the other frameworks, but like that is a key deal, is like intentional living and then removing friction so that we can live intentional and making sure that that intentional standard is a thing that trumps cash flow, net worth good debt versus bad debt.
CG (14:36):
All of those are many frameworks, but should elevate your ability to live your one life. Well,
AJV (14:42):
Okay, well first of all, that is the most impactful
AJV (15:31):
So I love that. I love that. I also loved your side comment on retirement. I don’t know if I talk a lot about this on the show, but I know I talk a lot about it in my Instagram stories. But we don’t believe in retirement in our house. Like people say all the time, like, Hey, what’s, what’s the end goal with Brand Builders Group? And I’m like, I don’t know. We don’t have one. Like we don’t, we there is, there’s not some event that we’re working towards. We’re not planning on selling it or we don’t wanna retire. And it’s like until, until the Lord takes me home or my business is my ministry.
CG (16:05):
That’s right.
AJV (16:06):
And I think I, so I love just that, that whole concept of like, okay, first of all, retirement is not the end goal. Yeah. So let’s, let’s reframe that and now let’s start from there. So I love that. So I love that. So I’m curious to hear from you then it’s like it with this concept of wealth efficiency, right? Defining wealth, defining efficiency what is it that you see that is causing friction? Like what are the things that are causing people to not use money properly? Or where is the friction in this wealth concept?
CG (16:41):
Love it. And I’m gonna go through the next framework, which is the, the wealth framework. And stop me at any time. ’cause As you can see, I get really excited about this, but, okay, so now if we understand wealth efficiency, okay, now, now let’s get into like what that actually means. I, I have a problem with people that just stay in the clouds and don’t actually get tactical. And so this is, this is the way from a dyslexic mind, how you can understand this. And hopefully you can draw a picture in your mind as I speak. And so when I am speaking with someone on a whiteboard, I’m drawing a, a, an individual of a stick, a stick figure. And this stick figure represents you. And so we’ve already identified that it’s clear that you should get clear about what you want. If you don’t know where you wanna go, it’s like the Alice in Wonderland at the fork in the road.
CG (17:26):
Any road will get you there. Welcome to America. And, and if you’re Canadian, welcome to Canada
CG (18:10):
And in fact, your number one asset, which is your ability to create, doesn’t even show up on a traditional balance sheet. That’s how messed up that is. And so once you get clear about what, what you want, the next, the next conversation that I’m always looking for is how are you creating this thing called currency or cash? We’ll talk about that in a second. But a lot of times we divorce ourself from like cash from value. And, and you, you can really only create two fundamental things, a service or a product. Those are, and if there’s a third, please, please let me know. But someone can fundamentally create a service or a product. And just because you exist doesn’t make that service or product more or less valuable. We, we, we all know people that do the same thing on paper, but one gets paid a lot more.
CG (18:55):
An iPhone and an Android are not the same, right? So there maybe someone could charge more for one of those products. And so the idea is to get hyper-focused on am I creating the most value and really focusing on that. And what I find is a lot of people ask me, like, Caleb, what should I invest in? Should I do this Roth and other things? And I look at their financial situation, I say you should invest in nothing until you triple your income because you’re, if you wanna look at me with a straight face and say that what you’re making is, is optimized for your, for your situation. And a lot of times that’s, that’s just giving them the permission to quote unquote invest in themselves. But I can’t think of a better investment early on than making sure that you’re, you’re maximizing, this goes to our business owners.
CG (19:38):
If you’re, if you’re in business and you’re not reaching the heights that you know deep down that you can, it may, you may not want to tie up your money in other things until you’re really making sure that your printing machine is able to print out money. I’ll stop there. But then I, I wanna share what you do when you get money, but I find that so many people skip that step. They go, they wanna know where they should invest their money. Should I pay off debt? And all these things, we’ll, we’ll get to in a second, but I’m telling you, majority of the people listening to this probably need to hit pause and figure out ways that they can be more valuable, create more valuable services, or more valuable products to the marketplace. And cash flow or currency will reward value creation.
AJV (20:18):
You know, I love that you said this because we literally had this conversation a couple years ago and it was like, you know, we started Brain Builders Group, what, six years ago? And it was a couple of years ago, and we were, you know, deciding how we wanted to grow it and did we wanna grow it, and what, what, what did we wanna do with the money? And we were actually sitting down with our financial advisor, and this was like, again, like three years ago. And this was the conversation. And at that time, this was rates were still pretty good in a couple of different places and you know, better than they were in the last 12 months. And it was such a fascinating conversation. We were sitting here, we were listening and also doing math in our head mental math, and then we pulled out a calculator and we were looking at each other and we were like, literally the, and if you just think about this in really tactical forms, it’s like the rate of returns on any of the investments that we were talking about were half of our own profit margin.
CG (21:17):
Yeah.
AJV (21:17):
And we were just thinking, why would we put all of our money into these funds that are getting half of the return that we would be getting if we just reinvested into ourselves and reinvested into our people and reinvested into our business? Because our profit margins were double what any of the rate of return turns were even at that time period. And I think it’s a fascinating concept to what you’re saying. It’s like, like how often are financial advisors actually saying, well, hey, let’s talk about your profit margins. Let’s talk about how, how good you are doing versus where should we put your, your money in terms of funds or, you know, the market or whatever. But it was, it is literally what you were just saying. And it’s like, Roy and I recapped after the meeting and we were like, yeah, actually I think that BBG is the best investment that we can invest into right now. So we’re gonna, and it’s almost exactly this conversation you’re having, but realizing you are your number one asset. You are your best investment, and at least you can have some influence and control over what you do versus anything else that’s happening.
CG (22:23):
I I, I even, I’m, I’m writing, I’m writing a lot right now. I’m forcing myself to write some of these concepts down. And I was doing the math around just someone getting a $5,000 raise versus like investing and like breaking down the math and showing, okay, 8% compounded over a period of time, like, awesome. And then just like what a $5,000 raise would look like. And just showing them on paper of like, even if you’re not an entrepreneur watching or listening to this, like just by figuring out a way to make yourself more valuable to the marketplace, which is your employer is just something that I believe every single person going into college, going outta college, we gotta understand how this works. And I think it’s one of the things that we don’t talk enough about, but if, if, if people can be, if people can really maximize and optimize that space in their life, everything gets easier as, you know, making more money, just life gets a lot easier. It, it also covers up for a lot of mistakes that we make on the back end, and we can afford to make, quote, unquote, more mistakes. I say that tongue in cheek because we’ve really are are em, we’re creating emphasis on creating more cash and the person that’s creating more cash in the long run has just more options. And so that’s so yeah, I think you said it perfectly.
AJV (23:36):
No, I love that. And I think that’s a really important just reminder to all of us. It’s like, before you start investing elsewhere, just take a really good hard look at where are you investing in yourself? How are you helping yourself become more valuable? Because that’s, that’s the number one place to start. Awesome. That, that whole concept, I love that. That’s so good. Okay.
CG (23:57):
All right. You’re gonna love this next piece. ’cause I, I think what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna simplify this so dang easy where people will be able to get, ’cause a lot of financial, the financial side gets really complicated and they almost, people wanna make it complicated so that you trust advisors, you know,
CG (24:37):
Okay? Hear me out here. It can either be consumed or it can be saved, can be consumed. So I, I already know the Christians that are listening to this. Well, what about tithing? And I’ll, I’ll get to that. Okay. When you make money, there’s only two categories that can go consumption, which I’ll, I’ll talk about lifestyle. Think of lifestyle or saving, which is a verb to hopefully invest and multiply. Okay, we’re gonna talk about consumption first. When I make money, my dollar’s only capable of doing one of two things. Lifestyle or saving. Let’s talk about lifestyle. Lifestyle could look like taxes. Well, Caleb, I don’t like, taxes doesn’t affect my lifestyle. Well, if you don’t pay your taxes, you’re going jail. So taxes is a cost of living your life. It’s just the cost of living your life. Jail free paying debt is a, is a form.
CG (25:27):
Your, your debt service, your, that’s part of lifestyle. Your coffees, your intentional decisions that you make, intentional or unintentional. That’s the cost of living your life. And so really the three categories are spending debt and taxes are like the three categories we could get. We could get a bunch more nuance, but at the end of the day, the hacks here are track your money. It’s amazing when you start being intentional about like, why am I spending money and just like tracking it and then start asking the question like, am I actually spending the money on like what I care about? And what a lot of times we’ll find is we’re spending money to impress people for maybe some trauma re like, as a kid, like we can get really deep here, but a lot of times we’re spending money on things that aren’t actually helping us live more intentionally, but doing it for other reasons.
CG (26:21):
And so when we track that money, we just start having just better conversations. One of the best things that we do for clients is just help them track their money, because most people won’t do it. But if you’re, like, if you get a spending report every single month it could be painful, but it’s, it’s hard to hide when you start categorizing where your money’s going. Second thing is taxes. Nine outta 10 business owners are overpaying on their taxes. And I don’t know about you, but I want to legally pay as little tax as possible. I’m all about paying the government, but I’m all about paying the government as little as possible. And so without getting super in depth, there’s, there’s, you know, deductions, credits, things like depreciation, different tax strategies that you can go down. For any of your audience that reaches out to me, I can, we have a one page tax checklist with five categories. And within those categories, there’s a bunch of areas like in deductions and credits that you can take to your CPA and make sure that you have this checklist to see if there’s areas that you can save more money. That alone AJ is fun because on average a business owner is able to save 20 to $30,000 with that checklist just by taking it to their CPA and, and maybe asking certain questions or doing certain things that help you pay less in taxes. So that’s fun. Let’s pause right there. The
AJV (27:39):
Last, I wanna make sure that people hear this right, there is a one page checklist that Caleb is happy to give to you. And so if you wanna get that, then Caleb tell them where they should DM you.
CG (27:52):
You can, you can email me at [email protected] or go on to my Instagram at Caleb Williams and the, just trust the last name. Hopefully it’ll be in the title of this, of this podcast. I’ll put it on the, and if, yeah, it’ll be in the show notes. And so just if you reach out, I’d be more than happy to give you that. And we have a wealth efficiency packet, which is every framework that I’m talking about, whether it’s debt and other investments, like all these, I’ll give you the whole packet just to help you be more efficient, remove friction to get to your desired result. So yeah, we
AJV (28:24):
Did kind of recap that, right? Taxes, we, we all believe pay your fair share and not 1 cent more. So That’s right. How do you tighten that up?
CG (28:33):
Yeah, I, the, I I should go on a rampage here, but one of my good friends, Tom Wheelwright, who’s the CPA for Robert Kiyosaki, wrote the book Tax Free Wealth. He has a, a perfect analogy of this. He’s like the tax code, which is thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of pages long. It’s like two or three pages of like what you owe. And then the rest is like a treasure map of finding incentives on how to not pay that. And so it’s just, it’s one of those things where you, you wanna start becoming treasure hunters and figuring out, Hey, how can I partner with the government essentially and create more value for the government? And oh, by the way, if I create more value for the government, they’ll, I’ll pay less. And so it’s just really, really cool and incentives work.
CG (29:13):
So, and then the, then the last thing when it comes to consumption is looking at debt. I have a, I have a non Dave Ramsey approach to debt. But I, I think about it this way is, I think when we’re, when we’re talking about debt, we really need to separate it debt and what you’re doing. A lot of times people marry those things together, but debt is just a tool in itself, and a lot of times it, it can be an enabler to make you make bad decisions. So I just wanna acknowledge that if I was talking to someone that was really pro Dave Ramsey, I agree personally debt can enable bad decisions. But when I’m looking at just for my personal life, I’m, I’m asking two questions. Should you buy these things? And then if I answer yes, then the next question is, what’s the best way to purchase those things?
CG (29:58):
And so for me, I look at cash flow and I just go to, if I’m already gonna determine to buy this home or this car, I don’t ever want debt to be an enabler. I don’t wanna buy this car because I can get it with debt. I wanna make the decision. And that that’s a, maybe a different podcast in itself because it’s like, how can you know what to afford? But once you make that decision, then I go back to what’s the best way to purchase that thing? And you can either use debt or use cash. And by the way, cash on the, on the top of your dollar bills says federal reserve note. So if you really wanna go down the rabbit hole, like cash itself is a form of debt because once we went off the gold current standard, every, all the, the, the dollar bills are just a form of debt.
CG (30:42):
So I get less emotional about whether I’m using a mortgage or not. And, and I just look at from a cashflow perspective, what gives me more control, what allows me to have greater cashflow that I can save and what limits risk? And in a lot of cases actually a 30 year mortgage and debt can, can actually be that thing that checks a box for a lot of people. Again, I I maybe I’m, hopefully I’m not confusing people more in saying that. I just wanna give you permission when you look at the lens through efficiency versus being debt free or not, it just allows us to be like, okay, what gives us more control? What allows us to be more efficient? Sometimes debt is that tool that we use on the saving side and the consumption side, but sometimes you can have toxic debt that’s just killing you, and you need to eliminate that, and that will free up a ton of cash flow in itself. So cashflow is what we really optimize for, or not, not something arbitrary like being debt free or not.
AJV (31:38):
Yeah, I know. I love that. And I think that’s, again, it’s using debt with guardrails, right? Yeah. And it’s like,
CG (31:44):
It’s using it as a tool.
AJV (31:45):
Yeah. It’s like making sure it’s a tool and you’re not flying off the cliff, right? And I think that’s true, you know, sometimes with cash too, it’s like, you know, it’s like, you know, sometimes if you’re just all cash, right? If everyone, if you know, it’s like we were all just hiding a bunch of cash and, you know, boxes under our beds. It’s like, is that really the best utilization of that? Right? So you can kind of go both ways, but I love that. So these consumption things, taxes, debt spending. What about saving?
CG (32:12):
All right, so, so, okay, so your dollar can only do one of one of two things. It can either be consumed and part of consumption is tithing, by the way, because that is the choice that you’re living your life. So if I decide I’m going to ti 10% in a way, I am voluntarily choosing a 10% tax as a part of my rich life, that’s just like, just something I want to be upfront with. But that’s a, that’s a lifestyle decision. Okay? So, so the beautiful thing is if you, if you make money and I figure out, I only need to know one thing, I either need to know how much you save or how much you spend, and I can determine, I can essentially model out your entire financial life. So if you make a hundred thousand dollars a year and you save 10,000, what are, what’s your lifestyle?
CG (32:56):
$90,000. We don’t have to do a whole budget to figure that out. It’s really quick. So that’s what, that’s a a life hack because part of that we can model out and say, okay, $90,000 today, this thing called inflation. Like what, in 30 years, what do you need to be having coming in to just maintain your current lifestyle? So that’s, that’s something that’s valuable. And understanding that your money’s only capable of doing two things, but okay, if we want to save money, going back to the richest man in Babylon, pay yourself first. Pay yourself first. There’s, there’s something really, really incredible about forcing yourself to, to save money. Saving is a verb. And so a lot of times a huge focus of ours is helping people be more efficient and then taking those inefficiencies from lifestyle and transferring them into savings category because majority of people are saving a fraction of what they need to.
CG (33:45):
But saving is, is a verb. And then what are we saving for? And, and we’re saving for investing and investing is a, is a multiplier effect. And one of the things that we, we try to determine is a lot of times people say like, what should I invest in? Should I invest in real estate? Should I invest in stock? Should I invest in myself? Should I invest in the stock market? And it, and there’s no right or wrong to this I wish I could tell you, like, do this thing, but it really comes down to everyone’s individual, you know, goals. And some people come to us and they, they realize like, I need to reinvest in my business. And so they, they’re in business, like for your example is like, that is helping me live more intentionally and oh, by the way, is gonna outperform any real estate or stock portfolio that I’m doing.
CG (34:33):
We have clients that are day traders, they really understand the stock market. Amazing. We have people that love real estate. Amazing. So it’s really identifying going deeper and saying, okay, what is this asset? It not only is gonna help me be more intentional, but it’s gonna create more cash flow. What’s the best way to be able to do that? And I’m not a fan of retirement, but I do think we need to be planning towards areas where our, our assets, whether it’s our business, whether it’s our stock portfolio, real estate portfolio, is creating enough cash that gives us the ability to do really whatever we want. Some people call this financial independence, some people call this financial freedom. But it, it’s just this idea of like, I have a system set up where I am able to live on my terms and to be able to make choices the way that I wanna make them, and I don’t necessarily have to go to work.
CG (35:24):
So that would look like in a business, having an operator do your thing. Or that could, and, but that’s ultimately you making the choice to continue to live intentionally, which a lot of our friends, aj, continue to work because work, they don’t work for money. They literally, literally are working because that’s what their God-given purposes for. And so all that to say, the saving is a verb to invest what you invest in. You can go through a process called investor DNA, which is something that I didn’t necessarily come up with, but it’s the idea of like, we’re all built a little different. And so instead of saying, is this good or bad, look at you and figure out where should I be spending my time and money? And then that will start highlighting where you should focus on. And then the last thing in this whole framework is risk, a risk management umbrella.
CG (36:09):
We could have, we could be crushing it, making money. We could be being super efficient in how we spend our money. We could be saving a ton, but if something medically happens or if something like a hurricane or a tornado comes and, and wipes out our business or on our, or our home and we don’t have it properly insured or having special risk management, like everything could be wiped out. And so as unsexy as it sounds like, you really do need to make sure that you are creating a, a moat and an umbrella around the life that you’re, that you’re living. And, and again, I don’t necessarily need to go into any more than that other than the checklist. I can give you a checklist to make sure that whenever you’re meeting with someone to help you, you, you can go through and make sure that you have all the risk management areas in your life checked. And, and then we’re, we’re cooking with gas. When you’re, when you understand that you’re your greatest asset, you really get clear about how you create money. Understand, once you create money, your dollars are only capable of doing two things. We can focus on optimizing or we can focus on multiplying. And then at the end of the day make sure that you’re creating a, a, a moat, a fence on umbrella around what you’re doing. So to, so that not one disaster can wipe it all out.
AJV (37:25):
This is so good, and I’m taking so many notes,
CG (37:56):
Yep. I, so, so any
AJV (38:00):
Personal recommendations?
CG (38:01):
Yeah. Okay. So the answer is you can actually, you, I could actually tell your audience exactly what they should be setting aside if I got, if I figured out how much money they’re making, how much money they’re spending, and then we could model out their situation. And not to depress anybody, but most people, 95% of people that model that are there, it doesn’t work. And so that it, it makes them realize like, oh, I either need to save more or spend less. So that’s just something that like, we can scientifically show what that in doing, hundreds and thousands of those models shows around 20 to 30%. That might sound extreme. Oh yeah. I, I I’m telling you, I’m not necessarily your biggest fan by saying like, you should save 20 to 30%, but I’m telling you, majority of people need to save 20 to 30% if they want to maintain their lifestyle.
CG (38:55):
And so a lot of times you, you can’t just strive harder. A lot of times people try to like, I need to just try harder. And that doesn’t work in most cases. And you, you, that’s where, again, not to, to pitch our business, but that’s where working with somebody that can be unemotional about your situation and help you free up cash and then also help you create a, a roadmap to say, okay, what does the next five to 10 years look like? And as we’re starting to make more money, let’s not spend dollar for dollar of what we make. Like, shocker. But there’s like anyone that’s listening or watching, and you are a value creator, there’s so much hope for you. You just wanna make sure that you could be your greatest asset, but you could also be your greatest liability. Most of the time it goes hand in hand. And so if you can get out of your own way 20, 20 to 30%, it should be the target. And it’s very doable if if you can get some of those pieces all working together.
AJV (39:45):
Yeah, and it’s interesting if you just sit here and do some, you know, personal calculations it’s like, let’s just say it’s like, yeah, the target is like, you really do need to be setting aside 30% of every dollar that comes in. And let’s just hypothetically say that tithing is something that you commit to. And even if you know, you’re not, you know, you know, doing that to the church, but maybe it’s like, Hey, I wanna give it to charitable causes or, you know, things I believe in, let’s just call it 30% savings, 10% tithing or charitable givings. Right? That’s 40% right there. And then assuming you are making over a hundred thousand, regardless if you’re an entrepreneur or in an, an employee job where you’ve got a salary, right? Let’s just call it’s a good healthy amount would be 30% in taxes. That means you’ve got to live on 30% of what you have coming in the door just there.
CG (40:38):
And yeah, it’s a, it’s, yeah, it’s a good, it’s a good framework to start at. And I, I don’t want that to be depressing for people to hear. And 30%, while it could be the target doesn’t mean you have to do that overnight, right? But it, it ideally for the people that are financially free, they are saving and investing in their unique ability. And, and it’s one of those things where they’re able to crush and it’s usually people that are able to save at least more than 20% of what they make are the people that can get on that road. And we’ve just seen a lot of success in that.
AJV (41:14):
Yeah. And I think that’s good. And it’s like as, and I don’t think it’s depressing as much as it should be a reflection moment of I wonder what I’m actually doing. Right? If you’re not sitting there thinking, huh, I wonder if I’m spending more than 30%. And I would assume that most people
CG (41:45):
Yeah. And, and just so you know, like that would just be a friction area. You don’t need to remove all the friction overnight. But the beautiful thing is if most people that come to us have friction all over the place, and what we try to do is, like, for example, taxes is a good example. If you’re overpaying on taxes and we free up some of that money, you’re already used to that lifestyle of paying the government. Why can’t we just pay you the difference? So it’s those kind of things that are like I, I don’t wanna make sound saving 30% sound easy. It’s not, but it’s not as painful as it might sound because you might be way over efficient. And this is where I’ll give Dave Ramsey his flowers. A lot of people are enabling themselves with that to buy things that they shouldn’t buy.
CG (42:27):
And sometimes the conversation needs to be, I should not be driving a hundred thousand dollars car, or I should not be living in this type of house. And oh, by the way, debt was an enabler. And that’s where, in a way, I 100% agree with what Dave Ramsey and the Ramsey court company teaches. Because majority of people, if you look at statistics, are over consuming. And that is made possible because of credit cards, because of debt. And so it’s not a cut and dry, black and white, but a lot of times we just need to wake up and say, especially if you’re listening to this or watching this and have something that God’s put on your heart to like go out and do and you have a mission that’s bigger than yourself. You, you have to realize that you could be the greatest liability to get that gets in your way. And that liability could be your lifestyle. So I don’t wanna sound like rice and beans, but sometimes math will just tell us like, what you’re doing is not gonna compound. Well, yeah.
AJV (43:22):
But I think that’s wise, and I think like for so many things in life, awareness is the first step, right? Awareness is the first step. Now I do have, I have a another quick personal question for you kind of on this, you know, concept of saving investing. Now this is this does not have to be formal, but since so many people are talking about it, I am curious to hear what’s your take on cryptocurrency, bitcoin? What’s your stance on that?
CG (43:54):
I, I ha have 5% of my investment portfolio, majority of my portfolios in, in our businesses and other businesses that I’m acquiring. I think crypto is not something that I am going like head over heels for, but I think there’s interesting, there’s, there’s interesting arguments to be made about it. And I, I think of it as a hedge to the American dollar and the hedge to maybe, maybe the stock market. I say that it’s a lot more volatile, but there’s some pe sometimes I talk to people that are like, the American dollar’s going away and we’re going all crypto. And, and, and my caution is this is how I, I think through things, if we did something like that, there’s gonna be a t it’s talk about a major shakeup. And so the thing that I always do is like, okay, if that happens, if over 90% of people in the population are gonna be like on their heels, there’s a really good chance that, like, I don’t ever wanna make like a decision based on fear.
CG (44:59):
And I find that a lot of people are going to crypto because of a fomo, like a fear of missing out. And I would not do that. But I do believe that that technology of blockchain is going to be something that is gonna continue to be more valuable. And so I’m giving you like a very political answer. I am keeping my eyes on it, but I’m not, I have less than 5% of my portfolio in it. And I would heavily caution you not to go all in on any one thing maybe other than your value yourself, making yourself more valuable. But I’ve, I’ve seen a lot of people lose a ton of money on, on crypto, and they’re, they’re, it’s really greed that clouded their judgment.
AJV (45:42):
No, I think that the good wise discerning statement around crypto, and I ask because I do think that, you know, in, as we have, you know, kind of just come out of an election season, there’s lots of talks of, you know the economy and market and the value of the dollar and exchange of presidents, which will be coming next year. So I think it’s always good to have some, you know,
AJV (46:33):
And so we’ve spent me personally a lot of time reading and listening, trying to understand the foundation of it, where it came from, how it was created, the future of it, the trends of it, the history of it. And you know what, that’s a commitment, right? That’s a learning commitment. And that, that’s our personal stance is I cannot give my money to something that I do not have my head wrapped around. And so we took a, a long sweet time to go, okay, now we have a little bit more of a better understanding, so we feel more comfortable doing it. But I will tell you, like back to investing in yourself, it’s like that was like, that was like, I was like, I gotta invest in myself and my own awareness and my own knowledge of what I’m investing in before I give my money to it. That’s
CG (47:20):
Right. That’s right. And yeah, and, and you also mentioned it’s like there gets, you get to a place where your dollar reinvesting in your business is not the right answer. And profit margin is what you look at. And so at the end of the day, there, there will get to a point where you’re crushing it in business and you don’t necessarily, you might not even need more money to make more like, so you’re getting to a place where your business is mature and then there’s so much wisdom in diversifying and, but you just wanna make sure that di you’re not diversifying your ability to make an impact and, and make money. And a lot of people AJ, are doing investing too early. Yeah. Like they, if you’re, if you’re asking me like, where you should put $5,000 a year, you’re probably investing too early. Mm.
CG (48:04):
Like, you’re probably need to go back to the drawing board and say, how, how can I have $50,000 a year to invest? And again, I say that outta love, but like that is the number one hack if I could give you anything, is like majority of people are, have the ability to create so much more value than what, what they’re showing up on paper right now. And so look as yourself as that asset and figure out ways that you can generate more value and like literally everything else, your ability to give, your ability to live your dream life, your ability to save 30% or more, all will get a lot easier when you, when you are optimizing and maximizing your ability to show up.
AJV (48:41):
That’s so good. And there’s so much wisdom in this conversation. And there’s honestly, there’s just so many like good reminders of not even just some of the, the more tactical frameworks and understanding of money, but also just how we view money in comparison to ourselves and why we’re spending money. Are you tracking money? Do we even know, right? And I think those are some of the things that, you know, as we approach kind of the end of year when this podcast is being released and as many of us are, you know, emotionally and mentally preparing for a new year it’s just a such a great time to have these conversations of going whatever you’ve done, you don’t have to do moving forward. Right? You can make a change at any, any time to reevaluate how you look at money, how you spend money, how you save money, how you invest money.
AJV (49:30):
And this is just kind of like a kickstart conversation that I would encourage everyone to lean into. And I would also encourage you to take him up, take Caleb up on getting those checklists. Like, if you’re like, I have no idea, well, great. That’s why we have interviews like this. This is why you come to podcasts like this. So take him up on grabbing those checklists, DM him, send him an email, both of which I will put in the show notes and make some, you know, minor changes to change the way that, you know, you’re reacting and you know, your relationship to money as we approach the new year. Caleb, such a great interview. So much wisdom. So many good golden nuggets. Love this so much. One last quick question for you, and then I will let you go. For everyone who is listening, if there was one thing that you would say, out of all the research, all the books, all the time, time in the bank, time, working with people, time in my own, you know, finances, if there was one thing, if you could look over, look back over everything that you’ve learned, what would you say is the number one most significant thing that you have learned about money?
CG (50:49):
I, I think the more I learned about money, the more I realize that it, it, it’s all, it’s all meaningless. And to really, I lean into what does your one life look like? I have a sign behind me that says one life. And it’s like a constant reminder that our life is, it’s, we’re a walking miracle. If you start realizing the odds of just being born and then like being, like listening to this, if you’re listening to this, you’re one of the world’s already wealthiest people. And so like really identifying that and realizing it would be a shame to spend your entire life chasing something that doesn’t have any meaning and money in itself. If you look at just paper currency, there’s no meaning in paper currency unless you give it. And so the big takeaway is like, live a life that gives meaning and then everything else will, will follow. And hopefully I didn’t just kill credibility of the entire, but I just like, I love this stuff, but I, I, the more I, the more I learn, it’s, I realize that we elevate all of these money conversations maybe more than the real conversation, which is how should I live my one life and living it with zero regrets and living it for a greater purpose?
AJV (52:02):
Hmm. No, and I think that’s actually the perfect answer. And I hope what everyone hears in that is from someone who has spent his entire professional career learning and teaching money, that at the end of the day, money is not what it’s all about. And it shouldn’t be what we’re all about, right? But back to where you started, money is a tool to learn how to use the tool. All right. Don’t let the tool use you, Caleb. So good. Y’all, thank you for sticking around. And don’t forget the recap episode will be coming up next. Thank you guys so much. We will see you next time on the Influential Personal Brand. I’ll see you later.
Ep 567: 4 Steps to Sell a Lot of Books | Mike Thomas Episode Recap
RV (00:02):
Let’s talk about four simple steps that you can use to sell a lot of books. And obviously I am, have been working at this a lot for a long time, became a New York Times bestselling author when I was 29. Have written two traditionally published books as of this, this moment two self-published books and have a, my first hybrid published book coming out that I’m co-authoring with my wife and business partner AJ here next year. And so we’ve been around this world a long time. We’ve also helped 56 authors at the time of this recording to become national bestselling authors, including 10 clients of ours who have become New York Times bestselling authors in the last year alone. So we have spent a lot of time in and among this world, and one of our formal curriculums at Brand Builders Group is called Bestseller Launch Plan, where we talk about how to launch a book and more specifically like everything that should happen when you’re pre-selling a book.
RV (01:04):
And that’s where most of the, the success has come for our clients. But today I’m gonna walk you through a four step process that I think is a great, a fantastic long tail sales strategy. And this came from an interview that I just did with my new friend Mike Thomas. So Mike is the author of this children’s book series called The Secret of the Hidden Scrolls. And my son Jasper devoured this nine book series multiple times. And I had become friends with Mike and interviewed him of course recently on our podcast. And Mike was walking through the story of how he sold 650,000 copies of this, of, of this, these books when he started as a self-published author. And there’s four, there’s four steps that he followed, which mimic four steps that I’ve seen be successful, that we’ve seen be successful, that we’ve done ourselves, that I wanna just sort of share with you to kind of recap part of what he was saying, but also generalize what he was saying to go, this is how it applies to anybody.
RV (02:17):
So first of all, what’s step one? So step number one is simple. Step one is you have to market test. You have to market test. What that means is word of mouth is always the best long tail marketing strategy that’s true for anything. So how do you get, how do you ensure that you get word of mouth for a new product? Like, how do you know if the product’s gonna get word of mouth when you’re just releasing the product? And the, the, the simple answer is you test it. This is, you do market tests, you do experimentations with the content, or if it was a physical product, right? Like these are market
RV (02:59):
Research groups where you, you give people early access to the product so that you can get their feedback from real people and go, alright, how do I have to take their feedback and adapt it in a way so that I can incorporate it into my product? So that going forward, it’s going, it’s gonna be much more likely to propagate because I’ve already solved the big issues that people have upfront. Well, authors have a unique advantage in this particular area. Now, the way that Mike told his story was that he actually wrote the book and then he went out and he started reading it in schools, and it was kids’ books, right? So he went out to his son’s school and was like reading the book in the classroom and getting feedback. And so he did that. Well that’s one way to do it, is to actually write the book and then go out and, and and, and circulate it and get feedback on it.
RV (03:50):
But the other way to do it is the way that we teach at Brand Builders Group, which is one of our, one of our mantras that we tell authors is that a book should never be a hypothesis. A book should be a conclusion. Writing a book shouldn’t be a hypothesis. Writing a book should be a conclusion. What does that mean? It means that I don’t write a new book when I have an a new idea that I want to share with the world. I write a new book after I have had an idea. I have shared it with the world. I’ve sold it to the world. I’ve tested it, I’ve gotten feedback, I’ve adapted it, I’ve molded it, I’ve shaped it. I’ve re re-edited it, re-presented it, retested it, reshaped it, and, and done that several times to where it’s like, ah, now I have a finished thing and that’s what I’m gonna deliver to the world.
RV (04:41):
And I go, I know it’s phenomenal before I release it because I already tested it. That’s what great writing should be. It’s going, I’m not testing out my ideas in a book. I’m testing my ideas out through speaking and coaching and consulting and training and you know, whatever video courses and membership sites and, and what whatever, whatever your business model is, I’m, I’m testing the content out with customers first. My existing, my preexisting customers, my past customers, my past readers, and I’m testing those concepts first, and then I’m getting feedback from them. And then I’m incorporating that into the manuscript that then becomes a book. And if you look at, you know, my journey as an author, it’s, it’s pretty unusual that someone becomes a New York Times bestselling author with their first book, right? And that’s something that we did in 2012 when my first book Take The Stairs came out on the surface.
RV (05:41):
It’s like, whoa, a 29-year-old first time author hit the New York Times. What an anomaly. And, and yes, it is an anomaly, but the true story for how we did that was that book came out in 2012. I had been speaking professionally on the concepts around Take the Stairs and the psychology of overcoming procrastination and creative avoidance and prior to dilution and the Buffalo Story, that is the flagship story that now lots of people on the internet use, but that I am the original author of. I had been speaking like the Buffalo story. I have been telling that Buffalo story from stage since 2004, right? So eight full years before it ever appeared in the book. I was building my career on it. I was getting feedback on it. It it started as an internal training that I led for a little team that I was running in college.
RV (06:36):
And I got so much great feedback that, that that became a signature story of my speaking. And that came part of our coaching program and, and part of our curriculum and, and so many people it got, you know, shaped and refined. And then it landed in a book one day that we wrote actually in 2010, and then was published and, and hits the New York Times Bestseller list in 2012. That’s an example of a story that I created years before that was tested and shaped and molded and adapted. And then when people read it, it was not a hypothesis, it was a conclusion. It’s the same thing when I go out and speak, right? I don’t when people pay me to speak, I’m not trying out new content on that stage. I’m delivering content that I have tested many times before in front of other groups or on social media or webinars or, you know, and when I first started, it was in comedy clubs and Toastmaster groups.
RV (07:28):
I built my first keynotes speaking to those audiences for free so that by the time I got in front of an audience where someone had paid me to be there, I wasn’t nervous. I wasn’t afraid that it wasn’t gonna be good. I knew it was gonna be a home run. I knew because it wasn’t the first time I was giving it, it had been tested. And that is what creates word of mouth is market testing is to go, don’t make it a hypothesis. Make it a conclusion. And too many people, you know, there’s this old saying that says a lot of authors have read have written more books than they’ve read
RV (08:14):
And that’s, it’s not impossible that that’s gonna succeed. It’s just way more, less likely. It’s sta statistically exponentially much less likely that that content is gonna succeed. So it starts with market testing. The second step to selling a lot of books is having a single channel focus, right? Having a single channel focus. If you’ve been around brand builders group for any amount of time, if you’ve been in any of our trainings, if you’ve ever heard me on any other podcast, you know that perhaps our most flagship mantra is that if you have diluted focus, you get diluted results. And when you launch a book, or when you launch any type of product, you don’t want to do a thousand things that you could do. You want to pick a couple. And typically what we see is the most successful campaigns really focus and really drive on one kind of core strategy that they go, this is the one thing we’re gonna really go all in on.
RV (09:16):
And Mike, you know, he told the whole story in my interview with him about influencer marketing and that influencer marketing was the one thing that he did really, really well. And he went all in on it. It was super tactical. There’s other things that we’ve done. We’ve done big live events with ed Millet was one of our, one of our first clients that we did a big live event with. And we were a part of a team that helped Ed sell 35,634 books in a single day. We replicated something similar to that when we worked with John Maxwell’s team and we sold 11,000 units all wrapped around one event. That was one evening, it was a few in a few hours between the people who bought on the way in and then the people who bought that night. Those are huge numbers that, that are the result of a lot of focus on one specific thing.
RV (10:06):
So when we teach our bestseller launch plan, like our formal, our curriculum, our formal in inside of our formal program, we talk about how there’s really only five main mechanisms that, that anybody can use to significantly move a lot of books. But in the interview, Mike and I go deep on influencer marketing and, and I think part of why he was successful is he really mastered one. He really said, I’m gonna do this one thing really well, if you not just wanna sell books, but if you wanna sell anything, it’s going have one thing that you do really, really, really, really well that you perfect, rather than trying to have 50 different marketing strategies that you execute in mediocre fashion. And that’s a, that’s just a common, you know mistake that we see a lot of people do. Number three, give the product away.
RV (10:59):
Give the product away whether it’s a product or a service. This is a consistent trait, a consistent pattern. A a a consistent theme that we see among books that take off and products that take off, and companies that scale is you give a lot of product away. You give it away because you need people using it more than you need money, more than you need sales early on. You need a lot of people who have used the product in this specific case, a lot of people who have read the book. So you want to give it away. And that’s, Mike tells this story about how he did influencer marketing by giving the book to influencers and going, Hey, he, I wanna send it to you. Yes, that takes time. Yes, that takes money. Yes, it is a risk. Although if you’ve done your market testing, it’s not a huge risk because you know that they’re likely gonna love the product by the time they get it because you’ve already done the testing, you’ve already worked out the kinks, now you’re into marketing mode and you go, I need people to consume this.
RV (12:04):
And this is true for building your personal brand in general, is to go, the reason we put out so much content on social and blogs and podcasts is going, I want people to be able to experience me and and us at Brand Builders Group for free. I want them to be able to te test us to, to try it. You know, we use the analogy of chicken on a stick a lot of times because that’s like when you go to the food court, you know, or you go through Whole Foods, you go to the grocery store when they’re launching a new product, what are they good? They give you a free bite of the food that, because you need to taste it, you need experience it, and when you do, you’re more likely to talk about it and share it and buy it and promote it.
RV (12:44):
And, and people need that same thing for you. So if you’re just getting started, you need to spend some time thinking about how can I give my product away for free? How can I give my service away for free? How can I give my ideas away for free so that lots of people can get exposed to them, get a, a taste of them, get to sample them. The amount of sales that you make are gonna be directly proportionate to the number of people who have e experienced your product or service. And with a book, especially early on, it’s like you gotta have lots of people with, with, with getting lots of copies. And so, you know, now these days at this stage in my career, we don’t usually just give away a book to everybody, but we usually will do something in our launch strategy, which is like, if you buy one, we’ll give you one so that they can give it away.
RV (13:35):
And we call those trust soldiers around Brand Builders Group is is giving your customers or your fans giving them an asset that they can share with their friends for free. And you heard that in Mike’s story. Again, if you haven’t, if you didn’t hear that podcast, go listen to that to that podcast. You’re gonna want to check it out. And then the fourth thing is give people an incentive to share it with their friends and, and, and with their audience, which is kind of what I was just talking about. So, you know, step three is you’re giving the product away, but step four is give them an incentive to share your product or service with their audience. Specifically with books we’re going, okay, I’m gonna give you a book to share with a friend, or I’m gonna, I’m gonna give you free chapters that you can read or free chapters that you can send to somebody. In Mike’s case with influencer marketing, what he did that was so simple, so powerful, so effective was after he gave away a copy of the book, he said, Hey, would you like me to give you a few more books that you could do as a giveaway to your community? What a brilliant, simple strategy that is, is like worth its weight in gold
RV (14:51):
For the promotion to go. He’s gonna give away a handful of books here which will cost him, you know, tens of dollars, it will be dozens of dollars, and yet he’s gonna likely drive hundreds, if not thousands, maybe tens of thousands of dollars in sales that will result from the promotion and the exposure of everybody seeing someone talk about that product. So that is so smart that he’s creating that incentive. What incentives can you create for the people who are buying your product to you know, use the product, share the pro product, promote the product. So you’re not only just giving them one, you’re also creating incentives for them to share with other people and making it easy for them to say yes to sharing what you do. So those are four strategies that I think especially work well once a book is out and part of the long tail launch.
RV (15:47):
Now, if you wanna learn how to launch your book and, and really have a massive book launch knowing that over 90% of the books that hit the New York Times hit the first week, the book comes out, that’s a data point that our data science team figured out. And part of why, how we have reversed engineered so many best seller launches is because we have an entire pre-launch system. If any point you wanna learn that system, you can either, if you’re watching this, if you’re watching this on Instagram, just type the word call down below and you can, you can request a call with someone on our team and they’ll talk to you about it. If you are watching this on YouTube, just click the link near or around this video and we will set you up with a free call with one of our strategists to share with you what that process looks like.
RV (16:36):
And if you’re listening to this on the podcast, just go to free brand call.com/podcast, free brand call.com/podcast and you can request a call with our team and they can introduce you to the system and start walking you through a bestseller launch plan. But there you have it. There’s four ideas four steps that you can do to sell a lot of books. First market testing. Test your product, test your feedback. Test test the content before you go out in full, full promotion. Mode. Two, have a single channel focus. Have one strategy that you’re gonna be absolutely sure you’re gonna go all in on making sure it works. Number three, give it away so that people can sample it and test it for free. And number four, give people incentives to share it with their audience, to share it with their friends and family. Do those four things and you are gonna have a book that is going to take off sooner or later. That’s it on this edition of the Influential Personal Brand podcast. Keep coming back for more. We’ll catch you next time.