Brandon Willington - Where U? Founder & 2025 Marketing Entrepreneur of the Year | How To Get Customers When Nobody Knows Who You Are

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You describe yourself as arguably the most attention-seeking person you'll ever meet.

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Why is this important to get out of the way first?

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I've always had this weird God-given talent for getting attention on the internet, often quite accidentally.

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Do you think that most people play it too safe with their marketing?

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I think a lot of people try and get immediate validation and approval from everyone.

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Whereas I come in admittedly a little bit arrogant.

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Today's guest is Brandon Willington, an entrepreneur and marketing expert who has built his career around capturing attention and turning it into business growth.

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In this conversation, he shares why standing out matters, how to reinvent yourself and why letting go of an old identity can be the key to creating a better future.

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What's your advice to somebody who's trying to figure out if they should kill an identity that's not serving them anymore?

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If I repeated my actions for the last 24 hours for the next 10 years, where would I end up?

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And do I like it here?

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What would you say to somebody who knows they need to let go of an old version of themselves?

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You'll only really change when the pain of staying where you are outweighs the pain of changing.

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And there's two ways you can get there.

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MyFitnessPal is a success story partner.

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Now, there's this thing that happens when you start paying attention to what you eat.

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And I think we can all agree that we want to care about our health and our wellness and our nutrition.

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But more often than not, we just kind of think we eat clean.

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We think we eat healthy, but we're not really, really paying attention to every single meal and what makes up every single meal.

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But.

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Just by paying attention and starting to log and track what you eat, you start making better choices without really trying.

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And that surprised me because when I first started using the MyFitnessPal app, and I've been using it for a while now, it's a nutrition tracking app, and I started logging what I was eating, it started showing me my macros, which means how much protein, carbs and fats I was getting.

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And then I started to understand why some days I felt good, high energy.

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Some days I felt like garbage because those three things, proteins, carbs, fats, that's what your food is made out of.

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And the balance between them affects everything.

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So my fitness pal app truly changed my life when it came to managing my food, which managed and helped everything else.

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Now, on the premium version of the app, it breaks down those numbers by meal.

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So I'm not just seeing one calorie number for the day.

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I can see what's happening at breakfast versus lunch versus dinner, where my protein actually lands, whether I'm eating enough earlier in the day or piling everything on at night.

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And all of a sudden,

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When I'm crashing at 3, 4 p.m., well, I can take a look and see it's not so surprising anymore based on what I ate or what I didn't eat.

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So that's what I mean when I say that MyFitnessPal is a great app for awareness.

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It's not obsessive.

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It's not stressful.

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It's not time consuming.

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It's actually the opposite.

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Guessing is stressful.

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When you have all the information, the food you eat, your nutrition becomes way easier to keep up with.

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Also, a lot of people stress out that logging food is going to be very time consuming.

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It's not.

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And if it was annoying, I'd stop.

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But what I love about the app is that they've made it super, super simple.

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They've removed all friction in food logging, right?

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They have the largest food database out there.

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So whatever I'm eating is already in it.

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I can voice logs.

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I can just say what I'm eating.

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They have a barcode scanner that handles all the package stuff.

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They have a tool called meal scan, which lets me point my camera at my plate and it breaks down all the macros and then logs it for breakfast, lunch, dinner, whatever.

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And the app remembers my regular meals.

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And I'm really just in and out of the app in seconds.

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And on top of that, it connects with over 40 fitness apps and wearables.

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So my workouts, my nutrition, they're all in one place.

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See, food is the foundation of everything.

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your energy, your sleep, your weight, your recovery, your performance, at work, at home.

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And I really believe that when you start to pay attention to what you eat, every single part of your life improves.

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And to be honest, for me, it's the most useful tool because when I see the information, when I see what I'm eating,

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and I feel the effects of having good nutrition and good food at the right time, the decisions on what to eat become obvious.

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Not because someone told me to eat better, it's because I have the data.

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And the data makes it super, super easy to stay on track.

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So please do yourself a favor, go to podcast.myfitnesspal.com and use code Scott.

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That's S-C-O-T-T, all uppercase letters, for 15% off MyFitnessPal Premium.

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That is podcast.myfitnesspal.com, code Scott for 15% off.

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My Fitness Pal Premium.

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So Brandon, you describe yourself as arguably the most attention-seeking person you'll ever meet.

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Why is this important to get out of the way first?

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Why is this who you are as a person?

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I don't know.

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I've always noticed this trend across my life where I've had this...

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Weird, God-given talent for getting attention on the internet.

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Often quite accidentally.

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Like back when I was a DJ, I made this mixtape, and my PR agent isn't going to let me swear, but it's called literally F Genres.

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And it accidentally went viral.

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It was actually how we met, right?

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And...

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It was actually meant to end my career.

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I didn't want to DJ anymore.

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And so I was like, I'm going to make the worst mixtape ever.

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So no one wants to book me anymore.

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And then it was completely counterproductive.

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It was on every major EDM publication in the world.

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I did two tours of Australia and a gig in the US off of it.

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I'm like, all right, I guess I'm going to DJ for another year or two.

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And then with advertising, I've just always had a knack for emotionally trivying people.

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I still haven't worked out what it is.

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Maybe it's just my face.

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Maybe it's just my voice.

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Maybe people just look at me and go, man, this guy's a dick.

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But I've had a knack for emotionally triggering people accidentally or intentionally.

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Why do you think that's important as a marketer, as an advertiser?

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Obviously, getting attention is important.

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But I think a lot of people are trying to get what they consider to be the right attention.

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Like, I want attention, but I don't want to upset people.

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I don't want to disrupt them.

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I don't want to piss them off.

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You do a good job.

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Apparently, a lot of people see your ads and they don't love your personality to leave you in real life.

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I just learned this two seconds ago when I was looking at your Instagram.

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It didn't seem that bad, but apparently people think you're an asshole.

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But obviously, it's working because you're successful and your agency is killing it.

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And the work you're doing for your clients is also doing well for them.

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So talk to me about right attention versus wrong attention.

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Is there such thing as good attention, bad attention or?

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Oh yeah, there's absolutely like wrong attention.

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Like if I was getting like horrible criminal charges, that would be, and they were legitimate charges.

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Like that would be terrible attention.

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But if the attention is just, this guy swears in his ads, I dislike that.

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Or you know what really pisses people off?

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If I put my feet on the table in an ad, dude, people get furious.

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I don't know what it is.

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Like if I just casually put my feet off, they hate it, bro.

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like I seem arrogant or something I just have tight like psoas muscles that's what that is if you're wondering they'll just come off arrogant but

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If they just dislike me for a little bit, that's fine.

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Because often that can just go away.

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You ever heard a song on the radio that like the first time you heard it, you're like, I hate this song.

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But then given enough times, you just, you know, it got really, really catchy.

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It's actually, it's called effective frequency.

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So back in, I think it was the 1960s and I can't remember the professor's name, but they did a science experiment with a bunch of college students.

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It's always broke college students.

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And they offered them all like 20 bucks, took them into a room, and then they flashed up a bunch of symbols and logos fast enough that often they didn't even consciously recognize what it was.

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But slow enough, they could go like, yeah, it's a triangle, it's a crown, whatever.

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And then they took them into another room and had pairs of those shapes and logos kind of on the table and just asked them like, hey, which one do you like the most?

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And they consistently picked the logo or the symbol that without knowing they saw it the most times.

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And so the joke that I always make to people in our workshops is like, you don't really like your friends and family that much.

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They just served you the most impressions across your lifetime.

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You just saw them a bunch of times.

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And so there's a bunch of people that see me and the first time they see me, they just think this guy's a dick.

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And to be clear, like if I'm filming an ad where I'm trying to annoy you and your reaction is that you're annoyed, can I really like blame you for that?

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I'm trying to piss you off and you got pissed off.

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Surprise, surprise.

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But over time, they just see me more and more.

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And that annoyance turns into, you know what?

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I think this guy's raising some good points.

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Do you think that most people play it too safe with their marketing?

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I do.

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I think a lot of people try and get immediate validation and approval from everyone.

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And that's why...

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It's probably why I get a lot of hate comments on my ads.

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Because a lot of people, if you look at my competitors' ads, they're very polite and professional and trying to please everyone.

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Whereas I come in, admittedly, a little bit arrogant.

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My attitude is very much like, I know I'm right.

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You know that I'm right.

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Eventually, everyone comes around in the end.

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And it just kind of rubs people the wrong way because it's very different to other people's ads where they're trying to get them to agree to them really nicely and politely.

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When did you fear...

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that that worked as a marketing strategy?

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Like at what point in your marketing career?

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Because you said that you being attention seeking was really when you first started putting up this shitty mixtape that went super viral.

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But when did you realize as a marketer, this was like a business strategy?

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Right.

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It was actually the very, very, very first ad that I filmed for my business.

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I don't think I would be technically incorrect to say the ad went viral, but it was very well recognized in Australia four years ago when I ran it.

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I filmed this ad that was just no script.

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I was doing a lead magnet ad.

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I just ranted about the lead magnet.

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I think the opening was like, I'm sick of recording this effing ad and stuff like that.

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And it was genuine frustration.

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I was just like, I didn't want to film this ad.

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And that ad just ripped.

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It just printed for like, I think I used it for like two or three years.

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And the comments were overwhelmingly positive because they're like, man, this is like the realest, rawest ad I've ever had.

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It was just a rant and it worked really, really well.

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And I've had a few friends kind of break that ad down or we've talked about it in retrospect.

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And

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Everyone reached independently the same conclusion that it was this real emotion that you can feel through the camera.

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Because, okay, let's do this for an example.

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Like, if you watch a news station, you know when the news reporter's reading off the teleprompter.

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Of course, yeah.

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It's a little bit too perfect.

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It's not just news.

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It's when I see creators read off the teleprompter for their phone.

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And I'm like, bro, I can tell this is like you reading a chat GPG script.

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And do you trust them more or less?

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Way less.

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Yeah, less because of it, right?

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And I think it's because, this is my theory anyway, humans, you go for your entire life speaking to humans like this where it's not off a script.

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And so as soon as someone is reading off of a script, your gut feeling is like something is incorrect here.

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This feels odd.

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You get this weird gut feeling about it.

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You trust them less because of it.

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You grew up in Perth, Australia.

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It was, I guess, a really isolated town.

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I don't know.

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Perth is, I'm pretty sure, the most geographically isolated city in the world.

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Yeah.

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Just furthest from anything.

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It's just literally the middle of nowhere.

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So that's where you started your agency.

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That's where I live.

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Yeah.

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What is building?

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I mean, we're all connected online, but does it, does it change you as an entrepreneur when you build in a city that is physically isolated from everywhere else?

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You don't have proximity to the people that could help you in real life.

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Yeah, your environment definitely influences who you become.

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And I always try and optimize my environment to be the best that I can.

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I think the first thing that it did for me was, and this isn't a good thing, it kind of set limitations on my own mindset of what's possible.

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And because it's just very small.

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And then the other thing with Australia, not just Perth, but Australia in general, is this, do you know what tall poppy syndrome is?

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Yeah.

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So for those that don't know, I don't know if this is a common term in the US.

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Tall poppy syndrome is as soon as someone does well, other people try and take them down.

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Super common in Australia.

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It's starting to go away now, but it's still pretty common and prevalent.

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So whenever anyone does well, it's very common for Australians to kind of drag them back out.

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You just don't get that in the US.

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You guys are super encouraged people.

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And then-

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I'll give you a perfect example.

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I just posted on my Instagram story an hour ago.

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I was just going for a run down Miami Beach and seeing all these, I don't know what it was, all this little river laneway thing and all these houses with yachts parked out the front.

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And I'm like, man, I'm so poor.

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You just don't get that in not where I'm from in Perth.

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And your eye is just open to, oh, that's possible.

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But driving around little Scarborough and Perth where I'm from, you just don't see it.

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And your brain will just make up stories in your head and agree with it with the evidence that's available to it.

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And so if I was only in Perth and the only evidence that's available to me is what other people in Perth have achieved, then I kind of just limit myself to that, kind of like a goldfish in a fishbowl can't see beyond it.

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00:13:18.596 --> 00:13:20.437
Whereas traveling to, like, I love Miami.

218
00:13:20.457 --> 00:13:22.918
Like, if I was to move anywhere else in the world, it would be Miami.

219
00:13:22.958 --> 00:13:23.738
I really like it here.

220
00:13:24.098 --> 00:13:29.760
It's chilled like Perth is, but there's so much money and success and achievement and drive.

221
00:13:30.021 --> 00:13:35.463
I'm sure there's some other things like it's very, like, very visually flashy, which can be a negative thing.

222
00:13:37.206 --> 00:13:42.749
Being able to see what other people have achieved financially, visually, that's very, very driving.

223
00:13:43.170 --> 00:13:48.213
You've been successful in spite of the fact that you grew up in, you know, quote unquote, small town.

224
00:13:48.273 --> 00:13:53.316
I don't even know how big Perth is, and I'm sure people are going to hit on me for calling it a small town in this podcast.

225
00:13:53.336 --> 00:13:55.117
But it's not New York.

226
00:13:55.157 --> 00:13:55.937
It's not Miami.

227
00:13:56.317 --> 00:13:56.598
So...

228
00:13:57.458 --> 00:13:58.559
What's your advice to somebody?

229
00:13:58.579 --> 00:14:03.241
Because I think that tall poppy syndrome, it does happen in the U.S.

230
00:14:03.542 --> 00:14:10.526
It happens probably more in other countries where entrepreneurship is not as praised as it is in the U.S.

231
00:14:11.266 --> 00:14:18.210
But I think that the places where it does happen, it's in the small town in the U.S.

232
00:14:18.751 --> 00:14:25.975
I don't think it happens as much in New York or SF or Miami where achievement and aspiration is...

233
00:14:28.893 --> 00:14:36.881
It's kind of like everybody expects people to be going for more and to be trying and building and failing and succeed.

234
00:14:36.901 --> 00:14:43.288
Like that's the de facto mindset, because if you aren't doing that, you can't really afford to live in those cities.

235
00:14:43.708 --> 00:14:50.715
Like you can't be lazy and apathetic and really be living a great life in Miami or New York.

236
00:14:50.836 --> 00:14:52.077
Yeah, well, to be honest, like,

237
00:14:53.302 --> 00:14:56.604
Obviously, there's a sliding scale of how driven I've been.

238
00:14:57.164 --> 00:15:06.610
I'd say I've definitely been sliding more aggressively on the driven side since my first trip to the US back in, I think it was October of last year.

239
00:15:07.211 --> 00:15:11.714
Because up until then, we were coasting around half a million dollars a year.

240
00:15:11.774 --> 00:15:13.275
And to be honest, I was very comfortable there.

241
00:15:13.615 --> 00:15:16.237
Because in Australia, and particularly in Perth, that's a lot of money.

242
00:15:17.397 --> 00:15:20.099
If you place me on the bell curve, I'm pretty far to the right.

243
00:15:21.140 --> 00:15:21.400
But...

244
00:15:22.374 --> 00:15:24.396
Dude, I remember the first time I got to Miami.

245
00:15:24.436 --> 00:15:26.137
This is going to sound super vain, by the way.

246
00:15:27.718 --> 00:15:30.300
I got to Miami with my girlfriend, Tanisha.

247
00:15:30.621 --> 00:15:32.382
We checked into the hotel at midnight.

248
00:15:33.042 --> 00:15:37.106
I stepped out on the balcony, just heard two V12 engines downstairs.

249
00:15:37.646 --> 00:15:40.749
I'm like, man, there's two Aventadors downstairs.

250
00:15:41.509 --> 00:15:43.050
I only have an Audi R8 right now.

251
00:15:43.070 --> 00:15:43.971
That's barely a Super.

252
00:15:43.991 --> 00:15:44.712
It's a nice car, though.

253
00:15:45.252 --> 00:15:45.933
It is a nice car.

254
00:15:46.193 --> 00:15:48.375
It sounds like it's a V10 to change the exhaust, which I've done.

255
00:15:49.020 --> 00:15:52.704
But just looking around, I was like, people are capable of achieving.

256
00:15:52.764 --> 00:15:54.046
This is so common here.

257
00:15:54.706 --> 00:15:58.691
And that was actually the first month we hit a million, a month, actually.

258
00:15:59.352 --> 00:16:04.397
So the story was, we got to Miami and I went to Jeremy Haynes' Inner Circle Mastermind.

259
00:16:05.298 --> 00:16:07.860
And I just realized, I was like, man, you got way too comfortable.

260
00:16:08.080 --> 00:16:13.383
Like, all you have to do to make more money is spend more on ads and hire more sales reps. Why are you overcomplicating?

261
00:16:13.403 --> 00:16:17.246
You've been stuck at half a million dollars a month for like three or four months now.

262
00:16:17.286 --> 00:16:18.226
Why are you not growing?

263
00:16:18.246 --> 00:16:19.387
You know exactly what to do.

264
00:16:19.687 --> 00:16:20.428
You just got comfortable.

265
00:16:20.448 --> 00:16:22.629
I just got comfortable because on turf, I was making a lot of money.

266
00:16:22.649 --> 00:16:23.149
Then I got here.

267
00:16:23.170 --> 00:16:24.650
I'm like, oh, this is nothing.

268
00:16:25.051 --> 00:16:26.492
There's so much more potential.

269
00:16:27.312 --> 00:16:27.712
And I...

270
00:16:28.938 --> 00:16:31.860
I actually, I got on the phone with Tim, who at the time, he was my head of sales.

271
00:16:31.960 --> 00:16:32.901
Now he's my COO.

272
00:16:33.081 --> 00:16:33.781
He's my best mate too.

273
00:16:34.562 --> 00:16:40.366
And he's like, oh yeah, our run rate for this month is, the sales reps just came out of the gate swinging the first month of October.

274
00:16:40.806 --> 00:16:42.707
He's like, just so you know, our run rate's like 9.50.

275
00:16:44.201 --> 00:16:49.485
like 950,000, I was like, dude, if we just gas this a little bit, we can hit a mill.

276
00:16:49.825 --> 00:16:52.207
And then the other thing we can do is one, two things.

277
00:16:52.428 --> 00:16:56.931
One, I can say I did it before I was 30 because I was going to turn 30 in November the month afterwards.

278
00:16:57.552 --> 00:17:01.114
And then two, we started this, we call it the with you bull run.

279
00:17:01.194 --> 00:17:04.437
Like when we really started growing, it started in October of 2024.

280
00:17:04.677 --> 00:17:09.001
And so I was like, dude, if we do it this month, we can say we like fought, we hit a mill.

281
00:17:09.601 --> 00:17:13.645
We went from $25,000 a month to a million in 12 months.

282
00:17:13.885 --> 00:17:15.066
We have to do it this month.

283
00:17:15.127 --> 00:17:16.468
There's 22 working days.

284
00:17:16.568 --> 00:17:19.030
Next month is 19 working days, but we have to do it this month.

285
00:17:20.852 --> 00:17:23.815
I just ran a webinar, spent on ads, and we hit it.

286
00:17:23.835 --> 00:17:25.917
We hit like 1.1 million or something like that.

287
00:17:25.977 --> 00:17:30.462
How important is it to travel as an entrepreneur?

288
00:17:31.198 --> 00:17:41.452
Well, in my instance, it has opened my eyes to new possibilities and reshaped beliefs so that they weren't limited by the geography that I just had in Perth.

289
00:17:42.438 --> 00:17:45.639
Um, I think it can be a distraction from time to time.

290
00:17:45.699 --> 00:17:46.279
Absolutely.

291
00:17:46.819 --> 00:17:49.780
I actually really don't like holidays very much, but I like traveling.

292
00:17:50.180 --> 00:17:52.781
Like I like traveling and seeing other cities.

293
00:17:52.921 --> 00:17:54.321
I don't like touristy stuff though.

294
00:17:54.681 --> 00:17:58.542
Charlie, my PR guy found out afterwards because like, we were like going around London.

295
00:17:58.823 --> 00:18:00.243
He's showing me all these sites.

296
00:18:00.303 --> 00:18:03.164
Then like the week after, I'm like, yeah, I don't really care for touristy stuff.

297
00:18:03.744 --> 00:18:06.185
It's like, you could have told me that last week.

298
00:18:06.765 --> 00:18:10.806
So everything you're talking about was sort of expanding what you think is possible.

299
00:18:11.646 --> 00:18:16.789
I've experienced that my own way because I mean, I grew up in Canada, was in Toronto, which is not a small city by any.

300
00:18:16.809 --> 00:18:17.589
That's the accent I was hearing.

301
00:18:17.709 --> 00:18:18.349
That's Canadian.

302
00:18:18.910 --> 00:18:20.471
It's not like super Canadian.

303
00:18:20.491 --> 00:18:20.891
No, it's not.

304
00:18:20.911 --> 00:18:22.031
You've been here a while, right?

305
00:18:22.131 --> 00:18:22.692
Exactly.

306
00:18:23.112 --> 00:18:31.936
And, but I was in a much smaller city growing up and, and then moved back to Toronto, but then moved back, moved down to Miami about seven-ish years ago.

307
00:18:32.637 --> 00:18:34.618
And then you see what's possible.

308
00:18:35.298 --> 00:18:38.663
And then your ceiling about what you think you can accomplish, it doesn't exist.

309
00:18:38.703 --> 00:18:39.604
It just erases.

310
00:18:40.145 --> 00:18:44.892
Of course, because down the street, I remember I moved in to Fort Lauderdale and now we're down in Miami.

311
00:18:44.932 --> 00:18:49.559
But when I first was in Fort Lauderdale and down the street was a guy who sold the company for half a billion dollars.

312
00:18:50.380 --> 00:18:51.761
And I was doing pretty good for myself.

313
00:18:51.781 --> 00:18:54.102
And I'm like, I'm not doing like that well.

314
00:18:54.622 --> 00:18:58.084
So then your perception, like your whole reality shifts.

315
00:18:58.204 --> 00:18:59.124
Changes, yeah.

316
00:18:59.184 --> 00:19:00.045
Changes completely.

317
00:19:00.605 --> 00:19:04.167
And you did this in a much more meaningful way.

318
00:19:05.607 --> 00:19:06.908
You changed your identity.

319
00:19:07.148 --> 00:19:12.610
And I think you've changed, now that I'm sort of understanding your story, you've changed your identity multiple times through your career.

320
00:19:13.331 --> 00:19:15.292
And I think that, I think you have to.

321
00:19:16.072 --> 00:19:22.875
So I want to talk about like how you change your identity because you did it in what I think is a very extreme but meaningful way.

322
00:19:23.275 --> 00:19:29.518
Before I talk about what you've gone through with drinking by changing your Instagram handle, why you did it.

323
00:19:31.119 --> 00:19:32.860
I want to understand what the back cave is.

324
00:19:33.492 --> 00:19:47.997
The bigger question there is the identity shift, which by the way, my favorite question, because I actually did a talk at one of our member summits about how changing your identity is like this cheat code to just like hitting goals one after the other, one after the other, one after the other.

325
00:19:48.657 --> 00:19:53.879
And I gave a speech, well, not a speech, I suppose, like a workshop to our members about how to do this.

326
00:19:54.399 --> 00:20:02.082
And so the basic premise behind the Batcave, which is just one small part of...

327
00:20:02.893 --> 00:20:23.896
everything and changing my identity is that the human brain will just behave in a way to prove that you're correct in your view of the world and so there's this concept called like naive realism which is is very uncommon for you or i or any humans to go through life assuming that our view of the world and how it works is incorrect we generally just had to float through life thinking

328
00:20:24.497 --> 00:20:41.408
we're right and we're objective it's why people like on the comments on my eyes that like bernie's a scam artist i had to stop and think like well with the evidence that this person has and every and them just connecting the dots i look like a scam artist can i really be that mad at them right and so one of the strongest ways to change your environment

329
00:20:42.188 --> 00:20:45.030
So change your identity is the environment that you're in.

330
00:20:45.590 --> 00:20:48.792
There's other things you can do, like the uniforms that you wear and things like that.

331
00:20:48.972 --> 00:20:49.912
The number one's environment.

332
00:20:50.253 --> 00:20:53.074
So I used to drink heavily because I came from nightlife.

333
00:20:53.134 --> 00:20:56.796
And that environment just means I get free alcohol all the time.

334
00:20:56.836 --> 00:20:59.358
And then when I left nightlife, I was making good money.

335
00:20:59.378 --> 00:21:02.159
And so that just meant I couldn't just out drink my bank account anymore.

336
00:21:02.279 --> 00:21:03.720
I actually had decent cash flow.

337
00:21:04.281 --> 00:21:04.701
And so...

338
00:21:06.000 --> 00:21:08.782
It was around May of 2025.

339
00:21:09.162 --> 00:21:10.903
I was drinking a lot.

340
00:21:11.883 --> 00:21:19.147
I was going through some other stuff as well, but I was having a cigar on my balcony and I was like, all right, you're starting to make really good money now.

341
00:21:19.868 --> 00:21:21.388
You're not going to be able to out drink this.

342
00:21:22.669 --> 00:21:23.830
This has gone one of two ways.

343
00:21:23.970 --> 00:21:29.833
Either one, you keep doing this and you know where that trend line ends and it's not a good spot.

344
00:21:29.853 --> 00:21:34.816
Or option B is if you want, you could literally try and become Batman.

345
00:21:34.836 --> 00:21:34.976
Yeah.

346
00:21:36.105 --> 00:21:41.510
Because what man, if they're truly honest with themselves, if they look deep down in their soul, doesn't want to be Batman.

347
00:21:43.712 --> 00:21:50.037
And so I started, the first thing I did was I texted Zach, who's, he's my full-time trainer now, but he wasn't at the time.

348
00:21:50.518 --> 00:21:52.420
I texted him and go, oh, I got a weird idea.

349
00:21:54.126 --> 00:21:55.747
I want to try and become Batman.

350
00:21:56.407 --> 00:21:57.708
Do you want to be a full-time trainer?

351
00:21:57.728 --> 00:22:02.432
I'll make you a staff member and you'll get a full-time salary, super, leave, all that stuff.

352
00:22:02.452 --> 00:22:06.435
He goes, hang on, I'm about to take a group boxing for fitness class.

353
00:22:06.455 --> 00:22:07.756
I'll call you in 45 minutes.

354
00:22:08.276 --> 00:22:08.717
Calls me back.

355
00:22:08.737 --> 00:22:09.277
He goes, are you serious?

356
00:22:09.297 --> 00:22:10.038
I'm like, yeah, let's do it.

357
00:22:10.838 --> 00:22:13.981
At first, what we were going to do was just train out of a couple of different gyms.

358
00:22:14.101 --> 00:22:16.563
We'd go to this gym for MMA, this gym for weights, whatever.

359
00:22:17.324 --> 00:22:19.025
But then I did the math and I was like, hang on.

360
00:22:19.205 --> 00:22:26.331
If I want to train twice a day, six days a week, it's 20 minutes to the gym in the morning, 20 minutes back, 20 minutes to another gym in the morning, afternoon, 20 minutes back.

361
00:22:26.351 --> 00:22:26.572
That's...

362
00:22:27.526 --> 00:22:28.867
80 minutes a day.

363
00:22:28.967 --> 00:22:32.951
If you extrapolate that over a full calendar month, I think it was like 46 hours of travel.

364
00:22:33.711 --> 00:22:38.135
And I was, after I calculated like how much I make an hour, I'm like, I think I should just build my own gym.

365
00:22:39.056 --> 00:22:44.801
And then, so I started going on, admittedly, chat GPT and just asking for quotes of like, how much would it cost to build a gym?

366
00:22:44.821 --> 00:22:47.343
And I was like, oh, that's way less than I thought it would be.

367
00:22:48.356 --> 00:22:52.198
And our lease was about to expire on our, at the time, current office.

368
00:22:52.858 --> 00:22:59.201
And so I was like, hang on, should I just get an office attached to a warehouse, paint it black, and then build a Batcave?

369
00:22:59.561 --> 00:23:00.801
Actually build a real Batcave.

370
00:23:00.821 --> 00:23:01.682
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

371
00:23:01.822 --> 00:23:03.322
And so that's what it is.

372
00:23:03.822 --> 00:23:05.503
So in the morning, I get up at five.

373
00:23:05.703 --> 00:23:06.684
I have an ice bath.

374
00:23:07.244 --> 00:23:08.824
I get to the Batcave.

375
00:23:08.925 --> 00:23:10.385
It's seven minutes from where I live.

376
00:23:10.425 --> 00:23:11.165
I get there at 5.30.

377
00:23:11.726 --> 00:23:12.726
Zach gets there at six.

378
00:23:12.746 --> 00:23:14.327
We'll train from six to 7.30.

379
00:23:14.787 --> 00:23:15.567
I turn around.

380
00:23:15.627 --> 00:23:16.688
My desk is there.

381
00:23:17.488 --> 00:23:23.590
I work until usually about two, turn around again, and then I train again in the afternoon, and then I go home.

382
00:23:23.950 --> 00:23:28.312
Was there anything outside of you just being more successful?

383
00:23:28.352 --> 00:23:43.097
Was there any event or thing that happened that made you realize that I actually do need an identity shift from nightlife, partying, to serious entrepreneur?

384
00:23:43.117 --> 00:23:46.218
Because the issue with success is like,

385
00:23:47.537 --> 00:23:53.839
if you achieve it, even if you have all these personality flaws, like I don't think, you know, I don't want to hate on people that drink.

386
00:23:53.879 --> 00:23:58.820
I drink too, but I mean, drinking obsessively, there's a slight personality flaw that's causing you to do that.

387
00:23:59.060 --> 00:24:00.041
It's not healthy.

388
00:24:00.061 --> 00:24:01.141
It's not helping you in your career.

389
00:24:01.501 --> 00:24:09.704
But a lot of people, if they're making money and they're still doing it, they don't wake up one morning and they just think, I should just stop doing the one thing that's super fun.

390
00:24:09.724 --> 00:24:10.524
Because even though...

391
00:24:11.424 --> 00:24:12.705
I know it's probably not the best.

392
00:24:12.845 --> 00:24:16.267
I'm still successful even while I'm doing that thing.

393
00:24:16.808 --> 00:24:22.972
So was there like a life event or did somebody say something or was it just you really woke up and you're like, this is not who I want to be anymore?

394
00:24:22.992 --> 00:24:29.636
It was kind of like that, but it was also just I was so many different instances over the course of four or five years.

395
00:24:29.656 --> 00:24:30.837
Like I wanted to quit for five.

396
00:24:31.237 --> 00:24:42.601
four or five years and I tried multiple different times and just failed, but I always tried it the shallow way of, I'm going to make a to-do list and the to-do list is don't drink today and I'm going to tick it.

397
00:24:42.641 --> 00:24:44.782
It's like, that doesn't work right.

398
00:24:44.822 --> 00:24:48.343
I think the longest I went once was two months.

399
00:24:48.864 --> 00:24:52.085
I think that was the longest maybe, maybe less, 45 days or something like that.

400
00:24:52.425 --> 00:24:56.687
But it was just a number of different things over, like for example, you mentioned the Instagram handle change.

401
00:24:57.187 --> 00:24:57.607
Because...

402
00:24:58.959 --> 00:25:03.363
From age 18 to, I think I quit DJing when I was 23 or 24.

403
00:25:03.803 --> 00:25:09.688
From age 18 to 23 or 24, my entire identity was Wilco, which was my DJ name.

404
00:25:10.249 --> 00:25:13.752
And my whole brand was just drinking and girls and partying.

405
00:25:14.771 --> 00:25:16.272
And I got a lot of attention because of that.

406
00:25:16.512 --> 00:25:19.054
And so for half a decade, it was grained into me.

407
00:25:19.134 --> 00:25:23.457
If you drink a lot, people will pay attention to you and think you're charming and charismatic and funny.

408
00:25:23.677 --> 00:25:24.258
Probably not.

409
00:25:24.718 --> 00:25:29.621
But in my drunken stupor and hangovers, I thought I was charming, funny and charismatic.

410
00:25:30.142 --> 00:25:30.322
But-

411
00:25:32.580 --> 00:25:36.082
It was grained into me for half a decade that it's very important that you drink.

412
00:25:36.222 --> 00:25:40.285
This behavior is a successful action in my delusion at the time.

413
00:25:40.765 --> 00:25:42.046
And so I had to let go of that.

414
00:25:42.066 --> 00:25:46.149
So for example, my username used to be, it was like Wilco Enley Charles.

415
00:25:46.169 --> 00:25:48.310
So they were like Wilco but Enley Charles because I'm an Enley Charles.

416
00:25:50.454 --> 00:25:53.295
It took me years to change my Instagram username.

417
00:25:53.656 --> 00:25:59.338
I was actually like in a mastermind with a couple other lads in another business coaching program that I'm in.

418
00:25:59.859 --> 00:26:03.340
And they had to like, I was like, they're like, what's the first thing you would do if you wanted to quit?

419
00:26:03.360 --> 00:26:04.721
I was like, I'd change my Instagram username.

420
00:26:04.741 --> 00:26:05.502
They're like, do it now.

421
00:26:05.522 --> 00:26:05.842
I was like,

422
00:26:07.412 --> 00:26:08.132
I'll do it later.

423
00:26:08.893 --> 00:26:15.975
I just like didn't want to do it because my entire identity was tied to, it's very important that you drink and this is your identity.

424
00:26:15.995 --> 00:26:17.015
It was like letting go of that.

425
00:26:17.315 --> 00:26:18.695
And then I got a sobriety coach.

426
00:26:19.495 --> 00:26:22.396
And then the other thing was, he was actually a member of the Withy program.

427
00:26:22.976 --> 00:26:24.277
I went to his funnel.

428
00:26:24.937 --> 00:26:30.498
I went to book a call and then close the tab and then book a call and then close the tab.

429
00:26:30.558 --> 00:26:34.519
I did that like six times for like every, like all morning until like lunchtime.

430
00:26:34.559 --> 00:26:35.880
And then I finally booked the call.

431
00:26:36.560 --> 00:26:41.285
Because booking that call was like an admission that I had a problem.

432
00:26:42.126 --> 00:26:44.489
Because up until then, in my own head, I didn't have a problem.

433
00:26:45.209 --> 00:26:47.252
But then what he actually...

434
00:26:47.352 --> 00:26:51.596
There was a number of things we did to let go of the old identity.

435
00:26:51.656 --> 00:26:57.443
One of the things I had to do was journal to my former self and write letters to myself of like...

436
00:26:58.414 --> 00:27:01.676
Like why we're not doing this anymore and what we're doing instead.

437
00:27:02.036 --> 00:27:04.578
It was really like this subconscious journaling.

438
00:27:04.598 --> 00:27:08.521
It was really interesting to like let go of this old version of me.

439
00:27:09.362 --> 00:27:10.162
And how was that?

440
00:27:10.182 --> 00:27:11.143
Was it hard to do?

441
00:27:11.523 --> 00:27:18.468
It was odd because it was like, the other thing I had to do was I had to write it with my left hand.

442
00:27:19.308 --> 00:27:21.470
I can't remember why, but I think it was something about like the subconscious.

443
00:27:21.490 --> 00:27:22.931
And you're always like spelling mistakes.

444
00:27:22.951 --> 00:27:24.832
Like my body was trying to reject it.

445
00:27:24.852 --> 00:27:25.853
It was really odd.

446
00:27:26.553 --> 00:27:27.314
It was really weird.

447
00:27:27.334 --> 00:27:27.434
Yeah.

448
00:27:28.636 --> 00:27:53.697
when you eventually you finally did work with the sobriety coach i'm assuming yeah so you finally went through with that yeah the funniest thing was um because i nailed the identity thing when i was working with conrad as the addiction coach i think i i paid up front for i piffed for like a 90-day program but after three weeks i was like bro not gonna lie i think we've nailed this i don't think we need to meet next week

449
00:27:54.992 --> 00:27:57.614
the weeks after he was texting me like, hey, do you want to use the other sessions?

450
00:27:57.654 --> 00:27:59.376
I was like, no, man, I think we're all good.

451
00:27:59.436 --> 00:28:00.076
We just nailed it.

452
00:28:00.356 --> 00:28:02.458
Once I did the identity shift, it was done.

453
00:28:02.558 --> 00:28:03.138
I've never had it.

454
00:28:03.178 --> 00:28:04.339
It was like a switch to flip.

455
00:28:04.379 --> 00:28:04.759
That was it.

456
00:28:05.040 --> 00:28:05.280
Yeah.

457
00:28:05.780 --> 00:28:07.421
Yeah, and there was a number of other things I did as well.

458
00:28:07.461 --> 00:28:11.845
Like one of the, this sounds so trivial and silly, but...

459
00:28:12.765 --> 00:28:16.869
We talked about environment change and then we talked about uniform as well, right?

460
00:28:17.329 --> 00:28:19.591
I just got rid of my old wardrobe.

461
00:28:19.751 --> 00:28:20.572
I went clothes shopping.

462
00:28:20.592 --> 00:28:24.035
I just bought like 12 new black shirts that were a different material and a belt.

463
00:28:24.695 --> 00:28:28.518
And all I did every morning was just wear a different shirt, tuck my shirt and wear a belt.

464
00:28:28.638 --> 00:28:30.800
It just felt like I was wearing a different uniform.

465
00:28:31.101 --> 00:28:32.362
Prior to that, I just never wore belts.

466
00:28:32.642 --> 00:28:33.282
Super trivial.

467
00:28:33.563 --> 00:28:36.005
Just felt like I was putting on a different uniform in the morning.

468
00:28:36.025 --> 00:28:36.505
Yeah.

469
00:28:36.625 --> 00:28:42.891
What's your advice to somebody who's trying to figure out if they should kill an identity that's not serving them anymore?

470
00:28:43.511 --> 00:28:45.453
Like, what's the checklist that they should go through?

471
00:28:45.893 --> 00:29:00.346
One really simple journaling prompt that helped me was at the end of the day, or in the morning if you wake up with a hangover, just write down a journal prompt, which is, if I repeated my actions for the last 24 hours for the next 10 years, where would I end up?

472
00:29:00.887 --> 00:29:01.828
And do I like it here?

473
00:29:02.501 --> 00:29:05.544
That's a brutally honest question.

474
00:29:06.545 --> 00:29:07.426
That's not comfortable.

475
00:29:08.888 --> 00:29:14.513
What would you say to somebody right now who knows they need to let go of an old version of themselves, but they can't?

476
00:29:15.254 --> 00:29:23.642
You'll only really change when the pain of staying where you are outweighs the pain of changing.

477
00:29:24.223 --> 00:29:25.524
And there's two ways you can get there.

478
00:29:26.333 --> 00:29:33.337
Number one, and this is why I'm being careful with my answer, is maybe you haven't hit rock bottom yet and you haven't felt that pain.

479
00:29:34.158 --> 00:29:40.281
Like sometimes people just like really got to feel that pain and be like, absolutely this can never happen again.

480
00:29:40.581 --> 00:29:44.283
But again, trying to be careful with my answers because that could be very bad for some people.

481
00:29:44.584 --> 00:29:47.645
It's difficult because rock bottom is the greatest teacher.

482
00:29:48.166 --> 00:29:48.346
Yeah.

483
00:29:48.686 --> 00:29:49.246
It really is.

484
00:29:50.447 --> 00:29:53.409
but you never want somebody to hit rock bottom.

485
00:29:53.989 --> 00:29:56.790
So that's the difficult part about this, right?

486
00:29:56.810 --> 00:30:01.493
So you know that if that person hit rock bottom and they survived through it,

487
00:30:02.525 --> 00:30:07.608
that person on the other side of rock bottom would be a better person because they'd see what...

488
00:30:08.049 --> 00:30:15.734
Instead of journaling out what the next 10 years of their life look like if they kept this habit going, this destructive habit, they'd live it.

489
00:30:16.374 --> 00:30:18.715
And lived experience is the most powerful teacher ever.

490
00:30:19.576 --> 00:30:25.240
But the issue is that some people don't survive that rock bottom, so you don't want to send anybody there.

491
00:30:25.860 --> 00:30:28.582
So I think the journaling is a really smart answer.

492
00:30:28.990 --> 00:30:37.335
Yeah, because that was going to be my second part, which is if you can journal hard enough and really sit with that so that it becomes perhaps not real, pretty close to it.

493
00:30:38.356 --> 00:30:41.518
And then one more thing, I actually learned this from a lot of different coaches.

494
00:30:42.578 --> 00:30:44.299
Cameron Norsworth is my flow coach.

495
00:30:44.479 --> 00:30:46.080
Didn't know you get a PhD in flow.

496
00:30:46.120 --> 00:30:46.741
Did you know that?

497
00:30:47.281 --> 00:30:49.042
Yeah, he has one.

498
00:30:50.043 --> 00:30:53.505
He taught me process goals, performance goals, and outcome goals.

499
00:30:54.660 --> 00:30:59.806
So it's much easier to achieve a flow state when you just focus on the process, just the next step.

500
00:31:00.087 --> 00:31:04.572
When you focus on the outcome, this big, hairy, audacious goal becomes very, very overwhelming.

501
00:31:05.133 --> 00:31:09.738
And so the question that I'll ask is like, what's one small thing you could do?

502
00:31:11.107 --> 00:31:14.009
today that just, it's like a small little win.

503
00:31:14.610 --> 00:31:16.931
And then you're just trying to stack these tiny little wins.

504
00:31:17.231 --> 00:31:20.153
Like for example, this is a financial example.

505
00:31:20.193 --> 00:31:30.601
Like when I was in all of that debt, the process that I focused on was I made a forecast of like what revenue looks like and all my different account expenses look like on a perfect month where we're profitable.

506
00:31:31.041 --> 00:31:37.406
And then literally every single morning at 8am, I just looked at it and just updated the values and go, yep, still on track.

507
00:31:37.426 --> 00:31:39.867
Just literally every single day an alarm went off at 8am saying,

508
00:31:41.340 --> 00:31:44.562
And it was just like every single day, every single day, just that.

509
00:31:44.642 --> 00:31:45.562
That was literally all I did.

510
00:31:46.503 --> 00:31:48.544
Let's talk about that year.

511
00:31:50.225 --> 00:31:54.007
I also want to understand the year that we're sort of alluding to.

512
00:31:54.047 --> 00:31:56.869
You were a quarter of a million dollars in debt to the tax office.

513
00:31:57.369 --> 00:31:59.130
You had 60K owed on Amex.

514
00:31:59.511 --> 00:32:04.814
You had 20K owed or unpaid on super, which for people who don't know, it's, it's, it's

515
00:32:06.139 --> 00:32:06.400
Yeah.

516
00:32:06.440 --> 00:32:09.264
Just like, I hadn't been paying my own retirement fund essentially.

517
00:32:09.284 --> 00:32:10.346
Which is an Australian?

518
00:32:10.506 --> 00:32:10.687
Yeah.

519
00:32:10.727 --> 00:32:11.568
Australian thing.

520
00:32:11.969 --> 00:32:12.951
When was this year?

521
00:32:12.971 --> 00:32:18.440
It wasn't, was it close to when you were going through this, this identity shift?

522
00:32:18.933 --> 00:32:19.934
No, it was before it.

523
00:32:20.034 --> 00:32:25.700
So this was- Oh, so you had this really bad year that you actually survived while you were still drinking I was still drinking and hungover.

524
00:32:25.760 --> 00:32:27.902
I still just ripped my way through it.

525
00:32:28.322 --> 00:32:30.104
This was late 2023, Fruita, late 2024.

526
00:32:30.844 --> 00:32:30.965
So-

527
00:32:40.119 --> 00:32:43.340
The mistake that I made was just overhiring employees.

528
00:32:43.601 --> 00:32:57.567
And so I learned at the end of this, I wish my accountant told me sooner, wages to revenue ratio, which is basically in a typical service-based business, usually your wages and salaries line should be no more than like one third of your revenue.

529
00:32:57.607 --> 00:33:01.129
So if you're doing, we were doing 100K a month on average in revenue.

530
00:33:02.129 --> 00:33:05.033
Should have been doing like $33,000 a month in wages and salaries.

531
00:33:05.494 --> 00:33:07.196
Mine was like $67,000.

532
00:33:07.536 --> 00:33:09.759
So I had like twice as many people as I needed.

533
00:33:10.120 --> 00:33:11.401
I think we went down from...

534
00:33:11.642 --> 00:33:13.684
I had a nightmare about this last night, actually.

535
00:33:13.764 --> 00:33:15.206
That's not a common thing, by the way.

536
00:33:16.168 --> 00:33:19.752
For whatever reason, last night I had a nightmare about this period of my life.

537
00:33:20.613 --> 00:33:28.158
And we went from 11 team members down to six because I had to make a bunch of people redundant.

538
00:33:28.358 --> 00:33:30.980
I think I had to do all of that in the same month.

539
00:33:31.060 --> 00:33:35.643
It was just like literally every single team meeting, it was just like one less person that I had to explain why they weren't there anymore.

540
00:33:35.843 --> 00:33:37.484
And it was because you hired too many.

541
00:33:37.845 --> 00:33:41.428
You had massive amounts of debt that you had to pay off, like personal debt.

542
00:33:41.648 --> 00:33:42.909
It was company debt, yeah.

543
00:33:43.289 --> 00:33:45.211
So what I was doing was I never missed payroll.

544
00:33:45.271 --> 00:33:47.493
I just wouldn't be able to live with myself if I missed payroll.

545
00:33:47.973 --> 00:33:51.356
But I didn't mind if the government had to wait on my taxes for a little bit.

546
00:33:51.456 --> 00:33:54.798
And so I just used them as a, at the time, interest-free line of credit.

547
00:33:54.919 --> 00:33:56.360
They attacked on interest eventually.

548
00:33:56.580 --> 00:33:57.060
And penalties.

549
00:33:57.080 --> 00:33:58.902
Leah, I understand, Russo.

550
00:33:59.222 --> 00:34:00.743
Future Brandon dealt with that.

551
00:34:01.083 --> 00:34:02.764
We just wanted to make payroll on Monday.

552
00:34:02.784 --> 00:34:03.304
You know what's funny?

553
00:34:03.324 --> 00:34:04.965
You're not the first person that's ever told me that.

554
00:34:05.525 --> 00:34:10.288
Like so many entrepreneurs have said like, so we didn't pay tax for five years.

555
00:34:10.308 --> 00:34:13.629
Yeah, dude, I'm like- And by the way, this is not financial advice.

556
00:34:13.649 --> 00:34:15.050
This is not financial advice.

557
00:34:15.450 --> 00:34:23.214
But like, yeah, because I've been pretty public about this story, the number of people I've had privately message me and say, yeah, I'm in a similar situation, sometimes worse.

558
00:34:23.554 --> 00:34:28.497
Because you think I can make more money, even if there's interest in penalties, I can make more money on that cash than paying to the government.

559
00:34:30.138 --> 00:34:41.710
But to be honest, and I've said this before, and this again is not financial advice, what kind of fully grown adult hasn't at some stage in their life owed hundreds of thousands of dollars to a government agency?

560
00:34:41.770 --> 00:34:43.912
I think it's a formative life event.

561
00:34:43.952 --> 00:34:45.294
I think you just have to go through that.

562
00:34:45.454 --> 00:34:49.658
Like what, you just pay your taxes on time, every time, like a pussy?

563
00:34:50.379 --> 00:34:52.019
You just do what you're told all the time.

564
00:34:52.720 --> 00:34:55.220
Life at the Speed of Play is a success story partner.

565
00:34:55.260 --> 00:34:58.221
Now, this is a book by Mark Pincus, the guy who founded Zynga.

566
00:34:58.241 --> 00:34:59.402
I've actually had him on the show.

567
00:34:59.702 --> 00:35:05.483
I met him in person and Reid Hoffman wrote the foreword, calling him one of the best idea people in Silicon Valley.

568
00:35:05.683 --> 00:35:09.344
The book is Life at the Speed of Play, Launch Products People Love.

569
00:35:09.424 --> 00:35:10.845
About 170 pages.

570
00:35:11.105 --> 00:35:12.605
It's already a national bestseller.

571
00:35:12.885 --> 00:35:19.087
It's his framework for figuring out whether an idea is actually worth going after before you put serious time and money into it.

572
00:35:19.287 --> 00:35:20.788
not theory, the way he actually does it.

573
00:35:20.868 --> 00:35:22.909
And he's repeatedly built successful businesses.

574
00:35:23.189 --> 00:35:24.950
On top of that, you can read it in a weekend.

575
00:35:25.130 --> 00:35:28.192
It can change your entire life and give you the right direction if you're an entrepreneur.

576
00:35:28.212 --> 00:35:34.855
So right now, if you go to getmarksbook.com slash success, you get two copies for $32, that's $16 each.

577
00:35:35.236 --> 00:35:41.579
Mark is paying for the second copy himself because he wants you to give it to somebody, a friend who's been sitting on an idea, someone who needs to push, whoever.

578
00:35:41.839 --> 00:35:44.460
That's getmarksbook.com slash success.

579
00:35:44.841 --> 00:35:47.322
Mark with a K, buy one, second one's free.

580
00:35:47.562 --> 00:35:49.364
My Fitness Pal is a success story partner.

581
00:35:49.545 --> 00:35:50.225
Now, a quick story.

582
00:35:50.245 --> 00:35:52.829
A few weeks ago, I was in the middle of a very heavy recording week.

583
00:35:53.049 --> 00:35:55.131
So five episodes back to back.

584
00:35:55.432 --> 00:35:56.753
By Wednesday, I could feel it.

585
00:35:56.833 --> 00:35:57.815
I felt tired.

586
00:35:57.995 --> 00:36:03.842
And I pulled up my food log in the My Fitness Pal app, and I could see why I felt tired.

587
00:36:04.042 --> 00:36:05.824
I was heavily under eating.

588
00:36:06.385 --> 00:36:07.806
I was not keeping up with my meals.

589
00:36:08.087 --> 00:36:09.548
My macros were all off.

590
00:36:09.868 --> 00:36:17.635
On weeks like that, staying on top of your fuel and your food and what you eat is the difference between being sharp on episode five and being flat.

591
00:36:17.795 --> 00:36:20.618
And that's the kind of thing you only catch when you're paying attention.

592
00:36:20.798 --> 00:36:24.842
And that's why I keep logging every single meal I eat in the MyFitnessPal app.

593
00:36:24.882 --> 00:36:26.624
It's not because I'm obsessing over numbers.

594
00:36:26.964 --> 00:36:32.389
It's not because I'm trying to diet, because I'm trying to have an awareness about what I eat in the day.

595
00:36:32.629 --> 00:36:35.590
And the app makes it so easy to maintain that awareness.

596
00:36:35.670 --> 00:36:38.392
I can point my camera at a plate with MealScan.

597
00:36:38.732 --> 00:36:42.873
It'll tell me exactly what I'm eating, all my macronutrients, proteins, fats, carbs.

598
00:36:43.074 --> 00:36:44.694
There's an intermittent fasting tracker.

599
00:36:45.134 --> 00:36:48.176
If I want an intermittent fast, it keeps my eating window honest.

600
00:36:48.496 --> 00:36:52.958
And it all syncs with my watch and all of my fitness apps, and it just runs in the background.

601
00:36:53.298 --> 00:36:56.799
See, food is a foundation for energy, sleep, recovery, performance.

602
00:36:57.079 --> 00:36:59.859
It is the one input that you cannot skip.

603
00:37:00.079 --> 00:37:02.540
So do yourself a favor, track what you're eating.

604
00:37:02.900 --> 00:37:06.281
It'll make you feel better, perform better in everything that you do.

605
00:37:06.321 --> 00:37:12.882
Go to podcasts.myfitnesspal.com and use code SCOTT, all uppercase for 50% off MyFitnessPal premium.

606
00:37:13.162 --> 00:37:16.363
That's podcasts.myfitnesspal.com, code SCOTT.

607
00:37:16.683 --> 00:37:18.323
HubSpot is a success story partner.

608
00:37:18.483 --> 00:37:18.663
Now.

609
00:37:18.983 --> 00:37:23.328
Every entrepreneur, founder, CEOs listening right now needs to pay attention.

610
00:37:23.689 --> 00:37:24.429
I have a question for you.

611
00:37:24.730 --> 00:37:32.378
When a buyer asks AI for a solution or a product that your business sells, does your business come up?

612
00:37:32.659 --> 00:37:35.482
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613
00:37:35.802 --> 00:37:49.613
They don't know if their name shows up in any of the AI tools, chat, perplexity, Claude, and by the time they find out, they have lost tons of traffic and tons of deals to someone who did show up.

614
00:37:49.993 --> 00:37:51.514
HubSpot AEO.

615
00:37:52.015 --> 00:37:59.300
It helps you show up in those moments with the right answers that your customers and your buyers are looking for when they go type in a question.

616
00:37:59.541 --> 00:38:03.524
It's before the first click, it's before they fill out some form on your website,

617
00:38:04.024 --> 00:38:07.807
That is the moment that HubSpot AEO is built for.

618
00:38:08.187 --> 00:38:13.891
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619
00:38:14.231 --> 00:38:17.954
They are the agentic customer platform for growing businesses.

620
00:38:18.374 --> 00:38:20.095
You had way too expensive a payroll.

621
00:38:20.696 --> 00:38:22.377
Company owed a ton of money.

622
00:38:23.237 --> 00:38:27.701
You tried to raise money to cover staff salaries, but the investors pulled out.

623
00:38:27.721 --> 00:38:28.021
It's like...

624
00:38:28.321 --> 00:38:29.741
No, that was actually before.

625
00:38:29.981 --> 00:38:32.482
So this was like the start of the whole thing.

626
00:38:32.542 --> 00:38:34.363
So this year was not a good year financially.

627
00:38:34.383 --> 00:38:35.423
No, it wasn't a great year.

628
00:38:35.683 --> 00:38:39.284
Personally, professionally, romantically, everything was going wrong.

629
00:38:39.824 --> 00:38:49.087
So when we first came up with the Whitney program, which is our workshops now, and by the way, I just, I want to, I love this story because so much, you know, this podcast is called Success Story.

630
00:38:49.127 --> 00:38:55.849
And I started it kind of ironically, because I knew that anybody who's built anything meaningful, there's so much shit they've gone through.

631
00:38:57.389 --> 00:39:00.732
And there's a light at the end of the tunnel for every entrepreneur.

632
00:39:00.872 --> 00:39:09.200
But just so that people who are listening understand that when you build something and you're ambitious, even if shit's not going right, you're not the only one this is happening to.

633
00:39:09.240 --> 00:39:10.101
This is uncommon.

634
00:39:10.922 --> 00:39:15.066
Well, yeah, I mean, like, to be quick, but shit not going right is common.

635
00:39:15.886 --> 00:39:16.527
That's the thing.

636
00:39:16.647 --> 00:39:19.470
That it is common and you'll survive and you'll figure it out.

637
00:39:19.490 --> 00:39:20.531
But, I mean...

638
00:39:22.112 --> 00:39:23.853
I feel like entrepreneurship is so lonely.

639
00:39:24.453 --> 00:39:28.416
So when you're going through something like this, some people, and I don't know, I'll ask you too.

640
00:39:28.696 --> 00:39:33.800
Did you have other people that you were talking to that were kind of like de-stressing you?

641
00:39:34.000 --> 00:39:35.942
Because some people, they just deal with this shit on their own.

642
00:39:36.242 --> 00:39:37.463
They can't talk to their team about it.

643
00:39:37.723 --> 00:39:39.504
They don't want to talk to investors about the debt they're in.

644
00:39:39.684 --> 00:39:40.905
They don't talk to their friends about it.

645
00:39:41.125 --> 00:39:42.366
They can't talk to their parents about it.

646
00:39:42.426 --> 00:39:44.568
No, no one are the only people that knew my parents.

647
00:39:45.497 --> 00:39:46.158
no one else knew.

648
00:39:46.298 --> 00:39:47.839
Like I had one of my best mates.

649
00:39:48.039 --> 00:39:52.082
I told him after, he's just like, oh, and he knew all the other stuff that was going on in my life.

650
00:39:52.103 --> 00:39:54.004
He's like, oh, that was happening too?

651
00:39:54.024 --> 00:39:55.045
I was like, yeah.

652
00:39:55.345 --> 00:39:56.526
So it's fine now.

653
00:39:56.987 --> 00:39:58.107
But the investor story.

654
00:39:58.127 --> 00:40:00.269
So this is, this is how it all started, right?

655
00:40:00.329 --> 00:40:02.871
So this was early 2023.

656
00:40:02.891 --> 00:40:02.991
Yeah.

657
00:40:05.033 --> 00:40:11.357
So we just came up with this workshop model and it was like doing really like showing early signs of life.

658
00:40:11.657 --> 00:40:14.158
It was just our downsell, but a lot of people are buying this.

659
00:40:14.779 --> 00:40:16.400
And I was like, I think I want to take a stab at this.

660
00:40:17.330 --> 00:40:22.032
And I was talking to one of my mentors about it and like raising money and investors and all that stuff.

661
00:40:22.412 --> 00:40:24.853
And he verbally said, I would put $50,000 in.

662
00:40:24.893 --> 00:40:26.314
I was like, okay, sick.

663
00:40:26.534 --> 00:40:27.134
All mates in.

664
00:40:27.154 --> 00:40:31.496
I won't say it's that we're actually still, he actually owns 5% of one of my other companies.

665
00:40:31.536 --> 00:40:33.617
We're still on good terms and I'm an investor in one of his.

666
00:40:34.378 --> 00:40:34.758
And, um,

667
00:40:36.163 --> 00:40:37.944
He verbally said he'll put $50,000 in.

668
00:40:37.964 --> 00:40:39.685
So I was like, sick.

669
00:40:40.105 --> 00:40:43.707
I'll hire three people because that will cover those expenses.

670
00:40:44.387 --> 00:40:47.069
And then I found out, so all three of these people started.

671
00:40:47.149 --> 00:40:48.350
Two of them are still with us now.

672
00:40:48.430 --> 00:40:52.292
One of them left a couple months afterwards because it wasn't working out.

673
00:40:52.332 --> 00:40:59.736
But I had Tim, who's now COO, Sophie, who's an ad specialist, is still with us now, and this other person start.

674
00:41:00.176 --> 00:41:01.537
They all start the same Monday morning.

675
00:41:02.552 --> 00:41:10.115
And then my bookkeeper is also, who was meant to be an investor, or he's verbally said he would be, his EA.

676
00:41:11.236 --> 00:41:19.320
And then she told me on Slack, she's like, hey, you know, I won't say his name, isn't going to invest until he sees the business as more profitable.

677
00:41:19.580 --> 00:41:21.241
I went, what?

678
00:41:21.861 --> 00:41:26.083
I was like, I just hired three people.

679
00:41:26.123 --> 00:41:27.744
Again, I was just young and stupid.

680
00:41:27.784 --> 00:41:29.084
I was verbally said yes.

681
00:41:29.885 --> 00:41:30.285
And then...

682
00:41:31.162 --> 00:41:37.266
I'm looking at all three of them in the office going, I think I have to get rid of all of you now before lunchtime.

683
00:41:38.087 --> 00:41:41.729
And so I went to Shay, who's my bookkeeper, she still is now.

684
00:41:42.570 --> 00:41:45.932
And I was like, I'll message you in a bit if we're getting rid of them.

685
00:41:45.972 --> 00:41:47.673
I just need to figure this out and go for a walk.

686
00:41:48.073 --> 00:41:49.114
And I just went for a walk.

687
00:41:49.194 --> 00:41:50.094
I was like, calm myself.

688
00:41:50.114 --> 00:41:53.357
I've never had, still to this day, I've never had so much cortisol flood my body at once.

689
00:41:54.432 --> 00:41:59.536
Went back, messaged Shay, I went, keep them on payroll, take me off of it.

690
00:41:59.576 --> 00:42:01.017
We're doing this with or without him.

691
00:42:02.238 --> 00:42:05.480
And then I was just like, I'm just doing this one way or another.

692
00:42:05.500 --> 00:42:06.261
I'm not getting rid of them.

693
00:42:06.301 --> 00:42:07.482
I'm taking a stab at this thing.

694
00:42:08.122 --> 00:42:11.925
And then, yeah, Tim, it was his first week in sales.

695
00:42:11.945 --> 00:42:13.607
He beat me his first week in sales.

696
00:42:13.627 --> 00:42:15.188
I was like, oh, thank God.

697
00:42:16.775 --> 00:42:18.076
Yeah, he did really, really well.

698
00:42:18.116 --> 00:42:19.437
Sophie did really, really well.

699
00:42:20.058 --> 00:42:25.602
And then that was the start because I was like, I'll just take myself off payroll for a little bit, like when I need to.

700
00:42:26.122 --> 00:42:30.966
And then that was when I was like, I'm just going to use the ATL as like an interest-free, like lighter credit.

701
00:42:32.147 --> 00:42:38.852
How do you keep yourself level-headed when that much shit is hitting the fan at the same time?

702
00:42:39.820 --> 00:42:47.123
For me, it was, what was helpful was breaking things down into small chunks and like process orientated goals.

703
00:42:47.543 --> 00:42:50.644
So the goal for me was just make sure you make payroll on Monday.

704
00:42:50.944 --> 00:42:53.425
So I was always doing math, doing the cashflow forecast.

705
00:42:53.445 --> 00:42:54.965
I was like, am I going to be able to make payroll on Monday?

706
00:42:55.005 --> 00:42:55.605
I'm like, sweet.

707
00:42:56.046 --> 00:43:03.868
But I'll open, I still, to this day, do not check my own mailbox because I have like PTSD of getting letters from the ATO and like the fonts just get bolder and redder.

708
00:43:03.908 --> 00:43:05.869
I still like, I don't have any ATO debt right now.

709
00:43:05.909 --> 00:43:06.989
I still can't open the mailbox.

710
00:43:07.029 --> 00:43:07.590
I just refuse.

711
00:43:07.850 --> 00:43:08.530
Tanisha can do that.

712
00:43:10.077 --> 00:43:15.200
But at the time, it was just, are we going to have enough money in the bank on Monday to make payroll?

713
00:43:15.260 --> 00:43:19.102
I just focused on that and just small, small things.

714
00:43:19.243 --> 00:43:22.304
Absolutely, to be clear, I absolutely could have handled it a lot better.

715
00:43:22.364 --> 00:43:23.265
I just drank a lot.

716
00:43:23.805 --> 00:43:26.147
But we got there in the end.

717
00:43:26.167 --> 00:43:27.728
Just brawled my way.

718
00:43:28.188 --> 00:43:31.270
Do you think that level of debt is reckless?

719
00:43:32.253 --> 00:43:34.076
Yeah, I think about that a lot, actually.

720
00:43:34.556 --> 00:43:36.860
I think, like, was I reckless in that?

721
00:43:36.940 --> 00:43:38.963
Should I have, like, not hired so many people?

722
00:43:39.043 --> 00:43:40.145
I think about that all the time.

723
00:43:40.685 --> 00:43:41.687
Like, there was one time...

724
00:43:41.727 --> 00:43:43.490
This is going to make me look real bad.

725
00:43:43.930 --> 00:43:46.334
There was one time I hired someone and then...

726
00:43:47.355 --> 00:43:52.677
Literally, my accountant, like, the day after he accepted the offer, he was meant to start in, like, two weeks' time.

727
00:43:52.697 --> 00:43:54.878
My accountant was like, dude, you cannot hire anyone.

728
00:43:54.898 --> 00:43:57.298
Like, this debt is now, like, $200,000.

729
00:43:57.819 --> 00:43:58.739
This needs to go down.

730
00:43:58.779 --> 00:44:00.279
Like, half of this team has to go.

731
00:44:00.480 --> 00:44:04.161
Or else, like, you're facing serious issues with the government.

732
00:44:05.048 --> 00:44:06.650
And then, so I had to call him back.

733
00:44:06.931 --> 00:44:08.072
Dude, I had tears in my eyes.

734
00:44:08.413 --> 00:44:15.422
I had to call this, we're actually still mates now, but I had to call him and be like, dude, I can't give you this job anymore.

735
00:44:15.442 --> 00:44:16.944
He's like, dude, I just quit.

736
00:44:16.964 --> 00:44:19.268
Like, I can't go back.

737
00:44:20.468 --> 00:44:30.715
And then I ended up hiring him like part-time for I think like two or three days a week just so I didn't completely screw him over until he got another job.

738
00:44:31.015 --> 00:44:34.537
But absolutely, I was young and reckless and how old was I at the time?

739
00:44:35.118 --> 00:44:35.958
26, 27.

740
00:44:35.998 --> 00:44:37.119
I think I should have known better.

741
00:44:38.040 --> 00:44:43.604
But I think about that all the time, like the moral implications of my naivety.

742
00:44:44.924 --> 00:44:45.625
But it worked out.

743
00:44:46.203 --> 00:44:47.764
In the end, I think it worked out.

744
00:44:48.004 --> 00:44:54.746
Like when I look at it now in the long run, there were some tough times in the short run, but everyone, literally everyone worked out better.

745
00:44:55.046 --> 00:44:59.287
Like even team members that left are in jobs that are better fits for them now.

746
00:45:00.308 --> 00:45:07.430
How do you as an entrepreneur going through that, not fold, not crash out, not give up and quit?

747
00:45:08.535 --> 00:45:11.638
No, to be honest, like, it's not that I didn't crash out.

748
00:45:11.738 --> 00:45:13.539
There were definitely, well, I don't think I crashed out.

749
00:45:13.879 --> 00:45:16.482
There were definitely moments where I was like, this is a lot.

750
00:45:16.582 --> 00:45:17.602
I'm getting a margarita.

751
00:45:18.663 --> 00:45:19.784
That happened a lot.

752
00:45:20.725 --> 00:45:25.409
But in terms of quitting, like, I remember, actually, I remember one time I was talking to my parents.

753
00:45:25.689 --> 00:45:29.913
And, like, this, I think it was when we were, like, 250 came down, like, the peak of it.

754
00:45:30.716 --> 00:45:33.477
And my parents were like, can you get out of this?

755
00:45:33.857 --> 00:45:35.718
And I was like, I don't really have a choice.

756
00:45:36.338 --> 00:45:37.798
I don't see any other way out of this.

757
00:45:37.838 --> 00:45:38.899
Like, I just have to.

758
00:45:38.979 --> 00:45:45.601
And I think I just had to, like, grit and just, like, I literally just, like, brawled my way out of it.

759
00:45:45.621 --> 00:45:48.722
I was like, I'm getting out of this one way or another.

760
00:45:49.162 --> 00:45:56.125
There was a time where I was, like, I was genuinely thinking about, I'm going to run away from the country and just move to Thailand or something like that.

761
00:45:56.405 --> 00:45:58.505
That thought ran through my head for about a week.

762
00:45:59.126 --> 00:45:59.866
And then I was just like,

763
00:46:00.731 --> 00:46:03.034
no, that doesn't seem like a viable solution.

764
00:46:03.054 --> 00:46:04.857
You just got to like grit your way through this.

765
00:46:06.240 --> 00:46:06.801
Yeah, it's tough.

766
00:46:06.841 --> 00:46:13.933
I, you know, I'm trying to figure out how somebody can prepare their personality and

767
00:46:15.252 --> 00:46:16.092
to be an entrepreneur.

768
00:46:16.233 --> 00:46:20.235
In retrospect, I would handle that situation a lot better now.

769
00:46:20.735 --> 00:46:23.236
And I actually, I don't just say this to business owners.

770
00:46:23.276 --> 00:46:24.517
I say this to staff members.

771
00:46:24.557 --> 00:46:26.258
I say this to friends.

772
00:46:27.218 --> 00:46:28.819
The way you do something is the way you do everything.

773
00:46:29.459 --> 00:46:36.383
And so I'm a lot better at stress resilience and handling stress now because I just train martial arts twice a day, six days a week.

774
00:46:36.783 --> 00:46:41.866
So it's like your hobbies sort of fortify your mind for all the other bullshit that you have to deal with.

775
00:46:41.886 --> 00:46:44.167
Dude, I'm stressed in the morning because Hilton's trying to kill me with his bare hands.

776
00:46:45.593 --> 00:46:48.615
So it makes the rest of the stuff not so stressful.

777
00:46:48.935 --> 00:46:50.155
Yeah, I was talking to...

778
00:46:51.036 --> 00:46:55.318
So Zach has a couple of trainers that train me in different martial arts disciplines.

779
00:46:55.558 --> 00:47:03.302
And we have Hilton, who is a black belt in Kraft McGuire and a brown belt in BJJ.

780
00:47:03.942 --> 00:47:05.383
And he would train me Friday mornings.

781
00:47:05.463 --> 00:47:10.026
And it's like disarming guns and knives and then like sparring, but with weapons and stuff like that.

782
00:47:10.386 --> 00:47:12.587
And I tell Hilton every Friday morning, I'm like, man...

783
00:47:13.755 --> 00:47:22.179
Whatever I've got on for the rest of the day is so much less stressful than you just trying to gouge my eyes out for the last 30 minutes.

784
00:47:22.319 --> 00:47:25.460
I want to talk about the anti-agency agency.

785
00:47:26.400 --> 00:47:29.482
So this is your book, F Your Agency.

786
00:47:31.302 --> 00:47:32.683
So this is out September 25th.

787
00:47:32.723 --> 00:47:37.045
You can get it wherever you get your books, Amazon, anywhere else you can get is your website for it.

788
00:47:37.397 --> 00:47:41.402
Yeah, if you go to FYourAgencyBook.com, but spelt correctly.

789
00:47:41.422 --> 00:47:42.303
Yeah, spelt correctly.

790
00:47:43.064 --> 00:47:48.470
My PR guy was just like smiling and he was like, don't swear.

791
00:47:48.490 --> 00:47:49.591
We can swear a little bit.

792
00:47:49.611 --> 00:47:56.579
I just want to, if I'm going to drop the book name six, seven times over the podcast, I'm just going to give all my editors a whole bunch more work.

793
00:47:58.747 --> 00:48:02.735
So why are you the anti-agency agency?

794
00:48:02.955 --> 00:48:08.085
So your premise is that business owners should always be the best marketers in their business?

795
00:48:08.105 --> 00:48:08.265
Right.

796
00:48:09.883 --> 00:48:14.126
Most agencies are built on the opposite premise that the owners have no idea how to market.

797
00:48:14.166 --> 00:48:22.171
So, and I'm like, I've gone through this even before we press record, I've hired so many agencies that were complete wastes of time, uh, burnt so much budget.

798
00:48:22.251 --> 00:48:33.558
I've advised companies that were spending upwards of 20 to $50,000 a month on agency work before they were even generating revenue, like for launch, they just raised money, uh,

799
00:48:35.230 --> 00:48:36.512
Why do agencies suck?

800
00:48:36.712 --> 00:48:42.319
So to be absolutely clear, there are rare agencies, rare instances where agencies can work out.

801
00:48:42.339 --> 00:48:44.863
It's just 90, 95% of the time, it's just not a good fit.

802
00:48:45.504 --> 00:48:47.326
And we were a done for you agency.

803
00:48:47.346 --> 00:48:48.087
We're not anymore.

804
00:48:48.468 --> 00:48:50.931
And people always go, oh, did you just like pivot this thing?

805
00:48:51.351 --> 00:48:51.512
But-

806
00:48:52.521 --> 00:48:57.583
They forget that I was turning away 90% of businesses that wanted our done for you services.

807
00:48:57.623 --> 00:49:06.605
Like if you go through our Google reviews from like 2023 or something like that, you'll find a couple that were like most honest sales pitch I ever had, like branded and try and sell me something that wouldn't work for me.

808
00:49:06.625 --> 00:49:07.866
Because I just did the numbers for them.

809
00:49:08.406 --> 00:49:14.288
And I was like, man, with the revenue right now, 10 to 30k a month, you're a one person team or we've got a couple of subbies.

810
00:49:15.292 --> 00:49:16.993
Like, it doesn't even make sense.

811
00:49:17.114 --> 00:49:21.457
Whether it's us or anyone, you shouldn't be paying this onboarding fee and this retainer and this minimum ad spend.

812
00:49:21.477 --> 00:49:23.959
Like, the best case scenario is you get busier and break even.

813
00:49:23.979 --> 00:49:25.501
You're just not at the scale where this makes sense.

814
00:49:25.661 --> 00:49:29.124
I think you should just learn the basics and do the basics well yourself.

815
00:49:29.945 --> 00:49:32.307
And then I was doing that for, like, 90% of the goal.

816
00:49:32.327 --> 00:49:33.327
It's probably why I was in debt.

817
00:49:33.367 --> 00:49:35.329
I probably should have sold them and I wouldn't have had the debt.

818
00:49:35.749 --> 00:49:36.130
But then...

819
00:49:38.563 --> 00:49:43.128
But I had one time, this guy was just like, it was actually his second time applying to work with us.

820
00:49:43.688 --> 00:49:46.231
And he's like, dude, like, there's got to be a way we can work together.

821
00:49:46.612 --> 00:49:50.076
And I was like, uh, like, it doesn't make sense.

822
00:49:50.156 --> 00:49:52.458
And he's like, can you just show us how to do it ourselves?

823
00:49:52.478 --> 00:49:53.099
Um.

824
00:49:53.239 --> 00:49:55.501
And I was like, I don't want to be like an online course, bro.

825
00:49:55.521 --> 00:49:56.081
He's like, no, no, no.

826
00:49:56.121 --> 00:49:57.222
I'll fly out to you.

827
00:49:57.403 --> 00:49:58.784
I was like, oh, that sounds like fun.

828
00:49:59.204 --> 00:50:01.546
And so we just picked a random date in the calendar.

829
00:50:01.566 --> 00:50:02.967
Him and his wife bought a ticket.

830
00:50:03.107 --> 00:50:04.548
And then we booked that one in.

831
00:50:04.949 --> 00:50:08.231
And then 30 minutes after that, the next sales call I had, I still remember her name was Kelly.

832
00:50:09.452 --> 00:50:10.153
Same conversation.

833
00:50:10.173 --> 00:50:10.794
I'm like, doesn't make sense.

834
00:50:10.814 --> 00:50:12.055
I think you should just learn the basics.

835
00:50:12.075 --> 00:50:14.457
I went to go find a YouTube link for her or something.

836
00:50:14.517 --> 00:50:15.738
She's like, appreciate the honesty.

837
00:50:15.758 --> 00:50:17.079
Is there any way we can work together?

838
00:50:17.459 --> 00:50:19.801
I was like, well, the last guy's fined a pair for his wife.

839
00:50:19.821 --> 00:50:20.642
Do you want to do that?

840
00:50:20.722 --> 00:50:21.002
She's like.

841
00:50:21.428 --> 00:50:32.657
yeah sick when how much i was like huh next person bought a ticket i was like oh this is odd and then what i noticed was they all get incredible results for a couple of reasons

842
00:50:33.692 --> 00:50:37.515
One, they know the customer better than anyone else, better than I ever will.

843
00:50:37.535 --> 00:50:39.997
They've been talking to their customer for years, some of them decades.

844
00:50:40.777 --> 00:50:45.360
So whoever knows the customer best can speak to their pain points and their aspirations better than anyone else.

845
00:50:45.400 --> 00:50:52.325
So you can't do a, what, you do a 45-minute onboarding call to me or anyone from an agency and expect me to understand your customer if you've been talking for a decade?

846
00:50:52.345 --> 00:50:52.826
Of course not.

847
00:50:53.426 --> 00:50:55.648
Number two is, I mean, we're just talking about debt.

848
00:50:55.708 --> 00:50:59.271
No one's more financially incentivized than the business owner for the marketing to do well.

849
00:50:59.891 --> 00:51:01.173
Check the bank account every morning.

850
00:51:01.193 --> 00:51:02.954
You get the letters from the ATO.

851
00:51:03.394 --> 00:51:12.682
It's just like, well, you're going to pay someone like $2,000 a month and then like you're 1 15th or 1 20th of their attention because they've got 15 to 20 other clients at the same time.

852
00:51:13.182 --> 00:51:14.724
And no one's going to move faster than you.

853
00:51:15.084 --> 00:51:17.527
So it's like you email an agency.

854
00:51:17.588 --> 00:51:19.070
It's like, hey, can we make these changes?

855
00:51:19.310 --> 00:51:22.555
And then they take a day to respond to you, another week to action it.

856
00:51:22.915 --> 00:51:29.124
It's just there's all this inefficiency and just whether it's marketing agencies or external agencies, there's always that communication inefficiency.

857
00:51:29.765 --> 00:51:31.748
And when you simply know what buttons to press,

858
00:51:33.478 --> 00:51:37.160
and you know the customer, and you're financially incentivized, and you move really, really fast.

859
00:51:37.180 --> 00:51:38.421
I was like, of course you do better.

860
00:51:38.801 --> 00:51:40.342
You just didn't know what buttons to press.

861
00:51:40.382 --> 00:51:41.483
So I agree with you completely.

862
00:51:41.563 --> 00:51:48.527
I've actually, not on the marketing side, but most of my career is on the sales side of building businesses before I did podcasting.

863
00:51:49.505 --> 00:51:59.794
And the biggest issue I had, especially when I did some consulting work, is the CEO would try and hire – or founder, excuse me – would try and hire like a VP of sales to figure out.

864
00:52:00.595 --> 00:52:01.315
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

865
00:52:01.495 --> 00:52:01.656
Right?

866
00:52:01.736 --> 00:52:03.297
Because they couldn't figure it out themselves.

867
00:52:03.317 --> 00:52:04.458
Try and delegate a system you haven't built.

868
00:52:04.618 --> 00:52:04.738
100%.

869
00:52:04.758 --> 00:52:04.978
And it –

870
00:52:07.748 --> 00:52:12.911
The difference between a successful and an unsuccessful startup was, is the founder good at selling?

871
00:52:13.471 --> 00:52:19.334
And I've been part of companies where the founder has sold $5 to $6 million a year before they hired somebody.

872
00:52:19.834 --> 00:52:23.516
And then, and that's one person accountable for $5 to $6 million a year in revenue.

873
00:52:23.536 --> 00:52:27.539
They hired somebody who then emulates the system, doubles the revenue.

874
00:52:27.559 --> 00:52:32.421
But the point is they figured out how to close a significant amount of deals before they hired somebody.

875
00:52:32.961 --> 00:52:33.302
And then...

876
00:52:34.383 --> 00:52:37.125
I've seen founders that were technical founders.

877
00:52:37.185 --> 00:52:43.730
Usually, like, the developer codes an app, doesn't want to talk to a customer ever because they have social anxiety.

878
00:52:43.750 --> 00:52:44.830
Yeah, they're a vice versa.

879
00:52:45.471 --> 00:52:46.191
A hundred percent.

880
00:52:46.371 --> 00:52:58.440
But then they try and outsource the sales, and it never works because that first hire, the first sales hire, doesn't matter if it's a VP of sales or it's a very expensive hire or if you hire somebody who's more junior –

881
00:52:59.240 --> 00:53:00.321
They don't have the playbook.

882
00:53:00.721 --> 00:53:04.864
They're testing everything, every messaging, every strategy.

883
00:53:05.304 --> 00:53:11.248
It's going to take them probably six months to figure out something because they don't know the customer as well as you starting day one because they're hot.

884
00:53:11.749 --> 00:53:14.130
And so I've seen this on the sales side.

885
00:53:15.171 --> 00:53:16.372
And I never understood.

886
00:53:18.497 --> 00:53:21.779
I never understood why anybody would think that marketing is any different.

887
00:53:22.159 --> 00:53:29.542
So when I started the podcast, I had to learn how to book guests, how to close advertisers, how to sell based on a CPM, how to position.

888
00:53:29.562 --> 00:53:33.324
I had to learn all this shit so I could sell my podcast, then I hired a sales rep.

889
00:53:33.804 --> 00:53:35.485
But it was like, I had to do the job first.

890
00:53:35.505 --> 00:53:35.965
Yeah, exactly.

891
00:53:36.905 --> 00:53:38.266
Why do so many people

892
00:53:39.813 --> 00:53:42.394
give up on learning how to market and just outsource it.

893
00:53:42.414 --> 00:53:44.354
They had this like avoidant relationship.

894
00:53:44.434 --> 00:53:44.854
All right.

895
00:53:44.874 --> 00:53:52.517
So this is another point that I often make with people sometimes is like, do you really want a business in this field or do you just want to do this skill?

896
00:53:52.957 --> 00:53:53.877
Let me, this is what I mean.

897
00:53:54.417 --> 00:54:02.979
So let's say you start an AI business because you want to do a bunch of stuff with AI and you're like, all right, I don't, I don't want a job in AI.

898
00:54:02.999 --> 00:54:04.300
I want to start a business in AI.

899
00:54:05.252 --> 00:54:05.912
Great news.

900
00:54:06.132 --> 00:54:07.793
You're not going to do anything in AI.

901
00:54:08.114 --> 00:54:09.374
You're going to have to learn marketing.

902
00:54:09.574 --> 00:54:10.795
You're going to have to learn sales.

903
00:54:10.815 --> 00:54:12.316
You're going to have to learn operations.

904
00:54:12.336 --> 00:54:13.897
You're going to have to learn finance.

905
00:54:13.917 --> 00:54:15.378
You're going to have to learn how to hire people.

906
00:54:15.398 --> 00:54:16.838
You're going to have to learn how to train people.

907
00:54:16.858 --> 00:54:18.259
You're going to have to learn how to manage people.

908
00:54:18.579 --> 00:54:21.061
You're going to spend four hours a week doing AI stuff.

909
00:54:21.081 --> 00:54:25.783
The rest of the time, you're going to have to figure out all this other stuff.

910
00:54:26.083 --> 00:54:29.625
And then when it doesn't work, you're not even going to have a business in AI.

911
00:54:29.645 --> 00:54:31.346
You're basically going to make less money.

912
00:54:32.967 --> 00:54:36.369
than if you just went and got a job in AI because you can't build this business.

913
00:54:36.749 --> 00:54:41.231
If you want to have a business in whatever field that you're in, you had to learn business owner stuff.

914
00:54:41.671 --> 00:54:42.952
You can't just learn that one skill.

915
00:54:42.972 --> 00:54:44.953
You had to learn how to market your skill set.

916
00:54:45.273 --> 00:54:46.313
You had to learn how to sell it.

917
00:54:46.594 --> 00:54:49.495
You had to learn how to train it to other people, how to find those people.

918
00:54:49.735 --> 00:54:51.036
You had to learn business owner stuff.

919
00:54:51.877 --> 00:54:57.221
Being able to get attention for your business and sell your services is business-oriented stuff.

920
00:54:57.301 --> 00:54:59.683
It's not enough to just be good at your craft.

921
00:54:59.923 --> 00:55:00.744
Congratulations.

922
00:55:00.884 --> 00:55:03.225
You have to do business-oriented stuff now, business-oriented skills.

923
00:55:03.986 --> 00:55:04.826
Why don't people know?

924
00:55:04.927 --> 00:55:05.967
Like, why don't people learn?

925
00:55:06.167 --> 00:55:13.553
So said differently, I think that following your passion is the worst advice because say my passion is AI.

926
00:55:14.333 --> 00:55:19.537
Well, then, okay, to build the AI company, the thing that I'm passionate about is like 5%.

927
00:55:21.068 --> 00:55:22.869
Yeah, what you actually do, like I said, yeah.

928
00:55:22.969 --> 00:55:23.969
I love podcasting.

929
00:55:24.269 --> 00:55:27.330
You know how much of my business is me talking to somebody?

930
00:55:28.310 --> 00:55:29.690
5% to 10% max.

931
00:55:30.191 --> 00:55:31.011
And what's the rest of it?

932
00:55:31.591 --> 00:55:33.992
All the other shit.

933
00:55:34.112 --> 00:55:35.252
None of it's that sexy.

934
00:55:35.512 --> 00:55:45.555
When I'm doing payroll and when I'm doing P&L and I'm doing HR and when I'm reviewing legal contracts, this is not...

935
00:55:46.295 --> 00:55:52.320
This is not what I'm passionate about, but this is the business owner shit that you have to do to build a business.

936
00:55:52.660 --> 00:55:54.321
So people think they're going to start a company.

937
00:55:54.341 --> 00:55:55.803
They're going to outsource everything they don't like.

938
00:55:55.843 --> 00:55:59.706
This is how marketing agencies make a lot of money off business owners.

939
00:55:59.746 --> 00:56:01.127
Yeah, they have a limited mindset.

940
00:56:01.187 --> 00:56:05.090
You've obviously heard of like growth mindset versus limited mindset.

941
00:56:05.110 --> 00:56:09.373
I think there's limited mindset where, let's say marketing, for example.

942
00:56:09.794 --> 00:56:11.475
You just logged into Facebook Ads Manager.

943
00:56:11.495 --> 00:56:14.758
You looked at the interface and you're like, nah, not worth the smoke.

944
00:56:15.910 --> 00:56:19.751
I'm going to get someone to do this for four grand a month because I don't know what button to press.

945
00:56:19.771 --> 00:56:20.451
I'm scared.

946
00:56:20.812 --> 00:56:22.612
Even though there's a big green create button.

947
00:56:22.672 --> 00:56:25.273
But that's going to be such an expensive decision.

948
00:56:25.773 --> 00:56:26.813
It's so expensive.

949
00:56:27.294 --> 00:56:29.034
So where does somebody start?

950
00:56:29.614 --> 00:56:33.596
So when you say F your agency, okay, the person's like, great.

951
00:56:33.836 --> 00:56:35.676
Now I got to fucking learn marketing.

952
00:56:37.237 --> 00:56:37.837
Where do they start?

953
00:56:38.834 --> 00:56:42.577
First thing you got to do is pick like what corner do I want to kind of stand on?

954
00:56:42.637 --> 00:56:44.138
Like, do I want to advertise on Meta?

955
00:56:44.479 --> 00:56:45.880
Do I want to advertise on Google?

956
00:56:45.900 --> 00:56:48.242
First, we just got like pick a platform, Meta or Google.

957
00:56:49.002 --> 00:56:56.088
Easiest way to decide is does your customer just already know that they have this problem and they need to actively find a solution?

958
00:56:56.349 --> 00:56:57.369
If so, we're going to Google.

959
00:56:57.389 --> 00:57:07.077
For example, if my tap starts leaking and I'm not enough of a manly man to be able to fix it, I don't just sit around on Instagram all day going, oh, geez.

960
00:57:07.838 --> 00:57:09.780
Really hope a plumber serves me an ad today.

961
00:57:09.800 --> 00:57:12.883
No, I'm just like going to Google and searching plumbers near me, right?

962
00:57:12.903 --> 00:57:14.985
If that's the case, we're going to Google.

963
00:57:15.105 --> 00:57:17.227
If not, we want to create demand on Meta.

964
00:57:17.327 --> 00:57:18.328
So we pick that platform.

965
00:57:18.928 --> 00:57:21.751
Second thing that we want to do is pick a funnel architecture.

966
00:57:21.911 --> 00:57:25.695
So everyone's probably heard of like funnels.

967
00:57:26.776 --> 00:57:28.437
We just teach one step and two step funnels.

968
00:57:28.497 --> 00:57:29.999
Real simple, real beginner friendly.

969
00:57:30.579 --> 00:57:35.644
And so I know there's others, there's like webinar funnels, lead macro funnels, DM funnels, all this other stuff.

970
00:57:35.725 --> 00:57:36.525
Let's just keep it simple.

971
00:57:37.326 --> 00:57:44.173
One step funnel is when you've only got a relatively short conversation, like five minutes, pretty common for like home services and trades.

972
00:57:44.194 --> 00:57:48.638
I heard you learned in the last couple of months, you US guys call them contractors.

973
00:57:49.079 --> 00:57:49.299
Yes.

974
00:57:49.459 --> 00:57:51.120
We call them tradies in Australia.

975
00:57:51.381 --> 00:57:53.122
So if you're like a contractor, you're a one-step funnel.

976
00:57:53.142 --> 00:57:53.822
That's real simple.

977
00:57:53.842 --> 00:57:57.065
Someone sees another clicker, the one-step, fill out this form.

978
00:57:57.505 --> 00:58:00.367
Two-step funnels, sometimes people will refer to them as coal funnels.

979
00:58:00.748 --> 00:58:08.774
They're really common for consultants, education, coaching, professional services, where there's like 30, maybe 45-minute discovery call.

980
00:58:09.618 --> 00:58:10.699
And then we just got to build our ads.

981
00:58:11.159 --> 00:58:15.042
Now there's a number of different things that comes to building your ads, but like I've got principles in the book.

982
00:58:15.462 --> 00:58:22.207
The number one thing you need to lean on, like if you just take anything away from this, it's my principle and philosophy and meet them where they're at.

983
00:58:23.175 --> 00:58:27.359
So what that means is you don't just want to talk about your service and the features and what you do.

984
00:58:27.960 --> 00:58:35.727
Your goal in your ad copy, what you say in the video is like, I repeat back your internal monologue to you and your view of the world.

985
00:58:36.308 --> 00:58:40.231
So that in your head, you go, how is this guy reading my mind?

986
00:58:40.612 --> 00:58:47.779
If you can do that, it's much more important that they feel understood than that they understand you.

987
00:58:48.610 --> 00:58:49.571
It's far more important.

988
00:58:49.631 --> 00:58:53.195
And that takes an insane amount of understanding of who your customer is.

989
00:58:53.495 --> 00:58:55.598
It's real easy for you because you've been talking for years.

990
00:58:55.618 --> 00:58:56.759
You've been on all the sales calls.

991
00:58:56.779 --> 00:58:58.001
You've been delivering the service.

992
00:58:58.401 --> 00:59:02.365
But without knowing, and often, this is one of the most common things.

993
00:59:02.846 --> 00:59:09.453
They underestimate how much they know because they go from, they're like unconsciously competent.

994
00:59:10.094 --> 00:59:11.095
at speaking to their customer.

995
00:59:11.135 --> 00:59:19.144
Because they speak to their customer all day, every day, the stuff that they hear over and over and over and over and over again, they take as a given and think it's just like everyone knows this.

996
00:59:19.184 --> 00:59:21.286
But it's like, no, that's the stuff you had to talk about in ads.

997
00:59:21.887 --> 00:59:22.708
That's so interesting.

998
00:59:22.748 --> 00:59:24.270
So a lot of it is...

999
00:59:26.211 --> 00:59:36.563
You're teaching the business owner the fundamentals of marketing, but then you're helping them uncover what they actually already know that is going to drive the highest ROAS, return on ad spend, that they can ever get.

1000
00:59:37.344 --> 00:59:42.030
They would never get this kind of result from hiring anybody outside the company.

1001
00:59:42.210 --> 00:59:45.895
What are the lies that agencies tell business owners?

1002
00:59:46.968 --> 00:59:48.369
Uh, there's a couple.

1003
00:59:48.910 --> 00:59:54.294
Um, number one is they over explain how like technical it is.

1004
00:59:54.755 --> 00:59:55.936
All the like three lettered.

1005
00:59:56.016 --> 00:59:56.696
Overcomplicate it.

1006
00:59:56.736 --> 00:59:56.856
Yeah.

1007
00:59:56.876 --> 01:00:00.279
They just overcomplicate it and they hope that you don't understand it.

1008
01:00:00.860 --> 01:00:02.421
So they're like, don't worry about that.

1009
01:00:02.901 --> 01:00:04.703
They'll hide behind vanity metrics as well.

1010
01:00:05.323 --> 01:00:07.025
So that's like an easy way is like.

1011
01:00:08.766 --> 01:00:10.667
I filmed an ad the other day and it was doing well.

1012
01:00:10.687 --> 01:00:16.631
It's like, you look at the report your agency sent you, you look at your P&L, and then you look at your bank account.

1013
01:00:16.651 --> 01:00:18.672
It's like, this isn't lining up, right?

1014
01:00:19.072 --> 01:00:25.256
Because they'll talk about like CPC, CTR, like look how much traffic we got here, but it's like clicks aren't keeping the lights on.

1015
01:00:25.476 --> 01:00:32.281
They'll talk about cost per lead too, but even return on ad spend, even return on ad spend can be a little bit of a vanity metric.

1016
01:00:33.073 --> 01:00:44.100
Because in my opinion, net profit should be the end metric that your agency is reporting on, how much net profit did we add?

1017
01:00:44.441 --> 01:00:46.902
Because even return on ad spend can be a vanity metric.

1018
01:00:46.922 --> 01:00:51.906
Let's say they say, oh, we got your 10x return on ad spend, but you only spent $1,000 on ads.

1019
01:00:52.426 --> 01:00:56.188
I was like, all right, well, I made $10,000 after your fees, $5,000.

1020
01:00:56.228 --> 01:00:59.851
Maybe I broke even, maybe even lost money off of that, right?

1021
01:00:59.871 --> 01:01:00.151
Right.

1022
01:01:00.765 --> 01:01:05.490
But if you have someone that's... Let's say, for example, I tell you I know someone that gets a 2x return on ad spend.

1023
01:01:06.050 --> 01:01:08.632
Most people's knee-jerk reaction is not great.

1024
01:01:09.253 --> 01:01:19.363
But if they're spending a million dollars a month on ads, doing 2 mil in revenue off of that, after their expenses are at like 20-25% profit, I'm sure they're happy with half a million dollars of profit a month, right?

1025
01:01:19.383 --> 01:01:19.543
Right.

1026
01:01:19.983 --> 01:01:32.295
Also, return on ad spend, it doesn't capture, for example, I guess you can bake it in, but like people that are already searching for your product or service and you're capturing those leads, which technically you'd be closing anyway.

1027
01:01:32.335 --> 01:01:39.923
So they could be inflating their performance to sort of tell a better story to you who's paying them the retainer or the percentage or...

1028
01:01:40.285 --> 01:01:40.886
Yeah, exactly.

1029
01:01:41.226 --> 01:01:43.168
Attribution and advertising is one of those things.

1030
01:01:43.248 --> 01:01:45.410
There's a lot of different software solutions out there for it.

1031
01:01:45.430 --> 01:01:46.951
I have a little bit...

1032
01:01:47.011 --> 01:01:51.575
I don't know if this is a controversial take in advertising paid media buying nerd world.

1033
01:01:52.315 --> 01:02:04.646
I have this thing called revenue return on ad spend, which is I literally just go the top line of my P&L statement, look at revenue, divide it by ad spend month to date, divide the first number by the second number, and if I like that number, I just spend more on ads.

1034
01:02:05.046 --> 01:02:05.447
Because...

1035
01:02:06.718 --> 01:02:14.040
It's, I think, impractical to think, someone saw this ad and then converted on this and that's why they became a lead.

1036
01:02:14.361 --> 01:02:17.061
It's like, no, like, how many organic pieces of content did they say?

1037
01:02:17.081 --> 01:02:18.702
We can't, like, track all of this stuff.

1038
01:02:19.102 --> 01:02:23.764
It's, marketing is not as clear cut and simple as I saw this ad, I clicked this ad, I converted on this landing page.

1039
01:02:24.344 --> 01:02:33.427
It's like, that ad could have just been the one that after they saw 17 other ads, they're like, that was the, I suppose, straw that broke the camel's back, but it gets all the credit.

1040
01:02:33.947 --> 01:02:35.267
Noom is a success story partner.

1041
01:02:35.508 --> 01:02:37.828
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1042
01:02:38.268 --> 01:02:39.729
Losing it isn't the hard part.

1043
01:02:40.089 --> 01:02:48.412
Keeping it off is almost anyone can white knuckle a few good months of diet and exercise, but then work gets crazy and routines break and it all comes right back.

1044
01:02:48.532 --> 01:02:51.533
I have built my entire career and my life around one idea.

1045
01:02:52.073 --> 01:02:55.455
Systems beat motivation and weight loss is no different.

1046
01:02:55.735 --> 01:02:58.637
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1047
01:02:58.857 --> 01:03:00.618
And that's exactly what Noom is built for.

1048
01:03:01.019 --> 01:03:04.141
Noom is a health and wellness app that combines GLP-1 medication.

1049
01:03:04.441 --> 01:03:08.123
That's a weight loss medication that everyone's talking about with behavioral support.

1050
01:03:08.363 --> 01:03:10.004
So the medication kickstarts the weight loss.

1051
01:03:10.365 --> 01:03:17.269
And then the psychology side, the daily lessons, the food logging, the real coaching that builds the habits that make it stick.

1052
01:03:17.669 --> 01:03:18.930
Even if you stop the medication.

1053
01:03:19.250 --> 01:03:19.750
And it works.

1054
01:03:19.990 --> 01:03:23.152
People lose 37% more weight with Noom than with GLP-1 alone.

1055
01:03:23.512 --> 01:03:25.333
Noom helps you lose weight and keep it off.

1056
01:03:25.594 --> 01:03:26.434
And that's the difference.

1057
01:03:26.634 --> 01:03:28.915
The Noom GLP-1 program starts at $39.

1058
01:03:29.055 --> 01:03:31.117
It's delivered to your door in as little as seven days.

1059
01:03:31.157 --> 01:03:33.958
So start your GLP-1 journey today at Noom.com.

1060
01:03:34.238 --> 01:03:37.020
That's N-O-O-M.com Noom.

1061
01:03:37.380 --> 01:03:38.281
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1062
01:03:38.721 --> 01:03:43.403
Initial one month subscription from $39 plus tax and $99 plus tax per month.

1063
01:03:43.443 --> 01:03:45.845
Thereafter cost of medication not included.

1064
01:03:46.225 --> 01:03:48.146
Final pricing depends on program selection.

1065
01:03:48.266 --> 01:03:58.419
Results based on a January 2026 analysis of 14,203 NoomGLP1RX program members who logged weight over a 40-week period.

1066
01:03:58.940 --> 01:04:02.724
Higher app engagement was associated with greater weight loss at 16 weeks.

1067
01:04:03.045 --> 01:04:03.225
That's

1068
01:04:03.285 --> 01:04:04.447
NetSuite is a success story partner.

1069
01:04:04.647 --> 01:04:06.169
Now you probably know NetSuite already.

1070
01:04:06.189 --> 01:04:09.915
It's a software that a ton of companies use to basically manage everything.

1071
01:04:09.955 --> 01:04:13.640
Their finances, their inventory, their HR, it's just all in one place.

1072
01:04:13.861 --> 01:04:15.864
Now they just came out with NetSuite Next.

1073
01:04:16.044 --> 01:04:18.167
This is the AI version of all.

1074
01:04:18.287 --> 01:04:18.727
all of that.

1075
01:04:18.747 --> 01:04:23.371
So now you can ask it a question the way you'd ask someone on your team who just knows everything about your business.

1076
01:04:23.711 --> 01:04:24.611
It gives you the answer.

1077
01:04:24.892 --> 01:04:30.596
It keeps you up to date on all the things you need to know about your company and your business without you having to go digging for them.

1078
01:04:30.836 --> 01:04:36.460
And it has these AI agents that take care of all the routine work in your business that eats up everybody's day.

1079
01:04:36.720 --> 01:04:41.565
Now, the bigger picture here is that AI is starting to change how teams actually work together.

1080
01:04:41.865 --> 01:04:45.629
It's happening incredibly fast, and most companies don't have a plan for it.

1081
01:04:45.890 --> 01:04:46.550
NetSuite does.

1082
01:04:46.831 --> 01:04:52.336
They have a free guide called Aligning for the Agentic Era, how AI is changing everyday work.

1083
01:04:52.477 --> 01:04:57.502
It breaks down how AI could reshape the way your whole organization works and what your business should be doing to get ahead of it.

1084
01:04:57.662 --> 01:05:00.383
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1085
01:05:00.663 --> 01:05:09.605
So if your revenues are at least in the seven figures, get our free business guide, Aligning for the Agentic Era, How AI is Changing Everyday Work at netsuite.com slash scottclary.

1086
01:05:09.905 --> 01:05:13.606
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1087
01:05:13.866 --> 01:05:16.267
That's netsuite.com slash scottclary.

1088
01:05:16.367 --> 01:05:17.688
Monarch is a success story partner.

1089
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Now, quick question.

1090
01:05:18.628 --> 01:05:20.590
Do you know where your money went last month?

1091
01:05:20.690 --> 01:05:22.431
Not roughly, but exactly.

1092
01:05:22.531 --> 01:05:23.251
And most people don't.

1093
01:05:23.471 --> 01:05:24.412
And I didn't for years.

1094
01:05:24.452 --> 01:05:26.573
And that is most of our money stories, right?

1095
01:05:26.653 --> 01:05:30.395
When we first start our career, we have one income and one account, and you can kind of wing it.

1096
01:05:30.636 --> 01:05:32.857
But once you're running businesses, once you're investing,

1097
01:05:33.177 --> 01:05:38.522
Once you're carrying 50 different subscriptions that you stop paying attention to, winging it gets super expensive.

1098
01:05:38.722 --> 01:05:39.743
Monarch fixed that for me.

1099
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It is the personal finance app that tracks everything.

1100
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So that means accounts, investments, savings goals, spending all on one screen.

1101
01:05:46.809 --> 01:05:50.532
The first week I had it, it fired recurring charges I've been paying for months without realizing.

1102
01:05:50.632 --> 01:05:56.017
And every single week, the AI recap tells me if spending spiked, if my net worth moved and what bills are

1103
01:05:56.057 --> 01:05:56.337
coming.

1104
01:05:56.357 --> 01:05:59.599
And I can just ask it, hey, can I afford this trip without touching my savings?

1105
01:05:59.639 --> 01:06:02.760
And I can get a real answer based on my actual numbers.

1106
01:06:02.860 --> 01:06:05.021
It is a financial advisor in your pocket.

1107
01:06:05.301 --> 01:06:07.162
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1108
01:06:07.302 --> 01:06:09.063
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1109
01:06:09.303 --> 01:06:13.885
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1110
01:06:14.145 --> 01:06:17.667
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1111
01:06:17.907 --> 01:06:19.488
That's what gets confusing for people.

1112
01:06:20.528 --> 01:06:27.750
So yes, I think that measuring revenue is super important, especially if you're holding agencies accountable to their work.

1113
01:06:28.271 --> 01:06:34.373
But then the business owner saying, okay, I put out 30 pieces of organic content.

1114
01:06:34.813 --> 01:06:39.134
I ran 10 pieces of different ad creative.

1115
01:06:41.455 --> 01:06:46.977
How do I actually know what contributed to the money coming into my bank account?

1116
01:06:47.297 --> 01:06:48.657
And that's where it gets confusing.

1117
01:06:51.083 --> 01:06:51.704
Well, this is the thing.

1118
01:06:51.744 --> 01:06:58.429
So a founder probably gets stressed and hopes that somebody understands it better than they do.

1119
01:06:59.348 --> 01:07:08.455
But if it's not the founder, if it's somebody like an employee that's hiring an agency, the employee, of course, they kind of want the agency to work out.

1120
01:07:08.556 --> 01:07:11.858
But what they also don't want is they don't want responsibility if it doesn't work out.

1121
01:07:12.739 --> 01:07:15.961
So I can just say I hired an agency and they dropped the ball.

1122
01:07:16.042 --> 01:07:17.423
That happens so much.

1123
01:07:17.563 --> 01:07:17.883
I know.

1124
01:07:17.943 --> 01:07:19.504
So then the employee is like, well.

1125
01:07:19.905 --> 01:07:21.246
I feel like this happened to you, Scott.

1126
01:07:21.286 --> 01:07:21.386
Yeah.

1127
01:07:23.602 --> 01:07:24.542
It's happened many times.

1128
01:07:24.803 --> 01:07:28.804
So I'm trying to just help that business owner and that founder not get screwed.

1129
01:07:28.824 --> 01:07:37.568
Have confidence to understand what's actually driving results and also not get screwed by their own team or by the agency.

1130
01:07:37.628 --> 01:07:38.369
Yeah, exactly right.

1131
01:07:38.389 --> 01:07:45.032
Because if you just blindly delegate, let's say you're in that scenario we were talking about a couple of minutes ago where you're like, don't understand it, going to delegate it to the experts.

1132
01:07:45.432 --> 01:07:48.993
But then you don't know why it's working when it is working.

1133
01:07:49.033 --> 01:07:50.294
So you don't know what to do more of.

1134
01:07:50.654 --> 01:07:54.155
And then when it stops working, you don't have any reasons as to why.

1135
01:07:54.195 --> 01:07:55.876
And so you just have to trust anyone else.

1136
01:07:56.256 --> 01:07:59.057
So it's like, you don't know why it's working when it is and you don't know what to do when it's not.

1137
01:07:59.677 --> 01:08:08.501
And so if you just have at least like a basic understanding, at least then you can speak the same language and not have to take every single answer they have as gospel.

1138
01:08:08.521 --> 01:08:10.181
You can at least have a debate.

1139
01:08:11.142 --> 01:08:12.102
What is chatvertising?

1140
01:08:13.150 --> 01:08:15.531
I actually trademarked that.

1141
01:08:15.891 --> 01:08:18.573
I trademarked chatvertising and chatvertiser.

1142
01:08:18.593 --> 01:08:21.454
It was the first thing I got my lawyer to do when I actually got a lawyer.

1143
01:08:22.155 --> 01:08:25.076
So chatvertising is basically...

1144
01:08:25.196 --> 01:08:30.579
So you can tell, and I can tell at least, a lot about someone by looking at their ad account.

1145
01:08:30.899 --> 01:08:34.521
So for me, I came up with the ad spend archetypes.

1146
01:08:34.541 --> 01:08:38.784
They're like star signs and horoscopes, but for ad nerds like me, right?

1147
01:08:39.565 --> 01:08:42.166
So the first one he got is the conversion cuck.

1148
01:08:42.867 --> 01:08:49.310
So this person just doesn't spend any money on ads at all, but he'll do scroll and like talk shit on my ads, right?

1149
01:08:50.411 --> 01:08:52.132
Then you got like the interface avoidant.

1150
01:08:52.592 --> 01:08:56.154
So this person is like the one we talked about before, like logged in,

1151
01:08:57.213 --> 01:09:00.876
looked at all the buttons, was like, nah, and then just like delegated it, right?

1152
01:09:01.576 --> 01:09:03.538
Then you've got the cautious calculator.

1153
01:09:03.698 --> 01:09:08.162
So the cautious calculator, it's super common with engineers or anyone that's like really, really data-driven.

1154
01:09:08.482 --> 01:09:09.683
So they're kind of a coward.

1155
01:09:09.943 --> 01:09:21.092
They just like, they'll spend 30 bucks a day on ads and then they'll want to squeeze like an extra like 0.1% out of their conversion rate before they go from like $30 a day to like $35 a day, right?

1156
01:09:22.113 --> 01:09:23.414
Then you've got the chat advertiser.

1157
01:09:24.078 --> 01:09:27.359
This dude is just a degenerate gambler.

1158
01:09:27.859 --> 01:09:33.261
Like, he's literally just treating his ad account like a sports bet account.

1159
01:09:33.801 --> 01:09:37.183
Just, like, can't be bothered optimizing anything.

1160
01:09:37.283 --> 01:09:44.765
He's just like, 2x, close enough, and then, like, quadruple the budget rather than, like, just doing numbers and stuff like that.

1161
01:09:45.025 --> 01:09:46.086
But then you've got the plotter.

1162
01:09:46.106 --> 01:09:47.947
So the plotter's the last, like, archetype.

1163
01:09:48.307 --> 01:09:51.408
Plotter is kind of a combination of the cautious calculator

1164
01:09:52.246 --> 01:09:53.246
And the chatvertiser.

1165
01:09:53.726 --> 01:10:05.488
So the plotter will want to aggressively spend on ads, just like the chatvertiser, but we'll do it based off of math, rather than just like laying in bed with a hangover and quadrupling the budget from his phone or something like that.

1166
01:10:06.329 --> 01:10:12.150
But to be absolutely clear, I can't advertise, I can't identify as a chatvertiser.

1167
01:10:12.950 --> 01:10:17.231
I, I do, I can't do webinars because I'm too much of a degenerate gambler.

1168
01:10:17.651 --> 01:10:18.331
They'll just like...

1169
01:10:19.364 --> 01:10:23.346
I lost 30 grand in a webinar once just because I was like, I just threw money at it.

1170
01:10:23.366 --> 01:10:24.726
I was like, no, it'll work out eventually.

1171
01:10:24.746 --> 01:10:27.107
I just could be like making new ads and stuff like that.

1172
01:10:27.627 --> 01:10:29.908
But I've got a perfect example of the plotter, right?

1173
01:10:30.268 --> 01:10:31.709
But no, but who should people be?

1174
01:10:31.729 --> 01:10:32.169
The plotter.

1175
01:10:32.189 --> 01:10:32.789
The plotter, right?

1176
01:10:32.809 --> 01:10:38.652
You want to spend more on ads, but you want to do it based off of math rather than just like, man, if I like double the budget, we'll learn eventually.

1177
01:10:39.547 --> 01:10:44.392
So we talked about October of 2025 was the first time I hit a middle of the month.

1178
01:10:44.672 --> 01:10:47.895
So the way we did that was the run rate for the sales team was only 950k.

1179
01:10:47.975 --> 01:10:53.761
So I was like, all right, well, I don't have time to hire a sales rep.

1180
01:10:53.981 --> 01:10:55.663
I don't have time to put myself in the calendar.

1181
01:10:55.743 --> 01:10:58.406
I need to see how much money I can make in an hour and a half into a webinar.

1182
01:10:59.510 --> 01:11:02.813
And I had done webinars previously in like March of that year.

1183
01:11:02.833 --> 01:11:04.775
And I got about a 4X return on ad spend.

1184
01:11:05.215 --> 01:11:08.218
I'd spend about $25,000 and then make about $100,000.

1185
01:11:08.238 --> 01:11:11.001
So I was like, all right, I don't want to just make $100,000.

1186
01:11:11.101 --> 01:11:12.562
I need to make $200,000.

1187
01:11:12.803 --> 01:11:16.086
So a bit of an insurance policy to make sure we don't just hit a mill.

1188
01:11:16.106 --> 01:11:17.167
We go way past it.

1189
01:11:18.103 --> 01:11:22.306
And so I launched and it was running out of time in October.

1190
01:11:22.446 --> 01:11:26.389
Like literally, me and Aiden filmed 17 ads in 13 minutes.

1191
01:11:26.689 --> 01:11:28.010
Like just going so fast.

1192
01:11:28.691 --> 01:11:32.894
And then I calculated it based off a 4x return on ad spend.

1193
01:11:33.134 --> 01:11:37.738
So I was like, all right, 200,000 divided by four, I need to spend $50,000 on ads.

1194
01:11:38.819 --> 01:11:40.059
But I only had a week.

1195
01:11:40.260 --> 01:11:44.583
And when you launch your ads at like whatever that was, like $5,000 a day or something like that.

1196
01:11:45.761 --> 01:11:46.842
doesn't do very well.

1197
01:11:47.062 --> 01:11:52.926
And so when I recalculated a couple of days in, I'm like, oh, I'm only going to get a two extra turn on hard spend.

1198
01:11:52.946 --> 01:11:54.828
Do you want to guess what I did, Scott?

1199
01:11:56.369 --> 01:11:59.551
Double the budget, only winners and quitters at the cast.

1200
01:12:00.672 --> 01:12:04.535
So I spent a hundred thousand dollars in like one week.

1201
01:12:05.015 --> 01:12:08.337
And then dude, it was the most nerve wracking experience of my life.

1202
01:12:08.878 --> 01:12:11.560
Because I think on top of the coal funnel, I,

1203
01:12:12.220 --> 01:12:21.008
I had gone from spending $10,000, like averaging $7,500 to $10,000 a day on ads to like $35,000 leaving the bank account over 24 hours.

1204
01:12:21.788 --> 01:12:24.811
And then the other thing is with webinars, it's a one shot.

1205
01:12:25.291 --> 01:12:26.592
I can't redo this webinar.

1206
01:12:26.712 --> 01:12:29.034
Dude, the Wi-Fi could have gone out in the warehouse.

1207
01:12:29.054 --> 01:12:30.155
I would have lost all of it, bro.

1208
01:12:31.056 --> 01:12:31.517
And so...

1209
01:12:32.592 --> 01:12:33.773
But I did the math, right?

1210
01:12:33.793 --> 01:12:34.213
The plotting.

1211
01:12:34.233 --> 01:12:36.355
I was like, all right, you're going to get 2x off of this.

1212
01:12:36.515 --> 01:12:37.416
I was dead right.

1213
01:12:37.956 --> 01:12:38.717
I was dead right.

1214
01:12:38.737 --> 01:12:39.678
It was exactly what happened.

1215
01:12:39.698 --> 01:12:41.899
I spent, I think, $95,000 on ads.

1216
01:12:42.380 --> 01:12:44.702
And I think I did 205 or something.

1217
01:12:44.742 --> 01:12:46.083
I can't remember the exact number.

1218
01:12:46.103 --> 01:12:47.384
But about $200,000 on ads.

1219
01:12:47.404 --> 01:12:49.025
And then we hit 1.1 mil.

1220
01:12:49.365 --> 01:12:50.386
So the math worked out.

1221
01:12:52.147 --> 01:12:52.768
The plot.

1222
01:12:53.829 --> 01:12:57.632
I feel like a lot of this podcast is not financial advice.

1223
01:12:57.652 --> 01:12:57.892
Yeah.

1224
01:12:59.180 --> 01:13:09.322
But at the same time, I rather somebody at the beginning just to, because when you're starting out marketing, you can't be a plotter because you don't really know what anything means.

1225
01:13:09.742 --> 01:13:10.422
You really don't.

1226
01:13:10.982 --> 01:13:22.844
So I think that at the beginning, you're not doing with a hundred thousand dollars, but like take some risks and be, I rather you chadvertize and blow 10, 15 grand, and then learn.

1227
01:13:23.604 --> 01:13:25.765
Because if you lose 10, 15 grand, you're gonna learn.

1228
01:13:26.345 --> 01:13:27.645
But if you never do anything,

1229
01:13:28.738 --> 01:13:30.739
then you're never going to learn and you're never going to get better.

1230
01:13:30.799 --> 01:13:34.281
I think everybody starts out as a chatvertiser because you really don't know what the hell you're doing.

1231
01:13:34.301 --> 01:13:35.882
That's actually a point I make in the workshops.

1232
01:13:35.902 --> 01:13:45.546
So in the workshops, I try and talk people out of like a perfectionist mindset because they'll want to keep getting feedback on ads and landing pages and nurture sequences without just turning the ads on.

1233
01:13:46.087 --> 01:13:46.867
And I had to make this point.

1234
01:13:46.887 --> 01:13:49.668
I'm like, look, this is going to sound silly, but it's true.

1235
01:13:50.429 --> 01:13:54.571
If your ads are off, you have a 100% chance of your ads not working.

1236
01:13:55.851 --> 01:13:56.572
If your ads are on,

1237
01:13:57.501 --> 01:14:01.965
You have a really good chance with us in your corner, but at least we can talk about numbers and not just feelings.

1238
01:14:02.245 --> 01:14:05.868
And advertising is dials, not switches, right?

1239
01:14:06.089 --> 01:14:07.470
The only switch is if it's on or off.

1240
01:14:08.070 --> 01:14:11.533
The dial is like everything works to a degree, but it's like to what degree?

1241
01:14:12.154 --> 01:14:15.837
And so it's about finding which dial I want to tinker with.

1242
01:14:16.177 --> 01:14:16.818
Is it the ad?

1243
01:14:17.378 --> 01:14:18.319
Is it the landing page?

1244
01:14:18.339 --> 01:14:19.761
Do I need to tinker with the nurture sequence?

1245
01:14:20.101 --> 01:14:24.305
Like maybe sometimes people will say, they'll make binary statements like my ads didn't work.

1246
01:14:25.210 --> 01:14:28.012
But if they've got leads, let's say they've got a really expensive cost per lead.

1247
01:14:28.032 --> 01:14:30.635
I'm like, well, it worked to a degree, just not to the degree that you want.

1248
01:14:31.095 --> 01:14:38.762
So if your cost per lead was 400 and your target is 100, I'm like, all right, we need to find some variables to tinker down so we can cut this down by 4x.

1249
01:14:39.302 --> 01:14:39.983
Is it the ad?

1250
01:14:40.023 --> 01:14:41.664
Are there not enough people clicking the ad?

1251
01:14:41.724 --> 01:14:43.546
Is there too much resistance on the landing page?

1252
01:14:43.586 --> 01:14:45.828
Just tinkle that stuff and then leave it for another couple of days.

1253
01:14:46.749 --> 01:14:50.492
At the end of the day, you just, ads are just putting your product in front of people that could buy it.

1254
01:14:50.930 --> 01:14:52.992
Yeah, people massively overthink it.

1255
01:14:53.452 --> 01:14:58.877
It's like if more people know about your stuff, the chances that more people will buy your stuff is more than zero.

1256
01:14:58.897 --> 01:14:59.998
Well, I've always thought about this.

1257
01:15:00.578 --> 01:15:00.858
Mr.

1258
01:15:00.898 --> 01:15:04.161
Beast has a quote about the algorithm.

1259
01:15:04.181 --> 01:15:05.602
The algorithm is just humans.

1260
01:15:05.962 --> 01:15:06.483
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1261
01:15:06.523 --> 01:15:07.284
I've heard him say that as well.

1262
01:15:07.464 --> 01:15:08.244
It's so smart.

1263
01:15:08.344 --> 01:15:13.068
Like if your content sucks, or sorry, if your content is not performing, it's because it sucks.

1264
01:15:13.088 --> 01:15:14.129
Humans didn't like it.

1265
01:15:14.149 --> 01:15:14.970
Humans didn't like it.

1266
01:15:14.990 --> 01:15:18.233
There's no algorithm, no shadow banning, just your content sucks.

1267
01:15:18.773 --> 01:15:20.414
And it's kind of the same with your ads too.

1268
01:15:20.454 --> 01:15:27.616
I would actually, you know, one of, one strategy that has worked decently well for me is just taking my best performing organic content and run that as ads.

1269
01:15:27.956 --> 01:15:33.478
And I don't know why people think it would be different if the content is entertaining to somebody who sees it for free.

1270
01:15:33.979 --> 01:15:37.800
It's also going to be entertaining to the person who sees it if Facebook puts it in front of them.

1271
01:15:38.480 --> 01:15:40.162
Yeah, that's all it is.

1272
01:15:40.182 --> 01:15:44.147
It's just like, well, I'm just showing my stuff to more people and a bunch of them will be relevant.

1273
01:15:44.267 --> 01:15:45.148
People overthink it.

1274
01:15:45.408 --> 01:15:46.309
That's a mess of it.

1275
01:15:46.329 --> 01:15:51.274
You've got to turn off your frontal lobe and just run ads.

1276
01:15:52.756 --> 01:15:53.777
Don't overthink it.

1277
01:15:54.758 --> 01:15:57.962
Do you think that ads are required for any business?

1278
01:15:58.548 --> 01:16:00.570
It's going to be surprising coming from me, but no.

1279
01:16:01.370 --> 01:16:04.413
There are some industries that can go by perfectly well without ads.

1280
01:16:04.653 --> 01:16:05.874
It's not a lot of them.

1281
01:16:06.194 --> 01:16:08.496
Like, for example, I think the big four accounting firms.

1282
01:16:09.196 --> 01:16:10.197
My accountant told me this.

1283
01:16:10.237 --> 01:16:12.138
I don't know if it's true, but I'm going to take his word as gospel.

1284
01:16:12.819 --> 01:16:16.862
I think you said the big four accounting firms have marketing budgets of just flat zero.

1285
01:16:17.162 --> 01:16:18.884
It's very much word of mouth and referrals.

1286
01:16:19.584 --> 01:16:20.765
Yeah.

1287
01:16:21.706 --> 01:16:27.371
And then there's some other industries or certain products that the economics of running ads just doesn't make sense.

1288
01:16:27.391 --> 01:16:28.752
Like you'll just lose money on days.

1289
01:16:28.993 --> 01:16:29.853
I'll give you a perfect example.

1290
01:16:29.873 --> 01:16:31.375
This is a very ridiculous example.

1291
01:16:32.316 --> 01:16:37.520
This person that wanted to be a client, but he sold shoelaces for $2.

1292
01:16:37.540 --> 01:16:39.102
$1.99 actually.

1293
01:16:39.182 --> 01:16:41.224
I'm like, dude, this clicker is going to cost $3.

1294
01:16:41.824 --> 01:16:41.884
$3.

1295
01:16:43.723 --> 01:16:45.925
That's before we even get any purchases.

1296
01:16:45.965 --> 01:16:48.207
I'm like, this isn't going to, sure, bundle them.

1297
01:16:48.287 --> 01:16:50.550
Like, what, you get four shoelaces for $6?

1298
01:16:50.590 --> 01:16:58.197
I'm like, we need a conversion rate of, like, 80% to make profit after gross profit margins.

1299
01:16:58.357 --> 01:17:09.187
I've heard that for, like, cheaper CPG products, for example, if you can be profitable on, like, if you have, like, a positive ROAS, you're a unicorn.

1300
01:17:09.587 --> 01:17:10.208
Oh, yeah, yeah.

1301
01:17:10.468 --> 01:17:12.429
Especially with inflating advertising costs.

1302
01:17:12.649 --> 01:17:18.893
Yeah, because now you've got to figure out how to have a healthier lifetime value of that customer.

1303
01:17:19.193 --> 01:17:23.816
So that's why all the consumer goods that you buy in CPG is consumer packaged goods.

1304
01:17:24.176 --> 01:17:28.559
All the consumer goods you buy, they all have subscriptions tied to them and they have bundles.

1305
01:17:28.859 --> 01:17:34.743
It's because they're trying to grow their business with ads and they can't justify the cost unless you sign up for a year.

1306
01:17:35.003 --> 01:17:35.203
Yep.

1307
01:17:35.644 --> 01:17:37.166
Yeah, and CPMs can only go up.

1308
01:17:37.466 --> 01:17:41.130
It's why whenever a new advertising platform comes about, it's like a gold rush.

1309
01:17:41.631 --> 01:17:43.853
Like, remember when, like, Google, you got clicks for, like, a cent?

1310
01:17:45.055 --> 01:17:47.177
All the people that made, like, Tai Lopez.

1311
01:17:47.398 --> 01:17:50.041
Like, he just printed off of that, yeah.

1312
01:17:53.787 --> 01:17:55.348
Everyone's going to say it's ChatGPT.

1313
01:17:55.468 --> 01:17:58.570
It's not very good now, and I haven't heard very good feedback about it.

1314
01:17:58.750 --> 01:18:04.694
But to be clear, pretty much no ad platform is fantastic when it first comes out.

1315
01:18:04.714 --> 01:18:07.416
The first couple advertisers are absolutely guinea pigs.

1316
01:18:07.916 --> 01:18:09.217
So it's a balance between...

1317
01:18:09.778 --> 01:18:13.100
So you're talking about spending money to run ads on ChatGPT.

1318
01:18:13.440 --> 01:18:15.301
Yeah, it's like a cost per click thing.

1319
01:18:15.702 --> 01:18:27.069
But the balance is spending money on a platform that's early doesn't have its ad system figured out yet versus getting a way more expensive cost per click or cost per whatever on like a Google or a Meta.

1320
01:18:27.649 --> 01:18:34.214
Like Facebook really, Facebook and Google really have a massive competitive moat because their algorithms have been trained with...

1321
01:18:35.027 --> 01:18:40.591
billions or potentially trillions of dollars of ad spend, whereas Chajibiji just popped up.

1322
01:18:40.871 --> 01:18:45.954
And sure, it has lots of data on people, but it has gotten no results in person.

1323
01:18:46.054 --> 01:18:51.458
Is there more like a Bing or something like that?

1324
01:18:52.319 --> 01:18:53.920
You know what I love about Bing?

1325
01:18:54.120 --> 01:18:58.403
Are there places that work well but are less busy?

1326
01:18:59.083 --> 01:18:59.883
and less expensive?

1327
01:19:00.304 --> 01:19:05.046
At least in Australia, TikTok, but their conversion tracking is not great and their algorithm is not great.

1328
01:19:06.647 --> 01:19:08.127
I'm not a big fan of LinkedIn ads.

1329
01:19:08.708 --> 01:19:11.689
I haven't seen anyone, like, really print with LinkedIn ads.

1330
01:19:12.730 --> 01:19:14.911
But then again, like, you'll be able to make, like...

1331
01:19:15.969 --> 01:19:18.990
When you factor in LTV and things like that, I wouldn't try and overcomplicate it.

1332
01:19:19.030 --> 01:19:21.051
Just stick with Meta and Google.

1333
01:19:21.191 --> 01:19:22.231
Meta is...

1334
01:19:22.271 --> 01:19:30.114
I don't think people understand how incredible Facebook is at predicting human behavior on the internet.

1335
01:19:30.375 --> 01:19:31.175
Dre bought...

1336
01:19:32.413 --> 01:19:34.615
a little carry-on luggage bag that I got.

1337
01:19:35.256 --> 01:19:39.080
You ever had a dream about a product and then you get an ad for it the next day?

1338
01:19:39.340 --> 01:19:39.540
Yeah.

1339
01:19:40.161 --> 01:19:42.163
How else could you possibly do that?

1340
01:19:42.824 --> 01:19:46.848
It's like, it's following you everywhere, has so much data.

1341
01:19:46.949 --> 01:19:48.931
It's like, oh, you probably want this in the morning.

1342
01:19:49.411 --> 01:19:51.814
And then shows me the perfect carry-on travel bag.

1343
01:19:52.134 --> 01:19:55.295
You've gone through all these identity shifts in your career.

1344
01:19:55.655 --> 01:20:02.758
And you mentioned that one shift, there's been many, but the one shift is when you came to Miami and you saw like what was possible.

1345
01:20:02.878 --> 01:20:06.320
And then you just, you know, pedal to the metal, hitting your million dollars.

1346
01:20:06.400 --> 01:20:10.981
And that was, I guess, the first time when you made a significant amount of money.

1347
01:20:11.001 --> 01:20:15.083
Like, I mean, $500,000 is still a significant amount, but when you are really turning it up.

1348
01:20:15.603 --> 01:20:17.685
So what was the mindset shift?

1349
01:20:17.705 --> 01:20:24.249
I want to talk about because you speak about a few different mental models that I think will be useful for entrepreneurs that have shaped who you are as a successful founder.

1350
01:20:24.709 --> 01:20:28.151
So what was that mindset shift, the before and the after?

1351
01:20:28.211 --> 01:20:36.817
What did you think before about business, money, and then was that coming to Miami just opened a world of possibility to you or how do you describe it?

1352
01:20:37.077 --> 01:20:43.045
Yeah, the first thing was that at least coming to Miami and visually seeing everything just opened my eyes up to what's possible.

1353
01:20:43.405 --> 01:20:50.915
But one of the biggest shifts that happened with me around money is, particularly in Australia, making money is viewed as almost evil.

1354
01:20:52.770 --> 01:20:58.899
or selfish, but there's a lot of unselfish things that you can do with money that you cannot do when you come from a place of poverty.

1355
01:20:59.440 --> 01:21:04.126
So for example, when you have extra cash flow, you can donate to charities that you really like.

1356
01:21:04.286 --> 01:21:07.010
So for example, in Australia, they have a...

1357
01:21:07.878 --> 01:21:10.600
They have like a cat adoption service called Cat Haven.

1358
01:21:11.081 --> 01:21:14.403
I swear to God, they must have me on some email list where I'm just tagged.

1359
01:21:14.523 --> 01:21:19.907
Like, don't you know, if they send me a photo of an ugly cat, I'm definitely donating money.

1360
01:21:20.128 --> 01:21:21.649
I'm like, oh man, look at this poor cat.

1361
01:21:21.689 --> 01:21:23.550
And then I just like Apple ID, pay IDs.

1362
01:21:24.471 --> 01:21:24.651
Right?

1363
01:21:24.951 --> 01:21:28.834
You can't do that when you're worried paycheck to paycheck.

1364
01:21:28.854 --> 01:21:29.215
Right?

1365
01:21:29.235 --> 01:21:29.355
Right.

1366
01:21:29.595 --> 01:21:31.476
One of the other things I really like doing is sponsoring fighters.

1367
01:21:31.776 --> 01:21:33.637
Like I sponsored Cody Haddon, who's in the UFC.

1368
01:21:34.318 --> 01:21:37.980
And at first, like the way that came about was so Cody trains me in wrestling.

1369
01:21:39.061 --> 01:21:41.802
And Zach, who's my full-time trainer, is his striking coach.

1370
01:21:42.343 --> 01:21:43.783
And Zach just made a passing comment.

1371
01:21:43.823 --> 01:21:45.484
He's like, oh, Cody's got a fight coming up.

1372
01:21:45.504 --> 01:21:47.806
Like if you know any sponsors, just let us know.

1373
01:21:47.846 --> 01:21:48.946
I was like, oh, how much does he need?

1374
01:21:49.347 --> 01:21:50.107
He told me the numbers.

1375
01:21:50.227 --> 01:21:50.647
Oh, yeah, sick.

1376
01:21:50.667 --> 01:21:51.128
Like I'll do it.

1377
01:21:51.968 --> 01:21:52.930
And I was like, sure.

1378
01:21:52.950 --> 01:21:53.592
I'm like, yeah, of course.

1379
01:21:53.632 --> 01:21:54.133
Like we're mates.

1380
01:21:54.634 --> 01:21:56.979
And then I didn't realize sponsors getting fired.

1381
01:21:57.099 --> 01:21:57.420
I'm sorry.

1382
01:21:57.480 --> 01:21:59.164
Fighters getting sponsored was a big deal.

1383
01:21:59.284 --> 01:22:01.108
I was just like, I genuinely was just trying to help out a mate.

1384
01:22:01.873 --> 01:22:04.314
And then I told Zach, I was like, yeah, like Cody.

1385
01:22:04.334 --> 01:22:05.495
And he goes, no, I want you to tell him.

1386
01:22:05.535 --> 01:22:06.656
I'm like, just tell his manager.

1387
01:22:06.676 --> 01:22:07.416
Like he needs the money now.

1388
01:22:07.436 --> 01:22:08.056
He's got to book flights.

1389
01:22:08.076 --> 01:22:09.157
He goes, no, we'll tell him tomorrow.

1390
01:22:09.177 --> 01:22:09.957
I was like, all right.

1391
01:22:10.598 --> 01:22:15.900
And then when Cody rocked up with Zach and then our other mate, Bond, came, I was like, what are you doing here?

1392
01:22:15.920 --> 01:22:17.361
I was like, I want to see Cody's reaction.

1393
01:22:17.501 --> 01:22:18.542
I was like, what?

1394
01:22:18.562 --> 01:22:25.085
And I told him and he was like, and then Zach told me, I think the next day that apparently when after training, he got in the car and apparently he called his manager Jazz.

1395
01:22:25.105 --> 01:22:28.367
And it was like, I feel like this massive weight has been lifted off of my shoulders.

1396
01:22:28.887 --> 01:22:30.048
I was like, I had no idea.

1397
01:22:30.228 --> 01:22:33.270
And then I talked to some people like, yeah, dude, there's no money in fighting.

1398
01:22:34.251 --> 01:22:34.992
There's no money.

1399
01:22:35.052 --> 01:22:37.333
So them getting sponsored is like this massive deal.

1400
01:22:37.693 --> 01:22:37.894
Wow.

1401
01:22:38.134 --> 01:22:38.814
And so...

1402
01:22:39.095 --> 01:22:44.438
I think actually I've heard that people give, like, Dana White shit for this, no?

1403
01:22:44.458 --> 01:22:53.465
Yeah, I think that's because my understanding is only the fighter and one coach gets their flights paid for, and I think they only get a few days of accommodation.

1404
01:22:53.745 --> 01:22:56.988
Whereas if Cody's traveling from Perth to the U.S.,

1405
01:22:57.668 --> 01:23:04.436
And flying over his team and giving him the best chance of success so he's not rocking up jet-lagged a day or two before his fight.

1406
01:23:04.937 --> 01:23:08.441
Me being able to pay for flights, longer accommodation, can help out.

1407
01:23:08.721 --> 01:23:13.587
He won his flight in Macau, and his head coach, Rommel, messaged me.

1408
01:23:14.047 --> 01:23:16.547
And it was like, bro, just like thanking me and stuff like that.

1409
01:23:16.567 --> 01:23:17.548
I was like, no, dude, thank you.

1410
01:23:17.588 --> 01:23:19.528
Like, there's a lot of dumb shit you can do with money.

1411
01:23:19.548 --> 01:23:22.849
Like, I've bought cars and dumb accessories and stuff like that.

1412
01:23:23.249 --> 01:23:29.510
But like the coolest thing I've ever done with my money, I swear to God, hand to heart, coolest thing I've ever done with my money is pay for the lads.

1413
01:23:30.250 --> 01:23:36.011
To go on a lads trip to some random foreign country, bash some dude I've never met in my life, still don't know his name.

1414
01:23:36.271 --> 01:23:37.771
And I get to watch it live on TV.

1415
01:23:37.851 --> 01:23:39.651
That was the sickest thing I've ever done with my money.

1416
01:23:40.231 --> 01:23:43.472
What else did you notice when your agency started making more money?

1417
01:23:44.580 --> 01:23:49.347
Um, the weird thing I'm going for this weird identity crisis at the moment.

1418
01:23:49.367 --> 01:23:50.609
We talked about identity a lot.

1419
01:23:51.550 --> 01:23:55.196
Um, for the last half decade, really decade.

1420
01:23:56.407 --> 01:24:02.130
me being productive and grinding looked like sitting at a laptop, furiously typing for like hours on end.

1421
01:24:02.510 --> 01:24:08.352
But now that I have like a really talented team in place, being productive is not sitting at a laptop typing stuff out.

1422
01:24:08.372 --> 01:24:10.473
If I need something done, I send a message on Slack.

1423
01:24:10.593 --> 01:24:13.354
I get messaged three hours later saying it's done.

1424
01:24:13.514 --> 01:24:16.816
Arguably better than if I had done it myself with my split attention.

1425
01:24:17.416 --> 01:24:19.017
So now being productive...

1426
01:24:20.083 --> 01:24:44.662
looks like sitting in a chair and trying to think clearly and make one or two really good decisions a day but that looks weird and I feel guilty like the team knows this because sometimes I'll be like sitting in my bat cave chain smoking cigars and a team member will come downstairs to ask me a question and it looks like I'm goofing off it looks like I'm just slacking but I'm like I'm trying to

1427
01:24:45.643 --> 01:25:11.990
see through time and think of like eighth and ninth order consequences of this one decision and i like i honestly i feel guilty that is that is the word i would use is i feel guilty because it looks like i'm goofing off but fortunately like because i've communicated this to the team they know like i'm just trying to think but why do you feel guilty for delegation yeah i don't know it's one of those things i really got to work on it's because if i talk about i was thinking about it this morning again because i was feeling guilty

1428
01:25:13.064 --> 01:25:21.668
If I talk about how hard that I work and how it's important that everyone works hard, if I'm not doing that style of work, I feel guilty.

1429
01:25:22.348 --> 01:25:23.989
It's just, I'm still working on it.

1430
01:25:24.941 --> 01:25:31.525
The only way you would ever be able to scale, ironically, is to delegate and not do hands-on keyboard work 24-7.

1431
01:25:31.565 --> 01:25:32.925
Yeah, exactly.

1432
01:25:33.066 --> 01:25:38.769
Like I was talking to Aiden, who's like my only person in the marketing department at the moment, about who we're going to hire next.

1433
01:25:39.609 --> 01:25:43.071
And I've been thinking this in the back of my mind for the last few weeks.

1434
01:25:43.852 --> 01:25:45.292
I'm not a great CMO.

1435
01:25:45.533 --> 01:25:48.074
I'm good at marketing, but I'm not a great CMO.

1436
01:25:48.154 --> 01:25:52.717
And I was like, I think we need to hire a CMO because I'm a CMO for four hours a week.

1437
01:25:53.672 --> 01:25:55.792
And like, it's not 40 hours of my attention.

1438
01:25:55.932 --> 01:26:01.174
I'm four hours of CMO, then I'm filming ads, then I'm trying to think, then I'm CEO, then I'm overwatching this thing.

1439
01:26:01.534 --> 01:26:09.075
If there's someone that like knew as much as me doing this 10 times more than I am, of course they'll do a better job than me at growing the marketing department of this business.

1440
01:26:09.415 --> 01:26:10.415
All of their attention's on it.

1441
01:26:10.795 --> 01:26:12.496
But my identity is the marketing guy.

1442
01:26:12.516 --> 01:26:14.156
I've got an old book about it and everything like that.

1443
01:26:14.176 --> 01:26:15.096
Wouldn't it be hypocritical?

1444
01:26:15.696 --> 01:26:17.617
That's what's going through my head.

1445
01:26:17.677 --> 01:26:23.158
How do you figure out as a founder what you want to delegate and hire for versus what you want to keep doing?

1446
01:26:23.878 --> 01:26:32.742
The way that I approach it, and I'm not saying that my way is the best way, is I always try and delegate the things that I love doing and that I'm good at doing last.

1447
01:26:33.922 --> 01:26:34.922
Right?

1448
01:26:35.903 --> 01:26:40.765
So that's why the last department that I'm really in is the marketing department.

1449
01:26:41.105 --> 01:26:42.585
I'm not in the product department anymore.

1450
01:26:42.925 --> 01:26:45.426
Finance was the first thing I got removed from.

1451
01:26:45.446 --> 01:26:47.007
I think it's probably smart.

1452
01:26:48.928 --> 01:26:52.031
I'm non-operations.

1453
01:26:52.071 --> 01:26:54.853
Marketing is the last...

1454
01:26:54.913 --> 01:26:57.776
Right now, the all chart, I sit as CEO and CMO.

1455
01:26:58.877 --> 01:27:03.661
But if I really want to grow this company, I can't be CMO and CEO at the same time.

1456
01:27:04.112 --> 01:27:05.473
You speak a lot about deleting things.

1457
01:27:05.513 --> 01:27:07.654
So I think that, you know, we're talking about delegating.

1458
01:27:08.154 --> 01:27:09.694
Delegating is also deleting tasks.

1459
01:27:10.655 --> 01:27:16.317
But you've also deleted parts of your personality, deleted, you know, things that you're doing in the day to day that don't serve you.

1460
01:27:16.697 --> 01:27:19.319
So why is deleting things so important?

1461
01:27:19.719 --> 01:27:22.260
I'll ask that because I want you to talk about.

1462
01:27:23.717 --> 01:27:24.958
the mindset of deleting.

1463
01:27:25.298 --> 01:27:27.058
So sort of like addition through subtraction.

1464
01:27:27.919 --> 01:27:30.820
Um, so that's the first part I want you to teach people.

1465
01:27:30.860 --> 01:27:35.342
But the second thing is what have you deleted in your life that people would be surprised about?

1466
01:27:35.682 --> 01:27:35.962
Yeah.

1467
01:27:36.022 --> 01:27:37.603
So there's mastery and simplicity.

1468
01:27:37.623 --> 01:27:42.025
And this is something that I've been talking about and thinking about a lot for the last couple of weeks and months.

1469
01:27:42.525 --> 01:27:45.607
There's this, you probably know, and Jiro Ono.

1470
01:27:46.007 --> 01:27:46.567
I don't know him.

1471
01:27:46.607 --> 01:27:46.867
No.

1472
01:27:47.407 --> 01:27:49.628
So he's this like legendary sushi chef.

1473
01:27:49.648 --> 01:27:53.150
I was watching a podcast about him and, um,

1474
01:27:54.245 --> 01:27:56.509
He's like the greatest sushi chef of all time.

1475
01:27:56.529 --> 01:27:57.531
He's been doing it literally as...

1476
01:27:57.651 --> 01:28:01.097
He might have passed away now, but he'd been doing it for like nine decades or something like that.

1477
01:28:02.483 --> 01:28:03.784
Very minimalist restaurant.

1478
01:28:03.944 --> 01:28:15.814
There's only a few ingredients, like a handful of ingredients that they have, but they just know the ingredients in crafting the sushi so well that it's just the greatest sushi on earth.

1479
01:28:16.295 --> 01:28:27.124
Because when you try and learn, talking outside of food now, when you try and learn and do so many different things, it's just impossible for you to focus all of your attention on something.

1480
01:28:28.048 --> 01:28:29.310
I'll give you another perfect example actually.

1481
01:28:29.330 --> 01:28:35.561
So I did this Muay Thai training session with this guy called Ajan Watt in Thailand when I was there with Zach.

1482
01:28:36.523 --> 01:28:36.763
And he's...

1483
01:28:38.295 --> 01:28:40.657
It was interesting because he speaks English, but not well.

1484
01:28:41.178 --> 01:28:44.821
It's not his first language, but I can only speak one language poorly.

1485
01:28:45.762 --> 01:28:47.544
He can speak a little bit of English.

1486
01:28:48.185 --> 01:28:53.330
And when he was giving me instructions, he had to do it with the limited English vocabulary that he had.

1487
01:28:53.830 --> 01:28:59.535
But because he had limited words to choose from, I could very easily understand.

1488
01:28:59.556 --> 01:29:01.037
He'd go, you control them.

1489
01:29:01.077 --> 01:29:02.478
I know exactly what you mean.

1490
01:29:03.259 --> 01:29:08.921
where like over communicating and over explaining simply wasn't an option because of the language barrier.

1491
01:29:08.941 --> 01:29:16.303
And I thought about it a lot because there's a lot of things that people will add to their business and then they do all of them really, really poorly.

1492
01:29:16.543 --> 01:29:22.545
Like we've grown as a business, both in quantity of clients and the quality of work they've done by just simply deleting stuff.

1493
01:29:22.925 --> 01:29:26.526
So for example, when we're in all the ATO debt,

1494
01:29:27.306 --> 01:29:31.933
We do about 100K a month and 75K a month was our done for you service.

1495
01:29:32.333 --> 01:29:34.717
But then there were so many different packages you could choose from.

1496
01:29:34.737 --> 01:29:37.501
It was all bloated and all this operational drag.

1497
01:29:37.721 --> 01:29:38.963
And then we just had this one with you thing.

1498
01:29:39.993 --> 01:29:45.116
And then we just cut out like 75% of what we offered and just focused on this one thing.

1499
01:29:45.136 --> 01:29:48.759
And even then and that, like we focus on fewer and fewer types of customers.

1500
01:29:48.779 --> 01:29:50.400
It used to be service-based and e-commerce.

1501
01:29:50.420 --> 01:29:51.441
Like, all right, we're better at service.

1502
01:29:51.461 --> 01:29:52.741
Let's just do service-based businesses.

1503
01:29:52.862 --> 01:29:56.944
That's where you said no to 90% of outside of the different categories of customers.

1504
01:29:57.244 --> 01:29:58.085
Also the wrong fits.

1505
01:29:58.105 --> 01:29:59.886
You're just like hyper-focused on what works.

1506
01:29:59.906 --> 01:30:02.528
People think I'm lying when I say we reject people every day.

1507
01:30:02.548 --> 01:30:03.869
We reject people every day.

1508
01:30:03.949 --> 01:30:06.551
Like if we're not confident, this is an absolute home run for you.

1509
01:30:06.591 --> 01:30:08.212
We just won't let you in.

1510
01:30:08.872 --> 01:30:10.853
And so we just focus on fewer and fewer customers.

1511
01:30:11.093 --> 01:30:14.435
I actually made a post actually in our school community two weeks ago.

1512
01:30:14.455 --> 01:30:20.638
I was nervous about making it because what I had done was, so we have advisory calls for members, right?

1513
01:30:20.658 --> 01:30:22.399
They're like calls you can go onto for support.

1514
01:30:22.679 --> 01:30:24.280
We've got like MetaCalls, Google calls, all that stuff.

1515
01:30:24.680 --> 01:30:26.381
But then I started adding guest speakers.

1516
01:30:27.061 --> 01:30:29.503
So I went, oh, my mate's good at organic content.

1517
01:30:29.523 --> 01:30:31.063
I'll let them do a weekly call with him.

1518
01:30:31.504 --> 01:30:33.785
Oh, my AI guys, I'll let them do calls with them.

1519
01:30:34.225 --> 01:30:35.466
Oh, like this other person.

1520
01:30:35.506 --> 01:30:37.527
And so I just added stuff onto the business

1521
01:30:38.387 --> 01:30:39.809
because I thought I was adding more value.

1522
01:30:40.510 --> 01:30:42.872
And then I realized my mistake.

1523
01:30:43.213 --> 01:30:45.135
The business has gotten better the more I deleted stuff.

1524
01:30:45.175 --> 01:30:47.818
And so I made a post in the school that I was nervous about making.

1525
01:30:47.838 --> 01:30:51.843
I said, I accidentally made the program worse, but I've fixed it now.

1526
01:30:52.544 --> 01:30:55.427
And so I said, I accidentally added all these calls

1527
01:30:56.555 --> 01:30:57.615
I'm going to delete all of them.

1528
01:30:57.835 --> 01:31:03.557
You're not going to get them anymore because I think I just need you to focus on getting your ads on and making them do well because that's what you paid us to do.

1529
01:31:04.457 --> 01:31:08.138
I was expecting backlash and everyone was like, yeah, actually, it was kind of overwhelming.

1530
01:31:08.158 --> 01:31:09.718
I felt like I was missing out on stuff.

1531
01:31:10.799 --> 01:31:11.679
This is a good call.

1532
01:31:12.199 --> 01:31:17.800
It's so funny how your perception as a founder is so different than what your customers see.

1533
01:31:18.340 --> 01:31:22.621
Like you think as a founder, you want to do more, you want to give more, you want to give more options.

1534
01:31:23.122 --> 01:31:24.522
And then your customer is like, no.

1535
01:31:24.871 --> 01:31:26.952
Yeah, just make my ads do well.

1536
01:31:27.972 --> 01:31:30.513
Yeah, I think that also that's a big issue with founders in general.

1537
01:31:30.533 --> 01:31:44.299
Sometimes we get so in our head and we have to for a second just pause and like zoom out and remove ourselves from like the business and objectively look at what we're doing and think is this actually serving the most urgent important.

1538
01:31:44.739 --> 01:31:44.919
Right?

1539
01:31:44.939 --> 01:31:49.141
Like the Pareto's principle, what's the 20% that's going to lead to the 80%.

1540
01:31:49.641 --> 01:31:58.305
And I think that more often than not, most founders, they do succumb to shiny object syndrome and they just keep doing more and more and more and more because they're just trying everything.

1541
01:31:58.525 --> 01:31:58.765
Yeah.

1542
01:31:59.025 --> 01:32:00.666
Do you know Kaizen philosophy?

1543
01:32:01.206 --> 01:32:03.507
Yeah, so it's just like 1% better at a few things.

1544
01:32:03.727 --> 01:32:05.548
That's what I'm trying to really focus on now.

1545
01:32:05.848 --> 01:32:10.010
Like I have literally every single thing that a customer experiences on a mirror board.

1546
01:32:10.050 --> 01:32:12.411
It's like clicks, add, converts on this landing page.

1547
01:32:12.772 --> 01:32:14.673
Like literally every single thing they're experiencing.

1548
01:32:14.713 --> 01:32:18.034
And I just look at it from time to time and go, which one's the worst right now?

1549
01:32:18.374 --> 01:32:25.878
And rather than trying to add stuff, I just like look at one of the little post-it notes and go, how can we make that less clicks or like easier to access without adding post-it notes?

1550
01:32:26.276 --> 01:32:29.698
So it's like the deletion and the boundaries.

1551
01:32:30.139 --> 01:32:31.500
So you're creating boundaries about what's important.

1552
01:32:31.520 --> 01:32:32.600
You're deleting everything else.

1553
01:32:32.881 --> 01:32:35.663
And that's forcing you to hyper-focus on that.

1554
01:32:35.683 --> 01:32:37.684
And that's going to make it that much better.

1555
01:32:37.704 --> 01:32:40.686
How do we go from here to here in as few clicks as possible?

1556
01:32:41.807 --> 01:32:42.487
I like that a lot.

1557
01:32:43.268 --> 01:32:43.949
I like that a lot.

1558
01:32:44.009 --> 01:32:46.750
You know, I've always... A couple ideas that I hate.

1559
01:32:47.231 --> 01:32:52.635
I hate the idea to diversify in business or in investment at the beginning.

1560
01:32:52.875 --> 01:32:52.975
Yeah.

1561
01:32:53.664 --> 01:33:01.252
Because how everybody who I know who's made a shit ton of money, like in the hundreds of millions or I've interviewed billionaires, they made it doing one thing.

1562
01:33:02.153 --> 01:33:03.935
One thing, like hyper focus.

1563
01:33:04.515 --> 01:33:08.239
And all the stupid advice about diversify and... Side hustles.

1564
01:33:08.279 --> 01:33:13.465
Yeah, it's like, no, just do one thing better than anyone else and you'll make more money than you know what to do with.

1565
01:33:13.485 --> 01:33:13.925
Yeah.

1566
01:33:13.985 --> 01:33:17.228
But people are so, Hermose speaks about this a lot.

1567
01:33:17.268 --> 01:33:23.153
He's like, you know, the average entrepreneur who's unsuccessful starts something, it gets hard, they give up.

1568
01:33:23.213 --> 01:33:25.134
They start the next thing, it gets hard, they give up.

1569
01:33:25.194 --> 01:33:29.258
And then he'd repeat that cycle for the rest of their life.

1570
01:33:29.938 --> 01:33:34.242
You speak about, so your goal is to hit $100 million a year in three years.

1571
01:33:34.282 --> 01:33:38.005
Right now you're roughly about, you know, 20 to 20, $25 million per year-ish ballpark.

1572
01:33:38.025 --> 01:33:38.165
So...

1573
01:33:44.363 --> 01:33:50.826
You speak about how founders hit a number, they get comfortable and they stop.

1574
01:33:52.827 --> 01:33:54.568
Now, two thoughts on this.

1575
01:33:55.468 --> 01:33:59.870
Why do people stop once they spend so much of their life and their energy building something?

1576
01:33:59.930 --> 01:34:00.930
Why does somebody stop?

1577
01:34:00.970 --> 01:34:04.172
Why do they say this is, or why do they subconsciously think this is enough?

1578
01:34:04.772 --> 01:34:06.153
But also, is that a bad thing?

1579
01:34:06.813 --> 01:34:10.815
I guess the point that I'm getting to is, how do you know what your number actually is?

1580
01:34:11.674 --> 01:34:12.275
I still don't know.

1581
01:34:12.595 --> 01:34:25.147
I can't lie to you and say that I know the answer to this question because even when I pick that number out, I've had conversations where I'm like, well, if we get to 100, why don't we just spend another two years to get a quarter billion?

1582
01:34:25.828 --> 01:34:27.910
And then we're already quarter way there.

1583
01:34:27.950 --> 01:34:28.931
Why don't we just go to a billion?

1584
01:34:28.991 --> 01:34:29.912
I don't know the answer yet.

1585
01:34:30.072 --> 01:34:32.794
I think the reason for that is I'm 30 years old.

1586
01:34:33.823 --> 01:34:40.565
The amount of experience I've had compared to significantly more successful entrepreneurs is dwarfed by them.

1587
01:34:41.085 --> 01:34:41.826
I don't have an answer.

1588
01:34:42.206 --> 01:34:44.066
I think if I gave you an answer, it would be naive.

1589
01:34:44.527 --> 01:34:45.127
I think I have enough.

1590
01:34:45.307 --> 01:34:47.848
I don't have enough of an ego to say I know the answer to that one.

1591
01:34:47.928 --> 01:34:54.630
Do you think about, in all seriousness, more money, more problems than what you want your life to actually look like?

1592
01:34:56.531 --> 01:34:57.831
I thought about this a lot.

1593
01:34:58.131 --> 01:35:02.773
Vivian too, your rich BFF on like YouTube, she has a good following, she speaks about finance.

1594
01:35:02.793 --> 01:35:17.197
And I think her number is 20 million cash, because if you invest that conservatively, 4% will allow you to live off the dividends and give you like a very, very comfortable life in terms of what you can actually spend per year.

1595
01:35:17.878 --> 01:35:22.159
But I think that not enough people go through that exercise about figuring what they want their life to look like.

1596
01:35:22.199 --> 01:35:22.679
And also,

1597
01:35:24.579 --> 01:35:27.240
20 million cash is a massive amount of money for most people.

1598
01:35:27.260 --> 01:35:30.700
But we're just we're speaking about people that are super ambitious, that are looking to sell their company.

1599
01:35:30.740 --> 01:35:33.581
If you're doing 25 million in revenue, you're getting a multiple on that.

1600
01:35:33.601 --> 01:35:36.062
You're getting a decent sized exit after tax.

1601
01:35:36.082 --> 01:35:37.182
Yeah, it's cut down a little bit.

1602
01:35:37.242 --> 01:35:38.642
If you took investment, it's cut down a little bit.

1603
01:35:38.662 --> 01:35:40.143
If you have partners, it's cut down a little bit.

1604
01:35:40.163 --> 01:35:45.824
But you're still thinking about, OK, what's the amount of cash I want on my bank account if I exit or if maybe I don't want to exit?

1605
01:35:46.524 --> 01:35:50.485
Maybe I like, but the point is, you also have to know where you want to live.

1606
01:35:51.086 --> 01:35:59.769
Is it 20 million paying 4% in New York or 20 million paying 4% in Perth or 20 million paying 4% in Bali, right?

1607
01:36:00.289 --> 01:36:02.430
So I think people don't map out their lives enough.

1608
01:36:02.650 --> 01:36:07.812
This is something I'm struggling with because I've been trying to map this out for the last couple of weeks and months.

1609
01:36:08.492 --> 01:36:12.653
Because, and this is going to sound cocky, I hope that it doesn't.

1610
01:36:13.013 --> 01:36:16.434
I look at goals as being goals, doing goals, having goals.

1611
01:36:17.314 --> 01:36:22.155
In terms of doing and having, I'm not going to lie.

1612
01:36:22.596 --> 01:36:27.117
I kind of have everything that I want and I'm doing things that I love doing.

1613
01:36:27.637 --> 01:36:29.977
Like, I don't really like traveling on holidays anymore.

1614
01:36:30.218 --> 01:36:31.598
It frustrates me because...

1615
01:36:32.947 --> 01:36:40.691
Like, honestly, for me to leave my postcode, the house that I like with the view that I have, the Batcave that I get to train in, I love what I do.

1616
01:36:40.771 --> 01:36:43.593
Like, my average Tuesday afternoon is gangster.

1617
01:36:43.893 --> 01:36:53.338
If I went to, like, 18-year-old Bren, and I'm like, bro, you drive your two dream supercars and you're literally LARPing as Bruce Wayne, you'd be like, sick, let's do that forever.

1618
01:36:54.158 --> 01:37:00.382
And then you take me out of that, I go somewhere else that I have less cars and I can't train, and it's just like, my holidays are admittedly a downgrade.

1619
01:37:00.662 --> 01:37:02.303
The thing that I'm trying to focus on now...

1620
01:37:03.255 --> 01:37:04.196
is who do I be?

1621
01:37:04.776 --> 01:37:14.584
But that's very difficult to write out because it's easy for me to write down, train twice a day, try and live as Batman, have this car, have this house and stuff like that.

1622
01:37:16.045 --> 01:37:19.427
But the being thing is a little bit difficult because...

1623
01:37:20.447 --> 01:37:22.207
it's not, I think it's not visual, right?

1624
01:37:22.228 --> 01:37:23.288
So it's like, who do I want to be?

1625
01:37:23.408 --> 01:37:26.449
So I want to be someone that's helpful and enables people to achieve their goals.

1626
01:37:26.469 --> 01:37:27.749
That's why I like sponsoring fighters.

1627
01:37:27.809 --> 01:37:28.009
Right.

1628
01:37:28.589 --> 01:37:32.890
And so how much money do I need to be the person that I want to be?

1629
01:37:32.910 --> 01:37:34.331
I haven't figured that number out yet.

1630
01:37:34.371 --> 01:37:41.373
It's like, what, how much money do I need to start the literal league of shadows and just sponsor like the best fighters in Australia?

1631
01:37:41.393 --> 01:37:42.673
How much money do I need for that?

1632
01:37:42.693 --> 01:37:46.254
So this season of, in this season of your life, that's your goal.

1633
01:37:46.494 --> 01:37:46.694
Yeah.

1634
01:37:46.874 --> 01:37:47.234
That's the thing.

1635
01:37:47.254 --> 01:37:49.315
It's going to change and it could change next year.

1636
01:37:50.184 --> 01:37:59.030
And I think the approach that I've got, for the time being anyway, in my 30-year-old naivety is I'm going to keep doing things and optimizing for fun.

1637
01:37:59.190 --> 01:38:01.492
That's what I like doing, is just optimizing for fun.

1638
01:38:02.032 --> 01:38:09.778
And right now, driving a McLaren that spits fire and then doing Krav Maga on a Friday morning before work, that's fun for me.

1639
01:38:10.833 --> 01:38:11.914
You optimize for fun.

1640
01:38:12.114 --> 01:38:15.496
What happens when somebody optimizes for comfort in their life?

1641
01:38:15.796 --> 01:38:18.398
Yeah, like I used to optimize for comfort a lot.

1642
01:38:18.598 --> 01:38:24.202
Like ages 18 to 25, I was probably... How much heavier was I, Dre?

1643
01:38:24.222 --> 01:38:25.483
Like 30 kilos heavier?

1644
01:38:25.723 --> 01:38:26.123
Oh, boy.

1645
01:38:26.524 --> 01:38:27.004
Yeah, yeah.

1646
01:38:27.024 --> 01:38:27.744
I was a big guy.

1647
01:38:27.764 --> 01:38:30.026
I was optimizing for comfort.

1648
01:38:30.066 --> 01:38:30.746
I didn't train.

1649
01:38:30.766 --> 01:38:32.448
I think if someone had...

1650
01:38:33.564 --> 01:38:46.797
known me at age 21 and they did not see me at all and then saw me today they certainly wouldn't recognize me like who was this person very very different change like even dre's nodding um optimizing for comfort just sets you in like the middle of the bell curve and so

1651
01:38:48.191 --> 01:38:51.054
You can't grow from a place of comfort.

1652
01:38:51.074 --> 01:38:53.376
All the growth happens from places of discomfort.

1653
01:38:53.396 --> 01:38:57.360
It's why when you go to the gym, you had to put your muscles through stress so that they grow back bigger.

1654
01:38:58.621 --> 01:39:02.966
I preach this to the team every single monthly company-wide meeting.

1655
01:39:03.767 --> 01:39:07.470
All of us sit somewhere on a bell curve and your behavior sits on a bell curve as well.

1656
01:39:07.831 --> 01:39:09.472
You are constantly trying to push

1657
01:39:10.233 --> 01:39:33.207
yourself to the right of the bell curve because you'll just find this new area of oh i didn't know that was possible and then that will become your new standard but until then nigh realism we're talking about about an hour ago your brain will just make up a story and agree with it and if the if the agreement in your head and the story in your head is this is all that you're capable of you're going to behave in a way that proves that you're right i love that um

1658
01:39:35.683 --> 01:39:38.767
On the book, you have David holding Goliath's head.

1659
01:39:40.248 --> 01:39:40.969
Who is Goliath?

1660
01:39:41.650 --> 01:39:44.053
Well, this is one of the things I like about the cover.

1661
01:39:44.593 --> 01:39:48.257
So I talk about in the book, advertising is an art versus science.

1662
01:39:48.758 --> 01:39:50.981
So the art is in advertising anyway.

1663
01:39:51.001 --> 01:39:52.102
You can do or say whatever you want.

1664
01:39:53.463 --> 01:39:54.863
and people will interpret it differently.

1665
01:39:55.504 --> 01:39:58.084
So people are going to look at this cover and interpret it differently.

1666
01:39:58.464 --> 01:40:02.566
It could be that they're David and Goliath is their agency.

1667
01:40:02.586 --> 01:40:04.646
It could be that Goliath is their competitor.

1668
01:40:04.666 --> 01:40:05.547
There's so many different...

1669
01:40:05.567 --> 01:40:09.248
It could be that I look at it and go, that's me with the rest of the industry.

1670
01:40:09.268 --> 01:40:11.128
I was going to say Goliath could be your own ego too.

1671
01:40:11.308 --> 01:40:11.708
It could be.

1672
01:40:11.728 --> 01:40:13.929
There's so many different ways it could be interpreted, right?

1673
01:40:13.949 --> 01:40:17.370
That's the beauty of art is you can look at it and interpret it all differently.

1674
01:40:17.972 --> 01:40:18.973
Where do you want to send people?

1675
01:40:18.993 --> 01:40:21.595
Where do you want to send people on social, website?

1676
01:40:22.055 --> 01:40:23.076
I'll put all the links in the show notes.

1677
01:40:23.156 --> 01:40:25.198
Yeah, just whereyou.com.au.

1678
01:40:25.638 --> 01:40:26.839
You'll be able to find everything there.

1679
01:40:26.879 --> 01:40:28.580
What's your handle on Instagram?

1680
01:40:28.600 --> 01:40:29.781
Like brand only ads.

1681
01:40:30.021 --> 01:40:33.964
The last thing I want to leave the audience with, you've learned so much over your career.

1682
01:40:35.045 --> 01:40:35.886
You don't have kids yet.

1683
01:40:37.087 --> 01:40:38.007
Do you want kids at some point?

1684
01:40:38.148 --> 01:40:43.252
So at one point in your life, you're going to have to pass down the most important piece of advice to your kids.

1685
01:40:44.532 --> 01:40:45.854
What do you want to teach them?

1686
01:40:45.974 --> 01:40:47.735
What do you want to leave them with and why?

1687
01:40:49.401 --> 01:40:52.163
I said it before, but the way you do something is the way that you do everything.

1688
01:40:52.704 --> 01:40:59.069
So the way that this shows up in staff members, for example, is what I'm trying to work out when I interview someone is what do you like on the weekend?

1689
01:40:59.369 --> 01:41:02.752
Because given enough time, you're just going to revert back to your average.

1690
01:41:03.032 --> 01:41:11.959
Like if you're just a degenerate drinker on the weekend, sure, for a period of time, you'll be able to put your goody two shoes on, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday to Friday.

1691
01:41:12.400 --> 01:41:15.242
But if you get a little bit of comfort, you're going to slip a little bit.

1692
01:41:15.522 --> 01:41:18.524
And so you should be optimizing your life and thinking,

1693
01:41:19.633 --> 01:41:27.455
How can I optimize my behavior outside of the activities that I'm trying to get better at so that when I get to those activities, it's just way easier.

1694
01:41:28.095 --> 01:41:30.195
And what would be the lesson that you would tell your younger self?

1695
01:41:30.795 --> 01:41:33.636
I don't think I would tell him anything.

1696
01:41:34.756 --> 01:41:38.557
I think that I had to go through all of that to learn all of those things myself.

1697
01:41:39.177 --> 01:41:46.639
And to be honest, with the ego that I had at 20 years old, if 30-year-old Brandon came in and said, hey, bro, go do this, 20-year-old Brandon wouldn't listen.

1698
01:41:46.739 --> 01:41:48.679
He'll just learn the hard way, but he'll get through it.