Guest Podcast: How To Email Influencers, Grow A Podcast, Sell, And Be Happy (Authentic AF)

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All listeners can save 30% off their first order. Just head to cornbreadhamp.com slash success and use code success at checkout. That's cornbreadhamp.com slash success code success for 30% off your first order of these amazing gummies. Today you're going to hear me on the authentic as F podcast with Sunyee. Make sure you subscribe on YouTube or go listen wherever you get your podcasts. The subject line. It's worked in B2B sales. It's working in guests on my show. Probably the one subject line that gets the most open rates of any subject line I've used and it's and that usually gets between a 35 to 40% open rate and then in the actual body of the email you're telling them that they're sort of like three versions of sales people. So you have people that don't have their numbers are fired, comfortable letting numbers and they slack and people that hit their numbers in like Q1 and then they're still like just head all to the metal for the next nine months and those are the ones that just absolutely kill it. How can I call my podcast like what did you do? You can do everything and what do I mean by that? Okay so there's not a single marketing thing that you would do for a company that you couldn't do for a podcast. So first of all in any business the most expensive customer is a new customer, the cheapest customer is a returning customer. When people they're just great marketers and they have shitty product it's because they don't feel like they can attract them first in the second time which is no way to build it just exists in this course creator world, nowhere else would a business survive only selling to a customer once. How can I get famous guests on my podcast like you, especially like if I'm just starting out? I think if you try and if you start to build a podcast and you want to get the most famous guests on your show and I'm not even saying that that's what you should be focusing on when you're starting a podcast but say that's really what you want to accomplish. Getting guests on a podcast is a sales pitch at the end of the day. So you have to understand when you're selling anything to anyone and what you're selling when you're asking somebody to come onto your podcast is you're selling the opportunity for them to tap into your audience but you may not have a large one and the ask is their time and their attention and their energy from the thousands of other podcasts it could be out there. So what I did was two things. First of all I knew how to find the the decision makers email which I knew from an enterprise sales background so I know to find the person's email. Now it's very easy you can just DM them but email I find especially when you're starting out you don't have a following of your own emails are a great way to get in touch because a lot of the social platforms if you DM a big celebrity you're going to get relegated to the spam inbox you're going to get relegated to the not their general main inbox so they may not even see your pitch. So you find their email address and you have to think of what is meaningful for them that's going to entice them to get onto your show. The subject line that I use that I've used when I don't have other past famous guests is a subject line that's worked in B2B sales it's worked in it's working in guess on my show I've never really used it for B2C but I'm assuming you could work there because it's probably the one subject line that gets the most open rates of any subject line I've used and it's my first name last name and then my cell phone number and that usually gets between a 35 to 40% open rate and then once you get the open rate this is assuming that you have no other past guest because you have other big names you can also include them in the show notes so that there's some social proof that your show's legitimate but if you just need an open rate and you have no other proof points that you've done anything cool that would be a great place to start and then in the actual body of the email you're telling them that I'm going to do it on zoom so I'm not taking up too much of your time we're going to keep it to maybe 30 to 45 minutes I'm going to chop up a whole bunch of clips so that I'm going to give them to you so that you can use them on your social so I'm almost acting I'm acting like an outsourced video editing agency for your own social and we're going to talk about the things that are most important to you on this show and then it's going to go out to my okay maybe maybe exaggerate a tiny tiny little bit about about the audience that you have you can try and pull some emails from there you're going to send it to a thousand emails we have you know a thousand listeners on this show you try and look at any sort of audience that you've built up to this point that will be beneficial to that person again so you have video assets for them you have a little bit of a built-in audience you make it as frictionless as possible and then the x factor that I found works very well for big names especially when you're first starting out is something called intent so when you're selling anything to anyone is something called intent what does intent mean it means that well they are actively seeking the thing that you are selling it's not like a nice to have it's a need to have and what does intent look like when somebody's getting on a podcast it means that they're launching something they're writing a book or they're launching their own podcast or there's something that they're they want to promote that your podcast can help them get that objective accomplished so when I first started it I was on Amazon I was looking at newly released books and I was filtering by category and by popularity and I was reaching out to people famous authors that were releasing a book in the next three to six months because you know there's intent there they have to accomplish they have to get PR they're already working with an agent so if you're hitting them up around the same time they're releasing a book and you do all the other stuff properly there's a really high likelihood that they're going to come on your show because they're always they're already in the mindset of I need to promote my new book I'm already paying somebody to promote a for me here's one other 30 to 45 minute zoom podcast amongst a sea of probably 20 to 30 podcasts that I'm doing so it's not going to be that disruptive to me I'm already doing a whole bunch of them that's how you can honestly with like a shadow of a doubt get big names on your show and you're first starting out and then as your show grows and you get I mean that just becomes easier I mean would you recommend yeah people to like kind of get a get a couple of big names first so that they can use that as a leverage to get other guests that was gonna be my next point yeah so it once you do this strategy you will get some big names and then you start to include those names in the pitch and the subject line and the email copy going out it's just getting the ball rolling getting that flywheel certain yes correct I mean for me what happened was when I started I was so bad at asking questions that I almost like wish that I kind of waited before I asked some because I already had some relationship with big names but I wish I had like done a few like kind of throw away episodes first you know you mentioned so you asked me right out of the gate how do you get big names on your show and I gave you an answer I don't think that's always the smartest way to start a podcast I do think you should get some reps in I think you should have very comfortable conversations with people that you know or people even that are just very charismatic that you can you know just you there's some people that you just sit down with and right out of the gate you feel like your best friends I was listening to Patrick but David speak about when he started the PBD podcast not the original value tame and podcast but the PBD podcast I think one of his first episodes was if I'm not mistaken his barber who is just a super charismatic dude who we just wanted to shoot the shit with on his podcast now he had already had tons of podcasting and and and and hosting experience but the point is you don't have to aim for big names right away I think it's important for you to get comfortable just asking questions having conversation and once you put the reps in then obviously those big names will be a lot less stressful I also did the same thing and I I pulled on Grant Cardone Guy Kawasaki Anthony Scaremochi way too early when I was way too nervous and the episode turned out okay and then we've done a guy Kawasaki we did another episode more recently so I mean you build relationships with these people they're gonna come back more than once it's not really the end of the world but yeah it's I think you should put a couple reps in before you start I got in the beginning I got a little bit thrown off because like like you are really good at like just kind of talking but I noticed that not everybody is like even some famous people and yeah like they just give very short answers and I'm like I'll shed my not a question section you need to there is an art to an interview I mean I've always been I guess a little bit of a conversationalist I think I'm much better now six years of doing it as a job I think I'm much better now than when I started but if you look at Joe Rogan look at Joe Rogan when he started versus where he is now he's become a great conversation he was always he's always chatty but he's become very good at the art of conversation and the art of if I if you feel like the answers are short then there's a Chris Voss hostage negotiation technique where you repeat the last couple words the person said with an upwards inflection and question and then they'll just go deeper you can do stuff like that or you can just be very explicit and say please go deeper or explain more or why was that and people usually open up and there's also a little bit of a pre-framing at the beginning where I say especially if I've listened to their episodes before in the past and I find that they are very short with their answers I say listen this podcast is all about you I can talk all day my audience isn't want to share me talk there's here for you please feel free to like take some time answer the questions fully give some context tell some stories after the audience loves and when you when you frame it like that when you're going into the conversation right off the bat I think they feel a lot more comfortable spending time and just living in their answers so yeah I have so many more questions up around podcasts then I want to dive deep but first can't can we hear kind of your journey of like how did you go from like an employee to an entrepreneur over where you are now so when I started my career I was an employee in sales and I did very well in sales and I was in tech sales I was working for a large telecom in Canada and then I moved to another company whereas leading sales and marketing and that company was acquired by private equity and I can talk about you know depends on what direction you want to take this in but that was sort of my first version of entrepreneurship equity ownership exit event and that was a light bulb moment for me because ever since I was very young I looked at the careers that my parents had and I understood that the safety and security and the pension that my parents were fortunate enough to have was not a reality for me or for the majority of people so I had to figure out another way I had to figure it another way because at the time I have a much different view of retirement now but at the time I was like okay so how do I retire at 65 if nobody's paying me a pension that means I have to have a lot of money saved up and in Canada where the the marginal tax rate is over 50% okay so how much money do I have to make per year and I couldn't see that in traditional nine to five so would you at this time well this has been a thought that sort of evolved over my entire life this idea of I mean 18 19 20 but I just I did see me falling the same path as my dad and my mom yeah not to cut you off but yeah just because like I thought that was interesting because I heard just talk about this story before and like me and a lot of people that I know yeah we don't think about that we don't think about when we're 60 we don't think about retirement we don't think about I just I just feel like a lot of people don't think about financial security at that much they just want to party it out right now or no I was like no I because I've thought about this a lot and I think that what what created the most discord and stress in my life was the fact that your childhood experiences if they're positive in mind were are kind of what you want to aspire to achieving your own life and then I understood that if I work the same amount as my parents did I would not have the same lifestyle so then that creates this imbalance I'm like okay so the path that I enjoyed growing because I was wanted to have a family I you know like American dream or Canadian whatever American dream white picket fence you get it like detached home like the whole the whole American whatever the whole American dream and I realized if I put in the same amount of hours as my parents did I wouldn't have that and that was really stressful to me I don't know why I thought about it I think more people should think about it I think more people should future prove themselves I think more people should think about how much money do I have to have when I retire so if I do want to retire at 65 which a lot of our parents and grandparents were able to do if I don't have this pension and to understand what a pension is because I think people that are younger probably don't even understand what like my dad has he gets 70% of his five best years I think five best years until the day that he dies so for easy math and make a hundred thousand dollars for five years over the course of your career you make $70,000 per year after you retire until the day that you die you don't have to do anything so you just have like that's that's true that's real passive income and you're just existing in making 70 grand a year or if it's 200 or three it doesn't matter the 70% still applies that type of pension doesn't exist in private industry anymore it only exists in government and private industry used to offer it anyways that's a whole other conversation about pension and how they flip to RRSP and and and and all these different and all these different kinds of pensions and Canada at least obviously I have a 401k down here but yeah so basically if you do not future proof yourself you are either going to work till you die or if you find another way to make money and ironically on that path to find another way to make money you actually find out that you may not ever want to retire but the point is most people do not think that far ahead into the future and God forbid people are going to turn 60 65 70 maybe their health isn't in the best condition whatever and they still have to work because they don't have enough money saved up that's like a horrible situation but it's going to happen more and more and more and more because fewer and fewer people have that safety net built that's very scary so I was just thinking about this at a young age and it and it really pushed it pushed me in different career trajectories and I think I would have if I thought that I was going to be safe and secure and I don't know I didn't know that I was just I was really curious about that because I do think that just that mindset alone I think already kind of sets you up because so my my my career was supposed to be either so my dad was originally a cop and then he went into counter capitalism he worked for the government in Canada were for ceases and which is like Canadian security intelligence services is kind of like a mix of the FBI and the CIA all rolled into one organization so that was very safe and secure I could have gone down that path but I was also looking at law school because I didn't undergraduate in criminology and law so that was going to be the sort of the traditional path but then I also saw I also saw people around me that were making tons of money in tech so I wasn't even thinking entrepreneur I was just thinking okay so how do I make a ton of money in tech climb the corporate ladder go sales and sales manager then director then VP and be pulling in you know half a million a million dollars a year plus stock options and just kill it in a career in tech because you can never even make that kind of money in the government either you really um so yeah and that so you were kind of just yeah aiming to for like a high in calorie yes nine to five jobs yeah a very high a very elegant exceptionally high salary that's the first journey I was on and then that journey pushed me into a company that was doing roughly 10 million dollars it was acquired by private equity and that was the the light bulb moment into oh wow this is interesting like I saw I saw the founder build this company from scratch I didn't see him I he started it far before I joined but the point is I saw the journey I knew the journey and I saw the multiple he got on the exit and I'm like oh what's next amount of money quick question yeah yeah how much of an impact do you do you think you had contributed to that growth and like can you actually feel it and the reason why I'm asking is I worked in a huge corporation where I didn't feel like I'm adding anything to the company yeah and I went to this small company where I did SEO there yeah and I can see that like the SEO I was doing was literally making the difference in millions of revenue that yeah I think that's so to answer your question yes I felt like I had a lot more impact on the outcome I mean I didn't have an equity position in that company so I didn't get a payout but I felt like and I saw it because we did a couple different things first of all it was it was basically the main product that they were selling was a hardware like it was like it was phone system and IT equipment but then we started to move into a VoIP so subscription revenue and then we started to add on service contracts for the hardware which was recurring high margin subscription product and then I saw how these numbers were not only affecting our revenue but now moving from one time sale into monthly recurring revenue sale and and the more of our business not 100% of it obviously more of our business is moving into an MRR model that was impacting the valuation that eventually was that's what the founder was talking about you is that the reason why you're like oh yes and do this for myself yes a thousand percent because and and also it's interesting because even and even even when you work for a smaller company you get exposed to every single business unit I mean when I work for large company I think I think Bell is fortune one thousand I can't remember I think they are I mean they have like tens of thousands of employees right billions of dollars in revenue when I work there they had an RFP team how nice would it be when you close an RFP to have like six people working on it for you and remember when I moved to the smaller company we closed an RFP and these RFPs range from you know $100,000 to $500,000 for some are a little bit larger but that was sort of the average size and like I think it was like my first week there and I'm like okay so who does it he's like bro you do it you you you write the 30 to 50 page RFP you get all the you get you got to go to the bank and get a certified check to guarantee that we can even bid on this RFP you got to get all the I mean you got to you got to do everything I mean every single bit of it you do and in my mind I'm like wow that's awesome I get so much experience but like how come I can't just do this myself and if I can close an RFP I mean that does a lot more complex city than just being able to write an RFP but you get the point like if I could find a product or service or whatever and I could cool if I can get a hundred thousand five hundred thousand dollar RFP I would immediately be making more than what I earn all year and I don't know it was just all these different signals that I think a lot of people should at some point not everyone but I think if we redefine entrepreneurship I think it would serve a lot of people much better than just I say just in air quotes there's nothing wrong with it but just working within a company because there's so many things you can learn there's so many ways that you can make money I don't think as an entrepreneur it really is exceptionally difficult to make a significantly significant more amount than what you'd earn in the job and we're not talking about building a hundred million dollar company we're just talking about building a lifestyle business that makes you 700 800 a million a million five a year which for most people maybe not Manhattan but for most people that's an insane amount of money so I think that you know we can redefine entrepreneurship and not yeah I also sorry like with this conversation is going I think of what I want to do is like as we go through your journey I want to ask you some specific questions like tactical questions yeah yeah so your background was in sales and one of the things I found was that like those rock star sales people like I really think that they can do anything like I honestly think that all of those people can start a business and feel successful entrepreneur because you can hire people to make stuff you can hire but but I feel like selling is kind of like the backbone of any any business and that that's where I see so many businesses fail I agree with that but I also see that so telecom sales I know some people from there and they're like very hardcore like they're you know they're like really kind of like top tier of the sales people really you I wouldn't know from that I would have thought like software I would have so telecom is very legacy yeah you have some for sure you have some rock star sales people but I would assume that a lot of the talent actually goes to SaaS companies because they have higher higher comp packages and I guess um yeah I guess like the time I'm talking about this is before SaaS these yeah selling to you online and things like that yeah yeah yeah but it had a very like this this that like Wall Street brokerage house feel to it like I had a one of my really close friends was one of them and but it also looked like there's like that top five to 10 percent who were just killing they're just making so much money yeah and then the other 30 percent stuff so bad yeah I mean what separates like what do you think separates those those groups well within within a large organization I think there's always a pretty I mean Pareto's principle I think applies everywhere so for sure 20% of your of your sales force is going to deliver 80% of the results I mean from what I've seen there's I would say there's two people that stand out as as sort of top performers in the organization the first is just somebody who has been there for an exceptionally large amount of time and has built a book of business they are just they have deals that come in all the time that's not really the avatar that I would model though they just spent their whole career there so people trust them their customers trust them they keep reaching back out to them I mean the on the other end of the spectrum is somebody who is new to the organization hungry and like I mean it's not rocket science they just outwork everyone so they're not waiting for leads they prospecting their downtime if customers call after hours they're responding they answer emails in 30 minutes not two days I don't think it's magic I think that you are I think you're assuming that everyone is a lot better than they are I've I've I've experienced that the bottom 80% for lack of a better term it's just people that aren't that motivated to do the work I think that they're just very happy with how much money they're making and they're not really trying to make much more that's the people that kill it it's like I don't think it's rocket science it's if it's a volume game at the end of the day yes you have a great product yes you have to understand how to qualify or disqualify on a on a discovery call yes you have to tell these anecdotes and stories of similar customers customers with similar pain points when you do a demo that's tailored to the target customer you have to multi-thread get to figure out decision makers you know decision info you have to do all that stuff but at the end of the day if you just do that more you're going to have better results and I think and also also if you do it more you're also going to just intuitively get better at it and you're going to do all the things I just mentioned to a higher degree of proficiency I don't think it's anything else it's just people that are killing it I mean there's sort of like three versions of sales people there's people that don't hit their number that are fired there's people that hit their number and then when they hit their number in you know q2 and they hit their fiscal number already they don't work for the next six months and then there's people that want to make a million dollars or maybe a little bit less but you can make a couple hundred thousand dollars especially in telecom I think it used to be more now you can I'm sure of what some companies can make over a million dollars as a salesperson in SaaS for selling enterprise deals for like Oracle or or salesforce.com or any of these I'm sure you can make a like a significant amount of money so you have people that are just comfortable hitting the numbers and they slack or people that don't hit their numbers are fired comfortable hitting numbers and they slack and people that hit their numbers and like q1 and then they're still like just like pedal to the metal for the next the next nine months and those are the ones that just absolutely kill it because they want they're hungry like they're really really hungry and then because they do so much it's almost again a little bit of a flywheel they're doing so much activity that every activity that they do becomes more effective and more efficient and that's really it I mean when you're to translate that to entrepreneur if you want to if you want to sell more I think this is a Hormosi lesson right get a thousand nose just do do more and you'll get result but you'll also get better that's so yeah like I I'm always like looking for that what's the secret sauce but it's like they're really like because what you say sounds exactly like making content to it's like it's true so what's doing well they're not doing something exception but they're just doing more of it they're doing more of it and they get better at it because they have more practice personality wise those top people that are the hit their number q1 they keep going right what do you think is motivating them usually like what is the thing that they what's the drive that they have that those people who hit their number and they just stop well I think that it's important to know that when you hire people people are in different seasons of their life that's and that's fine I mean you're not hiring somebody I mean you can hire somebody and say oh it's great that they hit 500% to target but you're not hiring everybody to hit 500% to target so your so your targets aren't properly set you you want people to hit maybe 110% to target because that's how you're that's how you forecast it out your your business and you have to understand that not everybody wants to hit 500% to target not everybody wants to work 80 hours a week as a salesperson because some people have different motivations like if for somebody who is single who has no family who is just trying to make as much money as possible nothing wrong with that that might be a motivation I mean it's very hard to assume motivations but I would say the people that continue past that q1 goal they want to make a shit ton of money they want to they want to prove themselves so they can get a better title if you are working that hard it's I don't think it's I don't usually think it's because you're trying to start your own business and you're trying to get as much experience as possible usually motivations for working that hard are like money or role I think that people that just hit their number they could be and there's again just making a lot of assumptions here but they could be focused on their family they just got married they had kids maybe there maybe they have other complications and they just need to show up for those 40 hours a week and they want to hit their number and they want to keep a job they're taking care of their parents and the you know you never know there's like a million different reasons why people have motivations but I think that also I want to just one more thought just because I think it's important instead of assuming I think you should get clear on those motivations when you're hiring them and have like a radically candid conversation about why people are doing what they want to do and I wouldn't I wouldn't I wouldn't I wouldn't ever not hire somebody because they want to have like a good balanced life I think it's actually very important and that's a stable person in your organization because keep in mind the person that is gunning for money or position there's a very high chance that they are going to look for the next best thing if those are motivators for them but somebody who is okay with hitting their number their target and having kids and having a family and they don't need more or this is not the season of their life where they're looking for more that person could stay with you for five six ten plus years that could be a very stable contribution to your company so there's there's pluses and minuses to every kind of person as long as they're doing the bare minimum that is not the bare minimum they're they're hitting the KPIs you said out for them yeah like I noticed that rock stars usually come with their own set of problems they do and I mean I mean you can make assumptions about like personality traits and you can probably run a disc profile or what's the other one where you get like the ENTJ or I don't even know that one there's another one that Myers breaks that's it Myers breaks and you can see different personality traits and you can make an argument that there's some personalities that are more traditionally set up for sales than others but yeah I think that personalities decide rock stars do have their own problems not all yeah there could be go involved and there could be a little bit of toxicity that may actually require you to get rid of rock stars even if they're overperforming but what's kind of your personal philosophy like it's like it's from your own perspective yeah are you motivated by like money are you motivated by like no it's all yeah you go no sorry tell me yours and then I'll tell you my no I don't have one like I'm just struggling to find mine because I'm because like half the people I hear are like yeah you need that external kind of accountability or validation in order to keep chasing that thing that the other half is like no just you know whatever makes you happy just be present and oh yeah I'm kind of struggling to find mine right now that's why I asked you so I think that everybody to some degree is motivated by money but I think that the difference is like what's your number what is what is the amount where you feel comfortable and like I've hit that number so then am I worried about am I worried about making more money I'll give you an example so right now what does my life look like so I am currently sitting in a podcast studio that's about 20 feet away from my house so I wake up I have a coffee in the morning I answer some emails um we're like Gina and myself we're trying for kids you want to build a family move into a house we could have kids in the house god willing that all happens I can come back here I can interview people they can you know I'm in Miami they can come and hang out in the actual studio we do virtual stuff like we're doing now so my life is very balanced trust me when I say that if I was purely focused on making money there's a lot of ways you can make money and not enjoy your work it's very easy to do there's a lot of things that you can do that are just sure money and you just maybe you do enjoy it I don't know but podcast is not the majority of people going to make them a hundred million dollars it can make you it can make you a living and it can make you very comfortable living and I think this is actually an interesting conversation about like the middle class creator economy what does that look like and is there one because there's arguments that there is it I believe there is one and I believe that if that's what you're interested in that season of your life great at a younger age I was more focused on just money no family now I'm focused on good money good life but balance with family and other things that are important to me maybe that'll change once my kids are grown up I have no idea but yeah some people for sure are just motivated by money and they don't do anything except have money and they don't want to have kids and they don't even want to date and all they want to do is start the next thing and the next thing and the next thing and there's nothing wrong with that but for me I do I do think that it's important to build a family to build relationships I have seen the dude I'm telling you in Miami I see these guys that are like 60 divorced they made a shit ton of money they've had no relationship with their wife or their kids they're at clubs spending 20 30 thousand dollars on a bottle I don't want that and I don't think many people want that I think that most people want a comfortable life they can work on things they enjoy which I enjoy this podcast they can travel whenever they want they can get some help they don't have to do the things they don't want to do you know it doesn't take a lot to get somebody to do the landscaping or to cook for you if you like or maybe you like cooking doesn't matter you don't really want to travel overseas in economy so I get that so maybe you don't need a private jet but maybe you want to fly a first or business because I'm 62 dudes are traveling overseas in economy absolutely sucks so so I guess you have to understand the lifestyle you want where your north star is and then you build towards that and that's why I'm such a big fan of entrepreneurship in a non-traditional Stanford dropout raised money sense because I think non-traditional entrepreneurship where you turn your expertise into something that can help companies and you sell that expertise I think as a service business or whatever I think that's a great way to build this kind of lifestyle that a lot of people would aspire to achieve I hopefully that answers your question yeah I have a couple follow-up questions like yeah well I mean first is kind of a comment I just I don't know if people know what they want until they've like for me I always used to be like oh I'll never pay 10x more just to play fine in first class like like what's the what's the point but then as soon as I did once once I did it like I got it and then like now I can't fly economy yeah it's sometimes like I you don't know if you want something or not until you've actually experienced it you know I mean correct yes correct but I'm saying that it doesn't take that much money to experience most things yeah that's true what yeah did something change for you like because it sounds like early earlier in life you were more motivated for the financial maybe not money but I think I was just I think most people when they're early on they're just very aggressive about their career because they want to prove themselves to the world I think it's a pretty normal experience I think that some people just get comfortable with where they're at that's really I mean don't get me wrong I have a lot of plans for the show we can talk about why why I even started building it in the first place I want to you know I want to actually leverage the audience and even I've thought about taking small equity positions and startups with media exposure which I think is a great way for creators to not turn into operators but actually leverage the media asset they've built all these ideas are floating around but I for example again I said I'm just doing the podcast I have I travel I speak it's a lot of fun but what I'm not doing is I'm not starting like five new companies which I could I mean I could just jump into new ideas all the time I could try and play operator again but you can also not do anything do I mean yeah I don't think that's how I don't think that's good either so I guess my question will be where is that ambition come from then if not because it clearly sounds like it's not coming from money or validation or anything like that um where does the ambition come from for you that's a great question um I think that I think that a lot of people maybe you feel this maybe you don't when you put out this podcast I think you probably and I do to feel a sense of fulfillment for having great conversations that you know will hopefully help somebody who's maybe five or 10 years earlier in their journey there's that piece to it the second piece I think that's the I think that is the main thing yeah for me second piece is I love sitting down with cool people and having conversations I mean that's sort of like a selfish thing and the fact that the podcast ends up paying for itself and then some because we've been doing it for a long time and we've grown it that also helps but I think it's I think it's a little bit of fulfillment because I've always I mean well my my first job ever was coaching tennis at a very young age I used to play tennis and then I went from like camp like camp attendee like I went from like a camper into like coaching and I was at this one tennis club for I don't even know since I was six something like that until I was like early teens and I was coaching kids and it was just very fulfilling and then I I did some pro bono I mean like fast forward obviously many years but then I would do pro bono mentorship with startups I was working with the University of Toronto and we were doing some like fractional CXO stuff with the startups going through an incubator at the U of University of Toronto I just enjoy it a lot I think that and I don't think I'm alone in this when you have experience with something and you tell that you somebody has a problem and you because I appreciate this when I have a problem and somebody does the same thing to me when you have experienced something you tell somebody the solution to the problem where you help them and cover it themselves and you see this transformation of this person from stressed and anxious and not knowing what to do to oh my god all of a sudden I feel like this waste been lifted off my shoulders I think that's a beautiful thing I think most humans want to help other humans achieve that feeling because I don't know I think that it life doesn't have to be that hard and I found it with the podcast I can just do that at scale which I think is also a very a very nice thing but continuing on you were talking about like oh so you're giving somebody a light bulb moment and yeah I think I think that's I think that when you when you give somebody you know you help somebody overcome a problem and they're going through something you've already gone through and you know five ten minutes of your time can just lift this weight off their shoulders and you see that before and after of that person I think it's I think it's a very fulfilling feeling as a you know and I think that with the podcast I believe that and you know you as well I believe that we've both been given the opportunity to do this at scale I think that having conversations and being you know gifted in the art of asking good questions and pulling out information from people that have solved these problems and built incredible things I think that that's I think it's a good business to be and I think it's a I think it's a valuable business to be and I mean if I think about the businesses that I would like to participate in their businesses that give value to the world and not just extract value and I think this is I mean there's many ways to do it but I think this is one way that I enjoy for like the all the reasons I just mentioned and I think that that's sort of it gives me ambition and drive to do it yeah that deeply resonates with me like I because I think I I'm the same way I'm like I again I get more joy out of like being the person to give that do that for somebody then having having received it and I'll tell you like I think that the the litmus test that you can deploy to see if the work you're doing actually fulfills you is it's very simple I mean this is not like a new idea like would you do it for free right and I can say with almost 100% certainty if I made no money from this podcast I would still do it I have to find a way to make money maybe I would just do it at night or on the weekends but I'd still enjoy it a lot and I think that's a great test for whether or not what you're doing is is fulfilling and I mean that's not I think we're very fortunate that we can we can do this for for jobs right I don't think that's the norm for most people I live as people find their work as fulfilling but maybe that's something people should like strive for and and maybe that's a good sign that what you're doing is it what you really should be doing for the rest of your life I don't I just want to take a second 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cornbread ham dot com slash success and use code success at checkout that's cornbread ham dot com slash success code success for 30% off your first order of these amazing gummies no so can you kind of talk about how how you got there how you got to the point where not only like okay from that that sales job you had to being an entrepreneur and starting your own business and then like I guess from there you didn't really have to start a podcast but you did correct so I also want to talk about here about that too each sure so which one do you want to go into do you want to talk about like why I started the show in particular or yeah let's actually actually jump to this as we have limited time whichever I mean I'm okay yeah I think so I guess okay so when I started the show yes I wasn't super concerned about money but also when I started so when I was starting the show I was building the last company which was acquired right at the end of covid and that was a broadcast software company and I had started the show while we were still building that company before we were acquired and the reason why I started the show was because basically how that transaction took place grass valley was a company that acquired us and for lack of a better description there was a tribe before you buy a situation and we were working with grass valley in like a joint venture capacity knowing that if the product that we have which was a SaaS product for broadcasters if it did well against the grass valley customer base they were going to acquire the whole company so basically why is that important because like writing was on the wall that we were going to get acquired we already had a strategic buyer that was lining us up and the podcast was first of all at the beginning kind of like how do I describe it I was sort of future proofing myself I knew that this exit was going to happen there'd be a little bit of money not like never work again money but there would be a little bit of money but I also knew that it wasn't going to be big and stuff that I would never have to do anything and I wanted the next thing that I did just to be a little bit easier I was taking a note of Gary Vee's playbook because I saw what he built and I saw the brand that he built and I understood that now you can launch companies against that brand because he has all these eyeballs and he did it with the NFTs and and VaynerMedia and empathy wines and well VaynerMedia was kind of the main one but he launched all these other brands against that audience and that was really that was really it I didn't know what I wanted to launch against the audience but I'm like let me build the audience speaking about content that I love I'm a marketer so I know how to do all this stuff I know everything from again the graphic design to the copy that goes into newsletters that promotes the show to audio video editing and I've definitely gone down the rabbit hole and learned way too much about cameras that I never thought I would have to learn now I understand aperture and key lights and all this other stuff that I never thought I'd have to know but I'm kind of like as an entrepreneur I do dive into the the weeds to learn before I hire but yeah I just knew I knew sort of the ways to market it I knew how to run paid traffic against it I knew how to clip out 30 to 45 second videos I knew how to you know write a great newsletters going to drive traffic back to the podcast so I knew all this stuff like let me just start it so that was really the start was at all skills that you kind of learned starting your business or well because at this point it was I had done a lot of consulting work with early stage startups doing fractional CXO work for them so it was fractive CXO is like it was a mixture of CRO and CMO gigs and then yes also from building a company were you doing that like kind of while you were still running your business or yeah yeah and yeah exactly yeah so I was like wow you you had your own business and you had a site also while you had your own business yes correct so yeah so for clarity yeah yeah yes yeah yeah I mean yes I yes I did yes I did yeah I've never heard of that like I could usually people that build their own business just do their business right well okay so understand that understand that there's many ways to build a podcast and for most people most people they build a podcast that would lead back to the business right that's the majority of people but I think the reason why I didn't start a show for the company is because I knew they were like like we were gonna be acquired you were selling yeah yeah so I was like I don't I want to start this integration for whatever happens after and were you putting out content or building a personal brand in any other way before you started the podcast no or you know podcast was the thing podcast was a thing okay yeah I mean I had I had dabbled on LinkedIn I had built a decent audience on LinkedIn but it wasn't significant and then I used the LinkedIn audience to launch the podcast the podcast actually was first called sales versus marketing because it was a sort of a play on what I was doing every single day which was sales and marketing and I was interviewing CROs and CMOs and then after the acquisition I expanded it except was boring to me so I wanted to bring another other topics but so I I have such a hard time growing my podcast yeah I don't really spend a lot of time on it it's not my main con like I use it to get clips and stuff like that yeah but I'm I'm mostly like doing written content what's the yeah so how can I call my podcast like what did you do um I mean the way that I look at growing a podcast is it it is a product so you can do everything and what do I mean by that okay so there's not a single marketing thing that you would do for a company that you couldn't do for a podcast so first of all you have content marketing right so you have long form audio video and you crop that you clip that into short form video and then you clip it into 10-minute segments which are a little bit more tied into the YouTube algorithm and you're posting all this stuff and then you transcribe it and you turn it into a newsletter you're sending it to your your your email list uh you're also taking a transcription and you're looking for like these super motivational spiky points of view or opinions and you're turning those into tweets you're turning those into little graphics you can post on Facebook and Instagram and you're all driving back to the podcast so that's your content marketing play uh for other other ways to grow it um you can always run paid so I did run paid through uh player FM cast box uh I've run ads pushing people to the podcast now you can run ads through Spotify so there is a paid option as well um you want to get as high quality video as possible because again an RSS feed audio component of a podcast does not have organic reach so I try and attract organic net new subscribers from YouTube second largest search end in the world you know this obviously um what else is there so you have content marketing we have paid um you swaps to that's another way so you can do a swaps to the other podcast you can trade impressions for impressions um so you and I think this is useful because again it's not it doesn't cost you money to do it so you find somebody else who has a podcast and a similar niche and you say hey listen I have a hundred thousand downloads or I have five thousand downloads as a matter or a million downloads it really makes no difference let's do like an impression per impression swap so we there can do like a pre-roll mineral ad or we could even do like a whole um feed swap or I take a full episode you give me one of your full episodes I'm going to record an intro explaining that hey you know this is a creator's podcast he speaks about this if you like it here's a full episode if you want to go subscribe go to www.podcast.com and the other creator does the same and that's a great way to collaborate and cross promote but yeah all right did you um so did you do all of this by yourself like did you learn how to do this all yourself or uh yeah yeah I did and then I hired people for post-production I did hire people but I did not hire them out of the gate I did everything myself until the show made money and then I rolled that uh that money into a video editor his name's Ali he's still my CMO and now he hired a whole bunch of other people that an EA graphic design copywriter uh and then another video editor so he he doesn't do a lot of the video editing himself anymore actually found him on five or upwork I can't remember but I found him and then helped him build out his own company and now he runs a marketing agency uh and I'm one of his clients but yeah at the beginning I did it all myself so you said that in the beginning you didn't really have uh you didn't have a product or anything you were just uh building this brand first um so you you just drove all you just looked at the podcast as the product and you just drove all the traffic and I'm still doing that now now like very very recently so almost six years into this now I'm figuring out different products because I also oh you still don't have a product no I'm figuring it out now the product is ad revenue the product is ad revenue but now I'm thinking of different ways to to productize it and then the question would be like why Scott but the answer is you know sometimes entrepreneurs it's very hard to stay focused and I've always had um I've always liked building and after uh like after the exit and after um we moved down from Toronto to to Florida and then I tried to start other businesses I tried to start a few different as CPD company tried to I tried to uh start a small private equity fund that would do sort of um Cody Sanchez style brick and mortar acquisitions um I tried to build a mastermind group I've tried to do a couple other things nothing successfully but I mean that's whatever that's entrepreneurship you have a a million different failures uh and you know fast forward to today where I spent the last now four four years trying to build different things um I'm finally taking my own advice and sort of tripling down on the one thing that is working and finding different ways to productize that and I've also said this a few times I think it's important um how do most creators how do most creators productize their business well like they can have an agency you can be like a service-based you can do courses you can do paid community a couple different things you can launch you can launch an actual product but that's like a significant amount of work um if you're gonna launch an actual product so most people default to like agency your service base or courses or community and uh and yeah it just wasn't as exciting for me to do some of those ideas and I did I never really wanted to start an agency I might in the future but that seems like a I feel innocent agencies are tough as I'm sure you know um I never felt comfortable productizing my knowledge not because I didn't have anything to teach I felt that if I did ever do that and I'm thinking about some ideas around that now but if you productize your experience which a lot of you know creators do I find that a lot of people overcharge and under deliver value and I never wanted to be associated with that and I think that that's why I was so um apprehensive though charging for wisdom and charging for experience I think the yeah I think the wisdom and the knowledge and the information I I don't believe that people should charge money for that at all I know but that's because I think that's a greater economy is people charging for courses and stuff like that yeah I think what they should charge is for uh some sort of a process like for example like when you go when you pay a hundred dollars a month to go to yoga class you're not paying because you're learning some new moves or anything like that but you're you're paying for the process of actually doing it and getting better at it and I think that like that's why I want to do reasons why I started a 30-dollar month membership is because I don't want like everything that I teach I'm giving it away for free but I think that if you none of those matter if you unless you actually put it into practice and do like storytelling exercises I agree with that completely and that's kind of what I'm selling so I don't that's a high attached product then somebody just putting up a course online or a PDF and selling that exactly yeah which I don't agree what's the product that you you're launching or is it figuring it out I'm figuring it out as we speak I have I've you know it's so funny um so I'm actually working with uh with Stan which is a software to ideate on a full store yeah yeah yeah oh good um when they work with a ton of creators and I've had this conversation with with their team a few times and we were ideating on different products to launch and probably it probably because I have a if I'm going to attach my name to something I want it to be exceptional so we put together a couple like courses and and processes but then what ends up happening is I I end up not wanting to charge for them because I think they're good but not good enough to charge a significant amount of money for so they end up I have like five lead magnets now I have all these different lead magnets they're collecting a lot of email and collecting a lot of emails but I'm still thinking through what is worth money and that's um it might it might be a community too I think that listen we're talking about an environment where people are charging like five thousand bucks for a for a couple a couple videos in in in in pottya or whatever course hosting platform they're using right or kejabi I think that already just because if you're putting a little bit of thought and care into what you're the problem you're actually solving in the in the customer base that you're serving I think already you're going to be ahead of ninety nine percent of people online but still you want to make sure that if you built something like this it's it's valuable it solves real problems it's people don't have buyers remorse right you know you should look at if you're going to launch courses in my mind at least I look at it from the perspective of okay so we know our customer acquisition costs we know um we know what people are willing to pay but then let's apply some other sass ideas let's talk about lifetime value are they keep do they keep coming back for more or after they buy one thing from you they never engage with you ever again that's not a good it's not a good indicator that you're getting value yes though yeah I think that's the biggest struggle for most of those I know of course in my mind if I put something out I want it to be so good that they come back for the next thing and the next thing and the next thing and there's a few creators that do this very well um I can't say that everybody is not good at this there's some people created this exceptionally well and they put out so much value I mean if you look at um Dan co if you look at Jack butcher these are guys that people keep coming back it's like people the people that buy their stuff if you look at um who else does a good job at this it's also because their product the price fits the because I feel like the price prices are actually an important factor because if you were selling the same thing for 10x more like it might yeah might not work out but because they're selling it uh you're not trying to they're not trying to gouge the market they're happy over delivering value and underpricing it but then that's creating ironically a higher long-term value customer a higher LTV customer um that turns less that is becoming a fan for life that starts to evangelize you and speak about you and tweet about you and and whatnot so yeah so yeah but what you said about kind of the sass motto I really like I really like like thinking of it as an sass business because like yeah that's what I with my community that's what I want eventually a few years down the road I want to take everything that I learn what's working and then I want to actually like build more of a app kind of like rolling or something like that where okay I know these things make them do these storytelling exercise and share their story but with us I can actually like build it all into the app and I would love to do that and you have to then you have to think like in any business the most expensive customer is a new customer the cheapest customer is a returning customer so it just makes good business sense that's really it but I think that when people put garbage into the market and they're just be they're just great marketers and they have shitty product and we all know them it's because they don't feel confident and they don't feel like they can attract the person the second time which is no way to build a business for some reason it just exists in this course creator world nowhere else would have business survive only selling to a customer once they go out of business but because course courses are such a time margin I guess in theory people are able to do it for a long period of time yes sir yeah you just maybe realize that something like because people do charge a lot because they know that they can for example they know that they cannot get a thousand customers so I'll just sell to 20 customers but like I'm really high price or something like that sure but the thing is they they use the excuse I'm charging a lot because it's valuable or like it's you know you have to you know if they don't pay they don't pay attention so they use that they hide behind this excuse but what they're really doing is like what and I think a lot of them are just lying to themselves like they have this deep insecurity of I don't actually think this thing can scale or I can I believe that I think that's actually very I guess funny I've never thought of it that way but that actually makes perfect sense it that I'm really loving all of the things that you're saying because you're you're kind of reiterating to me because I go into that world of like okay where is that secret sauce or what's that new sexy thing but like it's you're really kind of like humbling me to be like okay everything is really is like if I look at everything I've done it is really doing the basics just more of it I agree I don't think it's that complicated I don't think I don't think business is hard work and but it's not complicated I mean there's only so many levers you can pull if something's not working it's usually because your product sucks so find a way to improve the product if you do it for long enough naturally the product will improve most people are smart enough to figure out and iterate and pivot and change stuff up it's gonna take longer than it you expect it's gonna take more energy and money than you expect but when it does work around the maybe six seven eight year mark it's gonna make you more money than you ever thought possible so I think that just expectations have to be realigned around business doesn't matter what you're building yeah yeah like I because that it's what it's what I feel like I'm in a coaching session right now because when I was like asking you about like how do I grow my podcast and as soon as you said like yeah do you build do all of this and drive it back to your focus I'm like yeah of course like I should be doing that all of those things but also also it's true but also at the same time I respect that you haven't because you have to under is also a very important idea you have to understand where the podcast fits right where does a podcast fit in your business so what what's the time benefit of doing all those things for something that is kind of like this fun little marketing hobby maybe it's not there maybe it's maybe there is no time benefit or cost benefit to putting all that energy into the podcast if it only gives you like three leads a week when whatever SEO or paid is going to give you 20 leads a week I don't know I'm making up numbers but you get the point so it's made if if you're going to put energy towards it make sure that it aligns with your north star too yeah that is very important if it doesn't I think I think you're right you know I do have to think about that a little bit but one thing I do know for figure I heard you talk about this too like YouTube audience and podcast audience are no match to like social media I think one YouTube subscribers worth like a hundred Instagram followers a thousand percent there's so much more loyal if you look at TikTok is the worst TikTok there's no loyalty if I've run campaigns on TikTok and this is not again I'm sure that some people can make TikTok work for their brand I run campaigns on TikTok and I get I can spend five grand 10 grand and get zero conversions but if I if I work with a youtuber and and I think it's because it's video and I think it's because it's long form and I think it's because their fans have sort of grown up with a lot of the youtubers if I can spend money with a youtuber and you do like a minute and a half two minute mid-roll of them talking about something your product organically I mean it's like night and day compared to to TikTok it's just the the level of fandom with youtubers is crazy there's you ever want to know you ever want to understand the power of youtubers go go watch lifestyle you big lifestyle youtubers or big beauty youtubers I just say that because they sell a lot of products I mean there's other types of youtubers as well but if you go to a lifestyle or a beauty youtuber a big one and go listen to their video and when they talk about a product go try and buy that product in the store the next day and you won't be able to you just won't be able to like if there's like some weird secret ingredient for a holiday like a holiday dish they put together that we're that weird spice you can't get it at any grocery store that you can drive to it's insane it's absolutely insane beauty is working for them the beauty is I know this because Gina watches some of these youtubers and she'll say I want to try to do this or I want to try and make this for dinner and we'll go to late we're in Florida we'll go to a publics or all foods or a trader Joe's and that particular ingredient like the whole shelf will be cleared out it's crazy I've never seen influence like that before yeah yeah I mean because I know that it's similar with like Tim Ferriss's when he promotes a product like yeah let's go across the place Tim Ferriss is Tim Ferriss is wild so I aspire to have this show that Tim Ferriss has he I think I think an ad slot on his show is 50 grand for one ad slot on his show he probably pulls in I think he said he's like he could be pulling in 10 million just through the podcast annually without any like additional deals no like no Spotify deals no serious deals no 100 million it just be running at like 10 million dollars which is again it is like 95 percent profit because it takes the same amount of energy to put one hour two hour episode together that goes out to a thousand people as it does to make one that goes out to to you know a hundred thousand or a million but that's and also what he does he's guys a beast he obviously tells a lot of brands know and he's left a lot of money on the table and told them though but secondly he will audit the funnel of the brand to make sure that the ad will convert well so this is not normal for 99 percent of podcasters most podcasters you not go to an athletic greens or a better help or a manscaped or a LinkedIn and be like I want you to redo your landing page because I know it's gonna suck but apparently this is what he does he like redoes the brand's landing page because he knows exactly not all of that but he knows exactly what his audience wants and that's how I mean just another level well that's yeah I mean I've heard of a couple people doing that but I don't know many do I think it's a minority that do that not because it's not even worth it unless they have a certain amount of audience also yeah I have one final question I'm sure we can probably maybe if you can come back in a few months like I'm sure there's a lot to talk about I can do whatever yeah I we can go we can talk about a whole bunch I feel like we're very much kind of it's spirit so I feel like anything we talk about we could probably spend an hour on but we could do one in a few months to if you want yeah so my last question is if uh so it took you it sounds like you weren't making any money when you started a podcast and at least not from the podcast no not from the podcast now how long did it take you until you started monetizing or making a profit from the podcast and how did you last those period like well I found it in one place for me yeah like me that that's the the brutal truth is it's like I found it a lot of it myself until I made money like a moment when like it feels like oh I don't see a light at the end of the tunnel it's like how like is this is this actually gonna take off at one point or like because I have a lot of that kind of similar feeling with my podcast so around the two-year mark um was when so I had registered the podcast on advertised cast and I think I think gumball like right from the get go and it was around the two-year mark when they started really is showing interest and started to send me more and more ads and there was like a I think a pretty traditional 70 30 split and that's because I didn't have a sales team or anything like that I can't remember how much I made in the first year it's probably I don't know both 40 or 50,000 maybe okay so it wasn't like significant it was it was like enough to cover my costs yeah it was enough to cover my I mean it wasn't like enough for you to live on but no no it was not to cover costs and then it just goes up from and that was the point like I wasn't did you expect that did you expect it was gonna be that long or was it like I thought it was gonna be quicker because all my other friends that build large audiences on social they all had kind of this viral moment everyone who's on Instagram and TikTok and I have a lot of friends that have built large audiences on both of those platforms and YouTube as well they all have this like viral moment and then one of their videos just goes nuts and then all of a sudden it turns into a six-figure business somehow whether or not it's product sales or sponsorship I found podcasts to be one of the hardest things I've ever grown and I found it to be very much yeah it grows but it's like not like one viral episode it's it's not like that at all that's true it's pretty steady like an Instagram yeah for me I can count in my head like I think there's less than 20 posts that brought me pretty much most of my followers I have one right now I have one right now actually this has happened more and more we can talk about this if you want so one one thing that works really well for me on Instagram is first of all collaborating with other large creators but also these these sort of like thought-provoking tweet images and I test like about 10 different thoughts on Twitter per day and then I take those thoughts the ones that perform the best and I turn that into a newsletter I turn it into a talking head video on YouTube I turn it into a like a 1080 by 1080 in Canva little quote tweet that I put on Instagram and the important thought in that story is finding a way to test a lot of ideas and content quickly which for me it's Twitter but whenever I do that process and I do that process now daily I'll put a graphic image on the 1080 by 1080 image on Instagram that probably gets me five to ten thousand followers per image which is I mean now that I have this little formula I can rinse and repeat and it doesn't always hit but it does quite well so I mean the I mean go back to podcasting in a second but the takeaway is yes find the type of content that hits I don't like I don't like having to wish and pray and hope is something it's going to go viral I like something that I can test it and I know that that idea resonates with the audience when I put that idea across platform is going to perform well everywhere and that's kind of turned into my Instagram strategy right now as well as collaborating with other large creators that also helps but yeah I don't go questions I never focus on virality I try and focus on like predictable framework that still attracts that new followers you want to go back we go back to podcasting the I have two questions on this and then maybe we can wrap up with the the podcast another follow up in the podcast deal it's all right one so you said that you don't like to focus on the viral you kind of focus on the process is that something is that part of your person have you always been like that like trust the process yes because that you seem that takes a lot of patience to but you keep in mind my belief one of my core inherent beliefs is if you want to be successful at anything working out a relationship a business commit 10 years of your life minimum to it like I I revolt against quick wins I push back against something you learned when you were young or is that something you learned in kind of as an adult I learned that when I I saw the people that I looked up to and even the people that I didn't I've tried to think of like when I actually thought through this concept I think there was multiple signals in my life that helped me believe in this concept I think that I mean when I was dating I'm not super old dating had turned more into like a like a hookup culture and I saw the people that I looked up to in long relationships they committed a lot of time to it and they went through ups and downs and nothing was perfect but they fought for the relationship and they stayed in it for the long run and those were the people that were the happiest I saw the people that were working out they were trying to you know cut corners those epic wasn't around when I was young but there was steroids and people would take a ton of stuff and I saw people die that were in looking great and I'm like well I don't want to die so I might as well take you know fitness and and losing weight and looking good a little bit slower so I don't die and then I saw people that built businesses in the most boring industries like I think one of the I had a friend in Toronto and his dad had built a business and the business all they did was they were they would provide like glass for new homes like windows for like windows for new homes and I saw the house he lived in I'm like holy shit like this is just from selling glass to builders for new homes and he's like yeah that's what my dad's been doing for like the past like 15 years and I'm like that's such an unsexy business and no one's ever gonna know his dad's name but the guy is loaded and I was just like all you had to do is it commit to something doesn't matter how boring it is and in 10 to 15 years which is a fraction of your life keep in mind you only need one thing to work out then you're gonna achieve a life that is significantly better than 99% of the population so I think there was just a lot of different things that happened in my life that made me really comfortable with that idea this podcast is brought to you in part by stash are you still putting off saving and investing because you'll get to it someday stash turns someday into today stash isn't just an investing app it's a registered investment advisor that combines automated investing with dependable financial strategies to help you reach your goals faster will provide you with personalized advice on what to invest in based on your goals or if you just want to sit back 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Yeah the richest person I know sells gravel yeah yeah yeah it's the same thing and like there's no you don't raise money for that business there's no there's no hack to grow a gravel business you just do it for a long period of time and you build relationships and you know the next year is better than the last one. How much of it do you think was from because I kind of think you need that personality when you when you're in sales too right you kind of because it's like yeah you're doing this process for a long because okay the reason here's the reason why I asked when I was young I was a type of person as soon as I have money I spend it all like I get paid like I'm by the way I think most people are like that though that's not so unique to you. So but then I did have some friends who were really good at saving like you there were always like saving half of their paycheck and things like that and I've never had that I and I didn't change until like in my 30s after I built my agency and saw with my own eyes how the delayed gratification and having patients pays off yeah that's when I actually started believing it but before that I was very impulsive were you like that as a as a kid or were you younger were you always very I was very relaxed and patient I wouldn't spend money I hate is spending money I still hate spending money not because I'm frugal just because I'd like to invest it like I don't buy myself anything nice probably to a detriment um yeah I've never really also maybe you do have the kind of personality of like I think it could be a personality like I'm trying to think I never like I think that keep in mind from a young age I'm thinking about retirement so I'm already like 18 19 years old I'm already thinking like long game so at that point I'm already okay how do I make enough money but then I'm already starting to research how do I invest my money and yeah it was I was never I was never wanting to blow my paycheck because I didn't make a lot when I was young I probably ended up doing it several times but I hated that feeling the feeling of like not having money in the bank until next Friday or checking how much money you have when you're sitting at dinner hoping that your car doesn't decline that to me is like the worst feeling in the world I never wanted that feeling so I never spent more than I I never spent a lot came from your parents maybe yeah I think I'm sure I think most things come from your parents to be honest I think most things come from like these deep childhood experiences and they weren't cheap either but they were they were just very like my childhood was very safe and calm and you know my dad was not going out and gambling or or going out and spending tons of money like everything was like we lived good but we're very happy and we didn't go beyond our means and I was like looking how happy my childhood is why don't I just live the same way as how I was growing up and it seems to work out and then that's when I started going back to the beginning when I'm like wait if I do the exact same thing is what my dad and mom did I'm not going to live the exact same life and that's when I was like okay wait I got to figure this out but I think a lot of the personality comes from childhood and what your parents expose you to and what you think is normal and not normal and I am not a psychologist but no one's ever really asked me these questions so yeah I do too like yeah I can't looking back now I can think about like how many of my traits came from like my childhood so it's it's tough um but it's an interesting it's an interesting point because I think a lot of our traumas and our good experiences all come from kids from childhood so I think it's important to think about that especially if life is not going the way that you want I think if life is going fine then yeah you can look back you'd be like thank you parents but I think if life is not going the way you want I think it's very important to look back and understand why you operate the way that you operate um and why you believe the things that you believe and maybe going back and finding somebody who can help uncover those past negative experiences can actually be huge and this is not my area of expertise but I feel like that could be life changing for a lot of people um second part of my then Instagram question was so you said that you you tweet like 10 things and then you you take the ones that do well and then you repurpose them like my from my experience what I found is that a lot of the stuff that I'm talking about is like usually the same thing over and over just packaged differently yeah is so when you post those 10 things are they like 10 completely different ideas or is it like just maybe a similar advice but word a different way um like I've yeah right now I feel so repetitive I feel like I've said that thing like no no a lot of it is repetitive a lot of it is repetitive but sometimes it's a lot of it is repetitive but I try and pull an inspiration from the podcast if we spoke about something that I haven't spoken about before I'll test out an idea from like this show like I probably have five or six different ideas of things that I can talk about that I don't normally talk about maybe I'll mention something about childhood trauma maybe I'll mention something I don't know I'll think of something that'll be a little bit different than my normal my normal uh my normal sort of like go to topics but I also think um I also think what keeps it fresh is I usually tweet that night and I really try and think of all the the worst things that are happening in my life and turn that into content so if I'm having a tough conversation with an employee or if I just lost a deal or like I try and turn because I know that if it's significant enough to stress me out then it's significant enough to hit home and resonate with someone else because someone else is dealing with it so that's what I try and do and hopefully I don't know the same problems every day but that's something that's really worked for me uh actually you were like when I'm talking about something personal to me like that yeah it comes out differently too it does it hit like there's some energy that goes into this this thought and like I feel like I listen I'm not like superstitious but I feel like when you tweet something that is real and it happened to you people on the other side they just feel it and then you can actually bring it I mean if you're comfortable it's a little bit um uncomfortable to do this but if you're comfortable you can actually like reference the actual thing that happened usually people don't want it like I don't like referencing stuff that I'm dealing with in real time usually I'll talk about it on a podcast and like in like 12 months from that when I'm when it's no longer stressing me over it yeah exactly but yeah so I think that's I think it's a great way to think through content and you can you can tweet out a lot of emotion in a lot of real life thoughts without telling the world what you're going through uh and giving intimate details but I think that's a great place for content to come from now please whoever's listening to this don't like read into it and think that everything I tweet is this horrible problem that's going on in my life but I'm just saying it doesn't it doesn't hurt to use that as inspiration do you tweet like all at once or yeah I usually do like five or six at once and then I'll go back in two hours and I'll see which one has the has the most engaged that's not optimal this is not like best practices for content it's literally because I'm just too busy during the day if I had nothing else to do during the day then I would space them out and I would even I would even say that you could I mean you can use scheduling tools whatever um but for for my strategy it hasn't hurt me so and then I can also if I want to tag people or whatever then I can actually do the proper tags anyways I just do it my way but I still get I still get engaged working for you and keep in mind the goal of the goal of my strategy is to test multiple ideas if I had like a my my strategy is not a Twitter first strategy so you could have a Twitter first strategy that would be slightly different than my strategy where you want every idea to go viral and you could be a little bit more like Sahil like Sahil Bloom where he liked he writes his long threads that's a that's a very much a Twitter first strategy I'm using Twitter as a testing ground I use threads as well as a testing ground for all my other content for my newsletter for my short form solo 10 minute YouTube videos for my stuff on Instagram it just depends again on what your focus is Twitter I focus for me yeah I like Twitter and Twitter as like a test because like just so low stakes and that's it it is low stakes and I also look at the like listen I look at analytics and I I know that not a lot of my email subscribers are coming from Twitter I know that not a lot of my YouTube uh subs are coming from Twitter so if if a significantly higher portion were then maybe I would spend a little bit more time on having a Twitter first strategy but that's not where they're coming from like I'm using I mean I can tell on Instagram because I have the option to like auto DM when a new podcast goes up I can auto DM people that write a certain word like using many chat right you write a certain word you auto DM them the link to the episode or I also have when I post one of these squares with a tweet in it for like for better description I also have an auto DM that automatically sends people a link to sign up for my newsletter and a lot of people are signing up my newsletter through these tweet quotes getting an auto DM into their DMs with a link to sub so yeah I mean everyone has their own workflow to figure out what you're optimizing for perfect um yeah thank you so much I I think you're gonna see like uh like a year later when you look back from this day you're gonna see like my podcast started going from I hope so this day I hope so I really hope so for what the hell out of it I really hope so that you have the amazing I'm happy if if any of my ideas helped thank you so much for your time thank you for all the advice and wisdom you share with us my pleasure um other than sending people to your podcast where should where can people fight you um social is pretty easy every handle is at scott d clary so that's every handle and then the podcast is success or podcast dot com and they can find everything in there awesome I'll put everything in the show notes thank you so much for your time again thank you everyone for this thing and I'll see y'all next week