Phillip Stutts, CEO of Win BIG Media | How to Get 3 Presidents Elected Into Office (Marketing Lessons Learnt)

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Remember Gain Grow Retain on the HubSpot Podcast Network. Everyone, just take a second and thank the sponsor of today's episode Long Shot Leaders. It's a podcast that I just started listening to because I absolutely love them. It's hosted by my good friend Michael Stein. It's edgy, it's different. He interviews absolutely everyone under the sun and speaks through their journey. It impacts the biggest obstacles they've had to overcome to find success in whatever it is they've done in their life. He interviews Academy Award winners, ex-cons, Holocaust survivors, sports heroes, you name it, he interviews them, and he himself also has a really interesting background. Michael Stein is a host, he's an entrepreneur, writer, actor, filmmaker, he's also a stand-up comedian, so he kind of puts that all into the interview. And then he gets into how the why, the secrets of why people do what they do. It's really cool. I actually love the show. He reached out to sponsor, but I don't take any sponsorships, especially for podcasts unless I actually like them listening to myself. So I listen to it, highly recommend you check it out. That is Long Shot Leaders with Michael Stein. Today, my guest is Philip Stutz. Now, Philip is a best selling author. He comes from the cutthroat world of political and corporate marketing. He has been described as a marketing maverick, reshaping business success using the secret formula that gets presidents elected. He has contributed to 1,407 election victories, including three US presidential victories and working with multiple Fortune 200 companies. Philip plays the game of political and corporate marketing on the highest level, battling it out with fierce competition, multi-billion dollar budgets, and a win or die mentality. He is the founder and executive chairman of Go Big Media, a political marketing ad firm. He has spoken in front of 50 million plus people over his career. He has been on more than 350 national media appearances, including ESPN, CBS, Fox Business, Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN. He has also been interviewed by renowned business entertainment and health leaders, including Anderson Cooper, Gary Vaynerchuk, Peter Diamandis, James Alchullur, Michael Hyatt, Adam Corolla, Dr. Drup. He has written multiple best sellers, including his latest book titled The Undefeated Marketing System, How to Grow Your Business, and Build Your Audience using the secret formula that elects presidents, which hit top 65 out of 6 million titles on Amazon. So, what did we speak about? Well, firstly, we spoke about the origin story of Philip Stutz, and how he always has the best possible strategies on every platform, be it in the political arena or in the corporate marketing arena. We spoke about the best ways to test marketing strategies, as well as some lessons that he has learned from testing political marketing strategies. We spoke about how he decides what to focus his energy on, while being hugely successful, how does he build the brand, how does he still run two simultaneous agencies, one helping presidents win elections, one helping CEOs, and Fortune 200s reach their target customers. We spoke about some things that he has learned from his time in political marketing, and how those lessons can apply to consumer marketing that maybe the average marketer isn't aware of. We also spoke about comparitizing, what does that mean? He wrote an entire book about it, and then lastly, as a marketing agency owner, we spoke about why a marketing agency's only job should be to work themselves out of a job. And what does that mean in terms of a business owner, or even a political candidate looking for a marketing agency to work with. So let's jump right into it. This is Philip Stutz. He is the founder and CEO of win big media and go big media. Oh man, so I grew up in Alabama, and I was the first generation Scott of ADD kids, right. I'm 47 now. And so in the 1980s, I was diagnosed with ADD. There wasn't ADHD. The H hadn't come out yet. So this is how early it is. And I was put on Ritalin and, you know, like a lot of good entrepreneurs, I have ADD. And but ultimately, I only really cared about two things in life. And really, I couldn't ultimately pursue a career unless it was in one of those two things. And one was a college football. So for your Canadian audience that may not resonate, but I can't stand Canadian football anyway. So I was just football rights college football. But I'm five nine hundred fifty pounds. So that was never going to be part of my future. But I also was constant. I was fascinated by political campaigns. How people got elected. I didn't give two shifts about tax policy or environmental policy. I was fascinated by how a politician ran a campaign to win and get into office. And I was like high school fascinated. And so when I got out of college, I did an internship on a presidential campaign. And I just I got addicted to it. It's like working on political campaigns, one of the most addictive things you can ever do in your life, because you're working 24 seven, you're, you know, passionately pursuing something that you think will benefit society. Well, I was pretty purpose driven, obviously. And so, you know, that was sort of what I said, well, I'm an ADD kid. I got to put stuff in. I got to put my time into something really passionate about. And that's how I found it. You know, I went on to work on, at this point, as of November of 2021, we, I've been a part of 1,433 American election victories, three presidential wins. And then about five years ago, I just, you know, I had one of those, how old are you Scott? I'm 31. So I'm, oh, man, you're a young guy. So it's there. This is a four warning. So they're at about 38 to 42 almost everybody, you know, wakes up and goes, it's like they've been going up this roller coaster their whole life. And it's like, hey, sky is the limit. Look at the sky. And then all of a sudden, about 38 or 42, you kind of crest on top of that roller coaster. And then you start looking down and you go, oh, shit, that's all there is. Like, is this all there's going to be for the rest of my life? Because you kill it early. And then you try to figure out what to do next, right? Or you don't, or even worse, you don't kill it. And you go, shit, I'm at stuck in this place. If I don't change, right? And a lot of men, I mean, this happens to women happens to men, but a lot of men that I know cheated on their spouses in this period of time, they bought motorcycles. I just decided I was going to go start business with my life crisis. So I started a political ad agency in 2015. We've grown that from, you know, I invest it. I put a hundred grand in my money. We've now, we're now at 60 million in revenue. And then about two years later, I went, well, that was so fun. Why don't I go start a corporate marketing agency? And the ignorance of an entrepreneur is, is a beautiful thing and also a massive headache because nothing's easy, right? When you start, you think it is, you think this idea is going to be so easy. But we've, we've now run this corporate marketing agency, applying the political principles behind getting presidents elected into corporate clients. We work with Fortune 200 companies. We work with startups. We work with small businesses and where it's rooted in sort of the, you know, my manifesto is the book called the undefeated marketing system. How to grow your business and build your audience using the secret formula that elects presidents. And it lays out sort of, I had this theory that applying political, a political marketing system to corporations would grow their, their business. And just because I had a theory, it didn't mean it was true. I had to go out and prove it. And so I spent years working with businesses. And, you know, I found this niche in the marketplace, Scott, which is almost every business owner I've taught to in the last 10 years, they said one thing. They have fired multiple marketing agencies in the lifespan of their business. That they're over promised under deliver. They don't look out for the business. They, they're all making money. They throw them into, it's like throwing them into buying a hot stock and then the stock tanks like, oh, put all your money into this platform and this platform. When they didn't work and no one can figure out anything. And then ultimately they go, my God, I'm locked into an eight month contract with these guys that can't get out of it. And it's just a cluster fuck. And I just went, I'm going to change the rules of marketing. I'm going to create two things that are going to, that are the biggest sort of vulnerabilities in the marketplace. One, I'm going to create a marketing company that plays money ball and doesn't sit around arbitrarily choose what marketing tactics should be used. We're going to use real data and we're going to guarantee success for our clients. And then the second thing is when you work with us, there are no long term contracts. We're month to month on every single contract we've ever signed. For me, 26 years, never had any contract that wasn't month to month. And so because you can fire me at any time if I'm not producing. So because of that, we play money ball with our marketing. And what do I mean by that? So I'm going to change it. Do you want to know it's good? No, no, no, it's good. So it's all the story, the story's making sense. And I think it's why you're so successful. But I am curious when you're playing money ball with marketing. When you have so many, like you have so many factors that impact marketing, including things that are not uncontrollable. Right. Doesn't matter how data driven you are, especially how quickly you pivot in those moments is the key to the whole thing. And if you play money ball, you know those moments are coming and you pivot out immediately. So what do I mean by that? So what did I do? I went out and made a bet, like all good entrepreneurs. I made a bet on me. But the bet was this. I partnered with the largest data collection and analytics and AI company in America. And in our database, we have 240 million American consumers, 550 million connected devices. We're tracking 10 billion online purchasing decisions every day and a trillion searches. And so I can literally tell you everything you've ever wanted to know about your customer client. Because I can IP target them and find out what they're searching for, what they're buying. I can tell you their top three values in life. I can tell you their social media platforms. They're on an chronological order. Wouldn't that be nice if you were looking to understand your customer client base before you go and spend a bunch of money on a social media platform. If all this and you knew, I know exactly where they are. And in order to we started working with this data company, we were working with them unfortunate 200 clients. That was the data report we would produce for these Fortune 200 companies got. We would be. It would cost about 200 to $50,000 for one report. Right. So I went to the data company. I said small businesses startups. Everybody should be using this. These are the same reports that like Amazon and Disney and Hershey's and TurboTax and Altria and Davida Dallas system. These are Fortune 200 companies all using this exact data base and using these data analytics tools. And I said, I think, you know, small business and startups need us. And they said, okay, well, you pay us a licensing fee of a half a million dollars a year and you can have it and you can charge what you want. So I do. So I wrote that check, stroke that check, bet, bet everything on me on that because I wanted to build a marketing firm that focused on data and analytics, not on good feelings and hot, hot trends. So let me tell you what I mean by that. I'll tell you a story. We work with a short tank company and they do $20 million in revenue a year. And when they came to us, they said they were spending 85% of their marketing dollars on Facebook. And so we took their customer base. We overlaid it online with our data. And we found out that Facebook was the number five performing platform for this company with their customers and their potential customers. Number five, the number one social media platform was Pinterest and they had never spent a dollar on Pinterest because women had gotten into the market, gotten back into the marketplace. They weren't going into an office and they needed to buy this is an office chair company. And they wanted to buy office chairs for their home. And they were spending all of this money and doing okay, but they didn't realize that they could double their business if they just refocus their budget and allocated a budget based on where their customers were and what their customers wanted rather than them guessing. The problem was the marketing or sorry, the company that hired us to do this, the short tank company, they had a marketing agency that they had hired that only did Facebook ads. So tell me those, is that marketing agency ever going to tell the business owner that Facebook is the fourth or fifth performing platform? Right. Right. I'm screen agnostic. I'm platform agnostic. I find sometimes the clients that direct mail is more important than digital media. So where am I going to direct my clients? I'm going to direct them into where the data tells us to go. And then we optimize those that performance every single day we work with them. So when the when things happen, like you said earlier, which was a great point when when something happens in the platforms or people get the platform or trends change or things like that. We're on top of it immediately and we can pivot them out of that because we're on top of that. We know what's going on. We know what their customers are doing. And so for us, that's like a little glimpse in how we look at it, but I just kind of want to kind of lay that out. I just want to take a second and thank the sponsor of today's episode Shopify. Don't you love that sound as a sound of another sale on Shopify, the all in one commerce platform to start run and grow your business. See Shopify gives entrepreneurs the resources once reserved for big businesses. So upstarts, startups and established businesses alike can sell everywhere synchronize online and offline sales activity and effortlessly stay informed. 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If you want to try out Shopify right now, go to Shopify.com slash success story that's all lowercase for a free 14-day trial and get full access to Shopify's entire suite of features. Grow your business with Shopify today, go to Shopify.com slash success story right now. Remember success story is all lowercase that's Shopify.com slash success story. I love it. It makes a lot of sense and I'm just going to challenge you on one more point with with that. So when your platform ragnostics logically you go into the data and you figure out what works like it just makes a lot of sense. And I know a lot of marketing agencies don't do that because they have their specialists in each platform right and that's what they sort of put you towards. But the reason they do that is because it's hard to have the best practices across every platform. So how do you have that? You say you want to go into Pinterest. You just hire the best in every platform. Are you on TikTok, Pinterest, YouTube ads, Facebook, all that? Yeah, we have an internal team that knows how to focus on those platforms now. If the client like a support in 200 client and they want to get, you know, they want to, you know, they want to spend a lot of money on doing millions. Yeah, then yeah, I come, I have deals with almost, you know, a thousand different marketing agencies that specifically focus on certain platforms and we can partner with them on those. But yeah, that's how how we would look at, you know, like here's an example when I'm up, we worked with a background check company. They're one of the top in America and they came to us and they said, hey, we want you guys to do your marketing, but we've had this marketing agency for three years. We just got rid of them. We want you to look at all of our data. They work with like the big fast food chains because there's such a crazy labor turnover. They have to do background checks only. And so they said, and we, one of the things we all said is we audit everything they've ever, they do in their entire marketing systems, figure out what's working and what's not like where their inefficiencies are. And one of the things we found with them was that Google had changed some rules on them about three years ago on how keywords and Google ads were running and their marketing agency didn't know that the rules had changed and neither did the company's internal marketing team. And when we looked at them, we found out they were spending $15,000 a month to bid against their own keywords. They were bidding up, they were bidding on multiple keywords, but they were bidding against each other. And they didn't know that they were doing that. And they've been doing it for three years. It's a lot of money, a lot of money. Right. And so what I'm what I focus on first is eliminating the dumb tax that businesses are paying and marketing by figuring out how the efficiencies work better. And then we go in and look at the data and figure out first of all what platforms you want to be on should be on how you should be allocating your budgets more efficiently like a money ball approach. So I'm not saying you shouldn't spend money on Facebook. If you're that that that chair company, I was telling you about I'm saying how much of your allocation of your budget should it be. Right. And then the last part is the messaging and the creative you better in a you know, Forbes has this stat out right now. We are seeing up to 10,000 ads a day online and offline. 10,000 ads a day online and offline per day each person. So are you breaking through the clutter with your ads or are you one of 10,000 that no one's paying attention to. And so you use the data to find out what is going to ring the bell of that customer and then you make creative and messaging that makes them pop through screen or the page or whatever it is to say what is that. And they want to know more and they want to click through and that's the key the whole thing. Do you do you pull over any learnings from when you market like I know a very data driven approach is probably very important obviously in political marketing. But are there any other key lessons that you found after years in political marketing that you can pull into consumer marketing marketing B2B B2C that are like hyper relevant at the average marketer may not think of. Well, so I have this five step we call the undefeated marketing system right it's a name of the book to but yes, so two things that really stand out for me when the politician comes to me and says hey, I want to run for the United States Senate and the state of Florida. The first thing I do is I say hey I sit down and say what do you want to let's just say you know she sits down and I say what do you what do you believe in what do you want to run on. And inevitably the egotistical politician will give you like 25 things right and you're like all right no one wants to do 25 things but I appreciate that but here's what I'm going to do I'm going to go and survey and it's in by the way much more complicated than those but for the brevity of this podcast. I'm going to go survey and these customer are sorry these voters in the state and I'm going to figure out of the 25 policy issues you think are the most important I'm going to figure out for them what's the top one or two. When I say one or two I mean it will get you to election victory if you run on those two issues now for the other 23 issues probably not going to talk about a much but for those one or two that's all we're going to focus on because it's an alignment between the politician believes in in the voter. And we know that those issues are so important to that voter that they would vote for an unknown or even an unsavory candidate. And so the point I'm trying to make is I'm obsessed I love the politician but I'm obsessed with the voter and the translation is I love businesses and I love business owners I'm one of them but I'm obsessed with the customer or the client obsessed I'm their advocate for that company that hires me. And that's how I look at it and that's for me I've always thought that and I think that's what makes us a lot different and the most marketing agencies. The other it sound like most marketing agencies do what I'm about to say but they do it wrong and that is testing messages so all marketing agencies will tell you sky like hey we test messages yeah we test that but they're typically making those up in a brainstorm session around a conference room table. Hey let's say this let's say these 10 things let's go test it I'm only pulling the messages out of the data and then I'm going to test those to see which one rise we already know the 10 messages from the data will work but which one rises to the top so let me give you an example so please know. The story about I got a disclaimer the disclaimer is this I am not here to talk about left or right I'm not here to talk about Democrats or Republicans or woke cancel culture or Trump like and Trump in the sense of campaigns and stuff like that right but I'm going to use an example of what the Trump campaign did in 2020 2016 that was brilliant they followed this undefeated marketing system because all politicians following. And when they got to the testing phase they tested what they found in the data and they would they would they would test one message 162 different ways 162 different versions of one message they'd have a green background a red background they'd have a man in the ad a woman in the ad they'd have different font sizes they'd have bonds in the right corner the left corner they did 162 different versions and ultimately they knew the message would work they just didn't know which. How to optimize that message the best and so they went out and ultimately they found eight or nine messages that blew through the roof and they had no idea why but with before they went out and spent a lot of money on their marketing dollars to win over voters they now know these eight or nine different ad concepts are going to work and go blow through the roof instead of throwing all 162 up or using one of those ads wouldn't have worked as best. They optimized based on data they optimize tested and put it out there so the difference in what translates is that we do testing based on what the data tells us not arbitrary brainstorm sessions around a conference room table which is what 99% of a lot of marketers do. So let's take a second and thank the sponsor of today's episode true bill. So let me ask you a question how often have you signed up for a free trial and then it converted into a paid subscription and you forgot to cancel it or how often have you just not been able to cancel something because the process to cancel that particular monthly service is just horrible and painful and they make you jump through hoops. 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True bill has over two million active users and they saved people over one hundred million dollars I used it myself I saved about five hundred and seventy eight bucks but that's just because I spent so much time in the past having to go back and cancel I'm sure if I knew about them two three years ago it could have saved me like thousands of dollars by now so stop letting CEOs and bad businesses get rich off you being unable or just forgetting to cancel don't fall for subscription scams star cancel. Today with true bill at true bill dot com slash success story go right now true bill dot com slash success story that's true bill dot com slash SUCC ESS STORY it could save you thousands a year that's true bill dot com slash success story take control of your subscriptions and what's the easiest way to test so is it talking to customers jumping on calls is it running different creatives on different platforms what what's your record is running creatives on different platforms. That's the best low cost yeah the other part of this is in politics not everybody's a self funding candidate like people most candidates started zero. And so we do low cost testing usually motion graphic or banner because if you're if you click through a banner that means that message is really going to work. Like nobody clicks through banners right so yeah so if you do low cost banner ads it don't cost much money you can do a lot of them really cheap and you can ultimately find. What message is going to click through because again they're clicking through a banner that message is going to resonate you know it. One of the one of the themes in your book or one of the things that sort of I pulled out was the like your marketing agency you're working with should be working towards working themselves out of a job at some point but what does that actually mean does that mean that you are actually trying to when you work with companies are you trying to eventually exit and let them run on their own or is it just that's the mindset you have to have. Yeah it's a mindset it's like do you ever really think you're going to retire at 65 like you know but you know the mindset is hey you know you're working towards an exit but doesn't mean you're ever going to stop right so what I mean by that is. Your intention should be to create a loyal fan base a loyal customer base you should do so much for them and provide so much value and over and over and over again that they become so loyal to you that they work with anybody else. And or buy products from anybody else and like an example of that is Yeti. You got them right there. Yeti frickin coolers people. Oh coolers not the Mike sorry. No no I got a Yeti Mike right now but no I don't have a blue Mike but anyway Yeti coolers people put their stupid logo on a hat and wear it proudly. They put the bumper stickers on cars I mean I'm drinking out of a cut out of a Yeti right now like I mean people are obsessed with this company right does it mean Yeti doesn't market anymore no but they they make so much damn money because of their loyal customer base like. Here's another one no one has ever gotten a tattoo in their arm of a Honda motorcycle. But I have of a Harley right and shouldn't that be the aspirational way you look at your marketing like that's my whole point it's aspirational to what you're trying to achieve because you're going to say you're going to make 10 times more money if you have that kind of loyal customer base or client base. Another another point um comparitizing what does that mean. Comparitizing going negative yeah so I never heard that term before I read I made up the term I made that word up that's why I call it I thought I was like shit I really missed the like a marketing 101 definition there so I wrote I've written two books the first book was called fire them now right and I wrote a whole chapter in the book called going negative on your on your competition. And it's basically taking the concept of how the political campaigns we go negative on our on our opponents and then taking over to to the corporate world but I screwed up. Because no business owner likes the term going negative they're like oh that's that's going to hurt my business I can't do something like that and I went oh I have a branding problem. So I and it's not what I mean you know and I'm going to define it and say so I said well hold on how do I rebrand this because my intention and their perception are two different things. And so I said well it's just comparative advertising you know what I'm going to just clean the term comparitizing. So it doesn't mean you take a sledgehammer to your competition and eliminate and piss off 50% of your market that's what we do in politics we know all we have to do is get 51% of the money we win the race right. It doesn't matter I can piss off 49% doesn't matter right you can't do that in the corporate world you can't do that if you're running a company. But the most successful ads in the advertising world right now are comparitizing ads there's no doubt and you must do it there's an art to it you must do it in a way that draws distinction. Pisses off no one and drives complete loyalty to your product or service and so it's my third book is going to be called comparitizing because we do this with all of our clients and the number one ads we ever run on for them are compared to like when I'm saying the number one performance ads are comparitizing ads so let me give you an example what that means so we work with an apparel company. And they're they're a competitor to a Lulu live in right so they shirts T sweats things like that. And I said ask them who their competition was they said it's these cheap knockoff companies like I mean that cheap knockoff T shirt sweats T's companies like Nike under armor you know they just can get a lot on the market out the drivers night when we we we looked at their data so we ran what we call this customer insights report. And we found out that something like 82% of their customers hated cheap sportswear that's why they were their customers they liked high end expensive comfortable sweats T's all that kind of stuff. And I said I have an enemy let's go. And so we built we ran a bunch of ads for them but the number one performing ad we ever ran in the history of their company among men was a comparitizing ad. And it said don't buy your clothes from a shoe company and then the tagline said just don't do it got it just don't do it that's funny. So you're smiling right are you just is this a thin your sensibilities it does not offend my sensibilities no it does not. It's clever it's clever it's like and I'm not getting people I'm not getting people to no one buys because they saw that ad but they're curious and they go hold on what is this and they click on it and then they start that journey as a customer right. And it was the number one performing ad we ever ran for them among men and that was because for assault made you smile second of all it drew a distinction because in their subconscious brain they go yeah I don't like cheap clothes either that's me speaks to me right. So it draws a distinction it sticks out in a land of 10,000 and today and it draws loyalty because the loyalty they go yeah that's me I'm that too I'm loyal to that. We did a we worked with a food and supplement company nine figure food and supplement company and when we looked at their data we found out that 62% of their market hated soda. This is what the data told us now how would you know that like it makes sense but how would you know that we also found out that 50% of their customers are talking millions of customers were vegan veggie considered themselves vegan vegetarian. So we ran a lot of ads we also ran a lot of ads on other things we found in the data but the top two performing ads we ever ran for them were one the vegan vegetarian ad that made sense because half the market was vegan vegan vegetarian but the number one ad we ever ran for them in the number one ad they ever had the history of the company was a comparison. So compared to that it was an anti soda ad and that particular ad performed two X click through rate better than the number two vegan vegetarian ad not the other ones that we tested the number two ad it was a two X on click through rates and a 20% higher conversion over the number two performing ad why because the customer hates soda and their market plays doesn't like soda. And if you saw that ad and you love soda you're not really their customer so they didn't give two shits about that and so they people saw it and they go yeah I hate soda I want healthier sport drink or healthier drink approaching drink and then they click through the ad and then 20% higher than the second highest performing ad we ran they you know we got conversions on so I could go on and on for days but we've done comparison now we we tell every client that works with us. We're going to have to run some sort of comparitizing they have to prove it you know but we don't want we're never going to offend anybody but we know they work and in a land of 10,000 ads a day you know you got to break through the clutter and comparitizing is the number one tactic to do it. I just want to take a second and thank the sponsor of today's episode latter now over the past two years and a bit I'm sure we've all realized that how precious and fragile life can be in the last thing that you want to be worried about when something horrible happens is how you're going to afford it and that's why I am a firm believer in life insurance so that if something does happen you're not passing those costs onto your kids or your family. Now if you're asking yourself how do I find affordable long term coverage how do I find affordable monthly that can protect my family from anything that happens well the answer that question would be latter because if you wait longer life insurance does cost more money. So when you set term coverage when you're young you can get incredible coverage for a relatively low price and latter is 100% digital so no doctors no needles no paperwork when you apply for $3 million or less you can just do it online need a few minutes phone and a laptop to apply Latter smart algorithms work in a real time so you'll find out if you're instantly approved if you refer to talk to somebody they also do have a team of licensed agents they don't work on commission so they'll help you they won't upsell you there's no hidden fees you can cancel at any time and you can get a full refund if you change your mind in the first 30 days and latter policies are issued by insurers with long proven histories of paying claims they're all rated A and A plus by AM best so finally latter is the best. This is offering an option for people that want to protect their family that want to start getting behind life insurance at a younger age so if you want to see if you're instantly approved you can go to latter life dot com slash success story you'll see if you're instantly approved that is latter L a D D E R I want to these are all really good good marketing lessons I know that you speak about a lot of different things like when I was going on your Twitter before you were speaking about your moonshot that you had with a particular disease and I know you've also spoken of politics and I thought something about college sports as well so I love the marketing. I've been all listen I've made 26 appearances on ESPN I know so my question and more just like you you how do you decide as an entrepreneur as a business owner as somebody who has been highly successful where do you decide to focus your energy what's relevant and important for you now in your life because these are all my eight I mean I'm all in on my company I know but I mean there's other things that are also important to you and I just want to understand like why do you put these things out into the world why is that important for you as somebody who is big on marketing and you speak about marketing a lot but then you also go into these other topics talk politics I'll talk health and I'll talk it's part of it's part of who you are and I'm curious what yeah I'm an ADD kit let's go around back to that first question and I want to if I find it fun and exciting and different I'm kind of curious about it. Like in the last since the pandemic I've become I've become obsessed with hunting and now I'm hunting like crazy everywhere and I'm 47 years I'll never hunt it before but you know just got done with an elk hunt out in Colorado and planning hunts in the next 10 years and I am taking tons of classes and self defense classes and gun classes and I'm buying you know firearms right now because I want to learn that skill I want to learn how to be a better shooter I want to understand my gun I want to understand where it comes from I want to understand my scopes I just kind of get obsessed with things and then I put on my energies and then all of a sudden I go oh shit there's a vulnerable I guess I have a good here's my one skill I don't have many but this is one I typically when I go all in on things I find the lane less traveled within them. And then I talk about them and that gets attention because people go oh yeah you're not talking about that no one's talked about that before so like the political guy that does corporate marketing or I was on ESPN talking about how college players were going to get paid but which is now what's happening in college football but I actually saw this two and a half years ago and brought it to ESPN and they said well why don't you just come on talk about it and then I've been the form there we know into one of the experts on it. I have no background in that one so I said no one's this is going to change everything for this sport and no one's talking about it and you know I just for background of your listeners I have what doctors say is an incurable suffigial disease and so I went all in and decided as an entrepreneur I would find a cure to my disease in five years even though the Mayo Clinic where I was being treated laughed at me when I suggested such a thing. And there's no research behind a cure to this disease that I have and no one was doing much of anything and then four years and nine months later I had a cure in my disease but I'm the first person in human history that's ever improved their symptoms with the disease and that's never happened for it's a long story but I just kind of go all in and I find the lane that no one goes on and then I do all the hard work which really sucks because I get excited and then I think it's going to be a lot easier than it is and then it isn't and then I'm coming back. Do you think, no, like do you think I guess my my my my thought was when you constantly just take on these new things do you think that just makes you that much more I don't know just just more competitive in the things that you're already doing when you're forcing yourself to upskill all the time learn new shit just redo the thing again like not like major things you're not starting a new agency your just going down. I don't want to go down a road figuring stuff out I can only imagine like there's some sort of psychological benefit. Yeah, I'll tell you what it is because here's another thing I've gone in on on psychedelic drugs really how is there a therapeutic person said I've heard a lot about that and in what I've done MDMA I've done MDMA with LSD and I've done it with a therapist I've done one with my wife in the room with me with a blindfold on laying on a sofa and you ultimately come to figure out you you basically peel it. Layers of your of your subconscious of all the things that drive you you know I now know that anytime I'm upset angry or frustrated that's all rooted back in the trauma of my own life in my own childhood and when you have when you allow yourself to say that it's not anybody else's fault it all comes back to me there's a responsibility there. And part of my trauma is the feeling what I mean to be honest the the trauma that I've discovered and uncovered through all the psychedelic work was just the feeling of mass rejection from my childhood massive rejection on every level and every front and every form you can imagine it's also why I'm a really good entrepreneur because I dealt with so much rejection early in my life that rejection. It bothers me subconsciously but it doesn't bother me consciously that makes sense like I can have failure upon failure upon failure and I'm not going to stop I'm committed all the way through because I'm going to overcome that rejection of failure but it's also my kryptonite too it's where I you know struggle the most if I get frustrated angry it's because I felt rejected somehow and I didn't lash out at someone else over that you know and so and then you go. Oh fuck it wasn't their problem it wasn't their fault maybe they you know made a big mistake but my reaction to that is a bit rooted in my trauma and so for me I have Scott I don't I'm not competitive at all I'm like the least competitive person I'm competitive with me that's it I have no competitive bone what so I can go play golf with my friends and they want to bet and they want to say I don't give two shits if I lose like it drives them nuts it doesn't bother me. I don't care I don't have any competitive bone with anybody else other than just me I am the most competitive human being on earth in my world with myself which is all that really matters at the end of the day anyways that's all you can I guess I don't know it's just kind of my wiring. When you when you were like using some of these like I don't know I guess just drugs like what you're using them to uncover different parts of your psyche and just be more self aware do you because I've also heard this as well so I'm not sure if you've ever done this but I hear that like micro dosing for creativity is a very popular thing now but I have no I have no experience with this but I hear like CEOs do it and what not so is that something you've you found when you when you tried these out or. You know I had the choice to make you know what was that do I want to follow everybody else is doing I want to do I want to just take it one step at a time and do what's best for me and I'm not opposed to micro dosing but for me right now it's just not what I want to do some people I know do psychedelics with therapists once a month. I mean massive amounts of MDMA or psilocybin which mushrooms or LSD or you know there's a host of other I mean there's like 30 different things you can try and I'm not that way I usually do one session for five hours and then I spent a year integrating it with a therapist talk therapy and in integrating everything I discovered in that session it just takes me more time I'm more methodical about it. And so for me that's just my journey what my journey is different than other people's and the last thing I want to do is go well that guy did it this way so I should do it this way like that I do I've done that plenty in my life and I'm trying to be more conscious of the fact that no I'm just going to listen to myself and follow my own path. I just want to take a second and thank the sponsor of today's episode HubSpot now you may have heard me speak about leveling up in the past how we can level up our careers our businesses our customer experience. I wanted to take a minute and focus on that last because when we level up our customers experiences we transform our customers into evangelists and help our business and our careers grow like crazy with new features dedicated to helping your sales teams improve your customer experience HubSpot is on a mission to help millions of companies grow better starting with yours. Conversation intelligence tools help your teams get real time insights into calls with automatic recording transcription and call analysis with more visibility into customer conversations coaching and customer feedback becomes that much easier. Easy share meeting links let customers see availability and book meetings for you all from the HubSpot platform this cuts out endless cycles of scheduling email. Learn more about how you can transform your customer experience with a HubSpot CRM platform at HubSpot.com I want to ask a couple rapid fire I always do at the end to close these out but before we pivot what's next for you we're speaking just briefly before we started like you're going to try and ramp up build your own brand but really what is next outside of just pushing stuff out onto social there's probably a plan. Yeah I mean I I own five different companies I'm running one of them right now I'd like to be in my own holding company and managing all of my companies from that point and that that's sort of the next you know two years where I'm moving towards and also building my brand out a little bit more. And frankly I have one I have a nine year old and I'd like to spend more time with my family I've gotten nine more years for my daughter goes off to college and I want to be a better husband and father and part of that is relinquishing that time I put so much into my own businesses to make sure I have a more balanced lifestyle very good where do people find you what's the best social website people can go reach out. Yeah a couple different things if you're you can go to filip studs.com I'm sure you'll spell it properly in the show notes but if you're like curious on how we look at data for your own company we do it free data assessment and it basically it's 30 for 30 minute call with my team they'll tell they'll you'll tell them like what your customer base is like and they'll tell you how we're you know if we have how our data would match and look at that and then you can decide if that's something you want to undergo and work with us on. But I'm on podcast the undefeated marketing podcast where we give free marketing tips and value out to business owners I also write every two weeks to my subscriber list and that's again it full of studs.com. For people listening what's the type of company that you would work with is there a certain stage certain revenue size headcount or is it any category committed versus interested. Alright that's good I like that. I like committed business owners. I mean we work with startup companies right now that don't have a ton of money but they're like look we're in this thing to build this for 10 years and we need a partner to build us for 10 years. What I don't want is a business owner that chases shiny objects until the next shiny object passes through by their eyes and they move on like I'm in I like working with committed business owners whether they're fortune 200 or whether they're startups or small businesses. Very good all right let's do some rapid fire biggest challenge of overcome in your personal professional life what was it had you overcome it. Being a horrible human being in person and utilizing therapy and psychedelics to I mean I was heading towards broken businesses broken marriage and broken family. Eight years ago and working and I'm never I'm not solved any problems but I'm a thousand times further than I was in working every single day to be a better person and ultimately Scott I know this is rapid fire. It's learning to love myself. Something I did not allow myself for at least 45 years to even think about and the more I love myself the better I am as a leader the better as a husband and father and learning to love myself is one of the hardest things I've ever had to commit to but just like everything else I'm really all in on it right now. If you had to choose one person obviously there's been many but one person's had an incredible impact on your life who was it what did they teach you how do they help you. I mean there's a million people there no self-made men or women right there's an army of people that have helped us on the way but my wife wouldn't going to stand and take you know the way I used to be and she stood up and said you know you got to figure this out. And she's my greatest resource and I want to kill her half the time and she wants to kill me half the time but the love and the bond that we have is beyond words and I wouldn't be where I am today without her. Your favorite source to learn or grow podcast book audible something you've checked out lately somebody's scowry or listen to. Jay anything by James out teacher if you know who James out teacher is he wrote the forward to my new book I've I think I'm the most I've been on his show more than any other guest. I've been on about 11 times but he's just the smartest nicest kind of person and I learn everything I learned something every time I listen to him. I think Jay bram is a mentor of mine is another great one Tony Robbins obviously if you're starting on step one I think Tony is probably the number one for starting at step one is the best there is. And then one last one sorry there's a guy that no one knows he's not a big influencer go Google and he's the smartest business consultant coach that has ever lived in the reason being is that he made a hundred million dollars lost it all and made it all back. And he teaches right now what he teaches is not how to 10x your business but how never to lose your any of your money and his name is Keith Cunningham and that's the greatest person I've ever worked with on the business side amazing okay. If you could tell your 20 year old self one thing what would it be. Get ready got a hell of a journey hell of you and no regrets and you got out you got a hard you know there's a great quote I can't think of the guy said it but it's a easy choices hard life hard choices easy life and I would that's what I would tell that 20 year old. And last I was looking up that quote I know that quote too but I can't remember. Jersey something like Jersey Gregorak Jersey Gregorak I think it was in the TEDx he said it anyway that's good and last question what does success mean to you. Balance and the love of my family amazing it's all I got cool. You