Alex Hormozi Mastermind July (1-Day Recordings)

So, so niche, uh, helping business owners make more money using social media. Funny, that.

Um, big thing is, is some, uh, insights and a clearer path to our next big goal. And the fun, I, I've missed completely what you said. So, just, I'm excited to have fun today.

Yeah, let's go. That's one way to do it.

No. Whatever you do for fraud, do you have a hobby? Do you have an interest? Side passion?

Uh, just say no. Weird thing, you know, like I have six fingers or something.

Play with my kids. That's what I do.

All right, there we go.

All right. Um, I'm Simon and, uh, my niche is teaching on young online coaches how to sign to get clients. And, uh, a big thing that I want to learn is just absorb the energy from this event and, uh, fun, just do business for fun.

So, there's no topics either of you guys want to talk about. I'm sorry. There's no topics either of you guys want to focus on.

Not really.

All right. Cool.

All right. So, my name is Joshua. Um, we do like I do the same thing as Simon right here. We coach young entrepreneurs to sign high ticket clients.

Okay.

My own goal with like being here is to just see what everyone's like, their mindset, just absorb knowledge and for fun, I just spend all my time work nowadays. So, can't say anything.

All right.

Sad, dude. All right, we're in business coaching. Um, and let's see, my big name.

Oh, my name. Okay, I wrote my name. Uh, Kelsey. And my big thing is I'm more interested in the data side. Um, and then my fun thing is, let's see.

Bird owner.

Oh, I guess I say I'm a bird owner.

Bird mom.

Bird owner. That's kind of weird.

Bird mom.

Uh, my name is Doug. Um, we work with community creators to run conversion events to turn their free communities into paying clients.

Cool.

And, uh, big thing we've been organic up until now and looking to break into advertising for, especially with the retargeting to retarget our free community members with our workshop, our paid event. Fun.

Um, I.

So ads and retargeting is what you want to get out.

Yeah, ad retargeting. Um, yeah, that sounds good.

All right.

And fun, I like to hang out with cool, like all you guys at events. I go to a lot of events.

Mark roll.

Uh, my name is Matio. This is my brother Yugo and our niche is basically using AI at our advantage for only fun management. So, make things better marketing and stuff.

Our big thing would be retention. We have some issues on that and I would say that.

Retaining talent or retaining end users?

Uh, retaining users mostly and also ads because we've been doing, uh, organic content for the most part.

Uhhuh.

It's also a bit thin and for fun, we just travel around the world and work together.

Sounds chill.

My name is Yianis. I work with them on software and AI and manifagement and the big thing for me is how to make this work like software and this type of marketing for.

Do you use AI models or do you use AI for chat to sell?

For the models, okay.

Chat too, like.

So, do you have any talent that's real or is this all AI in terms of the talent they have all.

Cool, interesting, okay.

But you can also use AI to enhance, like, the marketing of a model. So, there is multiple ways to use that.

Interestingly, cool.

That's it. Binger.

All right. Rock and roll.

Hi, my name is Amanda. I'm co-founder of Forex for Women. We're here because we're excited to collaborate more on high ticket sales and learn a little bit more about that. We're originally a low ticket, um, monthly.

Well, I have lots of news around that with the new update that you guys saw just came out.

We're really excited. I am so excited, probably more excited than you guys are because there's this thing that I enjoy talking about, which is high ticket sales. It's something that I've, you know, kind of done for a little bit and I've more or less not talked about it at all. Uh, and now I can and it brings joy to my heart.

We came with the right fine.

All right. So, high ticket sales. Sweet.

Uh, my name is Cole. I am a high ticket sales specialist and.

We brought him.

And I am going to be building their high ticket offer.

And so that's talk about high ticket sales, who runs merchant accounts or what you guys recommend and, uh, you know, scaling from, you know, two, 300 to two, three million.

So, the old add a zero to the goal. It's a fun one.

My name is Jen. I'm the guys and, um, co-founder of Forex Works for Women and again, so excited to be here with everybody here because I feel like we get the opportunity to learn so much from each other.

Yeah.

My name is Pablo, like Pablo Escobar, and it's a great way to make an introduction.

The niche that we used for the community was, uh, fit this. So, there's definitely a couple things that I would like to know on that, on, on scaling that. But besides that, we run a couple agencies and like I'm getting to a point where, uh, like choosing whether to, I, I want to focus on one.

You do an agency for like fitness chicks?

No, no, no. We actually, we have an agency where we work a lot with coaches.

Okay.

So, like fitness coaches.

This guy is like a, a coach example. The one that we use the community for. So, I'm, I'm, I'm seeing whether to focus on, on just teaching coaches on growing their businesses through, uh, high ticket offer instead of running the actual agency. And I don't know if that makes sense, but I can talk about it later. And.

It's pretty classic decision at like, one to three million.

Yeah. And also, I, I, I'd like to know on ads, which ads are currently working right now and on high ticket, knowing how to structure a community.

Uh, what was the other? So you wanted to point it. So doer coach was one big question.

Yeah, question. And then ads also, knowing which ads are working right now for you guys.

Okay.

Because we do a lot of ads, but I just want to know if you have any insights.

We spend a lot of money on ads. And the final part was, I think that was it for now. And what I do for fun, my guilty pleasure is watching bad Netflix series with my fiance, like Love is Blind and stuff like that.

I was just watching the first UK version with Leila last night.

It's so, it makes you appreciate your.

Yeah, it makes you appreciate everything.

What's the series?

The comfort of your bed.

Blind.

Yeah.

It's ridiculous.

Go for it. Cool. Uh, well, one, I just want to, um, thank you again for allowing us in your space. Um, so my name is Trayvon Fujier and, uh, I own Wealth University. So, we basically help people land remote roles with no experience.

Cool.

Um, and, uh, I guess the big thing for us is really trying to figure out how to position ourselves, um, with big companies since we have placement helping high quality candidates land roles. Just trying to figure out how we can kind of cut down the time with them having to use LinkedIn, Indeed, and coming to us first for placement. So, so basically create the other side of the marketplace.

Yes, sir.

Okay.

Got it.

Um, for fun.

Work on the business.

Yeah. Hang with the guys. Work out.

Yeah, work out. And I'm Sheree. I'm more of like the content creator and coach within our community. And I would say the big thing is going to be affiliates. So, he's also another content creator and we pretty much merged our audiences. But there's so many content creators who are in like the digital nomad remote work space. So, that would be the big thing if we can figure out how to bring on more affiliates at scale into our funnel to help more people get hired.

And I was talking to some of the guys and girls at school and I heard affiliates will be coming soon to the platform.

Oh, yes. And then for fun, shoot, I'd say hanging out with my wife, like chilling, eating. I'm, I like to eat, so.

Sleeping, eating, human things. Yeah. Yeah.

Sustenance.

Yeah. Hell yeah.

I'm Austin. I'm also a content creator. I, uh, I'm not, I'm good at business. This is my first time running a business. So, or these guys really helped me out because I had a ton of people commenting like, "Oh, I want remote jobs. I want to travel with you." and I had no way to fulfill, no way to actually get my audience what they needed. So, partnering with these guys really helped me. And it's been organic so far. So, I'm really just focused on content throughput and like making it still hit, but increasing my volume. And then getting into paid ads would be really nice. And for fun, traveling. I flew in from the Philippines for this and I've just been all or Southeast Asia. I'm excited for the Vietnam thing that you guys have going on. Like a Vietnam mansion. Oh, you know about it?

What was it? Some winners are going to Vietnam. They've got a big place.

Oh, I was like, what are we talking about? Love that thing you did in North Korea. It was awesome. Well, I will say this. I appreciate the humility because I'll bet you you're a lot further along than you think you are. And you're certainly a lot further along than the many people who come in being like, "I know everything about business." So, kudos. By the way, this is Frank Kern for some of you guys who don't know. Frank's a good friend of mine and one of the best copywriters in the world.

Um, and, uh, Frank was, I think, one of the first guys I bought anything digital from, uh, back in the day, um, when I had my gym. So, like way back. And so, uh, he's, he's a legend in the space and he's awesome.

And I did not win this.

Yeah.

My name's.

I was going to say maybe one day, but.

Maybe we all have dreams, right? My name is Jack and I work with Reese. So, we do growth operating and we work with the creator right now in the fitness niche. And the number one thing would be audience conversion. And then for fun, we just work. But we're after this event, we're actually going to Texas and we're going to be working with a Navy Seal, building him a school group.

Pause real quick. Conversion is conversion, um, into getting people into growth operating or conversion of getting the influencer to what, what part?

Audience conversion of the influencer.

Okay, got it. Cool. Sorry. Navy Seal, continue.

Yeah, we're also going to be training with him, so that would be fun.

Cool.

Yeah.

That that falls under.

Fun.

Yeah. I'm Reese. Good to meet you all. Uh, the only thing I would add is in terms of ads, just we're working with the influencer who doesn't talk on camera at all. Like last month when we started was the first time he's actually spoken in front of a camera.

This particular influencer. Yeah.

But you have other influencers who are indeed influencers.

Uh, no, we don't have anyone else at the moment, but the one we're working with that we won for just.

I'm just zooming out real quick.

Sure.

Do you guys work? Okay. You guys have an influencer and about to do the Navy Seal influencer potentially.

And you guys are growth operators for those guys. Got it. For a split second, I thought you were teaching and placing growth operators. That was part I misunderstood. Okay. Yeah.

Helpful. Okay. That's super much easier. Okay. So, the question was around ads for an influencer.

Yeah. For an influencer who doesn't talk on camera. So, like script writing and actually making hooks is a little bit different.

I like really want to answer this right now.

Um, but.

Faceless.

Yeah. And then for fun, I mean, I was just living in New Zealand up until like three days ago. So, it's weird coming to Vegas. It's so hot. And then I was snowboarding last week, which is insane. But yeah, the toilet water does go the other way though, right?

Yeah. Yeah. It's. And it's a lot higher for some reason. Oh, really?

Yeah. Toilet water. It's strange.

I'm Logan. Um, I teach like blue-collar business owners like how to actually grow their business, which.

A lot of them don't know how to.

And it's very profitable. Um.

My biggest thing is I'm interested in like, if you think that there would be a model where I take equity and then grow and then like roll them up and sell them because like what we're making on the front end, I think we're leaving like a lot on the table obviously.

So, I'm interested if that could work.

Proverbial money on the table.

Yeah. Um, for fun, we travel to national parks and hike.

All right. Cool.

Hi, I'm Sophie. I work with Ryan on helping creators with their attention and decreasing churn. Um, the thing I'm probably most interested in today is audience conversion as well. And for fun, I would say I joke Ryan and I in a throppple with school. It's kind of the three of us. And yeah, we travel around school full time.

Hi, I'm Ryan. I am the top contributor on the school platform, have the most points. Um, I've helped the movement out here with their retention on there and a few other school games winners. My biggest thing is turning what I've started to build on school, my brand presence on school into something bigger than just school. So, or like leveraging it outside. Like how do I take a personal brand in school outside? And then for fun, I just post gifts.

It's actually easier than you'd think.

Go on.

Hi, I'm Max. This is Eric. And we sell high ticket community/coaching to business owners how, uh, and teach them how to get more clients through social media. Um, I think ads are working kind of well for us. Um, but we want to go or want to have a deep dive into content, how to sell high ticket through content, personal branding and for fun, I don't know, we like to, we we enjoy in Vegas.

You guys teach high ticket or you want to sell high ticket? No, we, we are selling high ticket and we want to learn how to sell high ticket through content and and personal brands because it works. We only doing ads right now. Yeah.

Dude, it's easier with personal branding.

We don't know how to. That's why we're here.

Is it the personal brand part that you don't get or how to get because.

How to build a personal branding?

Okay, that I was like, cuz this to this is, yeah, easy.

That's the easiest one. Okay, got it. So, personal brand expansion. I'll just say, you know, and then zero to one. Okay.

That's us.

Yes.

All right.

I think one more would be selling annual on school, like how you.

Oh, yeah. Let's talk about. I'm, I mean, I'm, I will be talking about annual cuz I'm free at last. You guys have no, like, as much as you guys are excited to have these tools, like I really do think that we are more excited than you are. Uh, because like, we, we kill ourselves over the because we have this list of like, all the things that we want to do and we look at it before, you know, we go invest a bunch of time into making the next big feature and we're like, are we sure this is the one? This is the one that we're going to put all of our resources towards and we're like, yeah, I think this is the one and then it comes out and then everyone's stoked.

Um, all right. So, uh, I'm, uh, Alex, kind of like Alexander the Great, if we're, you know, going along that.

Uh, fun fact, actually was named after that guy because my mother is Serbian or Macedonian, and my father is Persian and the meeting of the two was Alexander the Great. That's how they, they came up with that one. I know. It's a little clever, little clever thing. Those crazy kids. Anyways, uh, so, uh, anything on this board, uh, that that after you because you guys kind of got the hang of it after we were halfway through. Anything you want to add on here?

I just probably second the personal branding stuff.

Okay, cool. Can do that. Can somebody on my team give me nicarat? All right, so personal branding says two there. Anything else that's not on here that you like, man, that would be sweet if it were on here?

I'd say probably, uh, retention and churn as well.

All right, I'll just throw a little boop boop.

Okay.

Also on on high ticket, on knowing for example, whether to run, uh, masterminds with school or to do it just like a responsive.

Whether to position it as a mastermind or just a community.

Awesome. So the question is to position your school community as a mastermind.

Yeah, that's the question. If, if you should.

I think it depends on what else you give.

Okay. So, um, positioning school as mastermind, question mark. Okay. What was that quick one? You asked it. Uh, personal branding expansion. Okay. So, I'm going to hit this one first and then we'll.

Yeah, go for it.

Um, so high ticket versus low ticket. Um, in the sense of we've had, we've seen success at both and making sure that we don't, um, take away from our high ticket because we offered a low ticket.

The old cannibalization. All right. Low verse high guidelines. Okay. Okay. So, um, I'm going to hit on that one really quickly because this one's really easy and we could just start off with a bang. Um, so, everything that you do to build a personal brand on school, school is a social platform. So, just be like saying, hey, I have a brand on Twitter, what do I do to expand past Twitter? You expand, you do the stuff that worked on Twitter on other platforms. So, if you're providing value to your audience, whatever way you do it, you have to make it formatted, uh, based on the content that works best on those particular platforms, but beyond that, you just do the same thing that works again somewhere new. Fun.

Yeah.

If you're like, "Man, that's a lot of work." Like, yeah.

Oh, thank you, sir. Appreciate it. Um, yeah. I mean, that's, I mean, just for context for you guys, like we have a team of 20, uh, just for content that puts out 450 pieces a week. And so, like, I, I say that to point out like where this can go and also to show like how much potential there is. Uh, and we're still, like, there's a hundred things that we know we should be doing that we're not and that we could be doing better. And for most of you guys, I'll, I'll tell you right now, you'll probably get because if you're in this room, then you already have a level of execution. So, I'm going to say this without hedging it. You'll get a lot out of, we, we say a pound of, a pound of prep is worth a, sorry, an ounce of prep is worth a pound of post. So, uh, all the effort that you would do afterwards to like edit and try and make things cool, if you prepare what you're going to say and have like good points and good stories around the and a strong hook, you'll get so much more out of your content.

Uh, for those of you who are thinking about doing it.

Can I add something, um, to the, um, list? Um, so I'm partnered with Owen on his low ticket, but I mostly sell high ticket because I'm, own high performance coaching company and we've been talking about, I, I should build a brand and I should, you know.

But I also don't want it to take away from my attention. So, team building, you mentioned about 20, 20 people.

Yeah.

Um.

I had a hole right here, too. So that was good.

Yeah. Yeah. So it's perfect. Yeah.

Like, which should I focus on if I'm actually going to do that? I also don't want it to take away from my time because I need a, I'm focusing on some enterprise companies right now, too. So.

Yeah, that does sound like a distraction. Okay.

Yeah.

So, it sounds like the biggest thing that you guys want to talk about, um, was ads. And only one of you guys mentioned annual, but I want to start here because I think it will influence literally everything else. Cool. And Kirby probably knows more about functionality than I do. Um, big picture, annual is [ __ ] awesome for a number of reasons. So, first off, um, annual, on average, you'll get between 15 to 20%. I'll say 10 because some of you guys might suck, but like realistically, you'll be between 15 and 20% of people will just choose the annual option to save the the discount that you provide them for it. Now, here's how this actually nets out math-wise. So, let's say you have a $100 per month thing and you've got a $1,000 annual, right? Monthly. If you get a hundred people, right, who who come to your thing and 80 buy this and 20 buy this, then we've got $8,000 here and we've got $20,000 here. Huh? Now, here's what's crazy about this madness is that us adding this thing does a 2.5x to our upfront cash flow just by making the offer available. This is not saying like, let's add even more things or say people can only buy annual or add bonuses associated with annual. Like those are all things that would shift this curve even more extreme. Or we add a phone sale to it where we just say we only offer annual and then downsell the monthly. We all, everyone catch along here. Okay. So, if many of you guys, um, on school are running ads profitably or at least break even on the front end without this, if we can two and a halfx the cash flow or 2x the cash flow that you're collecting upfront, that will materially change your ability to advertise. So, this is point number one. Point number two, this not only gets you more people or sorry, more cash upfront, but it will also increase your stick rate. And so, if the average person here stays, here's the drum roll craziness, 12 months, right? And the average person before this, uh, was staying 3 months, then you average that together with, I mean, I don't, I'm not going to figure out the average of these two numbers weighted, but it's higher. Call it five months between doing that and so, if you can add an average of two turns to the membership, basically on average, this makes us a lot more money, which is a good thing. Now, the other piece is churn, right? And so, churn based on annual is 2% monthly. This is across, this is, I got this data from ProfitWell. We'll get our own data on school. So, this is like V1 data. In four months, we'll have V2 data from school communities. But, um, this is the average annual if extrapolated out into monthly. If you do quarterly, it's 5% and if you do monthly, it's 10.7%. And so, right now on school, I think we're a little higher. I think we're closer to like 15 or 20. I think in terms of monthly churn. So, you probably reasonably double these numbers across the board is like a good, uh, rule of thumb to start. But big picture, the relative difference between annual and monthly is going to be like a, like the difference here. This is a 4x difference in terms of LTV. And so, this might double your cash flow, but it 4xes your lifetime value per customer. And so, my thinking around this, have you guys seen anything about my stuff on like look back windows for churn and value? Okay, this is B. I'm also going to move these chairs because they're aggressive and in the way. All right. So, and if this is, uh, boring for you, just stop me and we can just switch up. All right. So, if I'm billing, this is time, right? And so, let's say I'm billing every week, right? Every single week, someone's going to get billed and then say, was it worth it for me to get billed this? And so, they look back at what happened between that billing and the last billing. And so, this happens all the time when you're like, "Hey, I provide my people amazing success. I made that made this one guy 40 grand in his first month and then the next month, uh, I made him five grand and he pays me five, but I covered myself for eight months on the first one." No, you just got him a really good return on the first month and the second month he got a bad return and then he cancels. And so, it's, it's very much the what have you done for me lately in terms of how consumers or businesses, uh, choose to buy and stay. So, the idea is that churn is inversely correlated with billing frequency. So, the less frequent the billing, the lower the churn. Sorry. Stick rate is inversely churn is correlated, uh, with billing frequencies. More often you bill, the higher the churn. The less often you bill, the less they churn. It's like a really big, like, make you lots of money thing. Okay. So, in general, if we can shift everybody over to annual, and this would be like, for me personally, I would probably only do annual. Now, that's strike it from the record because we have, you know, there are options and things like that, but me personally, um, I only like selling annual if I can. Um, and so I want to talk to you guys about a couple. Um, what's going to happen is that they will not be able to pay as much as your current rate is on an annual basis, which means that you'll have two options. One is that you can try to do like, kind of Mickey Mouse payment plans off to the side, which will kind of be a pain, or you lower the annual to the rate. Now, everybody here pretty much has digital products, so your cost of goods is basically zero. Um, you lower it to the rate that you can get upfront and then what happens is you now have an entire year where you can provide that value. And so, then this is what, let me close the loop on this. So, if I make somebody, let's say 40k this month, and then, you know, 5k this month, and then I make them 10k this month, and then five, and then I've got another, you know, 30k month here, and then, you know, five, five, five, whatever. This guy, if I was billing monthly, would have already canceled here. If I'm billing annually, he's going to add up all of these good and bad months together. And then he's going to look back and say, "Huh, was this year worth it?" And then he's just going to say, "Okay, well, I paid these guys 60 and they made me 180, so it was worth it." And so, you want to extend the look back window as long as you possibly can so that someone can. It's also less. I'll just leave it at that. The less frequently you bill, the lower the churn. Cool. Okay, so this is, by the way, my theory. It has, I have no data to prove this. This is just what I think. I do have data to support this, which is just the less often you bill, the less they churn. Okay, so thing one is it will help you with ads. Thing two is that will decrease your churn. So, thing three is how do we sell it? Right? So, I guess I'll turn back this way. Okay. Thing three, how do we sell it? So, what ideas do you guys have? Because I don't want to come come up here and and mic the whole thing. So, um, what do you guys, what ideas do you guys have?

Sales call.

Okay. Yeah, the sales call would work. Yes.

Organic content.

So, that would be more advertising it. So, let's talk about like, how do we actually get someone to say yes? How do we incentivize someone to buy it? Put it on your about page, like actually turn the feature on.

It's good stuff.

Step number one.

Yeah. I love your thinking.

It's, it's true though. Oh, I'm, I'm writing on the board. We're good. We're good. Turn on. Yes.

Free coaching.

Okay. Okay.

Bonus for bonus, or I guess discount. Not discounts, but free months.

Or, you know, something like that.

Added value.

Guarantee.

Mhm. Eliminate monthly.

Yeah. If they cannot buy monthly, more people will buy annual. That is a, that is a fact right there.

No monthly.

But then you could just downsell right into monthly if it needs to happen. Maybe it's not like offered publicly.

Exclusivity into something bigger if they.

Like what?

Like, okay, so they sign up for an annual.

Mhm.

And then you get a free guided tour program and an option to get into this special VIP club, or does that make sense? They get a sales call. I take and you, my friend, get a full extra sales call after buying my most expensive things. Um, no, but I mean, that is not a bad idea.

Or they get in-person events maybe.

Whoever said that. Yes.

So, kind of like the mastermind, which I was.

Using as a credit towards a higher ticket mastermind. Uhhuh.

$100 million offers.

Status.

Uhhuh.

Urgency.

How'd you do that?

Um, our business is like, kind of new and so we instantize people to ride the wave and like get on quick because there is a lot of money to do. So.

So, you're talking about creators.

You're talking about talent girls.

Creation and giving away value. So on the value, you can add urgency to the to the people watching on this. So, for example, I'm using man chat on Instagram.

And like, I'm getting them values. So, for example, a free coaching and then.

Are we hold on.

Deadline.

No, I understand that. Who the AI girls?

No, the people we get into our school.

Into your school?

Yeah. And we put urgency for them to create the AI models.

Okay, this is where I need to be clear. Are you B2B or B2C? Do you sell to business owners? No.

Or do you sell to consumers?

Consumers.

Okay, so what urgency are you giving guys presumably? I'm just wildly curious at this point.

Like the the possibility of making money quickly.

Okay, this is why I'm I'm losing my mind. He that mean.

Yeah, he sells, he sells the people to make the like helps them make the games like the, he does not articulate in that.

Got it. Okay. You sell B2B, so it's a business opportunity to have an AI girl lay Star Wars style.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Got it. Thank you.

Okay. Understood. That took me a second. All right. We got our our first section when you ended up doubt. Glad we got that.

Onboarding calls, too.

Yeah, like boarding.

Yeah.

What was it?

Like they get an hour-long onboarding call if they go annual or like high ticket.

Yeah. Cool. Love that. Okay. So, this feels like a good start for things that we can do to incentivize annual. And so I would, I would think about it this way. So, you have your monthly and status is for sure going to be something that all of them are going to want. So, if they can become VIPs, that's awesome. I will also share something that we found in the gym world. Um, you guys want to hear a really, really unbelievable, like profitable model and it works for coaching. It just happened to be weight loss coaching, but it probably applies to you. Is what we would do is we would run, uh, our weight loss challenges. So, people would put $500 down and then they would have six weeks that they would have to lose 20 pounds in that six-week period of time and if they lost the weight, they get the money back. Now, here's the, here's the ringling ding. So, here we would sell them $200 of supplements 48 hours after they bought the first thing. Cool. Now, at the three-week point, we would then say, "Hey, do you want to, uh, take your $500 and credit it towards a $2,000 membership?" Many of them would say yes. So, then I got to make this $500 that they were betting disappear, go into my pocket, which is great. And so, then I would take this 20, this $2,000, and I would make it $1,500 or whatever it was, and I would divide it back out by 12, and that would be their new monthly rate. And if I knew that every single one of my customers came in through this process, guess what I did to this? I raised it by $500, right? And so, what would happen is some people would go into, uh, would say yes and say, "Hey, I can't, um, can't pay for it all right now, but I'll take the credit, right? And it's going to monthly." Neat. So, all of the yeses who took the first offer here, when we'd meet with them at the end, we'd say, "Can we save you even more money?" And so, then of course they would say yes, I would prefer to save even more money. And then we would give them their prepaid discount. Now, here's what was really interesting about this. We gave these people first access to times. So, it's like the most popular classes are like 5:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. Um, and so they would have first dibs on that stuff. If we had a new merch release, they would be the first ones you'd be able to buy. And, uh, here's the crazy part is that with these particular people, it turns out they still bought more of everything else too. So, we have this fear as business owners to like, okay, well, someone paid annual, let's not bother them because they already gave us all their money. But it turns out that the people by annual, that 20% have more money and they would like to spend it with you, or they will spend it with someone, and it might as well be you. And so, there's this, I don't know where I heard this, but I will share with you and it's been true in my life, which is that customers are fractal. So, it's 80/20. You guys have heard that one, right? So, here's 20, and these are the guys who have five times the spending. So, this is 20, this is 80, right? So, you've got a 5x spending power of this. Now, that means that most of the times when you have a funnel or upsell process, I try to make my first thing one the price of my second thing. And if I have a third thing, I make my third thing 5x that price. So, if we were to do an example here, this would be a $1,000 thing. This would be a $5,000 thing. This would be a $25,000 thing. And it would usually flow through more or less like that. And so, the fact that 15 to 20% of people are taking the prepayment is kind of them saying, "Hey, I'm one of these guys." And they say, "Oh, you might actually be a perfect fit for our super duper thing, which is even higher than the prepayment." Does that make sense? Okay. So, back to selling it. I would strongly encourage you to have pick three. Well, everyone has to do that one. So, minimum one. Uh, pick three of these that you really like. If it were me, I would personally try and do in-person things. And the reason for that is, um, I think people like them. And they're really easy to overd deliver of like a great experience on. And I think there's this really cool magical thing of if you've seen someone on the internet and then you see them in person, it's just like cool. I don't know. I think it's, it's neat. And so, I think people get like a ton of value just from that first experience. Um, and so I would, I would strongly recommend doing that and I think a lot of people would be willing to take an annual just for one time a year, they'd be able to come out and guess what you get to do from that one time a year? Provide a lot of value. You can upsell other stuff. And my personal favorite, collect testimonials. So, that event, so like Gym Launch, for example, we never, uh, we never pitched at events during the seven, you know, six and a half, whatever years that I, that I owned majority of the business. I just used all my events as delivery. And so, I was like, how do I ROI these events? Sometimes I spend a million bucks on an event. Um, it's like, I have to make enough back in the marketing I'm going to get, collect from this event. And I always did. And so, when my whole team knew that the way we monetized the event was collecting as much collateral as we could, that became crystal clear in terms of like the purpose of this event is to collect as much collateral as humanly possible. By the way, that's what we're going to try and do here. Um, obviously make sure that you guys make a lot of money, but that's fundamentally, um, the objective. If, like, you don't sell anything, then you want to get the stuff that will allow you to bring more people into your world. And so, then these people frontload their cash flow and then they also help you advertise your business, which is awesome. So, number one, this would be one that I would like really strongly encourage. I think the sales call piece that you were referencing, I think this is good. I would try and position it into something that's not like, just try and make it more valuable than that. Um, or maybe like three calls or something like that. That would be.

Could be more of an a process like a guided tour through a train.

Sure. I mean, if, um, if you guys want to have like a crazy hack here, uh, you can upsell a huge percentage of people if you tell them you will get on more than one call. So, like, if you do annual, I'll give you three calls and then on the third call, sell them worth trying. I would, I would consider doing that one. Um, I know I'm going to get this question from everyone at home. So, should you do, should you offer monthly or not? Um, in terms of the feature set, I think it's going to be on the page or it's not going to be on the page. So, um, I think you just have to make a decision of like, upfront. And I don't think it's going to be a back pocket offer, uh, for the most part. So, because if anybody, so when you get on the phone, they're going to, okay. So, if you sell over the phone and it's not from people going to the about page, then at that point, you can just make the annual offer. They say no, then you can do the the monthly offer and then when they want to buy, you send it to them. But when I think through the difficulty of, hey, annual, cool, that's great. And then you send the link and the monthly offer is right there. I feel like, oh, didn't know I could do that. I'm gonna do that one. Like to me, I could see that happening a mile away. And so, um, I would probably, if I would probably do only annual if I was doing phone sales. And if I was running traffic, I would have both.

What would you do for your community that's already paying the low ticket to upsell them into annual?

Just make the offer. Um, I would tell them that this is going to be what's happening going forward and I would tell them about the benefits that these people are going to get and if they would like those benefits, they should opt into.

Do you see annual helping more school communities hit six-figure months?

Oh, yes, a lot. Yeah. Yes. Do you reckon it's going to help the first community get to eight figures?

Um, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

At the, at these price points, at the caps that they're at?

I mean, what is the cap of the pull on 999?

Okay. It's 5K. Yeah, for sure.

I mean, you guys sell what 200 people a year at 5K to make a million. You sell 2,000 people a year to make 10 million. So, that's what divided by 50 is 40 a week. Divided by five selling days, it's eight sales a day. You close 30%, 24 taken sales call, 60% show rate. Call it 40 calls a day. Got to get booked. Cost per call, you know, $150 bucks, $6,000 a day in ad spend. There you go.

There's a magic sales method for doing it online with info and this kind of stuff. You would like to know it. So, it does involve math. Let's say you're $100 a month and the average user stays like three months or whatever. So, customer really worth $300.

Can you say it again? So, $100 a month.

Mhm. Let's just say that's the average user and they typically churn out after 90 days. Just hypothetically. So, easy math. You do a webinar where you teach them something really cool and then you offer a course about that really cool thing they just learned and you build the value of the course to be very, very expensive and then you say, "You can have this course for free, but only if you buy annual." When you go to the about page, you'll notice it's $100 a month, but you can get a, you know, 40% discount when you buy annual, as well as getting this free. Okay. And get anyone for $600 bucks or whatever, like the math may be, you know, the pricing, but that just always works.

Every time. And so, it costs you less and you get more. And we just made sure that the. So, do you guys know what your turns, turn rates are roughly right now?

All right. What's yours?

I, I mine's different. Mine's like a three-month program. So, I'm not like a full, like.

So, 100% after three months. That's why this, that's why this is really interesting because I, like, there's an ascension in home service, right? Like guys coming from like 50 to 200k.

And then taking them to five, but they have.

Definitely different problems going from five to like 1.5 million, right? So, like, you can, I'm only like two months in because I sold my business that I have for seven years. So, like, all of this is very interesting, obviously, of me, like, I told these guys, like, I have one acquisition channel, all organic, like, I don't do any of.

So, this is all.

Do that thing that works. Yes. Yeah. Um, yeah, so 300 U. So, the point here though is that you can, you can be more aggressive on your annual pricing. So, customary is, uh, you know, 16.7%, which is buy 10, get two. Um, that's the quote standard deal. But if you're like, not even a gee, I have so many bad things I can't say. So, uh, if you're only an angel's breath away, there we go. From, uh, [ __ ] from, uh, from three months versus versus 12. It's like, you can get like, you can buy six, get six. You know what I mean? Like, you don't have to buy 10, get two. And if you really want to be like crazy about it, give them more free than they pay for. So, buy five, get seven. Um, again, if because the thing is is it's not like we're, we're, if you did buy, buy five, get seven, by the way, like, and you give them extra stuff too, everyone would buy it. But the thing is, is that you also are building.

Recurring revenue because one year from now, they will bill again. So that's the difference. It's not like we're selling the five months and then it's like, it's they're gone. They signed up for annual. This is great. We're already making more on our first transaction by whatever the math is between five. Let's make it $600, even though I wanted to do five and seven. But you're making twice the money up front, but then you still have the next billing that happens next year, which for those of you obviously, you're all new into this game, but like, next year does come.

Um, and when you have all of your bills paid on the first of the year, it's kind of nice.

"It's like free money."

Yeah. And as a general rule of thumb, gross generalization here, people who pay you a lot of money want to keep paying you a lot of money. It's crazy. Like, so you don't, they don't really cap out. Like the more they spend with you, assuming they're happy, they just want to keep buying more stuff.

"And when you sell them annual on the first thing, then they will be trained and accustomed to buying annual everything."

What were you going to say? Hey, this might be a techie question, but is there a way for current members to push them into annual without having to get them to leave the group and then join again on the annual?

"I have no idea."

"That's actually a feature coming very soon."

"That is very..."

"...like a one-click self-upsell kind of thing?"

"Yeah."

"I wasn't sure if people would leave and then just unlock."

Yeah. So, pretty much everybody here, I would say, like, what are the things you can immediately do to, um, to do this, right? So, number one is you can plan out the webinar that you're going to run that's like, sell, you know, teaching this really cool thing. You can give away, have, you know, make the one to two courses. By the way, if you give, like, three, like, if you take a course and you break it into three pieces, it's still the same amount of stuff, but you kind of sell the benefits of each, it will be perceived as more valuable. So, you know, pro tip. So, if you break your, your, your thing into three or four pieces and then you stack those as the things they're going to get with annual, which they also get for less money, and they get a once-a-year in-person event, which you would do anyways because why not collect the, the great footage of all your people meeting and whatnot and getting B-roll and all that jazz, you'll probably make more money.

"And would you upsell them on the in-person event, something else?"

I mean, it's like, again, this is if you, so, there's a lot of models here, right? Like, all of those things you can sell or give away for free. So, we're just like, how do we recombine these things? If you get a lot of people who are just like, "I want the free course and I'm happy to take the discount." Then now they're in this, the VIP status level. And by the way, the VIP status people are the only people invited out to my house. They come out twice a year, but now that's for more money, but they're the only ones allowed to buy it. And the reason that you're okay with only selling it to them is because they're probably the only people who are going to buy it anyways. So, um, not necessarily, but they will be the most likely to be to buy it. Um, does that make sense? So, you can use the thing as bait, or you can use it as like pseudo-bait where it's like, you're the only one who has access to buying this thing. No one else is invited. And then it makes that thing more attractive, more exclusive, which allows you to do more high-ticket stuff later. Um, I, I do like, I mean, I, I kind of skipped over the onboarding calls thing, but I do think it's super sexy. Um, giving away three, you know, calls in addition for anyone who signs up for annual because one, they're going to have a way better experience if you actually help them out. So, that's a, a good idea. You will then also have the cash flow to pay said person, or if it's yourself, you'll feel like it's worth your time if you got paid for a year or half a year up front to do the onboarding. But you'll also find that when you talk to a customer for three hours, they will like you a lot more and be more likely to buy whatever else you have.

"So, um, what do you think about lifetime access?"

Hate it. Hate it in general, almost always. Mostly because you are, you're pretty much setting yourself up to lie because when you're 80, you're probably not going to do this. Which means that on some level, like this is, I've, I've never done lifetime access for this reason. I just think, okay, when I'm 80, am I going to be taking [ __ ] coaching calls? Probably not. And so just like, if, if they're like, "Well, it converts less." Unless it's like, if it's a digital thing and it's like, you just need to like pay a server to keep something alive, that feels different than because when you buy, if you, someone, if you sell a course, for example, and it's just a course, then yeah, they get access to it. Um, and it's for as long as this business stays operational, basically. Um, and that you pay your AWS bill for hosting. Like, that's, you know, really it. Um, but if it's like, if it has any kind of service that's related to it that you pay, or you, this is why logically it makes no sense, is that whenever you sell lifetime, you have costs that's guaranteed forever, but income that's only today. And so you sell an unlimited liability on a one-time income, and that's why I'm not a huge fan of it. And also again, I like recurring revenue, so I'd rather just sell annual. And you'll, you'll convert almost the same.

"Yeah, we, we sell annual, but on the onboarding call, we say you get it as long as it like, we, we operate the business."

I prefer not to. It's your call. I prefer not to.

"Back to the 'what have you done for me lately?' kind of thing."

Do you see it as a value? I, I don't know if this is more of a technical question, but back end seeing when people are coming up for renewal and just having checkpoints and reactivation in case if they were to drop off in the year, or just let it ride and let them build, get billed?

"No, you should definitely talk to people before they're about to get billed again."

So, I'm wondering, back end would be able to see...

"Upcoming renewals."

Oh, I'm sure that to organize. Well, more access to the actual data. So, like, have a data dump. And...

"The good news is, by the time annuals are coming up, that will, I, I can, I, I feel pretty confident in saying that one year from now, you guys will have a notice that will let people know or let you know when that person's coming up."

Yeah. So, I, I feel like I could shoot that one out into the distance. I kick that can, like, it'll be there.

"Okay."

So, like, that should not dissuade you from selling annual.

"Oh, I've been waiting for this one."

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Me too. Believe me. Um, so I think, like, is anyone not, like, does anyone not going to do this? Is kind of my question. I'm being, like, I just, I so strongly believe, like, every business should do this. If you have a recurring revenue business, sell annual. At least provide the option for it. You're just, you're just going to get 15 to 20%, which will double the amount of money that most of you guys are making up front. And for those of you who are trying to get into ads, which we can talk about more, I really want to, like, squeeze the living life out of this one, though, because I think it's like the, like, my theme of today would be like, crush this. If you just did this, nothing else will really matter. I'll be like, super honest with you. If you just murder this part, it'll destroy. Because so, to answer your question about the eight-figure thing, if right now the average, I think average is what, 20 or 17? Do you know what it is somewhere?

"I don't know exactly."

Okay, call it, call it five months to make it simple. Okay. So, average, average school community that's paid has a five-month LTV. Okay. So, if we can, on average, get everybody to do annual, right? Then that doubles. So, that basically means that every business that does that would double their revenue without really doing anything else. Now, this does not take into account all of those people that 12 months from now will say, "Oh, I will also keep buying." And so, then you might have half of those people who stick. So, now you're at, you know, whatever that is, uh, two and a half, you know, X, uh, for the business by simply changing the way that we bill. And so, will it get people to eight figures? It will definitely get many, many, many, many, many people over six figures. I think the all-time leaderboard will almost entirely be six figures, um, within the next, call it, six months. I can give you one more piece of broad data. Again, like generalized and broad, in this. I've never compared this to things that are under $300 a month. So, take that into consideration, please. Um, annuals is easier to sell.

"Yep."

Like, it's hard as [ __ ] to sell continuity this over $300 a month in comparison to annual, you know, where the annual price is significantly less than the combined monthly price that they were to have paid for a full year. That's like cakewalk level easier.

"And the same reason Clickfunnels sells the majority of their stuff is annual. Same reason a lot of, you know, Go High Level people sell a lot of their stuff is annual. Like, again, from that look-back window that we were talking about earlier, it's easier to say in one year, this big thing will happen for you than like, what will I do every single month for you and why it will be worth it every single month? Because you just make one big promise. And also the fact that it's a year out, in some ways, makes it more believable."

"Right, because they're like, sorry..."

"...the thinking of the people, just thinking of you're not letting them give up on themselves, like, in two months, three months, when they would churn themselves. It's like, no, they're going to stick out further if they put in a year. You know what I'm saying? Like, just thinking on the behalf of, if you actually want to change people's lives, let's actually challenge them to a year rather than..."

"...committing that to them."

"Your promise can be stronger. So, what I realized, like, with retention, mine's decreased your churn by up to 50% every month. And then I have people that leave, like, retention has a retention problem because it's like, the retention's kind of solved. And I go, 'What would I do?' versus now I can just say, 'I will work with you until your churn's below 10%.' So, my promise can be even stronger than just doing it month on month because I feel like I reset every month and they stay. I'm like, it's too low now."

"Yeah."

"So, they're just like, it's fixed, it's solved, now we leave versus you can make your promise stronger. I'll get you to this goal by the end of the year..."

"...and then they won't ever leave because they already bought."

"Yeah. I have a question about the big end-of-year goal and you get them there and then the goalpost changes. So, maybe your next offer is, we got them the remote job, and now we're going to get them traveling the world or something. Do you want to keep those people in the same community for free because they're going to be posting their wins, or like, and start a different community about the new annual, or should we keep them all in the same and sort of have a course unlock maybe? But I'm curious about when they win that big thing, the next..."

"I think I would probably do it as a course unlock once they hit their first year because I would want all those wins in the community. And then people are like, 'Dude, when do I get that?' It's like, 'Oh, if you want to pay next year now too, you can get that as well.'"

"Yeah, that makes..."

"...like, yeah."

"Um, and just, I like when we hit on the retention thing, I'd love for you to, for you to chip in. Um, but yeah, I just, I really want to squeeze the life on this one because it just, it help, it literally will make your life easier. And, uh, around that, and I'll get you, um, just as a reminder, like proof, promise, plan. So, what's the, what's the big promise? What proof do I have that I can, you know, help you get there? And then what's the, what's the roadmap? If you just keep it, if you just make sure you always have those things, um, it'll make it a lot easier for people to say yes. In regards to the guarantee part of that."

"Yeah."

"Um, you know, versus a lifetime membership, you know, hey, if you sign up for blank amount of time, one, two, three years, if you don't see blank, right? If you don't see this result, we will continue to work with you until you do."

"Does that have the month in your experience?"

"I think if it's a year-long thing, it's already so far away that it just feels like forever. So, I think the, 'I'll keep working with you,' they're like, 'Jesus, it's, I, how I want to have hit it by then.' You know what I mean? Like, it's already out there."

"So, kind of stay away."

"I don't think that, I just don't think that particular guarantee would be the, the guarantee that I would give because in some ways it would, so, like, I want to give a guarantee that that accounts for the current thing that they're afraid of. If it's a year, they're not afraid that it's going to take longer than that. They're like, 'That's already so long, right?' They're afraid of other things. And so, I'd want to cover those other things more than the time duration, right? If I have a six-week thing and it's, you know, lose 20 pounds in six weeks, they're afraid they're not going to get there. And so, then if my guarantee is around like, 'I'll work with, I'll work with you for another six weeks if you don't hit 20.' That's a very, like, you can even hear the difference. You're like, 'Yeah, yeah, I would do that.' Like, that makes a lot of sense. And so, it's just making sure that the guarantee matches the risk that we're trying to reverse."

"Okay. More broad random data worth testing. And so, it's limited data set on this. I, uh, stopped offering guarantees and I honor it obviously if anyone ever requests like you have."

"Nothing happened except our refund requests like plummeted down to around 2% instead of 10%. That was like, literally the only change. And the guarantee used to be like, 'If you don't like it for any reason, just let us know and you can just have it anyway.' And I stopped doing that and it did not affect sales. But yeah, basically what I like..."

"Same thing happened with us. We were doing like, we guarantee to help you until you land a remote job."

"And so many people just give up and then ask for a refund. And we changed it to like, 'We'll just help you until you land a remote job.' Y..."

"And yeah, refunds, chargebacks from crazy."

"Love it."

"Did you have a guarantee with Gem Launch?"

"Did you have a guarantee with Gem Launch?"

"We've, I mean, we've, we've done a hundred variations of an offer. So, yes, we've had it. We've not had it. We've, we guarantee certain components. We, we make conditional guarantees. Um, we usually do have very aggressive. So, it's like I have, we, because we work with a very specific customer and we have a very specific playbook that we can run, we can get darn near to like a really strong guarantee. So, like, for us, we would just say like, 'We'll make you an extra $120,000 in profit this year.' And we could guarantee that because the conditions of that were that you spend the $2,000 a month on ads, you run the ads that we tell you to run, you send the emails we tell you to send, and you sell the offers we tell you to sell. Not a single person who didn't do that made, did not make $120,000 an additional profit."

"Essentially speaking, with certainty and conviction, it's the same thing as giving a guarantee."

"Yeah. I mean, we, I mean, the, the clear part was like, I mean, I love this close. Um, I used it all the time when I was selling supplements, but I said, 'If you, if you change the variables, change the outcome.' And so, we'd get a lot of people like, 'Well, do I have to run your offers?' I'd be like, 'Change the variables, change the outcome.' I was like, 'I can guarantee this because I know this works. I have no, like, you want me to, you want to pay me money to try what you've already been doing that hasn't been working, but you want my outcome from your variable? It doesn't really make sense.' And then they're like, 'Yeah, you're right.' And then they would, you know, they'd buy. So, it's just like when you, when you have those, those conditions that really, like, I hammer conditions really hard, uh, in sales calls because it also allows you to kind of like sell from your back foot because if you're like, 'Hey, if you don't want to make these changes to your business, one, don't buy. Two, are you happy with what's currently happening?' And then they're like, 'Well, no.' It's like, 'All right, well, then you got to change the change,' which is one of my other big ones, right? Cool. All right. I just want to ring this out, but it feels like everyone's like really sold on this. So, yeah. Go ahead. What is your framework for having calls at the end of the year prior to annual renewal?"

"So, I would first off, um, I'd be looking at doing it not like the month they renew, but like maybe talking to them like one or two more times before that. Um, and, uh, you can put, you can build this in where they get, you know, four calls or something like that. And, uh, what we found with Gym Launch was that we had regular call cadences with customers and when we had calls where we didn't sell them, they were more likely to buy on the calls where we did sell them versus when we just said, 'You have two calls and we are going to pitch you on both of the calls, uh, other stuff.' And so it also had a lot more trust with the person that was doing the pitching because they'd already like talked to them a few times and that person had more, more context. But in terms of the renewal near the end, um, so this is me with just, you know, a smaller data set. Um, like the last quarter, especially the, the messaging around is like, 'Look how far we've come. Look at the big difference.' And a lot of people like forget how, like, where they were. And that kind of like, you emphasize the look-back window of like, 'Hey, we're 10 months in, you started here, you're here. What an amazing delta. Now, let's just continue the line forward. If that were to happen next year, would you be happy about it?' Cool. Not promising that, but saying that if we just keep the party going, let's do that. Um, and then for those of you who have, uh, which is everybody here, uh, other stuff that you're going to give them, have unlockables for a year or two. And so you want to have some sort of benefit. And this is for everyone for immediately post-purchase. So, I'm talking like seconds post-purchase that they, they buy and they immediately get something because sure, you have this big outcome, but that's a year from now. Like, what can you, what can you do for me right now that can, like, at least move me one step forward? And they'll feel very confirmed on the purchasing decision. And so, if there's a big bucket of fast value, we frontload that right at whatever the, the continuity, like the next continuity payment is."

"Can I ask something about annual?"

"What about annual?"

"Uh, yeah, a question about because one of the questions I had is I, I, I saw I bought Sam's YouTube. Is Sam here? He's, he's his flight got, anyways, he'll be here soon."

"No, but it's because he..."

"Sam's ill, becoming unfortunately."

"Oh, [ __ ]. Well, there you go."

"Yeah. So on, we wub, he was talking about having a lower-end mastermind and then having a higher-end mastermind. And so my question was actually related to this because I, I, there wasn't a way before to structure a mastermind in school in this sense, like where they pay annually. And so my question is, if you had an offer, for example, if you had a paid community for acquisition, would you ditch, uh, monthly and just sell a higher ticket, uh, mastermind, for example, a yearly plan on the phone?"

"I like annual."

"So that's, I would rather lower my price. So let me put it this way. If I know that I can get people to buy a $30,000 thing. So, I'm using quotes here because we all know that that $30,000 thing, if $2,500 a month, ain't nobody paying it. Okay? So, that $30,000 thing and they can pay $2,500 a month and they turn out at month four. I would rather charge five to $10,000 upfront and give them the year and then adjust my operations to be still very profitable and the product to still be very valuable for those people. This, by the way, is something that has taken me a long time to learn. So, I, Gem Launch was not built this way because I didn't know what I know now and I probably would have built it differently. Um, I would have built it all around, uh, annuals and I would have built it on lower, lower ticket price points."

"And what, what's the lower ticket price?"

"Well, lower, like I would have probably gone for like 10ish a year instead of 30."

"And do you think having..."

"It would have taken me more time to get to 4 million a month, but that 4 million a month would have been more stable."

"Yeah. And do you think having an in-person event close to the, Oh, no. A year renewal would be different for everyone?"

"Unless you had four events per year and then you let the people who were new from that quarter."

"And you think that would increase the..."

"For [ __ ] short."

"That's because think of it this way. If you just hold one event per quarter, the event's going to be smaller, it's going to be more intimate. It's kind of functions like an onboarding experience. And the nice thing with that is that it gives you pretty much urgency at all points, right? And so, if, if an event literally just happened, it's 12 weeks away, but all you're going to talk about is the collateral that you just got from all those people and referrals that come from those people. And so that'll, that'll carry for the, the first month post, you know, event one. Now, two months out from event two, you're eight weeks out from an event. It's like, dude, let's get you in. Let's lock your seat in, get your, get your, get your, uh, your flight scheduled, and I'll see you out here, right? And as you're four weeks out, it's like, dude, you got to sign up now because like the thing's coming up. Like, what are you doing? Two weeks out, you're like, 'You buy what, right now, in this exact second, right?' And I think I didn't get the part where you were saying that the in-person events for Gem Launch, that the overhead from the event, you were covering it. I understood that. What I understood was that clearly you maybe you didn't say that that you were upselling something in the event that for the expense."

"Oh, no upsell."

"I was collecting marketing materials. That's how I paid for it."

"Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay."

"Which you guys were talking. Okay. So that is an easy segue on this one. Um, so if you have an influencer who sucks in ads, then use your customers. So I did a big data review of all of the 2,000 ads or something that we ran at Gem Launch, and I looked at the top 50 ads that we ran. And of the top 50, we ran, guess how many were Alex's face?"

"Well, no, I was, uh, 10 of the top 50. 40 of the top 50, 80% of our best ads were not me, it was customers, it was proof. And so the big is, I've got this huge, I've, I've had this big obsession recently around proof. But basically, like the counter to offer is proof. So, if you had on a hypothetical continuum, on one hand, one guy who just says, uh, 'I'm an agency. I sell generic services. Here's 5,000 five stars from people just like you saying that I'm great and I offer zero guarantees, zero anything. I'm twice as expensive as everybody else. Would you like to buy?' Or newbie, I offer, you know, urgency, guarantee, 17 bonuses, and no one's bought yet, but it's going to be amazing, right? This guy is going to get it every time. And so I think people over, like, believe me, offer matters a lot. But if I had to pick between a shitload of proof and a super sexy offer, I would rather have a shitload of proof. And so that's why those events were so valuable for me. Uh, is I would just collect a ton of proof because that's how I could get more people in the world. And a lot of it is, um, you, I like collecting lots of different types of proof in terms of avatar. Like, look, even if you have the same customer in terms of like, or deliverable. If I've got an old lady, and I've got a young guy, and I've got a black guy, an Asian guy, a white guy, you know, whatever, right? I want, I want to have as many different looks and feels in my ads. And that's why probably those ads brought me more customers than me, because my ads only brought customers like me. This tends to attract dudes. Like when I had female ads, crazy. We had more women gym owners who would come in, right?"

"Yeah. Shoot."

"Is there a certain question you ask the customer to queue them up for a good deliverable on the ad?"

"Yeah. You guys want to see it? All right. So, this is, uh, this is Alex's incredibly secret. Um, so, what's actually crazy is that this, this has taken me a very long time to get right. Uh, and so here it is. Okay. So, there's six, six points in this script, which is you ask the customer for their worst moment before doing the thing. Then you say, 'Okay, tell me some of the stats of what was going on at that point.' Now, stats, if I'm in weight loss, would you weigh? Like, what size were you wearing? Um, if I'm, if I'm in B2B, then I'm going to be at, uh, you know, how much were you making? How many customers are you getting? And to be clear here, you want to, you want to get as many stats. So, for some people, number of customers will be the thing. For some people, it'll be revenue. For some people, it'll be profit. For some people, it'll be churn. So, you want to get as many of those stats as you can because you'll find out that one or two of those stats might convert better than others. So, what was the worst moment? Stats. Now, I used to do this is like, we, we tell, we try and get these like long, we try to get these stories and then pull out the moment. And so then I was like, 'Oh, I should just ask for the moment.' And, um, the difficulty with this is, um, is actually a lot with the rapport between the person doing, like, asking the questions and the interviewee. And so, um, some of you guys will tell your stories, which we'd appreciate, uh, so we can get more people into school, which actually helps everybody because it's a platform. Um, but if they're like, uh, you know, 'Things were, uh, things were, you know, tough,' it's like, that's not, that's not going to, that's going to be a ter, like, imagine the ad. 'Things were tough.' Like, it's, it's not, it's not really going to be a good hook, right? But it's like, you know, 'I, I remember checking my bank account and, um, I didn't have enough for groceries that month, right? And, uh, you know, I got two kids and a wife and she's depending on me to provide for her and I just feel like a horrible person.' Like, that resonates with a lot of people, right? And so the key with the ads, and I, I'm going to make a really big differentiator here. If you sell to people who make less than, call it $20,000 a month, these will crush. If you sell to a higher avatar, then these will not bring them in. So, that hook that I just said probably wouldn't convert for a lot of people here because that's not something that is relatable to you. You know, if I said, 'If I had, um, yeah, I mean, we had been, you know, we'd been stuck at, you know, three million bucks a year for like four years and I just, like, kept trying all these different things and, um, I just couldn't really break through that next level and it was really frustrating for me.' That would probably hook you guys in a lot more because that's your relative pain, right? And so it really, like, this is like 2011, you know, testimonial stuff, but you have to know who your avatar is when you're asking. So, for us, if you can, this is me telling you, if you can lower your, your bar here, because most of the people are coming on school are trying to make their first dollar. And so the groceries ones will convert better for me. Just telling you. Um, uh, but if you're, if you're selling B2B or you're selling higher ticket stuff, then you're going to want it to be relative to what the pain of that avatar is. Does that make sense? So, what's their worst moment? What are the stats associated? And then I like to, I, I like to address the skepticism up front in the ad, which is like, 'Why did you try to, you know, why, why did you try choose us versus somebody else? Like, I mean, weren't you skeptical?' And they were like, 'Yeah, you know, I'd seen, I'd seen, I'd seen a bunch of Tony stuff and he was, you know, he seemed okay.' It's like, 'Well, what made you decide to do it?' I was like, 'Well, you know, I saw this, I saw this, this ad and it was a guy who just sounded a lot like me and I was like, you know what? Um, you know, I'll give it a shot.' And I was like, 'All right, well, what happened? You know, what's happened since?' It's like, 'Dude, you know, six months later, we're at, you know, we finally broke through that $3 million plateau or finally got my first $10,000 a month. Like, my wife, I don't have to worry about it. I've got groceries covered for the next year. Um, and I can't tell you how much relief I have. And I feel like my marriage has improved just because neither of us are stressed about money anymore.' And, uh, and then you cover stats, right? That's it. So, it's really just, what was the moment? What was the stats to back it? And what we're doing is basically trying to, like, the eyeball of the ad, right, is right here. And so we're basically trying to lead them through like them saying, 'This is me. Oh, I think this too. Oh, he did it anyways because, and then he got this. So I should follow the same journey as him.' So, this is fundamentally an approximation of proof. It's like the closest thing you can do is have someone who's an identical twin to that person who's in the exact same business town, was, you know, had the same outcome, and then they're like, 'Shoot, I should probably do this.' It has a high likelihood of success. In terms of the call to actions, if you interview George at the end, are you able to be like, 'All right, secure all results like George?' Or..."

"Yeah. Be like, so one is you can just do like, 'Click to start for free.' Like, it, like, once, once they're there, like, you're the, the CTA is not the part that's going to, you already have one at that point. Um, I've had ones where it was me who came on was like, 'Hey, if you're, if this was at least interesting to you, um, or you thought that outcome was at least kind of compelling, like, just click the link, schedule a call. We'd love to talk to you if it's a, if it's a phone sale. If it's not, it's like, 'Would you be willing to risk 14 days of your life for free? If that sounds at all interesting, click the link, follow the steps, and I'll see you on the other side.'"

"Yeah."

"So, if you have a low ticket and a high ticket, would you consider shooting for both avatars?"

"So, you have your, your story that you were telling, you know, related to the low."

"Would you do that on ads or would you only focus on one?"

"Are we pushing to one page?"

"Well, I mean, if you were doing ads and you were..."

"Are we pushing to one group is my question."

"Well, that, I guess that's my, that's my question for you. Are you okay with pushing to several groups or do you suggest just focusing on one?"

"It's a good question. Um, I would, if I'm being super real, I would just do the one that's most profitable."

"There you go. Chomping at the..."

"If you were someone else is asking about having a high-ticket mastermind and a lower-ticket or offer. I think..."

"Please don't do that. It's awful. It will drive you insane and it confuses the marketplace and it's less profitable. And I only know this because I've lost so much money making mistakes over and over again like, 'This time will be different,' and it never is different."

"Yeah. And the, the steps to making all this work is, um, it's, you know, convert, retain, ascend. That's the whole thing. So, if you have a low-ticket and a high-ticket thing, the only reason to have the low-ticket thing is to get someone who can become the high-ticket thing. And a low-ticket thing is unnecessary for that process. Then just eliminate the low-ticket thing and just do the high-ticket thing. So, yeah, it's fundamentally, I had a, um, a girl who's out of one of our workshops who asked this question. So, she did, um, B2B business coaching for hair stylists and like, whatever. And then she also taught hair stylists how to do extensions. And so, I think teaching extensions was like two or four grand. I can't remember what the price was. And then the business coaching thing was like $15,000. And so she asked, like, 'What, what should I do?' And I was like, 'Well, what's LTV to CAC?' And she was a good business owner. And she was like, 'I have, you know, 17 to 1 LTV to CAC or sorry, uh, 12 to 1 LTV to CAC on my business coaching.' I was like, 'Oh, that's fire.' And I was like, 'Well, what's the, what's the other one?' She was like, '34 to one.' I was like, 'Oh, um, okay. Well, how many people, like, do people who learn how to do extensions also later want business coaching?' She was like, 'Well, yeah, but we don't cross-sell it.' And I was like, 'Well, I have an idea for you.' Um, because the thing is, is that there's probably a hundred times the amount of hair stylists that want to learn how to do this particular technique than want quote business coaching. And she was more profitable in the acquisition. And so her LTV to CAC was higher. So it's like, cool, run a shitload of this and then all of your focus is, how do I just bridge this? How do I make some offer that I can skim off the top of these guys to jump them into this $15,000 thing? And the thing is, is like, even if it's kind of like the metrics with annual, even if 10% of people take something that's 10 times as expensive, you double revenue. And so don't be like afraid of small ascension numbers. If the number on the back end is big enough, it still has a massive impact on the funnel overall. But yeah, do the one that makes you the most money and then do that one alone."

"It sounds simple, but like, that's what most people don't do. I'm just being really clear."

"I get that."

"Yeah."

"I understand that."

"Yeah. And so like, um, the, the, the best campaign that we ever ran at Gym Launch, um, which of course we never repeated because it worked so well, um, was what we call the one-year-later campaign. And so, um, I took all the customers that had been there a year and I said, 'Can you just tell me what's changed in a year?' And so all of the, the testimonials were just like absurd. And, uh, and so the hook for the ad was like, 'Listen, you've probably seen a gazillion ads for people who can help you, you know, make money in four weeks or six weeks or eight weeks or whatever.' And I was like, 'But where are their one-year-later testimonials?' And I was like, 'And I'll tell you where they are. They're non-existent because those people cancel because they only have one trip.' I was like, 'I'll tell you for me.' I was like, 'These are people.' And I was like, 'And some of these people have been with us for two years and three years, and every year they keep doubling.' And so if you're not looking for a quick fix, but actually want to build a gym that makes a lot of money, um, and can turn into an asset that you can hand over to somebody else, uh, then consider booking a call. We might be able to help you out.' And that brought in the absolute highest quality gyms. And because the thing is, is the, the numbers at the end were big numbers. And so they were gym owners who were like, 'Yeah, I went from, you know, taking home $50,000 a year to taking home $250,000 a year. And this thing's been unreal. Like, if you're on the fence, just do it. Just please, just do it.' And, uh, you know, going from $300,000 to a million dollars top line. And so that, lo and behold, attracts gym owners that are of a higher echelon who were, who, who weren't a dumpster fire."

"No, I mean, I'm being like, they, they had a couple trainers and they had a facility that was legit and was not like out of the back of their van with sandbags. Um, I say this because that was me. Um, so, um, but yeah, this is what, this is what we what we try and follow. I've, I've spent a very long time trying to get this down to a very simple process. Um, I've had scripts, I've had a lot of stuff, but fundamentally, like the interviewer has to understand it and the interviewee has to understand it. And this is the language we use. What was the worst moment? What were your stats around that? You know, were you skeptical at all before buying? Yes. Okay. Then why did, why'd you do it anyways? Cool. Understood. So, what's been your best moment since? Got it. And what are your stats now? Awesome. Thanks so much. That's it. The key is just to get them comfortable enough that they'll actually tell you the truth."

"Do you send them this beforehand as well?"

"No, we just, I mean, we don't, I mean, it's, if I were to show you right now, this is it. This is what they'll ask you. Yeah. Shoot."

"One thing that I was thinking about for them with the creator that like doesn't want to show their face because I'm similar. Like, one thing we found well for local service-based businesses that I feel like people don't think about is like, we incentivize super, super heavily to get the community to post like in their socials, like Nextdoor. Like, if you know what Nextdoor is, like the community page, like Facebook for only their neighbors in their neighborhood. And when, like Cindy posts that they got a new patio done, like it changes everything because like we can actually run community awareness and then hit them with a paid ad or like a paid direct mail campaign. And like for them, like to get acquisition, like maybe one of your followers has, or maybe one of the people in the group, I feel like that has like 10,000 followers that got amazing results if they just like organically posted about it basically, saying, 'This is what I've been doing. This is what I've been up to.' Like, there's a lot of people that want to be like them. At least we find that in home service. Like, it crushes."

"So the interesting thing with that, and I come from local, so I..."

"Yeah."

"...hear me out."

"When Stacy posts that she got a new patio, it's a flex. When John the fitness influencer posts that he's making money on y'all's eyeballs, not a flex."

"What about for our case, which is..."

"Do you, do you know what I'm saying? So like, I'm an influencer..."

"...and I help people do remote lifestyle."

"Yeah. If I post that these guys help me monetize the [ __ ] out of my audience to my audience."

"Yeah."

"...they probably would not think I was very cool."

"Does that make sense?"

"Yeah."

"So it works in local. I'm understand. I'm telling you because you're..."

"I get it. I come from where you're at."

"...Facebook group, like one of the, like, weed removal companies, like they're trying to advertise, landscapers, anything like that. Like, they get like 10 likes. They had a customer post, like, 'Oh my god, these people are amazing. Here's a before and after.' They got like 270 likes and 30 phone calls. And then like, now people actually know about them on that lake. So then they..."

"If there's a community that all of the influencers are hanging out in and you post it into that community, then it would work. But if the influencer posts to his audience, it will not work."

"Yeah. We just sell to the average, like, everyday gym person, essentially."

"Yeah. I just mean like, if I'm in a, if I'm in their program, like learning movement, and then like I post to my followers, like a cool story, like..."

"Okay. You're saying a level. You're saying..."

"...'This is what got me to do this. This is what got me to do the splits. Like, this guy's group, you know?' Like, I feel like that would help and then like hitting them with the target. I don't know. Maybe I just never heard anybody talk about it like..."

"Yes. Yes, it totally works. Yes. Yeah. Getting customers to post that they got good results works for sure. Um, but yeah. Okay. So that's the testimonial script. Everyone's doing annual. Yes. Cool. Okay. Fantastic. What was that? Yeah. Go for it."

"There's just two things still lingering and I want to..."

"All right. Linger away."

"Yeah. Uh, one of them was you mentioned stability on exiting Gym Launch."

"Yeah."

"And going back, you would have done something like 10k recurring per year."

"Yeah."

"How do you think that would have affected the exit if you had that versus..."

"I would have made more money."

"A lot more. Like, a lot more. Yeah."

"Yeah."

"Yeah."

"And the same thing lingering was, uh, Frank mentioned having two models being a big mistake you made in the..."

past. What specifically is that like a 5k to the like 50k or like? It was a done and an 18k. I think and the 40k was easy and awesome, easy to sell, wonderful customers. Everything was going great. Could have just done more of that, but you know, like let's just mess this whole thing up.

So, that 18K thing called flagship, it uh it was harder to sell and the customers were dramatically different. It uh it was not fun. So 31, 18, 40, you would just eliminate the middle one. But you think having three and the 18 or three and 40 would still be a viable option for ascension or just eliminate both?

Yeah, the three. I thought you said three. I'm sorry. You said 18 and 40. 40. Okay. Yeah, I had 18 and uh and 40 higher in groups. Started with the 40. Yeah. And that was great. Oh, you started with the 40. More 40. Got it. Okay. I was like I could get 18. Get more. Okay, cool. Got it. Okay.

So, yeah, fundamentally the the purpose of of like the purpose of the low ticket thing ideally should be to create the customers that will then ascend. And so the the the thought process is that you just get a a huge slice of people and you and this is the big part that I think a lot of people miss is that the point is to get them to ascend. Like the point is to add enough value, get them to some clear milestones, some outcome that then qualifies them for the next big thing.

Yeah. So I have something to say about the whole annual. So we had a huge boo boo in um the beginning of what was it? When was this first school games? Was it in March? January. Yeah, January. February. Um we initially offered um like our coaching program at $12,000. Okay. And then so we had discounted rate of like 10,000 but then for the school games we decided to have monthly. Okay. And that was our big boo boo with a higher ticket coaching program. Sure. So just like on that chart that you're showing there. Yeah. People like we had like a lower turn rate before. It was like like it was like nothing. It was like there was like only two people a year. And so because um we found that people typically cancel out of convenience or discomfort. Sure. And they're you know if they can cancel they can cancel. It's like kind of human nature. And so this became clear when I was talking to a client one day and he was like oh I thought I could cancel at any time. I was like no you're really contracted but but it shifted the mindset like I can cancel any time. So instead of like sticking with the whole program, oh, I can just cancel at any time. Yeah. So you're not really gonna try to do anything. You're not going to try to reach your goal. And so um so then we switched back to handling the payments outside of um school. And so you know, we we had to do that. So that's why we're really excited about the whole annual payments so that we can shift back. We were trying to make your lives easier. We apologize. the fact automatic is just I don't think we were do that in Stripe.

The key by the way to making them stick is to make sure that it is inconvenient for them to cancel. Meaning you own a lot of what I mean more in terms of what we do not how we bill. Yeah. Uh so it's like I mean gym launch charges uh we we don't currently sell annual like we I mean we we have a prepayment discount but um our sales have dropped too precipitously given the fact that gym owners are so incredibly poor. Um, so the key is like, okay, how can we make ourselves inextricably linked within the business? And so for us, it's like, well, all of a sudden in the first month they get 20 new people walking in the door, they tend to not want to cancel that, right? And then if we can, like we stack a ton of upfront value. Um, and this is like for everybody. Like if you want people to just be way more likely to keep paying um have your fast cash plays that you drive upfront especially if you work with existing if you're starting with newbies that I think having the annual having the longer term duration so that they can kind of stick with it I think is a good idea. You still want to act like think about this way you still want to act as though they're paying you monthly. Yeah. Yeah. Like I treat it like that from a Yeah. from a mental perspective like you want to give them that really fast first win because as much as we could say like I want to empower the people and uh you know when I sell them on a longer duration it's like well they just can't cancel they already paid you know like if we're just being real right um unless we can show that we have a really high retent like resell rate at the end of the year then it's just convenient for us as business owners which fine hey it's America um but if you can really stack and it's hard for me to say without like you seeing it in like being a customer from a business like a high service business that we own like the portfolio. But we obsess. Frank's been here for two days, three days. Like we absolutely go nuts on trying to make sure that the experience that a customer has is exceptional. And that's that's what creates um like you can you can double your ascension rates by the way by just nailing onboarding. double double 2x whatever you made last month twice that amount from just crushing onboarding. And a lot of people obsess on like the offer, the pitch, the sale, the process. I pro like this is still it's still blows me away. But when we just do all of the details right of just actually really delivering really quickly, keeping promises, just buttoning up, being personalized with our with our outreach, making sure that we're talking to that specific person, saying their name three times in the first five minutes, making sure we ascribe the goal that they signed up for with the goal of the actions that they're going to take. All of those little things, we find that we upsell far more people. I just did a case study on this, which of course no one will watch because it's like a really in-depth video. Um, watch it. It's the last video. I just I just It's the most recent. Do you see it? Yeah. I wanted to double down on that because we seen that video. Yeah. And literally we use like the speed love success on the close no matter what the price is and we're like speed love success. Yeah. Okay. Speed love success. Okay. Got it. Okay. Cool. So we use that and it's like we're going to get on an onboarding call immediately as soon as we hang up. I can get you on the calendar. We can get your resume tailored and sent out. And that literally gets them over the edge of like dang that's quick. like, you know, puts them already in the mindset of being inside the program. So, it's like immediate benefit. Yeah. Fire. Yeah. I've seen that video. You guys watch it. So, you just did done a deep dive. I did. Yep. A massive Cool. I I want to ask the question. 30-minute one that will have like 10,000 views because it's about refunds and onboarding rather than like how do I get my first five customers? Yeah, that that help with yours? Huge. Okay. Where's that video? You just YouTube. YouTube on the YouTubes for free. Gratis. That's great. my gift to you. Okay. Yeah. Shoot. I know it's might be hard to answer because it's more of a specific question. I can give more context if necessary, but do you recommend going all in on one or two offers or you recommending having like an offer ladder? I I would strongly recommend doing one thing until until you're doing like $1 to3 million a year. You can pretty much get there on one thing. From there, you usually need to add some sort of backend to that thing and then start ascending people. I like building up some pressure so that I have huge amount of demand. So then when I open the doors I have a lot of people who buy it and that you can usually take you to a million dollars a month and I'll just leave it there for now. So one avatar, one channel, one offer until you're at a millionish. Then you can add the backend in and then that usually propels the LTV up so that you can massively increase the advertising. Would you ever introduce maybe a lower ticket offer as a tester for those who are I tend to go up market not down. Okay. I have a question about the onboarding. Sorry. Actually, that's not true. I don't tend to go up market instead of down. It just depends on the context. Kind of along the same lines, but sideways. We'll say um the as far as, you know, churn rate. If we have, let's say we have a three-month training on average, would you ever recommend retargeting that and into an annual or something along those lines or hey, that's kind of they've run their course. Don't bother with it. What was that script, Frank? Hey, uh you were about to cancel and uh it was after it's like a year after they cancelled. It's amazing. So, um, as, uh, hey, we noticed you were with us before, but you canceled and my hallucination is that you just either got overwhelmed or weren't able to see the value of the program if you would like. I'm happy to jump on the horn with you and help you come up with a custom way to implement this thing. And it was a reactivation campaign and um, it was done by a guy who's not even a salesperson and he crushed the [ __ ] out of it. Do you think you have to do that live? Or could that be a video sales letter of some sort to get on a live? No, this was like an open-ended email and then it just had a booking link. Nice. That was it. And so they would just like click the link in this calendar and speaking my language. Yeah. What's your uh what's your price point? Well, right now we just have our at 35 going. What's the Oh, 35. Uhhuh. But the the high ticket's going to be 35 to to five,000. Yeah. Yeah. Got it. Um 35,000. Yeah. 3.5 to five, right? 3500. Yeah. Yeah. Um Yeah. I mean, if you're at if you're at that price point, a guy can take it the call, right? Yeah. And even even to get him into an annual big enough past audience, I think we could a lot of revenue, which then again ascend into the isolation as well. I think for many of you guys the um the low ticket or freed group into annual paid uh for the high ticket group is going to be a really really lucrative model. It's just repositioning that the free or the low ticket is is literally just ser um serves the purpose of acting like a lead magnet and then or like even if it's the low ticket, it's just qualifying trash out just so they they put some dollar down then using the onboarding call to then or several onboarding calls which I recommend um to then ascend them into the the more expensive thing. Do you know someone that's using that three core model in school right now? It's No, but there's there there are there are things in the works. I will leave it at that. All right. I say no more. Yeah, go for it. Question about the onboarding calls. Yeah, sure. Um we do live webinars. So we um have sales calls from Thursday through Sunday and we get roughly about 100 to 150 clients and our team's too small to do onboarding calls in the week after. Why is it too small? We only have one one person. Okay. Yeah. So, um how would you You only have one person on your team or one person doing onboarding? One person on our on our team. On your team? Yeah. Well, you could hire a second person. Um as a one way of handling that that problem. Um I mean like I'm being kind of serious. Uh like if you you said 100 new customers a week a month. Oh yeah, I mean, yeah. I mean, that's what 25 a week. That's five a day. So, it's okay not to like have all the onboarding calls in week one. Oh, because you because yours is a surge, right? You do the it's all at once. Um I mean, I would try and stack them up front and if you want you could have multiple of course follow up with them. Okay. Do you do group on boarding? No. Yeah, we do one group on boarding call on Monday, the Monday after. if you sell expensive stuff 101 will will make you a lot more money like we actually so I mean the the case study that I talked about um maybe it was was it the last one I just did I can't remember I think it was the one that I'm referencing um we switched from group onboarding to one-on-one onboarding so that business is very large and does like 150 customers a day at a high price point um and so we had you know we didn't have the capacity to do to do one-on-one and so we had one person doing uh like 20-ish people five six hours a day. Like that's what that that's all they did was every day they were onboarding 20-ish customers per hour. Uh it took us we did a test with about 15% of customers with a 101 model just to see if it would generate you know us more money and uh it took our ascension rate from 25% to 48%. And it decreased our cancellation rate and refund rates by 2/3. So, and for that business that was responsible for like many millions of dollars. As far as that price point goes, I'm used to kind of the ultra high ticket at this point. What price point do you think it goes from 101 to group? Honestly, it's literally just a math problem. So, it's not like what's the right, it's just okay, if we make an extra two, you know, thousand bucks per onboarding call, what's our cost per onboarding call? And then if it's worth it, then is it worth it to go here or Yeah. Just boil it down to what's my cost per call? What's my revenue per call? Done. And for me, it's like if I'm in a service business, I want that to be at least 5 to1. And I think that if you're selling anything expensive, it's going to be you'll easily cover that. The issue that most people have is they just don't like hiring people, which I get, but I've I've been like we've been like Leila is there right there in the back. uh she uh she has been exceptional at building great teams and so we've been able to squeeze the you know squeeze a lot of LTV out by providing more value than competition by just being able to go the extra mile. Cool. Reactivation. Oh, sorry. Yeah. Cool. I was I was going to say, do you advise against um having like videos in your onboarding process for them to watch versus a live onboarding? Videos in your onboarding process for them to watch versus live onboarding. So, let's say live is for sure going to be better. Okay, again, it's it's actually the exact same answer, which is just do the math. Okay, so when we did that, we had a very I mean, the business is massive. It does 110 million a year. Um the for us to just say like okay we're switching to 101 that would have been a nightmare. We said we're going to take 10% of customers. We're going to try this new onboarding out. We're going to get the dust out. We're going to see if we have an uplift on the metrics that matter to us which was cancellation rates uh refunds um chargebacks and ascensions. Right? So that's what we can immediately impact from this uh new onboarding process. That's oneonone. When we saw the metrics, we saw what it would cost, we saw what it made, then we said great. Now, if we did that across all of them, we would make even more money, right? That was it. So, it's just doing the math. How would you prioritize or is the school currently have anything in place right now for uh win back campaign or reactivation campaign for uh cancel the communities or is it kind of like a waste of time in your eyes? You think timeline for school to do win back campaigns or like are you guys currently doing anything for reactivation campaign for church? No. Not really a priority that or is like kind of like we'd rather just go find Sharp. I feel like you guys would rather have affiliates. Well, that's what I'm assuming, too. It's affiliates. No. So, like this is how like it's like that's an awesome idea. So, like, do you want affiliates or do you want that? It's like, okay, I want affiliates. It's like, all right, we'll do that first. And it's like, all right, would you guys rather be able to have free trials or would you rather have that? It's like, I'd rather have free trials. Okay, so we'll do that. Would you rather have reviews or would you have that? Because reviews will boost conversion rate on the like we just work our way down like that's just so you know how we do it. I meant for like internally for you guys. Do you guys are you doing anything with the people have churn from the communities and like reaching out or Oh, we do astonishingly little. You do a lot of that. It's embarrassing. No, I said astonishingly little. Oh, okay. Yeah. We have yet to send emails. Yeah. To customers who opted in for our thing. So, like just to like the plane is always being built while you're while you're flying it. You know what I mean? There's a big list of a hundred things that we should do. And just like that, which we should be sending emails to those people, we have another thing that's slightly higher priority. Sure. Which we will do first. Cool. Yeah. And so I mean I actually think this is actually a really good this is actually a really good like mini segue here which is I think the reason that we've been able to grow businesses really fast and a lot of different industries and kind of repeat the same playbook is um I'm going to use the the the why the why not but uh the single most important question is why not and so the idea is I would say why don't you 10x your business right because obviously just do 10 times more of what you're currently doing. Do that. So, can you do that now? Yeah. Can you? Well, sure. Yeah. No, but but Well, then so then that's what you're going to do immediately. Yeah. All right. Well, then we're done. Yeah. Ignore everything else for us 24 hours. Yeah. Yeah. No, but for real though, like why why haven't you build mode? Huh? I'd say build mode. building back end just making sure everything's like ready to go for be more specific. What's the thing that's prevented you from 10xing what you're currently doing that works myself from not wanting to hire people to build content team ads while I'm building the backend fulfillment. Okay. So, what takes your time that builds the what should you be doing that you're not doing? Creating more content and filming ads. Okay. So, that's what we know will make you 10x, right? Doing that. Got it. What are you doing that's not that that's preventing you from doing that? Treat manage. Trying to manage the team. Okay. Got it. So, guess what? Here's how this works. Right now, you not having an operator in your business is the reason that you're not 10 times bigger. And so, as much as these ideas are amazing and very sexy, none of them will happen because you still have zero time. Yeah. Right. And so, you need to find an operator, which means that the actual activities that you need to do is like I need to be posting on Instagram. I need to be reaching out on LinkedIn. I need to be running ads on Indeed with clear title and headline of what I want for this ideal person who can do all this stuff that I'm currently spending all my time on. And then when you hire that person, you will have actually been able to then do the things that grow your company. Yeah. Got it. That is called a constraint. Yeah. And that is how we grow companies. I bring people in with sexy tactics because that's what everyone wants. So I'll tell you a story. So there's a it's a little it's a parable. So it's called the ham and the garlic. But there's a little boy uh he's been, you know, dying for a dog for years. He's begging his dad for a dog. And finally, dad brings a dog home. And so the kid's super excited. Um he's like, he's like, "Got to take care of him now. You know, make sure you got to do all the good, you know, all the stuff you have to do with the dog." He's like, "Okay, I I'll do." So, um, you know, he's got the dog for a week or two, three weeks, four weeks. And then one day the dad goes to work and he realizes the kid realizes when the dad's away at work and he's with his grandmother uh at home that the the dog has ticks and he's like, "Oh my god, Aba, you know, I uh you know, I've got I've the dog has ticks and what do I do?" And she says, "Me, relax, calma." She's like, "Just just give the dog some garlic and he'll eat the garlic and it'll sweat it out and then the the the text will go away." So the kid is like, "Okay." Okay. So, he takes the garlic clove, he goes to the dog, and the dog, he's trying to give to the dog. The dog, I don't want any of that. Right? So, he goes back to the grandma's super upset. He's like, "The the dog's not going to eat the garlic. What am I going to do if the dad comes home and the dog gets tick?" He say, "I'm not taking care of him." She's like, "Me?" She's like, "You have to wrap it in the ham and then you give the garlic to the dog." So, the kid wraps the ham in garlic. He gets to the dog. Dog eats it, sweats it out, ticks go away. Dog, dad comes home, says, "You're doing a great job." You know, uh, everyone's happy. So the moral of story is you have to give people what they want, the ham, in order to give them what they need, the garlic. And so I we will talk about all of these sexy things. This is all ham. The garlic is that all of you guys have something that's actually limiting you from doing this stuff. And that's the reason that your company is not growing. So we will go do this and we will talk about these very sexy things. But the reality is that none of this will happen unless you hire that person who's going to allow you to do this. I have a constraint. Is it cool if I Yeah. Okay, cool. Yeah. So, we I'm working with this fitness offer, uh, fitness and beauty, and we're stuck at like around 300,000 a month, and we haven't been able to break through. Uh, and I think I know where the constraint is. So, we we do live group webinars with a Q&A at the end. We pitch a 3500,5,000 or $10,000 offer. All three are offered at the end with the payment options as well. Okay. Uh, and the closing rate's around 10%, but if the calls exceed 70 people, then the closing rate starts to drop. So, is the offer too confusing? Is like what would you if you're closing 10% on a live webinar? There's nothing wrong with that. It's likely that you like you do well with a webinar that's of like call it 50 or less maybe. So, maybe you just run more webinars. Would you change the pricing structure at all? think it's it's I mean is it what's the what's the how profitable is it when it's run not with more than 70 people we're getting around a 3 to 4x return on ads then I would probably just do twice the webinars and have 35 people on each one rather than 70 and your conversion rate would probably go up okay and so you'd keep the offers the same okay more times like it's so hard to get something to work is for everybody it's like it's so hard like think about how many times you had to do stuff before you finally got like this is it. When you try to change something, you go back into the arena of I don't know if this is going to work. And so we have this assumption that like the next thing is going to work just as well because the last thing just did, but we forget that we tried like 20 other things that didn't work. And so the likelihood is that we have like another 5% shot of working, but we have a 100% chance of [ __ ] up what is working. And so the thing is is that the cost of change is guaranteed, the upside isn't. And so that's why like I'm so vehem about the woman in the red dress and like more better new in terms of like do it in that order. And so we ask the question always like when I buy a company the first thing I do is I do the same question like thread that I had with him. And the reason the why not question is the big sexy question is because I said why don't you 10x and you're like sure. It's like but you can't why not? And then the answer to that question is the real answer. Like that is and usually that thing is all over the place with different businesses and like that's the thing that's limiting you. So it probably isn't an offer thing. So I'd be like why don't So the same question there like why don't you do 10 times more webinars. It's um the person running the webinars just doesn't want to do them all day. Yeah, that's the constraint and that's and it's like okay so either that person can pick to do the easy thing which would be double the amount of webinars that they do and you could be like hey this will make you like and I like to quantify these things so it's like okay if we double the webinars and we increase conversion because the groups are a little bit smaller right that'll take our revenue from 300,000 to 600,000 but that extra 300,000 that we're making almost all of that's profit right you know 20% of that's cost and the other 80 is profit so $240 3,000 that is profit. So I don't know what the what's the profit of the business right now roughly. Uh monthly. Yeah. Yeah. Roughly. We spend like 60 70 on ads a month. What's the profit of the business monthly? Oh the profit roughly. It's like 150 to 200. Yeah. Around that. Okay. I'm going to say 150 to keep this the 120 to make the math simple. So if you're currently making 120 in profit and you have the ability to make 240 in profit, then I would say we can make three times the amount of money if you're willing to take a second webinar. And so then it's quantified. So you'd be like, "Hey webinar pro, would you like to triple the profit of this business?" Is that like sometimes people like, "Well, I don't want to do more webinars either, but I will for a price." Right? Like like it's always So if you ask like just in general, it's like a lot of times we think, "Oh, I don't want to I don't want to work more. I want this thing to be a lifestyle." It's like, okay, but at what price would you do it? Would you do it for a billion dollars? Yes. Okay. So, now we're just negotiating on what the return is. Great. So, you can get the yes and then you can work back into the math. Like, at what price would it be worth it? Would tripling the business be worth it? And then that person might say yes. Is that the right mindset? Because that's going to reach a cap as well at some point. Sure. And then we can do with that then. Okay. All right. What are you doing with the people that register and don't buy? We have like a really small email sequence or we'll take deposits. You could send uh more more emails to like a lot, you know. Like seriously, if I'm not kidding that that real and then like if you're able to behaviorally identify them whether they saw the pitch or not and you have someone that can just call them immediately after the webinar. If they didn't buy me, how'd you England? you want to buy the thing, that works pretty good. And if you don't have someone that can call them, you can just send them email, open-ended email, hey, how do you like the web? You want to buy the thing? I'm guessing you didn't buy because of one of these three reasons. I'd love to still hop on a call and see if I can provide value. I still just hate it when people say that they won't work to make more money, but that's one just drives me nuts. That's a personal gripe. You combine the two and now you really got more webinars and more followup. We call that more and better. Better. All right. So, one of our big things is doing ads. Okay. But we kind of have this thing where we are thinking of either we hire someone to make the ads and stuff or we try to teach to themsel how to do it. I know that you that have you that you take coaching right when coaching on ads, right? I did one I did one time when I was many years ago. Yes. And do you think it's good decisions? So yes. So here's my here's my recommendation. So if you're going to crack it to a new platform, the the very best thing you can do is find an agency owner who runs ads on that platform for businesses like yours and say, "Can I pay you hourly to do this?" They're going to say no. And they're going to say, "This is America. At what price would it make sense?" Right? And it's like, okay, well, you know, your agency does what? Two million bucks a year. Okay. Okay, probably profit 500 grand. Okay, divide by 2,000. You make $300 an hour take home. I'll double that. I'll pay you 600 bucks an hour. And it's like, cool. Just give me eight calls. It's five grand. Go straight to your pocket. Literally, that was a conversation I had with the guy that that I did this with. He's like, I don't I don't sell my time. I was like, dude, everybody sells their time. You just don't denote what you make based on time. Everybody sells their time. And so, you currently have five customers pay, you know, $10,000 a month. Cool. And I was like, "And you probably work on there." Because this is where you can get them. You're like, "You probably work on those things way more than an hour a week, right?" And they're like, "Oh yeah, we work a ton." It's like, great. So you're so you're doing a ton of work for your customers. So I'm asking for just a measly hour. And because they don't manage their time well, uh, they will probably say yes when you put the number that's high enough. And for you and for me, for example, when I did that, when I had my gyms, I knew how to run local ads, but I didn't know how to run national ads. Uh, and I didn't know how to do retargeting. I didn't understand the whole pixel thing. I didn't understand any of that stuff. And so I had run ads for myself for three years, but I was like, I need to level up if I'm if I'm going to really expand nationally. And so, um, that's what I did. I paid the guy 750 an hour. And, uh, it was a ton of money for me at the time. Um, and it was because I went to agencies that were all like national, uh, agencies that had, you know, bigger brands. And I think the cheapest one was like five or six grand a month, which for me at the time, I was like, dude, no [ __ ] way. I'm not paying five or six grand a month for for ads. But I was willing to pay, you know, six grand one time to just get eight sessions with the guy. And by the eighth session, I knew what I needed to know. Okay. And what do you think about Insta ads? Because like Instagram ads. Yeah. Because we're doing organic. We are doing organically on Instagram. Yeah. Those will be the best ads real or just like sponsor special posts for for ads. You're not going to run like sponsor posts. You're just going to run conversion event campaigns on on meta. You can probably run it on Facebook and Instagram because the people who are on Instagram are also on Facebook and so you'll just get more reach. But if you had to pick one on a limited budget, I would just keep it on Instagram. Uh, because it's the it's the warmest audience of people who know who you are. Yeah. Cool. All right. So, I think we talked about annual. Yeah. Good topic. Nailed it. All right. Uh we kind of went into high ticket. We kind of got into high ticket. Yeah. Um we talked about Yeah. We did the ascension piece. Um I would even argue we got into clarity on scaling, which is the reason that you're not uh the reason that you're not scaling is that there's something that's blocking you and you should undo that block. So this feels like a good time to talk about ads because I feel like that's kind of where this went. Okay. So um we had three four of you guys who asked about about ads. So what do you guys got? What are the questions? We had one. So so I have a question on like Yes. On the best performing ads that you guys have been running. Yeah, best performing ads. Uh, is it mostly for which business? For school, for example, or Yeah. For school, the service school. Okay. But are there mostly because the ones that we run that that perform the best are video ads. So, I was wondering if the ones that work best for you are video ads or are there for for meta? Yeah. Are there video ads? And then how do they compare against YouTube for for you guys? So, we honestly have I'll just say that we haven't run YouTube ads. We barely just started like as of like literally yesterday uh running YouTube ads. So, I have no YouTube data. Uh that's enough that I would answer the question. Um in terms of meta ads, uh interestingly, and this isn't just school, this is across our portfolio. We've actually seen kind of resurgence in static ads. Um, so image ads, uh, we've seen a huge amount of, um, image ads actually doing like really well. So, um, like the easiest ads to make worth like it worth at least taking an hour to get like 60 images up and run those side by side with the the video ads. Um, so number one, I would try static ads. So, I'll put I'll put a list on here to make this easier. And how many uh copy variations you guys usually test at copy variations? Literally zero. We've run the same exact copy for it entirely. You change the image. It's all vid. Yeah. Yeah. The creative and same title also. And the headline is the same. Yeah. Like literally all of the copy and the ads are the same just cuz it worked and then you didn't want to uh switch it up or Yeah. So we were like, "Hey, this has worked. Let's do more of it." And then um as it continues to work, we're like, "Well, shoot. More more hasn't stopped working, so let's do more of that." And then more continues to work. And so we keep doing more. And why is that? I'm being like serious cancer. Like that's if if we thought it was going to be we had a copy issue where it's something else, we keep the copy that's working, we create a new piece of creative, we run it with the same copy and it works again. Just out of curiosity, why did you guys start with meta instead of YouTube since like a lot of Oh, that would be a very obvious uh question. I think the issue was we had we actually got our account we got like it rejected or dinged in the first like two days. Okay. Um and so we've just been running on meta. Okay. Yeah. So it happens to us as well. And are you having a direct uh return on the initial payment or until No, after months it takes us a couple months. Okay. Okay. Well, that was mostly I don't think if anything comes. That was it. It easy. So static ads, please run the dude. What is uh your budget that you spend per day? We vary because we we do different businesses. So it depends on on the business. on on some we spend like 3,000 per day on some we spend like a hundred bucks per day and so it varies depending on the business that that I was that I was thinking about. So that was mostly for a thousand below especially with newer accounts. I know this like so ridiculous and stupid but just try it and you wouldn't. Um let's say you were selling horses or something like could be anything. Your image would say something like, "Read this if you want to buy a horse in the next seven days." And then the copy is like, "We have horses for sale." Like, you can see them when you click the link below. And uh I as dumb as that and uncreative as that is, it makes machine learning and AI finding the perfect people because it's such an obvious ad which gives you now the power to be able to scale up to the level of I actually started looking at at your ads that were super direct and I was like and we started running ads super direct ads and the the best performing ones are we do barely any targeting But the ad that calls out those specific avatar. Yeah. And it works and we have a huge ROI. So that's keep doing do that. Yeah. Do more of that. And I was scared to do it but but it worked and we were surprised. Yeah. I believe you in all of the things and we don't and we don't test any a lot of copy variation and I felt bad about it because it just worked and I didn't want to tweak it. We have ads that have worked for a year for example but I felt bad. says he's good on you. Yeah. If you have copy that works, run the living hell out of it and try with new creative over and over and over again. Okay. Read this with traffic here. It's all organic right now. Fire. So, no paid ads. Like, um, would you recommend riding that until it's essentially the wheels fall off or would you recommend while you mean riding organic? ride organic or would you recommend while organic hot run now to simultaneously? Yeah, it's tough. Um the problem with those questions is like they're they're both the right answers kind of thing. And so I think it's it actually I think it actually ladders up to the goals. So like what your goal is. So if you're like I need to because if I don't make a million dollars a month I just am worthless and no one will love me. And it's like, well, yeah, you're probably have to run ads really fast. Uh, but if you're like, you know what, I just want to make this thing into a big legacy brand long term. Um, then I would say, what do we need to do to 10x organic? So, it's more of a you question rather than the right way to do it. Like, you could immediately run ads and make money. Um, you could probably immediately start making better content and also make more money. Yeah. And I don't think it's about the more money. I think it's about the longevity and continued growth. Well, then I would probably say do more of the thing that you have been doing. Um, I know these seem like very simplistic answers, but like they are very much what we do. Um, but the I think the the 2011 version of the answer is is really looking at to at a more granular level why why we can't make more organic content and why our organic content isn't performing as as big as we want it to be. And I think organic content's actually performing massively, especially when we add in a high ticket. If the lead flow is no issue now, I just didn't know if it would be a good Oh, if if you like have more leads. Yeah. If you have more leads than you can handle, handle the leads you got. Just Yeah. All right. So, we have static ads. So if that is the one thing on the board is the other length of the copy how long is it usually dude that's that's all test like I I can't it like what what price should I sell this at try three see which one works and makes you the most money scientist yeah what yeah no I mean for real like I we just the I would encourage a lot of like all of you guys to if a question can be answered with an Excel sheet do the test right now where this gets really guys guys guys because I'm only saying it because the mic will catch you and everyone at home's like, "What the [ __ ] is going on right now?" Um, uh, what were we saying? Uh, testing. Okay, so the thing is kind of like the cost of change has a fixed cost and variable upside. The cost of testing also has guaranteed cost and not always having upside. And so like for us, even with school, we test one variable at a time. And the and the reason for that is you'll be surprised, but one variable often affects many others. So, it's like if you change a headline, sometimes you'll get more optins, but you'll get fewer trials or you'll get you'll change the headline and you get, you know, fewer optins, but 100% of people get on the call are showing and closing. And so, it's looking at all downfunnel metrics from the test that you run. And the same thing happens from the ad side. Like, if we if you run a really pain-based ad, it's going to get more beginners because they're in more pain. if you run um a more high level ad, you're going to get lower CTRs, higher CPMs, but the quality per call is going to be really high. And so I remember that one year later campaign that I was referencing earlier. Um I think our cost per call was somewhere in the neighborhood of like 30 to 50% higher than our cost per call on our more traditional campaigns, but our cost to acquire customers was the same. But the customers we were acquiring were just

Bangers. They were just great customers. Yeah, in terms of video length and ads in general with the holy grail and going to the brand building thing and organic versus paid, the holy grail is an ad that provides value in and of itself and is also obviously an ad. And so if you can create that thing, then now you're building goodwill and pitching at the same time and you're getting paid to build your brand because the ad is giving you a return.

Yeah. So, the magic is you probably have so this is for this is going to be specifically for the organic guys here and gals, excuse me. Um, if you have you've probably posted an organic piece that like just drove a ton of people into your communities and you're like, "Oh man, that was good." I would start by trying to use those as ads because they've already proven to work and the algorithm likes them.

Or the ones that scammers copy you on and use. Do you? Sure. Where people are like, you have a high converting ad. There's a lot of people that are coming to our community thanks to their ad. The what? There's a lot of people that are coming to our community thanks to the scammers running ads on her using content. Sounds like a win. More people find out about your stuff, more people buy it.

I had a question about um organic content. So I do like lifestyle, but people don't know the value of the offer I'm selling, more the lifestyle first, but I've never spoken about getting people remote jobs and never spoken about why I'm an expert on it. So, we're trying to lead people through a lead magnet through the sort of just lifestyle post at the very end, but I don't know any metrics of if we're doing a good job of like how many should be clicking on the DM or the lead magnet because we're doing like comment X, we'll send it to your DMs and then how many of those should convert. I'm really just in the dark of like, is this lead magnet working? Should we change it? How to?

Yeah. Do you have any numbers? So I, so benchmarks I cannot give you, but in terms of this is where trying a lot of things in the beginning is helpful because you'll see that some things if you try multiple things will work better than others. Um, in terms of like page conversions, that can start to get around benchmarks that everyone here would recognize. And so if the lead mag is free, you want it to be over 20% um in terms of conversion rate. A good, you know, a banger lead magnet will be about 40 or 50%, especially if it's organic. Um, but 20 is like, okay, we at least have some traction here. Um, the the other part of it is kind of like the CTR of from like how many people who see this organic piece are are going to click. Um, I think the the interesting part about this is I think most people click profile links more than they're going to click from. Now, organic bros and gals, please correct me here because I never make real CTA. I don't do any CTAs in shorts. Um, the CTA is just whatever is in your profile as far as I'm concerned. And so I just look at whenever we have a spike. Oh, okay. Uh, that one did well and can we do more stuff like that?

I had a follow-up question on like just the positioning and branding. My content's more like the tactical tips of like, these are the metrics numbers you want to add to your resume. This is how you answer questions during the interview. And he's more lifestyle. But I've only got like a 100k followers and like I'll get, you know, basic views on mine, but he'll have like million, like 10 million plus views, just showing like traveling here, doing this, but some of the quality of my people are higher intent, but he gets way more eyes. How do you see like we maybe shift the position of some of the content, but still get a lot of eyes?

Yeah. So this is a classic question for personal branding, which is at like at the complete extreme, you're lighting Lamborghinis on fire, and on the other extreme, you're walking through a tactical Excel spreadsheet of exactly what they need to do. Um, this on this side will get you the people who absolutely want to buy, and there will be 10 of them, and they'll watch your video, and nine of them will opt in. And over here, um, you'll have a whole bunch of people who have no interest, and the people who opt in are just curious and have no interest in buying. They're like, can you go all the way down?

So, I will just share my my specific metrics around this. So, I made a big piece of content about how we've shifted our content. So, um, for three or four months, we basically experimented with wider content. And the theory or the hypothesis around that was, okay, well, if we get more eyeballs, then we'll have more quote top of funnel, and that will, I'll have a smaller percentage of a much larger number. That was kind of the thought. That turned out not to be true. If I talk about business [ __ ], I get business owners. If I talk about meal stuff, I get people who want more meal stuff. And if I want to sell business stuff to people who came for meal stuff, they tend to not buy it. And so I had to, we had to completely reset our expectations as a team in terms of views and whatnot and just say, objective one, let's make sure that our content is being shown to the people that we want to sell stuff to. Objective two, after objective one is met, get as many views as possible to those people. And so that's that's fundamentally how we think about content. Now, we absolutely want to hit bangers out of the park, but we want those bangers to be for business owners. And so in terms of how do like, so now what do I do? Right? You'll like it's kind of there's a big decision for you to make, right? So this is a strategy thing, which is, am I in this for views, or am I in this for cash? Now, uh, and this is not me breaking y'all's business up to be clear. U, but like maybe you'd convert really well with vacations. A lot of people like those, you know what I mean? And that's what super wide, like you have a product and then you have the advertising for it. And so if you have super wide advertising, then you can match that with a super wide product, or you can niche down your advertising to have a more niche down product. When it comes to organic,

Would you recommend starting a separate channel? No, just everything or one?

Well, the thing is, again, this is ladders up to why do you do this to begin with?

It's a real question.

Um, I really want to show people that it's changed my life, like becoming a digital nomad, leaving America, you know, price of your apartment's like $600 a month. Yeah.

Um, and I'm able to go wherever I want, whenever I want. That was really important to me. And I think I just want to influence more people to make that decision. And the hardest step is getting the remote job that lets them do that.

Okay. So, if that's actually what you're like super passionate about, then I would talk more about that because I'll bet that the vast majority of your time you're not on a beach.

Yeah.

Right. So, then I would show like what your life really is, and you'll probably get more people at that life. There's a really simply uh simplified magic formula for what to say in personal branding to attract buyers, and it's uh, I think it's three questions. We'll see. Uh, first one is, who do you want? So, who do you want your customer? And then the second one is, what do they want? And the third one is, how do they get it? And the answer to question number three is this stuff you talk about right all the time. And then you take those questions with you, but a big circle around it, and you write the word down. And you adopt the mindset that every single piece of content that you make is about what they want, how they get it, and or what life will be like after they get results. You are the writer, director, and um, the storyteller of a movie that is exclusively about them, which is wonderful because it takes all the pressure off of you, but you don't have to pretend to be cool or anything. You just tell me about them and what they want.

And so I um, so we run workshops here occasionally at the headquarters, and um, almost every time I ask the question, I say, "Who here came from like a very deep piece of business content of mine?" And then the entire room raises their hand. And I'll be like, "Who here came from one of my brutally honest advice to younger men or my meals videos or my, you know, the lifestyle related stuff?" And then usually like two to three hands will raise. And once I saw that happen once, and then twice, and then a third time, I was like, "Oh, [ __ ] that." Like, and so the thing is, is like, it's very true, like likes ain't cash, you know, like, and um, I got in this to make money. Like I never got in this to get famous. I had zero desire. Fame has predominantly d like negatives associated with it, um, from a lifestyle perspective. So, I was like, great, if I can be less famous and make more money, I will do more of that. Uh, and so I I just recommend like, I you probably have you seen the video that I have about the girl who had 5,800 followers?

Yeah.

Yeah, we've seen that. Completely changed my, I mean, like I already had strong beliefs about it, but like when I saw her business, and she was doing, you know, one, and if she just did like two more things, which is what I told her to do, she'll probably do between three and five million in that little business with less than 6,000 followers. I just, but like she has 5,800 followers, and I purposely didn't say her name because I knew that all my following would go there and just destroy the algorithm for her. I didn't want to do that.

But um, but when she told me, she was like, "Yeah, I make 10 sales a day online like autopilot." And she was like, "And then I email them and say if they want to buy a more expensive thing." And she did like, she had no automation. She literally just emailed them. I said, "Yeah." No. Like, she her email list, her first sale, I'm getting goosebumps. You can see it. She her first sale came to her email list when she had eight people on her email list. And I was like, it just like, it just completely, she's like, "I just try and show up every day for the people that are there." And she's like, "Even if I go live and there's five people, it's like, hey, it's a room of five people. I'm going to try and, you know, deliver." And that was just like her whole perspective on it. And she had zero employees and she was just like loving life, being a registered dietitian teaching other registered dietitians how to build the [ __ ] build the [ __ ] out of insurance. That was her, that was her, that was her tagline. And so um, and and if you looked at her content, it was like, here's how you build Aetna, and she's like, these are the codes that you get you three times more, like you can do this one and this one, she's like, just make sure you ask this one thing during the consult with the, you know, with the patient, blah, blah, blah, blah, like, and then people just are like, "Oh, [ __ ], she really knows. Cool. I will just immediately buy." And so her her biggest post that I saw had 19 likes on it. And so the thing is, is that the algorithm now is getting, and I think I think part of this is because, which I'm happy about, the algorithm has gotten so good at knowing what is in your content and knowing what people watch or what people like. And I've told the story, but like, I I like gym equipment, which is really, really niche. Uh, and then within that niche, there's tons of custom metal fabricators. And you might not know this, but custom metal fabricators tend to be very bad marketers. And so like, that there's the the Venn diagram of overlap is zero. They all suck at marketing. And so like, there's just posts that are just like carousel posts of like, "Look at this new pec deck that I just built." You know, it's just like six pictures, and it has like 19 likes on those images. But I get served that in my discover page because I click on gym equipment pretty much whenever it comes in my feed. And I also have money and buy gym equipment, lots of it. And so like, you want to tell, and this is where for you, that the shift will start to happen, is like, and I do think the algorithm is super fast with this, though. So I don't see it as necessarily a bad thing. It's just post about the stuff, the how they get that thing, and you will get those people. There might be a little bit of an adjustment phase, but the thing that's going to be a 100 times harder for you is that you'll be thinking that you're bombing. That's the hard part. The video that I posted that I'm telling all of you guys to watch, I think currently has like 40,000 views, which for me is a bomb. A 10 out of 10 if for anybody does YouTube, like probably the worst video of the last two or three months.

But super valuable. So I get what you're saying.

Thanks, man. But then people who have businesses are like, "This [ __ ] is awesome." There's just not that many of them. There's 9% of people who own an LLC, let alone like a a business with like at least one employee. Now you're talking like 3% 5% of the US has an employee, you know, a business with one employee. It's tiny. And so for me to be like, I need to have 10 million views on my video. It's like, dude, there's not even 10 million people in my market. And so it's just like shifting the perspective. But if I got on a stage in front of 10,000 people that were my ideal customers, I'd be stoked as [ __ ]. But if you got a a reels that had 10,000 views, you'd be depressed and be like, why do I suck at everything?

Yeah. Right.

Well, I am now because like I got 20 million views in the past like two weeks, and my email list grew by like 2K.

Yeah.

So I'm like, what is? You know why we go wrong? We did the really wide content. Our number of opt-ins, our number of book sales, and our um and our application metrics for portfolio companies dropped when I made really wide stuff with way more views.

Could you interview him and bring him across to start bringing more of the tactical stuff across and to let people know how they can get started? You guys do that?

Yeah, I think we had a we're going to set a podcast up like while we're out here dig and do that for sure.

Yeah, we have Zooms, but it's like it was like a Zoom call between the two of us on Riverside, but I think now that we're in person, we really need to like introduce because he has the expertise. I just have the lifestyle. So, it's like I need to learn a bunch. Yeah. But that's that's

You have some expertise. You live. You have a remote job.

Yeah.

Right.

You give a little credit, you know.

Does that help?

Yeah, that does. Okay, cool. Um, you had qu No, your personal branding was how do I do it on another platform, which is a lot of work. You just do it again.

Yep.

Yeah. It's okay.

Yeah. Shoot.

Back to ads. And this is more so out of Austin.

He's like, I really know bad [ __ ]. Yeah. Yeah, go for it.

Um, because I was speaking with Andrew Kirby yesterday about how he comes up with hooks for his videos.

Your first name Andrew.

I didn't hear that, but I'm assuming it was funny.

Yeah. Yeah. Uh, so I'm curious what your process is with coming up with hooks. Like, do you have a creative process, or do you just look at what worked before?

All right, this will be fun.

Are you going to start making videos, or is this for fun?

This can fight to ads as well.

Yeah, [ __ ]. I'll just do a new. Okay, so this is from Google and they prove this with math and I just trust them. So this is in another one of your detailed YouTube videos.

Yes.

More of what always works, similar to the stuff that always works, and then brand new [ __ ]. And so our ads process um, you guys will see because we'll do some at the end. Um, I write down all the hooks that I always know work. Kind of like the copy that seems to work. Now, in the beginning, you don't know which hooks are going to work. So you just try a lot of your hooks. But once you find, well, when you do a lot of them, there will be some that work better than others. And then you will do more of the ones that work better than others. And then you will make similar ones to those ones until eventually you find one or two hooks that just always murder. And then you will pretty much always keep using those hooks for kind of ever until when you're like, I just can't take this anymore. I just need, I I just feel like this hook will work. And when I do my brand new hook, it's someone else's hook that I think is also very good and has worked. I just use very little new stuff. And I would say that the biggest difference between my early advertising days and now is I just do so much more volume of repetition. Like that's, I mean, I'm telling you guys, like it is like you guys see the ads we have for school. It's the same copy across hundreds of ads. The same copy because that copy works. And if you look at the hooks, I have three or four hooks that crush for school. We have, uh, I want to, you know, real quick, I want to give give me your email address so I can give you $1,000 free stuff. That one crushes. Um, uh, big result. So I chunk that one up to like, $4,664. That's what Kyle, the lowest person on the leaderboard made. Uh, and sure, I could talk about Evelyn who made this and Tams who made this, but let's just talk about this three or $4,000. That changed their life. Blah, blah, blah. Right. So, but I've used that one and been like, well, $6,779. That's what Kyle made, and he was the 20th person on the leaderboard last month, too. So I just, so I know that that angle of amount of money that's reasonable, lowest person, that hook angle works, and I could just keep repeating that. Um, uh, the the fastest way, um, I think the fastest way to make income online is, uh, one of the hooks that has crushed. So we use that one. And so like when we do the the things later today, uh, want to know something crazy? That's also one that has worked well. Um, that's when I pop the balloon. Uh, that one crushes. Um, and so I use the same visual hooks, and I I use the same verbal hooks over and over and over again. And if I see, and this is this is where like this is how I do my research on this, is that I have no premium subscriptions to anything, and I actually watch ads. And the thing that I specifically watch for is I I really pay attention to hooks because the hook is the hook is everything. And I would say that the more I've advertised, the more I just almost exclusively care about the hook. Uh, it's just there's it's I mean, Oglevie said this, once you've written your headline, you've spent 80% 80 80 cents of your dollar. And so if you spent, you know, four fifths of the of your effort should go to the thing that matters the most. And as silly as it sounds because it's so short, like we write out, I mean, you've probably you've watched all of these. So I write out 50 plus hooks if I'm starting net new. Like if I'm if it's my first session, I'm going to write 50 plus hooks out. Once I know what the winners are, I'm mostly just using the winners, and then I'll try one or two new hooks that I'm like, really jonesing and be like, I think this one will work. And if one of those beats my controls, those enter the thing that always works a lot bucket, and I just keep using the crap out of it. But this is what I messed up. So like for so many years, I thought I had to reinvent the wheel every time I made. I was like, I made an ad like that last time. It's like, and I should have just made another ad like that, but instead I was like, I have to come up with something brand new. And I would just, and then making ads became stressful, whereas now it's just like, hey, send me the top performers from last month. Okay, cool.

And then I just redo them.

And the same me, same concept. You used to posting daily on social media, like if it's working, just keep posting the same type of content over and over. And like, is my audience going to get bored?

They don't even remember your name.

Yeah.

I'm being like, so I'll tell this story because I think it'll it'll drive this home. So you guys, I had a book that launched last year. Have you guys heard about it? Um, and I I spent a lot of time and money trying to like let everybody know that that would happen. And so if I walk around here on this trip at Vegas, I probably get stopped like four or five times on a 30 or 40 minute walk for the whole month leading up to the launch. That's when we were just like promoting like crazy. And call it 100 people or 150 people stopped me over that entire month. And after they said, "Hey, you know, I like yours up." Blah, blah, blah. I would always just ask, "Come to the book launch." And every single person except for one said, "You have a book."

One.

Yeah. And I already had another book out for two years that I post literally every [ __ ] day. And so I say this to say like, they don't even know who you are, and you can repeat it. But if you do have the desire to create variety, you usually have to have a lot less variety than you think you do. And so I'll explain different. So it's like if I wanted if I wanted to make another video that was a clone of yesterday's or two days ago video that came out, I would talk about the same concepts and apply it to a different example. And so you can use endless examples of the same thing and still find interesting. Like, have people gotten tired of beaches?

Dell. Okay. Right. They just want to send the exact same. Like you can even show the same beach. Just don't show from here. Here. It's like, oh, you know what? I'm going to show it later in the day. You know, I'm going to do it first thing in the morning. Hey, I'm going to do it from this side. Hey, I'm going to do it in the water this time. Like, it's the same beach, right? It's like, hey, you do Forex stuff, right? So, it's like, I'm just going to talk about Sarah this time, and then I'm going to talk about Jessica this time, and then I'm going to talk about this particular currency strategy, whatever it is, right? You just keep doing examples. That's where the variety comes from. The thing is, and crazy part is, is that people will watch 20 examples and then finally you're like, and this is Sarah. They're like, "My name's Sarah. This now applies to me." And the other 20 that I watched definitely wouldn't apply to me, but this one now does.

This works for Sarah.

Yes. I'm like,

I'm telling you.

Like, but that is that is very much how it works. Like, and so it's like, you know, the student is ready, the teacher appears, whatever, like whatever you want to say. There's there's this bucket of people, and then someday, you know, they become single, and all of a sudden they're in the market. Yeah. You know.

So good.

Yeah. You bet.

I have a question. So like my best performing videos are like me on like a remote job interview, like answering questions about like not saying the number first for salary, and we also encourage our members to record their job interviews. Would you encourage to like just post my interviews, or like would it be good to post other members and like other students interviews?

So this is really interesting. So I actually think all of that stuff goes to the brand. So if you had a if like like long term you want to build a business around this, then you can make those posts be about like the posts from the company can be about the customers. So that'd be a corporate brand versus personal brand.

Okay. So then I wouldn't do that on my personal page.

If you're not going to do the other thing, then I I would try it and see how it does. Thing is, I would probably do I would probably record the hook because like the people who follow you follow you follow you, right? And so I'd be like, "Hey, check out this interview from one of our students from our thing." Boom. Like it just like I would try and compress it to like a and you'll figure out what that hook is that works. And then I would just say it on every one of them.

Okay. And would you just focus on like the interview content? Because sometimes I'll do that and then I'll also like really dial in like, this is our process. This is how we like we'll get you hired, or but those don't perform as well.

That's okay. I would absolutely still put those in.

Okay, cool. So, like the video I did yesterday, we'll will [ __ ] bomb. But we will get applications from that video.

Yeah. Okay. That makes

Because if you happen to have a $50 million per year business and you see that I did this thing to add two or three million in profit, they're like, well, how? I'll be, I have a $50 million business and this applies to me. And there's no videos online that talk about this stuff because these videos don't perform, and no one who actually makes that amount of money makes YouTube videos. And if they do, they go wide because they're afraid to get low views. So it's like completely the nice thing is that if you do the hard thing, which is actually making really good content that's specific, you compete against the one because no one's willing to do it.

Yeah. So good point.

Can I ask about that? So for example, I always heard that if you do if you do amazing content where you dump everything that you know, it's going to perform great. But then my question always is like, then when they pay for your course or whatever, if they see the same stuff, are they going to be disappointed or no? But I will give you a more in-depth answer.

Yeah. Thank you.

Okay. So I'm going to give you a couple different isms that you can kind of think about this. So you've got generic is what you make public. Personal is what you offer for money. You give them information. You sell implementation.

Okay. So they're they're also buying like the convenience of it.

Uhhuh. So you would say though, for example, if you have a course and you have a module on on I don't know, on acquisition systems.

Let me pause you right now, just real quick, because I just want to make it real for you.

Have you watched any of my stuff online?

Yes.

Is anything that I've said here today something you've heard before?

Yes.

Was it less valuable to hear it right now in person to you?

Was it less valuable? No.

Okay.

Yeah. Just like it with my mind.

This is a great question. I was just say like this is a common concern. It's also okay. I follow a lot of philosophy accounts, and I follow those accounts because I like to be reminded to think about things in this way. And so people need to be reminded many more times than they need to be taught.

I heard you that already like multiple times on social media.

Still hit.

Yeah.

I think I tweeted that this morning. Actually, I really did.

To give, give, would you would there be certain things that you wouldn't give away, or would you give everything away?

I give any basically anything that I think will be, it's again, it's going back to the audience, like anything that I think will be valuable to the audience.

Because it's valuable, you give it away.

Okay.

And that has served me really well. And the more I'll tell you this. I wrote my book Gym Launch Secrets. Has anyone read Gym Launch Secrets?

It's [ __ ] good.

They use it for coaching.

And selling. It's unbelievable. It's a really good book. It should be called coaching secrets, but like, um, because by the way, fitness is a coaching business, and everything in that book applies to any business where you serve customers, but whatever. Anyways, um, and so that book's like 400 pages, and it has like every script, the like, I'm like, everything is in the book, and the book's like 30 bucks. And I remember um, when I was talking to Laya about this, because I was like, this is my life. This is I was like, this is my contribution to the gym industry. Like, if you read this book, and a lot of people read the book and started gyms because they were like, "Oh my god, I can like, this is the whole, this is everything. There was nothing else." And my sales guys, here's the thing. My sales guys were like, "Dude, can we sell more books?" I was like, "What do you mean?" They're like, "Dude, if someone read the book, they get on, they just buy immediately." And what we sell is the same stuff in the book. And the people who bought from the book are like, "Wow, this is amazing. It's just like the book." Because I wanted more of that thing. So, the best upsell in the world, you guys can write this down. This is very high level. The best upsell in the world, there's two of them, all right, that always convert every time, no matter what, is more of that thing you just bought, and more help with that thing you just bought.

Deep stuff, I know. But for real, think how many business influencers there are out there that don't make content and charge for it, but yet you've flown out here to meet the one that gives it all away for free. Like, you being here is living proof that giving it all away for free makes you want more than that.

That's true. Completely.

Yeah.

And I had the same fears, dude. So like, I'm I I say this having, you know, many more years of of of reps on this, and it still it was tough. I get it. Like, there's this fear. But the other part of it too is that when you give everything away, it also forces you to make more new great stuff and learn more [ __ ].

Yeah. Cuz I've been working on on on a course, and I've been like dumping everything I know.

Yeah.

And I was so proud of it, and I was like, should I make a video of this? And I was like, no. Cuz I won that on the course and like put sweat and tears into it.

Yeah.

So it it hurts to give it for free.

Dude, I spent like 2,000 hours writing a book, and then I just gave it away for free, and then it just like exploded my brand. And then I was like, man, I wonder if I wrote another book and did the same thing and just made it like really good and put everything I possibly could in there, and then just gave that away for free, if that would grow my brand.

But also, people think there's going to be more. So they're like, "Wow, if that's for free, I'm going to purchase more." I teach a free class the same thing every week that I sell also. It's the same information, but they're like, "I want to be more in proximity to this person who's giving you such valuable information."

The same thing what he said earlier is because they don't know who you are.

Yeah. Said differently. Said differently.

What are all the things besides the information that they get when they give you money?

Right now, nothing because it doesn't exist yet.

Okay. But once they give you money, hypothetically, they'll get?

Access to you, coaching, for examples. It'll become it'll go from being generic to being personal. Logo from just being information to being implemented.

And question on that on the fitness community that we have, he doesn't do any uh educational content. He does only like entertainment.

I don't even know that. So like slapstick, like humor.

No, no, no, no, no. But he does like just because of his specific, you know, like he's uh he has followers just because of what he posts. He does in Eddie V.

That's right.

Like thirst drops.

Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. So he's like a male.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Only fans.

So the question is, do you think if he did more educational content, like more people would come into the community?

And then at the same time was like, for example, if he gave away routines, and they come into a community to watch those routines, then it's the same, or what do you think the same thing?

I mean, you have a very simple CTA at the bottom was like, I mean, you can just test it. Want to look like me, or want to train like me? Want to eat like me? Click here. Uh, I wanted to ask you because you talked about the business content and like the food content, but you were also doing vlog content and I wanted your feedback about that.

We stopped doing it.

Because it wasn't performing well.

The vlog. Yeah, it was also it was actually it was not that it wasn't necessarily performing well. I think it was more that like it took a lot of my time. I just had people I just had more cameras around me for more, and it just it was distracting for me. So, so for me it was more of a return question. Like it cost a lot and had if the vlogs had just been like the all-time number one videos and were generating tons of sales, I'd probably be more willing to do more.

But would you say so would you say that it's very important to add a lot of value into into the vlogs?

I think the vlogs, so the thing about in my opinion, the thing about vlogs is I think they are for exclusively warm audience because if someone doesn't know who I am, why are they going to want to know behind the scenes of Alex, because they don't even know what the front of the scenes of Alex is, right? And so I think it's um, yeah, that's kind of that's kind of my two cents on that. Like if the point of advertising is to get people who don't know you to know you and then eventually give you money, then I try to make my content for people who don't know me and make sure that when I make that content, it still provides value to people who do.

You know, you can never go wrong with the uh classic guaranteed to work formula, which is who do you want, what do they want,

And how do they get?

Yeah. You know, that just has only always worked.

Yeah. Only always.

All right. Um, so we covered the that piece. I'm sure some of you guys always have that fear like where do I draw the line between what's paid and what's not. Just give away all your best stuff and talk about it again within a different context or example when you're under the paid side. Like it's fine. Um, it just won't be an issue. And actually, I'll give you a 301 version of this too, is that if you make your free content exceptional, it also retains paid members because people don't know where they get value from. They just know that they get value from you, and that it's worth whatever they pay you. So like, really good content is also a really strong retention tool because they're like, man, this guy just gives me like, the fact that they're on continuity, they're they're not be like, you know what, I could pause and only consume the, they're like, no, this guy's [ __ ] like, I've made more money, and that's why they bought to begin with, is that his free stuff made me more money than than uh than anybody else's, and that's why I'm going to I'm willing to pay him. And then as long as that free content continues to provide more value than he pays, he still feels like he gets a good deal.

You talked about mapping out 50 hooks.

Yeah.

Do you then film those 50 hooks all at once and then just splice them into the rest of the video?

Ideally, yes. Sometimes I just feel it right after a hook and I just crush the ad. But most of the times, uh, if I'm real, real is if I'm if I'm just like feeling magical one day, I'll just end up just ripping 50 ads and just doing it that way. Um, but if I'm usually like lower energy and just want like, "All right, let's just get this done." Then I'll just do the hooks, do the three to five pieces of meat content that are going to be compelling, and then have my CTAs.

And those hooks are usually a sentence or two?

10 seconds or so.

Oh, way less than that.

Five seconds. That's it. Cool.

Yeah. Want to hear something crazy?

One second.

Yeah. I'm just like that's I'm just saying like that's that's a hook.

Sweet.

Yeah. Like the the um Do you guys see the meme ads we ran for a little bit?

Yeah.

Okay. The meme hook was like a half a second. But those meme ads just had unbelievable CTRs.

Put donkey flipping over.

Yeah.

Yeah. Unbelievable. Un like unreal CTRs. Uh, problem is the CTRs were so good that it just got the like the pixel was like everybody likes this, and so we're like, okay, we got it. But like, just as an extreme example, like it was such a strong hook, and it was only this long. So yeah, it doesn't it's not it doesn't need to be super long.

Question going back to like giving away as much free value as you can. It's two-part question. One, do you see there's specific channels like just in the content giving away the free value versus like we have a free group and a paid group? Like should we just pack out free group with as much value?

It depends on what the objective of the free group is. So like I would try and get like the content is where you're going to put 90% of your effort, right? Um, weirdly, this is just my Alex's one of experience. Um, I think the free community, you want to be very specific about what they're going to get from like, what the benefit of joining that group is, and then make it just about that thing. Whereas content, you you just, you know, you're using it as advertising. It's much broader, right? Um, and so if the the free, the free group is a lead magnet, it's really just like, how do I, how do I make the two to three things that I provide in this group exceptionally good and worth it? And then all of that is still oriented around getting them to ascend. And you've probably watched my stuff, like the four ways you ascend people within the free groups.

Right? That makes sense because yeah, we're going to test out like webinars too for ascension. That will work.

Um.

But the second part is like,

Being that I've used like a free resume template to help them secure the job. And it's like, I feel like if I give away everything for free, and then they do land a job, maybe they don't need us. So, it's like, we give everything away for free, and they don't land it, and they're like, "Well, I don't know if it'll help me land it."

Well, here's the easy thing you can do is try it.

Yeah.

It's not like now all of humanity will be like, "Oop, I got all of his free stuff." Like the 20 people who will have seen it. Um, but what will likely happen is they'll be like, "Wow, this is amazing. I just want to give this guy money so he helps me do this even more."

Okay. Thank you.

Dude, I've been saying make more offers and send more follow-up for like 25 years.

It's just exactly what you said. Okay, I'll say it by that side this time, you know, and now I'll say it from a car.

Right?

But like every product I have basically make more offers and send more follow-up.

Uh, my question is about ideation, like how do you found so many ideas of content? Maybe your team helps you, or just like getting out of your head? I wanted to know more about that.

So for what type of content? I can give you I can give you very specific answers. So.

I mean, like I saw you talking about like you use Twitter and stuff. So maybe like it's more of you write your ideas and put them on tweets and.

So I'd say um shorts for sure are tweets. A lot of times. Um, if I have tweeted a lot about a specific topic, the team will search my Twitter for all tweets related to that topic, and they will string them together, and then that will become along. Um, I also send the team, I mean, Caleb's here, so like the the I send the team, uh, like, "Oh, we should do a video on that," like it comes out from one of these discussions. And I'll immediately pull my phone out and send it to him be like, "Hey, let's let's do a video on this." And so that's um I would say that's probably like 80%, and then 20% is the team's like, "Hey, we saw some videos on these topics that we think you could crush." Uh, and so then they they basically come with um top performers from other industries or whatever that they're like, "Hey, this formula of um, you know, what professionals do that beginners don't is like a concept," and then be like, "All right, can we apply that to sales?" and then have you riff on that.

And like what's your way? Like do you take like some moments like one hour, or you then you just like write?

I could probably I think I I think I could I could speak truthfully in saying the how well a video does is almost always directly proportional to how much I prepare for it.

Okay. Are you redoing video?

Redoing.

Like if you don't like the the way you talk and stuff, like maybe you could have done it better. So you say, "Okay, I'm just going to do it again."

The whole thing.

Or maybe some parts I.

Well, there's definitely been times where we'll get to the end of a video and I'll be like, "All right, now I know what I'm going to say. Let's start again." And, uh, that

almost always works as a better video. Are you writing like with with a pen or just on your PC on your phone?

>> What the You mean like notes for the video?

>> Uh like your ideas and stuff.

>> So ideas for me either go to Slack or Twitter. That's where my ideas go. In terms of long, so like YouTube specifically. So a lot of that stuff then gets used on shorts. If I'm if we're doing longs, then I'll meet with Michael who's my team Alex uh head and he'll be like, "All right, these are three videos that we could potentially do this week. Which one's like which he'll be like, which one are you feeling?" And I'm like, "You know what? Let's do this one." Or sometimes I'm like, "You know what? I got this other thing on top of my head. Let's do that one." And um and then we'll bang it out like kind of like a rough outline for what the video is going to be about, relevant examples, stories that are going to illustrate the points. Um, and then that way when I go um actually film, he'll beef that out. He'll do some research, plug some stuff in. Um, and then we pull that up on a screen and then I record the video. Um, I don't script, some people do. I just kind of have the bullets of like I know what stories I want to tell related to the the key points.

>> Okay. And what about your books?

>> Books are an enormous amount of work that I recommend no one do. I'm like I'm ser like I've I feel like I've had every every person that has ever asked me like, "Hey, should I write a book?" No, it's way too much work. I just I a lot of people don't know this, but like I I was a I was I was the the vice editor of the newspaper. I was the president of the uh creative writing magazine. I got a full scholarship for writing um in college. Um I like writing and so it's more of a like I enjoy it and so it happens to be a way that I can kind of like express myself and I've just tried to do my very best to do it in a way that can still kind of make me money. But if I took the 2,000 hours that I spend writing a book and spend it on making better YouTube videos, I would probably make more money. It's just the thing is is the likelihood that a book that someone's going to write is going to be an all-time number one is just really low. And so it just takes such level of obsession to get it to be there. So like leads and offers have been number one and number two in marketing and sales for three years um on Amazon. And a lot of people just kind of just put words into a document and say like, "Look, I have a book." Uh, and it just like it's so much more than that. It's a lot harder to do.

>> I see.

>> Okay. Thank you.

>> Yeah. You bet.

>> You said something very powerful. You said how well the video does is predicated on how much prep you put into it. And then you gave a couple examples. You said you brainstorm with I think Michael >> said you brainstorm examples and then you brainstorm uh Yeah. stories. So, let me tell you something that will make all of your content better. So, that by the way is a hook. Um, so tell me which video is better. Yeah. Right. So you've got Which video will do better?

>> Right. Right.

>> Every time.

>> This is way too much stuff. Seven points. It's like, dude, I wait. What about Hold on. I barely understand 0.1. Right. So, it's just like, all right, here's point one. Let me tell you a ham and garlic story. Let me also tell you how it applied to my business. Let me also tell you how it applied to one of our customers businesses. And let me give you a graphic that also displays the same concept that I just talked about. And so, I'm not to say that you can only have one point in a video, but oftentimes people basically you cram too much stuff in and don't spend enough time on each point and don't illustrate it from enough angles. So, it's like I want to just I want to fully flesh out an idea um rather than do like just I'm just say this is what has what has worked well for us. And so when we when we make points it's I'll call like a quotable notable like some some you know hammer of a line uh which is a lot of times like a tweet for me. So like that's a tweet that would be the point and then I'd be like let me tell you a story about that which I wouldn't say let me tell you a story. I would just start telling the story and then I would have another example or another example. Cool. We feel like we got that one done. Cool. Now I'll make point two.

>> I never realized that that's what makes your videos great that you get to hear in different perspectives on different

>> dude 100%.

>> It's all about the examples.

>> Had seen it like that. Yeah.

>> If I just said, "Hey, make more stuff." Not that compelling. If I said, "Make more stuff." So when I was starting out, boom, I'm right into a story about making more stuff. And so we started running ads for school and we're like, man, the copy works on these one ads. Like maybe if we just ran more of that ad, it'll work. And then lo and behold, it worked. And then we were like, shoot, should we start something different? We're like, no, maybe we just made 10 times more of those ads. We'll see if that worked. And then it worked again. And we're like, [ __ ] we probably need to do something new now. And I was like, well, let's just at least see if more of that works. And it's and sure as [ __ ] more of that worked, right? And the crazy thing is is that when I was in this other context, boom, I have another story, right? And so you can just link the stories together all illustrating that concept because the thing is is if you think about teaching as changing behavior, right? If that like same condition, your behavior, you guys have heard that from me before hopefully. And so if the point of my videos is education, which it is, right? It truthfully is. If it's entertainment, then I would make them differently than I do. But if the point is to change behavior, then I have to sell the person on the behavior I want them to change almost more than I need to sell them on what the behavior itself is. And so if someone actually changes their behavior from a video, they will think they will send that video to everybody they know and be like, "This thing is really important." And they'll send it to all their co-founders be like, "Hey, we should do this."

>> That's what I do.

>> It works.

>> Shoot.

>> I have a question about content teams.

>> Yeah.

>> So, um, who would you hire first? Which role? Caleb, what who would you hire first for a content team?

>> Uh, somebody to run it and build it.

>> So, I'll say I'll I'll caveat um Caleb's answer, which is it depends on your budget, right? So, if you have if you have low budget, then you're probably just going to want somebody who's going to capture your stuff, right? Um, and I think interviewing multiple times to get somebody you can capture and edit is paramount. I would definitely not get someone who can only do one because nowadays there's enough people who can do more. If you have a higher budget, you want to get somebody who's a G who can then build the team underneath because like for example, I don't know what a good editor looks like because I don't edit [ __ ] So I just had to look really hard and try and find someone like Caleb like hey he's like hey focal point color grading and I'm like oh that we should do that lens you know lenses. tell you how much I really know about making very deep videos. Um, but no, so I mean there's an investment saying um, which is hire one to hire 10. Um, and that's fundamentally how we tend to build things in general at acquisition.com. The only caveat is that you need the money to hire one that's good enough to hire 10. If you're starting, then you need to h you need to get the most you can out of the one you have.

>> What are your thoughts on writers or ghost riders that take your ideas but then amplify them?

>> Because you write everything.

>> I write everything. every written word that comes from us is I wrote. Um, and that's just because I'm such a stickler with writing. Um, now

>> it's Twitter.

>> All of that content.

>> It's all Twitter.

>> Twitter is everything. Yeah. I mean, I I have like more than a book on Twitter. What's up? Oh, food.

>> Food already.

>> All right. Well, we can eat in a in a moment. I'm gonna finish my thought.

>> Um Um, leverage on writing. The other thing though is that um if someone so the guys who uh so like LinkedIn for example um I do have a writer who writes for LinkedIn but the rules that he's allowed to write on are it has to be exact words that I used. So he looks at videos about topics, grabs the sentences and then puts them into a post. And so it's still my words and that's why it's still me. Um so like we do really well on LinkedIn. Um, but it's the reason is because it's still like source material as soon as like and I just I think ghost writers in general tend to suck. Um, and especially with chat GBT, they just it's got a hundred times worse. And so now everyone's content just looks like it was chat GBTE. And so I think we've kept the personality in it because it's still me talking. And so that's been it. So like that's how we get the the most leverage on on writing. Would you add anything to that?

>> No, you nailed it. I would say for the the previous answer, the pre generalist is kind of what I call them. And they're

>> able to film, edit, and do graphics.

>> Yeah, there you go.

>> Yeah. The weapon, the triple threat. Yeah. So, like Caleb could do all of those things when he came in, but like Caleb's skill set is higher than that, but he was also had the humility to be like, "Dude, let's let's film some shit." And so, my first shoots were with Caleb at the very beginning of as soon as we took it in-house, Caleb was the first hire in house. And um but then that allowed him to get in the weeds and be like, "All right, well, this is what we need here. This is what we need here. This is what we need here." And then started building the team under. All right, eat. Sweet. So, uh where are you guys feeling? You guys have a you guys have a have a preference here? We did talk about ads. Uh we talked about hooks. We talked about um scaling them, which is do more of the thing that is working. Uh and if you're starting, make 50 or so hooks. uh and then see the ones that do work and then do more of those. Um so I can check this off if you guys are good here.

>> Yeah, fine. You got something?

>> We're quick warmed.

>> Yeah.

>> So, uh what's working really well for us right now is free community to a paid workshop. It's a evergreen five-day challenge and one to many offer at the end of that challenge to send to our high ticket

>> inside the free group.

>> Inside the free group. Uh 1,600 members. About 400 people have bought that workshop >> and our first great right. And I think it's we removed a lot of people that weren't doing anything. So that's helped. Um, my question is going from organic to paid, my biggest resistance is like the coldness of it, but I think the community really warms fast. So would it be a good idea to focus on just retargeting our community members to see that funnel ad to the $37 thing first or would you say let's keep pumping volume from ads to the community first and then retarget?

>> So the question is should you add retargeting in or not? Should I start with like just let's run ads to the pixel?

>> You've never run ads before?

>> I've done it for 5D challenges, but we turn them on and turn them off because it was live in the past. Sure. So, it was never something consistent that we've done.

>> And so, the question is to a >> if you want to break back into it, would it be a good idea just to start with retargeting? We have the pixel on. It's been probably warming up.

>> I mean, retargeting almost always is the most profitable advertising that you can do. So, you can start there. Thing is, it's not going to generate a ton of volume. There's like probably what 800 people or a thou 1,200 people haven't seen the thing yet.

>> It's tiny in terms of like audience size. Yeah. So your your budget could be like >> $5 or $10 a day. Like it does it could be tiny. There's just not there's just not a lot of people in that pool.

>> Yeah. So then maybe start there, but really quickly start running ads to the free community and then >> start running. Okay, cool.

>> Makes sense.

>> Want to do the challenge again?

>> Yeah. Um, I've ran him live every month for four years and just kind of thought um I talked to Russell and Russell's like I'm doing it with um I said the same thing once maybe does it twice but he just >> it feels live but it's not obviously. So I just say if I'm saying the same thing every month um why not just test the evergreen. So we done evergreen since March.

>> Did you do it once a month?

>> I was until March and then March we said um you could buy it today start today. We have people have finished it within like 48 hours. The way we make it feel live is my brother is almost like their um accountability coach through us. We give them seven days. If you finish in seven days, you get account support and if they finish it in seven days, they get a VIP day with me once a month that I run. So, I still do that part live and I'll repitch. Um works well, but I think there's a lot of people on the fence still, I think a live maybe quarterly would really shake them off. So, that's something we're considering doing.

>> I know you're gonna go ahead.

>> Go ahead.

>> Uh, no. I mean, I I was just thinking like there's a few things which is like what actually changes when you go from live to evergreen.

>> Yeah. What actually changes?

>> Like you're gonna still do the prize. So like what is actually changing?

>> Um just more time. Well, the biggest thing was like I do two hours a month most on the VIP day, three hours uh opposed to doing like 15 to 20 hours live every month. And for me it was just like let's see if this could work without me being live for that time. I could do other things in that time frame. Are there other things that you could outsource before you outsource that?

>> Yes,

>> you should outsource those.

>> Yeah.

>> Like I will promise you that you not being live will make you less money than you.

>> Yeah.

>> So like this is like you're like I'm about to do this thing that'll make me less money.

>> One upside is like hey >> they could buy it today and go through it. Otherwise like we're advertising two weeks out there. I'll be two weeks before it even starts. And that's the only downside I would say.

>> Dude, there's this other thing you could do. You could do more of them.

>> Do more of them. Yeah,

>> it's just okay. So, we have had two portfolio companies that have had a launch model.

>> And one of them, for example, it was a woman. She was like, you know what? I just want to get out of this. I'm just doing too much. And I was like, listen, you're doing like 15,000 other things that aren't like generating revenue for your business. So, like, what if what if we did those first? And she was like, no, that's too And so then we decided that we were going to not do the live launches. And then what happened was that she went from like a $8 million run rate to like a $5 million run rate. And again, she's like, we didn't change much. We just went to Evergreen. you did everything else the same. There's something to it. There's a lot of like intangibles that get lost and so her revenue dipped. So my suggestion would just be like what are the other things that you're doing that you feel like are competing for that time because at the end of the day, there's only a few people that can grow a business, right? Like do activities that move it forward that grow revenue and grow profits. So that's one of them. And so I think all the other things that you're doing with your time, I would look at getting those off your plate first and then you can revisit how do we make this more scalable? How do we get more out of it? And it might not be that you you do any less of them. It might be that you get them to generate more revenue and then it feels more worth it.

>> In reality, like two hours a day live is like a short workday anyways. And if it's all revenue produc Yeah. C

>> can I sell you guys on something? There's this illusion I I mean actually I think it's like a false illusion that somehow we got here by working less. And I and I can say with absolute confidence I out [ __ ] work everyone here. And that's really weird for me to say, but I can say that with like very sincere confidence that I work more than you guys. I have seen him do it.

>> Yes.

>> Yeah. And I >> But >> like and I'm I I wouldn't really say that unless I really believe that like there was no chance you weren't even close. And that's like if it was a room of like you know a bunch of guys are like 20. I'm like maybe this guy were like there's no shot there's no way that you work more than I do. And so there's this really weird [ __ ] thing on the internet where because we have lifestyle, look at me at the beach, whatever that it somehow like permeates the like the culture in some way and we have this weird illusion that working hard or doing the same thing over and over again is somehow bad. But here's this really crazy thing. When you do the same thing over and over again, you get better, like a lot better. And so it's it's so valuable to get good at the skill that you are doing which is presenting one to many to people in a way that persuades them like very hard to find a higher leveraged skill. Very hard to find an opportunity to even practice that skill because it costs a lot of money to put people in a room to then practice it on. Right? And so it's like the most valuable thing that you're getting reps on. It's like I'm an a I just haven't seen anyone make more money doing it. Right? And so like just there's this this obsession around like this isn't scalable. It's like you know what else also isn't scalable? Being poor.

>> Like something we talk about when we have people in the company who are like people come to me and they're like I've been doing this for six months. Like I just feel like there's no growth left for me. And I'm like interesting. I wonder if Michael Jordan said that after six months of basketball, right? And I'm like, "How long do you think I've been running the same meeting every week? I've been doing one- ones every week." And so, and so I think it is also just like you might see everyone else around you saying like, "Oh, I'm going to go to Evergreen. I'm going to do this." It's like, then they're probably going to end up in a worse spot than you because people who become excellent and people who get to hundreds of millions and billions of dollars, they just do one thing ruthlessly well and they get so good at it that it creates the returns that nobody else can get. And so, I would also just say like unapologetically continue doing the thing even if it becomes boring. But the cool part is that if you do it enough times, you start you get so good at it. Like for example, we both do uh there's like a few speeches that we both done multiple times, right? It's like now it's to the point where like I know when everybody's going to laugh. I know what's going to get people to rate me a 10 out of 10. I don't even have to guess anymore. And it's like for you that's probably what it is with this. And so it's like finding more I would say like joy in the process of making it better rather than looking at doing something different.

>> You've only done it 48 times.

>> Yeah.

>> It's like not that many times.

>> Yeah.

>> So I'll tell you two stories. So, one, so very very close friend of ours, he's a public CEO and we had dinner a month or two ago and uh we were we were talking about calendars. Um and he he's on the road five days a week, lives the nomad lifestyle. Um and uh he speaks at one to two conferences like a day. And in the 24 months since he took over, he took the market cap of the company from like 200 million to over a billion. And he we were then he was talking to us about our schedules and what we do. And he was like they just don't [ __ ] get it. He's like they just don't [ __ ] get it. He's like we just work all the [ __ ] time all day every day at the same thing and everyone thinks there's this secret. He's like, "We just keep doing it and we just keep doing it." And so I will leave you with that. But the second little thing I wanted to walk through is uh this little thing that I got from um Jacob, our sales director.

>> So this is your growth and skills. So probably should go down and kind of There you go. This is your skills. Okay. And this is you now. And you in like six months will be like here when you do something. And you're going to be like, "Wow, look at that. Look at that progress. It's a ton of progress. And then in like two years, you'll be like here." And you're like, "Man, this is a little less progress than this, right?" So that'll take, you know, another two years. And then for you to go from like here to here will take another like five years. But here's the here's the really crazy thing. This is your income. All the outsized returns, if you're looking at this timeline, come from here on years in. And so it's the it's the it's the little itty bitty details. It's hundreds of little details because if it were one thing, everyone would immediately do it. But it's not. And it's hard because even when you have the hundred details, you also have to keep doing all hundred. So there's two elements that make it difficult. One is you have to learn all the hundred details from failing and accidentally get accidentally getting it right sometimes. And then once you do find out the hundred details, never stopping to do all hundred. And so like I'll give you an example. So one of our one of our portfolio companies um uh runs events sporadically. Thank you. And um and so they have a they have an impartial model anyways. And so uh they recently uh had like lower performance and they were calling us up and they're like, "Hey, do we need to change the offer? Is the you know, is the people in the room different? Like what's the like what's the issue?" So we're we're like thinking about completely changing the model because they're like, "You know what? We used up our warm you our warm audience, whatever." And so we're like, was there anything else that changed between the ones when things were going well and the last two or three? And like we kept we kept beating this thing up like over and then finally it was like well this this one key you know employee who's really just on the back end wasn't there just like an ops person. So we're like, but the saleserson was the same like yeah like the pitch was the same. Like yeah the offer was the same like yeah the ads were the same like yeah yeah. I was like so the only thing you found was this ops person. So then we talked to the ops person. We're like, "Well, let's just see." And it turns out what they weren't doing was all the tiny things for the guests when they walked in the door. they weren't greeting them, calling them by name, making sure that all of the staff was going and tagging each of the individual customers, that every customer got touched at lunch, every customer got touched at the breakpoint, so that every single person had at least one or two one-on-one interaction with different people on the staff day one and day two. And so we were like, "Okay, crazy idea. Let's not break the entire [ __ ] business and let's just try to do every single thing that we know has worked 100% for the next one you run. They were like, "Okay, not sure if it's going to work because we're pretty sure it's this whole market trend thing, the warm and cold traffic." And we're like, I was like, "Just [ __ ] flatter me." And then they did it and they beat their all-time record by 50%. in sales and they changed nothing besides just absolutely making sure because this was like when I you know I'm jumping down their throats being like guys you have to tell your team that they have to do all of it like they can't miss any steps because this is a like a pivotal decision for the business if we're going to change the model we got to know that we did everything possible and so the difference between and think about this the cost basis for the event was the same if you can add 50% to revenue and add no extra basis on cost. You usually more than double profit. And so that means that that company had a more than double of profit sitting right there just by doing a hundred details in a row correctly every time. And so I'm like I'm I'm beating this because a lot of you guys do know a lot of things that you should do but don't do them or you don't do them consistently. And I promise you that the difference between beginners and experts is that they just never don't do the basics. and you've heard me say this on podcast and now I'm repeating it and I'm reminding you of it and now it's bad because you've heard it before so I should stop making this like stop should I stop talking about right and so I'm saying this to emphasize the point it's also the reason that great sales people versus good sales people is they never don't do the basics they always build rapport in the beginning they always follow up with prospects they always do five minutes of research before the call they always make sure they're upbeat they have energy they like they practice the overcomes they know what the person's going to come in with they do that on every call. And so like good sales people can get on hot streaks. Great sales people never get cold. So ham stuff we can do that.

>> Yeah. Shoot.

>> I have a question on you know in in I think it's $100 million offers you talk about creating scarcity and you can do that with like cohorts. Sure. you know,

>> um what is a good way to create immediate value also cuz you talked today a lot about giving them a bunch of front-loaded, you know,

>> sure while still creating that we're limited and this is the start date kind of. Those are separate things though. They are separate things but have so basically the bonuses are going to be the things that provide immediate value. The scarcity is how many people get them. Okay? So just see if they're just separate separate vectors. Okay? So if you want to provide more immediate value, try and break down the smallest thing that somebody can immediately do to succeed or see some sort of win. The scarcity is just related to how many people are going to get access to that.

>> Okay.

>> I've never seen sales get lower from giving more value. I've only seen them go higher because a lot of people are like afraid. They're like, "What if I provide too much value?" It's almost like I haven't seen it.

>> Yeah. And I'm not I'm not worried about giving too much. I just want to make sure that we're were like that it didn't you know one didn't take away from it but it makes sense

>> they definitely will not take away from >> oh yeah this is scarcity do this right now work on this until this date

>> yeah urgency is time a function of time scarcity is a function of units bonuses is a function of value just different all of all of those things so if we're talking about like checklist right like the details If an offer has scarcity, it will do better than one that doesn't. An offer has urgency, it'll do better one that doesn't. If it has scarcity and urgency, outperform the one that has only one of them. If an offer has more value, it'll outperform one that has less. If the value is faster, it'll outperform the one that's slower. Right? It's just thinking about these as continuums is each of them is how can I move all of the the the sliders towards the left side of the equation. But like this is how we like review stuff. This is how we think through it. Like, you know, like if we're talking about testimonials, it's like, okay, well, live is better than recorded. Okay, in person's better than virtual, you know, recent is better than old. And like you just keep going through. It's like, okay, what else would it be? Like specific to the person, not specific to the person, with numbers, without numbers. Like you just think about all of these different vectors. And like that's those are the checklists that many of you guys either have in your heads and have never written down or you have written it down, you don't follow it. But I do promise you because I will I will hit back on that point that like you have to learn to to like I I kind of relish the pain of repetition. Like I like knowing that no one will do what I'm going to do because it just feels like I just continually separate the gap between me and the rest of the field. And so to the point of like okay uh yes I also script out YouTube videos. I also tweet all day. I also you know will write stuff that then gets you know reformatted into LinkedIn. will also help the portfolio companies. We also do school days. We also run other work, you know what I mean? Like, and I'm hearing like, I'm I'm doing this one virtual event a month and I really want to make sure I'm scalable. It's like, it's like, [ __ ] I do like a hundred zillion of these. You know what I mean? Like, do one. Like, if you want to make more, do two. Uh, like Taylor Swift's like, I'm not There's got this other blonde chick and I think I can kind of delegate the the singing. I you know, she's kind of like me, you know, like like if you're great, be great and do as much of it as you can. All right. So, what what anything on here jump out at anybody? We talk retention. I think Ryan's got a bunch of stuff. You want to share some stuff on retention?

>> Yeah.

>> Yeah, dude. RIP. So, he does um Yeah. Well, why don't you tell everybody what you do? Um, so I've been solving I run school.com-retention and I just solve churn rates retention helping the movement guys here and work with a bunch of other school games winners like Evelyn, EMA Shreds, Music Money VIP. So most people that have been at these events. Um, I'd say the biggest thing that usually solves a lot of issues is just simplifying what you do. Like you don't have to give them absolutely everything. It's like usually overwhelm is the biggest issue inside of like your school group because I fix the retention inside the community. I don't do anything outside of school. I just build the whole process, the whole system inside of there. So basically go through like all of your classroom content, all of your course stuff and try and just direct it back to it being one like one topic solving one problem and make it very clear to those people because a lot of people just leave because they do overwhelm um inside of your school group. There's a lot of studies um on this from basically a lot of software companies which is for example if you have a software this is what a lot of people do right is they build a software it's like a niche small software and then they're like you know what would be better is if we did more different things and then eventually one day they're a CRM and then they implode and die but until that point basically it's like you have the software and what happens is that and and I know this because I know a lot of software companies we've looked at a lot is that they start to wonder why are people turnurning it's because they started as this one niche software and they said we should add this and then we should add this and we should add this and we should add this. But what happens if you imagine like the user experience and they come in is that they come in and there's all this stuff but they only signed up because they really needed like one fifth of it. And so then every time you're billing that person they see this price which is encompassing all these things but they're only using this piece of it. And so it's funny because if you look at software companies what they do is they can charge the same price, right? and they take away all these other features that they added in and they increase retention because now you're solving one for one which is what they wanted to pay for is what they're getting versus they're paying for this little thing and then all these other things. It's just their perception which is like they come in and it's like okay now I have all these things I'm paying for for this price versus like I'm getting the exact solution to my problem. So for a lot of people it's like they think more is better to add in but it's just solving that one specific problem really well and then charging for that. Let me give you guys something really tactical for this. So, uh, you guys can send out a survey to your or make a poll, uh, inside the school community if you want.

>> I drop one for free on my profile. It's like a feedback loop. Everyone that's done it has like got all their answers that they've been looking for in the school community.

>> Well, we can go over those questions right now so that we can actually do it. Um, I will give you a very valuable one, which is you ask them here's all the stuff. So you have a list of all the all the things you provide and you say if I got rid of everything except for one of these things which one would you want me to keep inside the community? Was like wait like just answer the [ __ ] question. Second question is if I were to get rid of only one thing which thing would you not miss at all? Say whatever language you want but fundamentally that's it. If I only kept one thing what what would be the one thing that you'd be like this is the one thing you have to keep. And if I got rid of one thing that would affect your experience the least, what would it be? And then when you have the the answer from like a hundred people, you can pretty much plot it and see what things no one values and what things everyone value. And the results will often surprise you. I know I was. And I'll tell you, I ran the survey at gym launch and I we really prided ourselves on our IT support because one of the biggest issues for gyms is that they don't know how to detect stuff. And when we ran the survey, the lowest thing was our IT support and it was a 35 person department. And so then we got rid of a 35 person department and nothing happened. Nothing. And I was like, well, wow, that saved us some money and 35 headaches.

>> Some blessings to them.

>> Nothing happened. There were some people that complained, but a lot of people what they end up doing, especially in the beginning, is like you have like two or three people in your community complain. And what happens is like I'll give you an example. So, we had um one of our girls that did billing in gym launch and she's like, "We really need to accept PayPal." I was like, "What?" She was like, "We're missing out a ton on people because we're not accepting PayPal." And I was like, "Oh, man." So, she brought it up at our quarterly meeting. I'm like, "Those must be important, right? It's like the leadership." It's like, "Holy shit." And so, I was like, "Okay, well, how many people?" She's like, "A lot." And I was like, "Okay." And so I was like, "I need numbers, dude." And so she pulls the list and out of the 800 customers that we had at that time, four of them wanted to use PayPal. But a lot of you, because you're so close to your communities, hear those four people and it magnifies because you know them, you know their names, you know something about them, right? You hear them talk on the calls. And then we make decisions based off that that add into this bloat of our what we add in the community, the things that we offer. And so I also just want to put it in perspective, which is like something that we always talk about. We're like data first. Like we have to look at the data. Like is this statistically significant? There's four people out of 800. Should we make this entire move for the whole business? But I know that in the beginning, especially when we had gym launch, we did. It's like if this person wants this thing, do it. If this person wants this thing, do it. It's like adding that shouldn't be a detractor, but it's like if you add so much, it actually becomes the main detractor.

>> And so when you do get the results and so what other questions do you have on your survey? I I'll add those in.

>> Um well, yeah, since like you said data is like everything, like we don't usually make a decision now without looking at the data from our communities. Um because what what I found was we should do like these five or six different things. But before you do that, let's ask the community first and then the members respond back with everything that I

>> What are those five or six things?

>> Um, oh, it's it's usually it's like relevant to like their community, but like usually a start here process. Okay.

>> I'm I'm a massive belief that like you should always have your start here post pinned and then cycle to other posts because if you don't think about a member joining like if a member joined right here right now and no one's active or no one's hitting them up, if they don't have a start here process, then they're lost and they don't know where to go. They don't like if they've never been on school before. So, always have a start here process. always ask like a first question which is like to just to break the barrier of entry into your community. Not like tell us the biggest problem. Like we ask like one of our questions like what's your favorite color jelly bean just to like break the cycle of what happens that they comment that below and then usually we cycle them through into the the first classroom like a start here classroom which either tells them about school tells them about how the community runs your product and like reiterates what that promise was that you delivered at the start like just reiterate it again. Then usually on your first call with people you do the same thing again. you remind them why they joined in the first place and then you give them like an action step to go through and then usually after that they're pretty used to school used to using it. Um that's one big thing and then one of the biggest things that a lot of people miss is actually building it for the mobile experience. Everyone builds on desktop, builds out their classrooms and forgets that a lot of users on school actually just download it from their Instagram ads, Facebook ads and so they usually go through a lot of graphics are like way too small text wise even on laptop. So like that experience needs to be considered like go into your school community you'll be like oh [ __ ] I can't even read that like that text in my graphic that I'm using. Um so that's a big one.

>> I'll also double on this from a uh from a conversion rate perspective. Uh if you look at your about pages, I would strongly recommend looking at them through mobile. And uh I'll bet you if you just optimize it for mobile since the majority, especially you guys who are running ads and everybody at home who's watching this, um if your profile like this is I mean this is huge on YouTube for example, like when we make our thumbnails, we run it through mobile first so we can see what it looks like. And nine times out of 10 when a graphics guy is making a thumbnail, it's this big on his screen in Adobe and he's like, "Oh, this is thing is beautiful." But you can really just see like two to three words if it's this big on your phone. And we have max three v three visual elements max within any kind of thumbnail. And so I will bet dollars to donuts that that will also uh carry over for page conversion for about pages. And so a lot of you guys have like I've seen um I mean some some of you guys the like the testimonials that you guys have on your about pages they're they're so small on mobile they're almost impossible to read.

>> So when you do that kind of stuff not only do you can you have it like if it's too big to for them to actually read then it's like highlight the part and then write the text of the the kind of the mini quote on top of it so that it so it appears more more relevant. So I'm going to break what he said down a little bit more. So the onboarding call itself. Do you want to talk about this? I mean it's more your hat than mine.

>> Yeah. Well, I was thinking about it in a different way. So, we'll see.

>> Yeah. Everything after the sale is really just not me. But

>> yeah,

>> what I just want to highlight so that you guys understand is just um in business talk. So, like having the start here pinned post and having the first question, this is like when you're looking at getting somebody into community, the first thing you want to do is activate them. I don't know what the verbiage you guys do use that word, right? Okay. So, activating them. And so when you activate somebody, it's like within any company, it's like you need them to take an action after the sale. And so people who activate faster are more likely to stay and be engaged, right? And so that's what I see when you talk about this post is like that's what that does, right? And same with the first question. Now, this piece right here, when you say goal and then homework, what was that?

>> Well, I was going to explain it.

>> Okay.

Go for it. I don't know.

So on the onboarding call, you typically want to relate why they're here back to the goal that they originally started with. And I said, I know that sounds like obvious and simple, and yet your team is not doing it. And so it's like, "Hey Sarah, you signed up because you were trying to insert desired outcome. Um, we're going to help you insert desired outcome through these next steps that are going to occur."

And so we found this out on the Gym Launch side, which was when we related it back to the goal that they had. So let's say, uh, you know, they wanted to make money, more money with their gym, whatever. But usually there's a reason they wanted to make more money with their gym. They moved to a better neighborhood. They want to support their wife. They want to retire. Whatever it is, right? There's something that they wanted. And then we said, "Great. We're going to help you achieve this real goal through this monetary goal by doing this stuff." And by tying the actions we needed them to take to the big outcome that they actually wanted, we got way more people to take it.

But from the business perspective, more people ascended, lower churn, lower cold feet and drops, dropouts of like false starts. We got way less of all that stuff. And that was when we transitioned from like what we used to call the handoff, where we basically just tossed the lead uh to the onboarding team and they just like cleaned up the mess, to the handshake, where the salesperson has notes on the customer and then gives those notes to the onboarding rep. The onboarding rep sounds like a genius by being like, "Hey Sarah, uh, I know your husband John and he's working as a teacher, right? And you want to take your gym from here to here." And they're like, "How do you know?" It's like, "Cuz I read the notes from the first guy." But you look so much tighter. And then that creates a prediction for them of what the rest of their experience is going to be. And that impression never really changes. It kind of becomes the frame through which they consume all of the stuff that you deliver for them. And so like having an amazing, magical first experience just completely elevates the rest of their experience. And also having a really tragic and terrible one, no matter it's like, it's so much harder to dig yourself out of a terrible first experience. And so nailing onboarding is something that you can almost immediately do to drop churn in any business. Like if you only did one thing from here to increase your or decrease your churn, it would be onboard.

With um, as I'm understanding it here, and I think I might have missed it, but you said first question, which I understand is light, but it sounds like you have a questionnaire, an onboarding questionnaire of some sort. Fill this out before your onboarding call. What would be a sales call is that lots of questions that are getting?

So you, you're doing on the call on the call. That's why.

So the guys have to take notes. You do not want the customer to repeat themselves. And so I look at it and like I would score my team in a negative if they ask something on the sales call and they ask the same thing on the onboarding call. That person immediately is like, "What the [ __ ] is this [ __ ]?" Right? It's like, why am I going to repeat myself because you didn't do the work? So we want to, as much as we can, take the work off of their plate.

Gotcha. Yeah. And so in the scenario we have, we have a buyer, you know, a buyerly booking a call. Would you recommend putting any sort of questionnaire in between to get?

You can absolutely qualify leads better by having applications. You guys probably know that. The I would say the thing that makes this way more powerful is that if you have someone do pre-work that you reference that pre-work. Like, sounds wild, but like, "Hey, turn, you said you have these three things, and is that true?" They're like, "Wow." And so, um, a good buddy of mine exited his software company for a big oodles of money. And, um, he always talks about this. He's like, "It has to be magic." He kept, he always repeats that term. I was like, "What do you mean by that?" Like, one day he was like, "It means it has to happen without them doing anything. He's like, "It has to work." And so, uh, he's on like the bleeding edge of software stuff and he's like, "It has to like, he's like, you really want the software." He's talked about software, but it really just comes down to product. He's like, "You really want it to be like Wi-Fi where like it just works." Like no one like anyone logged into the like the portal for Cox Internet or what like no, you just it works. And so when we think about these experiences that we're creating, because this is what we're doing is creating an experience for a customer, is if they filled out an app that it feels like magic when you bring that back up to them, right, later. Now, if you bring it, if you don't, then it's not magic. It's like, "Oh, well, duh. You just asked me and now you're saying it back to me, right?" And so it's the again, it's the hundred little details. And I'm telling you guys, you will be floored by how much more money this will make you. This is not like a like a woo woo feel good like, "Hey, customer service is important." Like it's not that. Like this will make you a shitload of money and it'll make you feel better because you'll feel like you're actually doing a good job because you are.

So I'll give you a tangible example. Is like for when we host the workshops once a month and then when we have our portfolio companies who have like a workshop or an event model, um, something I always do with my team is that I find, say we have a hundred people that are attending. Out of that, I'm going to have a team of say, 10 people. And like, "All right, I want you to remember these 10 names and details. You remember these 10, and these 10, you remember these 10, these 10. Great. I want you to find these people and bring up, call them by name, bring up their business." I even do it like, you know, we had one yesterday. I stand on stage and I was like, "All right, Brian, you have an ice cream shop. Okay, this is the problem that you were talking about, and here's how I think you can solve it." So, it's like, because the most punishing thing you can do to a customer is have them do something for you, provide you with information, and then not use that information for something.

Understanding?

It's like it's I always look, I call my with my team, I'm like, it's a tieback. You know what I mean? It's like you're always tying back anything that they've given you at all, whether it be verbal or not. You know, we had somebody uh yesterday who uh had someone pass away and so we all were like, "What could we do?" He's like, "Okay, let's get a card." You know, it's just like all those little things. It's like constantly trying to tie back things that your community is giving you. You know, in Gym Launch, for example, um, we had people who anytime we had birthdays, we had anniversaries, we had deaths, we had marriages, we had divorces, we would send them something for those things. And it would be something from the whole team. And sometimes it would be to the degree that like we had somebody whose father passed away and we paid for the whole thing. Paid for the entire funeral. It was not cheap. It was like $15,000. But we're like, he didn't have the money. He was talking to us in the community about how stressful it was because of his family, whatever. And we're like, "What could we do to go above and beyond for this person to show that this isn't just a transactional relationship? This is a, I would say, like transformative relationship, right? Like this is something we're in for the long haul." Um, and it's just like a matter of like, you know, you guys are all just starting in your communities and such. At least a lot of you are. But like, what kind of person you want to be? You know, what, what reputation do you want to have with yourself? And like, for me, it's less about the product and what they bought, but it's about who I want to be when I am alone with myself at the end of the day. And like somebody tells me that someone died and they don't have the money and I do, it's like, well, [ __ ] I want to help that person, you know? And that is what seeps through to your team. And if they see that you're willing to do that, then they will also be willing to do it. But I can also say like, for all of you getting your team to do all these little tiebacks, they won't do any of these [ __ ] tiebacks if you don't do them too. And the thing is is like, where these tiebacks, where I do them the most, for example, is with my team. So like, if you guys are trying to build these communities eventually, what's going to happen is the community gets so big that you yourself cannot be the one managing all the tiebacks. So what happens is you build a community within your team, which then builds a community within your community. And like that's how Gym Launch got to be one of the biggest communities that existed to this day in that niche. It's like we treated the team like a community, and then they treated the customers like a community.

Do you want to do the why, the right?

Yeah. So, when it comes to the onboarding call, this is my structure that I use for it. And then just a little tidbit right here. But it's basically the structure is like, why are you here? And the why is what we loop to the roadmap. So, the first thing that we're going to show the customer when they come in is one, we always reference something that they gave us on the on the sales call. So, it's like, I had a customer service rep, um, and she gave me a great idea, which was like, every time she got on the call, she would make this joke. She would be like, "Hey, Jerry, like I love that you spoke to Sean. He was saying great things about you. Like, I was looking at your business and you did X, Y, and Z and blah blah blah." And she would go through the whole thing and be like, "Oh my god, I'm so sorry. I didn't even introduce myself. How awkward." Same thing every time with every [ __ ] customer. And it broke the ice and it tied back to the sale. It was like the best script that I've ever used. Um, but then she goes into, "Okay, I want to tell you why we're here today because why the [ __ ] am I taking your time away from your business for a whole hour or 30 minutes to get on this [ __ ] call right now?" And then we use the roadmap, which for Gym Launch, for example, it's like, "All right, you're here. We're going to do the next six weeks, which is going to get you here, where finally what you're going to have is you're going to have a full gym. You have customers coming in, you have lead generation, all these things." Then what's going to happen is you're going to be like, "Oh my god, I think I need a more team. I think I need more people. How do I retain people?" And we're going to go, "Okay, now we're going to focus on retention." And then once you nail retention, then we're going to say, "Okay, what needs to happen now?" It's like, "Well, [ __ ] I have all these sales coming in. I'm keeping all the customers. Now I need to build a team." And then you're like, "Shit, now I got to build a team." And so then we're going to take you here. You're going to go to our next level program called Gym Lords. Then we're going to teach you how to build a team operations and a gym that doesn't involve you to scale the whole thing. And then you're going to be like, "What the [ __ ] do I do with my life? I'm just sitting here. I'm not working." Blah blah blah. And then we're gonna be like, "Okay, cool. So maybe we're gonna teach you then how to sell your gym." And so that's the roadmap that we paint for them. And then we show them where you are, right? And then you can pre-see along that roadmap all the upsells you have as well if you offer those within your community, which I think is like huge.

Huge.

On, for example, when we had the Gym Launch and in the very beginning, this is like 2016, me and Alex taking sales calls, right? One thing that I would say on every sales call is I'd be like, they're like, "You want $16,000 for this?" And I was like, "Man, if you think that's a lot, imagine what you're going to pay me in four four months." And they were like, "What are you what am I what?" And I was like, "Yeah, you're gonna pay me $40,000 in four months." And they were like, "For what?" And I was like, "The next program."

And they're like, "Well, why?" I was like, "Because this one works, so then you're gonna want more." I We would say it every time. Always seems.

I'd be like, "Oh, dude, this is my low barrier offer." I was like, "This is just for you to come in." I was like, "The main game is the 40K." I was like, "That's what we're really trying to get to." I was like, "So, we just got to go make you some money real quick." And then I was like, "Then I'm going to say the real thing." And they're like, the thing is is that when they hop on that second call, when they're like, "Sure, it all happened exactly the way you said." I mean, I got overwhelmed. I got more leads than I could possibly handle and I made more money in the month than I ever possibly thought was possible. And I was like, "Yeah, ready to give all that again to play the play the game again." And they were like, "Yeah." And I was like, "All right." But we seated it on the first call. It also decreases the pressure on the first one. So you're like, "Oh, this isn't like, oh, this like basically it creates a foregone conclusion of like, of course, we're going to get you through this. We'll get you some leads. You're going to make sales. You're going to switch to our model. You'll make more money. We do this all the time." Uh, but the main thing that I want you to do is sign the three-year agreement with us for $40,000 a year. That's what I really want you to do. So, this is just my way of just proving very quickly that I'm very good at what I do. So, that's the roadmap, right? And that's where we're taking something from the sale and then we're preceding what's going to happen next. This is key. This is what increases upsell and ascension. I want to say like for us when we implemented the specifically the visual roadmap, not like [ __ ] just telling them, but having a slide deck that had a visual roadmap that we like put some graphics on, um, that increased ascension rates by like 12 to 15%. Which especially when you're selling.

In absolute amounts, to be clear.

Yeah. Yeah. Which when you're selling.

Like 70% like big big percentage.

Yeah. Yeah. Sorry, we speak in different math terms. Um, so that's the first piece and I think that's the most important. The second piece is the what, which is like, okay, what do you do now, which is like now that they're in there, tell them what they need to do step by step. And so we had for them a checklist. I know it sounds ridiculous because they're like business owners that are doing some of them making a million dollars a year, but we're like, "Here's your first 30-day checklist." And we're literally like, "You're going to check that [ __ ] off." And sometimes eventually we moved it to it's in a portal, but we always had a checklist of like, these are the things that you need to do in the first 30 days. So it's kind of like if you, if you hire a new employee, right? You're like, "Here's all the whole thing. You're going to do this whole first year and like where your career could go." And you're like, "Okay, but the first 30 days, these are the things we want to do." Because especially in the first 30 days, that's when you want to handhold people. That's when you want to give them the very specifics and you're going to give them more help. And I want to be really clear. You make it clear to them that this is just for the first 30 days. And if you're clear about that expectation that that's just for the first 30 days that you're going to give them more explicit instructions, then they will be one, they will be better customers. They will last longer. They will stay longer. They will upsell more likely than the rest of the customers. But they also won't expect it to happen the rest, the entire. Because the only mistake people make is they don't tell them. This is like I used to call it like a 30-day jump start. I'm like, "This is your 30-day jump start call." And so we're just getting you jump started for the first 30 days. So that's the second piece. Tell them exactly what to do step by step. And then you tell them who they need to go to. So a lot of people come into your communities and they're like, they know who you are, but there might be other people in your communities. It's like, "Who the [ __ ] do you go to for what? Where do you need to go if you need to talk about billing? Where do you need to go if you need to talk to somebody about, I don't know, [ __ ] dog died? I don't know, therapy. Whatever it is, right? Where do you go if you need to talk about this?" You might have different subject matter experts in your community. You need to direct people where to go. Otherwise, this creates a [ __ ] mess for you guys because it's like, "What?"

No, I'm, I'm gonna schoolify this real.

Oh, yeah. Go ahead.

So, for for y'all, there's if you have subject matter experts, probably you don't. Um, within your community right now, but you do have the tabs for the topics of all of your communities. And so, you can at least say like, "Hey, if you have a sales question, when you put the question in, drop, put the Dropbox on that says sales." Or when you, when you have a win, which you will, uh, put it under the wins column. And so this is just a way of basically helping you pre-triage the questions that come in. So they know where, uh, where to go and then your team can also know where to look for those questions.

One thing that Evelyn does really well is like an urgent category. She's insane with how much she like delivers. Like she Loom videos, everything, but she has an urgent category. Then once she's answered the question, she recategorizes the post into the the question it's meant to be in.

Her way of doing support tickets.

Support tickets inside of the community. It works really well, too. It's like such a good way cuz if a member posts like a really like good question that you know you definitely should respond to and you're not following them, you're not notified in School. So, it's like if you don't check your phone today, I'm sure someone's asked a question in someone's community, which is like, you really should answer that or they might leave or they might be, they need that extra help today. If you have that category, you can just filter and it just it solves all the urgent issue problems in your community.

Isn't it so much better when Leila's here, right?

So, just want to explain churn real quick. Okay, so this is something I use with my team all the time to explain why these two things are important. And so when you guys are thinking about your communities, there's the results that you get people, which especially when a business is smaller and first starting, this is usually the main thing they focus on is results. But on the other end of this axiom, you have experience. Those two things are what create retention. And so I want to walk you guys through this. So, if you have no experience and you have uh no results or really shitty of both of those things, you get the highest amount of churn. Right? Now, if you have great results and you have low experience, you get unpredictable churn. So, imagine this, right? It's basically what's happening is that they get the result, right? Have you guys ever gone, Oh, let's think of something like you go to a teeth whitening place, right? To get your teeth whitened and you go there and your teeth are whiter when you leave, but the entire time you're there, it's like the chair's uncomfortable, the people are [ __ ] mean to you, all this stuff. So, it's like basically what happens is that you don't know why people churn because the moment that they find something better with a better experience, they leave because all they're looking for is like, I was in discomfort the whole time. I got the result, but I didn't like it when I was going through it. Right? So, that's how they feel when you don't have experience, which a lot of people don't. Now, on this side, maybe you have a really great experience, but you have low results. This actually is going to be, you're going to have higher retention here than you would here.

Which is wild.

This is wild. People leave people. Customers are twice as likely to leave due to um low customer experience than they are product or price. So people are more likely to leave because of a bad experience than they are that it's overpriced or it's a bad product. Think about everything that you ever canceled. There's usually a moment that happens and you're like, "Fuck this place." No, like that's what happens, right? And so it's just how many times can we prevent that from happening as a baseline? And then the equal opposite of that is like, you have one of those and you're like, "Dude, I'm never leaving this place." You want as many of those. And so Disney calls it tragic and magic moments. And it takes 39 tragic, sorry, 39 magic moments to make up for one tragic moment. So a huge part of it is prevention of negative, even more than, you know, the amazing positive thing. But of course, you want to stack as many amazing positives as you can. But people remember negative so much more uh than all the things that you've done that are positive.

Exactly. And so here is where I look at it like it's the relationship, no results. They have a relationship with you. Some of you might have this as a strategy, right? You just provide like a great experience but you don't actually get people in the community results. And so a lot of communities rely on this, which is like, you've got the relationships but you don't have the results, right? And so like, for example, uh, there was like a, a mastermind that people were trying to get us in. This was like seven years ago. And so they're like, "We want you to come to this one event." So, we went to one event and they were like, "Are you guys like going to stay? It's blah blah blah." And I was like, "Oh, how's this going to make more money?" And and they were like, "What do you mean?" I was like, "How long have you been here?" And they were like, "Two years." I was like, "What was your revenue two years ago?" And they were like, "You know, whatever. 20 whatever million." And I was like, "What is it now?" They're like, "20 whatever million." I was like, "So, it doesn't work." And they were like, "Well, all the relationships that." And I was like, "Yeah, I don't give a shit." So, left. Now, here where you have really great experience and you have really great results is the word of mouth zone. That is where people start to tell their friends about it because not only are they getting what they paid for, but they're getting more than that. They're getting a great experience. They've built relationships. And so for all of you that maybe come in and right now you're just focused on the results, if you want to make it easy to get customers, that's where you have to focus on the experience piece.

Are we upgrading?

No, you're good.

Everybody focuses on these because this is what keeps get gets people to buy and that's why everyone here is a marketer and that's how everybody thinks is like, I got to just promise and results and all that. But this is what gets people to keep buying. And so we have this saying in the gym world which is, "They come for the bikini, they stay for the community." They come for the results, they stay for the experience. So, when we're talking about all these moments where you're like tying back in and you're threading that needle for the customer, you know, like I talk about this stuff a lot and I think people like, "Oh, Leo soft." No, this stuff makes you money. This is why we do it because this is also where you get the word of mouth and that makes everything in your business so much easier because otherwise you're just going to create a churn factory. And if, if as we're going through this, I'm sure some of you are like, "Man, it feels like there's just like a lot of details, like a lot of little things that all have to be working." And yeah, that's why big businesses make more money because they do all of those things every time. And it's like, man, that's going to take me a while to get all this stuff in place. Like, yeah, that's why big businesses take a long time to build.

Oh, the little clicks on the dial.

On the dial. Yeah.

So for you guys that are wondering how do you operationalize this? There's something that I started doing in Gym Launch and I started doing it first with my team because that was just how I was thinking about it and I started doing it with uh community, which is what we call uh wow moments and then we had our wow policy, right? And so what this was is that, and guys, if you don't have anybody on your team, then you do this.

So this is your policy with yourself.

No, I mean, I.

No.

In the beginning of Gym Launch, I have have a picture of myself and I am literally hand packing presents for customers. Like, and we were at that point making like, um, a lot of money, almost $30 million a year, but we just couldn't scale up fast enough, right? And so what I did is I hand wrote letters to all, it was like our top 50 customers and I found all of them gifts and I sent them all out, hand packaged. And that is what we, I, I call now is wow moments, right? And so what I basically turn this into is, um, where can you spot moments? Like every time that somebody in your community has like a tragedy happen, for example, like I know that sounds ridiculous or like whatever, like tragedy or like something bad happens, that's an opportunity for you to be the person to create a wow moment for them. So for example, um, one of our uh employees worked at Disney and at Disney, this woman came in and she had a dinner reservation at 9:00 p.m. She showed up at, I think it was like 10:15. And she was super late for the dinner, obviously. And they're like, "We actually close at 10, ma'am. So like, we can't serve you." She starts crying. They're like, "Why are you crying?" And then she's like, "I came here because I was actually supposed to have this dinner with my husband because it was our 30th anniversary, but he died six months ago." And I was late because I was in my hotel room crying and I didn't want to come here with like makeup dripping down my face. So, what did they do? They called, they were like, "Guys, what are we going to do in this moment?" And so, they called the chefs back in and they made her like a five-star dinner. They brought in violinists. They brought in fireworks. And they completely changed it for her. And so if you think about it, like people always ask me like, "Well, how do I know when to create this moment?" The best time to create that moment is when something bad happens. And sometimes when something bad happens is when you [ __ ] up. I'll give you an example. So, um, we had like, I said, told you guys, so we've been running like a couple times a month these workshops.

Can I pause you real quick? Are you noticing point example, point example, example?

All right.

I didn't know I was doing.

You're doing great.

Um, is that we had uh, basically a mess up in our CRM. And so what happened in our CRM is that it opened up a date for an event that didn't exist. And so what happened was, uh, one evening, my head of customer success called me and she was like, "I don't want to freak you out. I'm handling it." She's like, "But we have seven people from out of the country here for an event tomorrow." And I was like, "We don't have an event tomorrow." And she was like, "Right." And I was like, "Fuck." And so, you know, everyone's saying, "What should we do?"

I flew from Israel like through a war zone.

Yeah. Yeah. That was a real, real story. And so, it's like in that moment, I was like, "Oh, [ __ ] Okay, what are we going to do?" It's like, "Well, if I want to make them not want to [ __ ] kill me, I will refund them, right? That is the obvious thing that we do." And that's where a lot of people stop. They want to refund them, right? And say, "I'm sorry." Okay? So, let's not just refund them. Let's also pay for their flight and hotels, right? Because their flight and hotels, they incurred those costs. So it's like there's the hard cost, there's all the ancillary costs that they incurred due to my [ __ ] right? So I don't want to just cover the hard cost, but also all the ancillary costs as well. And then the next thing was like, I thought to myself, how could I turn this into better than what they wanted in the first place? How could I take what they came to be at this event with 100 people and how could I make it better than that event? And I was like, "Well, what if we invited them to our headquarters and they got to spend the day with our whole portfolio team with nobody else? It's just them. And we would circulate them around our different portfolio team members and then they would get to deep dive into sales, marketing, etc. Right? What if we could tell them that they could use the gym? And so when they're here, they could get a workout in, etc. And then what if the rest of the day they get to go hang with Alex and Ila and go get dinner at a really nice restaurant?" And every single person that left made a post talked about the best experience of their life. And they literally at the dinner, every single person looked at us and they were like, "Thank you for [ __ ] up because this was 10 times better than the event that I signed up for. At least it's better than what I hoped for." And so when I talk about creating these wow moments, the biggest opportunity you guys have is like if you're somebody that [ __ ] up all the time, you have more opportunity than anybody to create these wow moments because you've created them for the customer. And so it's basically what we talk about is taking.

And you don't have to try, those will happen organically.

Yeah.

Do you want to do? Oh, yeah, do that one. I'll.

Yeah.

Give this other thing that.

And so what we're doing right here is taking somebody who is a detractor and turning them into a promoter. So what a lot of people think is that you take somebody who is a neutral and you can turn them into a promoter, right? That's what most people think. Like I have to take somebody who's just like chill. Like they're a good community member, but like they're not like a raving fan, right? And I can turn them into a promoter. But actually, the best promoters come from detractors, which are where you [ __ ] up or where you did something completely wrong and then you make it so right that they can't help but tell people about it. And so a lot of people have this belief that it's like, oh, I've got to have all this like goodwill standing with somebody in order to, you know, create that moment. But you don't. And so for all of you that keep [ __ ] up and doing bad [ __ ], you have opportunity there. It's the moral of the story.

I thought you were going to do the um, you have that, I don't know if you have a visual for it, but I'm trying to see Laya so she can say she said it better than me. But basically, when you when you mess up and then you make it right, you still have them.

Yeah. There you go.

Yeah. So, for example, in that moment, right, where we [ __ ] up and HubSpot is a [ __ ] dick and released that date, right? So, I had somebody who was at what I call a zero, right? So, they're in the zero zone. They're a neutral. HubSpot [ __ ] up and inviting them and then they finding out that there's not an event takes them to, let's just say a negative five. So, now they are a negative five. They're a detractor. Me refunding them takes them probably to a negative -2. Me paying for their flight and hotels that were the ancillary cost incurred takes them to a zero. Now I've done all this stuff and this is what most companies do and they just take you to a neutral. So they take you back to where you were prior to the event. You're definitely never going to [ __ ] tell your friends about it and you're probably never going to buy [ __ ] from them again because you're like, "If I could find somebody that doesn't [ __ ] me over, that would be ideal." And so if you want to get them to be a promoter, it's great because you've already got the momentum in place, which is when you say, "Okay, now I'm going to let them come to my headquarters, right? Which takes them to, let's say, a one. I'm going to let them talk to my team. Oh [ __ ] Wow, that's good. That's a five. I'm going to take them to dinner with just Alex and Leila. Now I brought them to a 10, which is a positive 10, which is a promoter." And so every time that I'm thinking through something bad that's happened, by the way, I use the same frame with my team. So, like it's the same as with an employee as it is with somebody else. If I [ __ ] up something that [ __ ] up my employee's day, like I think of the same framework. Um, you want to make sure that you're not just taking them back to a zero, but you're taking them into the promoter zone. And promoters tell about on average, um, five people, right? I would say social media changes all this, but they tell about five people about what happened. Detractors tell 10 to 15. So, it's really important that we get people to be promoters.

Was that it?

That was it.

True.

Does anyone have any examples of wow moments in their community? I swear getting to level two is a big one for school people. They get the dopamine of getting those five points. They're hooked. So, get people to level two really quick.

Sure. You have.

That as part of your retention checklist?

Yeah. Yeah. That plus labeling as well. Like I just, I just had a client in retention. I'm now a partner in their community and they teach people how to make money with AI and I hopped on to the, I did a call with them explaining how it worked. And then I was like, "AI Creative Specialist." And I was like, "[ __ ] it. That's all we call these people from now on." So as soon as I hopped on the next call, I was just like, "You're an AI Creative Specialist." Like, and just drilled it into them like that's who you are. Change your bio. Tell your mom, tell everyone that that's who you are now. And everyone's like, way committed. But like, level two, like leveling up, getting people to to take action. Usually if you can build a good start onboarding process, you can actually design it in a way that they just level themselves up organically. Um, or on the first call, onboarding call, group call, sales call, coaching call, all of it. Just consistently remind them to post and like other people's stuff and engage. I have one rule, like everyone needs a flame emoji in my group or like you're not respected. So like, like, and it's like, every single member has a flame emoji now. So yeah, if you, if you want them to achieve something or do something, you just ask them to do it or lead by example and do it yourself.

How many of you guys use swag within the communities?

Swag.

Swag.

Merch is what the Gen Z calls it.

Clothing. Yeah.

How many of you guys use that? High hands, not T-Rex hands. Okay. Because something that we did when we were in, uh, Gym Launch and something that, um, we do even now in our portfolio companies that have this is basically when someone joins, there's a certain kind of swag they get, right? And so I understand this is a cost. I, I'm happy to incur the cost because I think it's worth it. So if you look at, for example, we're talking about the onboarding, we're talking about immediate value. When you immediately ship somebody a t-shirt, it's immediate value. Right now, the cool thing is that if you have levels in your community, which I'm assuming you're talking about, I'm not.

Yes.

But, um, is basically what we did in Gym Launch is that we had, if you're in Gym Launch, you get this t-shirt, right? If you then move into the second level where you're in Gym Lords, you get this swag, this t-shirt. It's like an elevation of that swag. And so for you guys, I think thinking through too, like there's so many ways that you can gamify this. Um, and I think doing something like that with the swag is one that everybody here can probably do pretty easily. Like there's so much drop [ __ ] stuff. You don't even have to pay for it yet. Like, you know what I mean? You don't have to get inventory. Um, but then the cool part with that is that it's also free advertising for you guys. And so, for example, like what we did at Gym Launch is that we didn't just make swag when we had people ascend into the top level. We didn't just make swag for them. We made baby swag and we made kids swag. We made blankets. We actually had pacifiers for Gym Launch.

Everything.

Little mustaches because I had a mustache.

Yeah. With a little mustache and it said, "Little Gym Launch" on it. And so I thought of it in two ways, which is like one, it creates that like immediate value for a customer. Two, it creates that aspiration of wanting to get to the next level and that exclusivity. And then three, it's free advertising, right? And then if you get their whole family wearing it, this is something I always think to myself, which is like, how do I make it to the dinner table? So, how do you get your customers to talk about you at dinner? Swag is such a great way to do that because then they're like, "What's this t-shirt you've got?" And the thing is is that a lot of people are like, "Oh, my customers canceled because of this reason." Who has more influence over your customers than anybody? Who do you think here? Like, we have the most influence on each other most likely for decisions, right? So, say I joined some women's empowerment group, which I wouldn't do. Um, but if I did and then I could, don't talk about it with Alex, right? I don't say much about it. When he hears one thing, I'm like, "Yeah, that girl's a bitch." Right? And then he's like, "You're paying how much for that?" And I'm like, "It's this." And he's like, "You should [ __ ] quit that shit." Right? And so I'm always thinking about how do I make it to the dinner table in a positive way, right? So that whether it be my customers or whether it be my employees, one, they have something to prompt a discussion with other people around them who have the most influence over them. And two, when they get that prompt, they have something good to say. Because it's funny, the amount of people that quit a job or quit a program because of their closest circle of friends, family, or spouse, it's oftentimes the people that are surrounding them that cause them to stay in and out of the community, not even just themselves.

Something to think about.

We did, we did, we just went to the School HQ and Sophie designed like a bunch of like personal gifts for everyone there. Like, I'm a paying client for School. Yeah.

Like memberships. But then we got like Sam a really weird blanket, but like so many people have been posting it, but Sam wanted to take that home to like give to his kids. So like making it like into people's like spaces and stuff through like a very personal element, personal touch on like the crew at School. Yeah. Yeah. We had tons of baby pictures of babies wearing Gym Lord mustaches and uh.

No, we really did a lot.

Even that, like I would send them two t-shirts and then I would say, "Give one to your spouse." And then it was funny because just the act of, "I gave you one to give to your spouse," I can't tell you the amount of, because they're gym owners, their spouses who would be running races, participating in some sort of physical activity and they would take a picture of themselves wearing the hat or the t-shirt that we gave that was the extra for them because they're like, "Wow, that's so nice of them that they would give that even though I'm not part of the community." I think for for the lower cost communities, you can easily use those kind of merch bonuses at like level two, level three, you know, because if we know, so this is where this is where the data gets really interesting, bringing it from soft back to hard. Um, from just the many conversations we've had at these, most people's churn happens at level one. Like the vast majority of your churn members, if you look at your churn list, is just level one people, right? And so it's like, what do I need to do? Like everything that we can do to just get them to get that little like put as much incentive to get to level two or if you know it's level three, whatever, but this big jackpot there. Uh, and I think that that's kind of like your version of the fire emoji. But then if they take that, they get to level two, they take a picture of it, they post inside of the group, it's like now it's like a, it's a closed loop of they're now one of us, right? They're now part of our community. They're they have that label that whatever we've ascribed them to. So for us it was, I'm a Gym Lord, right? Like I'm not just a normal gym owner. I'm a Gym Lord. And Gym Lords have these new higher standards that they live by and they also don't quit what they start.

They follow up with their commitments. Now, part of that is continuing to pay, right? But it's also, like, because obviously we came from the physical world, like, you know, all the physical and a lot of gym owners enjoyed, you know, that that association.

Hopefully, I feel like we hit retention pretty right.

He has a question.

Yeah. I just wanted to leave a comment. Like, I didn't realize how powerful this school merch was until I started wearing it, and it was like, I get stopped often, and people are like, "Oh, that's Alex Harzi's company. What, uh, what is it about?" And then, like, all of a sudden, now they get this one-on-one pitch because I'm wearing the merch.

Yeah.

And it happens like, one out of every three times I'm wearing it. So, it's, it's actually a pretty powerful tool.

Yeah.

I kept using it as an opener for my girlfriend. So, I told her to stop wearing it. My dad wears acquisition, lead magnet, as a dude magnet.

No, it's great.

Does anyone have anything else on retention?

Let's check. Get it. Sweet. All right. Um, merchant processing.

Yeah, that was a, that was a. Well, I'll tell you this. Uh, Stripe, you know, has been pretty public about they're no longer supporting information and coaching businesses. Um, so that's already changed. That's already happened. Um, what that, what I, what I translate that as is that they will now more freely kick off, uh, coaching and education and information businesses than they were before. And so it's more that, uh, they, they want to keep making money, but they also want to decrease their risk. And so coaching, education, etc., businesses are risky. Um, one of the benefits that School has, obviously, is that we consolidate all transactions across all communities and typically low-ticket, uh, high-volume transactions are the lowest, uh, risk transactions. And so, um, we are approved for, obviously, the use case that we process money for. And so with the advent or the new, uh, annual feature, it's only going to make it easier to process money on School, uh, versus others. And that was more for the high-ticket, you know, when we start processing, you know, hundreds of thousands a week, just kind of, what, what companies have you used that you have good experience?

It's, I think it's less about companies. It's more about being really transparent with the person who's processing, like stating the facts and telling the truth about your business, and then accepting the risk, uh, price that they're going to associate with it. So, when I say price, like merchant processing is not all created equal. Um, and so there are fees associated with higher risk, um, transactions. And so they will charge five or six or percent, and some of them will hold a 10% reserve at all times, um, of all the funds you have, and they hold them for six months before they release them in case someone does a chargeback because historically, it's a very high-risk industry. Um, and so, um, here's my plug for School. You don't have to worry about that because we worry about that and you're all good. So, there's that.

Are you guys going to implement a high ticket?

I think it will happen eventually. It's just, again, what is the most important thing for everyone in the community? Now, annual payments was that one, and now we're moving on to affiliates and free trials.

What's your price?

The high ticket is like, 25k stuff.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

It's also like, once you get to that, you have very niche processors. So, it's like, you'll have processors who will do a 25k for, you know, something related to insurance, but they would never take some kind of fitness coaching or whatever. So, it's about having multiple and, um, having backups. I mean, once you like, yeah, you have multiple, you have backups, you do the one that has the best rate, and then you have the other one. You let them know, hey, I just want you to know you're my backup processor. So, it's like, I'm just being upfront, telling you the truth, but I, I may tomorrow, if I can shut down, put all my [ __ ] through you. So,

I'd say the most important thing is like, once you get something into the high ticket, like having a relationship with somebody.

Yeah. Like establishing and getting on a good side of somebody that owns the merchant processor is like, I mean, that will pay for its weight in gold.

I don't think it's important for us to know, but I'm curious. What do you mean by consolidate? Like, you guys consolidate it through? Is that, you just mentioned that earlier.

Well, so School functionally processes everyone's payments and so we are the processor of record and so that's also why a lot of the payment stuff is so easy on School, why the payouts are faster. Like, there's all these, the all these benefits that we can do because fundamentally, you're, everyone here is basically piggybacking on our reputation.

Yeah.

Cool. So, that's merchant processing. Did that one. Um, okay. Uh, conversion. Audience conversion. Let's talk about that. Sound fun. Audience conversion. Sweet. Um, who? So, you guys wanted to know about this for influencers, right?

For, no, getting consumers into the product.

Yeah. For, in, like, right. Yeah. Yeah. Understood. I actually am on the same page as you this time. Um, okay. So, it's getting people in. So, like, you're a Navy Seal guy. Um, getting them to convert. And, um, I think, I think big picture to zoom out, there's, there's functionally like, two, two primary ways that people are doing conversions. So, one is either like, we're converting through the page, so it's to the paid community, or it's a multi-step or two-step sales process is free, and then something else, right? So, um, if you have an influencer who has a, a mondo of traffic, then it's probably not going to be feasible for you to do sales calls, right? Because you're just going to have a ton of, ton of traffic. Um, but I still think you can use the same thought process around this, which is instead of having the free group that you're driving all the traffic towards, you can drive it all towards the low-ticket group and then now you have a smaller number of people that you then hop on the call, onboard, and then upsell into a more expensive thing.

Does that make sense?

Yeah.

So, you just have one barrier essentially that then, um, decreases it. Now, I still believe that the free and then phone will be the most profitable version, period. It's just that you'll have more than you can handle, and that's when Leila comes in and builds a massive team, and then we just make a ton of money. And so,

Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. I guess the only thing that we were considering was, we understand how much more work the free group's going to be to do, like free group into paid group. And our influencer is like, Pablo's like pretty thirst trappy, or he just posts him doing like, really, really cool [ __ ].

Okay.

Basically, so he doesn't do much education and he's never spoken in front of a camera before. Yeah.

So, we were like, "What if we do the free group to actually tell them what they're actually going to get, instead of just, 'Look at me, do the.'"

Yep. This is really, really important, um, for you guys especially, but for everyone at home, um, who's either a content creator or trying to pick the creator they want to partner with. So, School, you know, the name, uh, does really well with people who have something to teach. So, if we have these continuums, we've got entertainment over here. And the purpose of, uh, of entertainment, by the way, like my definition, is to keep someone consuming it. That is the only purpose of entertainment is to get them to continue to watch it. The purpose of education is to change behavior. All right? And so, you, for example, are kind of an entertainer.

Yeah.

By my definition, you are an educator.

Yeah. Your audience converts way higher than your audience does. This isn't a diss. I'm just saying, like, stating, stating facts. Okay. So, what can be deceptive is you probably have more followers than you do.

See? Right. But yours makes more money than his does.

Right. Don't worry. We'll get there. We're going to prove it. Yeah. Okay. It's fine. All right. Um, point being here is that if you are going to pick an influencer to go with, in my opinion, many of the entertainers tend to wildly overvalue the value of their audience, and many educators wildly undervalue the value of their audience. And so they're like, "Well, I only have 100,000 followers." It's like, "Yeah, but those 100,000 followers are all, you know, venture capital investors."

Well, that is a. So, I, I'll tell you a fun story. Um, actually, I think it's in a, in a few days, I'm hopping on a podcast, tiny, tiny podcast. And a friend of mine who's a multi-billionaire was like, "Hey, buddy of mine likes your content. Um, he wants you to have us on his podcast." And I was like, "Sure, man. I mean, friend of yours, a friend of mine, I, I'll hop on." Um, and so then I, I got introduced, and then, uh, we, we hopped on the phone, and, uh, he was like, "Yeah, I'm pretty sure I only have like 6,000 downloads a month, so we're probably like outside of your range of give a shit." I was like, "No, man. I'm, I'm all ears." He's like, "Yeah, but the only people who listen to my podcast are LPs, which means limited partners, which is people who invest in funds." He's like, "So, the last guy I got on here just raised 100 million from my one podcast." And I was like, "Cool. Yeah, I'll be on." And so, it's not like it's not about the, uh, number of eyeballs, it's about the dollars per eyeball, uh, or earball, if you will, in that, in that particular situation. And so, um, for you guys and for all the growth operators out there, um, if you, like, in terms of spotting who to go after, I would definitely be going more in this direction, this way, because those are the ones that are going to have people. Like, if you think about the value of education, people pay, you know, there's a, you know, $200,000, $100,000 for a four-year degree. Like, val, ed, sorry, education has, oh shoot, I drew, yeah, you know what I'm saying? This way, sorry, my bad, everyone at home, this way, this, like, not this one. Um, people pay a tremendous amount of money to learn skills that will ultimately make them more money. They pay significantly less, uh, to be entertained, right? So, like, Netflix is much cheaper than things that teach you [ __ ] right? And so, um, when you are picking who you want, you want those people. And so now the value of entertainers is they just get a gazillion eyeballs. And where their value is, is on like consumer, consumer products. Like, if, if Taylor Swift stands next to something and says, "This is the lipstick I use." A lot of girls would probably buy that lipstick. Um, so I just say that in terms of the benefit of education is there's so many ways to monetize it. And the hard part with entertainment is there are very few. It's very difficult. Yeah. The sort of good thing about ours is he knows how to educate as well. Like, he has online training and he's the best in the world at what he does, which is movement. But all of his Instagram and like public content is just him showing off the cool stuff.

Okay, got it. So he teaches. Okay. So he does teach, uh, flexibility. So that makes sense. So that actually works if, uh, it's harder with. So, I mean, again, the tie that you have here makes sense. Um, like, how do you, like, how do they get that beach? They get a remote job. How do they do that crazy [ __ ]? They, whatever. Some of the harder ones is like, like a comedian, for example. It's like, they're going to get a ton of views. And what do they, what are they going to sell inside School? Well, they have only one bit or one act that's 60 minutes long. They're going to sell tickets to that. And so the thing that they would probably have to sell would either be like some sort of consistent virtual pass to those, but I don't know if that's like super compelling, or it would have to be, um, like, "How to do comedy? How to do your first stand-up?" right? But that's again, like, if you, like, I follow a ton of comedy. Um, it would be weird, I think, for me to see that. So, I just bring this up because when we're thinking about monetizing, the beauty of education, there's so many ways to monetize it.

And I was going to touch on that a little bit because coming from, like, I spent three years just trying to get eyeballs. That's all I cared about. Was like, that was my win was views. And then what I really liked were the comments, like, "Oh, I was able to do this," or "You helped." And that felt way better. That felt way better than just the number. But pivoting to go, go educational, it's really hard to take the hit on views and to preface the creator, like, you're gonna get a huge drop and you're not failing because my three years that I was focused on just getting people to watch my stuff. So, it's really hard to let it go. It's tough, but it's more rewarding because I'm actually, they're not living vicariously through me. They're going to live it, you know? And to see someone live it.

I think it's great. So, think about this though, just so you don't feel like it's a complete waste. All you did was you learned all of the skills that make great videos. And so then when you have the education stuff that you know, when you make the videos, they'll outperform his because you have the other skills that you learned along the way. And so there's nothing wrong with the fact that you learned how to make great videos that lots of people watched. Now we're going to make great videos that lots of people watch in my target audience.

Dude, was your question about how to get the Navy Seal dude's audience to buy stuff?

It wasn't a Navy Seal guy. That was the guy we're working with now, which is like a nerve community.

But you are going to go do the Navy Seal thing and then maybe sign that guy. That's what you're doing.

But what's the constraint? Is he like,

With the Navy Seal?

The other dude.

Oh, the biggest. Yeah. The biggest question I had was more just around like, where do we put all of the information showing this is what we'll do inside the course, which is essentially like public facing. No one has any idea that he really is an educator or how to get from point A to point B.

Okay.

So I was like, "Do you think free School group actually funneling people showing what they do, or just lead magnets, YouTube?"

But so the audience doesn't know that this person has this skill set yet.

They know they have the skill set. They probably don't know that they're able to teach it.

Oh, nice. Okay. Well, this is not hard. Um, wherever the sales thing is, whether you decide on free or paid, the way to get that messaging out there is very simple. How many followers does this person have?

5, 14K.

Awesome. Okay. So, you can get, they'll make content for you that are, they're cooperative in that?

Yeah. So, he won't talk in front of camera. Not really. We might be able to force him to. Uh,

Super cooperative.

Yeah.

Maybe switch to the Seal guy. They typically don't [ __ ] around.

Uh, he's just never done it. He's had his Instagram for 10 years. Posted content the whole time. First time we got him on camera was.

Oh, wait a minute. So, he just moves and stuff but doesn't talk. Okay. So, you can voice over.

All right. So, someone else can do the talking. So, make post this guy doing his [ __ ] [ __ ]. I'm now, I'm mad at the guy, by the way. Um, Jesus Christ. Anyway, so make him, like, you know, him doing whatever the [ __ ] it is he's doing, and have the voiceover say, "Look at all this cool [ __ ] and how you can learn how to do all this cool [ __ ] and if you like it, check out webpage." And then have the, uh, domain in clearly visible at all times during all of this content. Make like 70 pieces like that, each one of them educational, and run them as a reach objective campaign specifically to those followers. And the campaign objective is reach. Each ad set objective is also reach. And each ad set has one piece of creative in there. The way the Facebook, which is what I call it now, but whatever the [ __ ] you know, Facebook and Instagram, when the campaign is set to that specific objective, it will only by default allow a person to see one piece of creative one time every seven days. So, if you have this guy making 70 pieces of content or whatever, you know, maybe they'll only do 21, but it's not that hard. He's just moving around. You have someone else voice over. So, tell them to quit being such a little [ __ ] and get to work.

So, anyway, it'll rotate all of these gazillion pieces of content. Every day they're seeing a new thing that's saying, "This guy teaches this stuff. Go here." And it's the cheapest type of ad you could possibly run. And, um, the reason it would work in this particular environment is because it's being shown specifically to his audience. So, generally, you would want to do a conversion objective or whatever, but because you're able to laser target exactly on his audience, you're going to be paying like $4 CPMs and stuff, and they're just going to saturate the [ __ ] out of his audience. And they'll know in like two weeks, really good, that that's what he does.

I'm curious, those 70 pieces, they don't go on his page.

Do they go on his account?

Yeah, he just runs them as ads. They don't have to sit on the account if he's sensitive about his account.

Yeah. Because as a creator, it's like, I don't want to just,

Make those pieces of content as though they were content, but you run them as advertisements.

Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. Just as like, voiceover where it's saying, "Hey, you can learn how to do it." Doesn't have to be like, "Buy now, crazy Eddie's house with movement."

Yeah.

You know, it's like educational content that very subtly has the domain name. They'll remember that's what built gazillion dollar brands. But we have the ability to do it now for pennies.

Yeah. We try and like, let people know what they should do, where they should go. There's a reason all my companies are domain names, by the way. I, I did have somebody be like, "Hey, how do I find out more about acquisition.com?" I was like, I was like, "It's not a fit. Don't worry." Um, no, but for, for you guys, does that, does that help out in terms of? Okay, cool. No, you bet. Okay, so I think that actually, I mean, I think we, I think we hit ads and retargeting pretty good today. Yeah, I'm checking this box. I think we did it. I think we, we succeeded. Uh, the faceless ads piece is going to be from, uh, your customers, the people who are like, you know, you've probably seen those like yoga transformation. The guy's like barely walking, and then like in two years, he's like doing full splits. I'm sure you guys have tons of those. If it's time lapses, I think it'll be like, first time trying to do a split. If you give them the instructions of, because that's one that everyone kind of understands is a split. If you just tell them like, "Hey, every 30 days, just take a clip of where you're at." I'll bet you, I'll bet you those ads will crush.

Yeah, it's really.

Yeah. Um, you also probably use the green screen function. So, um, Caleb would know this better than me, but if he does his crazy acrobatics, and then you can just play that behind him on the green screen function. So, we know that that video is going to do well because it's his normal standard thing. But then he also gets in front of it, like, face, you know, torso to here. Like, yeah. So, this took me two years to learn, but the first version of this, you can learn under 30 days. Check it out. Like, that will work.

Yeah.

And when we write faceless ads, shall we use company account?

Um, matters less. Yeah, I mean, you could, you could do it from your, like, Gym Launch ran testimonial ads from from me. Um, it, it just kind of depends on the brand itself.

Yeah.

Is it cool if we talk a little bit about hiring and managing?

Sure. Leila's here. Let's do it. Less for Alex to do. Let's rock. I'm kidding. She's better than than I am anyways. People just don't know it. Um, yeah, let's do it. You get a fresh page. We're gonna go fresh page. What do you guys have? What do you guys got on, uh, on hiring and team stuff? Shoot.

Did you want to go first, by the way, or?

I had a question, so you can go ahead first.

At least we'll segue. Um, I don't know when this would have happened. Maybe early on. Maker versus manager. I've done it all, all for a long time. Realizing I'm a horrible manager. Kelsey here is amazing. And having a hard time letting that go. And I know it's time. Do you recall back when you first, cuz I imagine you both did both. When did that, or how, what was the process like for you, like maker or manager?

I think I immediately was like, "Here's everything. Good luck."

Yeah. I mean, I never saw you do anything. So.

Yeah, there you go. So, I remember, I remember the, some of the best money I ever paid is we paid this consultant. It was like 25 or 50 grand, I can't remember, for a day. And, uh, he was like, "All right, we got to get really clear on roles." I was like, "Oh my god, this is gonna be terrible." So, he's like, "I need you to write every single thing that you guys both do in the business." He's like, "Just write it all up there on the board." So, he had this full, like, it was two whiteboards full of just like the stuff you do. And then I remember he just took, he took this marker and he just went like, and just, he did everything except for, um, marketing. And he was like, "All of this is Ila." And I was like, "I love this guy." And he was like, "Alex, you just promote." He's like, "That is obviously what will make the most money. You just do that. Leila, handle everything else." And, um, we did that and it made a lot of money.

So, I think sometimes, um, what happens if you were doing it before is like, you were getting some sort of reinforcement from the managing that you're no longer getting. So, what was it? What is missed? What have you lost? Uh, what did I like about managing the team?

Why does it suck?

You lost something.

Um, maybe.

I lost something. Um, I don't know.

Let me ask you a different way. What's now? What's not happening anymore that used to happen?

What's not happening now that used to happen? Um, I guess I kind of maybe enjoyed the team meetings and hanging, hanging with the team. Just like liking my team and them liking me. And, uh, and maybe I'm realizing I was a distraction from just doing what I need to do. And like, it's pretty clear now, it's like marketing, ads, run live events. That's all I should be doing.

Live events, you're doing.

Yeah, I'm going bring it back. You inspired me.

Yeah.

Bring it back.

There's one thing I would say, which is business is a game of who's the last man standing. And so doing stuff to make it sustainable for you, meaning like, you enjoy the work that you do, is a smart thing to do. It's not stupid. Like, people ask all the time, "How do you work so much?" It's like, "I also [ __ ] love it because I've engineered it so that I know what I'm good at. I also know what I love, and I know when I'm balancing the two." And so for you, like, what's wrong with still appearing on a team meeting or talking to the team?

I don't mind doing that. I'm just, I don't think I'm the best at it.

Well, okay. There's a difference between managing people and having a relationship with people. Yeah, this is actually a really big delay.

So, like, for example, um, in times where like, I have directly managed a team, but Alex is still talking to them, it doesn't mean he cannot mentor them. It does not mean he cannot have a relationship with them. It just means that when it comes down to what do they do, in what order, at what times, and what is on their plate versus others, that's what I would be directly doing. Right? Same as, you know, for example, uh, you know, Caleb oversees all of the media, right? That doesn't mean that I don't meet with people that report to Caleb. I have relationships with everybody on the team. And especially like, there's a Leila content team and an Alex content team. Like, I talk to them one-on-one. I have conversations one-on-one. I don't tell them what to do.

Yeah. I, I'll, I'll say that the easiest way that I've kind of delineated this is because in the very beginning, I remember when we had our, so I, I bucked this twice in our, in our, uh, trajectory. So, the first time was, um, actually, I'm thinking of the same story from two angles. So, this was the big one. Um, it was sales because I like sales. Um, and Ila was manager of the team, but I was still me and loved sales. And so she had told the team, you know, clearly, this is the plan, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then I hopped on a call and just was like, "Hey, everybody, hop on a call." And so everybody hopped on a call, and I was like, "Hey, this is what we're doing." And she rightfully said, she's like, "You basically just undermined me in front of the team." And them all thinking like, "Okay, well, I guess what Leila says doesn't matter because it's whatever Alex says." And so I was like, "What are you saying? I can't talk to my sales team?" She was like, "No." And I was like, "But you're saying I can't talk to my sales team?" Uh, and I was like, "Why are you trying to take my company from me?" So, this is, no, legit. This is actually happened. So, this is, uh,

Were we married yet?

Yes.

Right.

And so, um,

The [ __ ] hell.

Yeah. Yeah. Right. And so, the, the, I would say the easy delineation is, um, prioritization is not yours. So, it's, I mean, a different way of saying like, telling them what to do, but a lot of times it's like, "Don't work on that, work on this," or "This is more important than that." When you ascribe relative values, or you say different orders of task, or what tasks to do, anything related to that, I can already feel it when I think about it. It's like, "Oh, no, like, I've been trained on how to not [ __ ] things up." And so I can talk to anyone on the team when it's like, "Hey, um, Leila told me you were trying to work on this thing. Let me help." That is like amazing and awesome, and they're like, "Dude, thanks so much for taking the time, blah, blah, blah." And that's probably very fulfilling for you. It's just, delineate. If there's like a skill deficiency, by all means. If they want guidance, by all means. If they want prioritization, if they want to know what tasks to do, that's management. And so, just being able to like, one is leading, one is managing. Both are super important. They're just different. And so that might allow you to still do talk to the team the way you like. And if they, and then you can, you'll, once you get trained on it, you'll be like, "Oo, this is very into you should check, you should check with Le, you should check with so and so." Uh, and then that way you won't break [ __ ] all the time, which is what I did consistently for a very long time. I'll say this, which is, I think when, when we start out early on, and this would be not just between us, but between like me with other managers, me, it was very black and white. It's like, either you're managing them or you're not, which means like, if I'm managing them, I'm all in, and when I'm not, it's like, I don't talk to these people. And what I recognized over time is that the best and strongest companies actually do not do that at all. They recognize it's a dichotomy rather than an absolute, meaning it exists on this pendulum, which is, for example, I have people that directly report to me, but I have them get mentorship and guidance from five people on the team. Because think about the amount of teams who are like, "Well, you fit in this box, right? Like Alex, you know, manage, don't talk, right? You manage, you're the only person that talks to them." Versus like, "What if Alex has things to add to them too? And so does Ben, and so does Caleb, and so does Suzanne, right? Like, we can take little pieces from everybody. But then what the person knows, the employee knows, is that the person who tells me what to do, in what order, and helps you prioritize, is my direct manager." And so I wouldn't want your team to miss out on the things you do have to add because you've turned it into this black and white rather than this dichotomy. Does that help?

Absolutely. And you should also tell them this.

Yeah.

So, like, when I talk to my teams, they'll come to me sometimes like, "Alex." And I'm like, "Okay, do you think that he was telling you what to do, or do you think he was just ideating, getting excited about?" And then they're like, "Okay, yeah." And then I'm like, "Do you think that if he had context on these things that were occurring that because usually what happens is Alex hears that we're working on something, and then two days later he's like, 'We should do this.'" And I'm like, "Yes, but we're still doing this 17,000 other things that you forgot."

Right? And like, he doesn't.

I'm like, "Oh, yeah, do that first."

I'm like, "And, and so my job, right, like, in the way that we work together, is I inform him of all the things that we're working on. And I, I mean, for the most part, I try to make as many decisions as possible because I'm like, if he had the context I had, he would make the same decisions. He just doesn't have the context because he's not in it."

And that's where trust over time just honestly just consistently gets built between you guys. I mean, a lot of people don't know how to work with their spouse. I, now that I've only been doing this basically, um, can't really imagine another way. Uh, because I have absolute trust, you know, in Ila, and she is the same thing with me, and we just have so many decisions that we've now made together that it's like, "Alex, like, if she's on a call, she's like, 'Well, Alex would say this.'" All right. And she's like already accounting for what I would say and how she would deal with that. And, um, and I think the, the, the magic that's worked so well in Leila and I's partnership because it really is that, um, is really, it's, it's the yin and the yang. Uh, and we've really balanced the middle path. It's, you know, sometimes you do need to [ __ ] [ __ ] up a little bit, but most times you don't. And so, like, it's, it's kind of like 95/5 Alex, Leila, in terms of, uh, like, I'm, I'm really good at really big stuff. And, uh, I was talking to Frank about this yesterday. I was like, "I do like one really big thing a year, and that's kind of it." And it's like, "I think this is what would be the one thing that if we only did this, this will really propel all the stuff that we're doing." And that's kind of it. And then everything else, all the blocking and tackling, Leila prioritizes and distributes. I think over time what you learn is to call upon each other. You know what I mean? Like, over time, Alex has learned like, "Okay, this doesn't make sense for me to try to impose this upon the team or convince Leo this is a good idea right now." And so he pulls back. And I've learned over time that, "Hey, I need to pull Alex in because we need to [ __ ] this up a little bit." And I say, like, not [ __ ] it up, but like, shake it up a little bit. And so we both, like, learn when to cue each other in more. It's like a little dance. You know what I mean?

Yeah. And we've been doing this eight and a half years. And yeah, and by the way, the first two years were really [ __ ] hard.

And nobody sees that now, but like, it was like constant stress of learning how to communicate, learning where's the personal business, like, it's all this. Are you guys together?

Yeah.

That would be awkward if not. Um,

Are you trying to steal his business? I feel like I feel like in the, well,

Trying to like delegate like, or, or I'm trying to manage it so he can focus on the marketing because I feel like that's very important for him, like he's really good at it. But I feel like there's part of him who sees like, he sees his business as like part of his soul. Totally. And he needs to like, separate that and look at it as like an entity and talk about it like something separate, like it's like an object, not him. You know?

You're never going to change that about him. Yeah.

Yeah. Also, I, I'll add this just for all the entrepreneurs in the room. Um, which is everyone. Uh, so entrepreneurship is this very weird, uh, journey of taking over complete control of your life when you go from being an employee to deciding to, you know, hang your own shingle and and create your own destiny or whatever. And then from that point of absolute control, step by step, relinquishing control yet again. And so you cannot have both freedom and control. They're dichotomy. It's like you can't do it because if you control it, you're not free. And if you're free, you can't control it. And so a lot of us want freedom, but then go in and say, "No, it has to be done like this." Well, then you're not free because that requires you. Now, there's trade-offs of how much freedom and what types of freedom do I want, and that's good to, you know, get clear on for yourself. But a lot of it comes from repetition and trust. And sometimes that just takes time because you want to create a pattern or a history or track record of successful decisions that someone's made on your behalf. And there's also a really tough thing that I've had to swallow, which is that not everyone does things my way, and a lot of times it still works. And just being okay with like, and so we talk about things in terms of reversible and irreversible decisions. If there is an irreversible decision, of which, by the way, there are not that many, uh, then I'm brought in, or Ila's brought in if it's on my side. If it's reversible, and this goes downstream from Lelaya too, to the team and whatnot, and you can establish a budget of like, "Hey, if it's less than 10 grand, make the call." And the higher up in the, you know, and the higher up in the company, the more senior they are, the more you'll be like, "It's less than 100 grand, don't call me." And so you can just start establishing, I mean, for you guys right now, it might be a hundred bucks, it might be 500 bucks, might be a thousand bucks. Like, you can know what level of mistake you're willing to deal with. But by being really clear and objective of, "This is the cost of a decision that I'm willing to let you make." And then when they do make them, remember that you also made mistakes as well on the way up, and like, don't jump on, jump on them because then they will fear you forever, and it will suck.

I think between the two of you, the biggest thing I would say is just, you guys are different, and that's why you work well together. And so, like, him being really passionate about it in that way that you feel like sometimes maybe makes him too involved, like, there's more good than bad to that. And you maybe being more distant and like having a more objective view, there's more good than bad to that. Together makes you a superpower. You know what I mean? And so you can complement each other's strengths. And if you had the same strengths, then this wouldn't make sense. And so I think also like, I always have, I think in the beginning for both of us, there was somewhat of like, "Why can't you be more like me?" You know what I mean? Like, why can't you? And don't get me wrong, like, we have learned so much more from each other in the time and probably become a little bit more like closer to the mean. But at the same time, it's complete and total acceptance, which is like, I think that partnerships in general, and for any of you guys who work with somebody in any partnership, like, it just never, I always tell people this. I'm like, "You, yesterday I was answering a question. They're like, 'Well, I want to get him to do this, right?'" And I was like, "You people can barely change themselves. What makes you think that you can change this person?" And so for you guys, it's like, just complete and total acceptance. Like, never trying to change the other person. It's going to take your own time because you've got [ __ ] you got to deal with, and you've got [ __ ] you got to deal with. And it's going to take you guys your own individual time to get down that path, if you ever do, right? Maybe it'll never change. And so I think there's also, you know, there's been things that I think both of us in the beginning, I'm sure, wanted the other one to come to a realization to, and we're like, "Can you just tomorrow?" And that [ __ ] takes like five years, you know? And then when the person gets there in their own time, rather than like by the force of the other, it's a much more joyful and peaceful experience.

Yeah. And the, um, and I'll, I'll add this piece on, like, I, that I said, like, I've learned a lot of character traits from Ila. Like, I'm significantly more patient now. I'm way less angry in general, uh, than when Leila and I met. And this may seem crazy to you, but like, my very first company, Gym Like, well, my first business with employees when I had my gyms, um, everyone avoided me. Uh, at, like, everyone, like, people would run through the lobby because I'd be sitting behind the desk because if it was a customer, they knew that I was going to shake them down and get them to give me money. And if it was an employee, they just thought that they were going to get yelled at for something that they weren't doing. Um, and so she's corrected a lot of that in me, but not through her saying, "Hey, you should stop doing that." I just see the benefit of how much better she is at that. And it kind of, it's kind of like the, it starts to wear on you in a way. You're like, "Huh? All right. So, she kind of starts meetings like this. Maybe I'll start meetings like that because her meetings are better than mine are." And so I think that if you want to influence his behavior, the easiest way to do it is just be a shining example of the benefits of doing things your way. And then he will come naturally that way. And the same thing for you. Like, Ila has very much been like, Ila knows more about like marketing and sales than like the vast majority of people because she lives with me. Um, and I feel like I know a tremendous amount about operating, uh, companies, and I can advise a lot of our portfolio companies because I, I often start something like, "Well, Leila would say something like this," because I've been on those calls and I've heard her say it a hundred times. And so you'll be able to actually end up operating with like, kind of like, I think like the end version of this. And we're still, you know, in this, we're still young in this game, but it's like, your voice gets a little bit quieter, and you start to hear like, "What she would say," or "What he would say," also, and you start to hear both of those perspectives, and then you kind of start balancing, kind of like that yin and yang type decision. And I think that's what made has made us, um, it's, it's worked really well.

Yeah. And like, what I have learned from Alex has been, you know, I tend to, because I, I get a lot of benefit from putting order into things. And in the beginning, I was super stressed and like, very rigid in how I wanted to do things. And I've learned a lot of like, how to be more flexible from Alex because business, as much as we want it, as it is, organized chaos. And you are never going to take the chaos out of business. And some chaos is good, and that's what makes it fun. And I was too stressed and held on too tight and wanted too much order. I wanted to perfect, and striving for that perfection was like, I recognized in watching him that it actually took away a lot of the upside in many ways. And so what I learned from him was like, don't strive for perfection, right? Like, I accept myself and I accept that business is flawed, right? And, um, not everything needs to be perfect and in order all the time. And so I think it's also just like, especially because, like, I say this about us because it's so common in business relationships, there's one person who's more.

It's not all married. I mean, obviously, like, y'all are partners. There's a lot of you guys have partners. Like, it's, it's a, it's really appreciating what the other person can bring to the table. That's why you begin the partnership to begin with. They have something that you don't. And so to bring someone in and say, "Hey, you have this thing that you, that's that's not me." And then immediately be like, "Be more like me." Kind of negates having the partnership to begin with. And so there is a very, like, you have to create space to be like, "No, like, we'll do it your way." And I think at this point now, it's like, she's like, "If you really want to do it, let's, we'll do it your way." Like, neither of us are going to fall on the sword for it, like, for just about anything at this point.

We both know that we have like the same goal and same outcome. So, you know that we know that we can trust each other.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Which is tough. I mean, that's the most valuable thing. If you actually trust each other, it, it creates so much space in your head because you don't have to always be second-guessing, like, "Is my partner going to [ __ ] me? Is he going to steal this money? Is he going to try and position himself and pull customers? Is he going to, like, all of these, all of these what-ifs just all disappear if you actually have trust there because then it's like, all right, well, all we're doing is just learning how to work together.

even better. I would say like a key piece that I think we've learned how to do and it for any business partnership is you can disagree without arguing. Like we have learned to respectfully disagree. I think we disagree every day, all day. I think earlier we were texting last night with the business and then I, we started texting emojis back and forth, disagreeing like lighting things on fire. He's saying something, he's like, "Oh, because you hate money?" I show him burning money. Like, we're just like, we just, we just know that that's just how we go, you know what I mean? And uh, I was like, "Yeah, I'm going to light all the money on fire and burn the business down, you know? Why do you hate making money?" Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. "This will be so sick." And she's like, "Right after the team does these five things they're supposed to do."

And so, um, I think that disagreeing is having different perspectives and presenting your point of view to the person without taking it personally. Whereas, when you escalate into an argument, it's where you start to take it personally. You start to take it as like it's an attack on you rather than the idea or the action. And that has been something that has been critical for me into also understanding how to respectfully disagree with somebody, not even just Alex, but anybody in the business that is a teammate, an executive specifically, is like, we can disagree and not be mad, you know?

So, this is super, super important. Um, I would highly recommend that you teach your teams this concept. Um, I don't repeat it enough and so I will say it now. Um, a criticism is stating an observable difference between desired and reality. So, for example, if an employee shows up late, I would say, "Hey, uh, it's 9:05. Um, you were supposed to be here at 9. Can you explain the discrepancy? There's just these are all facts. This is the time you're supposed to start, or this is the revenue goal, or this was the quota and you are here. Can you explain the discrepancy? Help me understand." An insult is when you say you add a judgment onto that. We say it is 9:05. You're supposed to be here at 9 and therefore you suck. It's making a conclusion on the person based on a discrepancy or without a discrepancy at all, which is just you suck. Uh, which also can happen. And so you absolutely have to be able to criticize in a company because it's the only way that you can point out discrepancies and close the gap between desired and reality.

Something I like to say is we want to talk about the do, not the who. So it's like the criticism is the critique on the thing, the action versus insulting the person. An example that I like to use a lot is, um, you guys ever watch Selling Sunset? All right. Well, I watch that show every night. And uh, so there's a scene in that where basically like the manager, her name is Mary, she's yelling at Christine. Christine's like the really hot blonde. And she's like, "Christine, if you could just stop doing the thing." And she's like, "What thing?" And she's like, "You're just, you just, you're a [ __ ]. You're acting like a bitch." And she's like, "Stop acting like a [ __ ] [ __ ] otherwise, yeah, otherwise you're getting fired." And literally in that moment, she says, "You're acting like a [ __ ] bitch." Which is she's associating Christine as a person with something negative. [ __ ] has a negative connotation versus I give an example in a video I literally made two days ago saying, "Christine, when you talk to the team, you said this objectively. You said this statement. Next time, instead, could you say this because that is what I expect from you?" It's like, we are not disagreeing like [ __ ] [ __ ].

Yeah, and this gets into language stuff, which I can geek out on literally the rest of the day for like four days. So I won't go too deep on it, but fundamentally, you have [ __ ] is a bundled term. All right, which means that it's one term that has many actions underneath of it. And so, um, I think I told this story the other day, but uh, we had a team member who was acting like a dick. And so the feedback is, "So and so is acting like a dick." And so everyone was like, "Hey, can you stop acting like a dick?" And he was like, "Well, how?" Right? And so the thing is is like, "Don't be a dick" or "Don't be a [ __ ]" doesn't actually help someone because they don't know what actions they need to change. And so the reality was that people described him as a dick because he did these five things. And so I said, "Hey, in this instance, when you do this, people see it this way and they begin to describe you as a dick. If you do less of that, they will stop doing that. And if you do this other thing, they associate with you as a dick." So, the key is to get really, really specific with the actions that create the judgment that then people cast on it. Now, your team's not going to be as good as you at this, especially if you're learning this right now, obviously. Um, but really focusing everything. And if, if, if you're curious like why does Alex's content do surprisingly better than most other content in the space? Because I ruthlessly, ruthlessly focus on what does someone need to do? And it's, if again, we're trying to change their behavior, which means that we're trying to educate them, we need to focus on the activities. And so like I use, I like patience as a simple example because patience is this big amorphous term that people like, "Well, how do you be like, I'm like, 'Hey, be patient.'" It's like, "Well, what do I do to be patient?" "I'm just be patient." It's like, "Ah, but it just means figuring out something to do in the meantime. Just figure something else out to do." And then you can give that as the directive and patience is the outcome. It's the bundled term that we have associated with that. If I said, "Hey, be more charismatic," that doesn't help a sales guy. He might then translate that into like, "Smile more," or he might translate that into like, "Talk louder." He's going to translate that, or not, or most likely not know what to translate that into and then just keep living his life. And then I come back and say, "I told you to be more charismatic." And then he'll say, "I tried," but he didn't do anything because I didn't give him any directives. And so this is at a partner level, but also at a partner to employee level, or even employee to employee level, is saying, "We just need to focus on what the desired is and what the current is and then trying to bridge that gap purely based on activities and observables." And then this makes it, and then it makes it so much more objective. And then what happens is they realize that you're not actually attacking them at all. You're like, "Hey, uh, people have described you as a dick. Did you know that?" They're like, "No." It's like, "Right, would you like to decrease the likelihood that happens?" They're like, "Yes." It's like, "Okay, four things you can do." And so when I had the conversation, and this is what I said, I was like, "These are four things you can do." Within weeks, people were like, "Dude, so and so is not acting like a dick. What did you tell him?" I was like, "I told him all the things that you described to him as a dick and just told him not to do those things and specifically told him what to do instead." The dick whisperer.

Jesus. Actually, uh, a good example, I'm going to use a personal story of ours. Is, uh, there was a time that I got, I think it was like two months ago, and I got sick. We went out to eat and we got ice cream and I got sick. And so I told Alex, we were in the elevator going up. I was like, "Dude, I'm sick. I gotta, I gotta get the [ __ ] to the house." And then we go in and I'm like, "I'm sick." And then I'm like, in the other room and then he comes in and he starts saying something to me and I felt like, I'm like, "Dude, I was just like vomiting. And then you're saying something to me and I was like, I feel like, like you're you're being rude right now." And he was like, "Why would I be being rude?" And I was like, "Because I'm sick and you're coming in here and talking to me about this other thing and like you're not like giving me a hug or anything like that." And then so we, we dissect this situation right there and what we find out is this. There's two things that are going on, which is one, he's like, "You're always [ __ ] sick. Your period, you're sick. You eat dairy and you're sick. You're actually sick and you're what the [ __ ] does sick mean?" He's like, "I think you have like, I don't know. Are you on your period? Are you sick? Like, did you eat dairy? Did you have an allergic reaction? Like, could you do so many things?" Right? And so he's like, "I didn't know what it was. I didn't know you were throwing up." Right? So I was like, "Oh, you didn't actually know." Right? And on the other side, he was like, "How did you think I was acting rude?" And I was like, "Well, when I am sick, I would love if instead of bringing up work, you actually just came in and just gave me a hug."

Sad hug. Yeah. And so then it was like, okay, I will now not say "I'm sick" every time. I will use more descriptive terms. And then if I am actually sick, I would like a hug. And it was that simple. So just break it down into behavior. What do you want me to do? And that's a lot of times like, like if you were on the inside of our text threads or our our condo, which don't be there, um, weirdos. Um, you'll like you would see me say like, "What do you want me to do?" Like she'll say a whole bunch of stuff and I'll be like, "What would you like me to do?" And then she'll be like, "Just say everything's fine." And I'll be like, "Cool. Everything's going to be awesome. We got this." Or whatever. Or it's uh, "I need you to solution." I'm like, "Oh, great." You know, which one out of a hundred times is I think I, I actually think maybe two times in our, in our, in our life she's asked for a solution.

I'm like, actually, I just want you to listen to me then. Okay. Yeah. I was like, so you want me to just listen and nod my head, right, and smile and say, "That sucks." And she's like, "Yes." I was like, "All right." But now, but the thing is is it's a really clear directive. And so, it's very easy for me to handle that. But I think the, the problem is like, I say "sick," that means that you need to do these series of behaviors that then determines, I would bucket you as a good husband, right? And I don't know what sick means and I didn't know she wanted me to do this stuff. And so again, this is like a very simplistic example, but, um, I call them bundled terms, but they're these terms that are very amorphous that represent a series of behaviors underneath of them, um, that you expect someone else to translate without giving them the guide. And so it can help, it'll dramatically enhance your employee training if you just translate into, "What do I want you to do?" And oftentimes you don't know what you want them to do, which is your fault, not theirs.

So I'll give you guys an example is like, um, what we've worked on a lot and I've been, I'm really proud of our team is when we do these workshops, we're taking people that work in our portfolio companies and their job is that they're helping go into a business and like fix a function, right? Their job is not that they know how to present on a stage. And so we said, "Okay, well, if we're going to do these things, I want our team to be able to present." First time they go up, I'm like, "Oh, that's tough." So it's like, "Okay, let's learn presentation skills." And so when we first start talking about presentation skills, one word, for example, is tonality. So it's like, "Your tonality is off." People talk about this in sales all the time, like your tonality is off. That is not sufficient enough to train somebody on tonality. So instead, it's like when we have somebody go up there, what we talk about is like, "Okay, we're going to emphasize these words." Words. And so when you say this word, your voice goes up. When you say this word, your voice goes down and you whisper. That's tonality. And so what we found, for example, in training tonality with our team is that we don't talk about tonality, we talk about when your voice goes high and when your voice goes low, when you speed up and when you slow down.

And so instead of talking about, we train tonality, we train pacing and we train fluctuation in voice. And we use different ways in in highlighting the words to show people when they go up, when they go down, and when they go slow down, and when they speed up. So, by the way, if you have a sales script of any kind, there should also be a tone guide that goes with it, which basically the words on the script. So, you can have all caps, you can have bold, you can have uh italics, you can have underline, and each of those represent the tones that you want them to have when they're saying those words. And so that's how you can actually get the script to be said the way you want it to be said, not just only the words. Uh, because the vast majority of the time, the how you say it matters just as much or more than the what you're actually saying.

It's the same as I was having a conversation with one of my executives the other day and he's like, "I don't know how to get my point across more in this call. I was talking to this employee and I don't know if he took me seriously." And I said, "Well, let's watch the video." And so we watched the video of him giving feedback or critique to his direct report and I was like, "Your tonality is off." And he was like, "How?" And I was like, "So watch how I would say it." And so what we highlighted was like, the first thing is like when Ila has having a serious conversation, I lean in. The second thing is that I slow down and the third thing is that my voice goes lower like this. And so we literally had him take the exact same script because we had scripted out the conversation and say it with that, those three instructions and then he rehad the conversation and then the person was like, "Oh, I'm really [ __ ] up." And he was like, "I cannot believe that actually worked. It was just the way it was said."

I didn't say he hit his wife. I didn't say he hit his wife. I didn't say he hit his wife. I didn't say he hit his wife. I didn't say he hit his wife. All different sentences, right? And so imagine that over a whole script and then we somehow assume that sales people are communicating the same thing. Cool. Also works the same for customer success and onboarding. Like whenever you have a conversation that's going to happen with a customer, whether it's before the sale or after the sale, it should be scripted because there is a perfect way to do that conversation. And if you don't know what it is, go with the ones that go well, use that as baseline, and then just improve them. Cool. I know we're giving a little bit higher level stuff because I know you guys are just, you know, in your first teams, but hopefully this still will plant some future seeds of value for you.

That was for anything. I know. But when we start talking about like companies and team trainings and stuff like that, I, I know that sometimes we can lose. So fun though. Yeah. When you have a team, you know, like it's like, so who's my first hire, Ila?

We could talk about that, too. I feel you guys just gave parenting advice, so if there's anybody here, they're a team, too, right? Yeah, that's right. The home team. Um, yeah, first hires. So, uh, there is a very easy, uh, litmus test for this, which is, uh, look at all the stuff that you currently do. Look at the stuff that makes you the most time that takes you the least time. And look at the stuff that takes you the most time that makes you the least money. And give all of the stuff that takes the most time, makes the least money to someone else. I mean, fundamentally, that's it. And the thing is is like, I would love to say it's you need an admin. It might not be that. It might be you need a video editor. It might be you need a group moderator. It might be like, you just have to look at the stuff that's taking you the most time that makes you the least money and then give that to somebody else. And then here's the key part that everyone misses. You then fill that time back up with more of the stuff that makes you money and then you will be able to pay that person with the extra money that you make from your money-making activities. And that fundamentally is entrepreneurship in a nutshell for till the day you die.

That is actually the key piece that most people do not do, which is they're like, "I've gotten everything off my plate and the company isn't growing." And I'm like, "That's because you got to fill it back up with [ __ ] that grows the company."

Yeah. Every time you said that you had questions, so what were your questions?

Yeah, man. No, that was all really helpful. But my question was a little bit more basic. It was um just for hiring. Because I was watching a video. I think it was an interview you did where you were talking about how a lot of job interviews are just pattern recognition. I'm curious if you could dive a little bit deeper into some of the patterns that you've noticed that maybe weren't so obvious at first from interviewing a lot of people, positive or negative.

Okay, I'll give you general ones. So, at home, this is the one, the one school that we're that Leila's here. So, yeah, ask, ask all the team stuff and

I'm going to get voted off the island after this. They're like, there was no marketing. She didn't talk about Jackson. She didn't even know what school looks like. Yeah. You know what? I don't. You're not wrong. Yeah.

Uh, so the first one is no details. So something that I talk about is oftentimes when you are doing an interview. That's not good. Okay. Uh, when you're doing an interview is you're asking what I call like reference questions, which is you're saying, "Can you tell me about a time? Can you tell me about a time that you built a sales team? Can you tell me about a time that you built a customer service department?" Right? And so what I've seen time and time again is the first thing that happens when somebody is not a fit because they don't have the experience. This would be they might be a cultural fit, but they do not have the experience is that they cannot recall details on the call. So, for example, like when you hear me and Alex tell the stories, right? It's not like I just made that [ __ ] story up out of nowhere, right? That'd be like pretty tough to come up with on the spot. Like the workshop, the people that flew in, I had the seven people. It's like, you'd be like, that would be tough to come up with, right? And so, but if I said something like, "Oh yeah, there's one time we [ __ ] up and this customer had something bad happen." And then, and then we made it right. We send them some food. Be like, "Okay." Like, "Do I believe you? Do I not believe you?" You know what I mean? And so, the first thing I look for is like, when I'm asking that person a question, are they providing me with details? Right? The most common thing that I have noticed is that people who do have the experience can recall metrics. They have numbers that they will be able to recall. So, it's like numbers, metrics, and names. Right? So, they will talk about the company they worked for. They will talk about the KPIs that they hit or didn't hit. And they'll talk about the names of co-workers that they have. When people do not refer to these things in stories and they do not have details, then they likely don't have the experience that they're talking about. It doesn't mean they don't have experience, but they might not have the specific experience that you're asking them about.

The second piece would be, um, is I call this like they talk actually beat around the bush. So, I'll give you an example of this. Um, this happened to me. I was hiring for, um, a head of development for a software company we have. And I said, "Tell me about the biggest team that you've led." And legitimately, I, I looked at the clock six [ __ ] minutes before he answered the question. He was like, "Well, okay. So, nine years ago when I started, I was a developer and then I got promoted from a developer into a lead developer, but I didn't have any direct reports. And then I left that company. I went to this other company. I was a lead developer there. Um, didn't actually have developers under me, but then my boss got fired. And then when my boss got fired, they put three developers under me. Not actually under me, but the other boss didn't want to manage them. So, I oversaw the schedules and all these things. And so, I did have three people that I looked after at that point in time. Um, and so I would say that, um, but the biggest team that I worked on had 12 people. Now, they didn't, but it they had 12 people." And so the second thing that I look for is that when I'm again asking these questions about experience that people have, when people don't have the experience, is they get nervous. And when they get nervous, they fill the time because they don't want to directly answer the question, which is, "No, I don't have the [ __ ] experience. I have never managed a team." Now, I will say this, which is some of the best people I've hired have just straight up answered a question, be like, "Nope, don't got that one." When I'm hiring for a CFO, for example, I'm like, "Have you done an audit before?" They're like, "If they haven't, they're like, 'Nope, haven't done an audit.'" "I don't want you to find out by me not telling you, you know?" And so sometimes even just the ability to say, "I don't know and I've never done that," is a green flag, not a red flag, right? And so I'd say like those are the first two things.

Um, third thing I would say is speed of communication. So I will already judge a candidate based on how they, how quickly they schedule a call and how quickly they follow up after an interview. So, it's really just the before and the after, right? Because I'm thinking to myself, "This is the best I'm ever going to [ __ ] get. Like, this communication with me and how they show up on the interview is the best this, this is them putting on the best show possible. So, if this [ __ ] doesn't even respond to my email for two days before the interview and then they don't even send me a [ __ ] thing afterwards, they don't follow up to my email, they don't respond to my email for 3 days, what do you think you're going to get when they're comfy?" You know what I mean? And I'm like, "I definitely don't want slow [ __ ] in my company. So don't want that [ __ ]"

Um, and then I would say the last one is, um, you know, I guess this is like culturally dependent. Um, I don't want to say that, but if those are the most like broad ones that I look for. I would say that the last piece would be, um, you just have to figure out for your culture what's important to you. So like for me, if people are immediately asking it, it's this question that people ask. They're like, "So, can you tell me like the working hours and if I'm going to be like working outside of..." So, if you are, and this actually is applicable for all of you guys. So, like, there's nothing wrong with people wanting very, very explicit working hours in a company. There are thousands of companies for those people who need a lot of structure. They need a lot of boundaries. Small companies are not the best place for those people because we have so much that we need them to be able to do part of multiple jobs. So we need people who are a little bit like us. Like they like working a lot. They like working all the time. And so the one thing I will say is that when I'm sourcing for whether it be our company or one of our portfolio companies, and these are all people with less than a thousand employees, that is what I consider small. I do not want people who need that like insane structure in their life. Because I need people who can take 25% extra. I'm looking for people who like they say, "I'm going to give the 100% plus I want to take 25% more because I know that as a company grows, if somebody has an extra 25%, you can push them, then I can put more on their plate before I have to hire a new person. So it gives me buffer room versus if you have all these people who are like constantly paranoid about having too much work because they need their [ __ ] space and [ __ ] then it's like, there's nothing wrong with that. Just go work at like a bigger company. So those are the things that I would look for. Does that help?

Yes, that does. I actually have a question on that. Uh huh. So, um, do you have to like let go of expectation too, where like, like you said, if you're a smaller company, because at the same time we're looking for people like Share will do marketing and sales calls and dial and then with me, I'll dial, do sales calls, and we'll bring on a setter and all he has to do is dial and it's just like they're not reaching the numbers and things like that, but it's easy to go back into our mindset of like, "Bro, why are you not dialing? We have a hundred things to do and all you have to do is dial." So it's like trying to find those people who, but they're not entrepreneurs. So it's like, how do we, I guess, navigate that and not try to put that expectation on them either, even though it's like we're trying not to get on them for not being us, but we need them to be us.

Yeah, I understand what you're saying. Okay. There's, there's a couple things I want to say, which is like, the first one is that it is much harder to train soft skills than it is hard skills. Training somebody to work really hard is hard to train. Training somebody to be kind, to be empathetic, to smile is harder than training somebody how to say the sales script. So, if you think about it, what takes, what makes someone a salesperson? It's not saying the [ __ ] script. It's all the soft skills that go into being a salesperson. So, when you're looking to hire somebody who's a setter, I want to look for somebody who has high activity, right? They're self-propelled. They're able to constantly make the phone calls and they don't need somebody breathing over their neck. Now, do I need them to have ever done it before? No. I need them to know how to talk to people. I need them to know how to do a high volume of work. I need them to know how to be friendly. And I need them to know how to listen and take direction. Right?

So, a pathy way of saying this is that soft skills are hard to train and hard skills are easy to train. But fundamentally, they are all skills and there are big bucketed terms like kindness that have 20 things underneath of it that make someone kind. And so when we're hiring, the goal is to simply hire the person with the smallest skill deficit. It's just that often times the hard skill is the smallest skill deficit because the soft skills have 20 or 50 skills that we'd have to teach and the return on the investment would not be worth it. And so you always want to hire for the smallest skill discrepancy, period, across the human.

Does that make sense? Yeah. No, it does. Well, and like, cuz you're like brutally honest. So that's kind of like where I struggle, like especially like college sports or something.

My teammate told me stop being a [ __ ]. Yeah. I didn't get down about it. I was like, "Dude, you're right. Got to stop being a [ __ ] and hit it, you know." So it's just like trying to being able to make other people around you understand that. And because you both shared that context, the "stop being a [ __ ]" was actually a pretty clear directive for you because you both understood what that bundled command meant, which you were probably in the middle of workouts. We're doing two-a-days and you like don't want to run the hill again. And he says, "Don't be a [ __ ]" and it's pretty clear he means run the [ __ ] hill again, right? You make that translation. But then when you take the "don't be a [ __ ]" to somebody else who doesn't have that context and it's not necessarily shared, that could mean a hundred different things to them. And as crazy as this seems, most people don't know what you're saying. Like the biggest thing that has happened, it's like as my evolution as an advertiser and marketer overall is that I go over clear, not clever. It's like the reason that the books are written at a third-grade reading level, the reason that we spend so much time trying to unpack things is so that there is no duplicity, that there is no not duplicity, there's no vagueness in the language, that we're crystal [ __ ] clear. Like there's no way they could misunderstand this directive if they have a third-grade reading level and they can speak English.

Yeah. Okay, that makes sense. That makes sense. Now, the second thing that I want to talk about is when you're hiring somebody, these, these are the filters that we use and I, I literally teach this multiple times a month and we use it in our team, which is there's four ways that you want to make sure

Seen this. This is great. Really? Yeah. I got a lot of room. I'm not on the team call. Yeah. On the what? I am not on the calls that you do. I got a lot of frameworks nowadays. Yeah. Learn from the best. Uh, so, basically, there's four things you want to look at, which is there's being an expectations match. There's being a values match, there's being a potential match, and there's being a skills match. And so when I am interviewing someone, like I actually think about all of these things. Like I, I look at the after I get the interview done and I ask myself these questions. The first one is expectations. Do the expectations I have of the job match their expectations of the job? Right? So, for example, this is the hard stuff, like hours that we're going to work, uh, location, right? Location, responsibilities, like what are they going to do on a daily basis? Right? So, it's all the hard stuff that you have in a job description. It's like, is there an expectations match? Right? So, that's the first thing I'm going to look at. Just the hard [ __ ] like we're okay. It's 9 to 5. You're on location. These are the six things you're going to be doing every day. These are the metrics that you're going to hit, right? Those are all the things that we put right here. Metrics, right? So those are the first things in the expectations match.

The second piece is the values match, which is, is this person a cultural fit? Now, again, if we operationalize values, which is what I talk about a lot, which is people you get on a call and you're like, "Listen, one of our core tenets is be brutally honest." Well, what the [ __ ] does that mean? Because you're like, "Are you brutally honest?" And they're like, "Yeah, for sure." And then you're like, "Great, you're hired." It's like, "How the [ __ ] do you know?" And so it's like, "Okay, if I want to know if somebody's brutally honest, I'm going to say, okay, tell me about the hardest conversation that you had in the last month." And I [ __ ] you not, the amount of times I ask people this because we have sincere candor. I'm like, "Tell me about the hardest conversation you had in the last 30 days," because I can tell you about the one I had an hour ago, and I can tell you about the one that Caleb had yesterday, and the one he had the day before, and the one that my freaking, you know, uh, EA had two days ago, right? Because we all do it. And then if they're just like, you know, six months ago, I'm like, "No, [ __ ] that [ __ ]" Right. Second one would be like, "Okay, say your value is we've got uh competitive greatness." I would say, "Okay, so tell me about the hardest challenge you took on and what was the outcome in your last job?" And if they're like, "Oh, well, one time Johnny called in sick and, you know, I was like, I'm here. I can stay an extra hour." I'm like, "Dude, you lost me. Yeah, like this is [ __ ] pathetic." So, um, when I do a values match, I want you guys to think about this is if you, and none of you have values, so just realize that I'm guessing. Who, who here has values?

Can I take one real quick? So, we've all, we've been throwing the word culture around, uh, and values, but fundamentally, they're the rules that govern reward and punishment in an organization, right? And so if you're like, "Okay, well, I want to have a good culture," it means that I want to have people follow these rules. And if you want them to follow those rules, then you need to reward them for following those rules. And also means that when they do these things, if then statements, that then if they do not follow the rules, what the consequence of that is. And so that, that fundamentally is what creates culture is what are the rules that govern behavior, or the rules that govern the reward and punishment in this organization. Please continue. Mhm. And so what I know is that when I say they're following our values, our values represent bundled skills. Being able to be sincerely canderous is like 20 skills bundled into one value. Being able to be competitively great, 20 skills bundled into one value. Same with unimpeachable character. And so I'm saying to myself, I know that if people have these three values or skills, bundled skills, then they will be able to be successful in this company because I cannot teach below a certain level. I'm just not good enough as a teacher, right? And so that's why I ask about the values match. And so I'll go through each value that we have, right? And if you don't have values, you can just ask, "What would make somebody a great employee versus a shitty one?" Think about those are your values.

The third piece is I look at a potential match. Now, this, in my opinion, is the same as if you want to ascend and retain a customer, that's how you ascend and retain an employee, which is talking about the future. So nobody here needs to worry about career development plans. But what you can think about is what are the next two roles that they could have in the company? So like, if somebody comes in and they're my first sales guy, it's like, "All right, I want to be honest. The only two roles I see next are like maybe sales lead and then you could be sales manager, right? And so are you aligned with that? Do you want to go into that role?" And they're like, "Yes or no." Or I might be like, "Actually, I just need you to sell. And to be honest, dude, like I don't need like I don't have a whole career plan right now. Like if this company blows up, we actually sell some [ __ ] people. We can talk, but right now I need to know that you're cool just being like on the ground, boots on the ground selling people."

So it's just setting the expectation whether you have room for them to move up or whether you don't. It's being honest. Yeah, that's where the tough part with them. Yeah, that's where the tough part comes in because like for me, when we bring on a setter, I want to become a closer because that's how I got good at becoming a closer is setting. I understood the offer a lot better, you know? So, for the people, that was my main thing was like, well, if we can handle, if you can get really great at setting, closing is not going to be a problem, you know? But that, that's the problem right there, though. It's like, I want them to grow into that role and they're like, "Well, bro, I just want I just want to set. I just want to hop in the DMs and..."

Wow. So that's why it's important that you ask them first. They have to self-proclaim their goal. You cannot proclaim it for them. It's the same as with a customer. It's like goals where the person is the one that vocalizes their goal, are they're much more likely to hit than when you give it, you push it upon them.

Yeah. And then the last piece to this is a skills match, which again, I break every role down into five skills. And then I ask myself how I can test for those skills in an interview. Uh, which is a series of, I call it tests versus reference questions. So I'll give you an example of what this means. So if you're hiring for somebody

Real fast. Yeah. So if you're looking at this and being like, "This looks like a lot of work." Uh, that's because it is. That being said, the good news is you guys have to hire far fewer people than we do and we still do this work. So, we work harder on more roles than you do. So, it is doable and you only have to do this per role. And so, when you're thinking about the role, correct me if I'm wrong here,

She's thinking through each of the five skills and how she's going to test them. But once she has figured that out for the role, she can then apply that template to everyone from here on out that we ever hire for this role. So if it's a repeated role, so customer success or you know a dialer or it's a closer or it's a like there are definitely roles that this will get really [ __ ] clear because you hire lots of them. Where it gets more complex is when you have a high level role that's incredibly important that you can't get wrong. That's where you spend a ton of time on this to be like, okay, how do I guess what this person's supposed to be? I've never hired this person before. Right? Right? And that's where pattern recognition long term is why every entrepreneur's second business grows faster than its first and their third business grows faster than their second and fourth business because once you, it takes you six months to figure out uh how to, you, you hire a sales manager, you find out they suck and then you try another one and then they suck and then finally you get a third one and it works. You're like, okay, how do I detail as much as I can about this person? Because when you have your next business, you're like, "Oh, I know exactly what Todd looked like." So then you just look for Todd again and then you bring Todd in and then that's not where you get stuck because you get stuck on the next role and then you have to fail there for six months or 12 months before you get it right and then it works. But fundamentally, that's how you move so much faster. Like right at this point, I would say like, we don't build businesses. We assemble them. Like we just know what all the roles need to look like. We just put the pieces together. Sorry. Keep going.

Oh, that was it. So do the skills thing. Oh yeah. Okay. Um, so for a lot of you, I think this is probably the hardest part, which is like, how do I test that somebody actually has the skill that they say they do. Um, and so I look at that as a series of what things can I practically test, meaning like I actually can have them do the thing versus what things do I have to pressure test through situational referencing. So I'll give you an example. Um, if we are hiring somebody to be a video editor, this is a fairly easy one, right? Because what we've done and what Caleb does is the easiest thing, a test. All right, here's our footage. Make three videos. And it's due in 48 hours because we have to have. Can you turn things on time? And can you edit well? Or to what degree can you edit? Can you work on short timelines? Like it tests, it tests multiple things. How do you communicate? Do they have follow-up questions about the footage? Like all of that stuff gets tested with one clear directive. Versus situational referencing might be something like, if I'm hiring somebody, um, let's say to do sales and I want to know that they can, uh, not just like do the sales, but do the sales when there's not like a great process in place. I might say like, "Tell me about a time when you sold a product but you didn't have like a great script in place. You didn't have like many processes or systems. Tell me about that." It's like, "Oh, yeah, you know, my last," it's the same as when I was talking about it earlier, which is if they get vague, if they don't give you details, the likelihood they did it is low versus, "Oh, yeah. You know what? In my last company, we started this uh online course and then I had to go in and just like literally figure it out from ground zero and then I built the script and then I made it and then I formalized it and then I actually taught it to the next two guys who came in and you're like, 'Oh, okay. I believe you like you've actually done it, right?'" And so the same goes is like the things that you cannot test for from a like technical, like they deliver it, right, a deliverable standpoint, you ask for with situational referencing. "Tell me about a time when you x, y, and z." So when I'm hiring for a role, like Alex said, it's like these are the four, we call it the four-way fit. And then after each time we interview, this is just like.

A four-way fit. Yeah. Cool. She says it all the time. I had no idea what it meant. Um, I just figured it was like above you likes you, bow. My diagram is cuter. See, there you go. So, basically, it's

just becoming a lot more polished because we're we're trying to go from a startup, small company into growing. Like, we're learning like for opportunity. We're commission based. A lot of them are commission based because I I love commission based. Like that was how I got my opportunity. I'm fine with that. I control my income. But some people don't want that. So, now we get to thinking like, dang, do we have to go base? And maybe we'll attract better, but at the same time, the right people do want that. So, you know what I mean? Like, it's is it a match for for what you have?

Yeah. I mean, the whole point of an interview is you're trying to attract the right people to repel the wrong people. So, I want people when they get on interview with me that if they're not right that they're like trying to run the other way. I've had people that don't show up, they like ghost because I'm like, listen, I actually had a lady the other day. So, I'm trying to hire a CFO for a company and I I used my LinkedIn to like source some candidates and then I was like, you know what? I just want to expedite this. like this girl seems really good so I want to talk to her. So I got on I was like listen I mean this company is like worth you know half a billion but like it's a [ __ ] [ __ ] show. Okay we've got like two idiots in the department. We've got like one person this and I'm like talking about this whole thing and she was like yeah I don't think that's for me. And I was like, well what do you mean? Because I know cuz guess what? When I hired my CFO for gym launch I was like I was nervous. I was like I mean I got to be honest like it's pretty tough. We don't have this in place. We don't have these people. We have this. And she was like I love me some [ __ ] up [ __ ].

Yeah. And I was like, "Oh, okay." She was south. She was great. Yeah. Yeah. She was southern. Um, and so I use that same position. And to her, this is an amazing opportunity. To her, this is terrifying. So, it's like I'm also in every situation. I'm actually trying to make it sound more exaggerated than it actually is. So that I can absolutely repel the people who are not about this [ __ ].

And also because they desperately want a job. And so now the higher up you go, the less desperate they are for a job to be clear. but they want the job. And so it's kind of like when you go on a a first date with a girl who's cute or a guy who's cute, whatever the equivalent is, right? Um it's like they have bad breath. You're like, I'm willing like you're like I'm I'm willing to get over it, right? But like six months in you're like this guy's breath drives me nuts or this girl's breath drive, right? And so it's like you wanna you want to make it worse because they have this like little uh cloud of unre of what they're willing to deal with which is a lot more day one than what it is at month six. And so it's like we want to purposely exaggerate it so that if they're if if it when it's exaggerated it makes them more excited then it's like awesome, they're going to be a great fit. It's going to work.

Good question. Um, this is really valuable by the way. So thank you.

One person. Great. Um, what's that?

No, one person.

Oh, one person. One person. Yeah, I got you. That's good. That's good. Um, you mentioned before about values and that just being the rules that you reward and punish with.

Uh, so rewarding, that's easy, simple. How do you, let's say you, you find someone, you think their values match, but then they're living out of alignment of those values or rules. How do you hold them accountable to that without just saying, "Hey, I'm going to fire you."

I think okay there's a difference between punishing somebody and informing them of consequences. So if you come into this company and you accept this role and you agree on the expectations and agree on the fact that these are the cultures that we abide by then if these two things are not upheld then that means the consequence is you don't work here. I'll give you an example. So, I had somebody who um you know, we had these uh workshops that we do and I brought in a guy from our portfolio company like that would go in and tweak stuff around the tech and [ __ ]. And um one day I'm talking to somebody and I get a message online and this girl was like, I I don't know if you knew this, but I didn't get a refund from your guy. And I was like, the [ __ ] are you [ __ ] talking about? Refund for what? You didn't give me you didn't buy what? And she was like, oh, like you know, uh he was doing consulting with me. I thought that you knew. And I was like, what the [ __ ] So then I find out this guy's been selling some package and even worse, he's not delivering on it, right?

So if you're going to steal, I might as well do a good job. Geez.

I know. I was like, Jesus, this is worse than I thought because at least do a [ __ ] good job, right? And so I I call him up and we get on a call and I was like, listen, I was like, you can absolutely keep consulting and doing this with people. You can just only it's either you do that or you have a job here. Which one do you want to do? I didn't yell at him. I didn't tell him he's a piece of [ __ ]. I didn't tell him that he lied, that he was a thief, none of that. I just said, "You can keep doing that, but you can't also have a job here. So, which one do you want to pick?"

So, do versus who again?

Yeah. And I just I just point them out like at some point you have to inform people of the consequence.

That's really just what it comes back to each time is you either do this and you have a job or you don't.

And it's the same example with like someone asked me this with sales the other day. I said, "Yes." You say, "So, they said they're not making their dials, right?" And we've been coaching them this now all stuff, but like they're just literally just not making the dials. And I said, "Okay, at this point you inform them. Right now you're an orange, right? If you're making the $100 a day, you'd be a green. If you're making zero, you'd be a red. Right now you're making like $80 a day." So you're like an orange, which is like I consider that like at risk. And so here's the thing. If you don't continue to make the dials, right, then you turn to red. I don't want to go to a red. I'd like to go to a green. In order to get to a green, we need to add $20 a day. How do you think we could add $20 a day? And then it's like, oh, I think you'd add this. or they'd be like, "I don't want to make $20 a day, blah, blah, blah." Like, okay, if you tell me that you can't, I just want to let you know, you don't need to make the $100. Like, I cannot force you to do that. But if you do not, you become a red. And if you're red, you're not on this team.

Let's go.

So, it's always pushing it back onto them. Like, this is your choice. You choose if you stay on this team or not by your actions that you demonstrate every day. I just am the facilitator of the agreed upon rules that we have already established.

Awareness to it.

Yeah. Exactly. Thank you.

So, should you inform uh the people you're hiring uh of the consequences in the beginning of the hiring process, like when they first start on your team or later when they're about to like not meet the expectations?

I think informing people of what they are expected to do in terms of KPIs they're expected to hit, projects and milestones that you expect them to move forward, and goals that you want them to accomplish is the first thing you should start doing. So like every person that comes into our company, we do like a 30 6090 to start. What do we want you to accomplish in 30 days? What do we want you to accomplish in 60 days? What do we want to accomplish in 90 days? And then that tells them here's the goals to hit, right? And so then we have, okay, we agree on this. These are the things you do in the first three months. And then after the first three months, every single person in our company has goals that they are to hit each quarter, right? And so the thing is is that when someone first comes in, you're the one setting all of the goals, right? As somebody continues, I try to collaborate. We make them together. So it's like they have more buy in which means they're more likely to hit them. But I would say that when someone first comes into the team, getting a 30 6090, Google it, like seriously, then just use a framework together and then going over it on a call with them is like the most valuable thing you can do because most people come into organization and they don't know how to win. So I'm just like, dude, I want to help you win. I don't ever talk about like this is how you don't lose and get [ __ ] fired. I'm just like this is how you win in your role and and if you wanted to go above and beyond and blow my mind, you would even go beyond this and do this, you know? Um, because where you you direct people's attention, it is it's like if I constantly telling people what not to do, then they're thinking about how they suck and what not to do, which then causes more of it. If I'm talking about what I want them to do, then they're going to do more of that.

So, I would say directing in negatives is usually a bad idea. So, don't do this does not really work. Do this instead works because people can't really think in negatives. And so, it's just telling them what behavior to change will have a much higher likelihood. They just want to know what to do. And just make sure you keep the directives that way. It'll make it'll you'll be mind- blown at how much easier it is.

I have a question in terms of like the other side of hiring. to like firing. If you had to let someone go, is there a process you have for like if you're a smaller company, say they're only doing 30 of those 100 dials, are you first like you want to find a replacement and then you'll let them go? And is it just any like good process or framework of like if you just see a red flag day one, it's like, "All right, we got to get you out of here." Or is it three strikes or like what's the best things you've learned um at scam?

Do you want me to talk about the firing conversation? I'm not allowed to fire people.

What's up?

I fired one.

You fired one person since we started and that was recently.

I know.

He was like, I want to. I was like,

that makes it sound a little bit I was like, I think this one's mine.

Think you wanted to. I wanted to. It was the one I just told you about. I was like, that shit's [ __ ] up. Anyways, um, no. I I hate firing people. There's literally been like two instances where I want to and it's when they've done something that's hurt the entire team and they're just like not a great person and that's been like but that's not that's like the bad side of me that I don't like to lean into. Um, we all the dark side. So when it comes to firing, I would say like go through this as a checklist.

And this stuff happens all the time. That question that you have, which is I've got this person, if I have zero people there, it'll be worse than this bad person, but I can barely afford to have two people. So what do I do?

There Yeah, hold on. I got a framework for that so I don't forget anything.

Yeah, there's a framework for that. It should be like R. There's an app for that. Is this team stuff? I mean, we have never gone this deep on team stuff, but I feel like we were we're due.

Uh, cool.

I don't think anybody here knows because they haven't been to the other ones, right? Where have you guys been here before?

No. No. So, none of here has been there before. Been here.

Okay.

Here we go.

It's my first time.

Yeah. Right. Yeah. For you.

Okay. So, the first

won't stop coming. um

you just showed up.

So the first step

just showed up

is that you need to inform them of current. So the goal with somebody who has a performance discrepancy. So I'll say this, there's usually two reasons you fire someone, right? It's either cultural, which is performance in a way, or it's performance. I would say that this is what it actually means is that this is linked more to the soft skills and this is linked to the hard skills for the most part. And so for the most part, this is a bigger issue and harder to solve because why is it? And why do we hire for culture? Because it's all these bundled skills that are harder to teach. And so if you bring someone on and you recognize within the first few weeks they're not a culture fit, I'm usually like, "Fuck, I picked wrong. That's my fault. I didn't filter well for culture. And so that is the hardest one. And most of the times then it's like, okay, well, could you train that? And then I'm like, I could train it. How long would it take? It might take a year if I meet with them twice a week. And is it worth my time to meet with this person with this giant discrepancy twice a week when I could be meeting with my team, my other teammates who are doing well twice a week? Where do I get the higher ROI? And so a lot of times if somebody's not a culture fit, then it means that we're not going to go through a lot of the steps because what am I going to inform them? Hey, you're a [ __ ] dick and I didn't know. Can you change that? Like it's just very painful. And so if like I'm like, "Hey, can you change your entire personality, please?" Like for real. And it's like I'm not going to It's a shitty process for them and for me because I'm asking them to do something that they don't know how and it's [ __ ] impossible for them. And so for that I none of this applies the the main piece. So just let those people go.

Yeah. Uh and we'll talk about that, but like the next piece doesn't apply. If it's performance, I need to inform them of the gap. So the biggest thing is like it's just red, yellow, green. Where do they sit? Right? And it's like, hey, you're a yellow or my my uh new head of people likes to say orange. I don't know why she picked orange, but I'm used to saying yellow, which is like you're a yellow, right? It's like caution. In order to get you to a green, these are the things we need to do. Uh, if you don't do those things, then you're going to become a red. And I don't want to have to have a red conversation.

That means blood,

means death. Um, and so that's the first thing you want to do is like you always, this is this is the biggest thing. It's like you don't want people to be surprised. You at least need to give them a shot to know where they stand in the organization. Especially if you've got somebody who is a culture fit but isn't performing, it's usually that they don't [ __ ] know. like the amount of times I've gotten on and done like a post-mortem exit interview with somebody. This was like years ago before they didn't let me do it. Uh stopped letting me do it. Um and I'd be like, you know what? What was the like tell me how the conversation went if they were like upset and send an email or something and they'd be like, I didn't even [ __ ] know I was doing a bad job. You know what I mean? And so that's the thing we don't want to do. So we want to inform them of the gap. And I would say use the red, yellow, green. It's bad typing. Um, the second thing is if you do go through this process that's ahead of the time and you recognize like this person is not going to improve fast enough and it's the amount of time I would have to spend with them to improve them, I would get a higher ROI put on other people on the team.

I want to pause right there real quick. Actually thinking through how much time and effort would it take me to get this person up to skill level is a very like this is what quantitatively makes these these decisions. So it's not it's not like I have a feeling because the thing is is that you then have to compare that to how much effort is it going to take me to restart a search interview 20 more candidates like and do the rest of that. So like it is a very real question to look at skill deficiencies in terms of how much time will it take me to fix versus how much time will it take me to replace just to be like like if it's like man it's going to take me six one- on- ones to probably do that it's like well probably take me more than six interviews to find somebody and I'm going have to onboard and train them right so it's just like you want to look at it quantitatively sorry keep

yeah and I like to have those conversations with people you know Alex is talking about the guy that the dick thing right I had the conversation with them he's like you know you could just fire me and find somebody who doesn't have this issue I was like well but think about how long that would take and and I literally played it out with him and I was like and I think you can turn this around in a good six weeks and he was like that's fair like just honest about it

and he was a high performer and so that he had that to his advantage. If he hadn't been performing well then that would be a different question but he was actually a very high performer. So the the next thing I'll do is if you've informed them of current state you've determined now okay I am going to fire this person that goes into coverage which is are there people internally that I can distribute the responsibilities or is it external right which means do I need to hire contractors or vendors or do I need to redistribute their workload to a different employee or myself

right

or myself I'm just going to be really real with you guys like until you have a certain level of infrastructure. I mean, how many people do you think

I mean when we did your book launch, I ran the book launch and was the CFO and the CEO,

right? So, I'm just saying like that like you we are fundamentally the leftovers. Like that is the job of the entrepreneur. Like we're once everyone I think Elon has a wonderful quote around this that I will butcher, but he said being an entrepreneur is the most painful thing in the world because everyone does all the fun stuff and then what's left is the stuff that sucks. And he's like and so you have to do that, right? Right? It's like we get the leftovers and so the nature of the leftovers will change but them being leftovers will remain the same.

I'll give you an example. When we had Gym Launch, Prestige and Allen and this is like we're making nine figure company, right? And there was uh two reps that we had to get rid of. They had done something just like really terrible. And so we fired them and they were customer service reps and they were actually our weekend coverage for the software. And it just so happened that we fired them on a Friday and nobody was able to take the coverage that weekend. I did. So I just jumped in. I did customer service on Saturday, Sunday and Monday. And then I took my EA and I had her jump in the second seat and the two of us are just doing it all weekend.

I do remember that.

We'll start dialing. Yeah, we'll do that. We'll start dialing to set the tone. Like he won't book anything. We'll be like, "Yeah, we just booked five appointments and then you should just

Perfect."

Just you always have to do your current job and the other job that the company needs.

Yeah. I think it's just really embracing that like where you were like angry Alex like that's what we feel is like bro we're even giving you leads like at one point we had to build dial set cope all every single step and you just have one thing to do and then trying to be okay like that's where we like bounce each other out.

You got to you got to just separate yourself and just recognize that he just doesn't have the skill.

Right. Yeah. Like I've had so many times where teammates that come in they're like 19 20 years old and they they're five 10 minutes late to a meeting with me and I'm like and like I if anyone Alex knows and maybe my team but uh like I am I do not [ __ ] with being late and I don't [ __ ] with waiting in line and so like when somebody's late I just like feel myself escalate. I'm just like enraged. We had a meeting the other day. It was like the full team and it was in here and I looked and it was like 2 minutes that some people walked in late and I was like and the meeting already started with like me pissed because I was so mad and so I but I recognized I was like oh it's not that they disrespect me it's that they don't know how to be on time. What was it? Right. Even those people walked in. I talked to a couple of them. They're like, "Well, my last call ended at 1:30." I was like, "Well, you should have thought about that. Ended the call 5 minutes early and planned that when we put this on the calendar a week ago so that you could have walked down and been here in time." But they don't think about that. So it's just a skill discrep discrepancy. It's not like they're personally attacking you. Now I'll say this. So you do these two things and then the next thing is the conversation, right? Which is like what are you going to say to that person? In which case I would say this is how I would script it, right? Which is for the most part um when it comes to firing somebody the the thing to understand is that the more you say the worse it is for you.

It sounds terrible. Yeah, it sucks.

And like and I will say there are have been exceptions to this where I've been friends with the person, they've been on the team for four years or five years and it's like a conversation. You know, there's enough trust. I know they're not going to [ __ ] me. They're usually a smart person in a high level role. But for a more lower level role, you haven't had them for a long time. Keeping it as professional as possible and as painless as possible are the objectives. Professional from your standpoint, painless for them. And so what I like to say is you get on a call, you skip the small talk, and you say, "Hey, John. Uh, I've got something I've got to talk to you about. It's not great news." That gets them able to brace themselves, which it's kind of like um a hospital nurse. They always say, they're like, "I have some bad news I've got to talk to you about." Because you need that person to brace. Otherwise, it's like they're in shock.

They train doctors on how to give bad news. And people have a massive amount of resilience if you people can handle a huge amount of bad news if you just prep them. So when they say, "I have bad news. I need you to sit down for this." People are like, "Okay, I'm ready." You know what I mean? And like they're immediately like, "Everyone in my family's dead." And you're like, "No, only one of them." And they're like, "What a relief." You know what I mean? And so I'm being ser like people. So there's a there's they've already done the good thing is all the science on this is already done. Like the research is done. You have to let people you have to brace them for bad news. So the next thing I'll say is I will if it's a performance which it is if it's not the cultural I will reference the performance. John as you know last month you were supposed to hit quota which was 100 calls and you have not hit 100 calls despite our excessive coaching. That being said as of today your employment here is terminated. It's not it will be terminated. It's not it's it is terminated today.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Not we were thinking about

No,

it is it's done. The decision's already been made. And then what happens, and this is like the the hardest part when you're first doing this, is that people always fight back, right? They're like, "I need more of a reason. Is that really all it is? Was it something else?" Blah blah blah. One, you don't give more than one reason because you give anytime you open up more than one reason, you open up more than one thing to argue with you about because that's what they're going to do. Trust me,

it's a liability.

It is also a liability. And the second thing is you just say the same phrase over and over, which is the decision has been made.

Dude, I saw Leila do this for 22 minutes straight. No, I mean I mean 22 like you got to give me some more. The decision's been made. You No, I mean that's not enough. Like you have to give me a a better reason. We made the decision. The decision's been made. Like for 22 minutes straight. I was like, "This is unreal."

Yeah. That guy was a fighter.

Yeah.

Um and so and then you end the call as quick as possible. You say, "I wish you the best. I'm going to follow up in an email with your last paycheck and some of the information um around the job and wish you the best and then the end of the call. I mean is usually they take like freaking 90 seconds. And so that's the biggest thing when you're having the conversation is just to to follow the script, practice the script because you're going to get nervous so you can do it right. Because I look at it as a respect them. Like even if I don't want to employ them, I don't want somebody to leave with a bad taste in their mouth or to feel like I was a shitty boss on the way out. Like I want to do them right by practicing and at least like presenting myself like a professional. Um and then that's pretty much it. That's that's honestly how you fire someone. Now I will say this, which is if someone's a not a culture fit, all I say instead of the performance piece is I say, "John, it's not a fit." And because it's not a fit, as of today, I've decided that you're terminated. And you just say not a fit. That is actually a legal reason that you can let someone go. And the only states that I'm just going to tell you guys that you got to worry about are California and New York because there they can [ __ ] you for anything. So, everyone that loves LA, you can always just discriminate um from states. It's not a protected class. Um just kidding. I don't know. Anyways, uh so to your question and I think it's where I just want to I want to uh zero in on this. So if the person is having is good at performance but is a bad cultural fit, I think that's where you can take the time hire somebody else in because they're performing so they're generating you money but like everyone hates them fine. And then you can place the person in because they're at least generating enough revenue to to carry the other person, right? If you have a performance issue and it's a culture problem in some in some ways it's like okay um well this sorry other way around but uh it's redistributing with the team and and which you are included in the team right for that in the short term the good news is the business has been surviving with their terrible performance anyways and so it probably no I'm just being real like so if they are performing then the good news is you can you'll have the cash flow to replace the person and then swap them If they're not performing, the good news is they're not going to lose much, right?

So, just playing it out on both sides.

Thank you. Thank you.

No worries.

Can you talk about the finding or setting the culture? Is that based on the values that you were talking about like creating culture?

That is also a bundled term. Um,

I mean, I think if you want to figure out What' you say?

You shook your head out there. She'd be like, "No,

I look at culture as when I'm not in the room, when Alex is not in the room, what do people do?" And so, it's how do people behave when there's not a presence of the leader? Um, I think in creating that culture, man, like there's a lot of [ __ ] that goes into it to be honest, but like it starts at the top. Like at the end of the day, the person who founds and leads the company is the one who who makes, breaks or develops the culture. And so what you do, how you behave, the things you say, the actions that you demonstrate in front of your team, it's like I I tell my team this. I say, "We don't teach business. We demonstrate business which is like if I'm speaking to a portfolio company and they see like how we organize a meeting like we don't teach them how to run a meeting we show them how to run a meeting and so I don't teach my team culture I show them culture you know when I go into the bathrooms and I wipe down the counter when I walk past the trash it's overflowing and I you know sweep up the floor like all of those things teach culture and so I just think to myself anytime that I when I'm trying to develop culture in a team is that I have to be such a potent example of it that it is irrefutable to anybody else because they're like Ila would do that and then they can use me as a reference point which is like I am the example for everybody on the team of like what would I do in this situation I was thinking through what you would do in this situation I was thinking you would do this you know for example um when that incident happened with those people who flew in my head of customer success called me and she's like I was just thinking through what you would do. She's like, "So, I was already thinking to myself, I was going to call you and Alex to ask you what you would be willing to do because I think if they got to spend time with you, that would mean more than anything. Obviously, we're already going to pay for all these other, you know, she already had thought through all that stuff." Um, and so I think the fundamental thing that's the issue with for me about teaching culture is that it is 100% influenced by the person at the top. And I look at it as like I strive to be the best person possible because I want to create the best team possible because then it will create the best people possible and they will be better people for working at my company.

what yeah you should just take that.

Yeah. So so I'll I'll cover two different angles. So one is um so if culture is the the rules that govern behavior right within an an organization then you demonstrating those rules in action if this then I behave this way demonstrates what is what happens in each of these conditions and the longer somebody's at the company the more demonstrations they will have seen the other part is trying to well not the other part so sub point you can continue to demonstrate what things are rewarded or or punished or frowned upon um whenever there are opportunities that Republic. And so I'll give a really simple example. So um I asked uh my audience for uh I think it was like CFO no some sort of candidate. I can't remember what it was but hey I was like hey does anybody know somebody who does this? Uh it was oh for book stuff for KDP. Anybody know anybody who works at KDP? We have some issue. And so um I then said hey inside of my media team and I was like hey who know like who's willing to take all these DMs because I'm super busy right now. And it just sat there for like an hour in the whole chat with 17 people and that response thread is really fast and I was like pretty pissed honestly and then Caleb jumped in who's the leader of the whole team and he was like got it and in some ways I was actually really grateful that Caleb jumped in because then I got to say and that's why he leads this team and then that little moment it's like everyone's like oh that is a demonstration of what should have happened and if I would like to move up in the company as Caleb has then I should do that too, right? And so it's like whenever you see those the the hard part about training behavior is that you want to wait until the right behavior occurs so that you can then reward it publicly. I'll give you a different example. Um last week uh someone left a plate on one of my machines and so I like my gym clean as though no one has been there every time I walk in and I don't want to have an extra staff that cleans the gym. I was like this is not a commercial gym. this is my gym. You guys get to use this gym. That's a privilege. And so someone left the plate there. And I had I had put plates back, you know, basically every other time that I walked in the gym for probably like a month. And I was getting a little tired of it. And so I was trying to play detective during that like month trying to figure out who was doing it, being like, "Hey man, by the way, just put your weights back." Right? Um, and then as I was about to start that process again, as I was putting the weights back, I was like, "This is a complete and utter waste of my time." Um, for me to not only put the weights back, that takes a minute, but then try and find out who did it so that I can then like try and kill the issue. Now, I don't think it was malice because they didn't believe every one of them. I think they just forgot. But I was like, how am I going to figure out a way that I can reward and publicly show that this is not okay? And so I posted a picture of the weights and I said, "Hey, no one's allowed to work out today because we as a company didn't know how to clean up after ourselves." And so after that, no one got to work out that day. And then the next day, and this is the key part, when the gym was clean because people put the weights back, I took a picture of the clean gym and I was like, "Great job everyone. Way to like way to keep it clean." And then I will also be able to again today and the day be like the day before yesterday. I took a picture of the gym when I went in and it was clean and I said, "Great job." Because I don't want to be seen as a uh a punishing stick. Like the only time they hear from me is when something bad happens. If I have to do that, I want to I want to I want to compensate with that with far more praise than I do punishment for every other time that they do well. Because the worst thing in the world is you punish people when a plane crashes, but you don't give them applause when they land it right every other time. Right? And so if I get to be the person who says, "Great job 20 days in a row," and then one day they mess up, I've balanced out my reward to punishment ratio for me as a leader. Does that make sense?

And so that was obviously a public, you know, an issue in the commons uh versus like an individual instinct, but that's that's fundamentally um like the public displays are the ones that are the biggest opportunities. It's also uh culture is demonstrated a lot by who you allow to stay on the team. So, if you've got a sales guy, for example, and he's a star salesman, there's a lot of uh back and forth in the business world around this concept, like what do you do with the star who doesn't play by the rules, right? Um it has been our experience that when you have that star, they usually suppress the rest of the team more than their delta in performance. And so, if someone is an absolute raging dick, but they're an unbelievable salesman, when we let them go, the entire rest of the team just picks it up. So that phrase I use is like they stand out because they stand on others. So it's like when you remove them, everyone else rises up. We had this happen on the sales team. We had three guys that were just like cancerous on the team, right? They're just gossiping, doing whatever, like just being really shitty to everybody.

15 person team size context.

Yeah. And so, um, one day fired all three and then gave a talk to the team and then literally the next day we had a record day and they all were like, "Dude, those guys were so tough. They were so bad. I didn't like showing up to meetings." You know, I'd be on a meeting talking about the vision of the company. I'd watch them like rolling their eyes. Like, it was just bad. You know what I mean? And so, you're like, "You need to get these people out."

But they could close,

right?

That's the thing. They were they were they were all three of them led the leaderboards.

I will say one thing which is like culture is built through like a hundred golden BB's rather than one silver bullet. Certain things that you could do like all of you could do right now and this is something you could do within your communities because the same way that you build culture on team is how you build it with community. Um, every day at the end of the day when I'm laying in bed before I go to bed, I lay there and I think, what good things do I want to reinforce from today? What good things? And I look at my calendar. I look at all the meetings I had and the people I talked to. And then I think, what is something that each of them did that was good that I would like them to do more of? And I want them to know they did a good job. And then I just send them a message. I use Slack, so I slap them. And like that alone, like it doesn't matter who it would be. It could be the most random thing, you know. Uh I was doing something and I asked uh one of the girls that runs events to keep time for me and she actually kept You would be surprised how many people I say keep my time and get me at this 5 minute mark and they don't and she kept the time and she did a great job. She's like time to go. Right. I just slack her. I'm like you did a great job keeping time for me. Thank you so much. I know that's really hard for people to do and it can be scary to to tell me I've got to go. Right. Um, another one was like, I saw someone pick up a piece of trash right in the hallway the other day. So, I slack that person at night. I say, "Thank you so much for picking up the trash. Like, I appreciate you respecting the building." Just like any little thing you can think of. And I probably send like on the low end two or three messages a night and on the high end 10.

Do you get your team to do that as well?

you know, I will after today because the other day I recognized that I was doing that and I I saw that my admin team started doing the same thing. So, I saw that they added it to their calendars and then she did it to me one night and I was like, man, they're picking it up. And so, I was like, I should probably tell the whole team because I actually think this is a key piece of like leadership ability.

Do it in the main school community. It's like give love. So, like every week I post a post in the main school community, tag someone that helped you. And I learned this when I was 18 at a company. We do it like big round table, big circle. I'd be like, "Doug, help me." And they would say it in front of the whole team about this little event, this big event, this relationship event. And so I just started doing it in the main school community. The posts pop off. They go crazy. But you guys can do it all in your own communities as well. Um, yeah, it works every time.

You know, something cool that that we do on our company meetings that you guys could do in those communities, too, is similar to this, just like a little twist, which is every Friday we send out a survey that says, "Does anyone have any shout outs for other people on the team, right?" And so, it'd be cool to even do it in the community because in in um the gym launch community, we used to do something like that, which was basically like we would use those shout outs to determine like who was the member of the month, who was the most improved, what are the wins of the week. And so like every Monday when we get on our team meetings, it's like we just have like three full slides full of compliments and shout outs for everybody. We all say them and it takes up honestly most of the meeting. Um but I think that people love that.

When their name gets shouted out, it like makes their week. And if all of these things, which I will repeat, sound like work, um that's because they are. But I'll I'll share this with you. So when Leila and I met, she was all soft skills and I was all hard stuff. So mine was all quant like like I just get like what's our cost per click, what's our CTR, what are our CPMs, what are our conversion rate on the pages, how much do we make per lead and I would just like that's all I I lived on Excel sheets like that's how I ran everything. And Leila was all about like let's pay attention to the team and let's reinvest in them and let's try and tell people their career paths and and you know run

trainings to like help them get better. And I was like, yeah, as long as we make money, whatever.

And, um, over time of us working together, one of the things that's been interesting for me is that I've witnessed for myself is, um, everything that was like the hard skills, the hard sciences of business. Um, in the beginning, it was here, and the soft stuff was here. And then I would say, in like, kind of the middle of my business career up to this point, I was like, you need the hard stuff and you need the soft stuff. You need both of them.

Um, and I would say that now, um, culture is strategy. So if we redefine that as the rules that govern behavior is the competitive advantage because the vast majority of your businesses are not novel. They have been done before. And so the way that you will win is not on having a novel idea, despite the fact that you think the idea that's the woman in the red dress is just this amazing thing that no one has ever done before. Someone has done it before. Um, but you will win on execution. And execution takes behavior from a large group of people oriented in the same direction repeatedly without you being there.

And so now that I've seen us consistently outcompete competitors who had basically the same model as us, I realized that it wasn't my novel strategy of running ads and making sales calls and making offers, which just about everyone here does. It was how well we did it and how consistent we were with it. And it was all the very small details that no one wants to do. Like that is that is the gap. That is the advantage. And that means just being really ruthlessly consistent for an extended period of time and, uh, being comfortable with the fact that it will take a long time. But once you do have it, it's unreal. Like you can you can just crush everyone.

Then getting everyone else to be the consistent. But it takes years, you know.

Can I ask about the onboarding processes with employees? Is there any you guys have any procedure for creating, for example, SOPs for learning certain skills to onboard new employees?

So, can you give me an example of a skill?

Yeah, for example, Facebook ads, running Facebook ads.

Every employee has different skills that they would need to learn. So I think for specific departments, we have specific things that we can train people on. I think that training for the most part is a combination of documented processes and shadowing. So like there's nothing better than someone watching someone else do it. And I will just like go down to the day I die. I think a lot of people think you probably have a lot of SOPs. I don't have a lot of SOPs. I have a lot of processes. So I believe that if you build out an SOP in a Google doc and say, go follow this, that it, the likelihood the person adheres is low. I believe that if I put it into Asana and they have to cross it off, check it off, and they know I'm going to look at it and I will give them a high five for doing it, is higher. But I think the best is if they watch me do it and watch me walk through that process that I put on that document that they then have to check off every point to do.

Which brings us to our template.

Would you like to go?

Yeah. 3DS very simple. So every role, document, demonstrate, duplicate. So document is you do the thing and you keep doing the thing until you can only do your checklist. Like if you just did the checklist, if it doesn't happen, you need to revise the checklist and you keep doing it until you just following the steps that you have in the checklist gets the result. At that point, you have a checklist that works. That's the documentation. Then you demonstrate to Leila's point, her going through the checklist in front of the other person, sharing her screen, going through it so they can witness, oh, she is following this exact process. Then they do it in front of you. So they duplicate the effort on the document and then they do it in front of you. Now, if the key point here is that you want to train adherence to the document, not the outcome because if they follow the checklist and it does not work, you need to fix the checklist until they can follow it and then it does work. And then at that point, adherence to the document across all functions of the business becomes paramount because then it's back on you to make sure the checklist is right. If you have, I mean, I give the the classic example of the sales script, right? Because it's just easy to understand. If you have a sales script and the guys on the sales team all have like, kind of their own versions of the script, you don't have a script. So, the first thing we train is adherence to the script. And if somebody's outperforming in some way adhering the script, then we add to that script. But fundamentally, I just want everyone to do it exactly that we know works. And that's it. And if they have an idea, they can let me know and we can experiment with one guy. And if he outperforms, then we can roll it out to the whole team because they all follow the process. So adherence to the process is step is is number one most important thing.

Yeah. A lot of times when people like, this person is not doing a good job, I say, well, is it a shitty person or a shitty process? I'm like, if you give this process to somebody you know is competent because they've been on the team for a while, would they be able to do it successfully? And then if the answer is, they gave it to them and they didn't do it successfully, it's all right. Well, your process sucks. So a lot of times it's like people are like, "Dude, this person sucks." And I'm like, "Dude, you suck at building processes that people do." So, um, I would use that framework for everybody that you bring in when you're onboarding them. And I guess that's different for every scale. I mean, something like Facebook ads is fairly easy though. It's like that is really easy to document.

The tough part with, like, media buying is that the platforms change all the time. And so I think that, um, you trying to re-record new trainings or something for someone to follow along is probably not the best use of time because you're going to have to re-update them every like six months. You basically have to recreate a training for every time you have that person. Um, but that would be a role where I probably wouldn't train someone on running Facebook ads. I'd probably just have someone who is currently running Facebook ads and then have them run my Facebook ads since that one's particular. Like whereas sales, it's, you know what I mean? Like there's not like a, like there's not like a third-party platform that is constantly changing, right?

What other questions we want to go to? Have you dealt with employee jealousy? And if you have, what was the process of dealing with that?

What's that? Can you say what that means? What do you mean when jealousy?

Like maybe it's more common to small businesses when you're a little bit closer with the employees. But just as you rise, they might be jealous or feel like they

of you.

Yeah. Or feel like they deserve more because they contributed to that.

Oh, I don't entertain that behavior.

For real. It really hasn't been something that I, I don't even think that's ever really come up.

To be honest with you.

It's happened on small scales for sure in like in Gym Launch. Yeah.

Oh, okay.

Um, it's it's basically the same as like somebody, you know, they root for you until you're not the underdog anymore. They're like, "You're the underdog. Amazing. I'm going to root for you." And they stop rooting for you. I'm like, "Yeah, I don't [ __ ] with that." So,

yeah. If we, if we sense a hint of that, they're out. That's all it is. Because I mean, if somebody is not happy for you winning, it means they're actively sabotaging your business. You just don't know it yet. I would absolutely never keep someone on my team that was not happy to see me win. I'll tell you that recently I had that.

What?

I'm trying to think of who it is. Keep on.

Okay. Um, no, somebody who was close to me and then I found out that that person was very, um, very anxious about the fact that we bought a headquarters. And so then they, they specifically started speaking ill about the fact that we had now had an office and how it was a bad idea and then saying little things to other people on the team behind my back about how I made a bad decision and I wasn't doing a good job with some. And I was just like, oh, yeah, no.

Yeah, go on.

Anything gossiping like that, I actually have very low tolerance for that [ __ ]. I think it is, it's a very hard behavior to train out of people.

It's cancer. You just get it. Cut it out as fast as you can.

And, uh, often times, times it's just a lot easier to eliminate those people from the team.

Yeah. Zero, zero envy policy.

Yeah.

Cool. Team building, cover that a little bit. All right. Cool. Now you know everything you need to know about building a team. So it's all on you if it fails.

Um, yeah. Oh, yeah. For sure. Breaks. Break. Yeah. Break away. I forget the break stuff.