Chandler Bolt built SelfPublishing.com into an eight-figure business on partnerships and events, skipping the ad spend and the personal brand almost everyone else in his space leans on.
Posted
3 days ago
Duration
Format
Interview
educational
Views
6.8K
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57 · 43
Big Idea
The argument in one line.
Chandler Bolt scaled SelfPublishing.com to $80 million lifetime revenue almost entirely through strategic partnerships, event speaking, and SEO instead of ads or a personal brand, then built the brand anyway once AI search started eroding that owned-content revenue.
Who This Is For
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
You run a service or education business with a strong price point ($5,000+) and want a hands-off revenue channel that doesn't depend on your own time on camera.
You're building a content or media team from zero and want a hiring and org structure that's actually been stress-tested.
You lead a sales team and want concrete frameworks for KPIs, incentive design, and using AI to replace manager call-review time.
You're weighing a remote-to-in-person move and want to hear what actually breaks during the transition.
SKIP IF…
You're looking for paid-ad or media-buying tactics — this conversation is explicitly about the channels that replace ads.
You want a quick highlight reel; most of the value here is specific operational detail delivered over almost two hours.
TL;DR
The full version, fast.
Chandler Bolt built SelfPublishing.com into an $80 million lifetime business doing $800K a month, almost entirely without ads or a personal brand. His core channel is a B2B-style partnership team that books speaking slots and JV webinars, closes with a low-pressure 'no pitch' talk instead of a hard sell, and treats events as a portfolio where some flop and a few pay for the rest. He paired that with an SEO content engine built on owned 'digital real estate,' then started investing in a personal brand once AI search began eating into that owned traffic. The second half covers building a media team, recruiting and vetting talent, using AI to replace manager call-reviews, and why his business has outlasted competitors: no single channel, product, or person is ever allowed to become the majority of revenue.
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Cole's framing: Chandler built SelfPublishing.com to $80M lifetime and $800K a month with almost no ad spend and no personal brand, through a JV/partnership channel that runs largely without him.
02:04 – 05:52
02 · The Ideal Partner Profile
Chandler reframes partnerships as a B2B sales team where the 'sale' is a partner worth $50-200K, and lays out the three traits of an ideal partner: budget, desire, and a room leader who has done the thing.
05:52 – 09:33
03 · Why Speaking Beats Webinars
The Pete Vargas origin story: Chandler drives 15 minutes to speak to 27 orthodontists and walks out with $18,000, realizing a captive in-person audience converts far better than a webinar.
09:33 – 13:59
04 · The No-Pitch Pitch That Converts
Chandler describes the 'no pitch' talk structure: heavy value, then a 3-minute close that splits the room into a same-day strategy-session offer, generating $50-100K per event.
13:59 – 16:20
05 · Treating Events as a Portfolio
Events are a portfolio, not a sure thing: some rip, some bomb, and the math only works averaged across many bookings; event-sourced customers also carry higher LTV than ad-sourced ones.
16:20 – 19:56
06 · The $5M/Year SEO Machine
SelfPublishing.com built and acquired ranking content sites ('digital real estate'), including a review of a bankrupt competitor, generating $5-7M a year at near-zero CAC.
19:56 – 26:32
07 · Winning in the Age of AI Search
Chandler's approach to AI search: work backward from what people search right before they buy, target competitor-review content, and win trusted sources like Reddit and Trustpilot.
26:32 – 30:37
08 · Why Chandler Bet on Building a Personal Brand
After watching Dan Martell's brand take off and seeing AI erode his SEO revenue, Chandler commits roughly $500K a year, the size of one paid channel, to building a personal and company brand.
30:37 – 33:50
09 · Why Attribution Is the Dumbest Word in Marketing
Attribution obsession is a trap: it takes about 750 touches to make a customer, and brand content compounds indirectly into ads, SEO, and events instead of showing up as its own line.
33:50 – 40:23
10 · What Hormozi's Book Launch Got Right
Analysis of Alex Hormozi's book strategy: give the content away for free, serialize it everywhere, and treat the launch as the payoff of years of prior content, not a tactic to copy standalone.
40:23 – 50:18
11 · Rebuilding a Media Team From Scratch
A practical media-hiring playbook: decide if you're writer-first or video-first, avoid a 'creative director' as your first hire, and over-hire early because speed beats payroll efficiency.
50:18 – 55:11
12 · The Networking Secrets Nobody Talks About
Chandler's relationship tactics: volunteering at events he couldn't afford to attend, handwritten notes, physical gifts the whole family uses, and small 'dumbest person in the room' masterminds.
55:11 – 1:05:56
13 · How to Actually Poach Great Talent
Recruiting tactics: never poach from friends' companies, ask 'who do you know' for warm self-qualified referrals, and use senior-peer references instead of manager references.
1:05:56 – 1:22:58
14 · What Chandler Looks for in an Interview
Hiring filters beyond 'have they done the thing': AOV and B2C/B2B fit over industry match, Myers-Briggs/DISC/Colby/typing tests as proxies, and written memo tests that reveal thinking quality.
1:22:58 – 1:30:11
15 · Why Managers Are Disappearing With AI
AI now reviews every sales call instead of the three a manager can sample per rep per week, collapsing traditional middle management into a smaller 'player-coach' layer.
1:30:11 – 1:39:12
16 · Going From Remote to In-Person (What Broke)
Chandler's brutal 18-month remote-to-in-person transition: recruiting within a 30-minute radius, not riding the fence on policy, and not sunsetting the remote team faster than the new one could replace it.
1:39:12 – 1:54:48
17 · The Real Reason Businesses Die
Longevity comes from building slowly and diversified, no single channel/product/person over a fraction of revenue, reporting only net cash collected, and closing with why every business should eventually write a small book.
Atomic Insights
Lines worth screenshotting.
A partnership channel structured like a B2B sales team, not a personal-brand play, can generate $6-7 million a year almost entirely hands-off.
The best partner isn't the biggest audience, it's a room where people have budget, desire, and a leader who has personally done the thing being pitched.
One in-person talk to 27 orthodontists produced $18,000 in a single afternoon, more than most digital funnels convert in a month.
The best-converting event talks never pitch from stage; they add pure value for 20+ minutes and use the final few minutes to split the room into a low-key booking offer.
Events are a portfolio: expect some to bomb and a few to rip, and judge the channel on blended return, not any single event.
Customers acquired at events carry higher lifetime value than customers acquired from ads, because the relationship starts on trust instead of skepticism.
A blog built for zero-CAC search traffic can take six to twelve months to pay back, and that lag is exactly why most competitors won't bother trying it.
AI search engines weight Reddit and Trustpilot heavily because those platforms are seen as harder to fake, so brand visibility increasingly means managing your presence there, not just your own site.
Publishing an honest third-party review of a bankrupt competitor became one of the easiest keyword rankings the company ever captured.
It takes roughly 750 touches to create a customer, which is why obsessing over last-click attribution misses how brand, SEO, ads, and events actually compound together.
Alex Hormozi's book launch worked because of two to five years of free content built beforehand, not because of the launch mechanics themselves, so copying just the launch usually fails.
Hiring a 'creative director' as your first media hire is a mistake for most companies, because that role attracts people who want to build a team rather than ship content.
Asking a candidate 'who do you know' produces better recruiting leads than direct outreach, because it lets you pitch the opportunity honestly without the candidate's guard going up.
A senior-peer reference, a candidate's former equal rather than their manager, gives a far more honest read on performance than a manager reference, which is often constrained from saying anything negative.
AI can review every sales call instead of the three per rep per week a human manager has time for, which is collapsing traditional middle management into a smaller 'player-coach' layer.
A business that never lets one channel, one product, or one employee become the majority of revenue survives market and platform shifts that kill less diversified competitors.
Takeaway
A hands-off partnership channel and blue-ocean SEO beat ads for eight years
WHAT TO LEARN
An $80 million business grew on a hands-off partnership channel and an owned SEO asset years before its personal brand existed, added only once AI search began eating that traffic.
01Scaling to $80M Without Ads or a Brand
A partnership and events channel run by a business-development team, not the founder, can generate $6-7 million a year almost hands-off.
Reframing partnerships as a B2B sales function, where the 'sale' is signing a partner worth $50,000 to $200,000, changes how you build and staff the team.
02The Ideal Partner Profile
A good partner has three traits: an audience with budget, an audience with adjacent desire, and a room leader who has personally done the thing being offered.
Borrowing authority from a partner who has actually done the thing converts better than borrowing reach alone.
03Why Speaking Beats Webinars
A single in-person talk to a captive room of 27 people produced $18,000, because a captive audience converts a much higher percentage than the same pitch delivered digitally.
Changing the medium of an offer, not just the offer itself, changes the conversion rate you get from it.
04The No-Pitch Pitch That Converts
Adding pure value for most of a talk and reserving only the final few minutes to split the room into a booking offer avoids looking like a hard sell, while still converting.
Booking the strategy session at the event itself, with an event-only bonus, captures momentum that evaporates once someone leaves the room.
05Treating Events as a Portfolio
Judging a speaking or event channel by its worst-performing bookings misses that a portfolio of events only needs to average five-to-one or better to be worth running.
Customers who convert at an in-person event tend to have higher lifetime value than ad-sourced customers, because the relationship starts from trust instead of skepticism.
06The $5M/Year SEO Machine
Owning the top search results for a topic functions like owning digital real estate: it produces near-zero-CAC leads every month it keeps ranking.
A channel that takes six to twelve months to pay back is often a blue ocean precisely because most competitors won't wait that long to find out if it works.
07Winning in the Age of AI Search
The fastest way to win AI-driven search is to start from what people search right before they buy, then build content backward from that moment.
AI search engines lean on forums like Reddit and review sites like Trustpilot as trusted sources, so managing your presence there matters as much as your own site's content.
Writing an honest third-party review of a bankrupt or struggling competitor is one of the easiest keyword rankings to capture, and keeps paying off for years.
08Why Chandler Bet on Building a Personal Brand
Committing to a fixed budget for a new content bet, sized to match what you already spend on a paid channel, makes an unfamiliar channel feel less risky to start.
A channel dependent on search rankings should be treated as at-risk once AI starts reshaping how those results get generated, which is reason enough to diversify into brand.
09Why Attribution Is the Dumbest Word in Marketing
It takes roughly 750 touches to create a customer, so over-indexing on last-touch attribution undercounts channels that build trust earlier in that chain.
Brand and content often show up as indirect lift across ads, SEO, and events rather than as their own attributable line, which is why they get underinvested in.
10What Hormozi's Book Launch Got Right
A book launch that looks explosive is usually the payoff of two to five years of free content built beforehand, not a standalone tactic that can be copied in isolation.
Giving away your best material for free and letting people pay to have it delivered and organized again is a durable way to build demand before a launch.
11Rebuilding a Media Team From Scratch
Whether you're a writer-first or video-first operator should decide your first media hire, since a written-first team repurposes into video more naturally than the reverse.
Hiring a 'creative director' as your first media hire often backfires, because people who've already made it in that role want to build a team, not ship content themselves.
Overhiring early can be worth the extra payroll, because losing months to being short-staffed while you learn what a media team needs costs more than the excess salaries.
12The Networking Secrets Nobody Talks About
Volunteering at events you can't yet afford to attend puts you in the room with people you couldn't otherwise reach, and often earns you an assumed status you didn't ask for.
Small, topic-specific masterminds where you deliberately position yourself as the least knowledgeable person in the room are an efficient way to meet people above your level.
Sending a physical gift the whole household uses, not just the person you're networking with, extends the relationship to their family and makes the gesture stick longer.
13How to Actually Poach Great Talent
Asking a strong candidate 'who do you know' generates warmer referrals than direct outreach, because you can describe the opportunity honestly without triggering their guard.
A senior-peer reference, someone who worked alongside the candidate rather than above them, gives an honest read that a manager reference often can't legally provide.
The best person to poach is often a number two who has nowhere left to go at their current company, because a title or ownership stake is the only thing keeping them there.
14What Chandler Looks for in an Interview
Matching a candidate's prior average order value and B2C-versus-B2B sales experience to the role predicts fit better than matching their industry background does.
A written memo assigned during the interview process reveals the quality of a candidate's thinking in a way that live conversation doesn't.
Personality tests like Myers-Briggs shift with context, so using them alongside a behavioral test and a real work trial catches what a single test misses.
15Why Managers Are Disappearing With AI
A manager can realistically review three sales calls per rep per week; AI can review and score every call, which removes the main constraint on coaching capacity.
As AI absorbs the reviewing and scoring work, management roles are shrinking toward a smaller 'player-coach' layer that still carries a partial workload alongside coaching.
16Going From Remote to In-Person (What Broke)
Hiring for an in-person office without requiring candidates to live within roughly thirty minutes of it predicts early attrition once the commute gets old.
Committing fully to one policy, remote, in-person, or hybrid, avoids the ongoing coordination cost of a half-committed hybrid schedule that nobody can plan around.
Sunsetting an existing high-performing team faster than the new team is ready to replace it creates a revenue gap that can take years to recover from.
17The Real Reason Businesses Die
Letting any single channel, product, or employee become the majority of revenue creates a point of failure that eventually breaks a business, usually through the founder's own decisions rather than external forces.
Reporting only net cash collected after refunds, rather than gross sales or signed contract value, keeps a business's real financial picture from being distorted by its own marketing numbers.
A short, niche 20,000-to-30,000-word book, treated as an iterative asset rather than a one-time launch event, can generate more sustained revenue than a mass-market title with a big launch.
Glossary
Terms worth knowing.
No-pitch pitch
An event talk structure that spends almost the entire time delivering value and reserves only the final few minutes to split the room into a low-pressure booking offer, instead of a traditional hard sell.
Digital real estate
Owned content assets, usually blogs or review sites, that occupy the top search results for a topic and generate near-zero-cost leads every month they keep ranking.
AOV (average order value)
The average dollar size of a single sale; used here to match a sales candidate's prior experience to the deal size a role actually requires.
MQL (marketing-qualified lead)
A lead a marketing team has flagged as sales-ready; called out as a metric that can be gamed by quietly redefining what counts as one.
Colby test / DISC / Myers-Briggs
Behavioral and personality assessments used in hiring to estimate traits like follow-through, dominance, or thinking style, understood here as directional signals rather than absolute truths.
Senior-peer reference
A reference check with a candidate's former equal rather than their manager, used to get a more honest, legally unconstrained read on how they actually performed.
Player-coach
A manager who continues doing frontline work, such as taking sales calls, alongside managing a team, rather than managing full-time.
IC (individual contributor)
An employee, often a 'doer' or 'builder,' who isn't responsible for managing other people.
Tender offer
A formal process a private company must run to let more than a small number of shareholders sell their shares, which can effectively block early employees or advisors from cashing out equity.
Net sales / net revenue
Cash actually collected after refunds and merchant fees, as distinct from gross 'revenue' or signed contract value that may never fully get paid.
“Management is sameness. Leadership is uniqueness.”
tight aphorism on AI and management→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
1:50:50
“Revenue is vanity, profit's sanity, cash is king.”
classic finance line delivered with a fresh spin→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
1:53:40
“A book is a silent salesman. It never takes vacation, never takes a day off, never gets sick.”
strong closing metaphor for the episode's final pitch→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
Topic Map
Where the conversation goes.
00:00 – 16:20densePartnership and event-based sales channel
16:20 – 26:32denseSEO and AI search strategy
26:32 – 33:50Personal brand and attribution
33:50 – 40:23Hormozi book-launch case study
40:23 – 55:11denseBuilding a media and content team
55:11 – 1:22:58denseRecruiting and hiring systems
1:22:58 – 1:30:11AI and the future of management
1:30:11 – 1:39:12Remote-to-in-person transition
1:39:12 – 1:54:48Business longevity and closing advice on books
The Script
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99 % of business owners that I know have scaled their business through one of two ways. Either they scaled through ads or through organic slash content. But Chandler, who I talked to today, has done neither of those things.
And his business has done 80 million lifetime and does 800 ,000 a month. right now and the way he's scaled is strictly through strategic partnerships and leveraging other people's audiences so in this podcast we dive in to break down that entire model and so much more you guys do 10 million a year now 80 million lifetime and so what most people don't know about you is that the way you generate a lot of that revenue is not through ads it's not even through organic but it's actually through a jv and partnership model and so that's where i want to start is like first just kind of give the audience an idea like what's your business, how do the front end, back end offers work, price points, just kind of a quick overview.
But what I really want to dive into first is how you're able to generate eight figures purely through partnerships and also doing it in a way where you're not even involved at all. So walk me through that. We scaled to eight figures without ads and without really a brand, which is kind of crazy in the space because nobody does that.
So the partnerships are a big part of the business. So Backstory, SelfPublishing .com, we help people write and publish books that grow their business. That's the core of what we do.
Our average customer is anywhere from $8 ,000 on the low end to $100 ,000 on the high end. But the sweet spot is in the $10 ,000 to $25 ,000 range. So our partnership channel will do $6 or $7 million this year, largely hands -off.
It's a few fundamental things. There's the webinars. We speak at in -person events.
So we'll speak at 50 to 70 events this year. I'll speak at maybe 10 or 15 of them. And I think the part that breaks people's brain around all this is that it is not reliant on me.
When most people think partnerships, myself included, we shut down this whole arm of the business because I was like, well, I don't want to be doing this stuff all the time. And so, but it's not. We've got Pedro, who's done an amazing job with it.
We've got a business development team that we've built around it. And then they negotiate the partnerships. We've got a bunch of speakers.
There's a lot that we can unpack there, but that's kind of the high level how it works. Yeah. Well, I want to unpack it because, I mean, literally, you're probably the only person I know who does this.
And the only person I knew who's actually scaled themselves out of like speaking. Like a lot of people work with me because they speak at events or they do launches and they want to go evergreen. But you're actually able to like create a whole operational system around it.
So I want to know like all the components basically. So like how does the model work from end to end? Like how do you pick the right partners?
How do you decide if it's okay if it's a JV webinar or is it an event or is it a sponsorship? Are you going to speak, et cetera? How do you like vet to make sure it's the right person?
How are you actually getting clients from it? Like kind of like paint a full picture for me. So I'd look at it as a B2B sales team, your sales guide.
When I changed that frame, everything changed. So I used to look at it as partnerships or affiliates or whatever else. It's a B2B sales team where the average sale is 50 to $200 ,000, right?
And so - And that's acquiring the partner, right? The average partner is 50 to, okay. So yeah, business development.
So that's, I mean, that kind of, that is the way that - It changed the way I look at it. Now there's the team structure and then there's the ideal partner.
So the team structure is you need B2B sales and you need account management, essentially, right? So we've got people on like our business development reps. They go out and get partnerships.
What does an ideal partner look like? It's someone who speaks to our customer, which sounds super. obvious but like you would think oh self -publish .com you probably do writing conferences no author conferences no like we we don't do any of that stuff we want to be the only girl at the bar not the hottest girl at the bar right so we want to go to places where there's business owners and physical therapist any of that so and to be clear you're helping them self -publish their own book right like that's your offer and i think what you're saying because i was talking about pedro about this before is like a perfect client or a perfect event or a perfect partnership for you guys would probably be like like i was thinking if there was like a military event to where it was a bunch of ex -military wanting to maybe start a business or create a message or whatever you guys would probably crush with that because they probably haven't thought about doing a book, but you're kind of giving them the first like real clarity of maybe how to do that.
Well, I think really what it comes down to a good partner, the people in the room have three things. They have a budget, they have a desire, or at least we can stoke that desire. And then preferably the person running the room has done the thing.
So that makes a great partner for us. So if they have the budget, well, if they've paid to be in a room, they probably do. Right.
If they have the desire, meaning it's at least adjacent to their business, their practice, whatever else. What really crushes for us is if the person that's leading the room has done the thing, like how Elrod has sent us more customers than just about anyone. Right.
Because he actually wrote a book. He's written a book. He can confidently say that is one of the best things I've ever done in my life.
So you can borrow authority from that. Yes. Yeah.
But the event thing, that's the part that I think. For whatever reason, it's kind of what's old is becoming new again. People just sleep on events as this old, antiquated, because it's complicated.
It's a tough marketing channel. But I'll never forget talking to a guy named Pete Vargas, and he trained me on a lot of this stuff. He's the OG business development guy.
The OG speaking guy. You go to dinner with Pete, and you know you're going to have a good time. And there's going to be an offer.
It could be charity. It could be like, I don't know. He wants me to like come out to this cool event with Tim Tebow or something.
It could be a business deal. You don't know what it is, but there's an offer. And it's usually good.
It's like a fun thing. I mean, I love Pete. Yeah.
But he told me, he's like, dude, you're doing webinars. You need to speak at events. And I said, why in the world would I do that?
Kind of like opening an office. Why would I open an office when I got a remote team? He said, because you're going to do way more in revenue and you can do the same exact talk.
And so I'll never forget, I was living in San Diego at the time. I negotiated this thing to speak for, it was orthodontists. So I drive 15 minutes down the road, speak to 27 orthodontists, and I walk out with 18 grand.
And I literally went to the beach afterwards and I did pay nothing to be there. There was 27 people in the room and it was just one of those things where once you see it, you can't unsee it. I realized that having a captive audience and making an offer, whether it's in digital form, sure, but even more powerful in person.
I mean, you've obviously seen this a bunch, but it is, it's, it's a license to print money. Yeah. You change the medium, you change the conversion.
Yes. Right. And so how are you, so like, obviously I think most people can conceptualize, you know, them going to maybe go out, speak at an event and convert some people.
How are you getting guys like, like I know Chad used to work for you. How are you getting people like him to be able to go convert? Like, what is he talking about?
Is there a way you're structuring the talk to like shift the beliefs and help them like open up to what your offer actually is? And so like, what is the actual kind of like a. the event coordination run like like how do you make the most out of it i look at it as like we're running an internal talent agency and everyone works for the company so there's a bunch of ways to skin this but i mean i you look who does this well dave ramsey barstool sports espn it's like how do we have a a group of people who they're i mean you can either borrow their authority or you can build your own authority and then they borrow it from you which is kind of the path that i've taken or you can just write a chat which we've definitely done a bunch of that as well and so we've got almost like an internal talent development agency we've got a speaker program and so basically my hypothesis and it's worked really well is that you're the people who sell the best are or who can speak the best are your best sales people and your best coaches so they're already on your team and they love it because instead of selling one to one they get to sell one to many and then we built out a speaking training which is
you know you start selling or doing the thing then you go speak to a small event maybe you know five or fifteen people in a webinar yeah then you go small local in person then you do bigger webinar bigger in -person event and i mean it got to where chad and and other people on the team i mean i'll never forget when chad spoke at the biggest event we'd ever done it's 1500 people nice and it's like that was the system working and do they even care that it's not you Not typically.
No. No. But I don't have a huge personal brand, which is kind of funny and ironic the way that we've built a business without that.
And we'll get into that probably later. they don't care. Now I've, I've pitched this to other people like the, you know, John Maxwell's of the world, the John Gordon's of the world.
Cause I think if you already have a brand, you're in an even better position. Cause you're getting internal speaking requests and you can dish it off to the team. Oh yeah.
That would supercharge what you're doing. Yeah. They don't care.
They, they, they follow the money. They are well money and content. right?
Like they want great content for their attendees and they want revenue and we can deliver. If you're a business owner who has appointment setters or an outbound sales team, you're going to want to hear what I have to say for a second. So a multiple eight figure business owner texted me the other day.
And when he started using dollar .io for the first time, his pickup rates went from 9 % to 20%. So imagine doubling your pickup rates and ultimately the throughput of what your outbound salespeople and setters are going to get. How does that impact your business?
The answer is a lot. So if you want to check out dollar .io, for a phone sales outbound system.
Just click the link in the description or just go to dollar .io. Now back to the podcast. And how do you actually, so when you give a talk, cause I've, I even struggled with this with me personally.
I can easily get up there in front of, you know, any business crowd, give it on sales, team structure, sales team, whatever, super high value. And I know like it's going to crush. i don't know if it's necessarily the best way to structure the talk to convert right and so like now i do know how to make like a very good sales converting webinar but you know how those kind of feel sometimes you're like if you've been around the space for a while you you know it's like a sales converting webinar right yeah so how with the way you do it do you converge those two things because i have heard like you get really good reviews on the speaking yes but then you guys also make a shitload of money yeah it's the no pitch pitch like we don't pitch so i think when people hear my model they say okay you're gonna do six or seven million in revenue you'll speak at 50 to 70 events i speak at maybe 10 or 15 of them They just assume that we show up and hard sell the room.
Yes. Run to the back of the room with your credit cards. It's just like having this crazy thing.
But we don't pitch. I could count the number of times I've sold from stage on one hand at other people's events. And so what we do instead is we just add a ton of value and split the room.
And so the way we structure the talk is it's adding a ton of value. And then the end goal is to get them to book a strategy session with my team. Yeah.
And is that at the event? At the event. And that's very important.
Yes, very, very important. Why is that so important? Because they're in the moment and there's momentum.
And so we have an event only special. We know that it's like on the spot revenue. So we'll do 50 to 100 grand or more from every event.
I would say at least 50 % of that is on the spot. Okay. And then some is maybe like a follow -up later.
Yeah. Yeah. There's plenty of follow -up and it depends on the event, but like there's, there's this whole checklist of things that we've realized that's really important.
We need to speak on day one. We need to preferably be before a break. We need to, you know, have a booth.
We need to do, this is like all of these things that we know if we do those things, we need to have at least 20 minutes. Like if we do those things, revenue will go crazy, but it all leads to kind of what we. what we teach and how we replicate it is because I have a book.
That book is the process of everything we do. And I have a signature talk to use Pete Vargas' kind of framework. And I hand our speakers those two things.
Here's our signature talk, company signature talk, and here's a book. And so what I want you to do is add three personal stories to our company signature talk, and then you've got it. Nice.
And you're good. And then we have our whole internal speaker training program. And then we've got a book so that at the end of every talk, I can split the room.
It's kind of like qualifying, disqualifying for sales as I say, hey, how many of you writing a book is on the maybe someday, maybe next year list? Awesome. I brought a bunch of copies of this book.
I'm signing it right after this. This book will be there when you're ready. How many of you, this is a real priority?
Okay, perfect. QR code, book a call. We're doing sessions on the spot.
Oh, by the way, there's this event only special. You know, I keep that. It's like literally three minutes at the end of the talk.
So no event organizers are like, oh, my gosh, I invited you into my room and you freaking hard sold the whole room. It's just super, super low key. But then the people who are fit.
book a call and then we sign up a bunch of customers yeah and you only do the events where you speak to right correct right so occasionally you'll sponsor i mean so so one of the things and so we're i'm probably one of the rare people who've i've tried this model and i think one of the misconceptions i had i told pager this this morning was that it's kind of like venture to where you're gonna have some events that just absolutely rip and then as soon as you know that basically you have that event for the next five years because you're just going to keep booking it.
Right. Whereas some events they bomb and then, you know, it just is what it is. Right.
And, but when it all comes together, like that's one, like your channel, like some ads don't work. I was, we were beating ourselves up because we'd have one event not go right. And we'd be like, fucking hell, like fucking shit doesn't work.
Like what the fuck? And then the other thing is too, is, is I don't think we were booking enough speaking at the events. Yeah.
But it does work. Like we like we're doing one. We're going to try to do like two to three a year.
We're doing one using a lot of what we learned from you guys. And it's either next month or the month after. I'm not going.
But next month or the month after. And based on last year's performance, we should like spend 50 grand, do 500, I would say. Yeah.
And I had to really learn this the hard way because I would fall in the same trap. It's like we would have, you know, basically 30 % or 50 % are going to crush. Yeah.
Two out of 10 are going to be meh. And then a couple are going to bomb. And then you just end up focusing on the couple that bomb and you're like, why are we doing this and whatever else?
And so you should realize this is a portfolio of stocks or whatever investments that we're making. And as long as it yields out at five to one or greater over overall. Yeah.
Let's keep. Yeah. The other thing, and then we'll move on.
I did notice too. This is what my team always says is they're like, Hey, the returns are there may be even of ads or even a little bit less. And this is for us, but they were like, there's no way to equate this.
I mean, we could track it if we really wanted to. But our highest LTV people have come from events. So people who they end up buying and then end up staying for like several years just because I don't know, like the type of person who's at an event and also the way the relationship starts.
A lot of times it matters a lot, you know, whereas like when a relationship starts from an ad. There's like an automatic, a little bit of skepticism, you know, I feel like when people come from an ad, you convince them in the ad, you convince them to show up, you convince them on the sales call, like on the onboarding call, you're still kind of trying to convince them.
Whereas I feel like the events is a little bit more of a pool approach, you know? It's so funny. I don't know if you notice this.
I feel like the same applies in relationships. You ever notice how the context in which you meet someone is the way that they see you? And the best way I think to meet people, if you're looking for a partner is like to either create or be a part of like an environment.
which is kind of like an event in a way. Yeah. Well, it's a frame.
In the same way, if you're trying to meet your wife, you probably want to be introduced to women in a frame where you are in a superior frame. You're speaking. You're playing music.
You're an athlete because you're automatically a superior frame. Well, that's what events do. You're on stage.
They see you. They say, oh, that person's legit. But it's so funny.
I've even noticed early on in just growing my business. if I got introduced to people in the student frame, they still see me as that. Oh, interesting.
Like it's like, it's the frame that you get introduced that matters, which I think is why events are so effective. So another thing I wanted to chat with you about, because what's unique about you is like you do, you get clients obviously in this way, but in other ways that most of our industry, I mean, most of our industry just does ads, right?
Like ads or fame. Like it's ads organic. That's like, that's really it.
And you have these unique ways. So another one is, I think you were doing 5 million a year through SEO. Yes.
So how did you, like, how did you, it sounds nice. So how did you do that? It's crazy.
And I think it's going to get even crazier with AI and AEO and whatever else, because there's one answer. So it's going to be all or nothing. There's going to be people that are going to make absolute fortunes, where if you say, how do I self -publish a book or, you know, whatever the thing is.
I mean, it's going to almost more disproportionately be the haves and the have -nots. But our whole premise is we just created digital real estate assets and we bought digital real estate assets. So everybody's talking about real estate.
And I said, huh. there's this digital real estate that's even way more valuable it's the top three search results on google right so how do i own at least three out of the top five so when anyone googles anything about writing or publishing a book they end up in our world and so we started building assets and then we acquired assets so we acquired selfpublishing .com we acquired a bunch of other sites and then just learned that model to where we could get a bunch of traffic we could convert that into leads it's basically zero cac i mean that's it just prints money and then you get get paid rent on your digital asset every month.
As long as it ranks in the top three, you know, it's paying you a rent. And so. And were these blogs?
Yes. Right. So how are you getting them ranked?
Yeah. And does this still work? It still works.
It's less effective. No, here's what I'll say. Like the overarching principle for everyone watching this or listening to this is I think if everyone else is doing it, it's probably watered down and there's not a, it's not a blue ocean.
If nobody else is doing it, then you should. go in that direction. Also, how long does it take for you to spend a dollar and get a dollar back?
The longer that cycle is, the less people that do it and the least competition. So you're doing that right now with this show, right? Whereas early on, it just makes no sense.
I'm doing it as we build out the media company, but we did the same thing with the blog. So I said, this is not going to make any money for six months, 12 months. And I know that's why nobody else is going to do it.
So we're going to do it. And we said, let's create the best content on the internet. Let's get as many backlinks as possible.
And those are the two oversimplifying ways that we can get it to rank when people search. And then it still prints millions of dollars a year. Nice.
How's the lead quality on SEO? It's got to be good. Incredible.
Yeah. It is absolutely incredible.
massive volume like it's just no cack yeah yeah yeah it's just it's just there it's like it's just there it print i mean we would have someone making 60 grand a year running a multi -million dollar a year seo property and they're just it's just a writer creating content and so again it was just basically blogs were you working with like an seo agency to do the ranking and stuff i don't know anything about seo at the start we did but then we just realized like Create great content, get backlinks.
Okay. That's it. Now there's the header tags.
There's a V1. There's the H1s, the H2s. There's all the basic stuff, but it's really just create good content.
Okay. Your site needs to load quickly. All that stuff.
But I mean, this still prints a bunch of money. And we're kind of just taking that. That's why we're going all in on the media side of things.
Because I'm like, oh, we've done this before. It's just a different medium. And so how are you shifting the SEO stuff now with AI?
are you doing because i know like we get some leads from ai yeah which i'm like sure maybe we should double down on this because we put no attention on it honestly i just need to put it in the task list because we can easily do it we have the staff but we get leads from it because people will be like how do i build a sales team or like who do i go to to get sales reps and we come up because like our offer is pretty unique there's not many recruiting companies who do true like high ticket sales staffing so we could probably double down on it but is there a strategy you're using for that in terms of like getting recommended from the AI search engines or.
Yeah. I think you got to start as close to revenue as possible and then work your way back. And that, that applies whether you're doing SEO, whether you're doing video content, social content or AI stuff is what are people searching right before they purchase.
It's your company review. It's high ticket sales staffing. It's all that stuff.
And then what results actually show up. And so I just want to know the landscape first. And then I want to create really high value content as close to purchase as possible and then work my way back.
So we did that in the blog space. We're now doing that in the video space. You can do that in the AI space.
Where are they going on AI? They're going to Reddit. They're going to Trustpilot.
They're going to all these really stupid, just insidious sites where people just hate their life and just complain all day like Reddit. But you got to pay attention to that because the AI companies have made deals with them because their perception, right or wrong, is that that is the closest to the truth.
Like forums are the closest to the truth that exists. So then they're going to go to the place, not the other stuff where you can kind of fake it. They're going to go.
to the truth so it's like reddit management tp management stuff like that so we've hired companies that just like help with that help organic mentions all that but really the thing that i think anyone can apply is what are the things that people are asking or searching right before they purchase with you and so one of the thing that we've actually had a ton of success on and i think there's still a lot of uh blue ocean for this is reviews of competitors it's the easiest easiest rankings to show up for so we just said hey sales team what are all the companies that people bring up and then we would we would do an honest third -party review on our site and so then when people search you know whatever the company is scribe review We're right there at number one.
And we say, Hey, don't, don't do business with scribe until you read this review. And then it's an honest, that's really important. It's like, you need an honest, objective third -party review.
Otherwise you'd lose all credibility and you lose it straight out of the gate. Did you guys get a lot of customers from that whole, I don't, I don't know the details. You probably know the details.
But I just saw the commotion. I'll just put it that way. Did you get a whole lot of, yeah, I mean, I'm assuming that probably picked you up a lot of customers.
Yeah, we got a lot of customers from the scribe bankruptcy. I almost bought the business out of bankruptcy. Really?
I had a verbal agreement to purchase it, and the bank vetoed it. Why was that? It's kind of a complicated scenario.
Some of that stuff's NDA, but it was essentially they were underwater. Yeah, well, of course. And what I was paying was not what was owed.
or what I was willing to pay, even though they were willing to accept. So the bank had kind of the final say there. But yeah, we got a ton of customers there.
And we also have a review on their site. And that's when people search that, they see that. And so they've hit us up a bunch of times to remove it.
And I'm like, hey, I'm not removing the truth. You guys went bankrupt. A lot of people got screwed.
And we did not. And we can help people and we have a better product and service than you. And so here it is.
And then for some people, they're better. And so we just lay that out. But then to kind of close the loop on that review strategy, which I think there's a blue ocean on YouTube.
right now with all of that stuff yeah seo content review content all that just done at a high high quality that's actually a really good point because a lot of the review content i mean usually i mean we organically probably have some just good stuff out there in terms of reviews but i've never even like tried to target making it like good It's not going to get a bunch of views in the organic format that you're in right now.
Yes, of course. But it will get views five years from now, six years. So our whole original thesis was this stuff, was let's have really good written content on a thing that we teach that's close to revenue.
really good video content. That's basically the same content, different format. Let's cross link.
And then both of them are going to rank. And then Google is going to rank because, you know, Google is, it's called vertical SEO, right? So if you think about all the different ways that, that you, someone might be searching to do business with you, they might be searching on Google, on YouTube.
They might be in the podcast app. They might be in Apple maps, depending on the type of business that may be in TripAdvisor. They might be in Yelp.
They might be in Trustpilot. They might be on Amazon, obviously, with books and stuff and products. And so our whole goal is to say every vertical that they could possibly be searching for this solution or to do business with us, we want to own the top.
We want to be in the top three. on those searches and so then how can we just replicate and repurpose content all over this in the same way that you probably retarget on pretty much all ad platforms at least with a sliver of a budget because that's just your best row as kind of approach we want to do that same thing but with seo and then you create the asset once and it just keeps spreading makes sense so let's this is a good pivot to brand then so you I mean, I'm saying recently, but it might have been like two years ago.
To me, that's still recent. Yeah. You were going to go all in on brand, trying to build your personal brand and SBS's brand.
What was the overall thinking and what led you to that as well as like how is it going and what's the strategy? What are you trying to do? So it was two things.
One, I saw it done by a buddy, Dan Martell. And I saw the fruits of that. Yeah.
And then too, he crushed it. Oh my gosh. Yeah.
Insane. And we both knew him before too. Yes.
So that was like a very, honestly, I kind of had the same thing is, I mean, obviously I've known him, uh, not like super, not as well as you, but I've known him and known he's like a G for a long time and like super, super high level business guy. So I'm like, okay, here's somebody who's, you know, obviously he's been in business longer than me.
He's kind of further down the line, but like really talented, but didn't really have much of the brand. And then just. Yeah.
But I mean, it seemed like overnight, obviously he was trying for a long time and things come together and then just exploded. So anyways, you saw that. I saw that.
And then I knew that we had done it. So I knew we did it with the blog. And so I said, Hey, that was, that was smart when I was in the mode of, I want to scale this business, not tied to me.
Right. And I wanted to just print money and, you know, just build a sellable asset and all that stuff. And I saw the landscape shifting, AI starting to eat some of those search results.
That revenue is atrophying. And then I see this massive blue ocean on social video organic. Now, granted, I literally didn't even have an Instagram until nine months ago.
I didn't even have an account. But I said, I'm not willing to spend much money on this because of my scarcity and limiting beliefs and all this stuff. What if I just did?
And so I said, well, what's the amount of money that I would spend over the next year if it just broke even? And I came to half a million bucks. And so and I looked at what I looked at the other channels that we're doing said, hey, we're spending 50 to 100 grand a month on partnership marketing.
We're spending 50 to 100 grand a month on ads. We're basically paying a toll for hamster wheel revenue that we have to pay every month. Yeah.
And so that's it's one off stuff. What if instead we spent. a fraction of that on something that we had forever in person, right?
So that was the premise. Let's spend half a million dollars over the next year. And even if it didn't even break even, that would be a worthwhile bet.
And I also noticed, I don't know if you've ever, if you've had this happen, like so many entrepreneurs, like your business just starts printing money. And then you're like, well, where can I invest this money? And then you start throwing that money into other, a bunch of other things that don't return.
I've got crazy horror stories that I can tell on that. And then you just look up and you're like, well, hold up. I should just be investing in the core thing.
And the personal brand is the best way that we can do it. So I backed into that, said, Hey, that's roughly 40 grand a month. So I said, okay, well then why, why, why not?
Why not do it? Well, the thing that tripped me up is when I started as a salesperson, the whole vibe was like what a lot of people were buying back then was get rid of like launches and organic and like. you know, inconsistent revenue and do ads because it's consistent and scalable.
Like that's how, you know, when I was a salesperson, that was like the hot thing to sell. This is like 2016 to 2019. Right.
So then when I have my business, you know, what's crazy is I got to 500 grand a month just through Facebook, just Facebook organic, dude. Like that's it in referrals. And then when I cracked ads and got them to work, I felt like I had graduated.
I was like, okay, so like, I'm at the level now where I do ads like it's better. I'm going to give that up.
And what's crazy is if I now Facebook, obviously, how scalable is that? Probably not super scalable. But if I would have reinvested, if I would have just been like, OK, I'm going to stop doing that.
I'm going to start planting seeds on YouTube. And oh, my God, dude. Yeah, I'd be so much further along.
But it took me a while. And then what happened was around the time like Dan got bigger. It also ads got a lot harder.
And I'm like, OK, now, like everybody in the industry is making the most money. Like they all have huge brands. And the other thing is, too, is to really went ads at the highest level.
It helps to have the organic. So like what I've noticed is when I first started, actually, because we've probably at this point, 15 extra views across all channels on average year over year. And at first I was really frustrated because I was like, where's the fucking direct attribution?
Like we should be making more money. But then what I realized is that a lot more of the people booking from ads. we're like oh i you know we always ask like how long you've been following cole or closers .io and they'll be like oh yeah i watched the youtube videos but they came from an ad yeah does that make sense so the ad wasn't their first impression it might have been their third or fourth or fifth impression yeah and then the other thing that happened is we had an event and it was our highest revenue driving event like of all time you know not even freaking close and it was all it was definitely like 70 of it was the content so it has this like indirect ecosystem kind of feel to it which is why like yeah it would help ai it would help seo it would help even the brand partnership stuff that you're doing so i feel like it all comes together if you know what i mean i think attribution is the dumbest word in marketing Because people over obsess with it.
There was a time where I just banned it. I said, hey, if anyone talks to me about attribution, I'm throwing my computer out of the window, like throwing you out of the office because it's so stupid. Because as you know, as everyone knows, it takes 750 touches to create a customer.
So we need to be focused less on, sure, at a high level, we need to know what channels are working. It's like building an ecosystem. You need to know the levers that are actually driving revenue.
Yeah. So like, I'll give you an example. Like Hermosi told me one time he was running a book funnel, right?
And so it's all through ads. And I don't know if he would be okay with me saying the numbers, but we'll just say this. Like he told me like the CAC and the AOV and all the return of his ads from this book funnel.
And it was like the most insane thing I've ever seen in my entire life. But is that a fun, is that because he wrote a really good ad? No, it's because like it's really retargeting from like his whole brand, even though in the ads manager, you might just say, you know, open targeting.
Yeah. Right. But the pixel is so good.
It's finding people who naturally are the type of people who have already had some impressions, even on YouTube and not on the Facebook platform, if that makes sense. It's like the Hermosi book launch. I mean, everybody wants to do it.
And I think it's one of the dumbest ways to launch a book. I mean, we did a whole video on this. It's a one of zero thing.
It was not the launch. It was the two to five years of things and content that he created before the launch. So I think we're going to go into this next wave of a bunch of people copying his launch.
And they're going to bomb. You got to do things that are like, I just feel like with most stuff, it's good to recognize the overall tactics that are working, but then ask like, what are your unique strengths and your resources? And how do you sort of leverage those?
And I'm curious, since we're on the topic, obviously he's written three books now. You're like the book guy. I mean, I don't know, in your analysis, what do you think?
It's kind of obvious, but what do you think he's done really well that maybe most people don't realize? There's a lot. I mean, he serialized it.
He teaches in frameworks. He splinters all of that content and all of the book content in his content. And then I think he understands a fundamental principle that most people just aren't willing to do.
or not do it at the scale that he does it, which is give away all your best stuff for free and people will pay you to tell it to them again. So give away all the stuff that's in the book and your free content, then use that to build momentum for the book. And in a lot of cases, even give the book away for free.
Like he has the audio book for free on his podcast, on his YouTube channel, all that stuff. And then use that to ascend to your best customers. And so that's where I think he really understands how to do that.
And I think he graduated from that. in his most recent launch he stopped caring about selling books as much as he did generating a lot of revenue and so that's where we have like this we call it the million dollar event model which is use a book to get people to show up to an event use the event to sell high ticket right and like he kind of did that um it works like crazy yeah yeah so back to your brand What do you think you're doing well right now?
What do you think is like the things you're trying to work on over the course of the next year? Yeah, so we've done probably half a million year to date in directly, to your point, directly attributable revenue from our social and video. And so we're probably at about break even.
Great. I think what's interesting that we're seeing is that the revenue is growing faster than the views, which that really pissed me off at first, but then I kind of realized that's the whole point. Yeah.
And so we were getting frustrated and still, still am. I mean, it's like, if you look at our views, if you look at our subscribe, if you look at it, it's tiny, but then the revenue, like the revenue keeps growing. And so I think what's working is kind of, I know you did this in your 12 X, my views, here's what worked is like, speak to one person with one problem and speak directly to them.
Like there's pieces of content that it's like, Oh, that post did 75 grand and it got. 500 views yeah yeah but it spoke directly to a single person like some of our stuff like that million dollar event model i recorded that video because it's like okay we're helping dean and tony do their book launch we're helping carlton dennis we're helping pace morby we're helping a bunch of people so let me just and i realize we're kind of botching articulating that strategy and they're all just like let's do the the hermosi launch yeah all right well i'm gonna record this video for them This is for basically no one.
Like no one is at their level, but I'm going to record it to them, mostly just because I want them to be more successful. And then wouldn't you know it, the people who aren't at that level said, holy cow, that's helpful for me. Yeah.
Well, you know what I've learned is I learned this through ads first, but it applies the same with organic. I call it the pyramid principle. So I actually try to speak to when I'm making a piece of content that's, let's say, I mean, even the podcast, but especially my solo videos.
I will try to solve a problem and speak to something that I feel like somebody doing 500 grand a month to a million a month is interested in. Now, is that a big TAM? No, but some of those videos have done 30 to 40 ,000 views on YouTube, which is pretty insane.
And what I've learned is, is like the people who are maybe at 50 grand a month, they still want to know about that stuff too. But if you start talking about like how to find your niche or something, yeah, like I mean, if you package it the right way and that's your brand and whatever, I mean, like there's guys like Daniel Priestley or, you know, uh, who's the other guy, Simon Squibb, a lot of their contents like that.
And it does get a lot of views for me. That's not really the customers or the audience that I want to attract. So if I put out a video like that, it's going to bomb.
If I put out a video, that's like how to create a million dollar a month offer. Yeah. Almost 40 ,000 views.
And that video was like insanely highly tactical. And I'm running through a Google doc, which everybody told me was not going to work.
Yes. And I was like, fuck it guys. We're going to send it.
We're just going to, I just want to put this video out there. Ripped. It totally changed my paradigm of that.
But that's what I think about is I always tell people you, who's like your best customers to where if you had an event and only the segment of your customers showed up, who would you want to show up? And I'm like, just make videos for them. you know there's a limit here like i probably wouldn't exclusively only make videos for like pace morby for instance in your case because there's you know how many pace morbis are there like there's pace morby that's basically there's one you know but it's that top tier to where i almost like i want to speak with those people and then what's weird about content too is i i don't sell a lot of units but the units i sell are literally our highest level highest level highest level thing yes so It's like not a, you know, with ads, you're used to five to 10 sales a day, five to 10 sales a day.
But there are a lot of like the lower market. Whereas like our YouTube is like 80 grand, three weeks, 80 grand, 40 grand and a two day span. And then it's like another week of nothing.
I don't know if that makes sense. It's very lumpy revenue. I think the principle that you're saying, which I totally agree with is speak past your avatar and then your avatar will say, Hey, I want to be that.
Yeah, exactly. I mean, you summarized it in a sentence. Much better than my long spiel.
That was exactly what I was saying. We are hiring at closers .io. So we are specifically looking for account managers.
So if you want to make more than $600 ,000 a year, here's a commission check right here of $54 ,000 in a single month that was from last month to prove it, then listen closely. So a lot of you guys know that what we do is we recruit and hire and train sales teams on behalf of our clients. We have over about 800 to 900 active contracts right now.
The individuals that service and manage these accounts who do the sales. training the coaching the business coaching and help these companies scale those are called our account managers and they make a lot of money within our company so if that's an interesting position that you want to check out there's a link in the description essentially again what they do is they're the ones managing the accounts doing some of the sales training helping the business owners scale and then they also are commissioned on the retention and the upsells of all of our clients so you have to be highly highly highly skilled to do this position and I know a lot of people my audience might be interested in this so I wanted to make this quick role to show you what it is so link in the description if you're interested now back to the video i think people would like to see from you more videos that are like here's how i do 600 grand a month without ads without organic through partnerships yeah and like a very highly tactical video because if you watch like uh ryan clog's channel he did this really well he's doing like 30 40 million a year and he just would do a video every single day and he'd be like
Here's what's working. Here's what's not working. Here's a tactic that worked really well for us.
I think that's great for your business brand. And then if you want more people to publish books, dude, you already know all the authors. Why don't you just interview authors on a podcast?
That's going to do really with a separate channel. That would do really well. And then it's like you run a mid -roll that's basically like, hey, you probably don't think, you know, you know the messaging that your people would respond to on a book.
I think you're totally spot on. We fell into a similar trap it sounds like you fell into, which we just followed all the wrong advice, which is well -intentioned. Well, you're probably like me where when you enter something new, I want to know how to do it perfectly.
I want to pay. I paid everybody, dude. And, like, I almost realized.
Somebody actually reached out to me yesterday and they were like, dude, and he's got a big content following. And he's like, dude, he's like, if you want, I'll jam with you and I'll give you some advice on your content. And I was like, honestly, dude, like we just don't want advice.
And I kind of told him the story. I was like, I think like the advice may be worse. Yeah.
Because content, it's like an art, you know, you got to kind of like just know what works for your personality. Yeah. Anyways, I didn't mean to cut you off.
No, it's interesting. I think we followed the outlier theory. Outlier theory sucks.
And so we're just on that same journey of just, hey, what helps real people? Now, coming back to what's working, what's not. So we've got two arms of the media company, Bolt Media.
The whole premise was create a seven -figure startup inside of an eight -figure company. So we're going to create content for selfpublishing .com around publishing books for Chandler Bolt around scaling businesses. Now, what's ripping right now is selfpublishing .com stuff.
I mean, it is, especially YouTube is really ripping. And what are you posting there? Like what type of content?
It is. it's solo content specific to big problems that they have. And is it you?
Yes. Okay. Predominantly.
I bet, I bet you'll eventually figure out once you get it down, you'll probably eventually figure it out. Have you, you know, Sam par, um, the, I don't know if it's the Hampton channel or if it's called money wise, but it's for Hampton. Yep.
Dude. Like he's doing hundreds of thousands of views per month. It's not even him.
You should check them out. It's pretty impressive. Yeah.
Money wise. It's funny. You could do that for authors, dude.
Yeah, we totally could. When I first moved to Austin, I lived in Sam's house. No way.
It's super random. But this is before he moved to New York. I don't know.
I forget how we got. Maybe it's a friend, Neville, I think, connected us. And then Pedro is saying he connected us.
Well, you just got a default. It's usually Pedro. It usually is Pedro.
Pedro says he introduced me to my wife. That story is yet to be validated. I ended up, oh, yeah, you were the one who said, hey, he's renting out his house.
And so I ended up living in his house for three months. And I'm recording content. People are like, hold up, is that the My First Million backdrop?
Oh, no way. They're like, what is this? But anyways, so coming back to the content, selfpublishing .com is ripping.
The Chandler Bolt stuff is totally bombing. I mean, and I think it is because we got away from what made that channel great. Because if you remember years ago.
Dude, I literally, like how we ran our first company offsite is I looked at your video and then I looked at Dan Martell's video. And I'm like, okay, this is how I'm going to run my offsite. I'm not even kidding.
Same thing with like how to run one -on -one meetings. I looked at yours and then I looked at Dan Martell's because you guys both kind of made it way back in the day. You both made kind of the same content.
You know, I don't know if you have to make you should ask Nolan. You may have to make a new channel because your content is so like it is insane SEO backlogged with how that content used to be. Yeah.
But to your point, that stuff was like, here's how to fucking like execute a high level business. You should make stuff like that, but more so to make it more longevity. Just the real time stuff.
Yes. Here's what we're doing with media now. Here's where we suck.
Here's what we're doing with partnerships now. Here's how it works. We did this amount of revenue.
We did our best month ever. You should talk about bringing your company in -house versus remote. Totally.
Right. And it's not going to do a lot of use. But dude, like with Ryan, he knows all the top players in the industry and he had tons of inbound like consulting and everything you can name.
His shit barely popped like a thousand, two thousand most times. But it was like super high level people. Yeah, and that's what's interesting is I think the sign of good content is two things.
One, would I send this to a friend running a legit business and be pumped to send it to them? Or your team. Yes.
Or your team. And then I think secondly is like, does this answer questions that people are actually asking me? And that's where it's so funny.
We got away from that. That was the whole premise of the channel early on is I would have entrepreneur buddies text me and then I would have my, my employees ask me questions on one -on -ones and I would just put it in a backlog and I would go record 50 videos in three days. And then that would be the content for the next quarter.
And then. you're what you said about watching those videos is very similar to i can't tell you how many high level ceos i've had tell me my whole team watches your videos because they basically just outsource their training to my youtube channel and so looking back i'm like oh that was a signal and i should hey i should never stop doing that you should have just kept doing that that was really really stupid honestly honestly one of the biggest mistakes i probably made and have left millions of dollars on the table but then B, I need to get back to that.
So that's what we're in the middle of doing. Like we did on the biz dev thing, we did a pager came in and we did a, hey, here's soup to nuts, our $30 million business development channel and how you can replicate the same thing. Yeah.
And to your point. it doesn't get crazy views but the people who watch that stuff i mean and you might need to i mean again because you have such a seo backlog do a new channel i'm not sure but i would say that if you get back to that it'll do a lot better you know and honestly like there's just not a huge when you look at we like to compare ourselves to like dan martell right but he's talking to us such a like You can watch his content if you're an employee, right?
You can watch his content if you want to start a business, if you're AI curious, you know, like that's great. That's not what I want to do, you know? So like, I'm probably not going to get 250 ,000 views on every single video, you know?
And also he's been doing it a long time. And that's the problem with, I think, modern content and outlier theory is the content is better than the packaging. And I speak for Dan's stuff.
I mean, I love Dan. I know Dan. But even Dan, like I will look at his videos and I'm like, this looks like it's for a total newbie.
I would never watch this. And then we might be talking and I'm like, hey, what's your sell by chat process? He's like, oh, it's in this video.
And I'm like, wait, you mean the one that's like how to get rich so fast it's annoying? Yeah. It's like it's not.
It is wild, too, because he is one of the smartest operators I know. But I have the same impression to where like I don't watch his videos because. I just feel like they're for beginners, but maybe they're not.
I mean, I don't know. There's plenty of them that aren't, but the packaging wouldn't tell you that. Yeah.
But he is like legitimately like a Brit. Like he's one of the best operators I know. Like I've gotten amazing advice from him.
So what's the biggest thing you've learned from Dan Martell? So we're in a helicopter. We do this helicopter snowboarding trip every year and we're going up the mountain.
And he just yells to me. He's like, Chandler, you realize it's your business. You can run it however you want.
No way. And it's just like the most simple quote. But it's almost like one of those things where you look at the – it all kind of just clicks into place.
And I realize that's a lot of what Dan is inspiring to me is he's just so unabashed. I mean, I've known Dan for over a decade. Yeah.
I've seen the behind the scenes of a lot of what he's done. And he's just unabashedly himself and does not care what other people think. We go up into his office and we're doing a tour.
And I remember he shows me this fridge and it's called Martel Macros. It's like, this is the macros in the meal plan. And if you're not on the meal plan, you're not on the team.
And I was just like, what? What are you talking about? You make every employee be on the meal plan.
He's like, yeah. They don't like it. They can go work somewhere else.
It's like, and we do Saturday morning lifts. That's what we do. And it just like, he is such a prime example of it's your business.
You're allowed to run it however you want. And you don't got to get permission from nobody. You don't got to cater to societal stuff.
You might think it's crazy. He's going to find the people that are into that. And it's obviously really working for him.
That's epic. Let me teach one more framework on building a media company that I think would be helpful. I think one thing we've done really well is build the team.
And there are both pros and like there's things that really worked and there's things that bomb. But early on, because I had that budget. I said, hey, I'm going to go hire the best.
And I think there's top down or bottom up, right? So you can either hire the creative director and then they build the team or you can hire the specialist and then work your way up from there, depending on where you're at. One makes more sense than the other.
And I think there's written and video. I love this from Matt Gray early on. This was a big unlock for me.
Is this your primary mechanism? Is it writing? Yeah.
OK, then build a written first team that then repurposes that into video. Or is it video then build a video first team that then repurposes that into writing? What are you?
A video. Yeah. So I predominantly create video.
So then that dictated how I built the whole media team. And so the first person I hired was Cody Sanchez's ex -creative director. He came in.
built for a few months, immediately got poached. And then I realized, hey, this position is kind of the hot girl at the bar and everybody's just kind of trying to throw money at them. It is a very popular position right now.
So I think that's a dumb position for most people to hire first because then you end up hiring someone, hopefully, who's done it, but who doesn't want to ship. And so and I'm not saying that was him, but like by and large, people once people have made it, they're like, oh, no, no, I'll build a team out. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I want to make so much money. And you're not even doing the views or revenue to support that business model. It's just like so we we I kind of rebuilt the team.
And we've got creative director. We've got video editors. We've got social media people.
And we just over indexed. And my thought was, I think you and I are wired similarly. The most expensive thing in this whole process is time.
So if I suck for three additional months, that could be worth hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. I overhired knowing that we would probably lose half of them because we just don't know what we're looking for. We're not a media company yet.
And it was kind of clunky and I think screwed a bunch of stuff up, but it bought speed. And so it's like we overhired. We built the team.
Now that team is really humming. And then, sure, we had a bunch of attrition, but now we've kind of found our way and now we know what to look for. And so it's just like getting – and then we shipped a ton of content.
So it's like the whole quantity begets quality. Yeah. We shipped a lot of quantity and that helped us figure out the quality.
Nice. So one thing I want to touch on is you're a really good networker. And so I don't remember who told me this.
Maybe it was Jordan or somebody. But even years ago, they were like Chandler is like the best. Like you knew Dean, you knew Tony, you knew Dan, you knew like Pete and all of these guys that, you know, were super, super high level guys, even when you were like just first starting off.
Right. Which I think is really unique to you. You're still that way.
How are you so good at building those relationships? I don't know if anybody's ever asked you this, but I've always wondered. No, it is a stealth skill.
I think there's a bunch of things. It comes down to zigging when everyone else zags. So early on, I did a thank you challenge where I wrote a thank you card every day for a year.
Just stupid stuff like that. I met so many people. That way I would listen to their podcast.
I would write them a handwritten note. No one does that. And then they would write me something back.
And then now, now we're friends, right? I would do stuff like, uh, I volunteered at conferences when I couldn't afford to go to them. So then a weird thing happened.
Like I volunteer for mastermind talks. I'm the volunteer. So I'm basically like the lowest man on the totem pole, but subconsciously everyone viewed me as like Jason's right -hand guy at that one event.
And so then I met all these people. I met Dan Martell. I met, you know, Hal Elrod, Ryan Holiday, James Clear, all these people.
And then I just kept in touch and volunteered at their events and whatever else. And so that I create these two -hour mini masterminds. So it's very topic specific where my goal is to be the dumbest person in the room.
There's a topic that I want to learn on. Maybe it's real estate investing. And I'll either partner with someone who's really good at it and say, all right, you got to invite.
all the people, and then I'll handle everything else. Uh, and then I'll facilitate it or I'll get people in the room. So I do that founders dinners, like what you showed up to.
Yeah. Which was bad -ass by the way. I like left that.
And I was like, I was fucking pumped, but I think it's, I think it's anytime you're with Dean, you know, he just drops bombs, dude. Like I wish people could see that side of them because I mean, there's like Tony and then who else has really done it for how long?
Like 30 something years of like, he's like really stayed. I mean, just he's changed his business a little bit over the years, but it's basically, he's been in the same industry and he just like, he's just got the wisdom, man. Like you, you listen to him and then you're just like, yeah, you know, I'm like overthinking it.
And like, I'm stressed out about this. I don't need to be stressed out about that. I just, yeah, he's great.
I guess the other things I would mention are like, I'll find unique ways to add value. So we send people physical gifts in the mail. And I remember early on, like some of our partners, their kids, and no, this is very tactical as well.
Like I want to send something that the whole family uses. Yeah. Because then every time that family uses it, they think of me.
Do you do that for employees too? Yes. I've heard that's very good with employees.
I should do that. Yes. It's, so it's, it's not sending something with your, it's kind of like John Rulon giftology.
Like it's send the thing that they can use. And so there were people who were like, oh yeah, my kids know you as the guy who sends this stuff. It's like, you get that, you're in.
You get the spouse, like, oh cool. Etsy is great for this. Send a $75 cutting board.
They just bought a home. I think we may have even done this for Dean. It's like, okay, cool.
You just moved into your new house. Ping. after i get home i'm sending you a cutting board that's like the graziosi household established 2025 like 75 bucks but you're gonna get that and you're like that's going in the kitchen yeah and my wife is gonna be pumped about that and then every time we see that we think of chandler right so it's just like all kinds of little stuff like that but and then you know like i got my pilot's license because i'm like well i could get people on the plane and they would say yes to getting on the plane when they wouldn't say yes to anything else wake surfing like hey they'll say yes to come out and surf on the boat or i got a pickleball court at my house like they'll say yes to come play pickleball they wouldn't say yes to the other stuff just a bunch of little stuff like that but i think the last thing is you know i grew up in uh my brother was a grammy nominated rock and roll musician played 81 shows as the direct opener for taylor swift like
So I think that just taught me that I would meet all these people backstage. They're just normal people. Yeah.
So just, I think it was almost this affect of when I meet people, it's not clamoring and oh my gosh, it's just treat them like normal people and have normal conversations. And then they treat you like a normal person. You're like, Hey, let me grab your number.
Like, okay, great. And then I'm going to text them after, you know, just like, yeah, it sounds kind of basic, but just. Simple stuff like that.
Makes sense. So you mentioned you poached Cody Sanchez's ex -content director. So one thing I was going to ask you about, I'll ask you now, is you're really good at recruiting and really good at poaching.
What's your process for that? Just walk me through it. Yeah.
Well, first rule is I don't post from friends' companies. We're friends now. Yeah, that's good.
We're friends. It's almost like a get out of jail free code. There's been a couple times where like, I don't remember who it was, but years ago we were trying to, I mean, I run a recruiting company, so hopefully I'm pretty good at this stuff.
And we were in an offer war with you and I was like, fuck. I was like, he's actually good. I was like, he's actually pretty good at this.
I forget who it was. We might have lost, honestly. You guys pay people more, probably.
And I'm a good recruiter, so we can recruit. But you guys obviously are as well.
If we're zooming out of the talent development process, there's attracting, recruiting, hiring, training, retaining. Broad strokes. Right.
And so I think as a CEO, I have three jobs. My job is to rain make. My job is to set the strategy.
And then my job is talent. So I need to be bringing in and keeping the best and developing the best talent. And I'm amazed at how many people shortcut the hiring process.
And they look at our hiring process and like, that's insane. No, I just do one interview and then hire them. And I'm like, well, yeah, that's why your company sucks.
And that's why your people suck. Because and they say, well, I'm trying to hire someone. I don't have.
10 hours to spend on interviews. I'm like, but you have thousands of hours to spend with someone who sucks. Why would you do that?
So I think early on, we just spent a disproportionate of time and energy on, on the recruiting. Cause I realized like that was a whole thing. And so this is what I say.
I say every hour you spend recruiting saves you 10, if not a hundred hours managing. Yes. I got that from Brian Chesky.
That's, that's my one sentence. That's good. I like that a lot.
But I think, I mean, at the end of the day, it's just scaring people away, attracting the right people, and understanding what they're motivated by. And I think that's what makes me a good recruiter.
Well, let me ask you this, because one of the challenges in our industry, right? So if we have to poach for a client and they're in the software industry, I can easily map out their business on LinkedIn alone. Yes.
Right? I can honestly get their entire org chart. With our industry, if we're recruiting, if we want to poach, let's say a sales manager from a different Amazon FBA biz op coaching business, you know, they ain't on LinkedIn.
You know, they don't even have like some of these people don't have any social media. Right. So, I mean, the way we've been able to overcome that is just we have just such a huge database and we just kind of like know where people are over time just because it's like a compounded effect.
But I'm curious, like, how are you like? Even figuring out who's Cody's ex -content director or who's this person's content director or who's this person's sales manager. Does that make sense?
Yeah. I mean, they're LinkedIn. Well, there's two things I'll do.
One, I learned this from Dan back in the day, I think. It's the most powerful recruiting question that exists. Who do you know?
Right. And I ask that question like crazy to people I want to hire. And it's beautiful because then I can just explain the company truthfully as it is.
Where if I was trying to hire them, they would have their guard up and they'd be like, hold up. But I'd say, hey, this is an insane opportunity. Craig, come, all this.
Who do you know? I'm looking for someone who's just like you. Like think about who do you know that's exactly like you?
I want to hire that person. But then sometimes they self -qualify. Oh, 100%.
They're like, oh, I might be interested. And so it's almost like you said earlier, ask or pitch past your avatar. I sell past the person I'm trying to hire.
And then I end up. Hiring them dude. Here's another tactic you can add to your tool belt is so you know how there's like some bullshit Regulation around if I'm interviewing you and I asked for like a manager reference and then I call your manager They're not necessarily supposed to really say anything negative So I'll explain that to somebody on an interview and then what I want is a senior peer reference So like if I'm recruiting a sales rep, I'm like who's another sales rep you've worked for in the past Who's like if you were number three on the team they were number one And I want to talk to them about their experience working with you.
Then you talk to them and it's two things. Either we'll pay that person for more referrals or we're just like, dude, would you be interested in this actually? And sometimes like you got to think about it.
If it's a really good opportunity and they know like, oh, the number three guy is about to get this job. I beat that guy's ass. They kind of want to take that person's job.
Yes. You know, because they're like, well, why wouldn't I get that opportunity? I was so much.
better than that person. And so we call that senior peer referrals and it's a flywheel because you can keep doing it and doing it. It's, it's very ninja.
And actually in terms of actually getting an accurate representation of that, I mean, even if you're just doing it for the straightforward reason of seeing like, is the person you're interviewing good. it they can actually say if the person is good or not the manager really can't does that make sense when that's almost like the opposite of that is manager ic referrals so sometimes it's not like a similar way to approach the same thing it's like when i'm interviewing for a manager i want to know if they can hire and recruit and so i'll ask them hey you get the job first 90 days who's three people that you're hiring what's that person?
How do you spell that? I'm live on the interview, finding them on LinkedIn, being like, hey, so -and -so says great things because I want to hire those people. Whether I hire this person or not, I just got three referrals to their best salespeople or their best whatever else.
And just like, okay, perfect. And I just, I like the LinkedIn connection request live on interviews with people that get referred. When a lot of times too, that like the first person they would want to bring in is, you know how you were saying, sometimes people come in and they, they're kind of past the point where they like want to do the work.
But the person, because I know how this is. I have people where if I started in another company, I'd be like, you guys are coming with me. Because they're like my integrators right now.
That question kind of finds that person. Because you know that really senior person who probably doesn't want to do the work and doesn't really want to be a player coach until they can really do this. That's who they would want to bring in.
That's very good. It comes back to understanding the motivation, right? I think a lot of times the best person to hire is the number two.
who has nowhere to go yeah like the the assistant to the leader that is really great that that person's never going anywhere okay cool let me go poach that number two because why would they want to do that because they want to get promoted or make more money or whatever else so over the past eight years our outbound setting team has done well over 75 million in cash collected revenue for our companies and so what i did is completely for free i put together a document it's dozens of pages long that really goes through exactly how we do our setter team at the highest level in the game so it covers all the scripts all the sops all the systems the dialing cadences the workflows everything you need to run a setter team at eight figures multiple eight figures really at the highest level of the game in the industry so if you want that the link is in the description it's a pdf it's for free so check it out now back to the podcast when you're actually in the interview process what are you really looking for in terms of like the qualities that indicate that they can actually do the job
Have they done the thing? I mean, this sounds straightforward, but have they done the thing that I want them to do? Which, crazy story on this, you mentioned Cody Sanchez as creative director.
I realized I was looking for a unicorn. I'm looking for a creative director who's done the thing that I want to do that lives in Austin because I wasn't willing to budge on they need to be in person. So that shrunk the list real fast.
I'm like, okay, who's built brands in Austin? I mean, it's Noah Kagan, Cody Sanchez, there's a handful of others. Sam Parr used to be.
And so I just said, well, where are those people hanging out? And so I came to some of these creator meetups. And then wouldn't you know it, randomly Cody Sanchez's creative director was there.
Now, I didn't know Cody at the time. Otherwise, I probably wouldn't have recruited him and posted him. But we just got to talking and realized that a couple of things had happened.
A, it's what we talked about. When someone gets hired above them and they feel disgruntled. Best time to poach.
But then B, when there's like. a fundamental problem or differentiation from that business to your business. So we start talking about kind of the woes of personality driven businesses.
I mean, it's just like you've got, you really have a brand, you don't have a business. So the revenue is super lumpy. It's all over the place.
It's very dependent on the person. It could go away at any moment. So we're just kind of chopping it up on that.
I'm like, dude, it's so funny. I'm actually the exact opposite. I've got an insane business with no brand and I'd rather be there.
And we and meanwhile, like we're talking, we're having an honest, real conversation. But I'm also I know I'm recruiting like like, hey, curious for you, which one would you rather be at? Like, I kind of like this one a lot better.
Here's all the problems with that. And it's like and the next thing I know, I leave and get a text a day later. And oh, and then I said, who do you know?
Right. Like, hey, I'm trying to find this. This is a tough position, but here's what I'm looking for.
It's a great opportunity. A ton of autonomy. Build a team from the ground up.
All the things that a person who is wired the way that I would want them to be wired would really resonate with. And then 24 hours later, I got a text. Hey.
you mentioned that I might actually be interested in that. And I said, fish on. And then, you know, ended up hiring him.
And then he got poached a few months later, but learned a bunch of lessons in the process. Do you ever look in the, so, I mean, I look at the same thing as number one, have they actually done the thing you're hiring them to do? Do you look at things like, like IQ, conscientiousness?
Any like the traits for instance like another thing that I look at which you could technically lump into have they done the thing is But my my clients mess this up a lot. So I've separated it out in terms of like a quality I teach is like have they done the thing and actually the industry That because it's a very you know, I will have a client hire like a sales manager and they're like, yeah They've done it.
They scaled a real estate team to 400 like to 400 reps and I'm like, yo, it's like totally freaking different. I mean, it's like not even the same thing.
Like you run a health business, you run like a high ticket gut health business. You don't run a real estate company. So like I separate that out.
I call it industry acumen. Anything else you look for kind of in terms of those traits or whatever? Okay.
Tons. Well, first off, I think industry matters less than average order value. And so for us, I want B2C high volume sellers.
So if someone applies to us and they're like, oh, I killed it running sales and I was working for a software company selling $50 ,000 packages with a three month cycle. I'm like, that is not someone who's going to fit here. So I look at average order value as almost indicative of that.
And then B2C versus B2B. I'm just speaking sales. Is it an emotional and consultative sale?
Great. You're going to crush it here. So were you selling at Jim's?
That's a transformation. It's a low ticket, high volume. You got a high motor.
You're going to do really well here. Versus were you selling for some... government organization yeah you're gonna not or non -profit or whatever you're gonna suck here so AOV over industry I do a lot of tests like you're saying we I mean we'll send them through the ringer I have some controversial tests we'll we'll do we'll do Myers -Briggs Colby test.
We'll do disk tests. We'll do a type speed test, which people think is so stupid. And we've gotten a lot of flack.
Like, why are you putting your type speed on your application? It's a proxy for tech savviness. Yeah, I know.
I really like that, actually. It's like, how good are you with a computer? Because we're knowledge workers.
We work on the computer. Our computer is our tool. It'd be like hiring a construction worker and being like, have you ever picked up a hammer?
And they're like, not really. It's like, well, how fast can you type on a computer? That's probably pretty indicative of two things.
One, your pace and your motor. But then two, your tech savviness. So four roles where that matters.
Operations, back office stuff. Yeah, we'll put in a type speed test. One thing I like a lot is I will try to get some sort of written.
Report or analysis. So I'll give you an example. Like have you ever had your You know somebody on your executive team.
They want to do some initiative and you have them write a memo Are you familiar with this kind of Jeff Bezos type thing? Yeah, right. So and what's the best part about it is?
you really get to see what their thinking actually is because the quality of the writing is indicative to the quality of their thinking. And a lot of times, by the way, just as an aside, you tell them to write a memo and then they just like get halfway through it. And they're like, ah, this is actually a stupid idea.
And they just, then we don't even have to talk about it. But I want to find, it depends on the position, but a equivalent of them writing a memo in the interview process, because like for, so for sales, I'll have them just review a call and just. write a report on what they think went well what could have done better what do they think about the sales process what are the you just prompts like that and it's crazy because sometimes you look at it and you're like dude like how does your brain work like that like your brain i don't even know if your brain works yeah you know it's like you could see the scatteredness in the document or whatever they sent yeah and then other people you're like dang like this person's like super analytical there's super attention to detail which can be very good yeah right and so like because i know you can't test i think for iq directly but that's kind of like my proxy to test for like a clarity of thinking if that makes sense yeah yeah we do similar stuff like that i mean we'll do i mean the myers -briggs is the most controversial and why is that this person i driven i think some people would say that it's legal uh i i
We do it. So whether it's legal or illegal, I don't know. The issue with Myers -Briggs and any personality test is people have different personalities based on the context.
Yeah. Right? So like if you think about behaviorism, there's antecedent behavior and consequence.
Right? And so if I change the environment, you change the behavior. Right.
So if you have somebody take a Myers -Briggs and you say, hey, take this as if you were in a nightclub versus take this as if you were on a sales call. Right. Which obviously you could preface it and get a more accurate response.
But most people don't do that. Right. You'll get too entire.
Like if you probably did my Myers -Briggs and you're like, take it as if you're in a nightclub, I would probably show up as like some crazy, analytical, introverted, whatever. If it's a sales call, I'm going to show up as ENTJ. Right.
For sure. Yeah. Does that make sense?
Yeah. Well, I think, you know, there's some things that are immutable and that's why we'll do multi -tests. We'll say, hey, Myers -Briggs and Colby test.
But it doesn't matter for every position. Like if I'm hiring an operations role, you're going to be a high TJ. on myers -briggs you're going to be a high sc on disc and on colby you're probably going to have a really high follow -through so i know directionally if you were and i'll have them send me the percentages so if you're like a raging fp on myers -briggs you're not coming into an operations role that's that's not going to work because you need to be super so it's like but in the sales role you probably need high d high i on the disc and stuff like that but yeah i think it I think it depends on the role.
I love what Dan Martell said on hiring stuff. He said, I don't work with people until I work with them. I'm like, wait, what are you talking about?
But that speaks to your point of do the trial. Yeah. You know, hey, you're going to come in on trial or you're going to come in and present or you're going to do a mock sales call.
I want to see you doing the thing. I think that's worked really well for us. So when you ramp, how do you ramp people up in the first 30, 60 days?
really structured onboarding. So I think that's another thing that a lot of people screw up that we do well is we have an onboarding checklist. We have our company onboarding checklist, and then we have role specific.
So there's all like the generic minutia that everyone has to do. And then there's the actual like for their role. So we are just, you know, it's funny.
I was prepping for this and I realized, cause I was like, I call it company specific and role specific too. I think it was so long ago where I got that. I think I got it from you.
It was my YouTube video. I was like, I must've gotten it from you. Cause I was like, I was like, that's either a crazy coincidence.
I called it that. But probably what happened was I was like researching and I was like, Oh, company specific SOPs, role specific SOPs. Okay.
That makes sense. So our training is literally company specific SOPs. I mean, that's literally how it is.
You probably watched my video on onboarding. Honestly, like that's cause it's, yeah, that's the process. So again, drill down first 60 days you're obviously it's very structured what's the structure obviously there's sops we just talked about what else uh training feedback shots on goal i would say and so well first off they need really clear kpis so this is the part that i think so many people screw up and i seen us screw this up too is we got so lost in the checklist that we forgot the outcome Yeah.
So we just say, hey, you're 30 days. These are the three outcomes you need to drive. 90 days.
These are the three outcomes that you need to drive. Nothing in this checklist matters unless it is supportive of those goals. Does that make sense?
Yeah. So it's like, all right, we're just reverse engineering everything to the outcomes that we're trying to drive. And so then it kind of helps them contextualize what training actually matters.
But then we want them to get in the trenches and just fail a ton. Make sure we've got the training. We've got the process.
all that but we want them to fail when you think of kpis how do you keep them from being corruptible so i'll give you an example right like jeff i don't know if you've heard jeff bezos talk about this to where like he uh is always um what's it called skeptical of proxy metrics because anytime you set a proxy like a proxy metric is like a kpi because you really can't usually in most positions what you're trying to do in the company is raise profit That's really what you're trying to do is usually raise profit or in certain companies, you could have maybe a growth goal.
Like if you have a network effect and you're trying to really grow to capture market share or whatever, but there's usually like one overarching metric. But if you are a setter, like you can't directly, you know, measure your performance on profit or whatever, right? So you have proxy metrics, but then the issue is, is it sometimes they can be corruptible.
So like a common example is, is I've literally seen marketing directors. they're KPI'd on MQLs, right? They want to drive down MQL as much as possible.
Then you come to find out that, and it's tied to their bonuses too, but then you come to find out that in order to drive down MQL, they changed what's defined as an MQL. And then therefore, it went down, you know? Another example is if you KPI the closers on close rate.
right i don't do this the reason why is is they will lie about who showed up and who didn't show up they were live about self -reported live calls there's ways you can now track this that they can't lie but for the longest time that's why i just i'm like here's what we spent on you basically and here's your production that's all i really care about yeah yeah you know i'm curious if you have a process for thinking through that or even any horror stories we've screwed up everything with this because you try you you you say well this is the outcome that we're trying to drive within leading and lagging metrics, right?
So let's measure the leading metrics. Now let's incentivize the leading metrics. Now let's, I think kind of, I think you have a similar metric, which is net sales per queue app for sales reps.
It's like, okay, I know how much I pay to put an appointment on your calendar. What's the net sales per queue app? I think you'd call it cost per what it's.
Well, you could call it revenue per call, or I mean, you could just look like what we figure out is how much did we spend on you based on your open slots and how many calls are booked and how much did you collect? Yeah. I mean, it's pretty simple, which is smart.
I think where I've messed it up is trying to measure, well, trying to incentivize the middle. So like net sales per queue up. Okay, cool.
Who has the highest, whatever. But then to your point, people just start doing some funny stuff with that. So I've almost also you could drive.
So if that was where the leader, cause you gotta be careful about leaderboards because you can show a leaderboard on a team meeting. instantly changed the performance. So I'll give you an example.
So we rolled out this thing where we were selling trials to where it basically long story short, Hey, like, why don't you make a decision from the inside, not the outside, have a call with your account manager, your onboarding call. And if at that time you don't feel like it's for you, then we'll just refund the entire thing.
And so what happened was it was like an idea of mind virus to where At first it was really great. Like I would say it net increased our sales Yeah, but then like your sales rep and this guy's beating you this month and you see him like, you know inching ahead and so then You could just tell everybody started doing I'm like, you know, we weren't doing this this much like 12 months ago You know now it's like fucking 50 % of the deals are these fucking trials Yeah, so then what I did is I had ops run a report and I'm like I want a leaderboard of what their conversion rates are on the trial.
Every single rep on the team, except for one, their conversion rates were fucking terrible. And most of these deals were deals that if they just spent a little bit more effort, they didn't need to do a trial. And so I just showed the leaderboard on a meeting and one guy goes, holy fuck.
And literally that was it. The entire team stopped selling trials. I mean, it's it.
So a visual, especially like a visual or a leaderboard can massively change behavior. But to your point, Let's say you show a leaderboard of revenue per qualified app.
What can happen then is, is one guy might think, well, fuck, this guy is beating me, but I'm taking way more calls. I want to be on the top of the leaderboard to get status plus a bonus. I can reduce my calls or be pickier.
Maybe I can go from eight slots a day to five slots. I'll have more energy. I'll have more time.
And I can generate, see how that works. Yeah. You got to be careful with it.
Dude, we've made every mistake. I've seen that play out a bunch of times. One thing I'd say is I think you have to draw a straight line and fully align incentives across everybody.
And when I've messed that up has been the huge mistakes of how we measure things. So what I mean by that is when the customer wins, when the employee wins, when the company wins, and how do we make sure that that incentive is just... Exactly the same.
Now, this pisses a lot of people off. I'll give you an example. So for us, when someone refunds, that claws back from the sales rep.
Now, that might be six months later, nine months later, whatever. And so then the sales rep's natural tendency is to say, hey, that had nothing to do with me because I'm a salesperson. That had to do with the coach.
We should create a rule where if it's after 90 days or whatever, I don't get paid. So then you end up, you're like. That's a very fair point.
Let's create that rule. And then you end up with this Frankenstein of hodgepodge rules about how you incentivize people, and they're not aligned. So the simplest way I've found is just say, hey, you win when the customer wins, and I win when you win.
And anything that is not in line with that, we don't do. Anything that is in line with that, we do, whether you like it or not. And so it just kind of cuts to the chase of all that.
But then I think that combined with measure the outcomes, coach the controllables. If you ever wanted to get my one -on -one help in terms of scaling your business, then listen up really fast. So we're taking on a few clients where I can personally one -on -one audit their business across marketing, sales, operations, fulfillment, finance, to be able to tell you what your constraint actually is.
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So you can basically model the best practices of what we've done right into your business. And it'll include the opportunity to meet in person up at an event with me. So if that's interesting, click the link in the description and mount back to the video.
Is there any specific like profit sharing, bonus structure, equity? I know that's a whole tangent, equity. Is there any stuff you like there that you typically go to?
I think equity is a scam. First off, I think it's the stupidest way to incentivize most employees. And why is that?
Because equity is only worth something if you sell. Exactly. Or if you're using distributions based off that equity, but you could just do that with a profit share.
Exactly. And you get taxed on equity. So you might end up with a huge tax bill and not make any money to cover that tax bill.
And so I think equity is almost like this little farce that... people just dangle the carrot in front of people and if you look at what they actually make the business doesn't sell or it doesn't sell for what they say it's going to therefore it's not worth that much what we do instead is profit share yeah and we cut checks quarterly and so that's kind of been and i realized this also in my leadership team is we were incentivizing them on 17 different things and guess what we weren't rowing in the same direction yeah so we just started just distilling that to say hey most of the highest ranking people in my company are on a profit share and they're incentivized to grow profit.
And to be clear too, I think you'd agree. I, cause I agree with you. Equity usually makes no sense in our industry.
If you were a tech startup with no cashflow and you're only going for growth, I think it would make sense then because a lot of times you can't pay. It's like, you can't really pay the rates that you would need to, to get that person. So you have to almost pay them in the equity.
It makes sense for the company. There's like a secondary part. Well, yeah, I mean, I'm not saying it.
Not the person. I think it depends on the company, though. Because they could have a round or two rounds, and then they could also get liquidity through secondaries.
And there is some aspects, I think, in tech that it can work. I'll give you an example here. I was part of a unicorn.
I have made no money from that unicorn. I got advisor shares early on because I advised them. They went into YC.
They raised money. They're in the AI space. Huge, huge outcome.
I'm like, wow, I've got millions of dollars of my net worth tied up into this. Same way an employee would if they had equity. I still have zero dollars from that.
Why is that? Because your equity is only as good as the liquidity. So when they had a huge outcome, they didn't get liquidity or what happened?
I didn't get the liquidity because if you... If you make more than seven people, I think seven is the number, liquid, you have to do a tender offer. A tender offer slows down the deal because you've got to hear back from everyone.
So if you don't have the right terms written in your equity agreement, well, then you don't get the liquidity. So then they go raise $100 million at like a $1 .3 billion valuation. Now they just got that money sitting in the bank.
They don't allow secondary sales. I can't even sell my equity if I wanted to, and it's worth millions of dollars in my portfolio. Yeah, because they didn't IPO.
They didn't IPO. So now it's like the only way that I am liquid is if they IPO, unlikely, or if they have a secondary liquidity event, but they've been massively disrupted. Yeah, yeah.
Or they sold to private equity or something, and the private equity took all the equity off the table, yeah. Yeah, or I think this was a strategic, but either way, it's just like it all comes back to like equity by and large is worthless unless you are in control of how it's liquidated and when it's liquidated. Makes sense.
So moving on to, we talked about ramping management. I think you were saying in one of your podcasts that you're eliminating a lot of managers. And that's with AI, right?
So explain that a little bit. I think managers are going to cease to exist in the AI era. We've eliminated most of the management and repurposed our managers using AI.
So we built this crazy internal system. It's our AI hub. Like a central brain.
Yeah. And I guess the core thesis is, if you think about it, management is sameness. Leadership is uniqueness.
So managing is I'm going to review calls and get people to follow the script and close better and whatever else. Well, as a sales manager, I can review three calls per rep per week. So best case scenario, I'm reviewing.
I've been spending 15, 20 hours a week as a sales manager reviewing calls. AI can review every call and rank every call. So we built this crazy kind of internal hub.
I was just demoing this to a bunch of our customers. It reviews every call. It gives all the feedback and it hands my sales manager trends.
So here's how your team's doing. Here's, oh, this person, they're wildly inconsistent, which he would have never seen that on just three calls, but it reviews every, they get live scores. So it's scored, it's ranked, it's all that stuff.
So they get to self -improve. He gets better, you know, outcomes and stuff that he can take and coach them, coach the team. And then he just bought back.
five to 15 hours a week so we're just basically taking that across every vertical with managers and saying most of this isn't needed anymore right but when you say that you're really a lot of a lot of times referring to like middle management right not necessarily like the actual like there's you and then you might have like a sales director who leads the team right it's not like you have like Cause some people are confusing managers and leaders.
I just want to be clear. Like you probably still, you still have a line of executives who manage the people on the front lines, but they can essentially, if I'm understanding correctly, manage more people because of AI. Yes.
Okay. That's very similar to what we do. Well, and it's, you know, the, um, the Jack Dorsey guy.
I was going to ask, are you, are you Dorsey mode? Mostly. Yeah.
I mean, he would say there's three roles. There's ICs, there's player coaches, and then there's direct DRI, directly responsible individuals. Okay.
I would put builders under the IC bucket. And what's IC stand for? Individual contributor.
Got it. And so like in my mind, individual contributor, we did a whole video on this, but like it's doers and builders. So the doers are the majority of the company and those are the people that are irreplaceable.
The builders, their only goal is to build things that make the doers better. And then player coaches, they are, sure, coaching, but they're also doing, which I think AI is enabling that in a way that it hasn't been before. And conventional wisdom, like I remember we had this leadership coach that came in and was like, well, no, you need to get your managers to stop doing the job.
They just need to be in management mode. And I always just fundamentally disagree with that. But it's like, hey, I'm hiring this guy.
He's more seasoned, more experienced.
it just, it didn't work well. Cause when you're not doing the thing, you're out of it. And so I think it enables that in a way that it hasn't been in a really long time.
And I think how that looks, player coaches can be different in every position because if you have a sales rep managing your team and also taking a full round of calls, they're just going to take a full round of calls and not manage the team. Now that being said, the way I structure it with sales is I say, okay, no, you're the sales manager.
You're not on the calendar, but if a sales rep maybe gets stuck, with a deal like they've already had a follow -up maybe it's going to a third they can bring you in or my favorite one is hey you know when you're reviewing a call and you want to throw your computer out the window because the rep up the deal okay like take that anger you have in that moment just call the customer and be like, hey, you know, I'm really sorry.
So -and -so's new. Can I give you a little bit of insight? Because I watched the call and they missed two or three things.
Even if you don't work with us, would honestly like, they would transform your business over the next year. So if you have like 15 minutes, I'd love to cover that with you. I used to do that when I would manage my own team.
It wasn't even like a, it didn't come from a, oh, I think this is a good strategy. It came from just being fucking pissed. I started doing it and I'm like, oh, I just called that person for 10 minutes and collected 20 grand.
I called that person for 10 minutes and collected 15 grand. OK, I called this person and they didn't buy. But then but then they told me, OK, well, I wasn't good.
I'll be honest. I wasn't going to do it. But, you know, I'll keep the call on Friday and I'm going to do it on Friday.
And then they would do it. And I'm like, man, I'm like, as I'm managing the team. Like that's an activity.
You see how that's revenue generating? So good. Yeah.
And then the other thing too is, so that's way number two, way number three, managers and sales can generate revenue, is I do think a couple times a month, they should take like five or 10 calls. Because if they textbook close somebody, like the way they wish everybody would close, that's the call everybody should review, send notes, send all your takeaways.
Because sales reps learn, they learn a lot better through just looking at what's good and just modeling it. Versus getting like feedback and criticism on their calls because like I still recommend like reviewing calls and giving your reps feedback and all that stuff but a lot of times like It's tough to do it. The challenge is is there's a lot of low -bearing phrases So you might be like like dude your energy's off when you're in discovery like your energy's just off That doesn't like mean anything, you know, it's like it means something to us But like if you're a rep you're like, what do you fucking mean?
My energy's did I sleep wrong? like but if they could see like Oh, like this is his energy.
This is how he does it. This is what it sounds like. They could just model it.
Does that make sense? So that's kind of how I incorporate the revenue generator. And you could do the same thing with like ops.
I think player coach for sure. Like you don't need somebody who's just assigning tasks. Like no, even CS, it's kind of similar to what I mentioned with sales, but I'll have them take a little bit higher account load.
And then, you know, ops finance recruiting. I mean, they all still do the job, you know, but they also manage people. Yeah, I think there's nothing more powerful and potent than your people seeing your leaders doing the thing.
Like I'll never forget running a painting business in college. And my paint, there was like this steep roof and big ladder. And my painters were like, we can't do it.
We can't paint up there. And I show up on the job site and I just run up the ladder. I'm hanging off the side, just painting the side of the house.
I'm like, yeah, you can. didn't hear another word about that for the rest of the summer because they saw me do it. It's like every now and then just knowing when you need to roll up your sleeves.
And I've had, I did a dial -a -thon with my team where I'm like, Hey, I'm going to get in the trenches. I'm going to put my money on the line. Here's a hundred bucks for anyone who beats me today.
And I'm, I'm hitting the phones. And so it's just like people see. Easiest thing you can do.
Nobody wants to do it, but I've only had to do it one time. Easiest thing you could do to reset the performance of your entire team is just take calls for like sometimes like three days. Like I did this and I took calls for two days.
I took probably like five live calls. I closed four or maybe I closed all five. And I'm like, all right, guys, like this is I don't think I need to do much more.
Do you want me to close 20? You know, like and it was it was pretty sick, too, because I actually do think I legit went five for five. And some of the people I closed were not good.
Like, I mean, they were like. leads that they were leads that the sales team would have definitely wrote off and i'm like we're putting these in the training they're still in the training so okay you got this office it's sick uh used to remote shifted in person why'd you make that decision i looked around the industry and could count on one or two hands how many people were bigger than me that were remote yeah and that was that's all i need hopefully hopefully maybe was i on one of the hands Yeah.
I was on one of the hands. Perfect. Okay.
But then I looked around and I saw the people who were like, by and large, I mean, you just look, it's like, oh, the Cardons of the world, Russell Brunson, Dan Martell. I mean, you just go on and on and on. Dean, on and on and on and on.
Michael Hyatt. They all had in -person. And so I think I realized that we had hit a ceiling.
And I realized that the choice of remote or in -person was actually not what was best for the business. It was just what was best for me. I didn't want to commit to a city.
I didn't want to commit to an office. But then I moved into a different phase of life where I'm like, hey, I'm committed to Austin for the foreseeable future. Bought my dream home.
Got married. I'm settling down. I want to build community.
And then I think you've got to play to your strengths. There were just fundamental things about me that I suck at that I tried to change for five to ten years, and I was not able to change. Communicating over text.
I'm kind of a dick. Yeah. Well, no, I don't think anybody is good communicating over text.
So my rule with, as a side note, I always say if you have something that is like anything that is remotely in the circle of what could be a crucial conversation or whatever you want to say, it should not be over text. Yeah. Yeah.
Should not be over text. I'm like, pick up the phone. Yeah.
That's the first, anytime there's team conflict. I'm always like, did it happen over text? Oh yeah.
Okay. You know my rule about this. Yeah.
You know, you should, it's, it's your fault. It's, it's automatically your fault because you needed to just pick up the phone and call somebody. But anyways, go on.
So, I mean, it's, it's all those things. I think we had done 60 million, probably remote. We had 65 employees.
We are, and were, I think the best of the best at creating remote culture.
I just don't believe that it's the best way to build a massive business. I mean, it's like if you were building a sports team, would you say, hey, we're going to run this by Zoom? If you were trying to build a family, would you say, all right, guys, we're going to meet in person twice a year?
Yeah. You just wouldn't do it. And so we started running into all these training problems, accountability problems, all this stuff.
And I'm like, hey, you know what I think would solve this is if we just hired someone and they sat next to the top performer for two days and then they hit the phones. yeah we're very similar because i've told myself a story that i didn't want to do it either because like you we are really good at running remote you know yeah like is is as far as it can go i think we are like the best at the same time i'm kind of getting to a point where i'm like yeah you know like okay yes you can be really good at running remote and you could be so good at remote that maybe you are better than some people in person because they suck that bad But if you're really good with remote, you're probably even better in person.
I'm sure that's what you experienced. Yes. Yes.
And it sucked for the first 18 months. I mean, I just got absolutely kicked in the teeth. I think there's a bunch of big mistakes I made.
I try to pull the ripcord and just basically just just.
And it, it screwed a bunch of stuff up. So I think probably the hardest year or even two years of my life were the two years that I tried to get the in -person team going. Cause it was just different.
What'd you do wrong? Like what, so what have you, what have you learned? What'd you say?
Like, what would you do differently? And then now what have been the results? I, gosh, there were so many things I did wrong.
I mean, I didn't know how to recruit in person. We were incredible at recruiting, but we could, I didn't realize that, Hey, if you're hiring in person, they probably need to live within 30 minutes of the office. Yeah.
Don't. I don't make that exception. Do they currently work in an office?
If not, they're probably going to get tired of it three to six months from now and not want to do that anymore. Like go through the checklist of, and then I also just, I think actually probably the biggest mistake I made is I just rode the fence. I was like kind of in kind of not, I wasn't willing to fully say, no, we're doing this.
And like, either you're cool with that or you're not. And so, especially with recruiting new people, then I think also another big mistake I made is I. sunset the existing performing team way faster than I should have without the troops ready to roll.
And so I think I took for granted that I had a really good team that I'd worked with for a long time, years and years and years. And I thought, hey, I'm just going to copy paste that culture with new people. I was mishiring.
I was mistraining. I didn't have any money. I didn't force people to move, which maybe I should have, maybe not.
But that was just a strategic choice I made. I think I would have lost some really good people if I would have. So I think there's tradeoffs.
But I didn't have those culture bearers that had been with me for five to 10 years that were in the trenches. And so what ended up happening is I just started going really aggressively at my low to mid tier performers. on my remote team, and they just churned, as you would expect, right?
Because I'm like, hey, we're going to replace you with these people over here. And they're like, okay, cool, I'm out. But, like, these people weren't ready yet.
And so then our revenue starts staking. I mean, it was just a total shit show. But then it's just.
it started working like it's working like crazy now. And I think there's a bunch of stuff, whether it's the media, whether it's the sales team that would not be working like it is without that. And we're just getting started.
Yeah. Cause my two biggest questions on it, we're going to be like, cause this is my hesitation is it's so much harder to recruit because the recruiting pool is smaller in person. Right.
So how do I overcome that? The second thing would be like, and this is kind of related to that is Do you allow hybrid, not allow hybrid?
How do you think? Yeah. Yeah.
So, A, it's hard to recruit, and you've got to pick which ones are your non -negotiables and which ones do we have to have in the office and which ones it's kind of fine to have remotely for now. I think eventually we'll get to a place where 80%, 90 % of our team is in person. We're about 50 -50 right now, 25 % in person, maybe 30 % remote.
clear on that at the start and but i think um do you on the hybrid choice i just i just decided no uh now is that the right decision maybe not but i just didn't want to get i didn't want to get stuck in the middle of like constantly negotiating because i'm like oh for hybrid well then do we have, when is our hybrid days?
And then if we don't sync them all up as a company, well, then people are going to be like, I'm in office. I'm trying to meet with so -and -so and they're on a hybrid day today. And I didn't know that.
Now we got to like spend so much time planning to actually be able to meet in person with each other. There's all this stuff. And I'm just like, screw that.
I'm going to. Choose my hard, which is going to be the biggest dose of hard right now. And then that's just going to make everything else simpler.
And there's going to be some people who would say, I would never work for that company. I'll say, great, don't work here. And there'll be some people who are like, I love that.
And that was actually the surprising thing. There's a lot of people who are like, man, I am so glad. Like I've been remote and I hate it.
I'm totally alone in my home office. Like I'm so glad to come in the office. And so you just find your people.
I think I'll be how we do it. I don't know if I'm ever good because for us doing, I mean, we have people global. So who are fantastic.
So doing a hard, like in person only probably not going to happen. It'd be very destructive. But the way I think about it is when I have kids, I mean, I'm going to have to get an off some sort of office.
Yeah. So number one. you know, I gotta go.
So I gotta go somewhere. So if I'm gonna go somewhere, I'm like, well, okay, I might as well get enough space for like a core team and then try to like, essentially, it's almost like, you know, it's like, I'm trying to think of a good example, but, you know, think about who are the key people that I can get there first that are the highest impact that almost it's like when I tip those people, people are just gonna wanna be there.
And then like, I'll just create the problem of we have too small of an office. You know, but at first I'm just going to get one because I got to I got to get one for myself. I'm going to deck it out to where it's like even if nobody fucking shows up, I'm glad I'm here.
Yes. You know, and then kind of build from there. I think that's a smart way to do it.
And we sorry. Oh, no. So I was going to say two last things.
One thing I respect about you is you have longevity in the industry because our industry is like one of those ones where, you know, you see some guy doing like five million a month next year, zero million a month. you know they're just gone yeah right like nothing was real yeah and that happens a lot so i'm now going on my you know i think we're seven years in i'm going on my eighth year right you're going almost a decade i think 12 12 years right what do you think especially you know in this industry has allowed you to have that amount of longevity because it's super rare it's kind of sad but it is true it's crazy i've i've seen so many people got a business get f FTC lawsuits get shut down.
My brother always told me in the music world, he said, Chandler, the longer it takes to build it, the longer it lasts. He said, you go to these shows and you have an artist that has a hit song and they tour on it and they have a ton of people at the concert for that one tour. And then his band, they never had their big break, but they tour better than anybody.
they built that audience over a long period of time. And so I just always kind of had that mantra in the back of my head of, hey, the longer it takes to build it, the longer it lasts. And let's reverse engineer everything to be built to last.
And so not chasing stuff that is short -term spiky, but like BizOp, great example. People would tell me for over a decade, hey, the fastest way to grow is just to make massive income claims. Like, yeah, that's true.
All of those people are going to get shut down. And so you see that. And so I think we've just went the total opposite way.
We've just said, hey, we're going to build it to last and we're going to attract the type of people. And then when you look up, you see like, we almost bought Scribe out of bankruptcy. Other big competitors of ours, FTC, FTC.
And then suddenly you look up and you're the last person standing. But I think building it to last and then building a great team, like that's probably the thing I'm most proud of is we've got like a melt rush more of talent. You look at, there's tons of companies that are popping off and they all started working in my company.
I know you have a nice family tree, right? I have one too, which is like, and I came from one too. Like I used to work for traffic and photos before.
And a lot of us who are high up there have gone on to do like crazy stuff. Yeah, I know. But, uh, those are good guys, but I mean, yeah, well, I mean, then that was years and I left years and years before that.
So I don't even really know what happened, but, um, but yeah, even you, like there's, I know like, bunch of people who are now crushing it in their own business and they came from like the Chandler family tree and I'm sure you came from something else yeah right it's like you know the football coaches almost all of them.
Have you seen the chart of the amount of football coaches that were like influenced by Bill Parcells? It's either Bill Parcells or Bill Belichick. It might've been Parcells then Belichick.
Probably. Yeah. Nick Saban for sure.
Oh, like him for college. The Saban tree is nuts. Yeah.
It's insane. Just people all stem from that. And I think the other big thing too, because what's interesting is most of the people who go out of business in our industry, it's not because like, sure you have a couple of people get sued by the FTC or something.
I mean, that's very rare. Most of them, it's just the founder just blows it up. Yeah.
And so a lot of it is just managing your, like the quote, Peter Drucker, it's like managing yourself and just not like so many people develop over time, this emotional thing to their business where they just are hating their business. And I think part of that is like, you hate the people you work with, you hire and you hired them.
It's your fault. So just get, and then they try to go to a different business and there's just the same problems. You know, and a lot of that times a different business isn't really conducive or aligned with the gifts they had in the first place.
But that's what I see more often than not is people just they fizzle out and it's all self -inflicted. Yeah. They hate their they hate their business because they hate the people they work with or their customers.
They hate their customers or they just want something new. Like I think the most two most dangerous questions in entrepreneurship are what's new and what's next. It's you show up to a conference and what do people ask you?
What's new? what's next and how many employees you got that's like yeah what so you always feel this pressure to have a new and next and so that means starting new things giving up on your current business whatever else or you have a feel of pressure to have a lot of employees which really what they want to ask you is how much how much money you making yeah why don't we just ask that that's what i'm A lot of times I do just ask people that.
Or I'll say, how many sales do you make a month? And then I'll be like, okay, what's your price? So is your revenue this, or do you do a lot more on the back end?
And then they correct the record and they say, oh no, we do a lot more on the back end, so we're really doing this. That's my sneaky way to do it. I think that's smart.
I've made the mistake. Because it's like, why is employees even a, like, is the goal to have employees? You know, if you have too many employees and you have no profit, well, you're not going to have many employees in two years from now.
Yeah. I made that mistake a lot because I'd show up to these conferences. They'd ask me how many employees I got.
I'm like, you're kind of like your sales scoreboard. You're like, oh, that's the scoreboard. Let's optimize for the scoreboard.
And next time I show up, I want to have more employees. But then you just realize I'm just going broke and I'm pulling my hair out. But to your point, back to the longevity thing, I think the most dangerous number is one.
One product, one customer acquisition channel, all that stuff. So I have always been very intentional to not be single channel dependent, single product dependent or single person dependent. And so if I've got to, I'll never forget when one time I had two people threatened to quit and I looked up and there were 60 % of my revenue.
And I'm like, they have me by the balls and I will never let this happen again. And so now I just look out for that. Hey, where's their key man risk?
Let's cross train. And I want to develop and retain those people, of course, but I just want to hedge my downside. If we have one channel, that's the majority of our revenue.
We need to be creating other channels. If we have one product, that's all of our revenue. Well, we should probably diversify a little bit so that.
That's helped us last. And then that couple with we're just I'm just wildly fiscally conservative. So, you know, this you've been in space.
Everybody lies about their numbers. All their numbers that they say are just wildly inflated and or just not true. Or they take one month.
Yeah. And they say, I'm running an eight figure business. It's a true psychological thing, though.
I mean, I've even caught myself doing that sometimes where it's like and it's just a psychological thing where you're like you have this month and then you're like. That's what we're doing now. Like you had a really good month.
I mean, some people do it to where they have a lot. I mean, in some cases, if you're a very evergreen, steady business, like I get it. Like, you know, you kind of just pick a number and then you're just like, OK, I'm just going to because everybody asks you or you got to say it in your fucking videos all the time.
And you're like, I'm just going to say this number. You know, I even noticed I was saying two point five million a month for so long. And then I looked at I mean, I obviously look at the P &Ls every every month.
But the way they're structured, it's like there's a couple of different revenue items. I actually added them up and I'm like, fuck, we're like 2 .97. Yeah.
I was like, I've been saying 2 .5 for like three years. I just kept saying 2 .5. We were actually higher than that.
The other thing people do is they say revenue. I don't want to say any names. I know some big people who do this, but it's like, yo, if you're selling Google, I'm cool with you saying revenue because Google will have to pay the contract because they're a Fortune 500.
If you're selling Tom and Sharon and they're doing $30K a month in their business, I don't care what the revenue is. Because what are you saying? Cash collected?
Well, some people say revenue in terms of contracted. Oh, I call it sales, right? Yeah, it's the same thing.
So some people will say they'll report their contract. They'll sell a three -year. There's some people who will sell a three -year $150K deal, and then they say that's their monthly.
They say it as if they're collecting that. Cash. Does that make sense?
Dude, 100%. I am militant about that. Every number that we say is net sales.
So it's after refunds. Because if it refunds, it doesn't count. And not only does it not count, it's even worse than not counting.
We had to pay merchant fees on all that. We had to pay people on that. It's a massive negative.
It's like net sales and then there's net revenue. And I think to your point, everybody's, so I'm like, hey, if you're talking revenue, we're talking cash. If you're talking sales, you're talking contracts.
So cool. It's Fugazi. Yeah, it's like, oh, cool.
Yeah, you sold 100K, three -year deal. How much cash did you collect? Exactly.
Cool, we're counting that. Well, the other thing is profit too, which, and I can understand why, because I don't like, I don't want to advertise my profit on every YouTube video when I'm trying to establish authority or whatever.
But there's a ton of people in this industry that like I know, like they are actually doing five million cash collected a month. But like if I told you their profit, you'd be like you'd be like, dude, how do you live with yourself? You know, like how do you even how do you not have like anxiety all the time?
I'm like, because if you go down 10 percent, I mean, that's going to go like I mean, you're bankrupt because, you know, yeah, you know how it is. It's like. You could be making even decent profit and then go down a little bit and then all of a sudden you're like losing money.
Well, also profit's not cash, right? So you could be profitable and be bankrupt. I mean, one of my favorite quotes is, revenue is vanity, profit's sanity, cash is king.
Revenue is a penis measuring contest, even sales even more so. Then, okay, profit is sanity, but then cash, which I think a lot of people just don't even understand the difference. It's like, no, you could be.
profitable and be not have money to pay your bills it's like you got to monitor well yeah the other thing is too is like i think of the profit margin because i've always tried to run an extreme like we've always been way above average in terms of profit for our industry and just my standards are very high but what a lot of people don't realize too is that like number one if you have a bad month it is essentially like that margin is your buffer right if you go down by 20 are you losing money the other thing is too is like well, yeah, you might have this amount of profit per month, which is a snapshot of everything that happened that month.
But by the time you get into the next, like you're probably like this, a lot of our sales naturally front end and back end are like the last two weeks of the month, you know? So that means a lot of the payment plans hitting are the last two weeks of the month. But I have to pay ads for the first, you know, I don't pay more the last two weeks of the month.
Does it make sense? So like a lot of times too, if you look at like the actual cash account, you know, is used to drive me fucking insane.
I'd look at the profit and I'd be like, that looks great. Why does my account not look like that? You know, like I'm like, well, somebody, and like, you know, I get it now, but they used to drive me fucking nuts.
But a lot of people don't realize that, you know, is that like, you got to like have like an operating capital and reinvest back in and all that stuff. Last question. Should I have a book?
How long you got? You've got, okay. We were just talking about Joe Polish.
His book being in every place that you go into. A book is the ultimate, you're a sales guy. A book is a silent salesman.
It's the best salesman you can ever have. It never takes vacation, never takes a day off, never gets sick. It sells at scale.
It's the ultimate content asset. You're spending all this time creating YouTube videos, creating trainings, creating ads. What if instead you...
When I mapped this out with Pace, he got it. It was like, oh, if you could spend $100 ,000 to generate a million or $2 million asset in year one that then continues to print money into infinity, would you do that? Where else?
And you're like, yeah, I'm hoping to get a four to one on. ads it's like well that's a book like this book it's brought in seven million dollars in sales in the last 12 months i published that book five years ago it is the ultimate asset and so if you think about it in terms of time and money okay well let's spend let's spend a budget to get a it'll be it'll be any return on any spend you ever any marketing asset you ever do but then you think of it in terms of time okay let's take hundreds of hours well when's the last time that you spent hundreds of hours well when's the last time that you created an asset that's printing you millions of dollars years later.
That's what a book is. So people, it's kind of like they get kind of like content. They get blinded by, Oh, it's going to take so long up front that I, and so they just never probably already have it.
I just kind of organize it. You know, I even have the unifying principle. Like, you know how like Hormozy has the value equation.
It's like, I have that for how I would do sales. Um, but I'd have to put it all together and I'd want to write it myself. So I'll tell you the, I'm going to give you my objection.
Yeah. Let's go. And I bet you've heard it before is after Hermosi came out with his books and I was like, fuck, these are so good.
And I'm also like, dang, like I also know how long he put into these books and how much time it took him. It's like now that's my bar, you know? So I'm like, dude, if I'm going to, I think about it, like, do I want to commit all year to writing this?
And so it seems like it's like such a bar that it's like a chicken and the egg thing. Does that make sense? Yeah.
Yeah. Here's what I would do. I would say, first off, books are iterative.
And so that's the beauty of self -publishing is that is the second edition of the book. The first edition did multiple millions of dollars in revenue. But I said, hey, I can make it better.
And then that one's done eight figures. So if I'm you, I would create the most niche 20 or 30 ,000 word book with no expectations except. I want this to drive customers.
I'm not doing a big launch. I'm barely even, I'm just going to integrate that as an asset in my business. And writing a book is kind of like learning how to ride a bike.
Once you know how to do it, you just keep doing it and it's getting better and better and better. There's a reason why when you look up, there's no one book authors. Either people have written no books or they've written like seven.
That's because they learned the process. So what I found is not to put such big expectations on the first one. So don't do your big mass market book.
Just do the 20 ,000, 30 ,000 word ebook and audio book. And maybe you do a small print run, but then that book would generate knowing you and your marketing and sales ability. probably millions of dollars.
And it's not like this, I'm launching $100 million offers. It's just, hey, this is a really solid book. And then you use the skills that you learn from that to then just...
Yeah, it's smart. Because what would help us a lot too, I would just send it to all my customers who buy it. Yeah, yeah.
And it would be like, hey, if you like it, just buy some copies for your sales team. Or hey, if I'm speaking at an event or whatever. I would move some units for sure.
Even organically now. Look at Chad, right? I mean, Chad obviously worked with us, wrote the book on high ticket sales.
Then that business is built off of that book. Yeah. Well, he's in our mastermind.
Yeah. And one of his funnels is the book. So, and I mean, I would argue it's, it's his training process.
It's his recruiting process. He gives it to every, it's, you know, do a marketplace. He gives it to prospects.
He uses it exactly like we do and exactly like we teach, which is, it gives you leverage in every crack and crevice of your business. All right, cool. Thanks Chandler.
That's the pod. If you enjoyed this podcast, you're also probably going to like this podcast. I also did recently that you can check out by clicking the screen.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Cole opens by pointing out that Chandler Bolt built an $80 million business without touching either of the two channels almost everyone else relies on, ads or organic content, and spends the next two hours unpacking exactly how.
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Twenty-seven years in, four exits, and a dozen companies later, Ryan Deiss tells Cole Gordon exactly how he paces equity deals, hires, and exits so growth doesn't outrun trust.
A recruiter-turned-eight-figure operator lays out six frameworks, hiring leverage, who to fire, how to give feedback, how to raise standards, and how to stop being everyone's bottleneck, that he says fix 99% of why founders stay stuck in the weeds.
Two direct-response operators sit on a patio and trade the actual numbers behind their businesses: setter pay, application grading, spend cuts, and the leadership gap that shows up once you're past eight figures.
Two direct-response operators trade notes on the offer changes that took a low-ticket start to nine figures, and why most health offers stall at the same monthly number while a handful pull in millions more.
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