How To Think With Dan Henry

In this video, I talk with the legendary Alex Hormozi, the co-founder of Acquisition.com which brings in $100 million per year. We cover the key pratfalls of the entrepreneurial mind, including how to shift out of these mindsets, and even tactics that can drastically help your business go to the next level. This interview is full of tactics that you can implement TODAY like shifting your focus, playing to your strengths, and by knowing what "effort" actually means. An insanely informative interview, plus you get great work out tips as a bonus. ►Where to follow Alex Hormozi: Acquisition.com: www.acquisition.com Instagram: @hormozi Facebook: facebook.com/HormoziAlex Twitter: twitter.com/AlexHormozi Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/alexanderhormozi

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what it takes to create an amazing podcast that will attract a loyal audience, how to avoid making the most common mistakes most new podcasters make, and he'll share how to monetize your podcast without getting overwhelmed with the details!>>> Get Daily Success Mentoring By Becoming A Member At How To Think

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In this episode, I talk with Amanda Holmes, CEO of Chet Holmes International, founded by her father, Chet Holmes.Together we discuss her father's book, The Ultimate Sales Machine, including one of its most popular, and timeless strategies, the Dream 100, and more!Listen to the full episode now to learn more about the mindset and strategies you can use to increase sales and grow your business!--------Can you imagine what it would be like to double your sales year after year?You might believe that would be difficult at best, and you might even feel like that would be impossible...But would you believe me if I told you that it feels difficult or impossible because of your mindset?If you find yourself struggling with those limiting beliefs, this episode is for you!In this episode, I interview Amanda Holmes and discuss how she learned to reframe her mind to step into the role of CEO of Chet Holmes International at just 26 years old and how her company has helped countless clients double their sales year after year using their 12 Core Competencies.  In this episode, Amanda and I cover:What it took for Amanda to step into the role of CEO at just 26 years oldThe Dream 100 in practiceWhy you shouldn't rely solely on tacticsWhat the single biggest mistake in sales isThe importance of offer positioningWhat three things you must have to create a solid offer If you got value from what you heard here, please be sure to subscribe and rate this podcast! Bonus points for you if you write a review! ;)  — SUBSCRIBE & FOLLOW —Subscribe to Dan's YouTube ChannelFollow Dan on FacebookFollow Dan on InstagramFollow Dan on TwitterWant Dan's Wall Street Journal bestselling book for FREE?Click here to get Digital Millionaire Secrets, FREE!Interested in having Dan's team personally work with you to grow your business?Book a FREE Strategy Session here!Want to learn the 5 Things I Learned Scaling My Coaching Business To $25?Click here to watch the webinar now!Click here to Visit our Corporate Website: GetClients.comClick here to learn more about How To Think — TRANSCRIPT —Dan Henry (00:00:08): Hey everybody, Dan Henry here. Welcome to the How To Think podcast, the show where we dissect the inner workings of the human mind and learn how to achieve anything in business or in life. By changing the way we think. We bring on some amazing entrepreneurs, authors, thought leaders, and people that just know how to think and get stuff done. And today we have an amazing guest. Amanda, how you doing? Amanda Holmes.  Amanda Holmes (00:00:39): I can't wait. It's such a good intro.  Dan Henry (00:00:41): Thank you so much. So, so real quick, I'll do you know, I'm not much for intros, right? But you know, you are the CEO of Chet Holmes International, and Chet Holmes is your father. Who wrote, of course, the amazing; one of the most amazing sales books ever The Ultimate Sales Machine. The originator of what a lot of people now use quite a bit to grow their company, The Dream 100.  Amanda Holmes (00:01:09): Yes.  Dan Henry (00:01:09): And all that jazz, all that cool stuff. You've, and to be fair, you took over the company at 24.  Amanda Holmes (00:01:19): Yes.  Dan Henry (00:01:19): You doubled sales year after year. We're going to get into all that. But the first question that I have to ask you is, did you play all the instruments on When Grapes Turn Into Wine?  Amanda Holmes (00:01:34): No.  Dan Henry (00:01:35): You didn't. Okay. Well, definitely you definitely sang beautiful. You wrote the song. You played it. So I'm a guitar player. You know, that we talked about that before we went live and I listened to it. I thought it was great. Good production. Did you play, other than vocals? Did you do anything on it?  Amanda Holmes (00:01:53): No. Well, you  Dan Henry (00:01:54): Well, you wrote the whole thing. That's pretty darn good. Amanda Holmes (00:01:57): So I was a gymnast first, and then in my junior year of high school, I thought, oh, maybe I'll do singing. And then by senior year I already had my first record. And then in college I had four records, but all of the people around me were like amazing musicians. I went to USC Thornton, school of music. So it's like top. You either go to NYU or you go to USC or Berkeley school of music. So they were the best. And I looked around and went, I've only been doing this two years. I think this might be good if you guys play and I'll just sing and write.  Dan Henry (00:02:30): Well, that's fair. That's like knowing your role, knowing, staying in your lane, you know. That's amazing. That's amazing. So let's go back to cause a lot of people, you know, have read this book, which is again an amazing book. And I also believe a lot of people haven't read it and they've heard of it. You know how many people they say I'm going to read a book and then that book becomes a paperweight, you know? But a lot of people do know what The Dream 100 is, which, you want to play game?  Amanda Holmes (00:03:05): Absolutely.  Dan Henry (00:03:06): Let's play a game. Okay. So I'm going to explain to you what I think The Dream 100 is based on, you know, my limited understanding and what probably most people understand it as. Very, very like primal, very simple version. And then you're just going to tell me how stupid I am and how bad, how wrong I had it and that I'm going to get amazing value out of that. Trust me. So let's and by the way, before I get into this, I think a lot of people need to know your company has trained over 240,000 CEOs. And the main, I mean, I know you guys help with a lot, but the main thing is to increase sales.  Amanda Holmes (00:03:46): Yes. 12 core competencies on doubling sales.  Dan Henry (00:03:48): 12 core competencies on doubling sales. And would you say one of them is The Dream 100, or at least that's one, one of them is Dream 100.  Amanda Holmes (00:03:54): Yes.  Dan Henry (00:03:54): Okay. So let me sort of see if I can jump into this and okay. So The Dream 100 is where you find somebody that you want to sell to usually a big fish, right? Yeah. You just like, maybe it's the CEO of a company or whatever, and you research them and you figure out what they're into. You know, maybe they're into fishing, maybe they're into Marvel, I don't know, whatever. And then you send them this really amazing gift. It's either going to be really expensive or really thoughtful or both. And you get their attention because nobody opens a letter, but they always open a package. And they look at the gift, maybe it's a laptop. And then when they open it up, you're like, Hey, whatever. And then they go, well, who the hell sent me this? You know? And then they look at it and it opens up the conversation. And if you're clever enough, you can at least establish contact with somebody that you normally could never get past the gatekeeper. Am I somewhat on the same? Somewhat in the ballpark?  Amanda Holmes (00:04:53): Yes. Yeah.  Dan Henry (00:04:56): Okay. So that's essentially, I mean, obviously there's a fine art to it.  Amanda Holmes (00:04:59): Okay, so it's the fastest least expensive way to double sales because there's always a smaller number of better buyers than there are all buyers. So marketing and selling to them is cheaper than marketing, selling to all buyers. So how do you find that dream; my father called it The Dream 100. It could be The Dream One.  Dan Henry (00:05:14): Sure.  Amanda Holmes (00:05:15): I just recently saw a client of ours. They were at 60 million, they had 950 clients that produced that 60 million, but 900, I'm sorry, 969 clients 950 of which produced only 9% of their revenue. So 13 of their clients produce 91% of their revenue. So instead of going after another 900, they only led an intensive effort to one client. And that one client produced them a hundred million dollars.  Dan Henry (00:05:44): The big fish.  Amanda Holmes (00:05:46): And they doubled sales with one client.  Dan Henry (00:05:49): And that, that comes back to using the right bait and being in the right waters.  Amanda Holmes (00:05:52): Absolutely. Yeah. You did a good job of picking out some of the great things about it. So my father did it with lumpy mail and that's kind of progressed over time. There's also ways to do it on social. There's also ways to write, just being the bright spot in their day, adding value, being something of interest to them. So lumpy mail is one of those ways that we do.  Dan Henry (00:06:12): So I actually, you know, Russell Brunson, he invited me last year to speak at his conference. FHL and so I got to speak in front of like, I don't know, whatever. It was five to 6,000 people. And of course when people bought my stuff.  Amanda Holmes (00:06:26): Awesome.  Dan Henry (00:06:26): We probably did at least $2 million from that. So I was very thankful. So I was thinking to myself, well, for some, I don't know how I stumbled into this, where he asked me to speak, but I was like, I never sent him a gift, a Dream 100 gift. So I was like, let me retroactively do that because I don't think anybody does that. So I got him a Yoda, a life-size Yoda. Cause I know he's super into star wars. His kids are super into star wars. So I, and this was like right after this was Corona.  Dan Henry (00:06:54): So it was like, it took forever to get this fricking Yoda over to him. And they accidentally shipped it to me first. So they shipped it to me. So then I like put a, so then, you know, I got to like deal with that. And it's like this freight thing at my house. And so I put like a little note in and I bought like, RussellsYoda.com. And I was just like, listen, this is just me saying, retroactively Dream one hundreding you and saying, thank you for letting me speak at your stage because we had a lot of money. So I sent him that and he was very grateful, but I just thought, I was like, oops, I probably should've sent him something first. And I, cause I go back to that book and I'm like, you know what, let me see if I can like, correct this. So  Amanda Holmes (00:07:36): I love that story. That's so good. But it's also interesting. So my father, when he originally did it, he wanted to spend the least amount of money possible. Like he would get the stupidest little, like one time. I remember the day he found OrientalTrading.com. You can order lots of random, like a Rubik's Cube...  Dan Henry (00:07:53): I remember that. I remember that magazine be careful though. It's 2021. We may not be able to say that anymore. But, but no, I remember that magazine. Yeah.  Amanda Holmes (00:08:02): So that year we got 300 presents for Christmas because my dad went on OrientalTrading.com and bought the most ridiculous amount of things.  Dan Henry (00:08:12): He didn't go cheap on toilet paper, did he?  Amanda Holmes (00:08:13): Oh, he was, he would not buy anything brand, you know, designer, anything we got knock, I don't know about toilet paper. He wasn't buying our toilet paper. It was our assistant.  Dan Henry (00:08:24): Okay. Yeah, because there's some things you don't go cheap on. Heart surgery and toilet paper, Just saying, you know.  Amanda Holmes (00:08:32): So he was always about how do I find the cheapest things? It's just about changing that dynamic. But what it's evolved to now is because we have so much more ability to understand who a person is because they put everything online. Now we can get better about giving them something that would really mean something to them because he created it 30 years ago. Right. He was doing it 15 years ago. He passed nine years ago. And between the last nine years now we share everything on the internet. So you can be much more tactical about that.  Dan Henry (00:09:02): Let me, let me ask you kind of a, if you don't mind, it's a somewhat personal question.  Amanda Holmes (00:09:08): Happens all the time, yes, please.  Dan Henry (00:09:10): Look I remember when I was 24, right? I was, I was driven, you know, I didn't really get really driven till I was like 28. But I was, you know, I was being 24. I was, you know, drinking, going out, smoking weed, going to concerts.  Amanda Holmes (00:09:29): Were you at the pizza? You were running the pizza place at that time?  Dan Henry (00:09:31): Yeah. I mean, it was cheap weed, but you know, I mean, I was, you know, I was going to SevenDust concerts and I was hanging out and I was just being, you know, I mean, I was still trying to build my business and I didn't really have business then, but I was still trying to like figure things out. I had a couple of businesses that came and went, you know, but I was, I was being 24. I got started a little late. I wasn't that like 18 year old kid who was like, I'm going to be a millionaire. Like I said that, but it was like, yeah, I'll be a millionaire, but I wasn't really putting the effort in. At 24 to take over, not just a company, but a legendary company; a company that, I mean, it's not Joe, the rags man's fricking lemonade stand, you know, it's Chet Holmes International, legendary. I mean, what, I mean, how did you feel filling those shoes quickly like that and stepping into that role? Or were you already kind of in that, you know, or did you like hop off the party bus and go right into it?  Amanda Holmes (00:10:34): I was never so good at partying, I was very focused always, but I was a musician at that point. So my father got diagnosed with leukemia and he didn't spend one night in the hospital alone for a year and a half. It was between me, my mother and my brother. And he would have night sweats. So we'd be up all night with him and all of that year and a half, never once did he sit me down and say, these are my companies, these are what they, this is what they do. These are the people that run them. This is what I want for my companies. Right? None of that, we were just spending time together. Yeah. And there was no plan for that whatsoever. Like I'm sure my dad, if he were still here, he'd be like you did what? It would be pretty odd.  Dan Henry (00:11:16): So he didn't even expect you to do this?  Amanda Holmes (00:11:17): No, there was no plan for it.  Dan Henry (00:11:19): Did you just kick the door down and say, listen, Amanda is in charge now.  Amanda Holmes (00:11:25): Well, it puts things in perspective because for a year and a half, every day was Chet's going to die. This is what's going on. You know, it was life or death every day in the hospital with him and trying to find an alternative for him. So that was my context to then coming into this. Right? Well, well, so a, when things got even as difficult as they were, I'm like at the end of the day, nobody is dying. Like our business, like the worst that could happen is that I lost my father. Like that to me was the worst. So that had already happened. So whatever happens here, we can work it out. Right?  Dan Henry (00:12:03): Now, hold on a second. That's an amazing way to think about it.  Amanda Holmes (00:12:06): It's an important thing.  Dan Henry (00:12:07): I think a lot of people, whether they're entrepreneurs, whether they're authors, whether there's thought leaders, whether they want to be a sports star, whether they want to be a famous, whatever it is, if they want to achieve some sort of success, they, you know, a lot of times it's all about the meaning that we associate with events, how we define events and how we redefine events. So, you know, you being able to, some, another person may completely have a different definition of that. You know what I mean? But you gave it a definition that ended in a positive result. I mean, how important do you think that is?  Amanda Holmes (00:12:41): Absolutely. So I had looked to hire three different CEOs. I hired CMOs, CTOs, CFOs, just trying to fill the void. That was my father. I mean, he wasn't working in the day to day for years. Obviously it was all the sales team and there was a whole...  Dan Henry (00:12:56): So he was already out?  Amanda Holmes (00:12:56): Yeah, yeah. I mean, he was mostly just the direct reports would report to the CEO and the CEO would report to my father. So it wasn't like anything would really change. It was just like, as if a body no longer had a heart, it was just void of that, that founder. Right. So I'm trying to find all these different pieces to fill that, that hole. And I actually climbed Kilimanjaro. I went on the CEO retreat where it was like...  Dan Henry (00:13:22): The mountain?  Amanda Holmes (00:13:22): Yeah, yeah.  Dan Henry (00:13:24): Okay. Wow. I, well now I feel inferior. My, my best story is like, you know, going on a brisk walk  Amanda Holmes (00:13:34): I'm sure you have great stories.  Dan Henry (00:13:35): Not on Kilimanjaro.  Amanda Holmes (00:13:37): So it was one of my staff. We were at an event and it was actually a business mastery and he goes, you know, Amanda, I'm about to climb the largest freestanding mountain in the world. It's in Africa. I think you'd actually have a fun time. You should come. And I went, okay.  Dan Henry (00:13:53): It's whatever, sure let's do it. Yeah. Let's light ourselves on fire while we're at. It's fine.  Amanda Holmes (00:13:58): It was very bizarre, my thoughts were not really quite clear at that time. So Friday I get home, Saturday and Sunday, I buy all my equipment. Cause I'd never hiked that, anything before Monday I'm in Africa. And the first two days I am literally dying because it turns out that what's difficult about climbing is that people that smoke cigarettes, they have an easier time because your ability to breathe is restricted.  Dan Henry (00:14:27): Wow.  Amanda Holmes (00:14:29): Yeah. So Olympic athletes could have a hard time with altitude sickness because they're not used to not having breath. Whereas you look at me, my background, I was a singer. So I learned breath control like massively, right. I am certified yoga instructor. So I know breath so much.  Dan Henry (00:14:45): I wonder how many mountain climbers are going to start smoking now they've heard that.  Amanda Holmes (00:14:50): I'm sure they know it. I mean, you really have to practice it. So I was terrible from day one. I could barely get up that freaking mountain. And I shared, We were around a campfire the second night and I go, guys, I hate to break it to you. But I've realized that I hate hiking.  Dan Henry (00:15:09): I love how direct you were, and in such an eloquent way,  Amanda Holmes (00:15:14): They all looked at me like I was literally crazy. Cause they all had it on their bucket list for years. Right? Their lifetime.  Dan Henry (00:15:20): You like, you're crazy. The people that are climbing this mountain, but you're crazy. Got it.  Amanda Holmes (00:15:25): Well, because I hadn't thought it through. And I'm like, I hadn't really thought this through. I realized I hate hiking and I didn't know how I was going to get up that mountain literally. Yeah. I didn't know how I would do it. So then something clicked in me that I realized, oh, maybe I don't have to hike. Maybe I could just dance because I love to dance. And I love music. I've always been a dancer along with my music.  Dan Henry (00:15:47): What kind?  Amanda Holmes (00:15:49): I studied salsa, pretty intensively. Hip hop. I grew up on hip hop, like eight years of hip hop. So instead, now I'm sitting there and I'm like, either I changed my mind frame about this or I'm going to have to give up and I will not freaking give up on this. Right. So then I start singing. I have this personal,  Dan Henry (00:16:10): I'm just imagining you singing and dancing up this mountain. And I just said they were crazy. I retract.  Amanda Holmes (00:16:17): Well, no, no, no. So, I just recently written the song and it goes, forget the heavy load. So it had a really, really slow beat. So nobody could tell that I was dancing, but my head was going and nobody could hear me because I had all these masks on, right, cause it was really cold, but I'm singing my song and I'm moving my head and this is my mantra and it got me through the thing.  Dan Henry (00:16:42): I'm so wishing I brought a guitar right now because you have the mic. Wow. That sounded amazing. Did you sound that amazing when you were going up the mountain?  Amanda Holmes (00:16:52): Absolutely not, no.  Dan Henry (00:16:57): Oh man. That's incredible.  Amanda Holmes (00:16:59): But to circle it back, just to finish, the point is that change in my mind frame helped me to come back. And that's when I stepped in as CEO and said, okay, I'm going to do this. That was really a pivotal point because I also couldn't get up alone. I had to have help two African men, one by the name of Donut, that like assisted me when my eyes were rolling to the back of my head. I like literally couldn't walk. There was a guy that had died that day and was like, his body was laying all this.  Dan Henry (00:17:28): Oh yeah, that's fantastic. This is, what event is this? I'm going to put it on my do not go list.  Amanda Holmes (00:17:32): Yeah, every time people are like, I'm thinking about it. I'm like, yeah, I would never do that again. But it shifted my belief system around what I could do in my business. So I walked back and said, I didn't walk back. I flew back to the United States, and I said, let's do this. So that was a big point.  Dan Henry (00:17:49): So you redefined the problem. You found a way I can just hear like Jeff, Goldbloom saying life finds a way. You found a way to get up that mountain by channeling something that you loved. Because I mean, would you agree that if you're in a positive state of mind, if you're in, I mean, how often would you, you know let's say you're on your way to dinner and you're having a fantastic dinner with a friend or a significant other or whatever. And then on the way there, somebody like cuts you off, screams at you, like, you know, scrapes your car door, whatever. And you get into this argument, like you're in a bad frame of mind. Do you think that dinner is going to go as smoothly and nicely as if you were just, it's just butterflies and rainbows as you were driving down, right?  Dan Henry (00:18:38): No. So, so like you were in this frame of mind, like, Hey, I can't do this. This is nuts. These people are crazy coming up, Kilimanjaro, dead guy on the side of the fricking mountain, you know, but you had to do it. So you re you redefined it as I'm going to sing. I love to sing and dance. So I'm going to singing, dance my ass up this mountain past all the dead people. So I mean, you know what, it really freaked me out. Is you ever seen a weekend at Bernie's?  Amanda Holmes (00:19:07): No.  Dan Henry (00:19:08): You've never seen weekend at Bernie's? It's a movie where they had, I forget the exact plot, but this guy dies, his name's Bernie and they needed him to do something like right before he died. So they, like, they take him all around town and they're like holding him up and he's like this and they're like moving his arm. It was ridiculous movie, but I was just seeing you up the side of the mountain and singing and dancing. And then the dead guy on the mountain just starts doing this. I'm sorry. I smoke entirely too much weed. Okay. So, so, so, so here's the question. You went back, you, you took over Chet Holmes international. What's the first thing you did?  Amanda Holmes (00:19:56): Well, even before that, I would say the first thing I did was listen. So I think a lot of people, especially if you're changing positions or you're coming into a company and you just kind of say, here's what we're going to do, nobody will respect you. So I started by listening and asking lots of questions and the more questions I asked, the more they kept saying, oh, ask more questions. You're onto this. Right? You're understanding what's going on here. So I would say before that that's a predecessor.  Dan Henry (00:20:23): So you, you weren't that classic, like a Richie Rich, Macaulay Culkin, or whatever that walks in and just takes over and you know, like puts his feet up on the desk, like, all right guys, it's my company now.  Amanda Holmes (00:20:35): Absolutely not.  Dan Henry (00:20:37): Got it. That's good to know.  Amanda Holmes (00:20:40): And then I also think so I study under an Indian Saint. She's actually not too far from here. Her full title is [inaudible]. But I call her Guruji.  Dan Henry (00:20:55): I'm going to need to write that down.  Amanda Holmes (00:20:57): Yes, it's a good one. So I study under her and she just kept saying that if you come from service, that's the most important thing you can do. And if you can be a conduit of something positive, then you'll get through all of it. So that was really, it's not about me. It's not about the fact that I'm a 25, I think. So I stepped in as CEO at 26. So for a year and a half, I really looked around, tried to hire different people, and scrambled to find some kind of solution.  Dan Henry (00:21:26): So what was your role from 24 to 26?  Amanda Holmes (00:21:28): I was chairwoman.  Dan Henry (00:21:31): Ah, so kind of like, it was, it was just...  Amanda Holmes (00:21:35): A complimentary title.  Dan Henry (00:21:35): Right, right. Gotcha. Was there problems that you needed to solve?  Amanda Holmes (00:21:42): Absolutely.  Dan Henry (00:21:43): I mean, there's always problems you need to solve, but there were, was there something fundamentally that you deep down in your core knew that you wanted to change direction or you wanted to fix, or you wanted to, to grow?  Amanda Holmes (00:21:52): At that time it was just, you know, everything's on fire. We need to solve some serious issues. Like, so I stepped in a CEO. The week that I stepped in our merchant services stopped paying payroll. So like hundreds of people aren't able to pay and they're like, Amanda there's a merchant services have shut down. I'm like, what's a merchant services?  Dan Henry (00:22:18): No way.  Amanda Holmes (00:22:18): Same week, same week they come back and they go, so Amanda, we've spent half a million dollars to implement Salesforce. We haven't turned it on yet and we're thinking maybe we shouldn't, what do you think? I'm like, what Salesforce? You know, what is a CRM system? So  Dan Henry (00:22:35): You had to get acclimated real quick. Huh?  Amanda Holmes (00:22:37): My CFO used to always say baptism by fire.  Dan Henry (00:22:40): Okay. I still don't know what Salesforce is to be quite honest with you. I still don't get it.  Amanda Holmes (00:22:45): Well, 88% of companies hate their CRM systems. So it's okay. Even if you did know, you probably wouldn't like it.  Dan Henry (00:22:51): I hate that acronym. So just overall, I'm just like, just give me your email. We'll figure it out.  Dan Henry (00:23:05): I'm clearly joking. I'm clearly joking. This is what I like to say. And then my team is like, no, Dan, we have dah, dah, dah. And I'm like, yeah yeah yeah, I know, but this sounds cooler. It's fine. So,I'm going to do a quick, I'm gonna do a quick pitch. I'm just going to mention that our sponsor is us. So if you're interested to get daily success mentoring go to HowToThink.com and sign up. So that was our message from our sponsor. Yay. So, let me ask you a question. Is the Dream 100, that whole method, is that still the primary thing that drives Chet Holmes International? Or do you guys, do you have something different or have you taken a different direction or is that still the thing that you, is like the core?  Amanda Holmes (00:23:59): So we have 12 core competencies to double sales. That's just one of them. And it's, it's amazing how much this has been timeless. Right? So when I first decided I'm going to rewrite the book, right? Penguin was like, write the book, we get so many sales, we should just do a new edition. And I kept saying no. And then finally I'm like, okay, I will do it. And then when I went out on social and I asked, what should I update in the book? Everyone said, don't touch it. It's perfect. That was the response.  Dan Henry (00:24:26): It's like redoing a Pink Floyd song. Like, no, don't, don't, don't do it. Stop pump the brakes. Yeah, I got it.  Amanda Holmes (00:24:33): Very difficult. But so what I realized is that the framework is the same. It's just the ways the mediums in which have changed that need to be adapted and adopted. Right. So dream 100. Yeah. My father talked about faxing phone calls and lumpy mail. Right? Whereas we all know today...  Dan Henry (00:24:51): Can we, can we do. Cause some people may not understand what a lumpy mail is. Can we just define that?  Amanda Holmes (00:24:56): Well, you did as well too, right?  Dan Henry (00:24:58): You probably do it better. So is it, is it mail that, that, you know, is just let themselves go and just doesn't eat right? Or is it...  Amanda Holmes (00:25:09): So lumpy mail, meaning you have something in it. So it makes it a lumpy package.  Dan Henry (00:25:14): Yeah. All right. I just wanted to define the term.  Amanda Holmes (00:25:18): It's not a, not Humpty or lumpy.  Dan Henry (00:25:21): It is sat on a wall. Yeah. Got it.  Amanda Holmes (00:25:25): But today that can look like on social. Right? So I Dream 100'ed Dave Woodward.  Dan Henry (00:25:31): Ah, fantastic guy. Probably the nicest guy that I've ever met. In fact, sometimes I can't be around him too long because it just makes me feel terrible about myself because he's so nice. I'm like, ah, I need to go work on myself,  Amanda Holmes (00:25:44): His whole family. I mean, it's a test to who he is as well as you can tell that just his boys are so wonderful and his wife is so incredible as well. Their unit is wonderful. Yeah. They're great. So when I first met Dave, though, he kind of gave me a cold shoulder and I looked at him and went, oh, or are we not? Is my pig headed discipline and determination gonna kick in cause I have to like be friends with you. So I ended up following up with him. We friended each other on Instagram and I for every single day, for three months, every post he made, I commented on. So he would post, he took a hike and he bought some boots and he showed himself buying some boots. I'm like, I climbed Kilimanjaro and new boots. And I can tell you that that's the worst idea on the face of the planet you have to wear in your boots beforehand.  Amanda Holmes (00:26:31): Cause it will be really painful. Oh, that's nice. I'd get a heart. You know, he made a deal with his son that he couldn't not eat sugar for 24 hours. And I, and he didn't end up breaking eight sugar before 24 hours and he won like $10 or something. And I'm like, ha ha, you should have bet more. That's hysterical. So just little things. So he also posted a picture or a video of him and his wife and his wife is looking at all of these beautiful Christmas lights and she looks so happy. I'm like, Dave, you got to give your wife Christmas lights, like multiple times a year for how happy she is about these Christmas lights. Right? So I am in dialogue with him every single day. Even though he really didn't say much, it was like a heart here. I take screenshots of them, it's hilarious.  Amanda Holmes (00:27:17): But three months in him and Russell reached out to me and say, Hey, we'd like to buy 650 of these books for the, for our Inner Circle and give them to all of our best clients, which was awesome. I mean, five years later I just showed up to Funnel Hacking Live. That's how we met. Right. And everyone knew Ultimate Sales Machine because of that three months of pigheaded discipline and determination to follow up. So that's, that's an example of Dream 100 in today's world. Being that bright spot in their day where you're in their face, in their place, in their space and they can't avoid you. Right. But we still have these 12 core competencies. So it isn't just Dream 100. We're also known a lot for market data and utilizing market data.  Dan Henry (00:27:59): Do you get into sports at all? Boxing, anything like that?  Amanda Holmes (00:28:03): No, I'm sorry.  Dan Henry (00:28:04): Yeah, I went right past that. I just, I just did not turn down the right road. I just thought I was just playing on my phone. Just kept going. Well, the reason I say that is because, you know, what's funny is there have been times where, cause I'm a big like martial arts MMA.  Amanda Holmes (00:28:19): Oh, okay. My father was a fourth degree black belt.  Dan Henry (00:28:21): Oh, okay. Awesome. Awesome. So there was this and this has happened multiple times, but there was you know, I remember seeing Dream Onehundreding in that game. Like there was a, I believe it was Klitschko. I forget the other guy's name. Brandon probably knows it, but it's, it's the guy who's always like what's up champ. What's up champ champ. Do you know the guy I'm talking about Brandon? The boxer.  Brandon (00:28:45): I'd have to look up the name. I know exactly what you're talking about though. Yeah.  Dan Henry (00:28:48): Yeah. So what he would do was so Klitschko, I think I got the right one. He was like the champion. He was trying to get the fight. Right? Because you know, if you want to get a fight with the champ, you gotta, you gotta get the Champ's attention. You can't just say, I want to fight you or you have to be the number one contender.  Dan Henry (00:29:03): Right. But if you're not the number one contender, you got to get the attention. So this dude would literally follow Klitschko everywhere he went. If he was at a restaurant, he would show up with like a megaphone and be like, What's up champ? You gonna take the fight champ? Like right in the restaurant. Or he was, Klitschko was skiing. He came on a speedboat, drove right past him, knocked him off his skis and was like, come on champ, come on. What's up champ. Let's go. You know? And he did this like six or seven times and he finally got the fight and I'm pretty sure he lost, but the point remains, he Dream One hundreded his way into a fight with the champ. Oh  Amanda Holmes (00:29:39): My God. I never heard that before. That's such a good story.  Dan Henry (00:29:43): Don't I don't recommend anybody do that. That was an example. But you know, it's not what I'm saying to do.  Amanda Holmes (00:29:51): But the essence is there. The point is there.  Dan Henry (00:29:52): And that's the thing. Let me ask you a question in life. Cause you know, it's not just about business. I mean, a lot of it is, but some people don't want to be entrepreneurs, but they want to be authors. They want to be singers. They want to be whatever it is, whatever they define as success. Do you think that sometimes people when they try to, and this is the difference between people who get it and people who don't get it. People who succeed, people who don't succeed as they look at the tactics, they look at the surface level stuff, send a piece of mail here, do this. Comment here on social media. And they don't think of the essence. Like, I mean essentially that's what, what Klitschko got Dream One-hundreded and he gave him the fight. And that's the thing is that same, that same essence can be repurposed into a thousand different iterations and applications.  Dan Henry (00:30:45): And in a hundred years it can still be done. In the thousand years it can still be done. We might not have the internet in a thousand years. Maybe we were all just like cyber connected. And I can just be like, give you a compliment by going like whatever. And it's a completely, it's very creepy. But in this extremely creepy future Bing world, you can still Dream 100 people. You can still, sales is still sales. You know, rapport is still rapport. I mean, I'm hoping, unless we're all robots, then that might not be the case. But you see what I'm saying? Like, do you feel that people don't explore that enough? And they just try to rest on the tactics?  Amanda Holmes (00:31:20): Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, that's also why this has been so timeless and continues to be so timeless is because it's talking about the strategy and whether the tactics or the vehicles that you're using in marketing change. The things that my father talks about, like with advertisements, how much more it converts if you have a person next to a product. Right? So I think of that when I'm doing my Instagram stories, I always make sure I have someone dancing next to an image because I know research shows whether it was 20 years ago or not in, in newspaper advertisements with them showing like a book with a hand and it converts better than a book by itself or someone holding a product. I do the same thing on Instagram because it's understanding the concepts.  Dan Henry (00:32:04): Mm yes. Yes. I think that maybe you'll agree that when you deep dive into that and you don't play gets to me trying to learn tactics or at least relying on tactics, that's your safe zone. You know, oh, if I just learned his tactic and I don't expand my brain any, anywhere past that, I don't push the limits. I don't, I don't push the envelope and watch it bend. That is where you get stuck because you just, you, you build this little box and if the tactic doesn't work or does work or whatever, you stay in that little box and you don't push the box, bend the box, break the box and get out of the box. Would you agree?  Amanda Holmes (00:32:41): Absolutely. When I think of like, so we define marketing as creating top of mind awareness, like that is the whole purpose of marketing is to create top of mind awareness. So that as soon as they say, oh, I need a product or service like yours, you are the first person that they think of. Right? That's the true ability of marketing. Now, when you think of a business trying to do social media, they're like, I just need to do a Facebook post. I just need to do a Facebook post. Remember that the number one thing of any marketing you do is to create the top of mind awareness. So when you feel like, oh, I've only done this many posts, I don't want to do more. Nope. We're creating top of mind awareness. What do I have to do to make that happen? Right. Just like that. Very basic thing. We get lost in the clutter of all the tactics without forgetting. What is the point of what we're doing here?  Dan Henry (00:33:29): I agree. I agree. I have a much more you put it more eloquently than I did. I pretty much just say marketing is to make the sales guy's job easier. You know, like the better your marketing is the less, less less, you know, work you have to do when it comes to sales.  Amanda Holmes (00:33:46): Steve Jobs says it too. Marketing's job is to make sales obsolete. And the number one revenue generating company in the world right now is Apple.  Dan Henry (00:33:55): Of course. And how do you go when you go to an Apple store, what do they do? Do they pitch you? Do they sell you? They don't have to do anything.  Dan Henry (00:34:02): You got to wait in line. You gotta wait in line and then somebody like somebody, like you gotta go see the genius or whatever, you know? And it's, it's very different, very different environment. Yeah. And that's the thing is, is, you know, Steve Jobs, he was such a you know, he was such a brilliant guy. He and I remember there, there was a scene in one of the movies cause he had a movie with David Fessenbender Fastenbender. And then you had another movie with Ashton Kutcher and I believe it was the Ashton Kutcher one. And he was arguing with his engineers and they were saying people who buy computers, they like to switch out their CD ROMs. And they like to be able to replace their RAM. And, and basically what you, Steve jobs said was no computer nerds like to do that.  Dan Henry (00:34:46): People want whatever you tell them to want. And he created, he created that because that's the difference between, and maybe you'll agree. That's the difference between something like Apple and Microsoft, apple does not sell computers. Apple sells creative empowerment, think different. Microsoft sells computers. You go to, you go to, you buy a computer from Microsoft, you're buying a computer. You buy a computer from Apple, you buy into self-expression, you buy into spreading your art. You buy into creativity without the limit of, you know, you know, ease of creativity. You have an identity and you have and that's the difference. And that's why Steve Jobs did such a great job. But on the flip side the man created literally, the highest value tech company ever. And not only that is responsible for changing the way that we live our lives. I mean, think about it.  Dan Henry (00:35:43): I'm sitting here interviewing you. I got a fricking iPhone and an iPad in front of me, you know? And I mean, you want to talk to your family, you message on Facebook or, you know, you sh I mean, literally how we live our lives completely, really does social media, there'd be no social media without the fricking iPhone. You know, it all comes back to that. So he made such an impact. But do you remember, do you remember the story about what he talked about on his death bed? He said I don't remember the exact words, but he basically said it was all not worth it because he spent so much time making that thing great that he didn't spend enough time with his family and his life and he wasn't present enough. And on his deathbed, he regretted every single second of it. And I, I remember hearing that and every single day when I wake up, I try to think of that. And I just close my eyes and I say, I'm Steve Jobs in my bed about to die. And I just realized that none of this matters. How am I going to live my life? So that doesn't happen?  Amanda Holmes (00:36:40): That's really interesting that you bring that up because, so I had an experience with my father, right? 55. He has an empire. He is so successful, right? When he got chemo, he decided I'm going to buy a rolls so that I can drive to my chemo in a Rolls Royce. It's like really dad, really? And he was too nauseated to be able to drive it. So it was mostly me and I always felt so uncomfortable that people always wanted to take pictures. So we would wear hats cause he thought it was hilarious that people would want to take more pictures cause they thought he was a celebrity silly things. But anyways, so we had this moment where we were sitting in the hospital room and he had, so if you get a bone marrow transplant for leukemia, you're, you're quarantined into a room in the hospital and you can't leave for two months.  Amanda Holmes (00:37:27): So imagine my father larger than life. Right? Always dynamic, always out doing things, traveling the world, speaking and now he's confined to this small hospital room. And he was looking out the window and he says to me of all the wealth that I've amassed, it can only buy me the biggest room in this hotel or in this hospital. And I never forgot that because obviously what what's it worth if at the end of the day you can't enjoy it. He died at 55. So a big reason why I did the new edition, my why was because I wanted to give the final encore that my father never got to give. And it was this journey of him understanding himself and having a rich life beyond just what money can buy. So the last nine years, I've really, that's why I study under my guru as well. I there's just so much more to life than just doubling sales.  Dan Henry (00:38:26): Yeah.  Amanda Holmes (00:38:27): It's good that they have to get really far into this interview for me to say that, because normally I talk about sales.  Dan Henry (00:38:33): Well, listen, if they left already, they don't deserve to hear it.  Dan Henry (00:38:38): So we're going to take some callers here in a little bit. I love taking callers. I D I do ask the audience though that no internet marketing talk, that's barred. High-level strategy, only sales, whatever. So actually this is a funny thing is, you know, and I want to ask you this question. I'm very interested to hear this. I, you know, I woke up on it. I mean, I built my first company, or my first successful company, GetClients.com. This internet marketing company, you know, this company, HowToThink.com has nothing to do with internet marketing. And I, you know, I woke up one day and I said, you know, when I, in 10 years from now when I got a little bit more gray coming in, the last thing I want to be known for is internet marketing. You know?  Dan Henry (00:39:25): And I started asking myself like, what do I want to be known for? And, what would people talk to me about? And I kept coming back to thinking, you know? Like, I literally kept saying the word how to think, you know, so my question to you is, you know, your father is known for that book. I mean, I mean, which is a great thing to be known for. You write a book like that, you're going to be known for that book. And he's known for the Dream 100 and he's known for Chet Holmes International. My question to you is 10 years from now, what do you want to be known for? What does Amanda want to be known for?  Amanda Holmes (00:39:58): It's an interesting concept because I've spent a lot of time. So I, in pursuit of fulfillment, I shaved my head for five years. It was bald.  Dan Henry (00:40:16): Yeah. Thought it was Brittany, but no, Nope. It's Amanda.  Amanda Holmes (00:40:22): I didn't have a Cray Cray Brittany moment, but I did have a couple hundred staff all looking around going, what are you doing? And I'm like the amount of weight on my shoulders of the expectations of others and what they thought was dictating what I would make as my decisions moving forward. And I didn't want that. And my guru even said, if you want to release yourself of those expectations and be the best version of you and make those decisions based on your own independent logic, then this is a good practice to try. So I shaved. So I finally, for years I like got up the courage and I finally shaved my head and I loved it so much. I kept it shaved for five years and it was really this commitment to myself to be the best version of myself and to find that fulfillment within me without needing that from exterior people. And it's, it's an ongoing process. Like sometimes I'm better than other times, but that has been a serious undertaking to feel that burst of life that comes from me and me alone. So when you ask, what are you want to be known for? I don't want to be known for anything. I want to feel rejuvenated. I want to feel alive. I want to feel that I'm making an impact based on what I resonate with rather than...  Dan Henry (00:41:45): So basically, you don't need to be known for anything?  Amanda Holmes (00:41:47): Right.  Dan Henry (00:41:48): Wow. That's probably the best answer I've ever heard of it when it comes to that question. That's deep. So let me ask you this. What got you into the Indian guru thing?  Amanda Holmes (00:41:59): My father was diagnosed and we went through a couple of a hundred alternatives for leukemia and we narrowed it down to the top 150 best in everything. Sound therapy, light therapy, oxygenation therapy. I mean, pre speaking in tongues, I studied under monks in Japan and then I met her and it was just a completely different experience. Just being in her presence, felt different. Like something really magical about this woman. And I had Celiacs at the time. So even the smell of wheat, if I went into a pizza store, I would get nauseated because I was that highly allergic. I would have to go to the hospital if I ate any wheat. And she said, every disease is just a disease of your mind. So if you can release those, you can cure yourself of Celiacs. And I'm like, so you think I could...  Dan Henry (00:42:48): So you can eat gluten now? No way.  Amanda Holmes (00:42:51): So I, so anytime I was in her presence, I could eat pizza. It was absurd and imagined like  Dan Henry (00:43:00): What kind of pizza? I need to know. Don't tell me Domino's.  Amanda Holmes (00:43:05): She liked deep dish. So we would go eat deep dish. When I first met her, we were...  Dan Henry (00:43:12): They say you got to start small, you know,  Amanda Holmes (00:43:15): But so then she said, I need a concentrated amount of time to be able to help cure you of this. I have a center in Singapore, so I made my way to Singapore. And three months later, she helped rebuild my stomach lining and I now can eat wheat all I like.  Dan Henry (00:43:34): And I bet you that a doctor would have probably charged you tens of thousands of dollars to still have that issue.  Amanda Holmes (00:43:42): No Western doctor said that they could cure Celiacs. If you ask anybody about Celiacs, they say, oh yeah, you, I just don't eat wheat. Like nobody actually has a cure for that.  Dan Henry (00:43:50): Yeah. I mean, why would you, I mean, why would you cure stuff like that when you could sell drugs to people that have it, or why would you cure cancer when you can sell cancer? I mean, you know, much money we would lose if we, if we actually came up with or released the cure for cancer? All those all those machines, all those technicians that go to schools to learn those machines. You've got to think you've got a school somewhere. That school has staff. It has janitors, it has a cafe workers. It has construction workers that work on it. And that school teaches technicians. And those technicians have to use these machines. And the people that make the what do they call the cancer machines? Like chemo, chemo, chemo machines. Yeah. Somebody's got to do research to create those machines.  Dan Henry (00:44:32): Somebody has got to do the manufacturing and then somebody's got to do the licensing and all that dah, dah, dah. If you just came out with the cure, all those people would lose their jobs and, and, and you know, my response would be that they can find new jobs. But, you know, I'm just saying like, that's that that'd be a big thing. And I think a lot of people don't stop to realize that. And I'm not saying that there's any one alternative that I, or anybody promote or like, or say is the answer. But I think that you have to ask yourself, well, if this is supposed to be the only answer, going to a Western doctor and doing chemotherapy, you know, it's sort of like if I told you the secret to doing this thing is this thing, I just happened to sell that thing. Right? You know, if I say, well, the secret to lose weight is to, to get into a keto, you know, a state of ketogenics, by the way I sell these ketones just by absolute happenstance. I happened to also sell that thing, you know, it's, you kind of got to ask yourself like, oh, so this is how you cure cancer. And you also happen to sell the thing that does that. It's interesting. You know, we gotta, you know, you gotta think about that kind of stuff.  Amanda Holmes (00:45:40): That's the scariest thing about online marketing today is the health. Right? So on Google, you're not going to get the solution that you're looking for. You're going to get whoever's best at PPC, right. Or SEO, right? Yeah. That's yeah. That's unfortunate.  Dan Henry (00:45:58): I wanted to ask you about that. What's with this alkaline diet thing. Tell me about that.  Amanda Holmes (00:46:02): Did I tell you about that?  Dan Henry (00:46:03): No, but I do my homework, but I'm asking you.  Amanda Holmes (00:46:08): So amidst the hundred and 50 different alternatives that we looked at, whether they were from Asia, Africa, Australia, South America, the one thing that they all said common for my father to get him better was become vegetarian. Okay. Like even just to get your body back into alignment, that will help you get there faster and cancer can't breed in an alkaline environment.  Dan Henry (00:46:32): Really? So that means no meat. Is there any way I can get an alkaline cow? Do they make those?  Amanda Holmes (00:46:40): I think they're putting them in laboratories now.  Dan Henry (00:46:43): Really? So you can get an alkaline cow and maybe some alkaline chickens?  Amanda Holmes (00:46:48): No, they're just making them in a Petri dish. You've heard about that. Right? Making me in a Petri dish.  Dan Henry (00:46:52): Yeah. What it was like, is this a new vegan thing? Or?  Amanda Holmes (00:46:55): I don't know. I wouldn't recommend it.  Dan Henry (00:46:58): Okay.  Amanda Holmes (00:46:59): Don't eat straight chemicals, find better ways.  Dan Henry (00:47:01): Yeah. Yeah. I mean the plants, I mean, people, people bitch about the plants, but this sounds...  Amanda Holmes (00:47:06): Oh my God, even lettuce. Please stop eating lettuce and thinking that that's healthy. It's it's. So if it's hydroponically made there now just water and chemicals that create lettuce. So you are straight eating chemicals. So people like, oh, I'm so healthy I'm eating a salad.  Dan Henry (00:47:23): With cheese and Ranch dressing on it, but sure, you do you. Okay, well now I gotta ask you, cause now we're going down this health rabbit hole. And, and we, we went from, we went from fricking alkaline diets, not breeding cancer, which I really, I want to explore that all the way to lettuce is bad for you. Now I gotta ask you. I just got to know. Okay. What are your thoughts on cannabis?  Amanda Holmes (00:47:45): Oh, okay.  Dan Henry (00:47:47): I have to ask we're already on that rabbit hole. We're already on that side of town. Let's walk around. Okay.  Amanda Holmes (00:47:54): Well, so the actual plant has so many medicinal values, right? That is wonderful. I believe in the medicinal values of herbs, all kinds of different herbs. I like if I had to choose between someone doing cannabis versus doing drugs or taking pills, I'd probably choose that than the latter, right?  Dan Henry (00:48:21): As would I. Yeah.  Amanda Holmes (00:48:23): And then I also would add some kind of caution that when you use cannabis to get to it's helping you get to an altered state of consciousness, which is actually what meditation is supposed to do. But majority of people just sit in silence and think that that's meditation, which is the polar opposite. Because when you sit in silence, usually your mind gets louder and it just, you know, so cannabis helps get you there faster. You just have to smoke it. Right. The only problem is there's a disconnect between your mind and your body actually experiencing that. That's why it reacts in different ways. Same with alcohol. It's helping you get to this altered state of consciousness. Wouldn't it be cool if you didn't need to smoke or to drink, to be able to get to that place where things just fall off of you where you're honest and truthful. I don't know.  Dan Henry (00:49:16): I mean, it'd be a lot cheaper.  Amanda Holmes (00:49:19): But it takes work.  Dan Henry (00:49:21): Yeah. I don't prefer the ultra stage of consciousness that alcohol gets you. I don't like being there. I like the social aspect of it, but then, you know, at some point you end up in that part of town that you don't want to be in and then you're throwing up and that's not good, but.  Amanda Holmes (00:49:36): Not to say that everyone wants to be there. And that is the definition of altered state of consciousness. I should probably retract that statement.  Dan Henry (00:49:44): So, so, but I'm saying like, like, think about this, right? You have all these drugs out, you have. So here's the reason why I started being a daily cannabis user. I have real bad anxiety. Couldn't slow my thoughts down. So of course what's the first thing a doctor recommends, drugs, right They're going to, they recommend what's that drug everybody's on with the bead and you get the beady little eyes you know, and you're like super focused Adderall, Adderall.  Amanda Holmes (00:50:16): I'm not an expert on drugs.  Dan Henry (00:50:16): Yeah. So like a buddy of mine, he's like, dude, you got to try Adderall. You just take it. And you'll just sit there and get like a week's worth of work done in like three hours. So just like take it and do it when you nobody's going to bother you. And I'm like, well, if nobody bothered me, I would get three weeks worth of work done in three hours. So I don't need the drug if that's it, you know. But so he gives me two of them, right. So I sit them on my desk for, I don't know, two weeks. And I'm just, every morning I'm staring at them, I'm staring at them, I'm staring at them. And, you know, I realized that I didn't really need that to be focused. Right. And you know, I talked to another buddy of mine and he's like, Hey, you should try medical marijuana.  Dan Henry (00:51:00): You know? And I'm like, well, you know I don't know. And I was actually not, not for it. He's like, just, just go to the doctor and try you know, he said, how many times have you taken XYZ pills? Right. How many times have you taken all this medicine? You're telling me you're not gonna take the most natural one and at least give it a try. I said, all right. He closed me, and that's a good point. So I go, and I'm literally, I was like, I have anxi.... Here's your prescription. Right? I didn't even get the word out. Right. And so I started using it not during the day, but at night, because my problem was, let's say it's Six O'clock, I'm done working well, I'm done being smart for the day. I want to be dumb. You know, I don't want to think of all the problems with my business.  Dan Henry (00:51:42): I don't want it because I, then my mind gets tired. And then the next day it's already tired from the night of thinking and now I'm not fresh. So, you know, I tried it and it would slow my mind down. And let me just, I guess, kind of be more present in my thoughts. And enjoying things, food music, you know, and just let me stop thinking so that the next day mentally I could return with the fresh plate. I'm sure I could use some super ninja meditation stuff to do the same thing, but you also have never smoked the weed I've got.  Dan Henry (00:52:22): But, here's why I say this. So, you know, there are a lot of applications for recreational drug use that are not good, like cocaine and methamphetamines, all that. But then there are people out there that do things like not just cannabis, but they do things like psychedelics, like DMT. And Iowaska. I got to ask you, if you ever did a drug, it would have to be Iowasca all this Indian guru stuff. I mean, it would have to be right? Like that would be right up your alley. I would think. No? What's your thoughts on that?  Amanda Holmes (00:52:52): I mean, I feel like I've had a lot of psychedelic experiences. I just haven't taken the drugs to have them.  Dan Henry (00:52:58): That's true. That's true.  Amanda Holmes (00:52:59): So like, I could talk with the best of them. I have great, great stories of experiences, right. But it's like on a solar eclipse, my guru decided that we were going to chant for three days straight and it was eight hours a day. For three days straight.  Dan Henry (00:53:16): You accomplished the same thing. Have you been able to accomplish ego death?  Amanda Holmes (00:53:20): I don't know what the definition of ego death is.  Dan Henry (00:53:22): It's the thing where, I mean, I, as apparently you can, you can achieve it through meditation or obviously, psychedelics. I guess that's the easier way, quicker, but it's where you lose the sense of self. You lose a sense of who, you no longer become Amanda or Dan. And I guess, and maybe I'm not explaining this best way, but essentially it allows you to mentally feel like what it's like to die and cease to exist and not have an identity. And it's like a whole different trippy type of thing. And I didn't know if you have gone that deep down the rabbit hole or not, I stay up late and watch YouTube videos sometimes. And this is where it goes. You ever watched the Joe Rogan podcast, man, you can get, you can go down some holes, man. You can go down some rabbit holes, but we're bringing up this stuff. I just figured that maybe you'd have an opinion on it. Good, bad, indifferent.  Amanda Holmes (00:54:16): I mean, I've spent a lot of time. I mean a lot of time, I'm 33, but a lot of time, like the last nine years I've studied intensively under a Saint that if you truly want to be connected to let's say, if you were divided into your ego and your soul you can't even walk up to the door of her location if you don't want to truly know yourself. And, people that are looking for truth and looking for the best version of themselves, regardless of what the world says, regardless of what they say, your ego should be. Like, if you go there for ego pampering, you will get slapped. Like people I've watched people walk in the door and then leave because they can't handle the idea of stripping away the masks that we wear. So ego death,  Dan Henry (00:55:08): Maybe they call it something different.  Amanda Holmes (00:55:11): Yeah. Well that sounds like a painful experience, which can be difficult, but I'd rather connect it to a positive thing if we're thinking about the mindset. Like  Dan Henry (00:55:20): A lot of people that go through it, describe it as scary at first, but then beautiful. Scary then beautiful. I've haven't done it. I haven't gone through it. I just, it, I didn't even really get into it until I started talking to a lot of entrepreneurs and I'd go to these conferences and everybody would be like, Hey, you do Iowaska yet? And I'm like, no. And then somebody else, you do Iowaska yet? I'm like, no, why is everyone asking me that. You do Iawaska yet? I'm like, no, what are you guys all on drugs? Like, what are you, what are you doing? And so then I just got curious and I was like, well, now I gotta look into this because everybody's doing it. Not everybody, but it was just an absurdly high amount of people saying it. And I was like, well, now I gotta see what this is all about. But then I did research that meditation, heavy, heavy, serious meditation, not like, you know, Sunday meditation class at the yoga studio, but like deep, deep, deep, deep stuff achieved very similar results. And it's just, it's a fascinating sort of it's just, it's a fascinating thing to get into because a lot of people don't talk about stuff like that.  Amanda Holmes (00:56:22): I reframe it still, the ego death sounds painful and agonizing. I would rather say so something that my guru taught me was calling your higher self. Like I, something I say all day, every day as I grant myself permission to connect to my higher self. And so instead of thinking about a death, I'd rather think about a birth and a prosperous, you know, prosperity, abundant feeling. And that abundant feeling is in birth.  Dan Henry (00:56:49): I love how you reframe things all the time constantly, constantly. Yeah. So should you feel like the ultimate goal of a human being should be to achieve the highest version of themselves?  Amanda Holmes (00:56:59): Absolutely. Everything starts with you, right and your relationship with yourself. I watched that with my father. He was surrounded by all the people that loved him. Most he had a magnificent business and yet he felt alone.  Dan Henry (00:57:16): Yeah. I think a lot of entrepreneurs feel that way, even when they're not at the height of success that you and your father had still, I feel like a lot of them and,  Amanda Holmes (00:57:26): And everyone, it's not just entrepreneurs. It's just everyone. So  Dan Henry (00:57:30): There's not a lot of stuff out there. Oh. How to get rich, how to become rich, how to increase sales. There's not a lot of stuff out there to deal with that. You know, there should be more of it. Yeah. So do you let me ask you let's change gears here for a second.  Amanda Holmes (00:57:46): Let's do it. We took some, we went some rabbit holes. I wonder what calls are going to be.  Dan Henry (00:57:52): No, they're still going to ask about sales, whatever Dan, take your Iowaska. Amanda, how can I increase sales? I guarantee you, I can guarantee you. So let me ask you this. Cause it sounds like growth is super important to you and as well contribution. If you had a hundred million dollars and you could only spend it on bettering the world and there was no red tape, no restrictions what'd you do?  Amanda Holmes (00:58:18): So for the last five years, I've driven 10,000 miles around the United States looking for a remote area, couple hundred acres that I could create a university of self-realization. My guru came up with this idea and I just love it. This place where people could come, just like what I experienced, just getting disconnected from all of the craziness that's happening in our outside world. And connecting back to who we are, get really simple, learn the power of your mind, right? Learn how we only use a small percentage of it because we're clouded in our angers and our fears and our guilts and find that place of discernment so you can make

Do you struggle to overcome adversity as you strive for success?You might believe your humble beginnings mean you'll never be able to achieve anything great…You might believe failure in business is too difficult to overcome or that it's an indication that you're just not cut out for entrepreneurship…If you find yourself struggling with those limiting beliefs, this episode is for you!In this episode, I interview Eric Toz and discuss what he has learned through his entrepreneurial journey, taking what some might consider failure and turning it into lessons that have helped to take him from struggling entrepreneur to multi-million-dollar CEO! In this episode, Eric and I cover:How his childhood influenced his determination for success What timeless principles and skills can be applied to your personal and professional interactions Why what seems like a loss can be an opportunity for future successHow to build stronger relationships with customers and employeesHow seemingly insignificant decisions can create massive change in outcomes If you got value from what you heard here, please be sure to subscribe and rate this podcast! Bonus points for you if you write a review! ;) — SUBSCRIBE & FOLLOW — Subscribe to Dan's YouTube ChannelSubscribe to Dan's How To Think YouTube ChannelFollow Dan on FacebookFollow Dan on InstagramFollow Dan on Twitter— TRANSCRIPT — Dan Henry (00:00:09):So welcome everyone to the inaugural episode of the, how to think podcast, the show where we break down the inner workings of the human mind and learn how to think like successful people so that we can achieve anything in business or in life by changing the way we think, Eric, how you doing, man?Eric Toz (00:00:30):So good. I'm so happy to be here. Been waiting for a couple months now for this.Dan Henry (00:00:33):So it'd be honest if it were friends. So if it wasn't you, that was here for the first episode, I'd probably be, you know, pretty nervous right now, because last night I did this Instagram story and I was like, I'm gonna research, like all these world-class like podcasters and interviewers and try to try to be a good podcast or in the next two hours.Eric Toz (00:00:55):I think by the end of it will, you'll be doing good. Dan Henry (00:00:58):Yeah. I'll figure it out. I'll figure it out. But I'm glad I'm, I'm glad I have a good friend on to start out.Eric Toz (00:01:02):Take it easy, slow and steady.Dan Henry (00:01:04):I'm not much for intros, but you built $66 million business. You've done about a hundred million in sales, selling customizable jewelry online, and you started it by sleeping. You were sleeping and you were in Brooklyn, sleeping on a mattress. A whole bunch of crazy stuff went down and, and now you're here. And before we get into that, I just, I just want to say, like how, how would your parents describe what you do?Eric Toz (00:01:32):I think they would describe me as somebody who is always willing to burn all of the ships for me, like, you know, I had a pretty tough childhood. I think a lot of entrepreneurs did that provides an initial chip for them. They're off at whatever their circumstance or their parents, or just something bad happened to their health. And so they have this huge chip and for me, like there was never a plan B, like I was, I felt like I was going to be successful no matter what, if it wasn't like this thing that I'm currently doing, it was going to be something else. And so maybe not even about the money so much, but just such a strong desire to be successful in whateverDan Henry (00:02:16):It was. What gave you that chip? Because I know it gave me the chip that I had. I had a bunch of people who I would, I was delivering pizza and I would be like, oh, I'm going to, I'm going to build a business one day and they'd be like, shut up, like the delivery, you know? I mean, what, what was, what gave you that chip on your shoulder?Eric Toz (00:02:32):Well, a big part of it was my family has been very entrepreneurial. Like my grandfather, he actually, he had a factory in Massachusetts, literally called package machinery. This is like your old school factory, literally making like boxes and like packaging and stuff like that. And he, he sold that business. He was pretty successful. And then my dad growing up, we had a power sports business. So we were a family business. We sold jet-skis, we sold, we sold ATVs, like all these toys we had, like each of us three kids had our own everything. And then we had a few bad winters in a row where there was no snow up in New Hampshire where I'm from. And the business ended up going bankrupt. And so bankruptcy, you know, 30 years ago it was a lot different than now. Yeah, it was a true like seven years to repair your credit.Eric Toz (00:03:22):And so, you know, my dad, he went from being this entrepreneur to being like a Knight Security Watchman. Like I literally remember him coming home with like, you know, eggs and breakfast for us all after he was working all night at like a hotel. So I had no idea what was going on at the time. Had no idea what happened, how old were you? I was like five, like five, six, and all three of us. We were me and my brother, sister. We were like three, four or five, something like that. So yeah, that was really difficult. I was the poor kid at school. I was on free lunch. You know, I remember Christmas, like three Christmases in a row. I got like the same thing, which was this little, like a Hot Wheels set. And I'm like, oh, another Hot Wheels again, but we couldn't like afford anything.Eric Toz (00:04:07):So for me you know, going through puberty in high school at that point, I kind of wanted to latch onto something I could feel good about. And for me, it was sports at the time. So I threw myself into that completely. I would train for football, like during the summers, literally till like two, three in the morning, I'd be doing suicides and doing squats and stuff like that. And I had very good influences at the time. Like I had really, really great mentors. I had my football coach. I still can hear him yelling in my ear to this day saying, you know, stop feeling, sorry for yourself, stuff like that. So those were really good motivators at the beginning. And I had been influenced a number of times by some very important people not just in sports, but like later in business too.Dan Henry (00:04:55):So, so let me ask you this when you, cause I've seen, you've taken me to your warehouse in it's within the St. Petersburg city limits. And you, you took me there and it was super impressive. I mean, it's this gigantic it's like, you wouldn't even know it was there. You would not know it was there. You would not know that this building randomly in this industrial part of town is on a hundred million dollars in fricking e-commerce you know, and so you take me there and you've got these machines, let's see if we can get it, maybe Brandon can get a picture of your, of your thing up. And I can hear myself like a delay in, in my headphones a little bit, Brandon, I don't know if you've got the live stream going or not, but there's a picture of, of your, and how many people do you have working there?Eric Toz (00:05:53):Currently, we have 70 full-time employees. Yeah. Seven zero, I think during, during peak Q4, we'll have about 200 in the US and then we have an Amsterdam factoryDan Henry (00:06:05):Setting up now. So, so this right here is your, this is your warehouse. Okay. And I mean, that's, that's pretty big and it's actually bigger than that. That's just one section of it. And then you have another one where you do media, but I remember being in there, it was just like last week and yeah, zoom in a little bit, Brandon, like, look at that, look at all those people. So I want to understand the business model, because as far as I know it, you, you, you know, you have this company called shine on. Yup. And you, and you got to correct me if I'm wrong. Cause we've, we've been pretty stoned sometimes when we were talking about this, actually funny before I get into this funny story we met at this, this mastermind it was founders mastermind in downtown St. Pete. And we you had this you, you had this little segue thing that you were riding around on all, all through St.Dan Henry (00:07:00):Pete, that little, the one wheel, the one wheel. Yeah. And I remember I think you wrote it over to my penthouse here in downtown, and we got stone and just talk business for like three, four hours. It was amazing my condo. And it was a great conversation. And you told me and I definitely want to talk about this. Cause you, you told me about, you know, a lot of people say, oh, read this book and read that book. And you told me about the book, how to win friends and influence people, which I think a lot of people I think a lot of people say, Hey, read this book and people go, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, that's cool. I'll read that book, but they don't actually read it. And they don't actually put it into practice. And I re I noticed some things when we were, we were talking like, you would be like, oh, I'm sorry for interrupting. And you, you just said certain things. And I'm like, I really like this guy, like what the, what the, what is going on? You know? And I said to you, I was like, why are you so fricking likable? And you told me, you cheater that you read the book, how to win friends and influence people. And you like went hardcore on it. And you just, you, how much does that help you network and get through business and, and, and just in progress in your career.Eric Toz (00:08:12):Yeah. So I think, I think there are certain things you can learn that are timeless, right? There are certain principles that are timeless. And I think to be a good business person in the 1930s, when that book, how to win friends and influence people by Dale Carnegie was written you know, you couldn't hide behind email, then you couldn't hide behind social media. Like if you, if you wanted to conduct business, you had to like, look people in the eye, you had to shake their hand. You had to like, keep your word. You know, these are like old-school fundamentals. And so I think it actually be really helpful if entrepreneurs more entrepreneurs read that book today because it's really head-slappingly simple. Lee's simple things that he says where you're like, oh my God, I shouldn't have, I should have been doing this my whole, my whole life, like simple stuff. Like the sweetest, the sweetest word to somebody as their first name. So try to use their first name as much as possible because they immediately perk up. Right. You know,Dan Henry (00:09:06):Eric. Yeah. It makes me feel good. It does. And you know, when I read that, but I literally, because when you told me that it, it stuck with me and I've, I've read a little bit of the book, but I actually went out, I bought the book and I read it and I read it all the way through. And then I listened to the whole audiobook all the way through it. And then I downloaded the cheat sheet and I might've had one. I'm not going to lie. It's hard. It is super hard. Like some of this stuff is just hard to remember and hard to implement, and it's sort of like, you have to take. And when you first read it, you really feel like a Dick. At least I did, I read this and I'm like, well, I'm missing a lot of this. Like my first reaction was I must be a total Dick because I'm just reading all these things that we forget on a daily basis, you know, like not interrupting people, using their first names, smiling, you know, just, just, just something as simple as smilingEric Toz (00:09:58):With a pleasant tone. Dan Henry (00:10:01):That's the whole chapter on that, the whole chapter on that. And you dive deep into it. And I think in business and, and not even business, but in life, you, I mean, I'll give you an example. I was downtown. And I ran into somebody who was had actually followed me for some time and bought some of my products and stuff. And he had a friend who's this like high, high level, you know, manages billions of dollars in real estate. And I was just, you know, very nice to them. And I, I mean, anybody could have been any, any one of a thousand ways with their personality. And I was just trying to be very nice. And I noticed that his, his wife was a super, super sweet woman. And I remembered the book where it said, you know, think about what appeals to them, you know, think about w what brings value to them and how to appeal to them.Dan Henry (00:10:50):And I noticed that she wanted to talk about like cooking and making food for people. And that was like really important to her. And so I had a conversation with her about that, and I learned a lot about a lot of food that I didn't know. And then we ended up getting invited to their penthouse, which is actually four penthouses that they bought at the top of I forget which building, but it's, I think it's park shore. And they combined all four penthouses into one mega penthouse. Jesus. Yeah. It was you. And I learned so much about real estate and all that, and that was just, IEric Toz (00:11:23):Think it was from the, you conducted because of the cookingDan Henry (00:11:26):Conversations, because she invited, she invited us over for breakfast. She wanted to cook for us. So, yeah. So like, I mean, we didn't get an invite before that. And then, I mean, or maybe he, he would have invited us anyway, but it doesn't matter. The point is, is that, you know, sometimes I think we, we get wrapped up in all the problems in life. And so we're so focused on those problems and thinking about those problems, that when we go and all these differences in life, our problems are on our mind. And it's not that we're not, not nice people, but we don't take the time to articulate how nice and how genuine we are, because we're just so drowning in our own world of negativity and all the stuff we have to do. And I think that that book just gives it a great reminder to how to bring that to the surface.Eric Toz (00:12:11):Yeah, totally. And there's a whole chapter, literally just on listening. And at the end, he tells a story about how he had like an hour-long conversation with a woman on a couch. And he may be said like five words. And he was just asking questions, maybe like five or six questions. And she was talking the whole time, like, blah, blah, blah. I mean, he was into it. But at, at the end she was like, oh, you're such a good conversationalist. And he was like, I haven't said anything, but he just allowed her to sort of that. And just being there, like just holding space, I think for people can be really beneficial because everybody, especially in our business, our line of business, they just want to talk about what they're doing, like all the time and what they're currently up to.Dan Henry (00:12:58):Right. I, I do notice how did, and how do you think those tactics and that paradigm shift of how to interact with other humans? How do you think that differs between dealing with employees and dealing with just like other entrepreneurs, other, other people in your life that, that you don't pay?Eric Toz (00:13:17):I think the principles are, are the same, right? Like a mentor of mine, he's the co-founder of Zappos. His name is Fred Mossler and he, he treats his vendors the exact same way that he treats his employees and he treats people in the Las Vegas community the same way he treats vendors and, and they'll actually have vendor parties. They'll fly in their vendors once a year and have like a huge mega blowout party and something awesome that he told me was like friends, this concept of friends first. Like literally if you, if you just try to become friends first, all right. You know what they're doing a little bit, maybe not a hundred percent, but just focus on being friends first and really solidifying that. And then the business will come naturally. If, you know, if what they're doing is, is good. But you should be able to kind of know that ahead of time. So you don't have to worry so much about the business. Just kind of relax and see how you connect on different things.Dan Henry (00:14:15):And a lot of people, they try to create opportunities and that that's sort of, I mean, it's cool, but when you're networking and you're trying to make connections, a lot of times you just have to let opportunities come to you. And I think that if you try to create opportunities, you will go into meeting people in a disingenuous way. Cause you always have an agenda going in. I mean, if you meet somebody that is a player, right. Something is at, at some point is going to come of that. Something, at some point you don't know what it is right now, but at someEric Toz (00:14:49):Point and be like an A-player. Yeah. I mean,Dan Henry (00:14:52):I mean, it could be, it could be somebody that becomes an, a player. It could be somebody that's already an a player. It could be somebody that has done something that you respect. It could be a huge person in the industry. It doesn't matter. But the point is is if you try to go into that relationship thinking, what am I going to get out of this from the beginning, it's just going to, it's not going to be genuine. And if you go in and you just become friends and let the opportunity come to you, I think it's a lot better. Yeah.Eric Toz (00:15:16):Yeah. I have a firsthand example of this recently. I think we did a little bit of that also, my friend will, who, you know, who lives downtown here? He's just a really interesting guy. I just like him a lot. He does some cool things in skincare and in like NFTs. Right. And so I knew, I knew when I first started getting to know him, like there immediately there wasn't going to be any way where we do business together. And I was okay with that. Cause I didn't care. I just loved what he was doing on his own stuff. And I just wanted to be friends with them, but you know, over the past week or so, I've had an idea where I was like, holy will, would actually be like the perfect partner on this. And so you can't like expect those things to happen. It's just sort of, you know the way is of the universe sometimes if you have if you established friends first. Yeah,Dan Henry (00:16:05):Absolutely. I, I totally, totally, totally agree. So let me, let me just go back to this mattress that you were sleeping on. And you don't have to go deep on mattress pizza boy. Yeah.Eric Toz (00:16:17):My office is your pizza.Dan Henry (00:16:18):I see, I, you know, I actually I'm a mattress sleeper, every time I move into a new place, doesn't matter what my financial situation is. I always end up sleeping on a mattress for two months. Cause I can't find, I can't pick out what bed I want, you know, but I do like sleeping on a mattress, surrounded by nice walls versus the walls I used to have around, which were crumbling. But you know, let me ask you this. You had some stuff happen, you know, you, you, you took on some venture capital. You don't have, I mean, you can get into as much in this as you want, but you had some, some bad stuff happen and you basically had to sort of start over. Would that beEric Toz (00:17:00):With on yeah. So you know, starting, excuse me one second. Dan Henry (00:17:11):So polite. Is that in the book too?Eric Toz (00:17:15):I'm doing it for the listeners.Dan Henry (00:17:16):That's awesome, man. So, so, so what, what happened? They're like, well, whatever you want do.Eric Toz (00:17:22):Yeah. So I like to say I'm a two-time venture capital refugee. So the, for the first time was when I was at CustomMade.Com. We ended up raising about $25 million. Google was our investor, like all the top Silicon Valley investors. And we were basically you know, we were basically a high-end Etsy average order value, like a thousand bucks. But that it was a great idea. The business, it didn't work. At scale, we were burning a million dollars a month. And so it was just a reallyDan Henry (00:17:56):Burning a million dollars a month, whatever. I mean,Eric Toz (00:17:58):We were losing a million dollars a month just because of our overhead. And when you raise that much money, you're actually encouraged by all of your investors. Like, dude, we gotta, we gotta spend this as fast as possible because they either want it to pop in two to four years or they want you to, they don't want you to be the walking dead indefinitely. They would rather have you die or, or crush it quickly time value of money. But yeah, so I saw, you know, some of the advantages and pitfalls of raising that much money. You know, you lose a lot of control of your company, you have bored. And so when I started Shine On, you know, I didn't have any money either. So when I couldn't even pay myself, really, I actually started it on unemployment, which is honestly, that's the best trick.Eric Toz (00:18:45):If you want to start a company, try to get fired, ask your company, Hey, can you please fire me instead of leaving? Cause then you can get unemployment and you can get it for like nine months. So I was actually like, I went to Germany, I was like doing my unemployment forms from Germany. And the whole time I was taking literally all the money from the unemployment and putting it into shine on at the very beginning. Wow. Then that money ran out. And then I was, I was selling motorcycle rings to motorcycle clubs because I had this jewelry production knowledge. And I was like, how can I sell to a lot of people very quickly? So I made rings for like six or seven motorcycle clubs and that's how I paid my rent after the unemployment money ran out.Dan Henry (00:19:24):Did you have a machine for that or did you see all the machines you have right now, but what did you, what did you have that?Eric Toz (00:19:30):So at that time, so I had a friend who had a massive factory in Thailand in Bangkok. And so the first version of shine on was, you know, we would, us a, a marketer would give us their idea for a piece of jewelry, like a ring or a necklace. We would actually do a 3d render. It looked like an, a photo. It looked realistic. Can you give me an example? Yeah, if you actually just Google scooter ring, like on on Google something I designed it's like, it looks like a Vesper. Okay. So like Vespas scooteringDan Henry (00:20:01):Now. I feel like an idiot, cause I don't know what a VestaEric Toz (00:20:03):Is. Just like a stallion scooter.Dan Henry (00:20:06):Oh, okay. Okay. Actually, do you want, [inaudible] we'll talk about funny scooter story in a few minutes. You reminded me, do you remember what happened to me when I met Maura?Eric Toz (00:20:17):No.Dan Henry (00:20:17):You all, you don't remember that. I'll just tell it real quick. Cause Brandon's going to bring up, Brandon's gonna bring up a picture of this example, but you introduced me to Mara Glazer, who I ended up hiring to do some copywriting for how to think. Oh, okay. Yeah. And I remember I got that segue to go downtown and so I, I Google like how to change, make it go faster. Cause it was only going 15 miles an hour. And I got it to to a different mode where it went 25 miles an hour and right. So, but here's just a crazy thing about how, how, how thoughts can create reality is I'm driving down the road or scooting or whatever. And I think to myself, how bad would this suck if I totally wiped out right now? And five seconds later, I went to scratch my head, which I don't know why I did that. And I went over the top of it, wiped out. My knee was bloody. My hand was all messed up. I was goingEric Toz (00:21:10):25Dan Henry (00:21:11):Fast. Yeah. And I don't even know how I, and so I, I literally like the scooters all bent and I end up scooting down to beach drive and meeting Maura for the first time and right after, and I'm full of blood. And my, my stuff's ripped, like my jeans are ripped up and I sit down and I'm like, instead of saying, hi, how you doing? I'm Dan Henry. I had to explain to her why it looked like I just got to fight.Eric Toz (00:21:34):And she probably liked it like, well, this guy's edgy.Dan Henry (00:21:39):He still showed up, you know? But that just reminded me about how, like when you think of something you can like create the situation to happen. But Brandon, do you have that? Do you have that? There it is. Okay. So, so click on this.Eric Toz (00:21:53):This was the first, the first thing I ever designed for Shine On. So I was the first seller. I was the first, I was the first CS agent website, designer, jewelry designer, marketer. I was packing the jewelry myself like the whole first year. But anyway, what happened was yeah, this is how I kind of got started with it. I would, I would work with a marketer. I would make something custom and then I, they would actually put that on their store that just a render. So there's no inventory. And then we would take all the orders each week and I would put it in an Excel sheet and then I would send it to my friend in Thailand who ran a factory there. He makes all of David Yurmans jewelry. If you've heard of that brand high-quality men's men's jewelry. And so, yeah, that was great.Dan Henry (00:22:39):I'm going to stay silent. So I don't have to admit that I don't know what that is, butEric Toz (00:22:42):There's not a lot of guys do. But yeah, that was the first version of shine on. So I went from this like a motorcycle rings to actually designing some stuff myself. And then what happened was you know, Teespring came out, Teespring is like print on demand t-shirts and it was one of the first things Facebook marketers sold. There, I know a ton of guys who were millionaires a couple of guys, even in this area who made millions selling t-shirts there. And I had this jewelry knowledge. And so I was like, man, I, I love working with these marketers. We could really scale, I could scale this up much more quickly if I started working with Facebook marketers. And so luckily, you know, I had the prior experience from custom made which was, you know, it was still a success. Like it didn't work out, but we still raised a lot of money. We made a lot of noise and there was some trust there just from me being around that environment. And so I raised about a million bucks in venture capital and then immediately after actually hired Teespring's head of sales and Teespring's head of marketing. And that's how the initial Shine On got started. Wow. And they, then they brought all the sellers overDan Henry (00:23:47):Now, did you, I know that you raise capital and then something went wrong, and then did you have to raise capital again?Eric Toz (00:23:55):What happened? Was it wasn't that anything went wrong per se? It's just that we're kept pretty capital intensive business. A million bucks is not that much money if you want to build something large-scale. But what happened was we were it took four to five weeks for these items to be made in Thailand and then sent back to us where we would repackage it and then ship it to the customer. So these items sold super well. And we did over 5,000 various 3d designs and we did about five, 6 million in sales that first year. But what happened was we were getting a lot of chargebacks because of the weight. People didn't want to wait that long. They didn't trust it, even though the quality was super good. But no matter how many did it take, it took like four to five weeks after your purchase. So buyers are, you know, I think their limits around two, three weeks for reordering, they get pissy, they get antsy. So we started getting a lot of chargebacks and because we, we pay the sellers out like next day on their commissions or when it chips we would get these chargebacks after the fact.Dan Henry (00:25:03):So, so Jay, just to get the business model, right, you partner with people who want to sell their own personalized jewelry and you make the jewelry, and you ship. So it's like drop shipping and I believe you also give them the education on how to promote their products and get it out, get it out into the,Eric Toz (00:25:22):Yeah. So fast forward to today. I mean anyway, we, we, there was, we were running out of cash and at one point I said, never again, am I going to not make something myself? Okay. So I was like, I want the, I want to own the entire supply chain. Right, right.Dan Henry (00:25:38):And just so I'm clear, I just want to be sure I'm clear. That was because they were, it took too long. Right.Eric Toz (00:25:42):Just cause it took too long. That was okay. Got it. You literally the only reward to interrupt. And then there's, and then there's another thing about, you know, having more control of your margins, right. Being able to provide better customer service for everybody. But yeah, fast forward to today, I mean, we started in jewelry but we're, you know, we're an on-demand factory that we, we prototype, we develop and we sell ourselves viral gift products. So jewelry, wallets, watches, all personalized. And then what we do is we launched them through what we call an IPO process, initial product offering. So we'll say, Hey sellers, we got this new like wallet. That's personalized. You know, we, we sold like 500 grand in our initial tasks. And then we literally give away the farm. Like, here's exactly how we're doing it. And boom, now it's live in your app and it's free. Just go click, click, click, and you can add it to your store. And now you can sell this product. So we're almost becoming a little product agnostic. We're adding like metal wall art. Like that could go up here. I'll I'll have something for you. Oh,Dan Henry (00:26:44):Oh, okay. Yeah. I can, I could use some more, some more brains around this Personalized man. Yeah, yeah. You might have to, you might have to get me selling some products because I'm going to be honest with you. I'm gonna be honest with you. E-Commerce physical products is super difficult. And I told you this when I was at your, your warehouse, I doEric Toz (00:27:07):Hear like, oh no, I don't know if IDan Henry (00:27:09):Can, I couldn't do it. I could not do it. I mean, I'm looking at all these machines just to break down the thought process here. Right? I'm standing in this warehouse. I know that you guys have hundreds, you know, you've got, you've sold almost a hundred total, almost a hundred million dollars worth of stuff. You have machines that are like, w w what's your most expensive machine?Eric Toz (00:27:30):Ooh. we have we have auto pack machines that are about a quarter-million-dollar.Dan Henry (00:27:36):So $250,000 machines. And in my mind, here's what I'm thinking. What happens when something breaks, you got to call somebody, they got to come out, they got to get a part, and then you got orders. And like all this stuff going on, it's just, I gotta ask you this. How do you deal with the stress of going to bed every night and knowing that at any point, something like that could happen that could massively derail your business. Like, how do you deal with that? And how do you cope with that?Eric Toz (00:28:06):E-Commerce is complex because, you know, not only are you doing the marketing, sometimes you're also doing the training, but you're also if you're doing it right. I mean, you're also doing your own supply chain. You're buying inventory, you're storing it, you're shipping it out. So sometimes what we do because we're moving fast and we actually forget how many potential points of failure there could be, but we'll actually just write out a list. I'm like, you know, what, if, if, if any of these things fail, are we, are we screwed? Like, is this going to ruin the whole thing? And so a lot of times we're like, wow, yeah. If we ran out of X, Y, Z, that would shut down like everything. And so I'm constantly making lists constantly. If there's a new thing, that's a super imperative, making sure there's ownership of it.Dan Henry (00:28:54):But what do you mean by making sureEric Toz (00:28:56):There's ownership that somebody owns that it's like, Hey, if you have one job to do, it's making sure that we never run out of these like 50 different things. You know, we have an inventory manager too. Yeah. a lot of it is automated now. So like all our inventory management's automated their software to do it too. But you had to build, we built, we built our own. Yeah. So we'll kind of get a heads up of something running out, but look, honestly, stuff just happens to like, it's guaranteed, that stuff will happen. Major stuff. Whether it's a flood here or like a hurricane, or like, there's, there's a crazy cargo ship backup right now, like are all around the world. There are like crazy logistics problems. And so the number one thing for your customers is to just be a good communicator with them.Eric Toz (00:29:49):And that's honestly, it's a lot harder said than done. So that's where some of these Dale Carnegie principles come into play, just like thinking about them and their feelings being proactive, saying like, Hey, there's an issue. There's an issue here. You, you probably won't receive this in this time, but then give them some options. Like, I can do this for you. I can do this for you, or I can do this for you and just make them feel like they're the decision-maker next. And usually when you allow them to make decisions on what they want to do with their order, then a lot of the time they're, they're more cooperative and they actually will want to work with you. And sometimes you build stronger bonds with people and with customers when you screw up and then you, you like something detrimental happens. And then yeah, the redemption and you like go through this like thing with them. And they actually like, you have a tighter bond because they're like, then they're like the next time Eric screws up. Like, I know he'll, he'll be in my corner and he'll like, figure it out. So the same thing with employees too.Dan Henry (00:30:51):Do you feel that, cause I don't know if you've ever read the psychology behind likability and being imperfect, like, you know, what a Mary Sue is. So in, in film, Mary Sue is a character that is basically perfect and has no flaws. And so like imagine Superman, but there was no kryptonite. Like he wouldn't be that interesting. You know? And like when, when the star wars movies came out, a lot of people were saying that Ray was like a Mary Sue and that's why people were interested in her. And then so like later in the movies, they reallyEric Toz (00:31:24):Didn't know she had no flaws, she hadDan Henry (00:31:26):No flaws. And so you'll notice it in the second and third movie, they really dived into her like flaws around you know, her parents and things like that. And, and some other things. But, but the concept is that if you have a character in a movie that is perfect and has no flaws, then there's nothing to be interested in. There's nothing to be likable. There's nothing to, to bond with that because you can't relate to somebody. That's perfect. And I think a lot of times people strive to be perfect and they let perfection get in the way of the thing that makes them human. It makes them relate to other humans. And that in, in of itself is having flown.Eric Toz (00:32:03):Yeah, I think you know, we have our seller group on Facebook and so we're always analyzing what's what gets the most engagement and it's, it's usually two things it's posting about success. And then it's posting about like the hard times that you went through or like stories, hard stories, like redemption stories. Like people are so into that because we can all relate. Yeah. We can all relate to that.Dan Henry (00:32:28):Do you feel entrepreneurs have an ex an unrealistic expectation that things won't, that nothing will go wrong, and that if something does go wrong, that means they did something like there they failed or they're a bad person or they were wrong this whole time in their dreams. You know, like I feel like a lot of entrepreneurs really have that expectation going in that everything is going to go right. And they don't know how to mentally deal with it when things go wrong.Eric Toz (00:32:54):Yeah. I think that entrepreneurs understand that things are going to go wrong, but every entrepreneur is different in, in there how much they're willing to deal with. Like a lot of people will throw in the towel on something where somebody else won't. And I have two really good examples from my, from my life about not throwing in the towel. And this is not, I'm not saying I'm right by or right or wrong by throwing in the towel or not throwing in the towel. Right. But I'll give you an example of custom made.com where, you know, we, we raised that, all that money. And then I ended up leaving the CEO ended up leaving, but the sort of the third guy in our gang mentor of mine, Seth Rosen, he said, no, I'm going to stick with it. And so he made a deal with the bank wrote off all of the debt and he just went into this incubation period.Eric Toz (00:33:49):And now custommade.com is like 20 million, $30 million a year business. And he brought it back to life solely because he had a high tolerance for going through that. And he was so obsessed with it that he wanted to continue working on it. And same thing with me, I got to a point where after I burned all this, this seed capital that we raised and at one point I actually had to let go of almost all the company, like 90% of the company had to let go of like 15, 20 people in one day, once 15, 20 people in one day in one day. Yeah. We called it the red wedding. Like fromDan Henry (00:34:28):Game of Thrones, you have to be a game of Thrones nerdEric Toz (00:34:31):Joke, but not in a mean, not in a mean way, but it was just like, no, like, and everybody was like, Eric, give the investors like the rest of the money back. And there was maybe like, like a hundred grand left in the bank account. And I was just like, no, I'm not going to because like, I still have this vision for it. I need more time. And so I literally went from the super high and there's actually, if you Google the entrepreneur's journey, there's a graph of this where there's like this initial excitement. And then there's this period called the trough of sorrow. And then if you keep continuing going through the trough of sorrow, you get to experimentation and pivoting and new ideas. And then eventually you get product-market fit. And then when you get product-market fit, then you can scale.Eric Toz (00:35:21):And so how, how much are you willing to tolerate going through that trough? Because I'm not going to lie. I was, at that point, I cut my salary to like 40 grand a year. And I wouldn't say I was a loser. It's just that I kind of went into like hibernation mode. We're actually had to, my mind was going crazy. And if I didn't turn to meditation to help me calm down and just get refocused, like, all right, how am I going to pull this off? I would tell myself every day, this is going to be a book in a book someday. So yeah, we were down to like 20 grand bank account,Dan Henry (00:35:54):A book someday, dude, that's a roast on that for a second. This is going to be in a book someday. Yeah. That's that is that's deep, man. I mean, if you think about it, like, that's some internal motivation.Eric Toz (00:36:11):Yeah. I mean, I would tell people I'm like, you don't understand like there's no, I'm not going back. There's no plan B like I'm, I'm in this thing, you can't kill me basically. And I don't care if I make $0 for like four years like I'm going to make this work. And so there's, and then I kind of learned that there's always something that you can do. I had another, I hired another mentor who helped me out with some financing and I actually bought the company back from the investors. Cause I believed in it so much. So I was literally taking out like per personally guaranteed loans to buy back the rest of the company. So not only was I going from $0, then I even put myself in debt, like to get the company back because I was like, no, you don't get it.Eric Toz (00:36:56):Like I still see this path forward. I just need time. And so I actually have never raised money again since then. So we went from having 20 grand in the bank account to, we did, we did a hail Mary, we bought one machine and I moved out from Brooklyn to New Jersey and we started tinkering in a 1000 square foot garage with machinery and we built, then we built our first Shopify app in 2017. And we were the first people to do print on demand jewelry. And so then just incrementally building, building, building, building, building, come up with some new products, keep promoting keep doing what you say. You're going to do, build trust with the seller, with your customers. And yeah, now we're doing like 66 million a year in product sales, all bootstrapped. Yeah.Dan Henry (00:37:43):So if you were to like, imagine that on a graph, right. Where how much money did you raise at the, at the height of that?Eric Toz (00:37:50):At the beginning, we raised 1 million and then we ran out of that and we got down to 20 grand and thenDan Henry (00:37:55):Here at 1 million. Right. And imagine the, imagine it's a plane, right. And the plane starts nose-diving and it's heading towards the ground. And it literally goes so close to the ground before it pulls up that hits like 2200 feet off the ground. And it, you know, if you're on the ground, it literally blows your hat off as it scoops up. And then sky rack skyrockets up to, you know, from its original elevation of, of, you know, a million up to 66 million. That's insane. Yeah.Eric Toz (00:38:29):So when I went through the whole range of emotions, like you could possibly imagine like an idea raising money. Oh, other people believe in me, like this feels good. Like everyone thinks I'm smart. I have a great idea. And then reality sets in and just being like a total loser, firing everybody going. I had to learn accounting because I had to fire my accountant. I had to get rid of all the insurances. I'm like, what am I in? What am I protecting here? Something that's like worth nothing. So I was like, it, no insurance, no nothing. And so, but that was like the best lesson I ever learned because I had to learn, I had to learn a little bit about everything in the company, all the operations efficiencies. And so that going through that experience actually is really helpful today when I'm seeing all the pieces from a high level, because I've done all those jobs myself to a certain extent, I know enough about everything.Eric Toz (00:39:23):So I'm very grateful for that experience. But I'm also grateful for capitalism. I'll be honest because it allows you to go through that whole adventure and like that whole journey. And it is you against yourself. You're not really like competing against other people, even though you think you are, it's just like, you have to like, it's you in the mirror. So how can you, how disciplined can you be? Right? Like how disciplined can you be? How can you calm your mind? Can you get over your old? Because a lot of people, they, they bring their old life's experiences into their current business and they'll actually project some times. So if they are very needy, if they're a very needy person, cause you know, someone left them or whatever in the past, then they're just going to be attention-seeking in their business. So these can be, these are bad habits that could kind of take you down. So you really have to quiet your mind and try to get over your old and not project. A lot of people to, you might hire people from outside the company coming in and they're in a position of power and you don't see their bad habits in an interview and you would never know. But then after six months of working there, you're like this person's horrible. Like just like they're projecting because they're in this position of power now,Dan Henry (00:40:41):How did you, did you identify anything about yourself, old baggage that you were starting to bring in to your company and then you, you like identified it, you acknowledge it and you got rid of it. Did you ever go through anything like that?Eric Toz (00:40:59):Hmm.Dan Henry (00:41:04):You couldn't have always been the super nice guy that you are, that you are now. Eric. I refuse to believe that cause it'll make me feel even worse though. I'm just kidding.Eric Toz (00:41:14):Well, I'll be honest. Like when I had to let the whole company go I had somebody that really pushed me into doing that because I was like so nervous to do that. And it was the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. But going through that experience made me a very strong person. Right. I think me probably wouldn't have done it and I would've taken, taken it down, and gone down with the ship with everybody, but I got the sort of push from a friend, and he kind of helped me plan letting go of the whole company. And so yes, like the entrepreneurial journey, it helps you grow as a person too in many, in many, many ways. So I'm very grateful.Dan Henry (00:41:56):Do you think the unwillingness to let somebody go or let people go because it's a good business decision. That was a potential thing that was kind of brought in. That was a detriment. And you had to learn how to get over that was that, would that be one of the things that I guess as you called it earlier I think you call it baggage. Would that be something that you think was baggage that you brought in, that you had to, you had to get over? That was like a major thing?Eric Toz (00:42:22):Oh yeah, for sure. Like I think, you know, Inex inexperienced in younger entrepreneurs, they have trouble doing that. Like letting people go, but then I started seeing things through a different lens with running a business. Now I actually see it as we're working, we're here together. We're working on this project for like a finite amount of time. So instead of thinking about like, there's an owner and there's an employee and they're basically like slaves to the company, like they own you. I don't, I don't think that way. I think, and I'm open with my employees, like, Hey, we're, this is a project we're working on for two to three years. So let's go get committed to this thing and let's go crush it and let's see what happens. Right. And then, you know, provide the right incentive for them to, for us to crush it together. So having that sort of, we're working on a project mindset, it's helpful in letting people go because everything is finite and I'm not even going to be there in five, 10 years either. And I tell people that this is a project, so we're not going to be doing this forever. It's not like we're married. So, you know,Dan Henry (00:43:34):Okay. Like Michael Jordan was not always going to play in the Chicago bulls, but while he was there. Yeah. And while his teammates were there, they did the best, they could to win as many championships as they could. But ultimately that entity, that, that concept, that project will live on. Right. Is that how you view it? Yeah.Eric Toz (00:43:54):Actually so the term I use is let's go out and like get this Superbowl ring if we can, if we can go. And that might be we go public or we get acquired or something that experience that all the employees had. They can look at the Subaru warring and be like, yeah, I was part of that. I did that. And then what they can do is parlay that experience and go off and do their own thing and their com and their next company. And then maybe I'll even invest in it or there'll be able to get investment because people are like, wow, they worked at shine on. So that's what I'm trying to do with this whole Shannon thing is employees. If they can get a Superbowl ring sellers, there's a lot of sellers started with selling our product and e-commerce, and now I know two dozen guys that I'm friends with who started selling our product, and now they're doing $10 million a year on their store selling something else. But, you know, we all got, we all got wins like early out of it and that's, what's important is getting wins together.Dan Henry (00:44:49):So if I was going to read between the lines here, I would say that one of the biggest things to keep in mind with everything that you said is before all this, you have to really get clear on what, why you're doing it, where, where you want to end, because, you know, if you were, I'm just giving an example, right? Like Tony Robbins, Tony Robinson's, Tony Robbins, you know what I mean? That's his brand is his name. So, you know, the whole, like maybe the concept of I'll be here, you know, for a temporary amount of time. And then eventually I'll be gone. Maybe that still applies to his company. I'm sure he has an exit or I'm sure he has a death strategy, you know, cause nobody lives for other, I'm sure he's not just going to die in his company. That's it. I'm sure he's going to live. He's going to somehow has a plan of action in there. But you know, I think if you were to say, well, my goal is to exit or my goal is to build something great. Or my goal is to change the world. Or my goal is to, to, to do this. I mean, would you say that you have to get super, super clear on what that is before you can start, as you said, going after the Superbowl rings because you got to know what game you're playing.Eric Toz (00:46:01):Yeah. 100%, a hundred percent like people ask me, how is my vision change? I'm like, no, my vision has literally been the same thing for five years ago. Like where we're at now is where I thought we could eventually be. And so I need to keep going, but wouldDan Henry (00:46:17):You articulate that vision?Eric Toz (00:46:20):So five years ago I said I wanted to be the Teespring of jewelry. So I was just looking at that model and I want to build something just as big as them. And they're at the time they were doing a hundred million a year in sales. And so you're almost there. Yeah. Now we're getting, we're getting close to there. I actually, in two weeks we'll hit a hundred million in sales all time. So yeah, like if you don't have that, if you don't have that vision and you're not committed to it, if you go through hard, like, like I went through, if I didn't have that that level of commitment, then I would have totally thrown in the towel. It might be different though, if you're, if you're making good cash, if you're cash flowing and then suddenly it starts hitting bumps. I could see getting out then because you've made all this cash already. But for me it was kind of like instill like most of my personal like all my assets, like most of my wealth is actually in the business. So I'm thinking like longterm and it's, it's definitely risky. It's, it's a huge risk. And that's my personalityDan Henry (00:47:28):Condo that that's being built right now. Saltaire in downtown. It's a littleEric Toz (00:47:34):Sexy start my podcast there.Dan Henry (00:47:38):You got to invite me over, man. That place looks, looks like it's going to be sick. Yeah.Eric Toz (00:47:42):I think we're going to do some events there, some mastermindsDan Henry (00:47:45):And it's going to be awesome. Let me ask you a question. And I know that you're not your company is a little bit different than say mine where I'm a little bit more like the face of it kind of thing. And you're you're, I mean, you are, but like e-comm, it's about the products and all that and, and you know, so I'm sure a lot of people, as somebody who built this, they have a way they view you probably a lot of different ways. They view you. What would you say is something that people misunderstand about you?Eric Toz (00:48:19):Hmm. That's a good question. Misunderstand. Well,Eric Toz (00:48:34):You know, even when I throw these figures out, like a hundred million, 66 million I try to not make it about me. I try to say, we sold this together. Right? Like we did this together. And so I, people might see me as, I dunno being selfish because maybe on my Instagram, I promote like all this personal stuff. But at the end of the day, like I want, I want everybody to win. Like I truly do. And one thing is if you make other people money, they'll always invest in you and your next thing, they hit,Dan Henry (00:49:14):They stay with you on the ride. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, look at, look how a lot of these funds have been built. Like you got guys that they run a certain type of business. They make people money and then they start like a real estate fund or a, or this, and then they're investing in that so that, you know, that's totally makes sense. Yeah.Eric Toz (00:49:31):Yeah. If you were, if I was your client and you know, I made a lot of money from your trainings right. Or teachings, and then you were like, you said to me, Hey, I'm going to go start this other thing. Do you want to invest in it? I'm like, hell yeah, you made me so much money, dude. Like literally here's like, you know, here's a million bucks or whatever investment, like no brainer. I, I trust you. You made me money here. Let's do it again.Dan Henry (00:49:56):No, I think people underestimate the value of creating a great product. I think there's a lot of people out there that do it for a cash grab and they do it for clout and they do it for a lot of the wrong reasons. And they don't really care or not. It's not that they care, but they don't put the effort into making a great product because at the end of the day, a great product will, you know, it will transcend a lot of mistakes, you know? And that's the thing that you're going to make mistakes you're going. And you know, when it comes to a lot of people in life, not just entrepreneurs, but a lot of people in life, they lack confidence. And I always say that you cannot build confidence. Does anybody tells you, you can build confidence full of. You build competence.Dan Henry (00:50:40):And as a by-product of that competence, you are granted confidence. Let me ask you this. I like that. Oh, thank you. I appreciate that. I, you know, I want to resist the urge to ask you a classic question. Like what, if you could go back to your 18 year old self and tell them something, what would you tell them? But what I'd like to ask is, you know, how did you in the ups and downs, it's easy to feel confident, have faith and stay the course when things are up. But when things are down, that's where people break and they fall off. What did you do specifically in your brain, in your mind that helped you get through those dips and maintain the course and maintain the faith and keep the confidence. Even when things look bleak, especially when that plane was right, the bottom, you know, 20 grand left in the bank or whatever other challenges you've had. How did you maintain, what did you tell yourself every day to maintain that level of dedication? Mm,Eric Toz (00:51:53):Well, I think, I think that you have to take the pressure off yourself. And so I'm in the process of writing this book. It's going to be called the entrepreneur survival guide, 20 things you can do when you're totally AFT, oh God, I loveDan Henry (00:52:12):That title. I really, oh, that's a great titleEric Toz (00:52:16):Too. So it's kind of like, imagine like how you would equip yourself for the zombie apocalypse. It's like that before, like business for business, I've been through like 20 of these things already. And at some point though, like once you're like, I'm doing this, no matter what you, at some point you have to take the pressure off of yourself in the day to day. So you have to say, all right, like, look, man, I still have to sleep eight hours and I can work like a maximum of 16 hours. And so, you know, you just have to be as efficient with your time, because if you literally do everything like perfect. And when you have no money left in the bank, you have to like, watch literally everything. Like watch every dollar spent every, every hour you have to be doing the right things. I remember literally going to like open certain tabs in Chrome and I'm like, no, like you can't do that. Right. I didn't know what the are you doing? Like, stay focused here. We don't have time for this right now. ItDan Henry (00:53:14):Was, it, was it porn hub you were trying to open or it was just likeEric Toz (00:53:18):It could be anything like ESPN. It could be like news, you know, I've been in, I've been addicted to news before. And so newsDan Henry (00:53:26):Sports. So, so have you ever got addicted to looking at things that you didn't have yet? Houses, cars?Eric Toz (00:53:34):Ooh, that's a good question. Like fantasizing about cars and stuff.Dan Henry (00:53:41):Yeah. Like, like imagine you're sitting there and you're working and you're like, if I just work hard enough, I'll be able to buy X or Y or Z. So then you go and you look up that car, you look at the features, you look at the you know, you look at how much it costs. I mean, I'll be honest. One thing I used to do is I used to put real estate up that I liked and I'd say, okay, this is called a vision board, like a vision board. And I would leave the tab up on my computer and every like two hours or so I would just flip over and I'd look at the house. And I remember I did that with I don't think I knew you then, but when I had that 8,000 square foot house on the water in Gulf port, I was looking at, yeah, I sold it and I bought the penthouse because I just living on the water, man.Dan Henry (00:54:21):It's like, dude, there's always a contractor at your house every single day or something. Well, no, just fixing stuff because the salt water blows with the Florida winds, they blow against the house and I'm in you're right on the water. So stuff, Russ, I had to replace my outdoor fans. Like every three months we would just go get completely rusted, no matter what you did. And just all kinds of crazy stuff that doc, you know, just so much stuff. And I just didn't want, I wanted to focus on all my business and I wanted, I wanted to stop leaving my phone around. And then not finding it for six hours because it was on the, you know, it was on the third floor and this and that. So when I bought the penthouse downtown, I just liked it a lot. It was actually more expensive than the house I owned, but it was smaller and it was just, I don't know, I liked the lifestyle more, but what I did was I would, I would put up a house that was very, very similar to that house.Dan Henry (00:55:18):And I would leave it up in my tabs and every two or three hours, I would just take a break and I would look at it and I'd be like, all right, I got to get to this much money. You know, obviously after taxes that dah, dah, dah. And so I would look and I'd say, okay, I need to sell this many units of my consulting or whatever. And I would, I would basically make that sort of like my, because you know, goals are weird, you know, like what are goals? You know, people have goals, but goals change. I just knew that I wanted to have a really nice house and I wanted to invite my family over and I wanted my family to experience being in a nice place. Cause they didn't really get, get to do that. And so I would leave it up. Yeah.Eric Toz (00:55:57):So my opinion on it is are you familiar with lead and lag measures?Dan Henry (00:56:03):No. I would love you toEric Toz (00:56:04):Explain it to me. Lead and lag measures would be like, so lag measure would be how much revenue your company didn't last month. Okay. But that's lead measures are more activity-based so here are the things I'm measuring each day for things I can control. Cause you can't, you literally can't control somebody else buying your stuff. I mean, you can't take their hand and force them to click and put type in their credit card. But I think you'd get arrested it's to me it sounds fun. It's like, oh, open daddy's wallet,Dan Henry (00:56:36):Dude. We should film. You should film an ad where you like break into somebody's house and make them buy a little customized pendant under their heads that would not get approved.Eric Toz (00:56:46):Yeah. So if you think about lead and lag measures, like a lag measure would be revenue. You can't literally control somebody opening their wallet and buying them. They still have to do that on their own, but something you can control every day is I'm going to go live two times today, I'm going to set 40 appointments. I'm going to try to close X amount of sales. So these are the things that you can control. Like I've always looked at houses and cars and stuff as like a lag measure. It's like I would rather set a goal of like doing X, Y, Z for the things I can control, because if I do everything I can control, most likely I'm going to get, get those other, those, those prizes. So my goal would be like only the things I can control, which would be maybe orders made or on whatever metric, because then my taste might also change. I might also want to drive a car or something later on.Dan Henry (00:57:38):Could I present to you a different way to think about it and maybe mate, this how to think, bro. Yeah. It's how to think. Right. And, and, and get your perspective on it. W so I have this crazy concept that I've really started to delve into recently the idea of not having goals now, before I that's hyper bowl right now. Right? So a lot of people like that, but let's, let's, let's dive into it. So if you have a goal, like, let's say you want to go to the gym. Okay. And you want to get Jack. And the only reason you're going to the gym is because you want to get checked. So you go to the gym and when you get there, you realize you're kind of fat and out of shape, you don't have abs, but you look around the gym and you see all these people with abs big muscles and you say, well, they're jacked and I'm not jacked.Dan Henry (00:58:18):That's why I'm here. So now I feel out of place, I feel like I don't belong. And it gives you this sense of automatically right off the bat, you feel unaccomplished, you feel less, you feel like you don't belong, right? Because you're setting this expectation that there's the reason you're there is for a goal. When instead, if you simply fall in love with the process, you fall in love with working out. You just, it doesn't matter what you look like. You love working out. You're going there because you love working out. And you love that process. It's sorta like when you Jitsu, right? If I like, I love jujitsu, I love it. I don't go to jujitsu class and say, I'm only going, because I want to win worlds. Or I want to win ATDC or I want to be a black belt. I go because I love it. And I noticed that when you love a process and you don't necessarily have a goal, you end up getting, so you end up getting rapidly good at that thing. And you blow past any goals that you could have achieved, or you could have made for yourself by falling in love with the process. I'd love to know your take on that.Eric Toz (00:59:21):So I think, I think more people should set goals around how they want to feel. Right. Because ultimately isn't it all about having a feeling of happiness. So it's like, I envision, I envision a world where I wake up everyday and I feel this way. Right? It's like, that's not something that's tangible. That's a feeling, but it's also inarguable, right? Like if you feel a certain way, there's no metric that can dictate whether that's a success or not, because it's about how you feel. So I think people should focus more on that because they can literally get to that goal, like a lot faster than any other like metric based.Dan Henry (00:59:59):Well, what do you think creates happiness? Do you think happiness is created by feeling like you've made progress, feeling like you've. So I heard a Jordan Peterson talks about this. He was saying that a lot of times we feel happy because we solve problems. Cause if you think about it, right, what is the human mind? It's the computer. What is it? So forget the human mind for a second. W what, what does a computer do? What does it really do on a fundamental level? It solves it crunches numbers, and it solves problems. One after the other that's its purpose. And then one day the motherboard goes out and the computer stops working and it stops solving problems. And it dies. The human brain is basically a computer. And it, I mean, you know what I'm saying? Like, like, like what happens if everything was perfect in your life? You'd almost go crazy.Eric Toz (01:00:43):Well, actually we see this with super rich people and celebrities. They're like super depressed because the mind, even when, even when you saw everything, the mind will look for new things to solve. So it might actually drag you down. It might actually cause chaos in your life so that you can solve them. Like a lot of people, they bring themselves down from from success because their mind is just needs a new problem to create and solve. Oh yeah. I can feel that. And that's another thing. There's this amazing book called the big leap by gay Hendricks. And basically it's like you know, success for a lot of people is foreign and the, their subconscious it's almost scary to be successful because their subconscious is not used to that. So they would rather, almost subconsciously self-sabotage to bring themselves down to what they're used to.Eric Toz (01:01:38):So I've seen it with a lot of people and alcoholics too that runs in my family. Like people will get a certain taste of success and then there'll

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TranscriptHey, Dan Henry here, founder of GetClients.Com, and I'm super excited because today I'm going to share with you my devil and the food truck parable. And it's one of my favorite analogies to explain how to scale your business. Welcome to the Dan Henry Show.Where else can you see behind the scenes of a multimillion-dollar online business? Nowhere! So you better stick around. This is The Dan Henry show.All right, so let's get started. What is the devil and the food truck and what the heck does it have to do with growing your business and scaling? Well, imagine for a moment that you are in a desert and you have not eaten you have not had any water for days, maybe weeks, and you're like literally about to die. All right. Now, all of a sudden, out of nowhere appears the devil. And the devil says, all right, you don't have any water, you don't have any food. You know, you're starving. Check it out. I am going to put a plate of food right in front of your feet. And on that plate of food, you have like a nice steak, you have some mashed potatoes, maybe a big glass of water. And it's right there. It's at your feet. Your feet are literally touching the edge of the plate. You can smell the food. Your stomach starts growling. You know that you haven't eaten in weeks. And the food is right there. The devil says, listen, here's the deal. You can eat this food or way off here in the distance. Is this food truck okay? And this food truck has a month's worth of food.Speaker1: It's got a dining table in it with food ready to go. Prepared. It's got a full tank of gas. It can get you out of the desert. And it's got all the food and water you never need. But here's the dilemma. In order to get to the food truck in time before it leaves, you have to step over the plate of food and immediately start walking towards the food truck, which is probably an hour walk away if you stop to eat the food. You will miss the truck. What do you do? Now, anybody with a rational mind would say, well, I would step over the food and I would walk to the food truck. But you've got to remember, you don't have a rational mind because you've been in the desert for weeks. You haven't eaten, you haven't slept, you haven't had any water. So you're not thinking rationally. Just like when you're growing your business, you're stressed, you're tired, you're overwhelmed, you're looking at your bank account, you're worried about the bills. Your significant other is like, oh, come on, grow your business. All right. And so you are in a somewhat similar position to being in the desert. You're not thinking clearly. And so this is how scale works. Scale is all about making decisions that cost you money now, but make you far more money later. And so when you as an entrepreneur, decide to step over this plate and go towards the food truck, that requires massive amounts of discipline, because most entrepreneurs, they don't. They take the food. Now, what is the food to an entrepreneur? Imagine for a moment that you're trying to build your business and a potential client comes along.Speaker1: That's not a good fit. And they say, hey, I want you to do this other thing that you don't really do, but I'm willing to pay you money now to do it. Now, you might say to yourself, well, that's money now. I'm going to take that so I can make some money now. You get distracted from the growth of what you're building. And so it takes longer and longer and longer for you to hit the promised land, which is that food truck full of all the food you could ever need. To give you one personal example. I remember when I was growing my consulting business and, you know, the whole thing was, all right, we're going to refine this automated system that brings qualified clients in, qualifies them even more, and then gets them on the phone with us. And I had so many offers left and right. Dan, I want to do a joint venture. Dan, can you come on my podcast? Dan, can you you know, can you do this product with me? Can you be a guest on here? Can can we do this thing together? And in the beginning, I said yes to a lot of those things. And sure, I made a little bit of money. But what was happening was I was getting so distracted with the food in front of me that I kept missing the food truck. And so one day I said, stop, I'm not doing that anymore. And I started saying, no, no, no, no. And when I started doing that, I was able to build out our system.Speaker1: I was able to refine and fix the problems in our company, really dial things in. And we were able to, as a result, scale and grow and have, you know, seven figure months when I did hold events for myself. We had seven figure events where we did seven figures in revenue in a day because I was so focused on that. I wrote my book, Digital Millionaire Secrets in one month. It became a Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestseller. It's produced about eight million dollars for my company. People read my book. They like what I have to say. They go to get clients, Starcom. They become a client. And none of that would have happened. That book, that system that we use, those events that we did, that's the food truck, those other things that would have made me a little bit of money here, there and there. That's this. When you learn to say no to this and have the discipline to step over it and walk that mile to that food truck, and there's no money here, there's no money here. It's just a walk. But when. You get there, that's when your business truly scales. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the devil in the food truck. Hey, Dan Henry here. And if you enjoyed this episode, make sure to visit, GetClients.com for more free resources on how to grow your online business. And if you love this show, don't forget to leave me a five star review. See you in the next episode.

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