Podcast appearances and mentions of joe schmoe

Check out the full episode: greatness.lnk.to/1719"The worst thing you can do is think 'Oh, you're not choosing me? Let me do something to get chosen.' Let me change myself, let me not tell the truth... Stop strategizing to get some Joe Schmoe who you don't even know, who probably is not right for you." - Jillian TureckiRelationship coach Jillian Turecki opens up about the painful reality many face in their search for love. Drawing from her own vulnerable admission of spending two years trying to convince her husband to love her, she explores why we often fall into the trap of changing ourselves to win someone's affection. With profound insight, she addresses the complex emotions that drive us to pursue unavailable partners - from the pressure of biological clocks to the deep-seated fear of being alone.Turecki shares transformative wisdom about the importance of emotional resilience and self-acceptance in dating. She challenges listeners to shift their perspective on rejection, viewing it not as a personal failure but as a natural part of life's journey. Through practical guidance, she illustrates how to balance excitement about new connections with healthy discernment, emphasizing the vital practice of processing enthusiasm while remaining grounded in reality. Her approach offers a refreshing framework for navigating modern relationships without losing yourself in the process.Sign up for the Greatness newsletter: http://www.greatness.com/newsletter

The HOBI Gang is back in the studio this week and after talking Ted Danson's Man on the Inside and favorite Mystery Science Theater 3k episodes, the show goes off the rail when time traveling to remove some modern technology! Plus the guys determine who is responsible for pandemics, the return of the Joe Schmoe show, Den of Thieves 2 surprises at the box office and list the Top Five Favorite Movies That Take Place in Snow! This episode is sponsored by the Super Cincy Expo.

To work with Brea, connect at brearoper.com. She helps with talent development for teams and also does 1:1 CliftonStrengths coaching for individuals.   To work with Lisa, check out team workshops and retreats at the Lead Through Strengths site. For 1:1 strengths or life coaching, check out the Get Coached link. For independent coaches, trainers, and speakers, get business tools support with our Tools for Coaches membership.  About This Episode If you're curious about coaching or looking to make a positive change in your life, this episode is for you! Gallup says that over 80% of people who discover their CliftonStrengths do NOTHING after taking the assessment. What a shame. We know awareness of our strengths is necessary for growth, but awareness alone doesn't create change. You must put the knowledge into practice. Coaching has (and continues to have) a powerful impact on our lives. That's why, in this episode, we discuss the 'next step' of working with a coach. Listen in as we share some of our personal experiences working with a coach, practical tips on how to engage with a coach, and even how to improve your own self-coaching. So, if you're feeling stuck or curious about exploring your strengths further, don't hesitate to engage with a coach or seek feedback from those around you. Remember, awareness from assessments is just the beginning. Coaching will help you apply your strengths for more ease, energy, and excellence every day. Takeaways External Feedback is Powerful: Having a coach can provide you with an external perspective on your strengths and potential blind spots. This perspective is unattainable on our own. Just like how we can't see our own face without a mirror, sometimes we need someone else to reflect back to us what we may not see in ourselves. A coach can help you uncover hidden talents and opportunities for growth you may have overlooked. Self-Reflection and Awareness: Self-reflection and self-awareness is fundamental in the coaching process. Taking the time to pause, reflect, and ask yourself meaningful questions can lead to profound discoveries about your true potential and aspirations. Invest in Yourself: Of course, awareness by itself isn't enough. Whether you reach out to a professional coach or engage in self-coaching practices, making this investment is a valuable and powerful step towards transformation and growth.  Take Action ●      Engage with a Coach: Take the initiative to reach out to a coach, like Lisa or Brea. ●      Share Your Strengths: Dust off your CliftonStrengths report. Reread it to remind yourself of the goodness inside of you. Share your report with someone close to you and ask them to reflect on how they see your strengths showing up in your life. This external mirror can offer valuable insights and perspectives that may help you better understand your unique talents and behaviors. ●      Create White Space for Reflection: Make a conscious effort to create white space in your daily routine for self-reflection and self-coaching. Avoid overfilling every moment with distractions and allow yourself the time and space to ponder on questions about your goals, aspirations, and areas for growth. By giving your mind the opportunity to wander and explore, you can tap into deeper insights and clarity about your path forward. Let's Connect ●      LISA: Website | LinkedIn | Facebook ●      BREA: Website | LinkedIn | Instagram Listen to the full episode for inspiring stories and insights from the impact of coaching in our lives. If you're ready to explore the world of coaching and self-discovery, don't hesitate to reach out to us for guidance and support. Remember, investing in yourself is one of the best investments you can make!

Fans continue to share their thoughts on Packers defensive coordinator Joe Barry, along with positives and negatives following Green Bay's 34-20 loss to Tampa Bay at Lambeau Field.

Description"SmartLess," with Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes, & Will Arnett is a podcast that connects and unites people from all walks of life to learn about shared experiences through thoughtful dialogue and organic hilarity. A nice surprise: in each episode of SmartLess, one of the hosts reveals his mystery guest to the other two. What ensues is a genuinely improvised and authentic conversation filled with laughter and newfound knowledge to feed the SmartLess mind.Website: www.smartless.comWhat I Liked About This EpisodeThe Dad jokes at the beginning of the show made me giggle. What I Thought Could Use Some PolishingWhile celebrities can get away with chit-chat longer than normal Joe Schmoe, I was bored and didn't get most of the inside jokes. I would move the chit-chat to the show's end for the super fans. This is probably one of those shows that, if you listen to a few, you start to get the inside jokes, but for me, I would be settings overcast or castsmatic to start about five minutes in (something I also do for Conan Obrien Needs a Friend). The Goal Of This ShowThis show aims to help you make the best episodes and grow your downloads. If you'd like a deeper dive here are some additional servicesGet Your Podcast ReviewedProfit From Your Podcast BookPut Dave In Your PocketSubscribe and Follow the Show Listen to Podcast Rodeo Show: Reviews and First Impressions of Your Podcast Mentioned in this episode:Join the School of Podcasting CommunityGet access to step-by-step tutorials, unlimited coaching, and a community of other brilliant podcasting minds. You don't have to do this alone. Start your podcast today. Join the School of Podcasting

Meet our neighbor, Joe Schmoe! Yes, that is his real name. Joe lives and travels in a 15-foot Tear Drop trailer, allowing him the freedom to venture far off-road, embrace the solitude of boondocking with solar power, and relish the absence of immediate neighbors. Although he occasionally joins the communal spirit of RV parks, such as Thousand Trails, Joe's heart lies in the open road. Join us as Joe unfolds the amusing story behind his distinctive name, delving into the unexpected controversies and humorous anecdotes it has stirred. Learn about his journey into the world of Teardrop trailers, discovering the allure of a minimalist lifestyle on wheels. But that's not all – Joe shares the unique mode of transportation that accompanies him on his adventures: the Onewheel. Listen in as he recounts the experiences and practicalities of navigating the world on this remarkable device. For a closer look into Joe Schmoe's nomadic life and travels, follow him and his loyal companion, Hachi, on Instagram @teardropdiaries. You can also catch glimpses of his adventures unfolding on his growing YouTube channel – find it here and embark on a journey through the lens of a Teardrop nomad. Check out our website here: https://rockingthervlife.com/ For more RVing stories and tips, follow Rocking the RV Life on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. Listeners can also access the podcast via Spotify, iHeart, and Apple Podcasts, and cleveland.com's podcasting page. Follow us as we are Rocking the RV Life on Instagram. Also, Jeff Kinzbach on Instagram & Facebook. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Meet our neighbor, Joe Schmoe! Yes, that is his real name. Joe lives and travels in a 15-foot Tear Drop trailer, allowing him the freedom to venture far off-road, embrace the solitude of boondocking with solar power, and relish the absence of immediate neighbors. Although he occasionally joins the communal spirit of RV parks, such as Thousand Trails, Joe's heart lies in the open road. Join us as Joe unfolds the amusing story behind his distinctive name, delving into the unexpected controversies and humorous anecdotes it has stirred. Learn about his journey into the world of Teardrop trailers, discovering the allure of a minimalist lifestyle on wheels. But that's not all – Joe shares the unique mode of transportation that accompanies him on his adventures: the Onewheel. Listen in as he recounts the experiences and practicalities of navigating the world on this remarkable device. For a closer look into Joe Schmoe's nomadic life and travels, follow him and his loyal companion, Hachi, on Instagram @teardropdiaries. You can also catch glimpses of his adventures unfolding on his growing YouTube channel – find it here and embark on a journey through the lens of a Teardrop nomad. Check out our website here: https://rockingthervlife.com/ For more RVing stories and tips, follow Rocking the RV Life on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. Listeners can also access the podcast via Spotify, iHeart, and Apple Podcasts, and cleveland.com's podcasting page. Follow us as we are Rocking the RV Life on Instagram. Also, Jeff Kinzbach on Instagram & Facebook. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, and welcome to Beauty and the Biz where we talk about the business and marketing side of plastic surgery, and how to perform 3k lip lifts plus 300 facelifts per year. I'm your host, Catherine Maley, author of Your Aesthetic Practice – What your patients are saying, as well as consultant to plastic surgeons, to get them more patients, more profits and stellar reputations. Now, today's episode is called "3k Lip Lifts Plus 300 Facelifts Per Year — with Benjamin Talei, MD". One way to differentiate yourself in the marketplace is to work harder than everyone else, which is what enables Dr. Talei to perform 3k lip lifts plus 300 facelifts per year. That doesn't guarantee your success, but it certainly gives you a leg up over your competitors. That's what my next Beauty and the Biz Podcast guest did. Ben Talei, MD, facial plastic surgeon set up shop in Beverly Hills and went to work. For 6 years, Dr. Talei worked 16-hour days, 7 days per week honing his surgical skills and making a name for himself…. …until he had a medial scare and had to slow down. Now Dr. Talei “only” works 12-hour days, 4 days per week providing some of the best results seldom seen. He continues to perfect his techniques and do what others don't, won't or can't. And he uses social media and his before/after photos to set himself apart from everyone else and build a demand he struggles to keep up with. Here are some things we talked about: How he gets photo approval from his private patients How he gets results that others don't Tips for marketing to build up a huge demand and much more Visit Dr. Talei's website P.S. Please review!

What's the fastest way to start a war? Draw first blood. Join Becca and Logan as they embark on a war you won't believe, as Rambo(Sylvester Stallone) fights against his personal troubles after his time in Vietnam, as well as some small town Joe Schmoe sheriff. 

In the latest episode of the TFTIPODCAST, we explored the world of local burger spots that charge a pretty penny for their offerings. Despite not being high-end establishments, these spots have managed to create a cult following by offering unique, mouth-watering burgers that don't come cheap. We discussed the prices that range from $10 to $13 just for the burger, without including fries or drinks. Along with our burger talk, we also dived into the Joe Schmoe show and what makes it so addictive. And, of course, we couldn't resist the timeless debate of who would be more relevant today if they were alive, Tupac or Biggie? Join us for these lively conversations and make sure to follow us on all social media platforms at TFTIPODCAST !

Episode #3.1: The Heart of Law With Mike Papantonio  Today, on The Heart of Law we are honored to welcome back Mike Papantonio, or "Pap" as he is affectionately known, a senior partner at the Levin Papantonio Rafferty law firm. With a series of multimillion-dollar verdicts under his belt, he is a trailblazer in the field of mass tort litigation, having handled thousands of cases across the nation. Pap's unwavering commitment to seeking justice for victims of corporate greed has helped establish Levin Papantonio Rafferty as one of the preeminent plaintiff law firms in the country. As Mirena Umizaj and her esteemed colleague exchange pleasantries, she extends her heartfelt congratulations on his daughter's decision to embark on a journey in the legal field. They begin discussing advice for aspiring young lawyers, and the topic of the legacy case arises. Undoubtedly, it is imperative to leave a lasting impact and make a meaningful contribution to the legal landscape. Pap offers sage advice and commends Mirena on her own exceptional progress, urging others to emulate her trailblazing ways. He generously provides a roadmap for success, encouraging young lawyers to exhibit the courage to take on a monumental case. They should not cower in the face of rejection or the possibility of failure, but instead understand that the law of averages dictates that risks must be taken. To avoid becoming a mere “Joe Schmoe'', one must have the fortitude to blaze new trails, take chances, and leave an imprint on the legal community. Additionally, he proudly unveils his latest merchandise, a series of t-shirts bearing the slogan "America's Lawyer". The rationale behind this branding is to “inspire young lawyers to strive towards becoming the best legal professionals in their respective communities'', with the potential to earn the moniker of "America's Lawyer" in their own right. Pap highlights the incredible feats of lawyers who have taken on insurmountable cases and triumphed against all odds. He discusses his friend Rob Billot's harrowing experience with a PFAS case in Columbus, Ohio, which ultimately resulted in a settlement of nearly a billion dollars. Mike emphasizes that these lawyers did not view these cases as a cakewalk but as an opportunity to make a significant impact. He also recounts his own journey, meeting Mirena, and learning about the necessity of careful planning, tenacity, and a network of experienced professionals to succeed in the legal field. In a captivating exchange, Mirena and Pap delve into the entanglement of Wall Street with the legal industry. Pap boldly forecasts a major lawsuit looming on the horizon and uncovers a series of scams involving case acquisition individuals peddling cases to multiple entities. In mass torts, politics come into play, and Pap emphasizes the importance of having confidence in oneself in the legal field. He compares it to a “matador facing a bull, confident enough to turn his back and get on one knee”. Similarly, a lawyer must have the courage to face challenging situations without fear. He acknowledges that there will always be people who try to interfere with one's work and outdo them, but it is important to remain focused on the task at hand and not be distracted by petty “sophomoric rivalries”. Pap humorously refers to this as "Italian Alzheimer's" - forgetting everything except those who have wronged you. EPISODE SURVEY:  [00:03:16] - [00:07:00] Trouble Teen Institutions [00:07:33] - [00:10:18 Importance of The Legacy Case [00:10:20] - [00:14:46] Courage in the Legal Field: Advice for Young Lawyers [00:14:47] - [00:18:38] Lawyers That Have Stepped Out [00:18:41] - [00:26:15] Yin and Yang in Mass Torts [00:26:17] - [00:30:47] The Intersection of Wall Street And The Legal Business [00:30:50] : [00:45:45] Mass Torts: Future Predictions and Politics Amidst the Money Frenzy QUOTABLE QUOTES: “You can't be afraid of rejection, failure or being told no, you must understand what you do is all law of average” “Lawyers have to make a decision about what that license means to them…In the end doing some good means something” “Do you think any of one these lawyers looked at a big case and said this is going be an easy road, hell no they looked at it and said this is going to be impossible but they did it ” “ You know you don't have control of your cases when your not actively involved, when you don't have control of your destiny your kind of waiting to see” “You can be the greatest closer in the world but if you're not looking at cases or taking risks and you're afraid of failure you're never going to do anything significant. You're just going to be a Joe Schmoe doing the same thing everyone else does”    ABOUT OUR GUEST:  ●      Senior Partner of Levin Papantonio Rafferty, P.A. ●      Board Certified Civil Trial Lawyer by the Florida Bar and the National Board of Trial Advocacy ●      Host of the YouTube show America's Lawyer with over 900,000 subscribers , and founder and former host of Ring of Fire, a popular radio program. ●      Inducted into the National Trial Lawyers' Hall of Fame (2015) and Former President of The National Trial Lawyers (2012) ●      Author of multiple novels, including four motivational books for lawyers and a series of legal thrillers ●      Member of The International Academy of Trial Lawyers, The International Society of Barristers, The National Trial Lawyers Association, The American Board of Trial Advocates, The American Justice Association, The Southern Trial Lawyers Association, and The Florida Justice Association ●      Recipient of several prestigious awards, including but not limited to, the Compassionate Gladiator Award from the Florida Justice Association (2019), Defender of Justice Award by the American Association for Justice (2015), and the Perry Nichols Award by the Florida Justice Association (2011)

Welcome to March 27th, 2023 on the National Day Calendar. Today we celebrate a regular Joe and a spicy history. Ordinary Joe, Joe Sixpack, Joe Blow, Joe Schmoe, Average Joe...did you ever wonder if other cultures have their own "Joes"? These Joe terms are used primarily in North America to refer to a completely average person but there are parallel terms in other languages such as Old Mate in Australia, Herr und Frau Osterreicher in Austria (meaning Mr and Mrs Austria), Israel Israeli in, you guessed it, Israel and even Tizio, Caio e Sempronio in Italy, the equivalent of Tom, Dick and Harry! It seems that pretty much everyone around the world has their own way to refer to their own Average Joe. On National Joe Day take your pick of what it means to be you. The Spanish rice dish known as Paella, has an interesting history. Rice was first brought to Spain by the Moors around 1,200 years ago. Because of this, the word for rice or arroz does not come from Latin, but rather from Arabic. Then there’s the word paella itself which refers to the pan in which the meal is cooked. The word comes from the old French for pan or paelle. Are you following along? Good. Because there’s more. Some people claim that the word paella is a contraction of para ella, which means for her, because the man who supposedly came up with the recipe did so for his love. Celebrate National Spanish Paella Day with this uniquely delicious dish and its spicy history. I’m Anna Devere and I’m Marlo Anderson. Thanks for joining us as we Celebrate Every Day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We begin our Lenten journey together in a series that we are calling From The Ashes. We'll be spending each week of lent diving into some hard truths about ourselves that when we examine them, help bring us closer to the truth of who we are, whose we are, and how we can be closer to God.Week 5 - You Are Capable Of Quite LittleWeek 4 - You Won't Be RememberedWeek 3 - You Aren't That SmartWeek 2 - You Are Going To DieWeek 1 - Don't Trust Ourselves

Leah takes some loads. Sean applies for a mosquito job. Amber gets a ball. Cate hires Joe Schmoe.  TM New Chapter S1 Ep 12 YOUTUBE: www.youtube.com/c/TrashTalkPodcasts Bonus Patreon.com/TrashTalkPodcast Traceycarnazzo.com Tracey Carnazzo @trixietuzzini Noelle Winters @noeygirl_ IG @TeenMomTrashTalk Twitter @TeenMomPodcast

What seems to be a near monthly occurrence, the morning news highlights the latest in the billionaire's pissing contest, and we get to watch another rocket hurdle through the atmosphere. While the achievements are absolutely remarkable, and the fact that space travel has now become a “civilian's” game, it still sits in the “unobtainable” category for the average person. You, me, or any other Joe Schmoe can't really hedge any bets that we will be bolting ourselves into a seat, strapped to literal millions of pounds of thrust any time soon. Let alone be able to afford to do so. (Maybe you can, and I apologize for assuming otherwise) But what if there was an easier way? Something that could be done at the touch of a button, like…and elevator. Yes, and elevator to space. This week on The Malliard Report, Jim welcomes Neal Lachman. Neal is a disruptor in the space travel game, and he is here tonight to share those ideas.Neal has more than 32 years of business experience, including 26 years in finance and technology. He is a thoroughly experienced, energetic, and bold investor who is “cut from entrepreneurial cloth.” Neal is also a pragmatic and strategic planner with a long-term business philosophy. Neal is a telecoms pioneer and an outspoken entrepreneur; his opinion (often conveyed through White Papers since 2000) has earned him the respect from one part of the industry, as well as severe dislike from another part. Neal prides himself in having correctly called most of the telecom and technology trends and developments since 2000, often contrarian to commonly understood trends.This is a great episode, and Neal has a viewpoint that is unlike anything we really have seen on The Malliard Report to date. It's not often you get someone that has a firm grasp on the reality of space travel. You can follow the Space Industry Disruptor himself on Twitter @nealx1. For all things Malliard, head over to malliard.com for merch, past shows, and the live chat every Tuesday 9 P.M. EST. Remember to rate and subscribe through your favorite podcasting app. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit themalliardreport.com

What seems to be a near monthly occurrence, the morning news highlights the latest in the billionaire's pissing contest, and we get to watch another rocket hurdle through the atmosphere. While the achievements are absolutely remarkable, and the fact that space travel has now become a “civilian's” game, it still sits in the “unobtainable” category for the average person. You, me, or any other Joe Schmoe can't really hedge any bets that we will be bolting ourselves into a seat, strapped to literal millions of pounds of thrust any time soon. Let alone be able to afford to do so. (Maybe you can, and I apologize for assuming otherwise) But what if there was an easier way? Something that could be done at the touch of a button, like…and elevator. Yes, and elevator to space. This week on The Malliard Report, Jim welcomes Neal Lachman. Neal is a disruptor in the space travel game, and he is here tonight to share those ideas. Neal has more than 32 years of business experience, including 26 years in finance and technology. He is a thoroughly experienced, energetic, and bold investor who is “cut from entrepreneurial cloth.” Neal is also a pragmatic and strategic planner with a long-term business philosophy. Neal is a telecoms pioneer and an outspoken entrepreneur; his opinion (often conveyed through White Papers since 2000) has earned him the respect from one part of the industry, as well as severe dislike from another part. Neal prides himself in having correctly called most of the telecom and technology trends and developments since 2000, often contrarian to commonly understood trends. This is a great episode, and Neal has a viewpoint that is unlike anything we really have seen on The Malliard Report to date. It's not often you get someone that has a firm grasp on the reality of space travel. You can follow the Space Industry Disruptor himself on Twitter @nealx1. For all things Malliard, head over to malliard.com for merch, past shows, and the live chat every Tuesday 9 P.M. EST. Remember to rate and subscribe through your favorite podcasting app.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Back at it like a crack addict. The boys are back with another pod. German tells us about his weekend getaway. We speak about “The Bear”. And Reok tells us about how his week went.

This week on Narrative Analysis, Nate looks at the Truman Show through Reader Response, allowing him to point out the connections to history and omens of the future he's noticed in this comedy drama of the late 90s.

We cannot change how things are. How we interpret them, ultimately depends on our view of the world and on how we perceive them and what can we do to make a change in this world. “Peace is at every moment. Peace begins with yourself.”Melody Garcia, Global Influencer, Transformation Catalyst, and Socially – Responsible Entrepreneur. She is an International Best- Selling Author, Award-Winning Sought-After Keynote Speaker, Thought Leader, Writer, International Media Icon, Transformational Catalyst Coach, and Humanitarian. With over 20 years in Fortune 100 Corporate Management and Leadership, Melody has a proven track record of building winning sales teams, business processes, coaching, development, and mentorship, and extensive experience in hiring practices call center management, and more! Melody is a Certified Green Belt Six Sigma, along with extensive leadership certifications and high-ranking accolades that boast of her winning mindset and expertise.  Her entrepreneurial spirit, combined with top executive commercial industry expertise, gives her a lethal edge in a visionary focus, balancing microscopic attention to detail and macroscopic implementation for increased revenues, connectivity, and staying power of any marketplace. Mark Anthony King is a “Master of Words”. He delivers soul-searing messages in both verbal and written form, engaging his audience to deeply reflect. Mark Anthony King is a three-time best-selling author, publisher, award-winning motivational speaker, and one of the most sought-after multifaceted coaches who specialize in Social and Emotional Intelligence. He is also a Neuro-Linguistic Programming Master Practitioner, as well as specializing in Timeline Therapy, Weight Loss Management & Holistic Health, and Strategic Intervention. His incredible love for people has allowed him the privilege of coaching hundreds of clients from all nationalities, age groups, and walks of life in the areas of relationships, leadership, curing lifelong phobias, helping clients achieve physical transformations into their healthier version of themselves or helping a suicidal individual rediscover the beauty of life.===============================Ari Gronich0:00Just like what we're doing. So, yeah. All right, we're going get started now. Welcome back to another episode of create a new tomorrow. I'm your host Ari Gronich and today I have with me Mark Anthony King and Melody Garcia. It is a double feature for you all. Marc Anthony is a serial entrepreneur, master of storytelling, multimedia persona and a global leader, with a focus on the kingdom of humanitarian impact. His business handlings include a master's in nutrition, health for optimization of overall wellness, and well-being. A Master Practitioner and NLP, strategic interventions of emotional intelligence, etc. His partner melody is part of the global peace. Let's talk with 35 countries handling co-leads of UNICEF, unite Orlando, and international multimedia handling. They're about to launch their sole script, which is a podcast media column and TV show. Is that like a breath full? Melody Garcia1:13Just a pinch. And that was the short form bio.  Mark Anthony That excited me.  Ari Gronich1:21You know, here's the thing, I have been told that I'm going to be in people's pockets, so that when anybody asks them what they do for a living, they just pulled me out. And this is what Ari says. So why don't you guys kinda of tell a little bit about yourselves, Mark, I talked to Melody before, so I'm going let you get started. Tell a little bit about yourself. Why am I talking to you? What is it that you're doing that's going to help create a new tomorrow? And, you know, let's get going. Marc Anthony King1:56Alright, so my name is Marc Anthony King. As far as why you're talking to me, you can thank Melody Garcia for that for putting us into it's a contact. You know, I full disclosure, full transparency. I didn't know the name of the show until right now. And I absolutely love that. You know, we live we live in an age where can I be candid? Or do I have to be like, super politically correct here? Ari Gronich2:24No, there's no political correctness allowed. Okay, perfect. No, no, you're not allowed to censor yourself at all. Marc Anthony King2:34Alright, so we live in an age where, unfortunately, the leaders and the trailblazers in the world are just horribly narcissistic, and the things that they're doing, and the things that they pride themselves on, and what's important, it's all self-glorification, at the end of the day, you know, so you asked what it is that we're doing to make a better tomorrow. Again, speaking, truthfully, we have the audacity to put God first and put service to humanity. Second. And that's an interesting concept for a multitude of reasons, you know, and I'm not going to get into religious discussions or religious debates. But my greatest mentor, Jesus Christ said, that the two things that we should do in this world in order, it's service to God, and then service to humanity. And somehow a Melody says that she was at best, when you put God first and humanity second, God finds a way of putting you first. You know, I never thought in a million years that I'd be doing the things that I'm doing now. It's, I didn't plan for it. And when it started happening, I asked myself a, no disrespect, but are you sure God that I'm the right person to be doing this? Because it was never on the plan, you know, and we become so myopic in our desires, and we become so like, single minded and tunnel vision in terms of what it is that we want, but ultimately, at the end of the day, that might not be in alignment with what God wants for us, you know, and when we surrender in that regard, we allow Him to place us where he wants us, the impact that we make, it's not self-serving, it's not self-glorifying. It's all to glorify Him and what better way to glorify Him then that actually doing something to create a better tomorrow, not hypothetically. Not conditionally, but literally, and long, long story short, short story long at this point, I'm sure. We were now in a position where we're handling the and I say this humbly, and I say this with so much gratitude in my heart, the welfare of 36 Different nations across the world, you know, and when I say welfare, I'm talking about hygiene products, I'm talking handling internally displaced peoples, orphans, preserving pygmy cultures, teaching children about their rights, teaching women about their rights, women's empowerment, agriculture, bringing in food, bringing in clean water, bringing in infrastructure, into incredibly remote areas. You know, these are, these are responsibilities that I don't take lightly. And one of my greatest pleasures aside from talking about God, and how amazing God is, and how amazing that woman is, right there on the screen underneath me here is doing what I can everything I can, you know, Melody has an amazing prayer that says, God, use all my gifts, talents, and annoying things and maximize everything that you gave me so that I can help make the world better, and help people, you know, help me help them. Being able to use that platform to talk about what it is that we're doing, and who we're helping is, is become the greatest joy of my life at this point. Ari Gronich6:09Cool, so I'm gonna interrupt you a little bit. Marc Anthony King6:12So I was I was rambling at that point. Ari Gronich6:16I don't know this about me. But I'm a very non-religious person, very spiritual person. I've studied pretty much most of the religions in the world, like, at a young age. And so I was, you know, nine years old, and I was I was in Hebrew school, from the time I was like, five. And then I started when I was nine, practicing Buddhism. And through Buddhism, I met my girlfriend, who lived on a reservation, and I started practicing and studying Indian way, and native way. And from there, I ended up studying Druidism and the Quran, and I kind of just love studying religions, in general, but I don't find myself in the same kind of state that you find yourself in, right, as far as like, having a specific and direct person that I think I'm speaking to. And so, I just want to I want to open this up, because the things that you're doing are amazing. Some people who are listening to this show are not going to resonate with the words that you're using, as far as God kingdom, King, you know, those kinds of things, they might resonate with the word source, they might resonate with the word universal truth, they might resonate with a lot of other things other than those words, and I want them to get turned off to the things that you're doing because of the words that you're using. Right. And so, I just wanted to emphasize that the things you're doing are amazing. To me, they have nothing to do with anything other than what's in your heart and your soul. Not so much a higher being that you're answering to and so I have a question for you. The question is serving God serving humanity itself? Because if we watch or listen to the scriptures that you talk about, and I will, there's a lot of stuff that says that we are in the likeness of God. So, by serving humanity, are we not serving God? Marc Anthony King8:39I would say it all depends on the intention, right? Because I used to fall into this category, many moons ago where, you know, I wanted to be seen and I wanted to be praised for all the good works that I was doing. So, at the end of the day, you know, it wasn't about God, and it wasn't about humanity. It was about Mark Anthony Kings ego. And that intention is everything. It's relative, but it's everything you know, so I would say yes, if your intention is pure and not self-glorifying, Ari Gronich9:16awesome. Melody you're up all Melody Garcia9:19Alright. What did you want me to cover? Everything about me? Was more Granville law. Ari Gronich9:27Why you're why you're helping to create a new tomorrow today. Melody Garcia9:31Well, so many platforms. We talked about UNICEF as one of the handlings you know, back in 2016. I decided to go with a what is the world's largest children organization that's known and then recreate that in local Orlando what was UNICEF. We live in a world that keeps basically putting up the message let's leave a better planet for our children. Let's leave a better planet for our children. Well, let's use some common sense the planets won't resolve its own problems. Without better leaders, you know, a lot of the handlings that I have along with Mark as coaches, I'm one of the few certified PMA coaches in the world. What does that mean? Psycho neuro actualization? What does that mean maximizing the human potential? One of my, the person that certified me in this is Dr. Steve Miraboli, one of the top behavioural scientists in the world, right. And let's pair it down to simplicity here. A lot of adult's root cause problems can be traced back to their childhood. We call the childhood trauma, and a lot of that from abandonment issues, abuse issues, you name it, that shapes them, to who they become in the adult stage. So, my genius basically said, Well, then let's leave better children for a planet. If I can impact at those young foundations, whether whatever their social, economic, cultural, whatever status background is, and show them what is love, what is fairness, what is equality, what is not having all this boundaries that have been imposed, almost impossibly by the adults by the environment they live in, then we can better leaders for tomorrow that started with that, you know, and giving sensitivity to your audience. But echoing Mark's sentiments were again, heart centered servant leadership, right? I was blessed with the opportunity to not contain it in just representing 190 countries my journey spoke about the first time I decided to say use me to help them not to glorify Melody, that very first event brought on impacting and saving over 20,000 lives halfway around the world, which is a lot more than what people can ever dream of in their life, collectively. So, I decided, okay, well, you know, I did that was my one all be all, but God had different plans. That was just my beginning, came UNICEF. And then he didn't contain, and I have the passion, the purpose once you truly have what Mark has, is a clarity of His purpose and impact. What is his life legacy message? You know, it's not just about boards, because as he beautifully puts it, beautiful words aren't always true. And the truth isn't always beautiful. Right. And that's a powerful statement to make. Will, lived authentically. It went from well didn't stop there. When we tap into the gifts that we have talents, gifts, anointing, whatever you want to call it. I discovered I have his love of passion for writing, well, didn't stop there. All of a sudden, that little column became a well-known column in many nations and started winning awards for it. So now I'm going to call him this for three international magazine that has anywhere from 11 countries to 74 countries reach, but it didn't stop there. Right comes global peace, let's talk that literally got handed to myself and Mark to now lead 36 countries, the handlings we have are massive.  Ari Gronich12:59purpose is exactly the global picture. Melody Garcia13:02I had more. I'll let Mark lead that. And then I'll add whatever you missing as far as global peace, let's talk. Marc Anthony King13:09So global peace, let's talk is an organization that was founded by somebody who's become like a sister, dear friend, mother figure to Melody and myself. She again had the courage and the audacity to say yes. And to do something that shouldn't have worked. That seemed far-fetched that seemed insane at the time. And through sheer determination through sheer love and compassion, she has created this organization that as it stands, as of right now, is in 36 different countries, and has now what? how many members that we just recently add, like as of not too long ago? Melody Garcia13:58So, we just added an additional 35,000 members with global peace, let's talk it's early concept very simple, because the founders in her 70s, in the UK, was just to spread peace unknowingly that intention brought on everything that needed to line up and in 10 months Ari. This is just a 10-month-old Foundation, non-profit 10 months. We're in 36 countries. It's incredible. It's almost unbelievable. And unless you're with us in those meetings, we are meetings with politicians, you know, from different countries, we are in meetings with leaders, entrepreneurs, but what really touches us as when we hear from people on the ground, what they're going through what the media doesn't cover. This is why Mark and I have the audacity to speak what is true, right? How are we changing a better tomorrow when we hear people from Cameroon, Africa being hunted down worse than animals and being slaughtered at that? When we're hearing about children try, you know, have groundworker saving children that have been violently assaulted. And all they're asking for Ari is a piece of paper and crayons so they can continue with art therapy. This is Yeah, art therapy. Marc Anthony King15:18Soccer ball so they can kick it around. Ari Gronich15:21So, what exactly does the foundation do? Melody Garcia15:25Yeah, so we support these 17 sustainable goals of the United Nations, which everybody can Google that part. But then it's not only supporting with message, so for example, to fight famine, we have an agricultural program that literally provides food on the ground, and then not only do that, but also somehow create an entrepreneurship program. So that people are sustaining their livelihood. Marc Anthony King15:54Yeah. Bringing repeatable, scalable, sustainable infrastructure into these impoverished areas. Ari Gronich16:01Cool. Question, which new technology is being used and how much old technology is being used in what you're bringing? So, things like for agriculture, how much soil are you teaching or creating soil garden, versus hydroponic in warehouse and things like that? Marc Anthony King16:23So currently, Kurt, you know, that is the goal, the goal is bringing technology into the equation because I always found it curious, you know, we invest so much money into smartphones, right? Smartphones cost over $1,000. Today, I mean technologies is growing at such a rapid pace. And as humanity, we're evolving with it in every area of our life, except agriculture. agricultural practices are still like 60 years old, and we're still implementing them today on mass. To me, it makes no sense. Why would you allocate so much resources to a phone, when a phone, you can't eat a phone? Unless you're David Blaine, I'm sure he's eating a bunch of iPhones in his career, but you can't eat a phone. So, the whole goal is eventually to make sure that we are leveraging as much technological advances and applying that to where we're growing food. But currently, I mean, it is we're doing what we're doing in America, at this point, where what we're doing now is though, we have this this really big parcel of land that we just acquired, we're going to use that to create an agricultural Academy, where we physically matriculate students and we teach them how to grow food, we have an onsite, really, really large garden growing, you know, things, things that grow well, in certain parts of Africa, like Yuka, and sweet potatoes, potatoes, cabbage, Moringa. And, again, taking those products and then selling them and using that to create infrastructure within the community, in addition to online academies, because we're looking at opening up the schools in different parts of the world. But right now, we're looking at, um, is it Botswana now, where the first school is going to be open? Yeah. Ari Gronich18:19Botswana?MGMelody Garcia18:20Botswana, Africa. And we've also got Marc Anthony King18:24We have a land in Kenya now as well, right?  Melody Garcia18:27Yeah. But we've also got Jamaica with their initiatives. And, you know, you talked about agriculture and technology, right. So that's part of one of our contacts in a different country, is helping us bring it to a level where at least we can use modern technology to expedite some of these initiatives. We are actually also creating new programs that bridges gaps, instead of that whole stay in your lane message that we talked about. Part of that is creating like a child ambassador program that will connect children around the world that shows leadership. Remember, I don't know Ari where you ever were you? Did you have some knowledge of old pen pal style, where you make friends by writing letters. Ari Gronich19:13I'm an old fogy at this grace Melody Garcia19:19But do you remember when we used to write to friends from a different country and how excited we were to get that that letter? Ari Gronich19:25Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Pen pals  was a big thing nowadays it's you know, Facebook WhatsApp. Melody Garcia19:32But there's so much mystery and just excitement when you get that letter stamp from a different country, and they send you pictures. It's recreating that in the newer modern version of child ambassadorships. But we're looking specifically for children that have demonstrated leadership and a global thinking. Right, what does that create peace, what does that create collaboration over competition?    Ari Gronich19:57Right. So, I have a good friend who has a non-profit and motivational missions. They do a lot of child trafficking, work and education, but they also travel to like the worst places on the planet and do talks in prisons in like South America and stuff like those beliefs. In Dominican Republic and all-over South America, they do these motivational missions to help with child trafficking. Do you guys as part of what you do team up with other non-profits and other organizations that are doing good? Or are you looking for people to just join in on what your thing is? Melody Garcia20:49Now we're actually in collaboration mode, but we are highly vetting any type of partnerships or invitations or collaborations. Because, you know, unfortunately, in my walk with UNICEF, right, as well, I've done a lot of call to action against human trafficking and drug trafficking and skin spit up statistics pastored, and a lot of people can and just the platform of trafficking, which is again, you know, the solid pandemic. Oh, yeah. Well, the statistics are this it's $152 billion industry well-funded, there has over four 40 million victims worldwide. Marc Anthony King21:27For the viewers, she did say billion with a B.  Melody Garcia21:31And child trafficking right now over 5.4 million children million are being trafficked. Right here in Florida, where I live, Florida's the third highest state reported when it comes to trafficking, right. People and this is just, you know, a side-line educational piece for any adults, parents, aunts, grandmothers, you name it, anybody that has an association with a child, watch anything that has to do with their social media handlings. From Snapchat, it Tik Tok, to Instagram, because a lot of traffickers are masked as predators mask as other children or teenagers. And people don't think about this that lures them. Because there's commonality, parents, if you have GPS tracking devices on your phone, specially when it comes to Instagram, social media, turn it off. All you're doing is literally giving these people triangulation of your activities. In fact, here's one thing, that's because we live in a social media world of posting everything that has to do with your children, and everything. I would encourage you to really restrict that and take you know, what are you promoting? Why are you showing your children all the time? Yes, we love we love their accomplishments. But you have no idea who's actually looking at your materials. More often Marc Anthony King22:54I know personally, individuals who have been trafficked by way of Facebook, they found themselves sold into human trafficking, because they began chatting with somebody on Facebook and within a few months, this individual was sold to a pimp.     Ari Gronich23:19Yeah, it's amazing. The craziness that is happening right out in the open. And the fact that people aren't recognizing what's right in front of their faces is kind of like it is very telling. So, the one of the reasons I wanted to have you guys on is because you're actually doing the things that most people are talking about doing. Right? So, I have this saying, and the saying is we want to stop gathering to complain and start collaborating to succeed. And collaboration is the main part of that we want to collaborate for results, right? So how do you guys collaborate, you've been collaborating with governments I want to get like a picture of what that looks like. So that people who are feeling like, that's just too big for them to be able to do I could never meet with a politician, I can never meet with a government official. Right? So, they could get an idea that this isn't like a big deal. There's they're just human beings like us, right? Melody Garcia24:26It's not, for example, and then I'll let Mark also explain this. For example, my work with UNICEF unites Orlando, it's an advocacy team in with beautiful, intelligent members and leaders. However, what we start is just knowing it starts with educating yourself, what are the issues? Right, what are the root causes when we do advocacy, for example, you know, this is my fifth-year advocacy Mark have the honor of actually leading part of that advocacy this year. It was literally meeting with members of the US Congress, right? And humanizing the statistics that they say, my story sure shares, everybody has a story. That is the one thing that that literally ties humanity is through story shares. But we tell stories. And then with that comes the other platforms that we represent. I'm sure people can tell stories. That's what they call their friends for. It starts as simple as that. You know, it doesn't have to be this Oh, my goodness, we're meeting with the senator from a different country. That's a whole different global thing. But it starts with a Let's educate ourselves be how can you, you know, for those that are interested, whether it be UNICEF, whether it be global peace, let's talk, I'll drop our email here on the link on how they can connect with us and to learn more. But it's really simple. It starts with the desire to make a difference. Ari Gronich25:48Right. My thing is, what I see is that the barriers of fear people have stopped them from being able to do the things that they're complaining about. So, for instance, in my town here in Florida, every time the politician runs for office, it seems like the biggest deal is the roads and the potholes. It's like the potholes. The potholes.  Melody Garcia26:21You're definitely not in Orlando. That's        Ari Gronich26:23Not in Orlando, right. Closer to the beach. But it's like this is a big, big deal for people, the roads, the roads, the roads, right. The things that are really important. Like, we have the river, you know, Indian River, I mean, it's being completely polluted. We have, we're right near an Air Force Base, and Space Center, and all that. So, we see all of the environmental damage, but the issue is the potholes. So how can people get away from? See, I think that people are going after the potholes because they think it's something that they have control over. And I don't think that they think that they have control over the environment and the policies for the environment or agriculture, the policies for agriculture, the policies for human trafficking, I don't think I think that that feels too big for somebody. And so, they go after the potholes. You think.  Marc Anthony King27:35I, I'm so happy that this isn't centered here. I, you know, absolutely. I hear and I appreciate what you're saying it's on the journey. I think we all experienced the same thing where I want to make a change, but I don't know where to start. I want to help animals, but do I join PETA? Do I join the ASPCA? Do I join the Humane Society, and you kind of sort of get so bogged down in the variety that you have, you know, it's like, you have that phenomena that occurs where you have 10,000 channels, but there's nothing to watch. So, a big part is just being decisive and just making a decision. It doesn't have to be the perfect decision. At the end of the day. If you choose the ASPCA and you don't like it, you learn something, you contribute it, then you can move on to the Humane Society, right, because you got an education. So, education, be decisive, and get an education and use it accordingly. You know, and in terms of the pothole that Melody and I say, have the audacity to care about humanity more than you care about yourself. You look at the people who've created the greatest change people who we admire who we love, who we tried to emulate like Mother Teresa, a poor little Indian woman from Calcutta who didn't have a whole heck of a lot of money. And yet every single world leader was at her funeral, and she died. Why is that? She wasn't worried about the potholes. She wasn't worried about how the potholes inconvenienced her journey. She wasn't worried about how the potholes affected her rims or her suspension for her commute. She had the audacity to care about other people who never even knew she existed. Who would never even know she existed care about them more than she cared about herself. You know, there's something to be said about experiencing compassion. Compassion means I understand. I empathize where you're coming from, and it hurts me to the degree that I'm willing to help you. That's why I'm not an advocate of complaining. Why? Because complaining eases pressure. Why is it that a whole bunch of people can gather together at an event complain? accomplish nothing, but they feel good? At the end of day. Ari Gronich30:01Like every protest I've ever seen. Melody Garcia30:04Yes.   Ari Gronich30:07Just saying every protest I've ever seen, and especially what happened last year last summer. Especially what happened last summer, was letting off the steam. It's a pressure cooker. Right? So, here's my question to you, then we don't want to let off the steam, we don't want to let off the pressure. What do we do instead of that, because if we're in a pressure cooker, at some point, the pressures either gonna get too big, and it's gonna blow up, or we're gonna let it off slowly, you know, or we're gonna, like, protest and create some violence and let it out that way. So, what is what is your solution? I know you're an NLP master. So, you gotta have something. Marc Anthony King30:52When and we're gonna use the pressure cooker analogy. So, what happens to anybody who's ever used a pressure cooker, if you open the pressure cooker right away, it explodes. Literally, it explodes. But what happens when you take that little nozzle and you just turn it sideways, you have a consistent stream of pressure, I don't believe in keeping everything bottled up, I believe in taking what would have otherwise resulted in an explosion and channelling it into a consistent stream. What that stream looks like, that depends on how much you're willing to care for humanity, that depends on how far you're willing to go to solve a problem that depends on how, how resourceful you're willing to be. You know, I know that for myself and for melody that, obviously, you know, we were in in Orlando, and basically, during between the month of October and mid-January, we're just heavy that is when UNICEF is in its heaviest humanitarian work. You know, all you got to do is drive around a certain part of your town. And you look at the living conditions of people. That should break your heart, but it should anger you. It should anger you to a point where you don't post on Facebook about it. And ease the pressure. You find out how you can actually help. You know, Melody and I were we're in a trailer park called Oh, goodness, what's it called? Happy oaks. Something? Well, it's one of the most unprogressed trailer parks in Orlando. And you go there, and it's like a third world country. I remember vividly the property manager, he manages 25 or 26, semi-trailers that are there. You would think that he would live in the best trailer and the best home there because he manages everything. This man lives in what looks like a shack, like that was abandoned a long time ago. And not only does he live there, but he lives there with his wife, and his six or seven grandchildren. You know, you see something like that. It doesn't matter if you don't know what to do you, you buy food, you donate money. You know, it's like a phenomenon where I want to make a change, I want to help somebody, but when the homeless person walks by my window, when I'm at a traffic light, all of a sudden, I'm pretending to text or I'm pretending to look in my glove compartment or in my center console. Or I'm just I happen to be looking this way when I know that he's over there. You know, we sometimes things are painful, right? And it hurts to see certain people's living conditions and it hurts to recognize what's happening to our children in this world. You know, it's painful to know that child trafficking is 152 human trafficking $122 billion a year. Industry and it's happening right in front of us. It's painful. I got scolded. While I was speaking to shocker. I was speaking to a senator's office, or was he a senator?     Melody Garcia34:23It was a congressman. Marc Anthony King34:25Congressman, can I say his name? No, okay. I was speaking to a certain Congressman's office. And I got scolded because I shared my particular story. My battle with mental health since I was a child, every label I was given a DD ADHD dyslexic, socially anxious, being epileptic. These are all labels I was given and then being sexually abused by Men and by women as a child, I told this story, right, because we connect via stories. Well, UNICEF attempted to silence me and the congressman, his office, we got into a bit of a 12 round fight, right. And at the end of the day, just knowing that people like that are in office, people who are willing to disrespect not just the struggle of the individual, right, me, but are willing to hear a bunch of individuals say, we need your help, we need your support, because there are girls right now in Africa, being raped on the way to get water that us in America wouldn't let our dogs drink. We need your help. And for that office to turn around and say, you know what? We don't support that. Because we need to be helping kids in our borders. Because, you know, white children are more special and more worthy of protect than those black children in Africa. Knowing that people like that exist, should light a fire and everybody in the way that they vote. And in the compassion that they're willing to have when they look at children, and when they look at that homeless man down the street.  Ari Gronich36:25We're shitting on people a whole lot. Right. So, it should do this. And it should do that. I get that. But there's a huge population of people who can't see in front of their own shoes, because their own shoes are holy, their own shoes are tattered and worn, because they're working two and three jobs, and they don't have time to think of anything other than trying to survive, right. So, I get that we're shooting on what people should be doing. I think most people, most people these days, are in a heightened state of fight or flight, their nervous system is completely out of whack and not working properly. We're reactive instead of responsive. So, we react to triggers versus respond to events, and truth, in fact, right? So, all of these should that we're shooting on people, right? What is it that is going to take us to actually care about us? Right next door. So, we have the world sucks chart, right? The world sucks chart looks like this. It's me as an individual. Right? And then my family, and then my community, and then my county, and then my state, and then my country, and then my, you know, common, right? The world sucks chart, because most people are stuck in the individual, maybe individual family in order to get to the worldview, where they're literally able to take that bigger picture view, you've got to go through individual trauma and pain and sickness and illness, then family pain and sickness and illness, then you got to go through city, you know, pain and, you know, illness. I mean, the pain and illness may be the roads, it may be the fraud and the politics, it may be any kind of thing, right? But we got to go through these layers in order to get to the worldview for most people, just jumping to that worldview is almost impossible. So, let's, drop back. Yeah, absolutely. Let's drop back into step by step it.    Melody Garcia38:53Right. So, I'm gonna start with a question for anybody who's listening, watching, you know, this interview? What is the value of a human life, whether it's yours, whether it's your child, whether it's your parents, whether it's your neighbourhood? Starts with that one question, because you're right, it starts with it. It all starts with us. We're not expecting people to jump on a global scale here. I'm asking you what Mark had alluded to, are you sensitive to the human suffering that when you see that homeless person on the side corner, what's the first thing that comes into mind, judgment? because that's what we've been hearing a lot. Oh, that person's not really a homeless, they're good. They're pretending to be rich, and you know, they're pretending to be poor, but they actually use this money for something else or the labels that we give them. They're alcoholics, they're gonna use that money for drugs, literally human nature is to automatically judge the situation. Let me pull it back with say what Mark said compassion.  Marc Anthony King39:52Compassion over condemnation. Melody Garcia39:54Right? What if we change that perspective and story? Could we literally stocks, You know, spare 50 cents or $1, or just even ask for their name Mark does something beautifully that I haven't seen in humanitarian space a lot, which is as simple as an act of kindness, that when we're doing our humanitarian impact, is to ask for that person's name that we're serving. What's their story? You know, a lot of this homeless folks in the Orlando area, surprisingly, are what veterans, people who served our own country, most of the time they're not even looking for, for the dollar 50, it's really interesting, sometimes they just want to be listened to, and that the act of compassion is free. So, I'm going to scale it back to start with that. So, you pointed out a really good picture there. Ari, we live in a world that is reactive, versus proactive. We live in a world that are judgmental, versus compassion. So, if we look at this behavioural modification of just retelling it from a different focus, what if you were that person in that person's shoes right now? Wouldn't you want somebody kind to at least lend an ear? Or maybe five minutes of your time it starts with that, you know, it's free. It's really free. When you look at it. Ari Gronich0:04Cool. thank you. Melody Garcia0:05You're welcome.       Ari Gronich0:06Bringing it back down, I just like I said I'm not, I'm not. I don't want to shame people. Because, frankly, like, people been told their entire lives, right, let's go to weight. They've been told their entire lives that they're fat, because of their particular habits, or particular kind of eating their particular way. Most of those people were never told that eating a low fat, high carb diet was going to make them more fat. Right? They weren't told they were told the opposite. And so, I think most people, they're not at fault. They're not at fault for the chemicals that have been put into their food. Right? They're not at fault, or the policies that have allowed poison to come into play, right. They're not like Nestle having a contract with the state of California to take out the water for like 70 cents, like per million gallons since the 1970s. And having that negotiation, never, you know, be renewed. Letting Nestle take that water allowed the fires, the droughts, the temperature changes, the amount of water not in that state is directly because of bottling, right? We can kind of target these things. We know this. Yet. The people are being told that they're responsible that they need to make the changes. I think that the changes need to come from the people to the politicians, right? So, the politicians, but how do they even know? How does Joe Schmoe? Like, look, I was at a Walmart, and I asked for the grass-fed meat and the guy in the butcher department didn't even know what I was talking about. He didn't know what grass-fed meat meant. So, if we think the people who think that we know, and that and who study this stuff, who know all kinds of information about it. Right? We think that everybody should know the same information we know. But most people haven't a clue about proper nutrition, about proper health about proper, you know, wait, not even most doctors know about how to create a lifestyle of health. And so, we stop blaming, I stopped, so I stopped blaming I get let people off the hook. It's not your fault. Now that you know that, right? What are you going to do about it? But at first, it's not your fault. You have been deceived. Right? So, for people who are wanting to change the world, right? And step up and step out of that comfort zone? What do you think that they need mentally, to get to the point where they can even think about something outside of I'm surviving? Melody Garcia3:13So, I'll start with a couple and then I'll turn it over to my trusted co-everything here. It starts with what is truth, not my version of truth or your version of true, what is true at this given moment. Right, that starts with that education, just like you said, the butcher didn't even know what grass-fed cow is. But we assume he should know because that's his part of his profession as a butcher, but they don't. Right. So, what is true? What is true in that picture? is there's a disconnect, about our assumption, our expectation and their learning. Right? Number two, did we judge them that they should know this? You know, you were talking about the shoe that you were throwing? So, the second question is asking that question, why don't you know this, then you're going to discover this whole mantra of well, we're no longer trained. We just we just expect people to read the label. Right? I'm like the butchers in the olden days. So, what is true in the current situation? Let's start with that. suspending all judgments, right, suspending all the expectations what is true, not my truth, not Ari's, truth, not Mark truth, but the factual statement at the moment. Right. Because like you said, we saw those protests we saw the marches, we felt every, the whole world was watching everything that was happening last year, but yet there were the silent people in action that are moving. You gave birth, lack of a better term Ari to a podcast that wanted to highlight the people that are making a difference of changing the world for a better tomorrow. That came out of a desire to make a difference for yourself. Right and find like-minded people that is doing this very things that that we're talking about right now. Instead of complaining about those things, that's a start. Right? Wouldn't it be beautiful if people actually had a gathering of solution driven thinking versus complaining? Ari Gronich5:11That's what I've been developing is Solution Summit.  Melody Garcia5:15So imagine if it starts with two people. Because that's what started with myself and mark, and then it just grew in teams, but it has to start somewhere. So why not start with yourself and just grab one person? And then rapid fire? Ari Gronich5:30Here's the thing. I have an entrepreneurial spirit; I have I am absolutely not risk-adverse. Risk is like, my life, right? I don't remember a time in my life, where I've felt safe. I felt comfortable. I felt, you know, any of those things settled that most people feel in life. Okay, so I recognize my personality, I'm not gonna settle for anything ever. I can't, I don't know how it's not in my DNA. That is not most people. And so, I recognize that in me, I am this type of person who will not ever settle. Who will not ever see the world as something that's done something that's finished something that doesn't need fixing, or doesn't need optimizing, I've actually taken the judgments out, I go, is that system optimized? Or is it sub optimized? If its sub optimized? How can we optimize it and make it more optimum? Right, take out the judgments completely. But I recognize that about my personality, I don't know your personality, I don't know your personality. Right, I would imagine that the fact that you've done what you've done means that you have a fair amount of risk, you know, to safety ratio, where you prefer a little bit more risk than safety, right? Because it is very risky to do what you're doing. And for you to go off and do that is takes it requires a certain personality type. So, here's my thing for the people who are not that personality, who do not have an entrepreneurial spirit who are born to be in the assembly line. They are trained from birth to be this cog in the assembly line, I do this, it goes down the line, the other person does that. Right? The other person does this. And then that whole product is done. But I'm not the master. I'm not the guy who's gonna cobble that shoe in turn, make every single piece of it perfect. Got it? You know what I'm saying? Like, there's personality type for mastery, and there's a person a personality type for an assembly line. So, the question becomes, how do we get the entrepreneurs who are moving things forward? Instead of the 1% That set tends to keep things stalled. Right? How do we get the people who are moving things forward, To then activate the assembly line to create the assembly of what we what needs to happen. We have the visionaries I get it. You're a visionary. You're a visionary Mark, you're a visionary, a Melody, I get that. So how do you move the people who are not visionaries into your way of being thinking, or at least acting? Melody Garcia8:39Mark, you go first?   Marc Anthony King8:40That's a really, really good question. I really, I thoroughly enjoyed that. When you're looking at, like you said, the visionary and the assembly line. I think that self-awareness is a priceless gift. A lot of people who should be in the assembly line, want to be leaders, want to be leading the pack. And that's going to cause chaos and calamity on its best day. And a lot of people that should be leading the pack have allowed themselves to be convinced by their own volition or by other people that they belong in the assembly line. So, I think there's something to be said about knowing who you are. And honoring that truth, honoring the truth of that and being where you belong. You know, Ari you have gifts and talents that I could never dream of having. So, it is Mel and vice versa. So, I think that that is critically important for because everything starts at leadership. Everything starts at leadership. Just like with families. how well your family does is a product of the leadership in the household. So, I think that there's an expression that I love that the majority of people are going to defer to the highest resonance in the room. Right? So, it's critically important that we bring in compassion and selflessness to leaders which is difficult, right? Because we live in a world that glorifies selfishness. And if leadership at the top is entirely self-focused and self-involved, we're not going to really get anywhere, because you're not doing your job as a leader at the end of the day leaders are supposed to produce a result. Absolutely. But it's your job to inspire and to teach. And based on what your goals are, and based on what drives you, what makes you get up out of the bed is it for you to leave a legacy, is it for you to become rich and well known powerful is it for you to make sure that, you know, one homeless person was seen that day and felt heard, I think flipping that script and flipping that switch from self-focus to, to just compassionate and not self-sacrificing in a in a negative way. But like we said, being willing to do for others, what the vast majority of people aren't willing to do. And I mean, there's only so many ways I can say compassion, compassion, compassion, compassion. Stop being selfish compassion, Ari Gronich11:28Right? So where does the whole concept of, you know, put the mask on your face before you put it on your kid's face come in? Marc Anthony King11:38Well, it starts with the self, you know, you have to make sure that we talked about self-awareness, but you need to figure out what's wrong with you. First, if you are a leader, and you want to make a positive impact, you need to figure out what your shortcomings are, you need to deal with your own trauma, you need to open those doors, that you worked tirelessly to bolt shut. You know, you can't have compassion for other people. If you're holding yourself to an immeasurable standard, and you're constantly criticizing and condemning. And it's almost like pennants. If you've seen that movie, with Tom Hanks, What's that movie? The prequel to angels and demons, The Da Vinci Code, there's this remember that guy that was constantly whipping himself? You know, leaders do that to themselves all the time. You know, if you're constantly in a state of war with yourself, or whatever the case, you're not going to be in a state of peace or compassion with other people. So that whole concept of putting your mask on first, I do believe that you can only help them bless other people to the capacity that you're able to do it for yourself. But once you've got yourself figured out, evolution, right dictates that we don't just stay there. Because if we just stay there in the self, we've become stagnant. And ultimately, you know, how much of this mental health crisis is just a product of I'm gonna say, inadvertent narcissism. It's just a product of inadvertent focus, you know, when you are this, there's 8 billion people will 7.9 something. But there's almost a billion people on the planet. It's a big world. And if everything just revolves around us, we're a pretty insignificant presence when compared to everything and everybody even when compared to those people at a town hall meeting. You know? So, I think that once you've got the cell figured out, once you've brought in compassion and understanding and a little bit of grace, it's only natural to extend it outward. How far is up to your discretion? It can stay within your family, your community. Ari Gronich13:54So, NLP, Ben, how does somebody start the process of figuring out who they are when they've never even heard that concept of, I know who I am, I like to, I like to watch a TV, my football. I know who I am. I know who I am. I like to, I like to study and read books. And you know, I know who I am.  Marc Anthony King14:17Like, the voice change for those two individuals. Ari Gronich14:22We have stereotypes, right? We have stereotypes, what are the stereotypes? Stereotypes are simple. You don't want somebody who's you know, as your neurosurgeon cutting in your head saying, Now, here's what we got to do. We got to cut your head, I don't want may, you may want that tremendously. It might be an awesome thing, but you'd rather say, you know, here's what we got to do. We're going to cut a hole in your head, and we're going to chord. Yeah, universal knowledge, you know, you want to hear totally different. We have stereotypes, most of them for a reason. Which is kind of odd. But the stereotype that I'm putting out here is most people don't know what they don't know. They don't know themselves. Because they know, nobody's ever told them to investigate themselves. Nobody even says, what do you want to be when you grow up anymore? It's more like, how do you want to make money? You know? So that's the question. You know, we're, we want to help people activate their vision for a better world. We want to help create a new tomorrow today. People need to have skills and tools to do that, right? we already know like, if they wanted to get part be part of global peace, let's talk they could contact you. But they may not know that they could do that, here or here. Right? You may have told them that, but they may not felt like that was an invitation for them. So how do you get them to feel like this is an invitation for you? And LP? might do that. But you know, let's kind of talk a little bit about that. How does one feel like the invitation is for them to start moving and start doing and start feeling and. Marc Anthony King16:19I'm gonna let you take that away, Mel, I want to see what steamer.      Melody Garcia16:25Like, let me take a step back here Ari. Prior to my entrepreneurship adventure of roller coaster of what the heck am I doing? And the three of us can relate to that I was in corporate management for two decades. I'm very familiar with this one. Ari Gronich16:45That's your two years old? Melody Garcia16:48Sure. Yes. Thank you for that. But yes, I wasn't sure if this is an audio or video or both type of podcast. But I get that all the time. Yes, since I was two years old for the sake of your listeners. But basically, you know, and I have a lot of those people that were just following that you give them a duty check, you know, and they're happy. They're happy with that their content. But this is the truth that everybody comes through what they do with it is a whole different matter. There's one question that ultimately shows up. I've seen this in annual reviews, performance reviews, because I mean, a lot of these people are like, Oh, am I going to get a raise this year, for the 12 months that I've done my checkbox, right? And then it sucks completely sucks. When you're being rated from one to five, you fall on the average? Right? Eventually, that's what led me out into this adventurous world. But here's the one question that's always showing up, there has to be more to life than this. It's gonna be That's why even in assembly lines, they look for promotions. They look for those merit badges. There's a competition sense of competition that happens within a corporate life. So, we can make people feel valued. That's the word what is your value? Right? People want to be contributors, even in an assembly lines. If not, then people will be happy with minimum wages and not want to have goals or any of that in life. But again, it's that label if you're an assembly line, most of you drop that enough. That's how they exactly go into perform. But if we start with there has to be more to life than this. You weren't born to live in a box. Tony Robbins says this. You weren't born to live in a box to drive a box to work in a box to type in a box and drive back in a box, spin in a box, turn on a box and then go to sleep still watching a box. It's not a box life. But somehow people have decided they were going to put you inside the box. Right. But yet, even in assembly lines, there's hierarchy. There's promotion, because people want to constantly prove to others, they're better than when they started or how they started. So, think about that. What is the value of human life? There has to be more to life than that. So, if we were to bridge out all the learnings in the last hour that we've been talking, right, whether it be NLP PNA, home in, in my case, in Marks case, we say God, right in the middle of everything that we handle, and Ari with your learnings. We don't start to remain stagnant. So even those people that are watching television shows somewhere in their history line. I love asking that question. What is the deepest adversity that became a catalyst to your purpose? What is the deepest adversity that became a catalyst of your purpose? Ari Gronich19:51So yes, that of normal people sitting on the couch watching TV.    Melody Garcia19:55Absolutely. And you know what? Yeah, the quality of your questions determines the response and the focus that conversation is going to have see people that you pointed at people that comes together in a crowd to complain someone was leading that complaint, someone festered, that complaint, and someone ended it with a complaint. But what if you're that one person, regardless, if you're just a clerical start-up, you know, I don't even know what the minimum wage is at this point. And just ask that quality question. What can you do to make a difference in this world? What is the deepest adversity that became a catalyst to your purpose? Do even know what your purpose is? or even as simple as this, what did you want to be when you grew up when you were a child? Because somehow along the way, we all wanted to be some kind of doctor or superhero actor or something. Right? It starts as simple as that. It's a fun question. So, I'm going to ask you that, for example, Ari, when you were little, what did you want to be when you grew up. Okay. And why did you want to be a veterinarian? Ari Gronich21:01Loved animals, liked medicine, I had a friend whose dad was a veterinarian. So, I spent like my ninth grade or ninth year in life, this summer, working for the veterinarian and helping with surgeries and stuff and doing all the things that veterinarian assistant would do. But that was why Melody Garcia21:22And what was the fondest memory of you doing that job? Ari Gronich21:27I'm not sure I had a fond memory of it was pretty gruesome to watch, but you know I really doing I enjoy doing stuff. You know, I always wanted to be doing things that were productive. My parents though, see, my parents had Amelie in the garage. You know, we have boxes of Amway. LOC sweet shot masks, you know, we had all that stuff. So, for me, I grew up with entrepreneurs, entrepreneur parent's, every everything was, what hustle can we try to get. And so that's how I was, that's how I perceive everything in my life. I was also a martial artist, gymnast, baseball player. I mean, I did a lot of sports, long distance cycling. And so, I was always very active, and very, using my own creative energy, I also wasn't a fan of people very much. Most people didn't like me. I had been raped and molested, and I was, you know, basically, treated like, because I was Jewish, I was treated like I killed Jesus personally. And so therefore, I shouldn't be alive. I mean, you know, there's, my history is very specific to the person that I've become. Right. I wouldn't wish my experiences on anybody. And I know that those experiences were uniquely directed at me. So that I could be who I am. But that is a lot of self-awareness that comes from I went to ask when I was eight, I did Life spring and landmark in the forum and Cyworld and CEO, space and IB, I mean, I've been in the world of self-development, alongside being in the world of being traumatized my entire life. So, it's like side by side went hand in hand. And so, I, I assume nothing. When it comes to other people, and how they grew up and what their thinking is, I assume nothing. I only can ask questions. Because the truth is, is that no matter how much I think I know what's in somebody else's head. I never have and I never will. Because most people don't even know what's in their own heads. Melody Garcia24:08But do you see what just happened here? I would not have discovered that unless I ask you those questions. And here's the truth, the truth of the matter here. Yes, you know, stories tie humanity together. But so, this adversity and suffering because none of us has spared from that as we go through life. It comes in different forms. You and Mark were very transparent with your abuses. You know that came painfully and the reasons why you're both advocates in different forms is because of those traumas. You went through personal development because you're trying to heal and find answers from those traumas. And I can almost bet you with accuracy. Everybody that you come across, whether it's the guy that's watching TV, because that's what brings him joy, at the moment, right at the moment has gone through some deep suffering themselves, because that is unfortunately, the one thing we can avoid in life, from childhood to adulthood. But there's also this humanity that is, you know, there's a part of humanity that is true, regardless of what background you come from, is the desire to be good, the desire to be accepted, the desire to be loved. That is something that three does desire to be needed and desire to be part of something beautiful.  Ari Gronich25:31How you know that that's part of everybody's belief, because I've met people that is even close to what they believe. Melody Garcia25:41It's not so much as they believe it's how you deliver that question. It starts at something happens in their childhood.  Ari Gronich25:50I understand that. I'll give you an example I used to do. We used to do sweat lodges in the prison system in California. So, we'd go into California Youth Authority with a bunch of gangs, people who thought that they were really tough, and we'd get them into a sweat lodge, you know, native ceremony. And what we considered the stones, the grandfathers, the ancestors, you know, gangbanger might think that they're tough, tougher than 100-degree temperature sitting, you know, in a womb dark with some stones sweating their pants off, right. And so, we could cleanse out and shift behaviour right from that. And I had somebody who had come to once they had gotten out of prison had come to the sweat lodges, and said, one night, you saved somebody's life tonight. And what are you talking about? I was about to go retaliate and kill somebody. And I came here instead. Right? So that's somebody being, in my opinion, having that that belief, like you were talking about, there's other people who are in that system, not only would they never have even thought about it, they would never have considered not killing that person, it wouldn't have even been a thought in their head. Maybe I shouldn't do this. Right? So, here's the thing, yes, the history of that person is going to be directly involved in where they're at now. And I don't believe in evil, I believe in optimum and sub optimum, right. So, their state of affairs that they're in his sub optimal mental state, right. In order to get that person to a cleaner mental state, would take probably a massive act of tools, a massive act of tools, concentrated active tools. But I've never seen that person or those people who have who are in that position in the moment, calm themselves enough to be in a place where you're where you're talking about them being. Melody Garcia28:28Well, it's not Yeah, it's not in that moment, but sometimes one question would ignite that spark as simple as what happened? What happened to you or what happened? opens up a doorway of discoveries. Right, should they choose to stay there? That there's choice. Am not trying to save that person, when there's nation waiting for us to step up. But here's what's true, every day we delay, more people suffer. Every day that we decide to not do something about there's another crowd writing that complains about. Well, I don't want to be on the second or the latter crowd. The three of us certainly don't. That's why we're having this conversation this afternoon. Right. So, it's just something as simple as it goes back to that what happened, the simple questions, it goes back to the word that Mark said compassion, it goes back to you Ari, the audacity to say what is true, uncensored, right? Whether you be in an assembly line, whether you'd be a CEO or a high-risk entrepreneur, find out what is that link that connects to that the ability or desire to want to do something, I am not going to condemn you. If you're the person that decides no, my happiness is watching that box. Because I've done my time. Right? It's very interesting what then what I can learn from me during the time that you were doing that time so that I can gain wisdom or lessons or under the table. But I'm going to gain something from somebody all the time. What I do with that, that's my choice and prerogative. Melody Garcia30:13He ends this with a grunt.  Marc Anthony King30:17I had to drop that that little baritone, you know, you're, in my opinion anyway, for whatever it's worth, you're absolutely correct in that regard. We, you know, we're students and teachers at the end of the day, but part of having that compassion awakened inside of you is, it's just that, you know, not judging and condemning because you don't know, there's an expression that I absolutely love, which says, If you were to spend 10 minutes alone with your greatest enemy, you'd realize they have way more in common with them than you thought. Because as different as we all are, there are certain intrinsic, inherent needs that we all have, you know, as different as we all are. And in the mu

Can I get a woot woot, bonus episode time :) This week we talk about not giving a flying fadoodle what other people think about you. Let's talk about why you might be scared and how to overcome those silly voices in your head.... Stop letting the fear of judgement from strangers deter you from pursuing your passion. As always, keep doing life my friends :)Share this podcast with friends! Leave a 5 star review, Sponsor me.Instagram: @WhatNowMegan

Enjoy part three of this classic episode series where Andrew Warner from Mixergy interviews Russell on the ClickFunnels startup story! Hit me up on IG! @russellbrunson Text Me! 208-231-3797 Join my newsletter at marketingsecrets.com ClubHouseWithRussell.com ---Transcript--- Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome back to the Marketing Secrets podcast. I hope you enjoyed episodes 1 and 2 of the interview with Andrew Warner at the Dry Bar Comedy Club where he was telling the Clickfunnels startup story. I hope you are enjoying this interview series so far, and I hope also this motivates you guys to go over to the mixergy podcast and subscribe to everything that Andrew does. Like I said, he is my favorite interviewer and I think that what he does is second to none. So I hope that you guys enjoy him as well, and go subscribe to the mixergy podcast. But with that said, I'm going to queue up the theme song, and when we come back we will start into part 3 of the Clickfunnels startup story interview. Andrew: I actually got, I did see, I don't know, I didn't see the video you mentioned, but I did see what it looked like. Here's one of the first versions. He compared it to Clickfunnels, he said, I mean to Lead Pages. He said, “Look at how Lead Pages has their stuff all the way on the left, all the controls.” Oh you can't see it. Oh, let me try it again, let me see if I can bring up the screen because this is just, it's just too good. Hang on a second. I'm just constantly amazed how you're able to draw people to you. So this is the article from Lead Pages, this is the first landing page from Clickfunnels, this is what he created before, this is what you guys did together. This is your editor and h e said, “Look, if you're on Lead Pages, their controls, their editor is all the way on the left and it's just moving the main content to the right, which is not looking right. And I prefer something that looks like this, with a hundred pixels on the left, a hundred pixels…” I go, who knows a hundred pixels, it's like you, what is this? Russell: Dylan is obsessed with that type of stuff, it's amazing. Andrew: Obsessed. And you draw people like that. You draw people like Dave, who is just phenomenal. Dave, the traffic and conversion event that he was just talking about, is that the one that you went to? Dave: The one after that. Andrew: The one after that. Okay, we'll come back to that in a second then. So this became your next version, you brought on a new partner, and then you did a webinar with this guy. Who is this guy? Russell: It's Mike Filsaime, one of my first friends online. It actually wasn't a webinar, it was a live event. He was doing a live event in San Diego and he was like, “You have to come and sell Clickfunnels.” And I was like, “Nobody's buying Clickfunnels.” We had a free trial and like, we couldn't give it away. It was crazy. And he's like, “Well, you're on this website, you're picture is there, you have to come and sell Clickfunnels, and I need you to sell it for at least $1000.” Because the way it works, if you speak at someone's event, you sell something, you split the money 50/50. So he's like, “It needs to be at least $1000.” And I was all bummed out. I didn't want to do it. And the event actually started, but they were streaming it live online, so I was actually sitting at our office in Boise, watching it as I'm putting together my slides to create Clickfunnels, and then flew out to the event. And then we had a booth, and I don't know if I told you this, we had a booth and Lead Pages had a booth right across the little hallway, skinny hallway. And Todd's wife was manning our booth and then Lead Pages was right there, and it was so funny because she was not shy at all about talking about Lead Pages. She's like, “Yeah, we're like Lead Pages except for way better. We can do this and this.” And the other guy is sitting there like, right in front of her as she's telling them everything. And it was..anyway, I digress. It was pretty funny. Andrew: By the way, she's still at it. I saw a video that you guys created, you were talking to her and she goes, “I will be Clickfunnels.” I go wait a minute, you still had that fire, okay. So you were at that event. Russell: So we're at the event and there's probably, I can't remember, 150-200 people maybe in the room. So I got the slides up and Dylan was there and he was like, when we got to the funnels he was going to demo the editor, so I did the whole thing, showed the presentation and we demo'd Clickfunnels and at the end of the thing I sold. And I've been good onstage, but by far, that was the first time in probably 8 years that I'd seen a table rush, where people are stepping over the things, jumping around, trying to get to the back to buy as fast as they could. Andrew: What did you say to get them to want to do that? Russell: We made a really, I mean we gave the presentation, and gave a really good offer at the end. They get a year of Clickfunnels for free, plus they get training, plus they were going to get all these other things for $1000. Andrew: It was $1000 training and a year of Clickfunnels for free, and then they become long term members. And it was also called, Funnel Hackers? Russell: Funnel Hacks, yeah. Andrew: Funnel Hacks. And that's the thing that became like… Russell: The culture. Andrew: This culture, this tribe. It wasn't just they were signing to learn from you, they were becoming funnel hackers. That's it. Russell: I mean, that wasn't planned though. It was like, I was trying to think about a sexy name for the presentation, so I'm like ah, Funnel Hacks. And somebody owned FunnelHacks.com, and I'm like, I'm still doing the presentation that way. And then later we made t-shirts that said, “Funnel Hackers” and then now we got 4 or 5 people have tattooed that to their bodies, it's really weird. But anyway, that's what happened. We did that and we sold it and I remember going to dinner that night with the guys who were there, and Todd and his wife and everything. And we were all excited because we made some money finally. But I was just like, “You guys don't understand, like I've spoken on a lot of stages, and I haven't seen a table rush like that.” And I remember back, there was a guy, he passed away a couple of years ago, his name was Fred Catona. And he was a radio guy. He was the guy who did the radio commercials for, do you guys remember, it's got the guy from Star Trek, what's his name? Audience member: Priceline. Russell: Priceline. He did the Priceline radio commercials and made that guy a billionaire. And he told me when we were doing the radio ads, “This is what's going to happen. We're going to test your ad and if it works, I'm going to call you on the phone and let you know you're rich. Because if it works, it means you're going to be rich.” So I remember going to dinner that night and I told the guys, “Just so you guys know, we're rich.” And they're like, “What do you mean? We made $150,000.” I'm like, “No, no, no. The way people responded to that, I've never seen that in my life. We're rich.” The response rate from that, I've never seen. Andrew: And then you went to webinar after webinar after webinar. Russell: On the flight home that day I'm texting everybody I've ever met. “I got a hot offer, this webinar crushed it. We just closed whatever percent of the room at Filsaime's event. Who wants to do it?” And we started filling up the calendar. Andrew: And the idea was, and you told me you did 2 to 3 some days. And the idea was, they would sell somebody on a course, and then their members would then hear how your software and your funnel hacking technique would help up what they just bought and then they would sign up. You're still excited, I can see it in your face. And then this thing took off. And then you started doing an event for your culture, your community, and this guy spoke, Tony Robbins. Russell: Oh yeah, there's Tony. Andrew: One of the first ones. Was he at the very first one? Russell: No, he came to the third one, was the first one we had him come to. Andrew: Yeah? Why do an event? Why do your own live event? Russell: So we've done events in the past. I know events are good, but I'd sworn off them because the last event we did, I think we sold 3 or 400 tickets and less than 100 people showed up and I was so embarrassed. I was like, “We'll never do events again.” And as soon as this, as soon as Clickfunnels launched and it was growing, everyone's like, “We want to do a meet up. We should do an event.” All the customers kept asking. And against my, I didn't really want to do it, but at the same time I was launching my book, and I had won a Ferrari in this affiliate contest so I was like, “What if we did an event and we had the Ferrari there and we gave it away and then we're…” we had other ideas for giving away other cars and it became this big, exciting thing that eventually turned into an event. And that was the first Funnel Hacking Live event in Vegas, and we had about 600 people at that one that showed up. And that's where it all kind of, it all started. Andrew: And it built how much, how many people are you up to now? Russell: Last year we had 3500 people and we're on track to have about 5000 at this year's event. Andrew: 5000? Yeah. Russell: Those aren't free tickets. Each ticket's $1000, so it's…. Andrew: So how much is that in total revenue? Russell: From the event? Andrew: Yeah. Russell: So ticket sales, last year was $3 ½ million, this year will be over $5. But at the event we sell coaching so last year we made $13 million in coaching sales at the event as well. Andrew: Wow, would you come up here for a second, Dave? Do you guys know Dave? Yeah, everyone knows Dave. You know what's amazing… {Audience catcalls} Andrew: That's amazing. Dave: I don't know who that is. Andrew: A catcall. I saw a video, you guys have this vlog now, a beautifully show vlog. You guys went to sales force's conference, you're looking at the booths and in the video, do you remember what you did as you saw the different booths? Dave: I think that one I went and asked what the prices for each of the booths were. Andrew: Yes, and then you multiplied. And he's like, you're not enjoying the event, you're calculating ahead, how much. “10,000 that's 100,000….” It's like wow, right. You do this all the time? Dave: Yeah. It's a lot of money in an event like that. Andrew: And you think, and if this was not your event, you would be doing the same calculation trying to figure out how much they brought in today. Wowee. Alright when you went to sales force did you calculate how much money they probably did from their event? Dave: We were doing that the whole time, absolutely. Andrew: You saw the building, you had to know… Dave: Oh my gosh. 61 stories. Andrew: Why? Why do you guys want to know that? Why does, how does that… I want to understand your drive as a company and I feel like this is a part of it. Figuring out how much money other people are making, using that for fuel somehow. Tell me. Dave: I think it actually goes back to Russell and his wrestling days. We had the experience of going to Chicago right after that, and super just exhausted. And it was one of those things where he literally landed, we walked down and we're underneath the tarmac and all the sudden Russell goes from just being totally exhausted to a massive state change. Where he's literally right back where he was with his dad and he and his dad are walking that same path to go to, I think it was Nationals. And I saw Dan Usher, who was doing the filming, capturing that moment and it's that type of a thing for Russell. Where all the sudden it's the dream, where as soon as you see it, it can then happen. And Russell's just been amazing at modeling, and again the whole idea as far as just going at a rapid, rapid speed. I mean it's “Ready, fire, aim.” Andrew: It's not you gawking at the sales force, what's the sales force event called? Dave: Dream Force. Andrew: Dream force. It's not you gawking at how well Sales Force's event, Dream Force is doing, it's not you having envy or just curiosity, it's you saying, it's possible. This is us. That's it. Dave: It's totally possible. Andrew: It's totally possible. We could get there. And when you're sizing up the building, you even found out how much the building cost. Who does that? Most people go, “Where's the bathroom?” How much does the building cost? Dave: There's a number. Andrew: It's you saying, “We could maybe have that.” Dave: We can have that, yeah. Andrew: Got it. And so let's go back a little bit. I asked you about Traffic and Conversion because the very first Traffic and Conversion conference you went to, you guys were nobodies. Nobody came and saw you. Dave: We were put out in North 40 pasture, way, way far away. Andrew: And some people would say, “One day I'll get there.” you told Russell, “Today we're going to get there.” Dave: Well Russell wanted, he was speaking and so whenever you're speaking at an event, it's important that you fill a room, like this. And there's nothing worse than having an event and having no one show up. It's just the worst feeling in the world. And so he's like, “All we need, I gotta find some way of getting people into the event. I wish we had like some girls who could just hand out t-shirts or do something.” And I was like, we're in San Diego, that's like my home town. Russell: Dave's like, “How many do you need?” That's all he said. Dave: It's just a number. It comes down to a number. How many do you want? So we ended up having, within an hour or so we had 5 girls there who were more than happy to dance around and give out t-shirts and fill the room. Andrew: and the room was full? Dave: Packed. Andrew: Packed. And why wouldn't you say, “One day, the next time we come to Traffic and Conversion, the tenth time we're going to do it.” Why did it have to be right there? Dave: It's always now.   Andrew: It's always now. Dave: It's always now. Andrew: It's always now. It's never going to be the next funnel, it's never going to be the next product launch. I'm going to do whatever we can right now, and the next one, and the next one. That's it. That's who you are. Dave: That's how it works. Andrew: And now you're a partner in the business. $83 million so far this year, you got a piece of that. Dave: Yes. Do i? Russell: Yeah. Dave: Just checking. Andrew: Do you get to take profits home now? Dave: We do. Andrew: You do, you personally do? Dave: Yes. Andrew: Are you a millionaire? Dave: Things are really good. Andrew: Millionaire good from Clickfunnels? Dave: yes. Andrew: Really? Dave: Yes. Andrew: Wow. And you're another one. I was driving and I said, “What was it about Russell that made you work for him? What was it?” and you said, “I've never seen anyone implement like him.” Give me an example of early days, something that he implemented…you know what, forget that, let's not go back to Russell. As a team, you guys have gotten really good at implementing. Give me an example of one thing that you're just stunned by, we did it, it came out of nowhere, we could have been distracted by funnel software, we could have distracted by the next book, we did this thing, what is it? Dave: You're here on this stage with JP, and this was what 6 weeks ago? Andrew: and this whole thing just came from an idea I heard. You use Voxer. Why do you use Voxer? Russell: I don't know. Andrew: Because you like to talk into it. Russell: Yeah, and you can fast forward, you can listen at 4x speed, you can forward the messages to people really easily, it's awesome. Andrew: and it's just train of thought, boom, here's what I think we're going to…No, it's not that. I heard it's, “I have a secret project…” Russell: “I'll tell you guys about it later.” And they all start freaking out. “Tell us now.” Andrew: “Secret project. I don't know what it, it's going to be exciting.” They don't know what it is, going to be excited. Russell: Do you know how it started, this one? I was cleaning my wrestling room listening to you, and you were, I don't know whose event it was, but you were at the campfire, it sounded like. And you were doing something like this and I was like, I want my own campfire chat to tell our story. And then I was like, “Dave, we should do it.” And now we're here. So thanks for coming to our campfire…. Dave: That's how it happens. Andrew: And that's exciting to this day. Alright, thank you. Give him a big round, thank you so much. You know what, I didn't mean for this to come onstage, but I'm glad that it is. This made you laugh when you accidentally saw it earlier too. Why is this making you laugh? What is it? Russell: So we're not shy about our competitors, even when they're our friends. So one of the companies we're crossing out is his. That's why it's funny. Andrew: It's one of my companies. That's Bot Academy there. It's also a company I invest in, that octopus is ManyChat, I've been a very big angel investor and supporter of theirs. I'm not at all insulted by that, I'm curious about it. You guys come across as such nice, happy-go-lucky guys. Dave asked me if I want water, I said “Dave I can't have you give me any more things. I feel uncomfortable, I'm a New Yorker. Punch me, please.” So he goes, “Okay, one more thing. I'm going to give you socks.” So he gave me socks. Really, but still, you have murder in your eyes sometimes. You're crossing out everybody. This is part of your culture, why? Russell: It comes back, for me its wrestling. When I was wrestling it was not, I don't know, there's different mentalities right. And I did a podcast on this one time and I think I offended some people, so I apologize in advance, but if you're in a band and everyone gets together and you play together and you harmonize, it's beautiful. When you're a wrestler you don't do that. You know, you walk in everyday and you're like, those are the two guys I have to beat to be varsity. And then after you do that, you walk in and you're like, “Okay who are the people I have to beat to be in the region champ, and then the state champ, and then the national champ?” So for me, my entire 15 years of my life, all my focus was like, who's the next person on the rung that I have to beat? And it's studying and learning about them and figuring their moves and figuring out what they're good at, what they're bad at so we can beat them. Then we beat them and go to the next thing, and next thing, and next thing. So it was never negative for me, it was competition. Half the guys were my friends and they were doing the same thing to me, we were doing the same thing to them. I come from a hyper competitive world where that's everything we do. And I feel bad now, because in business, a lot of people we compete against aren't competitive and I forget that sometimes, and some people don't appreciate it. But that's the drive. It's just like, who do we, if I don't have someone to, if there's not someone we're driving towards, there's not a point for me. Andrew: And even if they're, even if I was hurt, “I accept it, I'm sorry you're hurt, Andrew. I still care and love you. We're going to crush you.” That's still there. Russell: And I had someone, so obviously InfusionSoft was one of our people we were targeting for a long, long time and I had a call with Clayton and someone on his team asked me, “Why do you hate Infusion Soft so much?” I was like, “I don't, you don't understand. I don't hate, I love Infusion Soft. I'm grateful for it. I'm grateful for Lead Pages, I'm grateful for….” I told them, have you guys seen the Dark Knight, my favorite movie of all time? And it's the part where Batman and the Joker are there and Batman is like, asks the Joker, “Why are you trying to kill me?” And the Joker starts laughing and he's like, “I'm not trying to kill you. The reason I do this is because of you. If I didn't have you, there's no purpose behind it.” So for me it's like, if I don't have someone to compete against, why are we playing the game? So for me, that's why we're always looking… Andrew: It's not enough to say, it's not enough to just say “we're playing the game because we want to help the next entrepreneur, or the next person who's sick and needs to create…” no, it's not. Russell: That's a big part of it, but like, there's something… Andrew: Yeah, but it's not enough, it's gotta be both. Russell: My whole life there's, the competition is what drives me for sure. Andrew: And just like you're wrestling with someone, trying to beat them, but you don't hate them. You're not going to their house and break it down… Russell: Everyone we wrestled, we were friends afterwards. We were on the same Freestyle and Greco teams later in the season, but during, when we're competing, we're competing and everyone's going all at it. Andrew: Everyone's going all at it. That's an interesting way to end it. How much more time do we have? How much more time do we have? I'm going to keep going. Can I get you to come up here John, because I gotta get you to explain something to me? So I told you, I was online the other day, yeah give him a big round. I was online the other day, I don't even know what I clicked, I clicked something and then I saw that Russell's a great webinar person, everyone keeps telling me. Well, alright, I gotta find out how he does it. So I click over, “Alright, just give your email address and you can find out how..” Alright, I'll give my email address to find out how he became such a great webinar presenter. “Just give a credit card. It's only $4.95, so it comes in the mail.” It comes in the mail, that's pretty cool. Nothing comes in the mail anymore. Here's my credit card. It goes, “Alright, it's going to mail it out. Would you also like to learn how to use these slides? $400.” I go, no! I'm done. Russell: Welcome to the funnel. Andrew: Welcome to the funnel. I'm done. But I'm going to put in Evernote a link to this page so I don't lose it so I can come back. I swear. I did it. And this is my receipt for $4.95. Don't you ever feel like, we're beyond this? We're in the software space now, we're competing with Dropbox, we're not competing with Joe Schmoe and his ebook. And you're the guy who sold the, who bought the ad that got me. John: I know. Andrew: I asked you that. Do you ever feel a little embarrassed, “We're still in the info market space.”? John: No, I think it's the essence of what we do, of what Russell does. We love education. We love teaching people. I mean, the software is like the backend, but we're not software people. I mean, we sell software, but we teach people. All these people here and all the people at all of our events, they just want to learn how to do it better. Andrew: I don't believe it. John: Okay. Andrew: I believe in him. I don't believe in you. I believe that for you it's the numbers. Here's why I don't believe it. I'm looking in your eyes and you're like, “I'm giving the script. I'm good, I'm doing the script.” I see it in your eyes, but when I was talking to you earlier, no offense. This is why he does what he does. When I was talking to you earlier, you told me about the numbers, the conversion, how we get you in the sales funnel, how we actually can then modify…That's the exciting part. Don't be insulted by the fact that I said it. Know that we have marketers here, they're going to love you for being open about it. What's going on here? What's going on, keeping you in this space? John: Okay, from my perspective. Okay so, initially it was self liquidation on the front, which is what I was telling you. It was the fact that we were bootstrapped, we didn't have money to just like throw out there. We had to make sure we were earning enough money to cover our ads. And Russell had all the trust in the world in me, I don't know why he did, but he did. And he's just like, “Spend money, and try to make it self-liquidate.” I'm like, “Okay.” So we just had to spend money and hope that we got enough back to keep spending money. Andrew: And self-liquidate means buy an ad today and make sure that we make money from that ad right away and then software. John: Yeah. Andrew: And then you told, and then software's going to pay overtime, that's our legacy, that's our thing. And you told me software sucks for selling. Why? John: Software sucks, yeah. Andrew: Why? Everyone who's in info, everyone's who in education says, “I wish I was a software guy. Software is eating the world, they're getting all the risk back.” I walked through San Francisco; they think anyone who doesn't have software in their veins is a sucker. John: I asked the same thing to myself, you know. I was running ads, I'm like why can't I just run ads straight to the offer? Why do I have go to these info products? I want to get on the soft…. And then I was like, I feel like it's kind of like marriage. Like it's a big thing to say like, “You probably already built websites, but come over, drop everything you're doing and come over here and build websites over here on our thing.” And it's like, that's a hard pull. But “Hey, you want to build webinars? Here's a little thing for $5 to build webinars.” Now you're in our world, now we can talk to you, now you can trust us, now we can get you over there. Andrew: Got it. Okay, and if that's what it takes to get people in your world, you're going to accept it, you're not going to feel too good for that, you're just going to do it and grow it and grow it. John: Yeah. Andrew: What's your ad budget now? See now you're eyes are lighting up. Now I tapped into it. John: We spend about half a million a month. Andrew: half a million a month! John: Yeah. Don't tell the accountant. Andrew: Do you guys pay with a credit card? Do you have a lot of miles? John: Yeah, we do. In fact…. Andrew: You do! How many miles? John: In fact, the accountant came into my office the other day and said, “Next time you buy a ticket, use the miles.” Andrew: Are they with Delta, because I think you guys flew me out with Delta. John: Yeah, American Express is where we're spending all our money. Andrew: Wow. And you're a partner too? John: Yeah. Andrew: Wow, congratulations. John: Thank you. Andrew: I don't know you well enough to ask you if you're a millionaire, I'm just going to say congratulations. Give him a big round. John: Thank you. Andrew: Wow, you know what, I actually was going to ask the videographers to come up here. I wrote their names down, I got the whole thing and I realized I shouldn't interrupt them, because they're shooting video. But I asked them, why are you, they had this career where they were flying all over the world shooting videos for their YouTube channel. I'm sorry, I forgot their name, and I don't want to leave them out. Russell: Dan and Blake. Andrew: They were shooting YouTube videos, they were doing videos for other people. I said, “Why are you now giving it up and just working for Clickfunnels all the time? More importantly, why are you so excited about it?” And they said, “You know, it's the way that we work with Russell.” And I said, do you remember the first time that you invited them out to shoot something? What was it? Russell: It was the very first Funnel Hacking Live we ever had, and probably 2 weeks prior to that, one of our friends had an event and Dan had captured the footage, and he showed me the videos. “Did you check out my Ven Video?” I'm like, “Oh my gosh, that was amazing.” And I said “Who did it?” and he told me. So I emailed Dan and I was like, “Hey, can you come do that for Funnel Hacking Live?” And he's like, “What's Funnel Hacking Live?” So I kind of told him, and he's like, “Sure.” And it was like 2 weeks later and he's like, “What's the direction?” and I was like, “I don't know, just bring the magic man. Whatever you did there, do that here.” And that's kind of been his calling card since. He just comes and does stuff. Andrew: Bring the magic. He wants to have those words painted on the Toronto office you guys are starting. Literally, because he says you say that all the time. And the idea is, I want to understand how you hire. The idea is, “I'm going to find people who do good work, and I'm going to let them do it.” What happens if they wouldn't have done it your way? What happens if it would have gone a different direction? Russell: I see your question, and I'm not perfect. So I'm going to caveat that by, some of the guys on my team know that I'm kind of, especially on the design and funnel stuff, I'm more picky on that, because I'm so into that and I love it. But what I've found is when you hire amazing people like Todd for example, doing Clickfunnels. The times I tried to do Clickfunnels prior, build it was like, me and I'm telling developers, “here's what to do and how to do it.” And like there's always some loss in communication. With Todd, he's like, “I know exactly what I would build because I want this product too.” And then he just built it and he showed me stuff. And I'm like, “That's a good idea.” And he's like, “I did this too.” And I'm like, “That's a good idea.” And it's so much easier that way. So when you find the right people, it's not you giving them ideas, it's them coming to you with the ideas. And you're like, “that is a good idea. Go do it.” And it just makes, takes all the pressure off your back. So for us, and it's been fun because I look at, man, the last 15 years of all those different websites and the ups and the downs, the best people have always stuck. So we've got 15 years of getting the cream of the crop. It's kind of like, I'm a super hero nerd, but it's like the Avengers, at the end of, when Clickfunnels came about we had this Avenger team of people. And we're like, now we've put in our dues, now it's time to use all of our super powers to do this thing, and it all kind of came together. Andrew: Build it and build it up. And then as you were building it up, you then went to Sales Force. You guys invited me, you said, “Hey Andrew, we're in San Francisco, you're home town. Do you want to come out?” I said, “I'm going to be with the family.” And you said, “Good. Being with the family is better than hanging out with us.” But I still said, “What are you guys doing in San Francisco at Sales Force?” Because sales people don't need landing pages, yet you guys will probably find a way for them to need it. Then I saw this, this is the last video that I've got. There's no audio on it. I want you guys to look at their faces as they're looking up at these buildings, walking through the Sales Force office. Look, they're getting on the motorcycles in the lobby. They're looking all around like, “Oh gee.” Counting the buildings that are Sales Force labeled. Look at that! What are they doing? Not believing that this is even possible. And then just stopping and going, this is dream force. This is your dream. What did you get out of going to sales Force's event and seeing their office? Russell: Honestly, prior to Sales Force, I was kind of going through a weird funk in my business, because it was like, again there was the goals. So it was like, okay, we're going to do a million bucks, and then we did that. And then it's like, let's make 10 million a year. And then 50, and then this year we'll hit a hundred. And like, what's the next goal?  A billion, because a hundred million, 2 hundred million is not that big of a difference. And it was just kind of like, what's the point, what's the purpose? We've grown as big as any company that I know. And then last year, Dave and Ryan had gone out there and they were telling me stories like, “There's 170,000 businesses here.” And they were telling me all these things, and it sounded cool, but I didn't, and they were going crazy. You have to see this so you can believe it. But there's something about the energy about seeing something that makes it real. So this year I was like, I want to go and I want to see Benioff speak. I want to see the thing, the towers, I want to just understand it, because if I understand it, cool. Now we can reverse engineer and figure out how we can do it. So for me it was just like seeing it. I think in anything, any, as entrepreneurs too, if you're people believe that you can do it, you'll do it. If you believe you can lose weight, you'll lose 3eight. If you believe you can grow a company, and I don't feel like I believed that the next level was possible for us until I saw it. And then I was like, oh my gosh, this is not ridiculous. Benioff's not, none of these guys are any smarter than any of us. It's just like, they figured out the path. It was like, okay let's look at the path. And then let's look at it and now we can figure out our path. Andrew: And seeing it in person did that for you? Russell: Oh yeah. It makes it tangible, it makes it like, it's like your physiology feels it, versus reading a book about it or hearing about it. It's like you see it and you experience it, and it's like it's tangible. Andrew: I told you, I asked people before they came in here, “What are you looking for?” and a few of them frustrated me because they said, “I just wanted to see Russell. I just want to see the event.” I go, “Give me something I could ask a question about.” But I think they were looking for the same thing that you got out of there. And I know they got it. I'm going to ask them to come up here and ask some questions, and I want to know about the future of Clickfunnels, but first I've got to just acknowledge that, that we are here to just kind of pick up on that energy. That energy that got you to pick yourself back up when anyone else would have said, “I'm a failure of a husband, I can't do this.” Go back. The tension that came from failing and almost going to jail as you said, from failing and succeeding, and failing again. And still, that is inspiring to see. I want to give the whole Clickfunnels family a big round of applause, please everybody.

Episode three is all about three amigos coming togther and sharing what its like serving in todays military (Active and Reserve). Get ready to hear those bootcamp stories and learn all about Kevin's "Juicy Korean babes"! If you have served or ever thought about serving or just want to chew the fat with us then stop wasting time and press play already. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/p-pmcrew21/support

Episode 165 is here and we've got dueling Definitely Not Main Hosts! Flow Euphoria and Joe Schmoe! We talk crazy internet things; Randy delivered bread; The problem with toilet seats; Queen of Canada; Dick of the Week with 39 wives; TWYD - weird OnlyFans; War Machine (and not the one you're thinking of; CT is legalizing; and many more shenanigans. Be sure to check this episode out before any other!

Celina is joined by Felicia to address the questions they loose sleep over: When/ is it acceptable to fart in front of your significant other?; Is it possible to start a new relationship during Covid ; Gifts from exes- keep, or burn Mr. Cuddles ? But the most important one being, who the heck is Joe Schmoe off the street, and why do we all know that phrase but don't know where it came from ? They story tell on how to see if someone blocked your phone number, and the episode closes with Sunday school, where they provide healthy dating advice on avoiding codependency. Featured cocktail: Spiked Strawberry Milkshake, for the kids at heart, or those looking to cool off on a sunny day! Watch me blend it fresh on the socials- @sunnywithashot

BAD LUCK LOTTERY • Misty and Ike (its a podcast) #mistyandike​​Be sure to Like, Subscribe and Share!Subscribe- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClFbXhdG_VR22nD5yFNluwgEpisode 189 • BAD LUCK LOTTERY!Everyone wants to win the lottery!  I  mean, it seems like a dream come true, right?  One day you are just an ordinary Joe Schmoe and the next day a multi millionaire.  But...there's a dark side to winning the lottery that a lot of people don't know about!  Some lottery winners believe they are cursed after winning.Misty and Ike deep dive into some stories of things that have happened to past lottery winners, some just plain bad luck and some just plain stupidity.

Are you worried that you aren’t ‘worthy’ to raise capital from people because you don’t have a bunch of deals under your belt already? How can we be compete for raising capital with someone who has 100 deals worth of experience?  Good news…you can!  Checkout: Raising Capital Without Rejection Full-Day Workshop (Online): https://investorattractionworkshop.com/ What you’ll learn from today’s episode: Learn how even one or two deals under your belt is all you need to raise money  Discover why an investor will choose you compared to someone with many more years and dozens of deals worth of experience  Find out why it can be helpful to you to tip the favor on your investor partner on your first couple of deals  Resources/Links: Are you looking to attract investors and raise capital for your deals? Get a complimentary copy of Dave Dubeau’s newest book, called ‘The Money Partner Formula’. Get your PDF version at investorattractionbook.com.  Join me for one of my upcoming live one-day virtual workshops. You can register here: https://investorattractionworkshop.com/  Topics Covered:  00:22 – Why you feel inadequate when you have 2 to 3 deals under your belt compared to others with hundreds  01:01 – Why it is important that the level of experience you have is relative and to have deals that are self-financed  02:56 – How having two or three deals under your belt is like being in kindergarten and how a kid in second grade is much smarter than you  04:33 – Why someone will choose to invest on you with two or three deals compared to someone with 122 deals  05:21 – How it will help you to tip the balance in the favor of your investor partners on your first couple of deals  Key Takeaways:  “But the level of experience that you need, is really, really relative. To be clear, I don’t recommend that you necessarily run out and raise capital from other people for your very first deal. I do think that you should have at least a couple of deals under your belt that are self-financed. That is ideal, okay. But if you’ve got those couple of deals under your belt, then there shouldn’t be anything stopping you from using other people’s money and bringing on investor partners, money partners into your deals.” – Dave Dubeau  “The vast majority of the people that we’re probably going to be working with as our investor partners. They don’t have any experience with real estate investing. So if you’ve got one, two, or three successful deals under your belt, then you’ve already got your credibility, you’ve already got all the experience you need because you are light years ahead of the folks that you’re going to be working with.” – Dave Dubeau  “If you’re focusing on the folks that I recommend that you focus on, you already have a pre-existing relationship with your prospective investors. Joe Schmoe doesn’t have that relationship. So in other words, these people already know you, they already like you. Now we just have to work on them, trusting you whether they trust you or not, with their money for investing in your deal. And again, with one, two, or three deals under your belt, you’ve got enough experience. If you do this, right, you can show them why they should trust you.” – Dave Dubeau  Connect with Dave Dubeau:  Property Profits Podcast  www.davedubeau.com  www.investorattractionworkshop.com  Facebook  LinkedIn  Do you like the show? Great! Please rate and review it on iTunes.

This week Shannon scares Emma with planes and gigantic crabs in retaliation for all the times Emma has made her cry to tell the incredible story of Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan, who disappeared in the Pacific in the 30s. Were they stranded and eventually eaten by crabs? (ew. no thank you.) Were they captured? Sucked up into space? Come listen to our theories and all of our shoutouts to Tom King, archeologist extraordinare! Sources: Wikipedia The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery: General overview and in-depth evidence list National Archives MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE  Half of the National Geographic website: disappearance theories, colossal demon crabs, forensic puppies, plane theories, and discredited photo. NBC News here and here Insider Royal Museums Greenwich USA Today ZME Science

Say What? We're talking about the craziest Disney parks rumors ever heard from bus drivers, cast members, and Joe Schmoe on Main Street USA. But first, travel news, including DCA Food and Wine fest deets, how to snuggle up with poultry in New Mexico, and the grumpiest festival east of the Mississippi. Grab your salt shaker and tune up your lie detector, it's time to hit the trail with the Gold Key Adventurers Society!   Links: DCA Food and Wine Fest, “A Touch of Disney” details http://bit.ly/DCAFoodFestDeets  How not to get into Hawaii during a global pandemic http://bit.ly/DontDoThisGKAS  Disneyland Grand Californian: Disney Vacation Club Opening Dates http://bit.ly/GrandCaliDVC Harry Potter films touring exhibit going around the world http://bit.ly/HPTouringExhibit  Exciting new package deals at Universal Orlando Resort http://bit.ly/NewUORPackage New Mexico Chicken Spa, cuddle with puppies and chickens http://bit.ly/NMChickenSpa  Freaky Festivals:Grumpy Old Men Festival, Wabasha MN http://bit.ly/GrumpyOldMenFest    As always, a huge thank you to our sponsor, Key to the World Travel. For all your travel needs, Key to the World's expert travel advisors are standing by. Make sure you tell them the Gold Key Adventurers sent you! Thanks to Outer Vibe for the use of their song Hoka Hey off of the album Hoka Hey as the intro and outro of our show. For tour dates, merch, music and more, check them out at www.outervibe.com. Don't forget to  subscribe to the show to make sure you don't miss a single week of adventure. While you're at it, how about leaving us a rating and review? Word of mouth is the best way for us to grow our society of intrepid adventurers-if you have a friend or two who might enjoy our particular brand of adventure and silliness, send them our way. The Gold Key Adventurers Society is always looking for new members! Find all our episodes, links and info at https://www.goldkeyadventurers.com Show The Gold Key Adventurers some love by buying the hosts a coffee (or two or ten?) at https://bit.ly/KofiDonateToGKAS Remember, life is short and the world is wide. So go have an adventure!

Well helllllo there big boy, how are you doing? It will sure be nice to see an old familiar like Galactus in this issue. I mean, we have been inundated with with a mess of characters of mysterious origins or deep Marvel past, so it will be nice to have an old familiar. We need a big, and I mean BIG star to show up and set this Power Pack ship right. And the big purple people and planet eater is just what the doctor ordered. Wait.....that is it. Like a few panels and the gifting of a parting gift. What is this nonsense! I want a planetary visit I want an invasion! I want a comedic misunderstanding where he walks in on someone changing! I want my MTV! Instead, it seems that I just get some mysterious Joe Schmoe, creeping up in our favorite spaceship, with our favorite unconscious little boy. Yeah, bring on the lounge songs after your free spa day on Friday. I mean...WHO IS THIS GUY? Ok. Not a big fan of any of these rando's in the comic, but if you can give me an alien packing a very large Terminator type gun, you will have my attention for a moment. I am just hoping that he is on his way to have a talk with some of the creative team. At this point, we really do not know who is doing the most heavy lifting on this book. It probably is the fans, wanting something new or better than what we are getting. The concept is good, but it just fails in the wrong hands. Speaking of the people who are really upset, I think we all nee to take a moment for Jim Power. Just take a look at this poor guy. One day, he has a wonderful beard, full of life and wonderful texture, then the next day...just a mustache. Why, I bet tomorrow it comes back...with a vengeance. We shall have to see. Oh, also he just found out his kids have super powers. We will continue to look for and celebrate the positive as we move forward with this book. Sometimes it will take a really big energy blast to keep us on track, but that is OK. Sometimes we need to have a swift kick in the script to keep us in line. And on this disturbing note, and picture, let's take our leave of our fair heroes. They have got their hands full with this new team, and Alex's changes and other stuff. Let's just take a break for now, shall we? Don’t forget to support us on Patreon, https://www.patreon.com/JeffandRickPresent.  We have started to release monthly episodes for our Energizer and greater tiers. We are covering the alternate versions mini-series that started in 2005.   To view the art from this issue, check out our website: https://jeffandrickpresent.wordpress.com/2021/02/28/power-pack-58-star-struck/ You can also subscribe and listen to us on YouTube!  We also have some merchandise over at Redbubble. We have a couple of nifty shirts for sale. https://www.redbubble.com/people/jeffrickpresent/?asc=u Our show supports the Hero Initiative, Helping Comic Creators in Need.  http://www.heroinitiative.org/ Eighties Action by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3703-eighties-action License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Tyrant by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/5031-tyrant License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Brendan Kane is no Joe Schmoe. He's one of the go-to guys I turn to for effective strategies on how to use attention-grabbing storytelling to build more engagement and have a bigger impact with my messages. The man is brilliant. He's helped mega stars like Taylor Swift grow their social following, and even built a personal following on Facebook of a million real fans... in a single month! I learn something new each time I talk to him. And today, he'll share some of his most effective strategies for growing your brand (plus some mind-blowing discoveries about human behavior.) So buckle up! You'll discover: How a short boredom spurt led Brandon to stumble on a hidden golden opportunity that allowed for his first major breakthrough (7:32) Struggling to form a new habit? Here's the single most common mistake people make when trying to foster new, empowering behavior (doing this guarantees you'll find it extremely hard to follow through on your wishes… here's how to avoid it altogether) (20:20) How to use the all entrusted 'IKEA effect' to inspire your audience to CRAVE consuming your content & investing in your brand (16:35) What NEVER to do in the first few seconds of your hook… unless you want your content to pass through your audiences' feeds like a ship in the night! (52:12) One mind-shattering marketing lesson I stole directly from MTV's founder, Robert Pittman (PLUS --- the ‘value-fountain' positioning trick I learned firsthand from elite marketer Eben Pagan... and why it is a must-do if you're looking to gracefully take your customer further up your value ladder) (22:23) Brandon's proven blueprint to go from ‘zero to hero' and build a massive following that engages with your brand (note: this is the very same framework Brandon has used to supercharge his own social media growth in a matter of days! Use wisely) (40:13) Check out Brandon's book here: https://bit.ly/3aDunYG

In the Sherpas Cave this week we are joined by Matt Waller. Matt Waller is the Senior Manager, CPA at Henry + Horne. He has a lot of experience with banking, auditing, and reviewed financial statements. Matt will share his expertise with us about the types of records you should keep and how to be prepared for anything that might come your way. TRANSCRIPTION: Speaker 1: From his first job flipping burgers at McDonald’s and delivering The Washington Post, Craig Willett counts only one and a half years of his adult life working for someone else. Welcome to The Biz Sherpa podcast with your host, Craig Willett. Founder of several multimillion-dollar businesses and trusted advisor to other business owners, he’s giving back to help business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs achieve fulfillment, enhance their lives, and create enduring wealth. The Biz Sherpa. Craig Willett: This is Craig Willett, The Biz Sherpa. Welcome to today’s episode. I’m grateful to have with me, Matt Waller of Henry+Horne. He’s a Senior Manager at Henry+Horne, and he has a lot of experience with accounting, banking, auditing and reviewing financial statements. And I’m hoping that today he’ll be able to share with you a lot of his expertise to help answer some of your questions about the types of records you should keep and how to be prepared for anything that might come your way. Welcome, Matt. Matt Waller: Thanks, Craig. Thanks for having me and I’m excited to be on my first podcast here today. Craig Willett: Good. Well, we’re glad that you chose The Biz Sherpa to be your first podcast. Thanks for joining us. You know Matt, often business owners—I’ve seen it several different ways being a CPA myself or former CPA, I don’t practice—often they realize they have a need for a lender and all of a sudden they kind of pick up the phone and call you and say, “My bank needs a balance sheet and an income statement. I can kind of show them an income statement, but I don’t know what a balance sheet is.” How do you recommend— especially businesses that are starting out—what they should do from day one to help them keep track of not only income and expenses, but keep track of their cash and everything else? Matt Waller: Yeah. It’s pretty amazing sometimes what we see in practice and you described it perfectly. The panic of all of a sudden, “I need something, I need to figure all of this out.” And that’s definitely not the way we recommend business operate. It’s hard sometimes when you’re just starting out, you know, new business, you’re focused on what you’re trying to do. It’s what you’re passionate about we hope, you’re very focused on day-to-day operations and maybe you’re not an expert in finances. When we come into that and it depends on the size and scope of what we’re dealing with, but sometimes things can be as simple as Excel spreadsheets. Generally don’t recommend that, unless it’s a really low transaction business and that’s generally what you might start with. But there’s some really basic things that we talk to clients about when you’re getting into starting a business. It may be as simple as, “Open a separate bank account.” Craig Willett: I think the IRS would like that too. Matt Waller: Right. Craig Willett: They know what you intend is to be business versus personal. Matt Waller: Right. So a lot of people just start out their business and it’s their personal account and they’re running expenses through, and then sometimes they’re not tracking it. And then at the last minute they have to sort it all out. It’s hard to remember what you did six months ago, let alone six weeks ago. Craig Willett: Yeah. And the older I get, the harder that is. Matt Waller: Yeah. Craig Willett: Believe me. Matt Waller: “Open a separate bank account.” Maybe it’s just, “Open a credit card where you track your expenses.” There’s a lot to learn. Craig Willett: A separate one where you just keep business expenses on there. Matt Waller: Right. If you don’t open a separate bank account, at least you use a credit card to track those expenses. There’s lots of low fee credit cards that you’re not paying a lot, but it just makes the record keeping for that a lot easier. We’re fortunate to live in the era we’re in that everything’s at your fingertips, right? Craig Willett: Right. Matt Waller: You can do a Google search, Small Business for Dummies, it’s that book. But I think it’s really important to get that basic knowledge and say—some people don’t even really know what a balance sheet is, what an income statement should look like. It’s some of that real basic knowledge and it’s available out there. Every keystroke you can find something. Craig Willett: What about aids to help you besides an Excel spreadsheet? Are there software packages that are fairly inexpensive for a business owner that may help him or her track their invoicing and their receipts? Because sometimes you send a bill out, you have to always try to remember if they paid—what’s out there? Matt Waller: Yeah. Again, we’re fortunate to live in the era we’re in. There are a lot of options at this point. I’ll throw a couple out there. I’m not a paid spokesman for any of them, just a couple of things. Craig Willett: No endorsements here. Matt Waller: That’s right. A couple of things that we’ve come across. I mean, I’ll throw out—to begin with—QuickBooks is still a great platform for a small business. A lot of our clients in that small business range use that software. It can account for inventory, payroll, some of the more complicated things that you get into, maybe as you scale your business. Obviously that’s a little more expensive than, say there’s a platform—there’s something called Xero, an online platform— Craig Willett: Oh, really? Matt Waller: —that does invoicing, can connect with your payroll system, and it’s very affordable. There’s even free platforms at this point. I believe it’s called Wave—is a platform that it’s $0 to use. You can do all your invoicing through it. It’s a very simple, basic program. Now they get you with fees that they want you to use their payment platform and they get you on a transactional basis, but it’s basically a $0-cost system to run a basic balance sheet. Craig Willett: You bring up a good point. I come from the generation of, you print out checks, you sign them, you keep copies, you keep them in order. But today is more of a digital transaction environment. I get invoices from people and they’re telling me send payment by any number of different— Matt Waller: PayPal, all these different transactional systems. And they’re all linked now. It’s very streamlined and all of these systems have that capability. And the nice part is, I mean, people want—generally now you’re not even sending paper invoices. It’s an invoice through email, and you pay online through a secure portal. All of these systems— Craig Willett: Yeah. Whether by credit card, or ACH, or something like that. Matt Waller: Yeah. I mean, my pool guy sends me my invoice through QuickBooks. It’s QuickBooks online, and it’s through PayPal, and it just feeds right into their system. They never really have to touch anything. It’s a professional-looking invoice. It’s not something you have to print out, all that kind of stuff. Craig Willett: That’s pretty cool. Matt Waller: Yeah. Craig Willett: So you recommend, “Look into these, use the technology because it makes it easier.” One, for you to get paid. A platform like that is you don’t have to wait for the mail to deliver or not deliver it. We all have had problems with the post office. Matt Waller: Right. Craig Willett: And we don’t have to wait for the time lag of payment. “Oh, I’ve got to print out a check. They have to be in town.” Instead, you could be in Hawaii when your pool guy sends you the invoice and you could make the payment from there. Matt Waller: That is absolutely how it works. I generally come out and do something specific and I get the invoice within an hour of somebody being out there and probably the technician has a mobile and probably does the invoice through that. And I pay it same day. Craig Willett: We’re not talking just about record keeping. We’re talking about key elements that are the basis for record keeping, but are also keys to getting paid timely. Matt Waller: Yeah. And so it is two-fold there. It’s feeding all that information into a system that you then have to monitor and understand what’s going into it, but it does certainly facilitate faster payment and more streamlined. Craig Willett: Every business owner wants that. It’s all about cash flow in the early days, because that’s less you’re going to have to invest in your business if you get paid sooner for your work. Matt Waller: Yeah. I mean, “Cash is king,” right? Craig Willett: There you go. Well, not only is cash and accounting important, but a lot of businesses are told, “You need to have a business plan or a budget.” I mean, what is a business plan or what is a budget? How does someone even know how to set that up? And then boy, it seems to me like a pain, I always hate the budget because then I have to see what I didn’t live to. I didn’t live to my plan. Matt Waller: Accountability. Craig Willett: Yeah. That’s what it is. Okay. Matt Waller: That nasty word, but— Craig Willett: That’s part of the word accountant, too. Isn’t it? Matt Waller: That’s right. Those two things go hand in hand, the business plan and a budget. I think they coexist with each other, but there’s definitely nuances. I think a business plan is really important for the owner to get an idea of what your company is. What is it that I do? I laugh. I have a friend of mine, he’s an acquaintance—a very good acquaintance of mine—and I see him at a lot of networking events and he owns a business and it’s technology-based. I’ll see him once every couple of months, and we’ll talk about business, and I’ll ask him, “Remind me again, what it is you do?” And I swear, he has given me a different answer every time I’ve met him, and I still don’t quite understand what he does for a living. Craig Willett: So he’s constantly changing. He’s a chameleon. Matt Waller: He’s either constantly changing or he hasn’t figured out how to describe what it is he does. Craig Willett: What he does. Matt Waller: What his company does. And because of that it’s hard for me to refer work to him. I’m not quite sure what his lane is. Craig Willett: And so that’s part of the business plan or budget process is defining you, your market, your niche market. What you’re really after into a really concise, understandable to not only your customers, but to potential customers. Matt Waller: Exactly. One of the biggest pieces to the business plan is it gives you a sense of, “What am I actually doing and how do I communicate that to the public, my potential customers?” So I think that’s a really important piece. And then it kind of leads into, “Well, this is what I’m doing, now I need to understand how can I make money doing this?” Craig Willett: Right. Matt Waller: And that’s kind of this budget concept. How do you know how to price what you’re doing if you don’t really know what your costs are? I mean, it’s getting that understanding of, What does this business look like from a dollars and cents standpoint? Craig Willett: Right. You need to understand what your overhead is, what your other costs are, not just what your product costs and how to make a margin on that, but to cover all your other expenses. Matt Waller: Right. Right. And to set goals. Where do you want this business to be in one year, in five years? It’s okay to miss budget. These may be aspirational. We tell our clients, “Set realistic budgets,” and you can spend a lot of time talking about the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of those. Craig Willett: Right. But I think the aspiration is important. People need to aspire to something, but you have to bring a sense of realism to it too. Not so much at—no one is going to test you on whether you made your goal. So you don’t want to set your goal too low that you’re not pushing yourself to be successful. Matt Waller: That’s right. It’s that fine art of finding that middle ground of nothing too astronomical that, “I know I’m never going to hit this. So why even try,” or too low that you’re just not trying hard enough. Craig Willett: But if you’re only accounting to yourself, that’s one thing. But if you have investors or a bank loan, you need to be fairly realistic, because if you don’t meet your targets or have a good reason why you didn’t, it will start to undermine your credibility with your investors or your lender. Matt Waller: Yeah. Craig Willett: Will it not? Matt Waller: It makes them nervous. I mean, they expect that you understand the market that you’re in and they’re going to want to know what those plans are, particularly investors. Bankers maybe have a little more retrospective look at your company and look at other things, but an investor is there generally to seek an exit plan and they want to see growth and understand how you’re going to do it. So that budgeting process is really critical, particularly if you’re looking at outside investors. Craig Willett: I think that’s great. So now you have your budget, you have your business plan in place, you’ve got your software, so you can bill and collect, what’s wrong with the theory of, “Hey, I don’t have to really look at my bank statement. The only time I have to worry about my bank account is when I overdraft.” Matt Waller: There’s a lot of things wrong with it. Craig Willett: Okay. Matt Waller: Well, we mentioned that “Cash is king.” Craig Willett: Right. As long as I have money in the bank, what does it matter? Matt Waller: Yeah. Well, probably the biggest thing, to be honest is, that’s where fraud occurs. I mean, if you’re not an inventory heavy company, what’s the only other asset that is susceptible to fraud? Fraud is prevalent in our society anymore. Craig Willett: Yeah. Especially third-parties that could access—unbeknownst to you—your accounts. Matt Waller: There is all sorts of manners of fraud now. And if you’re not keeping an eye on your cash, then you’re not doing yourself any favors. And it’s not a matter of understanding every penny and dollar that goes out— Craig Willett: So reconciling to the penny shouldn’t be my objective, it should be more I’m safeguarding my asset. Matt Waller: Generally. And it depends on the size of the business you’re talking about. If you’re talking about, it’s a five-man operation, you know you’re in there every day, you kind of know what’s going on. If you’ve grown your business to 50 people, to 75 people, you start losing the ability to see that on a day-to-day basis. And it’s important for you to just kind of keep that second set of eyes. I mean, things can happen. Craig Willett: You reminded me of an experience I had early on in my career as a CPA with the second firm that I worked for. There was an automotive repair shop and the client was great at repairing automobiles. And so were his sons and so were the other employees of the business. And they had a bookkeeper, an accountant working in the business. And the bookkeeper at the end of the day—they started wondering, “Why do we keep growing and we keep getting more and more revenue but we still don’t have any extra cash” or “We should have had greater profits at the end of the year?” They hired our firm to look into it and what was happening—I told them to put their bookkeeper on vacation for a week so we could just come in and look. And what he had been doing is there was no cash ever getting deposited into the bank. So the cash receipts at the end of the day, when he would go take them, he would make up the deposit slip and everything was credit card receipts or checks and the rest of it, the cash never made it to the bank. And he was pocketing it. We estimated, based on the invoices we sampled, over $200,000 a year in cash never made it there. When they called him to talk to him about it, he ended up not showing up the meeting, rather committed suicide. Now, I’m sure it was embarrassing to him. I think they would’ve worked something out with him knowing this was a family-owned business and he was like family, wasn’t related. But it just goes to show you if you’re trusting other people to do functions in your business, reviewing once in a while what happened—for them, they could have stopped it a long time ago by looking at, “Hey, we had this many invoices the other day, we had this much in sales and here are the receipts from it, but only this much made it to the bank. What happened?” And it got to be really bold when he started realizing no one would know he took all the cash. Matt Waller: Yeah. We see this happening— Craig Willett: Cash meaning the dollar bills. Matt Waller: Right. It’s good for business owners to understand that just because it goes out in the bank doesn’t mean it always hits the income statement. Where a lot of fraud gets hidden is on a balance sheet and maybe an owner really doesn’t—they’re not focusing on a balance sheet or they understand revenues and expenses, but if you have an accountant in place internally, there’s an ability to hide funds for some time on a balance sheet that you might not even notice. And if you’re looking at the bank statement, you get a sense of where your cash is going. And it kind of leads to the point of why you might have a third-party CPA come in and do financial statements because you want that third set of eyes, because trust goes only so far. Craig Willett: And you don’t want to tempt somebody. The problem is why give them the temptation. Matt Waller: Right. Craig Willett: It’s like somebody sitting in front of me, I’m on a diet and they’re sitting in front of me, a dozen donuts. I know I’m going to eat at least half of them, right then. Matt Waller: Yeah. Craig Willett: I don’t have the self-control. Don’t put the dozen donuts in front of me, because I love Greenfield donuts and I’m going to eat them. Matt Waller: Yeah. Craig Willett: And the same thing, I like cash. I needed a little bit, maybe his intent was, “I was just going to borrow a little bit, I needed something and I’ll pay it back.” And then no one ever asks. So then he takes more and more and you get more and more confidence to do something to where it escalates to where—most people that commit that kind of fraud don’t realize how big it got. Matt Waller: Right. This has been a major talking point in my last six months to my clients, given what is going on in our world with the pandemic, everything going remote. That means controls within and internally are breaking down. People are economically hurting. Your employees might have taken pay cuts. These all create what they call the classic fraud triangle. And I think you’re going to see a lot of fraud, unfortunately, occur or come out within the next six to 12 months in businesses because we’ve created an environment that has all those conditions present. So I’ve been telling clients, “Keep an eye on what you’re doing. It’s really important right now to follow that.” Craig Willett: What role can an outside CPA firm be in helping that? I mean, there’s audits, there’s reviewed financial statements, but are those designed to detect fraud? Or is there something in addition to that that a business owner might want to consider? Matt Waller: Yeah. So it’s kind of a classic misunderstanding a little bit of, “I have an audit done. So that’s for sure going to detect any fraud that’s occurring in my business.” And unfortunately that’s not the case. And that’s not what an audit is designed to do is make sure that every penny has been accounted for. Craig Willett: So why do we pay accountants to do review of financial statements and audits? And usually significant fees. What’s it designed to do then? Matt Waller: It is. It’s designed to identify significant fraud. So that’s kind of the understanding is, we’re not going to find out that somebody has taken $100 from your business. And depending on the size of the company, if you’re a $100 million company, we might not detect $100,000. It’s all relative, but it’s giving you a relative sense of safety. The classic is it’s no material misstatements on the financial statements. We’re providing— Craig Willett: They’re following segregation of duties, they’re following certain procedures that should prevent significant activities that would misstate the financial statements. Matt Waller: Yeah. All of those controls are in place and if they aren’t, we can let you know and give you recommendations of, “This is a bad method or bad practice, here’s what we would suggest in terms of segregating duties or setting up different processes.” Craig Willett: So I kind of derailed you. Matt Waller: No. Sure. Craig Willett: I want to come back to reviewed financial statements and audits. But let’s talk for a second about how can you help a small business owner that wonders if there’s somebody doing something with their cash or credit cards or online payments or something like that is diverting it? Matt Waller: Yeah. So usually the conversation starts with what keeps you up at night? And you listed some of the common areas that are susceptible to fraud, and if they have those concerns, we certainly can come in and design specific procedures to look at those kinds of things. Maybe starting with how do these get processed? Who’s involved in it? Let’s talk to them, put a little heat on them, so to speak. Craig Willett: Right. It’s always nice when someone’s looking over their shoulder, it’s kind of unfortunate the guy that committed suicide. Once he knew somebody was looking over his shoulder, he didn’t need someone to tell him he was doing wrong, he knew what he was doing. Matt Waller: Exactly. Craig Willett: And that kind of looking over kind of either prevents or discourages. Matt Waller: Yeah. Kind of to the idea of the audit, a lot of people think that it’s going to catch all the fraud, so it does prevent fraud from occurring. Yeah. We ask business owners if there are specific concerns. We’re accustomed to that. We have a lot of different procedures, things that we do to be able to go in, test those, and see if we think there’s anything unusual about that and bring it to their attention. Craig Willett: So if someone’s concerned, they ought to do that. Now, back to reviewed financial statements and audited financial statements. When is a good time for a small startup business to consider using those types of outside services in a business? Matt Waller: Yeah. There’s a lot of considerations to it, but generally it’s when the owner is unable to really keep an eye on all functions of his business. It’s an element of size. Generally, that might be related to number of employees, it can be related to revenues. But in general, when it comes from an owner requirement, it’s when you can’t sleep at night. Craig Willett: Okay. Matt Waller: You have a little bit of concern that you want that done. The other big reason is you expect that you’re going to need financing to continue to grow your business or, “I’m looking to add investors to this business.” By and large, those types of relationships are going to want to see at least reviewed financial statements. Craig Willett: Right. So a lot of lenders will put that as a requirement that we want to see reviewed financial statements on a periodic basis annually. And then certainly investors at the sophisticated level, if the dollar amounts are getting up there, they’ll insist on audited financial statements. Whether you’re a public company or not. Right? Matt Waller: 100%. I would say if it’s considered private equity, an audit is all that they will generally accept. Craig Willett: Really? Matt Waller: Yeah. You might have the friends and family around, that’s fine. They’re not going to push those kinds of things on you, or if it’s kind of a personal relationship and you have that going on. But once you get into the outside investor world, by and large, a lot of them will insist on an audit. Craig Willett: So if you don’t like that level of sophistication, I mean, you grow to a certain point. Certain people want only a certain amount. They have a number in mind of what they’re trying to do, and they don’t want to necessarily grow any bigger or they don’t want to take on the responsibility or the accountability to investors. You can control whether you do that or not. Matt Waller: Yeah. Craig Willett: But at some point, once you make the decision to do it, the decision is made for you that you have to do the audit or the review. Matt Waller: Yeah. I mean, if you’re in the fortunate position that you never have to seek lender, financing, or investor financing, kudos to you, and congratulations, that’s a heck of a business. But a lot of them need that in order to scale and grow their business. And the bank, they want that. They need that. They’re de-risking their investment in you, essentially. Craig Willett: Well, and then they’re regulated so they have to have documents in the file saying that they’ve looked at and considered and understand what’s going on in their own portfolio. So they need to understand the business, and the annual performance update of financial statements is a big one. It shows whether things are getting better or worse and if it’s getting worse what the company is doing about it. Matt Waller: Yeah. It’s funny, I often refer to what we do as being the insurance policy over your financial results. If we don’t do a good job when we’re doing an audit or a review, those investors or bankers can come after us and recoup their funds. We’re like an insurance policy to them. We’re saying, “These are good.” And if they aren’t, they’re going to look at us and seek recoupment of those funds. We’re really like in the hot seat. Craig Willett: You’re an insurance policy. Matt Waller: Yeah. Yeah. Craig Willett: Yeah. That’s great. So it gives them assurance and that’s really what it’s about. It’s an assurance function. Matt Waller: Yes. Yeah. Craig Willett: Great. Now, let’s leave—we’re talking about lenders in relation to financial statements. As a CPA, are there times where you find that you’re able to refer your clients to banks? Tell us maybe some experiences because matching the right customer or client to the right lender is important. How do you know how to do that? What businesses are suited to community banks? Which ones are suited to regional banks? And which ones are suited to national banks? Matt Waller: Yeah. This is a conversation we have almost immediately when we get involved with clients of ours. We want to know who your lending relationship is, who your attorneys are, who your insurance providers are, all of these things, because as CPAs, we get to know—it’s kind of your professional services group. We all talk to each other and we all network and we all refer work back and forth. So we have a good idea of who the good players are and who the not so good players are. Craig Willett: Marginal. Matt Waller: Yes, marginal. Usually, as a small business you start out, you probably continue to bank your business with whomever you banked with personally. And that’s generally the Wells Fargos, the Chases of the world, but a lot of times those aren’t the best fit for a small business. To be honest, those large banks aren’t focused on that area. And that’s why— Craig Willett: Even though they have small business lending arms. Matt Waller: They have that function, but I’d say a lot of that’s very automated. That’s how they make money, automation. That’s when you call a hotline and you get routed to five different people and never get an answer. Craig Willett: But as a business owner you want some relationships, some understanding that if there’s something you need, a special need coming up, you need someone to talk to, “What’s the best way to help me with this?” Matt Waller: Right. We don’t necessarily promote that it needs to be a local bank or a regional bank, but often those can have a little more personal touch at that smaller business level. As you grow your business, those large national banks certainly make a lot of sense and they’re very interested in you and they do very well by you. It’s very common for us to get into a relationship with a client. We meet them, we ask them who they bank with. They say “Joe Schmoe” bank. We ask them, “What’s that relationship like? Are you happy?” And again, that may unleash the flood of, “I’ve been trying to get—” Craig Willett: Let me tell you a story. Matt Waller: “—I’ve been trying to get a loan with them. They won’t provide much more than $500,000 line of credit, and they’re not comfortable with it.” And we can say, “Hey, here’s a list of a couple banks I’m familiar with. They do exactly what you guys—”or, “They’re very familiar with what you do. Encourage you to talk to them and we can even provide the healthy lead into it.” And that even makes the bankers a little more comfortable. Craig Willett: More comfortable. Matt Waller: Yeah. Craig Willett: I think they like that. I’ve seen it often in my experience that there’s a company that’s banking with a certain bank. And because they’d been there so long, the bank would make them a loan, but it wasn’t enough. And the bank wasn’t educated and wasn’t specialized in that type of industry and they weren’t able to support them the way two or three other banks I could think of could. What is that like? Can you tell us a story of maybe where you were able to match a better situation? You can name names if you want, but if you don’t feel comfortable, I understand, because we don’t want to trash any particular lenders. Matt Waller: Yeah. I do a lot of work with contractors. Okay. Contractors can make banks— Craig Willett: Construction contractor. Matt Waller: Yes. Construction can make banks uneasy— Craig Willett: Oh really? Why is that? Matt Waller: Yeah, a lot of them. We won’t mention what happened 12 years ago or so. Craig Willett: The financial crisis? Matt Waller: Right. So we’ll get into a relationship—I have several clients that we’re banking with a bank here locally that clearly had become uncomfortable with banking contractors. And the way in which they squeeze their clients is upon renewal, there’s always additional fees that are added on. There’s increased covenant requirements that make it really hard for you to run your business the way that you want. Craig Willett: All of a sudden, now you have to have a certain amount of cash to debt. Matt Waller: Liquidity. Yes. And debt to equity coverage. And all the things that make it harder for maybe you to continue to grow your business. That bank doesn’t want you to grow your business. Particularly— Craig Willett: They want their loan paid off. They want you to go somewhere else, but they don’t want to tell you to go somewhere else. Matt Waller: Right. So we come across that in industry like that and instantly we can tell you, “I know two or three banks that love working with contractors, they have a lot of them, they understand that business. They know what to look for in terms of how to lend to them that make it a lot easier. So don’t think that your bank does it all.” And that would be similar to an accounting firm. Not every accounting firm does construction contractors, and they may not be familiar with it. Craig Willett: They’ll do you disservice when they issue a financial statement. It may not appeal to the bank because it’s not following the conventions they’re used to seeing. Matt Waller: Yeah. I’ve picked up financial statements that clearly—the accountant has one or two contractors. They don’t have them on percentage of completion. They don’t have WIP schedules, all the things that a traditional bank would expect to see from someone fluent in that. Craig Willett: So it’s beneficial to line up in your industry, both as an accountant and a bank. And sometimes that changes. Banks de-emphasize certain industries and don’t want to make new loans. Sometimes you have to move around. I had a key strategic advisor tell me a long time ago—and I’m grateful that he did—he said, “Craig, you have all of your loans with one bank.” They did. That bank would lend me anything I ever wanted. I mean, I kind of had an open checkbook with them and I’m grateful that we had that kind of relationship and trust. And I honored that relationship and always repaid, and I appreciated their trust. But he said, “You know what happens if they get in trouble for some reason and they can’t make the next loan, you need to have a relationship.” And so I went to two other lenders and built relationships there which helped me to some degree. And so you’re right. Sometimes you need to consider not just one bank, but maybe you have two or three. Matt Waller: Yeah. I mean the big banks— Craig Willett: For different reasons. Matt Waller: Yeah. I mean, we see it a lot in the transactional day to day needs of a business—meaning you’re checking your receipts, that kind of stuff—may still reside with some of the big national banks. They have platforms built to really make that very efficient for them, but they may not be your best lender of choice for the business you are. So that’s when you may look to a regional bank or a local bank and it gives you some of that diversity. Craig Willett: That’s great. Now, as a CPA, there’s other services that you can help provide such as—are there times where you sit down with your clients and say, “As we look at this, you seem to be light on your profit margins from what we know,” without disclosing what your other clients do. “Why might that be?” And you can help them try to identify areas that may help them improve their financial performance. Matt Waller: Yeah. Craig Willett: Does that happen occasionally? Matt Waller: It happens a lot. And it’s the most gratifying aspect of what I do. Craig Willett: Because I just don’t bring you a pile of stuff and say, “Hey, give me a financial statement so I can get my loan renewed, and I’ll see you next year when I have to file my tax returns.” Matt Waller: I mean we do, as accountants, live in a very compliance-driven world and we do that function, and we do it well, obviously. But I think the best way we can serve clients is getting into the conversations you just mentioned. And we do have that. The nice part about us as public accountants, I’ve worked with 50 clients at any one point and I’ve worked with 100s of clients over the course of a career. So you see a lot and you really gain an understanding of what works for clients and what doesn’t. And being able to sit down with the owners of those businesses or the COO, CEO and say, “Hey, this doesn’t look right. What are you guys doing here to address your profit margins?” Or, “Your employment numbers don’t look right given what you’re doing. Let’s talk through that.” That gives that opportunity to be that actual advisor that’s much more meaningful to them and it’s much more meaningful to us. It’s where our value resides. It’s not in preparing taxes and audits. There’s a lot of firms that do that. Craig Willett: I think that’s important. And I think that’s key to our audience to have them consider, “When I’m hiring somebody, what can I get additional? What’s the value-add here?” Now that may mean that they pay you an additional hourly rate or a different contract to undergo that, but what a great benefit to a business to have somebody who has financial expertise that they can’t hire full time. Matt Waller: Right. Craig Willett: If they had to hire someone of your level, they’d be $200,000, $300,000, $400,000 a year. There’s no way they could afford to do that, but they can pay you so much an hour for a period of time to help identify those areas and come up with a strategic plan to address them. Matt Waller: Yeah. Yeah. At Henry+Horne, we have 75 plus construction contractors that I work with. That provides a lot of perspective as to how those businesses operate and that’s valuable information to an up and coming startup or whoever it might be. So I think that’s pretty important. Craig Willett: That’s great. And I think that’s something that people should ask because I know it’s often intended but so often you said accountants tend to be compliance-oriented, they’re deadline-oriented, got to get this into the bank by this date, or get this report to the IRS by this date, somebody is always pressing for a deadline. But it’s important, I think, to look at people who are going to say, “All right, we’ve done that, but now let’s sit down and find some other time to talk.” I know some of the best advice my father-in-law gave me when I was starting my own CPA firm—and he had moonlighted doing this when he worked for the IRS doing tax returns for people—he said, “Craig, do me a favor. If you’re going to start your own practice, take an afternoon a week,” this was every week, “Take an afternoon, leave your office and go out and visit your clients.” I went and did that. And you know without fail, I always came back with more work because they had all these questions. They said, “Craig, we’re having to deal with this or we have this. We don’t know how to do this.” Or, “We’re not sure what to think. This is what’s going on in our business. Can you help us?” And I came away with more work every time and I’m grateful for the advice. And so on the flip side, if you’re looking for an accountant, look for one who’s going to take that kind of interest in you to help you. Matt Waller: Yeah. Yeah. I can’t tell you the number of clients that have basically become friends of mine. I mean, there’s certain professional lines that you don’t cross, but I would certainly count a lot of my clients as also friends because eventually they tell you all the secrets. Craig Willett: Well, you have the inside scoop too. You can see it. Matt Waller: Yes. You’ve already looked under the hood. And you can tell them that their kid is ugly sometimes and that’s our job. That is our job. Craig Willett: In a very nice way. Matt Waller: That’s right. Craig Willett: Great. Hey, I have another question about cash flow. I’m just wondering how—if I’m a new business owner, we talked about having bank cash in the bank, that’s fine. As long as they don’t overdraft. I think some people run that way. I know there’s periods of time in my life where I have, because you’re busy enough and focused on what’s important. And if you hire someone and you look at it periodically, you can avoid the fraud or the other situations, but what are some keys to understanding what cash flow is? Just some basics that our viewers and audience can understand about cash flow. Matt Waller: So I’ll start with a quote anecdote, not sure what it is. But if you really want to understand the importance of cash flow, talk to a business that has had problems with cash flow. Craig Willett: That makes sense. Matt Waller: Ask them how difficult it is to call your customers and beg them to pay you early, take calls in from vendors and beg them to pay them later and see how that makes you feel as a business owner. So that’s kind of the cautionary tale of, if you don’t think cash flow is important, think about how hard it would be to do those kinds of things and how that might impact your business, as you mentioned. Craig Willett: From a credibility standpoint to begin with and also just a personal—it’s embarrassing. Matt Waller: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it’s humiliating for these professionals and they may have been very successful and still are perhaps very successful, but to have those conversations is humbling, humiliating, any number of things and hard to sleep at night. Certainly cash flow is one of the most important metrics and the real basic thing to look at. And this would be done in even your lowest level of financial statements compilation, it’s a cash flow statement and it’s really understanding where your cash is coming from. And we always look at the metric of cash from operations. Let’s disregard funds you’re getting from the bank. You might think you have a lot of cash, but it’s because you owe the bank a million dollars. So you don’t really want to look at that in terms of how your business is operating. You really want to focus on, “What is my cash from operations?” Craig Willett: Yeah. I got a line of credit for a million, so I’ve got a balance of $900,000 in my account. Matt Waller: I’m doing great. But eventually, we’ve got to put pen to paper. Craig Willett: And pay the million back. Yeah. Matt Waller: So it’s getting that basic report, and this is something that’s available in a QuickBooks or some of these other softwares that you can click the button and get a cash flow summary. Sometimes it requires a little massaging and it may not be perfect, but it gives you an idea of, “What am I really generating from my day-to-day operations? Is it really that I have cash because I’ve collected on old receivables, but I don’t have any new sales? So I’m going to run into a problem here in the next 60 days.” It’s looking at that level of scrutiny of, “Where am I generating my cash? Is it just that I’m delaying payments to my vendors and that’s why I have money in the bank right now?” There’s a lot of underlying components to cash flow. And that’s why I think it’s important to get that under—it’s a basic statement that every business owner should really kind of get an understanding of. Craig Willett: And if they don’t seek some help to do that because you can kind of see trends that will help you 60, 90 days from now, so that if you have an impending cash flow crunch, you can go increase your line of credit at the bank if you’re prepared and explain to them why. “Here’s what I’m faced with and here’s how I’ll pay you back. Here’s when it will correct.” Matt Waller: Yeah. I mean, getting in front of that is vital for that very reason. Craig Willett: Well, banks can’t react as quickly as they used to too, because of regulation. You can’t walk in one day and go, “Hey, I’ve got to meet payroll tomorrow. Can you get me a loan?” Matt Waller: Yeah. That’s not— Craig Willett: Unless it’s the PPP one. Matt Waller: Those are quick. Craig Willett: Yeah. Matt Waller: We’ll see if we get more of those. Again, it lends to that credibility. Your bank’s going to get uncomfortable if you’re coming to them every six months of, “Hey, I need this or I need that.” It just shows you’re not as business savvy as you probably should be. Craig Willett: Great. One other question that I have in the back of my mind, I often think about, and that’s loan programs that are designed for small business to help those that are new. Well, not necessarily new, but younger businesses or smaller businesses, that’s the SBA loan program. What experience do you have with that and how do you feel about that as a CPA? Matt Waller: You know, it’s a mixed bag I think. The SBA loan program can be beneficial if you really have a good business idea, I would say. They can come with a lot of strings attached and oftentimes there’s a lot of hidden fees within obtaining an SBA loan. It sounds great— Craig Willett: “Hey, I’m going to get a 6% loan, but—” Matt Waller: But there’s fees out the nose perhaps in terms of all the things that you have to provide, you’re likely personally guaranteeing these loans. Craig Willett: And pledging the collateral. Your house. Your equity. Matt Waller: Your house, your car, everything that’s involved in it. Craig Willett: And there’s reasons for that, but you have to understand that you’re doing that when you sign. You can’t just say, “Hey, this is a great loan” without understanding. Matt Waller: Yeah. I think a lot of people for some reason think it’s an SBA loan, it’s meant to kick start any business, that idea that I have. And if it goes belly up, well, it’s kind of this government loan and they’ll— Craig Willett: They’ll find a way to— Matt Waller: … get buried in the trillions of dollars that are up there. Craig Willett: But they’ll be knocking on your door the day you don’t pay it back. Matt Waller: They will. Like I said, I think if you have a solid business idea, a business plan, a good management team, these can make sense. And it’s a good way to get funding for your business if you can’t tap—you don’t have a friends and family bucket or that you haven’t personally saved that amount of money, it’s viable, but there’s lots of cautionary tales out there. Craig Willett: So I take it that you apply it when it’s necessary, but you think that banks in general by their very nature—if they’re serving their community well—they on their own should be able to find a way on their own balance sheet to take these non-government guaranteed ways to help lend to the businesses in the community. Matt Waller: Yeah. I think the SBA program is your last resort. Craig Willett: Okay. Matt Waller: Would be my take on it. Craig Willett: That’s interesting, because there’s some people that feel the other way and I think that’s a great view, but you have a lot of confidence. And I think that speaks to hiring the right team to help you approach that. If you’re going to go approach one, a bank, before you go just straight to the SBA, make sure you talk to some accountants that might be able to open doors for you. And based on your credibility and based on some past operational history of the business, there might be a better solution. That’s less costly and less rigorous. Matt Waller: Yeah. It goes back to, do you have a business plan? Do you have a budget? Do you have financial statements? All these real basic things. You can go in there and walk in there confidently and feel comfortable talking about that. The bank is much more likely to provide you traditional lending than having to go through the whole SBA program. Craig Willett: That’s great. That’s good to know. I think our listeners need to understand what’s available out there and I appreciate your perspective. Now, you can never enter the Sherpa’s Cave without answering one question. What is your greatest failure? And then, what did you learn from it? Matt Waller: Well, this is a tough one. There’s been lots of fail—I fail on a weekly basis, maybe daily sometimes. Ask my wife, I’m sure she— Craig Willett: True confession time. Matt Waller: Yeah. And it was funny. I was kind of aware of the question so I’ve reflected back because you said greatest failures. Man, I have to think about that one. Mine was a true failure. I don’t even know that my parents know this actual fact about me, but— Craig Willett: Are they going to be listening? Matt Waller: I’m sure they’ll end up listening to this podcast. Craig Willett: Okay. Matt Waller: I actually failed out of engineering school when I was in college. I was almost through sophomore year and a really bright kid, but I failed. I mean, that was huge obviously. I come from a background of a very educated family. My dad’s an engineer, my brother’s an engineer— Craig Willett: So it’s the family tradition you had to uphold. Matt Waller: A little bit. And that was when you mentioned kind of, What do you learn from these failures? That was one of the things on the surface. Don’t let other people’s expectations shape your behavior or what you want to do in this world. And it’s not that they provided any overt pressure. Craig Willett: No. Matt Waller: I mean, I love my folks and my family, they were always very— Craig Willett: You seem well adjusted despite the failure. Matt Waller: They were always very supportive. But I just realized that this isn’t—I guess innately, I just stopped being interested in what I was learning there, which is, you get through a certain point but then it’s like, “I just don’t enjoy what I’m doing here and just a lack of effort.” I mean, to be honest, it was— Craig Willett: How did a budding engineer turn to be an accountant? Matt Waller: That was one of the defining things. I was sitting back and saying, “Well, I enjoyed a certain aspect, I got into engineering and why did I initially go there?” I always loved math since high school. Math, for whatever reason, it just sounds stupid, it got me excited. I enjoyed it. Craig Willett: That’s great. Because I hate math, but I’m really good at it. And I don’t really like it. Matt Waller: I just liked how you can always find a balance. Something equals something else and you can kind of come to an answer. Craig Willett: Okay. Matt Waller: And so I enjoyed that aspect of engineering, but then there were other aspects that I just didn’t really enjoy. The science, although it involves a lot of math, just got weird to me. I just didn’t enjoy doing it. Hence the lack of effort of, “I don’t know what I’m doing here.” But that love of numbers and kind of where does that lead me? That was kind of another takeaway of learning about this process of, it’s okay to tell people that you don’t know what you’re doing and literally throwing up your hands and saying, “I don’t know what I’m doing with my life.” That was pretty heavy at the time. Craig Willett: So who turned you to accounting? Or how did you discover it? Matt Waller: I can’t pinpoint a single person in this endeavor. I would tell you that I talked to a lot of people about it. It was friends, obviously not my family because this is the family secret that I’m unveiling. Craig Willett: You’ve heard it here on The Biz Sherpa. Matt Waller: That’s right. But in talking to friends, it was kind of vetting that conversation of, “Well, what do you want to do?” And it’s like, “I kind of like the numbers aspects.” Some of them were business majors. And they said, “Man, accounting, finance really sounds like something you might enjoy.” When I got into it, I was lucky to have one professor, John Dallmus, and he’s still actually a lecturer. I don’t know what his official title is at ASU. But John was the best accounting teacher I’ve ever had. And somehow he made accounting very, very interesting. He wove real-life examples of how businesses use accounting and it really just kind of hit—the light bulb came on and said, “Man, this is a little more interesting than I even thought on the outside. It’s just as nerdy as engineering.” For some reason, this just really hit home. I do have him to thank for some of that and some of the other professors there at ASU, obviously I’m promoting my Sun Devils. Craig Willett: No, this is great. Yeah. The Sun Devils, here we go. Matt Waller: Yeah. Craig Willett: You know this resonates with me. I remember my aspirations were to go to law school. So I was studying political science and economics as a minor. I got into economics and that got in over my head. I remember I got in one course—everything else was good—but I got a D minus in one course. I don’t know why I didn’t get it just a flat out F, but the teacher must’ve felt compassion for me. Because I at least took all the tests and I failed them miserably, but he gave me a D minus and I started thinking, “Do I really want to go to law school?” I wasn’t sure. That created some uncertainty and I talked to somebody about it and they said, “You know, lawyers who understand accounting do really well. So you ought to take an accounting class.” And I hadn’t given up on going to law school yet. So I took an accounting course, and it’s the first time in college that I never had to do my homework. I could just go to class the next day, I understood everything. It all started clicking. It came naturally to me. Although I sit in there and go, “What am I going to do with this career? I really want to do something else.” But it kind of clicked. What I take from this is, right, we have our plan for ourselves. I like what you said, “Don’t let somebody else define yourself.” I almost didn’t do accounting because my older brother was doing it and I didn’t want to do what he was doing. So I almost let that keep me from doing it. But I did. He and I took different paths at some point, both have master’s degrees in taxation and both—he still practices accounting, I do other things. It’s interesting how we don’t have to feel like we have to set out on one path. Just like your friend, who when you ask him every time you see him at a social event, he can’t say what he’s doing. Maybe he’s still evolving. But sometimes in business, we start out with a certain idea and maybe that doesn’t quite work out, but we have to be able to pivot and be able to take that original premise and maybe focus on something bigger, better, and a better opportunity. Matt Waller: Yeah. Yeah. Craig Willett: And it looks like you did because it seems like you fit this well, because if you’re out there helping your clients, introduce them to banks, help them understand their performance compared to others, and help them enhance their success, what a great asset you are to your clients. Matt Waller: I would like to hope so and I will say I went into Accounting and I got straight A’s in every class after that. Craig Willett: Wow. Matt Waller: Just to let you know— Craig Willett: Okay. So you’re not a dropout? Matt Waller: That’s right. I don’t want anyone to think— Craig Willett: Redeeming yourself for your clients who’re going to watch this podcast. Matt Waller: No. This is Mom and Dad. Craig Willett: Okay. Matt Waller: No, no. No. Craig Willett: They didn’t get your report cards? I know now you can’t, you have to get permission to see your children’s report card. Matt Waller: Yeah. I’m sure I explained it away. I was very successful after that, but it’s finding what you love to do. Right? Craig Willett: Right. Matt Waller: And pursuing that avenue. I was lucky to have found that and then find myself in this career 20 years later and really enjoying it. Craig Willett: And I think that’s the secret to success. Being able to love the clients and being able to give them extraordinary service, give them value beyond the dollars that they’re paying. Not only for the compliance that you provide, but provide additional insight, provide introductions that can help them, move their business forward. And I think that’s what makes any business a success and any business owner a success. So I’m glad that you were willing to be a guest on our show today, Matt, I appreciate the time you took to be here. Matt Waller: Thank you, Craig. I really appreciate it and enjoyed it as well. Craig Willett: Well, thanks for joining us for this episode of The Biz Sherpa. I’m sure you will enjoy Matt Waller and we’ll have the contact information for Henry+Horne on the screen if you want to call them. It’s a great firm. One of my sons works there too, by the way. My son Michael. Anyway, this is Craig Willett, The Biz Sherpa. Thanks for joining us today. Speaker 1: Be sure to go to our website to access the resources related to this episode at www.BizSherpa.com. If you enjoyed this show, tell your friends about us and be sure to rate our podcast. Craig would like to hear from you, so share your thoughts in the Facebook community @BizSherpa.co. Follow us on Twitter @BizSherpa_co and on Instagram @BizSherpa.co.

This week we bring to you a very special episode full of laughter and topics. ICS sits down with Joe Shmoe Radio (Alex and Ian) and Might Be News Networks's very own Taylor Cooper for PODAPOLOOZA. Tune in as we shoot the breeze with two other podcasts and dive headfirst into any and all topics. Politics, debates, Rona, concerns over equality, how we discovered porn, sexual predators in high places, and more exhilarating topics are all jam packed to form a semi-drunk conversation that is sure to lift some ears and scratch some heads. Don't sleep on these podcasts!//Might Be News Network//https://mbnnetwork.com///Joe Shmoe Radio//https://www.facebook.com/joeshmoeradio/Our SponsorsFamily First Paintinghttps://www.facebook.com/Famfirzt/Deviant Clothinghttps://www.deviantclothingofficial.com/Use code "fuxwitit" to get 15% off!!Coatesville BBQIG@ CVBBQCOFB: Rob AllenSupport the show (http://patreon.com/incoldstorage)

Mark Ellis is on the show fresh off his brand new All Things Comedy Special and from his wildly popular Schmoes Know YouTube show for a fantastic Episode 15.              

Announcer (00:00): You’re tuned in to the Investing for Beginners podcast. Finally, step by step premium investment guidance for beginners led by Andrew Sather and Dave Ahern. To decode industry jargon, silence crippling confusion and help you overcome emotions by looking at the numbers. Your path to financial freedom starts now. Andrew (00:36): Welcome to […] The post IFB147: How Does the Fed Affect Joe Schmoe appeared first on Investing for Beginners 101.

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Host Chris Wright brings on some exciting guests to make the show extra awesome. Michael House comes on the show again. Graeson Korte decides to make his grand return to the show, for the first time since last spring. They are also joined by a mystery guest. He is called many names, including: Elton Jagger, Chase, Joe Schmoe, John Doe, John Smith, and Lucas. They talk about a myriad of topics including handpans, famous last words, crocodilian zen, and national anthems (particularly those of Canada, the United States, and Iceland). A couple of great quotes are mentioned as well as an interesting moral dilemma posited by Michael (the quantum version of the trolley dilemma). Graeson also goes on a tangent about Halo. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/pointcounterpoint/support

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE CONTENT DISCUSSED...• No Boss Talk: https://nobosstalk.com• Monday Morning Routine: https://www.bethholdengraves.com/routine• The Camp Elevate Facebook Group:https://thecampelevategroup.com• Beth’s Instagram: @bethholdengraves• Beth’s website: https://www.bethholdengraves.com• Profit HER Way Course: https://www.bethholdengraves.com/profit• Ray Higdon Interview:https://www.bethholdengraves.com/rank-makerKEYNOTES DISCUSSED:• Number one is standing on your own two feet and standing up and believing in what you are doing and how we can become confident and that's going to help you to recruit more people. (02:08)• The universe was telling me like you have so many people to help and this is going to be the way, this is the business model that will be the way, because I'm very creative. But that creativity sometimes gets me not crossing the red line. (05:31)• And I don't even want to call it a pitch because people can feel a pitch from a million miles away. But when someone talks to me, I am so, so, so sure that I need to share this message, that I need to help. (08:15)• You've got to do the work and then you've got to keep doing the work of, why you're grateful, why this is working, why you're doing this. To be in it for the long term by the little things, the details. (11:48)• You want to be connected with the people that have the same vision that you have. (16:55)WHEN DOES IT AIR...February 17, 2020EPISODE TRANSCRIPT...Beth:Welcome to ‘You’re Not the Boss of Me’. If you are determined to break glass ceilings and build it your way, this show is for you. I’m your host Beth Graves, and I am obsessed with helping you to not just dream it, but make the plan, connect the dots and create what you crave. Are you ready? Let’s get started.Hey bosses, welcome back to episode number 25, this is Beth. If we haven't met yet, thank you for just pressing play, putting me in your ear buds. My friend Jessica calls them Q-tips. She's like, my kid has Q-tips in his ears, and I literally thought he had Q-tips hanging out of his ears, but she was talking about him wearing his EarPods, what the heck? My kids are probably like mom, get with it. So anyway, you have chosen to listen to this podcast today for a reason and there are so many ways that we find them. I have had divine intervention of what I call the podcast scroll that literally shifted my entire way of showing up in my business because of one podcast. So, I do not take that lightly and I want to thank you. Thank you. Thank you for being with me today.So, I'm going to do a little introduction because I have so many new listeners. I just want to thank you for the downloads, for the reviews, for the people that are out there wearing their boss hats, for all of the campers over in Camp Elevate because this is really truly become a movement of supporting our sisterhood, of standing up and saying that it is okay to choose to build a business that feels aligned, that feels authentic, that doesn't require hustle and grind and it's okay to make more money doing it this way. And so today I want to talk with you about becoming the CEO and innovation versus duplication. Two really big words. I feel like those need to be vocabulary words. Did your kids ever do Wordly Wise? I remember Wordly Wise just to be like, why are everything like that? I can understand anything in a context.And that's probably why I tell so many stories. So like reading, you know, reading, learning with content clues. Well we're teaching reading for you teachers out there. So, I always like to give an example when I'm sharing with you a new idea or something that's not really a new idea that's just resurfaced. So today the big thing I'm going to teach you today or share with you and encourage you to lean into are two things. Number one is standing on your own two feet and standing up and believing in what you are doing and how we can become confident and that's going to help you to recruit more people. And I don't even like the word recruit. You're looking for people as the CEO that are going to share with you the same vision and are going to be a part of something that you're creating.So, I want to encourage you today, and I use the word recruit because honestly, it's a marketing word. So, I have a challenge that's coming up. It's going to be a free challenge. I think we are opening that up the second week of March and we'll make sure that you get on a list for that. It's going to be five days, and it's about recruiting. It's about how to get more people to say yes to what it is you have to offer. And I have some very unique ways that I do this, but I kept saying, I don't want to use the word recruit in the copy, but that's what we look for, right? So, recruit, I want you to think about this. I guess it's okay, but it's what we use in the industry. But I want you to think about this and this is the shift.This is your CEO shift. I want you to consider that you didn't just join this little thing, meaning stop hiding behind the curtain and stop having this conversation with, Oh, if you really understood, it's not like that. There’s people that really make money that does not sound like you have stepped into your power. So today if you're going to make the CEO shift, remember we’re talking about CEO shift in innovation versus duplication, and I believe that a team needs tools and techniques and strategies to duplicate, but I'm going to encourage you have one innovative piece of your business and we'll talk about that. But number one, the very first thing that you need to do is step into why you are going to say, I am proud and excited to show you my courageous journey because the network marketing model is the way that I will.So, I want you to think today, and your homework is this, and if you send them to me over in a DM in Instagram, send them to me on Facebook messenger. Mandy has an email that we use now that's a support email, but I want to know what makes you unique, the five things. Because as you're having a conversation and as you are, do you ever like find yourself holding back? Like I should really be having a conversation with her, with this person. She's my exact energy. She's the exact person that I want to build something with, and I feel an energy. I feel this nudge that this conversation needs to happen. Has that ever happened to you? Have you ever thought that? And then you're like, Oh, what do I say? And then you fumble all over your words and you sound like the crazy lady in the cereal aisle.That's trying to get you to like sell her thing, and it's really not pyramid and it's really this. It's because you haven't leaned into your truth. So, what I'm going to encourage you to do is to take some time and take out your business journal, take out your journal, look at why is this the best model for you? Is it the innovative website that you didn't have to build? I mean, I'm stumbling right now because I don't want to give you my five, because I don't want those to be your five. So, your assignment this week is to journal like why this business, why this company, why this product, why this model? Go back and listen to my podcast with Ray Higdon. I'll put it in the show notes, and he talks about why the network marketing model is the best model. And for me stepping into that, I don't know what happened in 2014 that that day I really think it was divine intervention.The universe was telling me like you have so many people to help and this is going to be the way, this is the business model that will be the way, because I'm very creative. But that creativity sometimes gets me not crossing the red line. And we'll talk about crossing the red line, it means finishing what I start, staying the course, and I have stayed the course. And the reason why is because I have a simple business model that is accessible to the everyday person. That right away you can begin set up shop, make some money and build a community around a value, an emission. And also, then teach sales tools that are easy for people to follow and easy for people to stay consistent and having the foundation in place. So, I want you to come up with, and the big reason is because you may be fumbling on those words, you may not know why you're here.You may not know, what is the value of your company? What makes you innovative and different? And it's not a sales pitch, it's what it is to you. So, if I said, I'm going to bring you on this podcast, Kathy, and I'm going to ask you when I say to somebody, why did you choose those shoes? Why do you love to run in those shoes if you're a runner, why do you like Brooks versus Adidas or Nike? Oh, well it has this feature and this feature, and it supports this. I had plantar fasciitis, so I needed this instep. You can talk about why or maybe you just love the bright colored pink or maybe your foot is wide, so we know why we choose certain things. Why did you choose this? Why did you choose the school that your kids attend? Why did you choose your house?What were those features in it? What was important to you when you were choosing your apartment, your house, where you live, your car? We know all of those things, but what was important to you when you chose your spouse? When you chose your partner? What was the value that you wanted in that person? Do you know those things? Because that is when you start to really, really lean into this power of your communication, of your marketing message and your visibility, which is going to be step two of this podcast. So, I want you to take some time and start with something that you know, start with your spouse. Start with maybe the house that you chose, why did you choose a vacation and start to pay attention and notice those things in your decision making. And then you can be a little bit more discriminatory on how you make a decision.And so, you're not just saying yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, that's a side note. But why did you choose the network marketing model, specifically your business? And keep it brief and simple and know it and say it in the car and pretend like you're being interviewed by Oprah. Pretend like you're on this podcast. And I say to you, Mandy, why did you choose that? Like what made you make that decision and then practice it and start with the five bullet points. And I don't even want to call it a pitch because people can feel a pitch from a million miles away. But when someone talks to me, I am so, so, so sure that I need to share this message that I need to help. That woman that was looking for her voice, that was feeling lost, that was feeling stressed out, what was keeping her up at night.And so, I don't just be like, Oh, my gosh, this is so amazing. It's awesome. We have all these things. Yeah, this person did this and this person did this and Oh my gosh, and she lost 32 pounds and blah, blah blah. I want you to know and I want you to be clear, so I want you to journal it and I can't give you those answers because only you can do it yourself. We're going to do some work on that over in Camp Elevate. If you're not in the group, thecampelevategroup.com, it's free. We have so many, so many amazing, amazing thousands of women in there, and some really awesome men, who are showing up for each other. And I do a lot of training in there. So, we're going to talk about that. I want you to journal that and I want you to really lean into it.And as you lean into this, with all of your choices, with all of your decisions, if you look at what is the quality in my spouse that I love so much, and sometimes those good qualities that you chose become the annoying qualities, and like, so one of the things I love about Don is, I love that he takes care of all the little details and he pays attention to those things. He doesn't let things slip through the cracks. And when I wasn't in gratitude and when I wasn't focused on all of the things, in the rich life that we got to lead together, that started to annoy me. Oh my gosh, here he goes again. Did you remember your driver's license? Did you remember your passport? Did you remember this? And I started to become annoyed by those little things when that was truly the big quality that I wanted and prayed for and thought about and journaled about.In the perfect partner for my life. So, I want you to do that for your business. Is this making sense to you guys? So, when you become clear on that, the next piece I'm going to talk to you about in the CEO framework, step into your power. So, before we go to the next point, I literally want you to visualize that you're in a room and it's dark and you're looking for the light and everything's kind of out of place. There's books and there's things on the floor and shoes that need to be put away. And how does that feel? It feels confusing, right? It feels like I can't get started until I clean this up. And then I want you to step into this room. I want you to step through the door and I want you to visualize how it feels to be in this clean and open space.However, that looks for you. For me, it's stepping into this room that has like a rich, a rich rug that is deep jewel toned. It has meditation corner; it has a clean desk that has like some very beautiful pens and books. And it's just inviting. I've got my microphone there and I walk into that space. That's what I've done with my office, is walked into a space and created a space where I could create. So, I want you to think about that in your business. Does your business feel like that cluttered office where you don't know what to do next? When you get clear on what you do and why you're doing it and how you're going to share with those five bullet points and you journal about it and you really, really lean into it. You guys, you have to do the work.I can't tell you the five. You've got to do the work and then you've got to keep doing the work of why you're grateful, why this is working, why you're doing this, to be in it for the long term by the little things, the details. Remember when I talked about Don, why those little things are not going to create disruption in what your daily plan is. So, I want to encourage you and invite you today to walk in, stand up, take a step from hiding behind the curtain in your cluttered room. Really not knowing why you made this choice because you're listening to this podcast because you want to make a shift. You can use this strategy any single time that you need to make a shift. It's going into being clear on what are those amazing, awesome things that had me make this choice and step into it and step into it with clarity so that when you have that conversation, when you're at the running store buying those running shoes and you just have this intuition and I need to like open my mouth and connect with is human and instead of going out and buying a $27 script that's going to allow you to connect and have conversations and recruit and grow your team like crazy.We've all done it, that you literally, we'll have the words the connection because you are so clear on it. So clear. I want you to think about this. I want you to think about the last perfect vacation that you took, and if you had one, and if you haven't, put that on your vision board, and how the sheets felt and what was the service like and what, what did the sand feel like and if, if that woman at the running store when you're buying your running shoes set asked you about going to maybe your places, Punta Cana, and you start to explain it, you have all these ways. She's like, Oh, I'm totally in. Do you have that for your business? Do you have those words? Do you have that? It's because you need to step away from the clutter, clear it out with your journaling, with getting clear on your messaging and don't think, I want Beth to give me her five because my five are totally different and the way that you can do this is to do some journaling prompts.You go back to where you were and where you want to be going or what you wanted less of in your life and what you wanted more of. Whenever I'm looking at, am I going to go in the right directions? I'll say, what do I want to do less of? What do I want to do more of and does that fit my more of what looks like love? What brings me joy and how will I feel? And this is another one that I learned this from my coach, Susan Hyatt, when she talks about not shaming, and this is about food, but how will this feel in an hour? And so, like even when I don't have that conversation, how would that feel in an hour? So, I need to do it now, but I want you to get very, very clear. So, I promised you step two would be how to take this message and then use this in your CEO framework of how you build out your business plan of being innovative with your marketing and your visibility.And that sometimes is social media. Sometimes it might be meeting with a group of almost empty nest moms at a high school. But the next podcast we are going to be talking how we take this work that you're doing. And then we put that into showing up consistently for marketing and visibility and for people to hear your message and find you, which is a huge, huge piece, but I am going to save that. I'm going to actually record that next episode right now while it's on my mind, and you'll have that episode next Monday. So, this week your homework is, this is I want you to think about and journal and really lean into, are you hiding behind a curtain? Are you kind of like in the shadows, not really talking about what you do or are you truly stepping into your power, stepping into finding your voice and committing to that?Are you visualizing? Are you journaling and do you know those five things? Three things, five things, right? Then if I were to say to you, Mandy, what is it? You would be able to say boom, boom, boom, and boom and practice a little bit like why did you choose that shaker cup? And I do this with my brain all the time. Why did you choose that shaker cup? Why do you like that white tee shirt? Why did you choose your spouse? Why do you choose those sheets for your bed? You can always come up with those five things and when you find yourself getting caught up in drama and somebody else's swirling tornado of emotions or boundary issues to start to really lean into, does this feel like love? Does this bring me joy? How will this feel in an hour? And when you know, like I know what my five, I know for my business why I chose my business.I know why I chose to work with women in a mastermind, but I also know what are my five agreements with myself and that they have to fall into place in all of, and we'll talk about all those things on the podcast, but today its business. It is. Why did you choose the network marketing model? Your specific business or if you're a realtor, why did you choose to work with Keller Williams? Why did you choose to do this? Why is it the best choice? Because what you're doing is not going out and recruiting and finding just anybody that says yes and puts up their hand. You want to be connected with the people that have the same vision that you have, and you cannot attract. You cannot have that conversation unless you are very, very clear. So, when I get messages from you and thank you, thank you for sending me those messages that say, I think you were in my head.I think that today you read my mind on this podcast and I think, okay because I churn all about it. I journal about what I went through, I journal about what are the things that when people say to me, I'm struggling here, how can I work through this? I want you to be so clear on why you made that choice. Step into the CEO role. Imagine that you are in, you are you guys, you didn't just join a company and you're like, Hey, I'm Joe Schmo and I'm the such and such oil person. You are Joe Schmoe, who is the CEO of this business that is using the network marketing model to help men and women build their business. You are excited because the product that you are like, think about the product that you get to put into people's hands will give you these results. Do you have clarity?And that is my question. Go on out there and get your clarity. Pull out that journal. It will come to you. And if you're stuck, go for a run. Put on some Beyoncé, go at your most creative time when you are feeling clear and do this work and I promise you that you will get such clarity on your message, such clarity on your mission. Then when you are trying on those running shoes and you feel this like I am going to have this conversation and you have the conversation and you ask a few questions and she says, well why did you choose, you know, why did you choose what you're doing? You can literally say with passion, with clarity that the energy and the vibration is there. And she may or may not say, Oh Hey yeah, like let me take a look. But you know that you have done your work and then you make a connection on social media.Because she might not say yes right away. You stay connected, you stay in the same space because at some point she may say, gosh, I remember hearing Beth to say that while she was trying on the running shoes, she had such vision like she's so excited about this and I'm really tired of this nine to five or I really need to get some therapy for my son's speech and maybe that's something that I'll take a look at. But you showed up and you had passion and you have vision and you have clarity. So, let's go out and do that today because there is someone waiting for your message. There is somebody that is just sitting there thinking, I can't pay my bills, or I feel disconnected. I feel alone. I didn't know what I needed on that day in 2014 August 6th, I didn't know that I desperately needed to, to have a shift go from selfish to serving.I didn't know what I could contribute financially to our family to change the entire legacy. I didn't know, but it was the authenticity and the excitement around Blair's message that allowed me to enter into this space. And then I became clear on another mission, which was to help serve all of you who are looking to build a business and have that financial freedom and have that clarity around who you truly want to be and show up to be in this world. So, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for being with me today. As always, I am so grateful for our time together and if you want to connect more, shoot me a message about your five things. Come on over to the Camp Elevate Group, and next week we will go into, once you have this message, how you show up with it to start having people really, really curious about what it is that you do and how you can really make an impact by getting this out into the world.See y'all next week.Thanks so much for hanging out with me today on 'You're Not the Boss of Me'. I'm hoping that you've found one thing that you will do today that will allow you to move forward to that big, audacious goal. And I have a favor to ask of you, and that is leaving me a five-star review over in iTunes every single week. I read your reviews. I love hearing what you have to say, and it allows me to bring you more, to get more people to interview that are doing the thing, breaking the glass ceilings, creating what they crave, and helping you with your game plan. So, leave me a five-star review, and when you do, I will enter you to win the 'You're Not the Boss of Me' swag. So, make sure you leave it and we'll reach out to you if you're the winner. Thanks so much for hanging with me today and we'll chat with you soon.

People literally ask me this one question ALL THE TIME… “Allen, how did come up with such a lucrative, safe, and easy way to trade?” I explain it all in my new book Passive Trading, get your free book here  https://www.passivetrading.com/free-book! Option Genius was built with you...the individual trader, the breadwinner, the dreamer, the rock your family depends on ...in mind. Because we know what it takes to become a successful and profitable trader. And that’s exactly what we help you do best. Get your $1 trial of Simon Says Options, our most conservative and profitable trading service here https://simonsaysoptions.com/stockslist-ss-trial-offer.  -- Every single day you get older and older, and this is not something we can stop, but it is something we should be taking advantage of. And that's what I want to talk about in this episode.  It's already 2020. Another decade has come and gone, and it's fun sometimes to sit back and say, "Wow. You know, where'd the last 10 years ago? They go by so fast." Oh, geez. 2010, man. I don't remember everything about 2010. It just seems like the older we get, the less we remember. But 2010, I had to write this down. I had no kids in 2010. Now my oldest is nine, and then we have a seven-year-old and a three-year-old. And I really cannot remember what it was like before them. That's a crazy thing. That was only 10 years ago. But they've changed our life in so many crazy ways that it's unbelievable. 2010 was also the beginning of Option Genius. Option Genius was started in 2009. So it only was about a year old, and I was just getting started with a couple of hundred members, and doing iron condors every day, every month, and just really had no clue. But I mean, we had no clue as to how to grow the business or where it was going to go. At that time, it was just going to be one website, kind of like a lifestyle brand or lifestyle company that I wanted to just use, and earn some extra money, and stay busy. Because I was trading options full-time, making money from it, but wasn't taking very long, and I was getting on my wife's nerves. So she told me very bluntly one day that, hey, you need to go do something otherwise because you're driving me nuts, and that's what she told me. So that was the reason for the birth of Option Genius. And of course, I wanted to help people, so that's awesome too. But really, it was her push that I needed to do something else with my time that led to the creation of Option Genius. Now, at that time, we had one website, one membership. That's all I was going to be. Now we have three memberships. We have two full-scale, very large courses that stand on their own. We have e-books. We have other products that we sell. And I have my Passive Trading book coming out. Still working on that one. Hopefully it'll be out soon. I know I've said that many times, but I'm still working on it. Want to get it just right, but I think maybe I should just get it out before it's going to be another 10 years and I'm still saying the same thing that I'm still working on this book and it's already been two years. Two years that I have been saying that. So I promise to get it out soon. What else? 10 years ago, the U.S. Was just coming out or still in the midst of the great recession. Lending was tight. It was hard to get a mortgage. It was hard to get a loan. It was hard to buy anything on credit. People were scared about what was going to happen to the future. Stock market was kind of ... You know, who knows what it was going to ... Nobody knew. Nobody could tell what was going to happen, and politics was all going nuts. Everybody was fighting, and just a big mess. Now, 10 years later, I take a look at my own self, we have the three kids, changed our lives completely. Financially, we're much stronger. We're much better off in much, much better position than we were 10 years ago. My five fingers are growing. And if you don't know what I'm talking about when I say five fingers, we do have a podcast episode that we did earlier on that covers that. Basically, in a nutshell, it's you got to have five different streams of income that are independent. So if one of your fingers breaks or two of them break at the same time, you still have three that are working and generating income for you while you regrow the other two. My passive trading is doing wonderful. I'm moving more and more towards that. My oil options trading is doing great. I'm very, very happy with those results. Keep learning, keep trying to do new things with that as well. But I keep seeing that the more I try different strategies, the more I try to mix it up or to improve it, it just changes it up. So I got to go back to the basics. Then, the way that we do it is the way that's been working. So even though we tried to improve this ... Okay, can we modify this? Can we change this amount? And we'd do backtesting on it. We find out that the original, the way we're already doing it is what's working the best. So I'm happy about that. My income from investment is growing considerably because the money that I'm getting ... Thank god we have enough to survive. My family, we are not big spenders. That is something that was ... I was very blessed with a wife that knows how to save money and knows how to be prudent with her money. So when she wants to buy something, she can go out and buy it. That's fine. She does. But she's not into name brands. Neither am I. We're trying to get our kids that way. She's not on top of the latest fresh and trends that she has to have a Gucci bag or a Prada bag and everywhere she goes, and she has to have 20 different kinds of bags, and she has to have matching shoes for every outfit and all that stuff. She looks good, but she does it without spending a lot of money. So thank god for me, right? So our expenses are lower than what they would normally be for a family of five. So the money that is saved then goes into other investments. So we've started to invest in other people in terms of people who are starting companies that people that we know or people that have cause that we would like to see. So we're investing in those types of businesses, and the returns have been good from that as well, and that's growing and growing. It's really interesting because the growth or the changes of my mentality over the years is something that I haven't really talked about. But when I started, it was all about I have to make enough money to pay the bills. Pretty much desperation. Now, my wife was at the time was working two jobs, so she was making enough to cover the bills. But being the man of the house, your masculinity is at risk when you're not bringing home the bacon. Now, I know that is changing now and there are a lot of guys who are stay-at-home dads, and that's wonderful. But in my household, my wife didn't want to work. She wanted me to do the job. She wanted me to make the money, and she wanted to not have to work two jobs. So it was on me to, hey, at least pitch in, at least they have the bills. I wasn't paying anything because I was laid off, and I was losing money, in fact, from my trading. So that was my first goal to, hey, start making some money, help around with the household expenses. And then eventually it got to the point where I was able to pay for all the expenses. Then, she quit one job. Then, later on she quit another one. Then we had the funds for her to actually go and start her own business, which is doing very well. So that was a good succession, and she was happy with that. Thank god. So my thinking shifted, right? So it went from first off to being in a mode of desperation, being in a mode of, okay, I need to pay complete attention to this, I'm going to do this nonstop 40 hours or more a week because I need to pay the bills doing this, and so I was on top of my trades. I was learning new strategies. I was backtesting. I was staying on top of the markets religiously. And then eventually, slowly, slowly, slowly, I got the confidence to know what I was doing to get better at my trades, to pick the strategies that worked for me and to really hone in on those strategies and to get better and better and better to the point where then I was comfortable again. I got to the point where, yes, okay, I have a certain amount of money coming in. I am pretty confident that that money's going to continue, and so now I can take my foot off the gas and I can kind of relax a little bit. That's when I got to the point where, okay, I'm chilling. I got money coming in. It comes in, and I spending a little bit of time on them. Still am working and staying on top of the markets but not like I was before because now I have a cushion. Now I have enough of a larger enough trading account where I can be relaxed. And even if I go a month and I lose, I still have the money where I can still generate income from it, and still take out the money, and still be okay. So the stress level, completely different stress level. Completely different mental game at that point. Now it was how could I maximize what I have instead of oh my god, oh my god, if I don't make money I'm going to not eat or whatever, whatever the case is. You don't have to borrow money from my father-in-law to pay the rent or something like that. So that was a complete shift. Mental, emotional, confidence-wise, I was a different person from being a failure at trading to now being actually living the life that I had always dreamed of living. Then, that's when my wife pushed me to start Option Genius. Then I got into ... Basically, I saw myself as a new role. I saw myself as a new person where I was like, "Anybody can do this stuff. Just go ahead and do it. Just learn it like I did." But I found that people needed a lot more handholding, for whatever reason they didn't believe it, or they didn't have the time, or they didn't have the resources to put the time in to learn it. So I think that Option Genius has helped thousands and thousands of people over the years because we've gotten all the emails, we got the testimonials, we have videos of people thanking us, and it's been really a blessing to me. I know I've been trying to help other people through it, but it does provide income and it does provide me with a satisfaction that I'm actually making the world a better place. Because when you're just sitting there selling options, it's great. It's great money. And I feel good that I can make money and I can provide for my family. But I'm not really helping the world very much. I'm not really changing the world. I'm not out there helping little old ladies cross the street or something that would really charge your soul. Yeah, you can take the money and you can go out and help people. You can feed the homeless. You can adopt a child or something. But if you're only in front of the screen and you're just sending out checks, you don't have that same feeling of actually going out and doing it. So by selling options, it's not like you're a public defender. If you're a lawyer, you go to law school and then you actually go and you try to help people that are innocent and you try to get them off. That is you're using your skills to make the world a better place. I didn't feel I was doing that by being a trader. If I didn't sell these options, maybe somebody else would, or maybe it wouldn't even be necessary. But I found something where I can actually go and take income from it. Okay, it didn't help make the world a better place, but it hit and served my needs. So that was great. But now I was getting bored. I got to the point where like this is fun, but now I'm bored. So my wife told me, "Go get a business. Go start your own business. Go help other people," so I did that. So that, it's been a complete blessing. So that was a new phase of my life. So first we had desperation phase. Then we had confident trader by myself phase. Then we had, okay, now we have a company where we're actually have people working for me and we have people that we're helping as members and students, and people asking questions, and me be able to respond and share my knowledge, and not really being a leader in a sense but being more like a teacher or an educator. And that really has helped me feel good about myself in that role. But as time went by, that was great. That was a great aspect. But in terms of my trading, I realized that I don't want to be spending even the time that I am spending on my trades. I mean, you can be doing iron condors. You could be doing butterflies, and calendars, and these type of strategies, and you can dive into the weeklies and you can generate very, very good returns. Whenever we do a butterfly spread, my target is 20% return on that trade. Iron condors, we're looking around 12%. Weeklies, we're looking for 5% a week. That's a lot of money if you can do it over, and over, and over again, which is what we try to do. So that requires a certain amount of time where you're staying on top of it. Now, my ultimate goal in life is not to be a trader, if that makes sense. I'm using trading as a vehicle to get me from point A to point B. But when I get to point B, I might not need the vehicle anymore. I will probably always trade, but I'm not going to be trading for a living anymore. I'm not going to be saying, "Okay, I need $12,000 a month to pay all my expenses. That's how much money at least I need to be making from my trading account." I won't be there. I'll be having my five different, at least five different, streams of income, and I won't have to worry about if I don't trade this month, how am I going to pay the bills. That's where I want to get to. That's where I'm moving towards. So how can I get to that point where I can pay my bills or increase my accounts without having to spend so much time monitoring the markets and looking at what's going on? So that is what I've been working on for the last couple of years. So okay, I know option trading can get me there to the point where maybe I'm just spending three, four hours a month, maybe five hours a month maximum and I'm still earning really, really good returns that's better than anybody else can get or any other investment. But I don't want to be spending 10, 15 hours a week. Does that make sense? So I got to the point where I have money coming in. I want to go out and actually do good with that. I want to get to the point where I'm the one feeding the homeless person, not just writing a check for them. I want to write the check, too, but I want to be able to go out there and actually feed the homeless person, and shake that person's hand, and talk to them, and see if we can help them or whatever. There's just an example. Whatever the issue is. But I want to be the one that can actually go out into the world and make a better place. And if we build a school, I want to be able to go and visit the school and be involved in the process of picking the location and seeing the kids go there. I don't want to be a teacher or anything, but I would like to be able to go and visit it from time to time, even if it's in another country somewhere off in the mountains or something like that. So that is the ultimate what I want to get to. So when I start my foundation, and I've been talking about this for a while, I'm still in the process, my goal is to be able to work on the foundation and be able to help in certain areas that I would like to participate in. So in order to do that, you have to study. You have to research. You have to talk to people. So I believe that I'll be able to get access to certain conferences. Or if you call up the university and you say, "Hey, I want to talk to so-and-so professor about something," if you just say, "I'm Joe Schmoe," they probably won't put you through. But if you say, "Hey, I'm calling from XYZ foundation, they'll be like, "Oh, okay. It's a donor. Get that guy, get the professor on the phone." So that's the whole point. That's why I came up with Passive Trading. That was the whole idea behind it, whereas we want to have something that is stable, reliable source of consistent monthly income. Another aspect that has bothered me for years after the great recession and the financial debacle was that there were a lot of people at that time that were trading iron condors and certain strategies. Then after or during the recession and afterwards, the iron condor, the way everybody was doing it, just didn't work anymore, and so people were lost. People kept doing what they knew without changing. They didn't realize that the market had changed. They saw that, hey, before I used to put on an iron condor and I would only have to adjust it maybe 6 or 7 times out of 12. Now I'm putting on my iron condors and I'm adjusting it 10 times out of 12. They noticed that part, but they didn't realize the reason why and that the market had changed and so they needed to change their strategies along with it. So that bothered me. It's like, "Okay, these people ... " And I was doing the same thing. I had all my money tied up in options, and I was selling options. But the point is if you have a large move in the market, and, let's say, you're using 70% of your account, if you're doing iron condors, or spreads, or whatever it is, if you're only trading in options, if you're only doing options, and there's a large move that catches you off guard and it goes against you, there's a good chance that you can lose 70% of your account or whatever percentage you have in your trades. You could lose all of that. Even if the market comes back, once it's gone, once that trade is over, once it expires, or once you get out, it's gone. That money's gone. It's very hard to recover from. Now, this is unlike stocks, right? Where if you buy a stock at $100 and it drops to $50, yes, you've lost money, but you can still hold onto that stupid thing until it comes all the way back up to a hundred hopefully. Does that make sense? So with the stock, you actually have something that doesn't expire. With the option, we're selling them because they do expire. But my point here is that the stocks can act as a foundation for your option trading portfolio. So if there is a drop in the market and your option trades do lose, you still have your foundation. What I found out was that when the markets dropped, a lot of option sellers would lose all their money and they'd be blow up their accounts because they didn't have a foundation. They didn't have a way to bounce back. They didn't have any rock solid thing on the bottom that was still there that they could build off of. So part of our Passive Trading Formula, and that was part of the thing that I came up with first, say, "Okay, if I'm going to be a trader, I have to be able to withstand all the ups and downs." Because the great recession was they say once in a lifetime. I don't know. I don't know if the stock market is going to drop another 50%, or 60%, or 70%. It could. And if that happens in one day, or one week, or whatever, a lot of my option trades are going to lose money because that's unexpected and is huge. So how would I recover from that if that did happen? That's the biggest thing that a lot of options sellers don't think about. Well, in this particular situation with the great recession, stocks stopped like 50% or more, but then eventually they'd recover, and it took ... Some stocks recovered within three years, five years. Some took 10 years. But they did recover, most of them. And in the meantime while they were recovering, option sellers were able to rent them out and sell covered calls on them and naked puts on them. So the people that had that foundation, number one, they didn't freaked out as much. Yeah, they lost money and it sucked, but they were able to build it back. And number two, which is even more important, they didn't blow up. They didn't lose everything. So as the next 10 years go by for you ... I mean, it'd be a good experience to just sit down and say, "Hey, where was my life 10 years ago? What were my goals back then? What was I thinking back then? And then where am I now?" So take a just like I did earlier in the episode where I sat down and said, "Okay, I didn't have kids, and this and that. This was happening. That's happening. Now where am I now?" And it's like I can't believe how much has changed in 10 years. I'm sure in your life it's probably the same thing. Hopefully it is because there's ... Tony Robbins has said it and other people have said it before him that we as individuals, we overestimate what we can do in one year, like, "Oh, yeah. In one year I want to be a billionaire." But we underestimate how much we can do in 10 years. Because if you take small actions every time over and over, and those small actions, they compound on each other, and they grow, and they grow, and they grow, and the results are crazy. So I would like you to take a few minutes if you haven't done it already ... Maybe you did it for New Year's as an activity or whatnot. But think about where you were 10 years ago. What were your dreams? What were your goals? What were you working towards? What situation were you in? Look at them now. If things have not changed, then we need to take more action. We need to set better goals, more realistic, reliable goals. If you haven't done any goals at all, you don't know where you're going, you're going to be lost. You have to have something. You have to have some direction, right? You have to have some desire of what you want, and then you have to take action to get there. So if you haven't had any changes in the last 10 years, something is very, very wrong in that situation. Maybe you and I need to talk. Maybe I can talk some sense into you. And I would love to help you, okay? If you're like most people and you had some growth, some things have changed ... And I'm not saying all of them are going to be positive. In the last 10 years, my wife and I, our family, has had two very major, major losses that I didn't talk about until now. My wife's best friend and our best friends, really, they both passed in a very violent, traumatic way. It was a murder-suicide. And that still haunts me and my wife because we were so close and we didn't see it. It happened, and it affected us in such a major way that it kind of derailed us for a couple of years. Then just recently, my wife's father having been shot and killed at his job. So you're going to have the good and the bad. That's just part of it. People are going to pass. Businesses are going to fail. People are going to get laid off. Kinds of things are going to happen. Divorces will happen. Life happens. But take a look at where you were 10 years from now. Take a look at where you are now. Then, think about where you want to be in the future 10 years from now. Making goals just one year out, that's great, but you can do a lot more in 10 years than you can in one year. And I don't even think 10 years ago I would not have even imagined the kind of success and the life that we're having now as we 10 years ago. It would've been like, "Yeah, maybe 20 or 30 years from I'll have some kids and I'll be able to do this and live like this." Well, no. That happened in the last 10 years. So the dreams that you have, they can be accomplished in 10 years. I think that trading options, passive trading is an amazing, amazing way to help you to achieve your goals. This is what I want for you, and this is what your assignment would be for this episode. Look back 10 years, look at now, and then look at 10 years in the future. Where do you want to be 10 years from now? And how are you going to get there? Then, what actions are you going to take to get there? Because if you don't do anything different than you're doing now, then life will just meander. You'll just go along that dah, dah, dah. The time is going to pass. The years will pass, and you will be looking at 2030, right? 2030's going to come whether you change anything or not. But if you want things different in your life, if you want certain things in your life, then we have to take the right actions to get there. So that's it. That's the episode. That is the homework assignment. And if you want to take it one step further, I would say email me your goals for the next 10 years. Help@optiongenius.com is the email address, help@optiongenius.com. Send me your goals. I'm not going to share them with anybody. I'm just going to keep them. If I can help you accomplish them, that would be great. If you need any from me, let us know. We're here for you. And who knows, maybe we can even accomplish some of our goals together. Maybe if something of yours aligns with mine, maybe we can do it together. Who knows. But that's it. That's your homework assignment. And may the next 10 years bring you all of your dreams. Remember, trade with the odds in your favor. Take care. -- LOVE ALLEN SAMA - OPTION GENIUS AND WANT TO LEARN MORE TRADING TIPS  AND TRICKS? HERE ARE SOME NEXT STEPS... SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PODCAST FREE 9 LESSON COURSE: https://optiongenius.com/ WATCH THIS FREE TRAINING: https://passivetrading.com JOIN OUR PRIVATE FACEBOOK GROUP:  https://optiongenius.com/alliance Like our show? Please leave us a review here - even one sentence helps. 

On today’s episode you will hear part 3 of 4 of Russell’s interview with Andrew Warner about the Clickfunnels start up story. Here are some of the awesome things you will hear in this part of the story: Hear how selling Clickfunnels at a Mike Filsaime event got Russell his first ever big table rush at the end of his presentation. Hear from both Dave and John about how they feel about Russell and what they do for the company. And find out how going to Dream Force this year, renewed Russell’s passion for growing his business. So listen here to find out more about the Clickfunnels start up story. ---Transcript--- Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome back to the Marketing Secrets podcast. I hope you enjoyed episodes 1 and 2 of the interview with Andrew Warner at the Dry Bar Comedy Club where he was telling the Clickfunnels startup story. I hope you are enjoying this interview series so far, and I hope also this motivates you guys to go over to the mixergy podcast and subscribe to everything that Andrew does. Like I said, he is my favorite interviewer and I think that what he does is second to none. So I hope that you guys enjoy him as well, and go subscribe to the mixergy podcast. But with that said, I’m going to queue up the theme song, and when we come back we will start into part 3 of the Clickfunnels startup story interview. Andrew: I actually got, I did see, I don’t know, I didn’t see the video you mentioned, but I did see what it looked like. Here’s one of the first versions. He compared it to Clickfunnels, he said, I mean to Lead Pages. He said, “Look at how Lead Pages has their stuff all the way on the left, all the controls.” Oh you can’t see it. Oh, let me try it again, let me see if I can bring up the screen because this is just, it’s just too good. Hang on a second. I’m just constantly amazed how you’re able to draw people to you. So this is the article from Lead Pages, this is the first landing page from Clickfunnels, this is what he created before, this is what you guys did together. This is your editor and h e said, “Look, if you’re on Lead Pages, their controls, their editor is all the way on the left and it’s just moving the main content to the right, which is not looking right. And I prefer something that looks like this, with a hundred pixels on the left, a hundred pixels…” I go, who knows a hundred pixels, it’s like you, what is this? Russell: Dylan is obsessed with that type of stuff, it’s amazing. Andrew: Obsessed. And you draw people like that. You draw people like Dave, who is just phenomenal. Dave, the traffic and conversion event that he was just talking about, is that the one that you went to? Dave: The one after that. Andrew: The one after that. Okay, we’ll come back to that in a second then. So this became your next version, you brought on a new partner, and then you did a webinar with this guy. Who is this guy? Russell: It’s Mike Filsaime, one of my first friends online. It actually wasn’t a webinar, it was a live event. He was doing a live event in San Diego and he was like, “You have to come and sell Clickfunnels.” And I was like, “Nobody’s buying Clickfunnels.” We had a free trial and like, we couldn’t give it away. It was crazy. And he’s like, “Well, you’re on this website, you’re picture is there, you have to come and sell Clickfunnels, and I need you to sell it for at least $1000.” Because the way it works, if you speak at someone’s event, you sell something, you split the money 50/50. So he’s like, “It needs to be at least $1000.” And I was all bummed out. I didn’t want to do it. And the event actually started, but they were streaming it live online, so I was actually sitting at our office in Boise, watching it as I’m putting together my slides to create Clickfunnels, and then flew out to the event. And then we had a booth, and I don’t know if I told you this, we had a booth and Lead Pages had a booth right across the little hallway, skinny hallway. And Todd’s wife was manning our booth and then Lead Pages was right there, and it was so funny because she was not shy at all about talking about Lead Pages. She’s like, “Yeah, we’re like Lead Pages except for way better. We can do this and this.” And the other guy is sitting there like, right in front of her as she’s telling them everything. And it was..anyway, I digress. It was pretty funny. Andrew: By the way, she’s still at it. I saw a video that you guys created, you were talking to her and she goes, “I will be Clickfunnels.” I go wait a minute, you still had that fire, okay. So you were at that event. Russell: So we’re at the event and there’s probably, I can’t remember, 150-200 people maybe in the room. So I got the slides up and Dylan was there and he was like, when we got to the funnels he was going to demo the editor, so I did the whole thing, showed the presentation and we demo’d Clickfunnels and at the end of the thing I sold. And I’ve been good onstage, but by far, that was the first time in probably 8 years that I’d seen a table rush, where people are stepping over the things, jumping around, trying to get to the back to buy as fast as they could. Andrew: What did you say to get them to want to do that? Russell: We made a really, I mean we gave the presentation, and gave a really good offer at the end. They get a year of Clickfunnels for free, plus they get training, plus they were going to get all these other things for $1000. Andrew: It was $1000 training and a year of Clickfunnels for free, and then they become long term members. And it was also called, Funnel Hackers? Russell: Funnel Hacks, yeah. Andrew: Funnel Hacks. And that’s the thing that became like… Russell: The culture. Andrew: This culture, this tribe. It wasn’t just they were signing to learn from you, they were becoming funnel hackers. That’s it. Russell: I mean, that wasn’t planned though. It was like, I was trying to think about a sexy name for the presentation, so I’m like ah, Funnel Hacks. And somebody owned FunnelHacks.com, and I’m like, I’m still doing the presentation that way. And then later we made t-shirts that said, “Funnel Hackers” and then now we got 4 or 5 people have tattooed that to their bodies, it’s really weird. But anyway, that’s what happened. We did that and we sold it and I remember going to dinner that night with the guys who were there, and Todd and his wife and everything. And we were all excited because we made some money finally. But I was just like, “You guys don’t understand, like I’ve spoken on a lot of stages, and I haven’t seen a table rush like that.” And I remember back, there was a guy, he passed away a couple of years ago, his name was Fred Catona. And he was a radio guy. He was the guy who did the radio commercials for, do you guys remember, it’s got the guy from Star Trek, what’s his name? Audience member: Priceline. Russell: Priceline. He did the Priceline radio commercials and made that guy a billionaire. And he told me when we were doing the radio ads, “This is what’s going to happen. We’re going to test your ad and if it works, I’m going to call you on the phone and let you know you’re rich. Because if it works, it means you’re going to be rich.” So I remember going to dinner that night and I told the guys, “Just so you guys know, we’re rich.” And they’re like, “What do you mean? We made $150,000.” I’m like, “No, no, no. The way people responded to that, I’ve never seen that in my life. We’re rich.” The response rate from that, I’ve never seen. Andrew: And then you went to webinar after webinar after webinar. Russell: On the flight home that day I’m texting everybody I’ve ever met. “I got a hot offer, this webinar crushed it. We just closed whatever percent of the room at Filsaime’s event. Who wants to do it?” And we started filling up the calendar. Andrew: And the idea was, and you told me you did 2 to 3 some days. And the idea was, they would sell somebody on a course, and then their members would then hear how your software and your funnel hacking technique would help up what they just bought and then they would sign up. You’re still excited, I can see it in your face. And then this thing took off. And then you started doing an event for your culture, your community, and this guy spoke, Tony Robbins. Russell: Oh yeah, there’s Tony. Andrew: One of the first ones. Was he at the very first one? Russell: No, he came to the third one, was the first one we had him come to. Andrew: Yeah? Why do an event? Why do your own live event? Russell: So we’ve done events in the past. I know events are good, but I’d sworn off them because the last event we did, I think we sold 3 or 400 tickets and less than 100 people showed up and I was so embarrassed. I was like, “We’ll never do events again.” And as soon as this, as soon as Clickfunnels launched and it was growing, everyone’s like, “We want to do a meet up. We should do an event.” All the customers kept asking. And against my, I didn’t really want to do it, but at the same time I was launching my book, and I had won a Ferrari in this affiliate contest so I was like, “What if we did an event and we had the Ferrari there and we gave it away and then we’re…” we had other ideas for giving away other cars and it became this big, exciting thing that eventually turned into an event. And that was the first Funnel Hacking Live event in Vegas, and we had about 600 people at that one that showed up. And that’s where it all kind of, it all started. Andrew: And it built how much, how many people are you up to now? Russell: Last year we had 3500 people and we’re on track to have about 5000 at this year’s event. Andrew: 5000? Yeah. Russell: Those aren’t free tickets. Each ticket’s $1000, so it’s…. Andrew: So how much is that in total revenue? Russell: From the event? Andrew: Yeah. Russell: So ticket sales, last year was $3 ½ million, this year will be over $5. But at the event we sell coaching so last year we made $13 million in coaching sales at the event as well. Andrew: Wow, would you come up here for a second, Dave? Do you guys know Dave? Yeah, everyone knows Dave. You know what’s amazing… {Audience catcalls} Andrew: That’s amazing. Dave: I don’t know who that is. Andrew: A catcall. I saw a video, you guys have this vlog now, a beautifully show vlog. You guys went to sales force’s conference, you’re looking at the booths and in the video, do you remember what you did as you saw the different booths? Dave: I think that one I went and asked what the prices for each of the booths were. Andrew: Yes, and then you multiplied. And he’s like, you’re not enjoying the event, you’re calculating ahead, how much. “10,000 that’s 100,000….” It’s like wow, right. You do this all the time? Dave: Yeah. It’s a lot of money in an event like that. Andrew: And you think, and if this was not your event, you would be doing the same calculation trying to figure out how much they brought in today. Wowee. Alright when you went to sales force did you calculate how much money they probably did from their event? Dave: We were doing that the whole time, absolutely. Andrew: You saw the building, you had to know… Dave: Oh my gosh. 61 stories. Andrew: Why? Why do you guys want to know that? Why does, how does that… I want to understand your drive as a company and I feel like this is a part of it. Figuring out how much money other people are making, using that for fuel somehow. Tell me. Dave: I think it actually goes back to Russell and his wrestling days. We had the experience of going to Chicago right after that, and super just exhausted. And it was one of those things where he literally landed, we walked down and we’re underneath the tarmac and all the sudden Russell goes from just being totally exhausted to a massive state change. Where he’s literally right back where he was with his dad and he and his dad are walking that same path to go to, I think it was Nationals. And I saw Dan Usher, who was doing the filming, capturing that moment and it’s that type of a thing for Russell. Where all the sudden it’s the dream, where as soon as you see it, it can then happen. And Russell’s just been amazing at modeling, and again the whole idea as far as just going at a rapid, rapid speed. I mean it’s “Ready, fire, aim.” Andrew: It’s not you gawking at the sales force, what’s the sales force event called? Dave: Dream Force. Andrew: Dream force. It’s not you gawking at how well Sales Force’s event, Dream Force is doing, it’s not you having envy or just curiosity, it’s you saying, it’s possible. This is us. That’s it. Dave: It’s totally possible. Andrew: It’s totally possible. We could get there. And when you’re sizing up the building, you even found out how much the building cost. Who does that? Most people go, “Where’s the bathroom?” How much does the building cost? Dave: There’s a number. Andrew: It’s you saying, “We could maybe have that.” Dave: We can have that, yeah. Andrew: Got it. And so let’s go back a little bit. I asked you about Traffic and Conversion because the very first Traffic and Conversion conference you went to, you guys were nobodies. Nobody came and saw you. Dave: We were put out in North 40 pasture, way, way far away. Andrew: And some people would say, “One day I’ll get there.” you told Russell, “Today we’re going to get there.” Dave: Well Russell wanted, he was speaking and so whenever you’re speaking at an event, it’s important that you fill a room, like this. And there’s nothing worse than having an event and having no one show up. It’s just the worst feeling in the world. And so he’s like, “All we need, I gotta find some way of getting people into the event. I wish we had like some girls who could just hand out t-shirts or do something.” And I was like, we’re in San Diego, that’s like my home town. Russell: Dave’s like, “How many do you need?” That’s all he said. Dave: It’s just a number. It comes down to a number. How many do you want? So we ended up having, within an hour or so we had 5 girls there who were more than happy to dance around and give out t-shirts and fill the room. Andrew: and the room was full? Dave: Packed. Andrew: Packed. And why wouldn’t you say, “One day, the next time we come to Traffic and Conversion, the tenth time we’re going to do it.” Why did it have to be right there? Dave: It’s always now.   Andrew: It’s always now. Dave: It’s always now. Andrew: It’s always now. It’s never going to be the next funnel, it’s never going to be the next product launch. I’m going to do whatever we can right now, and the next one, and the next one. That’s it. That’s who you are. Dave: That’s how it works. Andrew: And now you’re a partner in the business. $83 million so far this year, you got a piece of that. Dave: Yes. Do i? Russell: Yeah. Dave: Just checking. Andrew: Do you get to take profits home now? Dave: We do. Andrew: You do, you personally do? Dave: Yes. Andrew: Are you a millionaire? Dave: Things are really good. Andrew: Millionaire good from Clickfunnels? Dave: yes. Andrew: Really? Dave: Yes. Andrew: Wow. And you’re another one. I was driving and I said, “What was it about Russell that made you work for him? What was it?” and you said, “I’ve never seen anyone implement like him.” Give me an example of early days, something that he implemented…you know what, forget that, let’s not go back to Russell. As a team, you guys have gotten really good at implementing. Give me an example of one thing that you’re just stunned by, we did it, it came out of nowhere, we could have been distracted by funnel software, we could have distracted by the next book, we did this thing, what is it? Dave: You’re here on this stage with JP, and this was what 6 weeks ago? Andrew: and this whole thing just came from an idea I heard. You use Voxer. Why do you use Voxer? Russell: I don’t know. Andrew: Because you like to talk into it. Russell: Yeah, and you can fast forward, you can listen at 4x speed, you can forward the messages to people really easily, it’s awesome. Andrew: and it’s just train of thought, boom, here’s what I think we’re going to…No, it’s not that. I heard it’s, “I have a secret project…” Russell: “I’ll tell you guys about it later.” And they all start freaking out. “Tell us now.” Andrew: “Secret project. I don’t know what it, it’s going to be exciting.” They don’t know what it is, going to be excited. Russell: Do you know how it started, this one? I was cleaning my wrestling room listening to you, and you were, I don’t know whose event it was, but you were at the campfire, it sounded like. And you were doing something like this and I was like, I want my own campfire chat to tell our story. And then I was like, “Dave, we should do it.” And now we’re here. So thanks for coming to our campfire…. Dave: That’s how it happens. Andrew: And that’s exciting to this day. Alright, thank you. Give him a big round, thank you so much. You know what, I didn’t mean for this to come onstage, but I’m glad that it is. This made you laugh when you accidentally saw it earlier too. Why is this making you laugh? What is it? Russell: So we’re not shy about our competitors, even when they’re our friends. So one of the companies we’re crossing out is his. That’s why it’s funny. Andrew: It’s one of my companies. That’s Bot Academy there. It’s also a company I invest in, that octopus is ManyChat, I’ve been a very big angel investor and supporter of theirs. I’m not at all insulted by that, I’m curious about it. You guys come across as such nice, happy-go-lucky guys. Dave asked me if I want water, I said “Dave I can’t have you give me any more things. I feel uncomfortable, I’m a New Yorker. Punch me, please.” So he goes, “Okay, one more thing. I’m going to give you socks.” So he gave me socks. Really, but still, you have murder in your eyes sometimes. You’re crossing out everybody. This is part of your culture, why? Russell: It comes back, for me its wrestling. When I was wrestling it was not, I don’t know, there’s different mentalities right. And I did a podcast on this one time and I think I offended some people, so I apologize in advance, but if you’re in a band and everyone gets together and you play together and you harmonize, it’s beautiful. When you’re a wrestler you don’t do that. You know, you walk in everyday and you’re like, those are the two guys I have to beat to be varsity. And then after you do that, you walk in and you’re like, “Okay who are the people I have to beat to be in the region champ, and then the state champ, and then the national champ?” So for me, my entire 15 years of my life, all my focus was like, who’s the next person on the rung that I have to beat? And it’s studying and learning about them and figuring their moves and figuring out what they’re good at, what they’re bad at so we can beat them. Then we beat them and go to the next thing, and next thing, and next thing. So it was never negative for me, it was competition. Half the guys were my friends and they were doing the same thing to me, we were doing the same thing to them. I come from a hyper competitive world where that’s everything we do. And I feel bad now, because in business, a lot of people we compete against aren’t competitive and I forget that sometimes, and some people don’t appreciate it. But that’s the drive. It’s just like, who do we, if I don’t have someone to, if there’s not someone we’re driving towards, there’s not a point for me. Andrew: And even if they’re, even if I was hurt, “I accept it, I’m sorry you’re hurt, Andrew. I still care and love you. We’re going to crush you.” That’s still there. Russell: And I had someone, so obviously InfusionSoft was one of our people we were targeting for a long, long time and I had a call with Clayton and someone on his team asked me, “Why do you hate Infusion Soft so much?” I was like, “I don’t, you don’t understand. I don’t hate, I love Infusion Soft. I’m grateful for it. I’m grateful for Lead Pages, I’m grateful for….” I told them, have you guys seen the Dark Knight, my favorite movie of all time? And it’s the part where Batman and the Joker are there and Batman is like, asks the Joker, “Why are you trying to kill me?” And the Joker starts laughing and he’s like, “I’m not trying to kill you. The reason I do this is because of you. If I didn’t have you, there’s no purpose behind it.” So for me it’s like, if I don’t have someone to compete against, why are we playing the game? So for me, that’s why we’re always looking… Andrew: It’s not enough to say, it’s not enough to just say “we’re playing the game because we want to help the next entrepreneur, or the next person who’s sick and needs to create…” no, it’s not. Russell: That’s a big part of it, but like, there’s something… Andrew: Yeah, but it’s not enough, it’s gotta be both. Russell: My whole life there’s, the competition is what drives me for sure. Andrew: And just like you’re wrestling with someone, trying to beat them, but you don’t hate them. You’re not going to their house and break it down… Russell: Everyone we wrestled, we were friends afterwards. We were on the same Freestyle and Greco teams later in the season, but during, when we’re competing, we’re competing and everyone’s going all at it. Andrew: Everyone’s going all at it. That’s an interesting way to end it. How much more time do we have? How much more time do we have? I’m going to keep going. Can I get you to come up here John, because I gotta get you to explain something to me? So I told you, I was online the other day, yeah give him a big round. I was online the other day, I don’t even know what I clicked, I clicked something and then I saw that Russell’s a great webinar person, everyone keeps telling me. Well, alright, I gotta find out how he does it. So I click over, “Alright, just give your email address and you can find out how..” Alright, I’ll give my email address to find out how he became such a great webinar presenter. “Just give a credit card. It’s only $4.95, so it comes in the mail.” It comes in the mail, that’s pretty cool. Nothing comes in the mail anymore. Here’s my credit card. It goes, “Alright, it’s going to mail it out. Would you also like to learn how to use these slides? $400.” I go, no! I’m done. Russell: Welcome to the funnel. Andrew: Welcome to the funnel. I’m done. But I’m going to put in Evernote a link to this page so I don’t lose it so I can come back. I swear. I did it. And this is my receipt for $4.95. Don’t you ever feel like, we’re beyond this? We’re in the software space now, we’re competing with Dropbox, we’re not competing with Joe Schmoe and his ebook. And you’re the guy who sold the, who bought the ad that got me. John: I know. Andrew: I asked you that. Do you ever feel a little embarrassed, “We’re still in the info market space.”? John: No, I think it’s the essence of what we do, of what Russell does. We love education. We love teaching people. I mean, the software is like the backend, but we’re not software people. I mean, we sell software, but we teach people. All these people here and all the people at all of our events, they just want to learn how to do it better. Andrew: I don’t believe it. John: Okay. Andrew: I believe in him. I don’t believe in you. I believe that for you it’s the numbers. Here’s why I don’t believe it. I’m looking in your eyes and you’re like, “I’m giving the script. I’m good, I’m doing the script.” I see it in your eyes, but when I was talking to you earlier, no offense. This is why he does what he does. When I was talking to you earlier, you told me about the numbers, the conversion, how we get you in the sales funnel, how we actually can then modify…That’s the exciting part. Don’t be insulted by the fact that I said it. Know that we have marketers here, they’re going to love you for being open about it. What’s going on here? What’s going on, keeping you in this space? John: Okay, from my perspective. Okay so, initially it was self liquidation on the front, which is what I was telling you. It was the fact that we were bootstrapped, we didn’t have money to just like throw out there. We had to make sure we were earning enough money to cover our ads. And Russell had all the trust in the world in me, I don’t know why he did, but he did. And he’s just like, “Spend money, and try to make it self-liquidate.” I’m like, “Okay.” So we just had to spend money and hope that we got enough back to keep spending money. Andrew: And self-liquidate means buy an ad today and make sure that we make money from that ad right away and then software. John: Yeah. Andrew: And then you told, and then software’s going to pay overtime, that’s our legacy, that’s our thing. And you told me software sucks for selling. Why? John: Software sucks, yeah. Andrew: Why? Everyone who’s in info, everyone’s who in education says, “I wish I was a software guy. Software is eating the world, they’re getting all the risk back.” I walked through San Francisco; they think anyone who doesn’t have software in their veins is a sucker. John: I asked the same thing to myself, you know. I was running ads, I’m like why can’t I just run ads straight to the offer? Why do I have go to these info products? I want to get on the soft…. And then I was like, I feel like it’s kind of like marriage. Like it’s a big thing to say like, “You probably already built websites, but come over, drop everything you’re doing and come over here and build websites over here on our thing.” And it’s like, that’s a hard pull. But “Hey, you want to build webinars? Here’s a little thing for $5 to build webinars.” Now you’re in our world, now we can talk to you, now you can trust us, now we can get you over there. Andrew: Got it. Okay, and if that’s what it takes to get people in your world, you’re going to accept it, you’re not going to feel too good for that, you’re just going to do it and grow it and grow it. John: Yeah. Andrew: What’s your ad budget now? See now you’re eyes are lighting up. Now I tapped into it. John: We spend about half a million a month. Andrew: half a million a month! John: Yeah. Don’t tell the accountant. Andrew: Do you guys pay with a credit card? Do you have a lot of miles? John: Yeah, we do. In fact…. Andrew: You do! How many miles? John: In fact, the accountant came into my office the other day and said, “Next time you buy a ticket, use the miles.” Andrew: Are they with Delta, because I think you guys flew me out with Delta. John: Yeah, American Express is where we’re spending all our money. Andrew: Wow. And you’re a partner too? John: Yeah. Andrew: Wow, congratulations. John: Thank you. Andrew: I don’t know you well enough to ask you if you’re a millionaire, I’m just going to say congratulations. Give him a big round. John: Thank you. Andrew: Wow, you know what, I actually was going to ask the videographers to come up here. I wrote their names down, I got the whole thing and I realized I shouldn’t interrupt them, because they’re shooting video. But I asked them, why are you, they had this career where they were flying all over the world shooting videos for their YouTube channel. I’m sorry, I forgot their name, and I don’t want to leave them out. Russell: Dan and Blake. Andrew: They were shooting YouTube videos, they were doing videos for other people. I said, “Why are you now giving it up and just working for Clickfunnels all the time? More importantly, why are you so excited about it?” And they said, “You know, it’s the way that we work with Russell.” And I said, do you remember the first time that you invited them out to shoot something? What was it? Russell: It was the very first Funnel Hacking Live we ever had, and probably 2 weeks prior to that, one of our friends had an event and Dan had captured the footage, and he showed me the videos. “Did you check out my Ven Video?” I’m like, “Oh my gosh, that was amazing.” And I said “Who did it?” and he told me. So I emailed Dan and I was like, “Hey, can you come do that for Funnel Hacking Live?” And he’s like, “What’s Funnel Hacking Live?” So I kind of told him, and he’s like, “Sure.” And it was like 2 weeks later and he’s like, “What’s the direction?” and I was like, “I don’t know, just bring the magic man. Whatever you did there, do that here.” And that’s kind of been his calling card since. He just comes and does stuff. Andrew: Bring the magic. He wants to have those words painted on the Toronto office you guys are starting. Literally, because he says you say that all the time. And the idea is, I want to understand how you hire. The idea is, “I’m going to find people who do good work, and I’m going to let them do it.” What happens if they wouldn’t have done it your way? What happens if it would have gone a different direction? Russell: I see your question, and I’m not perfect. So I’m going to caveat that by, some of the guys on my team know that I’m kind of, especially on the design and funnel stuff, I’m more picky on that, because I’m so into that and I love it. But what I’ve found is when you hire amazing people like Todd for example, doing Clickfunnels. The times I tried to do Clickfunnels prior, build it was like, me and I’m telling developers, “here’s what to do and how to do it.” And like there’s always some loss in communication. With Todd, he’s like, “I know exactly what I would build because I want this product too.” And then he just built it and he showed me stuff. And I’m like, “That’s a good idea.” And he’s like, “I did this too.” And I’m like, “That’s a good idea.” And it’s so much easier that way. So when you find the right people, it’s not you giving them ideas, it’s them coming to you with the ideas. And you’re like, “that is a good idea. Go do it.” And it just makes, takes all the pressure off your back. So for us, and it’s been fun because I look at, man, the last 15 years of all those different websites and the ups and the downs, the best people have always stuck. So we’ve got 15 years of getting the cream of the crop. It’s kind of like, I’m a super hero nerd, but it’s like the Avengers, at the end of, when Clickfunnels came about we had this Avenger team of people. And we’re like, now we’ve put in our dues, now it’s time to use all of our super powers to do this thing, and it all kind of came together. Andrew: Build it and build it up. And then as you were building it up, you then went to Sales Force. You guys invited me, you said, “Hey Andrew, we’re in San Francisco, you’re home town. Do you want to come out?” I said, “I’m going to be with the family.” And you said, “Good. Being with the family is better than hanging out with us.” But I still said, “What are you guys doing in San Francisco at Sales Force?” Because sales people don’t need landing pages, yet you guys will probably find a way for them to need it. Then I saw this, this is the last video that I’ve got. There’s no audio on it. I want you guys to look at their faces as they’re looking up at these buildings, walking through the Sales Force office. Look, they’re getting on the motorcycles in the lobby. They’re looking all around like, “Oh gee.” Counting the buildings that are Sales Force labeled. Look at that! What are they doing? Not believing that this is even possible. And then just stopping and going, this is dream force. This is your dream. What did you get out of going to sales Force’s event and seeing their office? Russell: Honestly, prior to Sales Force, I was kind of going through a weird funk in my business, because it was like, again there was the goals. So it was like, okay, we’re going to do a million bucks, and then we did that. And then it’s like, let’s make 10 million a year. And then 50, and then this year we’ll hit a hundred. And like, what’s the next goal?  A billion, because a hundred million, 2 hundred million is not that big of a difference. And it was just kind of like, what’s the point, what’s the purpose? We’ve grown as big as any company that I know. And then last year, Dave and Ryan had gone out there and they were telling me stories like, “There’s 170,000 businesses here.” And they were telling me all these things, and it sounded cool, but I didn’t, and they were going crazy. You have to see this so you can believe it. But there’s something about the energy about seeing something that makes it real. So this year I was like, I want to go and I want to see Benioff speak. I want to see the thing, the towers, I want to just understand it, because if I understand it, cool. Now we can reverse engineer and figure out how we can do it. So for me it was just like seeing it. I think in anything, any, as entrepreneurs too, if you’re people believe that you can do it, you’ll do it. If you believe you can lose weight, you’ll lose 3eight. If you believe you can grow a company, and I don’t feel like I believed that the next level was possible for us until I saw it. And then I was like, oh my gosh, this is not ridiculous. Benioff’s not, none of these guys are any smarter than any of us. It’s just like, they figured out the path. It was like, okay let’s look at the path. And then let’s look at it and now we can figure out our path. Andrew: And seeing it in person did that for you? Russell: Oh yeah. It makes it tangible, it makes it like, it’s like your physiology feels it, versus reading a book about it or hearing about it. It’s like you see it and you experience it, and it’s like it’s tangible. Andrew: I told you, I asked people before they came in here, “What are you looking for?” and a few of them frustrated me because they said, “I just wanted to see Russell. I just want to see the event.” I go, “Give me something I could ask a question about.” But I think they were looking for the same thing that you got out of there. And I know they got it. I’m going to ask them to come up here and ask some questions, and I want to know about the future of Clickfunnels, but first I’ve got to just acknowledge that, that we are here to just kind of pick up on that energy. That energy that got you to pick yourself back up when anyone else would have said, “I’m a failure of a husband, I can’t do this.” Go back. The tension that came from failing and almost going to jail as you said, from failing and succeeding, and failing again. And still, that is inspiring to see. I want to give the whole Clickfunnels family a big round of applause, please everybody.

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What is happiness? Is it keeping up with the Joneses? Do you like having that feeling of lack when you look at someone who seems like they have something you want? Do you dream of looking at your neighbor's house to say, "Shit, Joe Schmoe painted his fence. Now I need to paint mine." Do you like it when your kids look at their friends and say they want something just because their friend has it? The answer to all of these questions should be NO. Happiness is what you choose it to be. Choose happiness NOW and f***k the Joneses. Follow me if you like what I have to say: Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/lifeturnedup1/ YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCD_UEB3zKRIM_adDD2ZzW3A?view_as=public FB - https://www.facebook.com/drjfoster Twitter - https://twitter.com/DrJamieJFoster Snapchat - https://www.snapchat.com/add/wow77jf

Why Dave Decided to talk to Hailey: Head of Marketing at Improvado.io and Co-Founder of Growth Marketing Pro, Hailey Friedman has helped hundreds of companies grow their bottom line through digital marketing. Hailey will discuss digital marketing basics and how to integrate it into your funnel, as well as give her tips on what works and what doesn’t when you are marketing your business. Tips and Tricks for You and Your Business: How to get customers (1:25) Getting started with Google Ads (6:25) What is most important in a marketing funnel (10:45) The allowable cost per acquisition (16:40) Quotable Moments: "Websites are dying" "As a marketer, I never send traffic to a website" Other Tidbits: Websites are becoming obsolete.  Instead of sending customers to a website, try sending them to a landing page that is designed specifically to push them down a sales funnel. Links: FunnelHackerRadio.com FunnelHackerRadio.com/freetrial FunnelHackerRadio.com/dreamcar ---Transcript--- Speaker 1:   00:00     Welcome to funnel hacker radio podcast, where we go behind the scenes and uncover the tactics and strategies top entrepreneurs are using to make more sales, dominate their markets, and how you can get those same results. Here's your host, Dave Woodward. Art, everybody. Welcome back to funnel hacker Speaker 2:   00:19     radio. I'm your host Dave Woodward, and today have the opportunity to having Hailey Friedman on the show. Haley, welcome to the show. Speaker 3:   00:23     Thanks for having me. Speaker 2:   00:26     I'm excited. So Haley's the head marketing or is head of marketing over at [inaudible] dot io. She's also the cofounder of growth marketing pro where she sells literally hundreds of companies grow their bottom line through digital marketing is one of the main reasons we wanted to have her on today is what you thought about really growing your audience. In addition to that, we're going to talk about some of the metrics and things that she's said loves to geek out on. So in addition to that, she also serves as the president Badass marketers and founders and I would just write, and I think you said there's over like 20,000 members that right? Speaker 3:   00:54     Yeah. There's 20,000 members globally. Speaker 2:   00:56     Crazy and I think you're running the, the primary group up in the Silicon Valley area. Speaker 3:   01:01     Yeah. I'm the president of the San Francisco chapter. Speaker 2:   01:05     Awesome. Well, I'm going to dive right into this and one of the things you and I were talking about just briefly here was this whole idea as far as how to get customers. I think that's the biggest struggle most people have is they get this wonderful idea and trying to find a way of, of getting that out to the market. So what are some of the things that you've seen? I know you spend a lot of time looking at different platforms and technology and it's not as much about the tech as it is about some of the other stuff. So how do you actually help people get customers? Speaker 3:   01:33     Yeah, I mean this is a challenge that I personally faced myself. I was a founder. Um, I tried to start something on my own and the biggest lesson that I took away from it was no, you can have an incredible team and you can have an amazing product, but if you don't know how to get customers and you don't have anything worth very much at all. So that's kind of what set me off on this journey to figure out like how do you get Joe Schmoe to buy something and I'm just like big gray box that I really did not understand and to an unwrapped how, how this works. And so, um, I just, I lived across the country from New York to San Francisco. I joined a startup at the ground floor. I just became a sponge and I just learned everything that I possibly could about marketing. Speaker 3:   02:18     I read blogs and conferences and the experts. Um, and then I implemented them not only at my job but for my friends and my family, like anyone who would let me. And I really kind of got my feet wet, figuring, figuring this stuff out. And so there's, there's really nothing better than trial and error. You learn a lot, but at this point I've probably done it like so many times that I've gathered this book of knowledge in my brain about what actually works and what doesn't work and it really depends on what the part of it that I think is so fun is that it's different for every business. Every business has different customers. You have different goals, you have different marketing budget and resources timeline that you need to hit those goals. And so like all those things need to be considered when you're figuring out what is the lowest hanging fruit thing I can do to get customers. Speaker 3:   03:08     And so it's hard to give a blanket statement, which is why through growth marketing pro we're often helping founders one off like marketing marketers and founders that need one off helpful. We'll, we'll customize a plan for them. But overall I like to think of it like this. Like where is the highest intent? Customers like where, where are your highest intent customers? So for example, um, referral programs always have the highest intent because people who are visiting your website that were referred by a friend and they were already sold and educated by their close friend or family and now they're visiting your site and they're going to convert at like 25 percent, whereas the average trapped under convert converted one percent. So if you already have customers start a referral program, that's how you'll get like the highest intent people to your website. Speaker 2:   04:03     Similar to I hear a ton about different types of referral programs. What are some of the things and referral problems you've seen that really work well? Speaker 3:   04:11     Yeah. So surprisingly people are not as motivated to referred friends when you pay them as much as they are to offer something of value to their friend. So people in when, when they're socially interacting with friends, they want to kind of be able to gift them something. So if you can create that vibe, then you're, your referral program will likely perform better. Speaker 2:   04:40     I've seen that they get a discount and you get a discount at the same time by offering a coupon code like that. Speaker 3:   04:51     Yeah, definitely. Um, and that works better than just having you get a discount and nothing for your friend. Yeah. Um, yeah. So I think, um, referral programs can be really difficult to track if you are going to implement one. I recommend using a tool I've used ambassador in the past. There's a lot of different tools you could use but definitely can get really hairy if you don't get super organized with your tracking links and things. So I'm tracking can become a nightmare. But um, yeah, along the same lines of, of high intent channels, I think affiliate programs with you can get like bloggers and influencers mentioning your product and sending traffic. That's also a great way to get like really trustworthy people doing the selling for you kind of thing. So those are high intent and then, you know, if you're looking at paid channels, if you have a budget and you're trying to figure out, you know, do I spend money on Google ads or do I spend money on facebook or, or whatever. Um, again, like think about intent, you know, someone who is searching a specific keyword related to your business as far higher intent than someone who's just browsing through facebook looking their friends' photos. Right? So a while facebook is not some channel for a lot of things. I would if there is search volume related to your product, then I would always recommend starting with intense is highest, which would be on google ads Speaker 2:   06:13     in Google ads seem to be the holy grail, but at the same time it's one most confusing things for most marketers. Everyone seems to kind of first of all go to facebook. It's easier to work with and things as you've worked inside of the Google ad network and the platform. What are some of the things that you've seen that work really well for a person who's just trying to kind of get the feet wet with Google? Where would you tell them that they should start? Speaker 3:   06:35     Yeah. I always start with like your branded keywords that someone literally searches for the name of your brand. You want to be there and then your competitors' keywords. So the names of your competitors, you want to be there too. That's content, lowest hanging fruit. Those people are already well educated, either about the name of your business or the name of your competitors. And so that's always the best place to start. And from there it's really just like careful testing. But again, thinking about when you're thinking about keywords like which of these keywords, long tail keywords are gonna be customers who have already thought very deeply about this and um, and if you are going to go higher funnel, more broad keywords, then you're likely going to want to serve content that's going to act as a funnel to your adapt to your purchase. Speaker 2:   07:32     So, speaking of funnels, I know you're in the process of creating your own and your first click funnels here, expert secrets. When you start thinking about a funnel, especially, you just made the mention as far as you know, top of the funnel, high end funnel. Explain to people exactly what that means. Speaker 3:   07:48     So I think people, people are at different stages of their purchase journey. And when I think about the top of the funnel, I think about the beginning of that journey, maybe someone doesn't know that they need your product. And so at the top of the funnel, people are doing their initial research, if you can create content that captured them at that stage and then you can become the teacher, the person who's being the educator, you can kind of like walk them down the funnel down to purchase product. Um, so basically people that are high in the funnel may not be super high intense quite yet. And as they get lower into the funnel, their intent becomes higher and higher and conserve them different types of content. So as they're deeper in the funnel, it becomes maybe not as much educational content, more not as broad educational concept, but it gets more narrow into your product. So you can serve them content that maybe shows a product walkthrough of your product or testimonials of people who purchase your products. And so there's kind of this sequential messaging that happens as someone goes from top of funnel. Speaker 2:   08:54     I love, I had this conversation with Speaker 3:   08:56     my son earlier this morning. He's doing some affiliate marketing for me inside of click funnels and I would sit there, I sit there talking to him about it and he's like, you had. It's really hard to get someone just to take a free trial of clickfunnels, and I'm like, yeah, you're right. Especially if they don't even know what a funnel is. I said, we're in the process right now of creating this whole idea as far as the death of the website and trying to help a lot of local business owners who think, Gosh, all I need is a website to help them understand that really websites are dying. They're not already getting some industries and really how a funnel works and so if you start with funnel jargon, people are going to go, I don't even know what a funnel is, what are you talking about it? Speaker 3:   09:34     So I love that idea. I just appreciate just kind of hitting home as far as where in that actual funnel are they top of the funnel, mid funnel, bottom of the funnel, and it totally changes the experience as well as the conversation that you're having with them. So I appreciate your going through that. Totally. That's so funny that you say that about the websites because we talked with marketing part talks a lot of, um, people that are just getting started and they have this website now. Like I have this amazing website, I to my website that is just not how it works. There's so much more intention that goes as a marketer, I never send traffic to a website, never ever. So as a marketer, I'm always sending traffic to landing pages that are specifically pushing people down a funnel, a very specific funnel. They have a very specific call to action, just one button on a page. And so websites that have menus with lots of different options, it's like you're, um, you're spending money to get traffic to that page and then you're losing people. You're giving them a million different places to click options and you're not helping them get through the funnel. Speaker 2:   10:37     I appreciate that. Well, here we've started to do, I'd like to kind of segway into one of the things I'm most excited about and that's this whole marketing data type of stuff that you'd love to geek out on and I know you've got kind of an awkward the end for those people want to stick around as far as a kind of exact how they can track some of this data. So tell me what, what are the things that you're paying attention to in a marketing funnel? What are the metrics that you're following? What's most important? Speaker 3:   11:00     Alright, well the first thing I want to say is that this stuff is really hard. Um, Speaker 2:   11:08     wait, all of my listeners right there, they're gone. Speaker 3:   11:10     Well, no, because I was a lovely side. Thought it was really hard and I understand why you think it is hard because I used to have a really hard time with it. I was really overwhelmed. Is that started out as a marketer? I was like, okay, um, you want me to build a weekly report showing how our marketing campaigns are doing simple enough. Right. Little do I realized that that actually involves logging into facebook and export and all the data logging into google, linkedin email tool, looking at our down revenue and like pulling all this data together takes hours because you've done loggins. These platforms export all the data. Then maybe you import them into a Google spreadsheet or excel. Then you have another tab where you may be creating a dashboard and you're using formulas and you're trying to map the data all together and hopefully your formulas are right and hopefully and then even at that point you just have like a big sheet of numbers and then you're going to have to present these numbers of people who are going to want to make sense of them. Speaker 3:   12:12     So they should probably be in charge now. It needs to be pretty in this whole thing. I swear like it used to take me two to three days of my week to prepare for the meeting with a meeting with our CEO just to be able to like pull, pull the numbers together, make them pretty enough for other people to understand. But also for me to understand like not only like putting the data together, but then so do the analytics and figure out the insights and figure out what's not going well and what needs to change. Just like the whole thing. It's so tedious. It is so time consuming and I can promise you that there is a marketer at every single company doing this, like somebody is doing this. And I was doing this annually about six months ago. I left my job, my last company, and I wanted to work at a marketing company, some kind of marketing tool that was helping marketers because I love thinking about marketing. Speaker 3:   13:10     I wanted to market to marketers and this is all very meta, but I've heard about this company called it provato that was looking for a head of marketing. And it was a tool that basically automated that whole process that I was pretty miserable over. Um, so basically they just sink into all the different platforms like facebook and Google ads and all your crm and all the things. And then it's just like slurps up the data into one place where it just lifts in real time all the time. So you can check on any ad, any campaign across any platform in one place or you can send it to your visualization tool. So the Google data studio or tableau or looker, wherever you want to visualize it, you just have this real time reporting. So you never ever have to like do that crappy stuff that all of us marketers are wasting time that ever again. Speaker 3:   14:03     Um, yeah. And so, and so that's, that's what my mission is now, to kind of spread the word that this is an option because I certainly didn't know it was. And um, you know, as a marketer and my favorite part is the strategy part. It's the thinking about using the tests and new ideas to try and optimizing what's working and don't want to be in spreadsheets all day. Just getting started. What are some of the most important metrics they should be paying attention to? I think a lot of times I see people making the mistake of looking at the wrong metrics. And so this is definitely an important question. Speaker 3:   14:43     It can be easy as a marketer get excited about top of the funnel metrics. Here we go. Talking about funnel signups, right? So at my last job I was at a company called realty shares and it was a real estate investing platform online and so I was getting were doing google, Google ads and we were running ads to the keyword real estate crowd funding, which is what it's called when you invest in real estate online, not everyone knows what the word real estate crowd funding is. So the people who have typed that in have very high intent, right? And those people would convert and they would the time paying investors in great customers. And so I wanted to expand from there and try and see if it worked and follow more people. So I tested out real estate investing as a keyword, which seems like a logical next step, real estate investing. And we tested it and while we were getting tons of signups for really cheap, this was awesome. I'm like, great, let's spend more money here. A couple months later I realized none of the people that signed up from the keyword real estate investing ever made an investment Speaker 3:   15:57     and so it's really easy to get excited by like sign up metrics, but what actually matters is like actual customers, actual paying customers, if none of those people become paying customers and that's actually not a good place to be spending money, so to kind of just like hold your excitement until you watch people go through the funnel and the different companies, different length of time, which can be challenging as a marketer to wait like a couple months to see if that thing works before you spend more money on it, but it's really about just careful testing and being able to see data from, from sign up all the way through to revenue and being able to tie that back. That revenue back to the child came from Speaker 2:   16:41     kind of what you're talking about there. The most important thing I always look at is what's that cost to acquire a customer? A paying customer versus the sign sign ups are great, but you can have a whole bunch of people sign up if no one take their credit card out. They are very, very little value to you or to them. So I always look as far as what's that cost to acquire the customer, what's obviously the average cart value. If we can kind of look at that where we get in at least inside of a funnel where the average cart value, if I can get the average car value to be equal to the cost to acquire customer base, getting customers for free and then I send them up the sales ladder from there. So Speaker 3:   17:16     keeping track, you know the customers signed up within a channel and that have gone on to make a purchase and you can have that revenue. You can just take that revenue number and divided by the number of signups that you got. And now you have your legs allowable cost per acquisition for a, for a signup. And so if you go above that, you're know you're losing money and if you go below that, you know you're making money. So Speaker 2:   17:44     can you repeat that Formula One more time just for those people are listening to, they understand because I think it's a real important number to. To track. Speaker 3:   17:49     Yeah. So I call the allowable the allowable cost per acquisition for a signup for someone that signed up. So within a given channel, if you keep track of, say for example your, your check, looking at facebook as a channel, you know that you got x number of signups on facebook and then he got y number of customers that actually paid and then you have a certain number of revenue. So if you take that revenue number, how much you made from people that you acquired on facebook and then you divide it by the number of signups that you got at the very start. Then you have this number that I like to call the allowable and that's kind of like your breakeven cost for acquisition, for facebook, for this specific channel, so that can rate. That can vary from channel to channel. You might have a different allowable cost per acquisition on facebook. Then you have google ads and this is really, really important when, when you're optimizing for channel two to realize that that's different. So on facebook you'll have this number and this is your allowable cost per acquisition and you want to stay below it because it's what soon as you start going, oh, if you're an addict, you're a even, that means like the, the amount that you're spending and getting Speaker 3:   19:10     on facebook is the same and if you're over it then you're losing money on facebook and if you're under it then, Speaker 2:   19:16     then you're awesome. So just running some numbers here. If I have 100 people sign up and they'll say 10 of those buy and it's a turtle a product. So it's a $2,000 total. So I've got basically 2000 bucks I made and divide that by 100. In other words, it means I could basically spend up to 20 bucks for a signup. That sound right. And so I think it's important for people who are listening to understand. We talked so much about what's my cost to acquire the customer? Well, that cost to acquire a customer. It could be 200 bucks because that's what they're paying me, but if it actually costs you that sign up as a 10th of that, I think that's an important number to kind of track and pay attention to. So I appreciate to appreciate you kind of go through there. Speaker 3:   19:58     Yeah, absolutely. Speaker 2:   19:59     Well Haley, I know we're kind of get close to wrapping things up here where, where can people get more information on tracking this kind of stuff? Speaker 3:   20:06     Yeah. So I actually need a blank template just for you guys who are listening, if you want to look at what my marketing dashboard looks like. Um, before I automated that. So this is when I go into Google sheets and I make all these different tabs so that I can see what's happening from a marketing perspective weekly, daily, monthly, yearly. Like how I figured out my goals. I have all these different tabs in a google sheet and I kind of took out all the data and made it blank for you in case you want to use it yourself. That's what I, when I do my marketing data manually, that's what it looks like. Do you want to automate? It can help you there, but if you just want this Google spreadsheet, definitely take a and download it for yourself. You can access it at that io slash podcast. You want spelling Pramada for us? Yes, I am t r o v a d o Dot io slash podcast. It's so funny. I had this terrible time and spelling allowed senior. I'm the table so that I. You Speaker 2:   21:16     did a great job spelling for it, so I appreciate it. Speaker 3:   21:18     Yeah. Speaker 2:   21:21     Well, let any last remarks here before we got to wrap things up. Speaker 3:   21:25     Um, let's see. Follow or connect with me on linkedin. I'd love to, uh, to chat there. That's probably the best place. My name is Haley Friedman, so you can find me on there. Speaker 2:   21:36     Awesome. Well, Haley, thanks so much. I appreciate your time and appreciate all that you guys are doing to push marketing forward. So thank you. Thank you. This is a lot of fun. Speaker 4:   21:45     Hey everybody, thank you so much for taking the time to listen to podcasts. If you don't mind, could you please share this with others, rate and review this podcast on itunes. It means the world to me where I'm trying to get to as a million downloads here in the next few months and just crush through over $650,000 and I just want to get the next few $100,000 so we can get to a million downloads and see really what I can do to help improve and and get this out to more people. At the same time, if there's a topic, there's something you'd like me to share or someone you'd like me to interview, I only just reach out to me on facebook. You can pm me and be more than happy to take any of your feedback as well as if people would like me to interview. I'm more than happy to reach out and have that conversation with you so I can go to itunes rate and review this, share this podcast with others and let me know how else I can improve this or can do to make this better for you guys. Thanks.

Dennis meets up with writer-director-producer Danny Salles, the creator of the musical comedy The Trump Family Special, which is currently playing at the Triad in New York City. He talks about taking the show from LA to NY, landing Gina Gershon at Melania, keeping up with the news cycle and how the experience has impacted his life. He also talks about his TV career, working on shows like Joan and Melissa: Joan Knows Best, Kathy Griffin: My Life in the D-List, Joe Schmoe and The Middle. He talks about how working in reality effects his scripted work, why he's good at it and the angst of not blowing the secret on Joe Schmoe. Other topics include: his favorite Joan Rivers moments, why he's good at working with mercurial talent, getting recognized in a diner, the 2012 Halloween costume he's super proud of the junior high drama teacher who still needs to suck it. https://www.trumpfamilyspecial.com/

Take action on your ideas! With GUSTO!!!  Which is “enjoyment or vigor in doing something. Style of artistic execution” Write down that idea, and get in the habit of taking action. But how? By doing. Sounds easy enough, and it is! This is a like a muscle, you have to work it, on a regular basis, in order to build its strength, or to tone and define it. Here’s an example: I had this idea to put my podcast logo on a coffee mug, and on the other side the customer could customize it to have their name, favorite hashtag, quote, or whatever on the other.  Do I know how to make this really work? No. But, I took action, and will figure it out as I go. It’s a cool idea, and I acted on it. If it works out, awesome. If not, awesome. I took action on an idea, a cool idea at that. I lose nothing, but could gain a lot. Think about all of those ideas you once had. Maybe you had this idea where instead of people calling a taxi cab, they can call you for a ride instead. So instead of getting a taxi that had cigarette burns in the seats, dirty floors, some weird smell, and a cab driver that hates his life, they get you and your nice 2017 Honda Accord. It’s clean, it’s friendly, it’s affordable, and it’s convenient. What a great idea that would be! That’s such an ubercool idea… But, you didn’t take action on the idea, and now some Joe Schmoe is making billions on this idea. I’m not saying my coffee mug idea is anywhere in comparisons, but you know what it is? It’s part of my repetitions on taking action. Between the IDEA and the PRODUCT, is ACTION.  --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/patienceandhustledaily/support

Buy official That Kind of Nerd Gear! Marvel to start advertising comic books on TV and in theatres Spawn Movie Will Be A Dark Rated-R Says Todd McFarlane Spawn The Recall Fan Film Spoiler free discussion about Logan The 13 Worst Supervillain Performances in Comic Book Movies Every Episode Of ‘Power Rangers’ Will Air Online In A 17-Day Marathon Looney Tunes and Hanna-Barbera classics are getting their own streaming service At these movie theaters, kids can play on a jungle gym next to their parents’ seats Brian is quizzed on sounds ever “gamer” should know Send your thoughts to Nerd@ThatKindofNerd.com Check out our other Podcast Hey Did You See Please Rate Our Show On iTunes Intro To That Kind of Nerd’s Podcast Want more? Follow your hosts on Twitter: @CJMellon (CJ Mellon) , @Jnubbs572 (Josh Burns) , @bathornton160 (Brian Thornton) and @ThatKindofNerd. Send a tweet with the hashtag #TKONPodcast if you’d like your question answered on next week’s show. Be sure to share your thoughts, comments, and suggestions below.Come and share your voice on our podcast! Share your opinion or a story from your nerdy life. Call into our Podcast line 484-373-4119 Check out our other Podcast Hey Did You See * Subscribe to That Kind of Nerd via iTunes * Subscribe to That Kind of Nerd via Stitcher * Subscribe to That Kind of Nerd via RSS * Subscribe to That Kind of Nerd via Google Play Music

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Hey there welcome back everybody to the universe's 2nd favorite Def Leppard & philosophy Ppardcast. Even if you're some ho-hum humdrum Joe Schmoe schlub or a plain-Jane nobody you can join party man Stuart "The Leppard Tamer" Wellington & his resident Hysterian Alex Alexander "Dr Def" Smith, Ph.D for an in defpth discussion of the art & lives of "The Fabulous Five Buddies", or "The English Band", Def Leppard. This Leppisode we discuss the penultimate track Excitable from side B of Def Leppard's fourth album, Hysteria! Also, spooks and screams and bad english accents. Gotta riot babe!

2000-02-16 Redemption ShowDave Ludt, Amy K, Sara, Benny C, Joe Schmo-Brandon 3:10:11 This is the Redemption Show. Now in color and surround sound. I think we're in for a new I don't know what I'm talking about. I always like being in for a I don't know what I am talking about. So. Whatever it is will be good, that's about all we can promise you. As somebody wise once said. It's all good, we're still alive. We got haircuts but you can't see that cause we're on Radio. Ben calls from his lifeguard chair. A common update. A Bus drives by. It's snowing and there's homework going on. Joe Schmoe calls in. A fool in a garbage can and a fool on the floor help with the news. Joe Schmoe calls in again. Lettuce Lips gives a shot out. 2000-02-16 | 3:10:11 | 2BS Radio Archive | The Main Event | Wednesday | 9 to Midnight | WRHO 89.7 FM Hartwick College Oneonta NY | The B-Smith Radio Archive | Archived Recordings from my College Radio Show | www.twobs.com | 2bsradioarchive.blogspot.com | For full details > http://twobs.com/wiki/2BS_Radio_Archive_2000-02-16

Is Braid too expensive? Is Wombat too negative? These are just some of the questions tackled, along with new releases, the latest video game industry and shopping news, your CAGbag questions and much more!