In short
Why digital products fail to create transformation, and how Chad Cannon helped Michael Hyatt’s team pivot from course-first selling to transformation-first offers, using analog products, pre-sales, and a customer-journey-driven sales system.
Guest backgrounds
Chad Cannon is a marketing and growth leader. He was VP of marketing at Thomas Nelson during Michael Hyatt’s Platform book launch, later worked on 43 New York Times bestsellers, and helped build Hyatt’s Full Focus business (employee #3). He later consulted/fractional CMO work, including with Donald Miller/StoryBrand, and helped grow StoryBrand after a decline.
Key claims
“Digital dust” happens when buyers don’t consume content (example: 2,000 course buyers, only ~200 complete). Pre-selling physical products reduces inventory risk. Sales vs marketing depends on when human interaction is required. Sales calls should focus on the buyer’s pain and rapport; don’t overwhelm with features.
Notable examples
Platform launch pivot to NYT list; Love Does giveaway strategy (5,000 books). Full Focus Planner pre-sold $500k in first day. Business Accelerator achieved 400+ seat goal via live event “Achieve,” plus fast follow-up and lead qualification (HubSpot, SDRs within 72 hours).
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOThe Birth of the Full Focus Plan
0:45 to 3:00
Chad discusses the development and significance of the Full Focus Plan.
“Yeah, it's so, it's like, it's a long time ago.”
Chad's Connection to Michael Hyatt
3:00 to 6:25
Chad shares his history with Michael Hyatt and his experience in marketing.
“You know, and Bob, we were like at that time it was leveraging Donald Miller's audience because he was kind of known in a million miles in a thousand years.”
Lessons from Launching Books
6:25 to 9:30
Chad recounts his experiences with book launches and marketing strategies.
“When I joined, 98 % of our revenue was digital courses.”
Transforming Digital Courses to Physical Products
9:30 to 12:40
The conversation explores the shift from digital courses to physical products like planners.
“We know leaders, the thing that keep people from achieving goals is actually writing their goals down and revisiting them.”
The Evolution of the Brand
12:40 to 14:00
Chad explains the rebranding strategy and vision behind Full Focus Company.
“It was no longer just a personal brand of an individual.”
Early Career Reflections
14:00 to 14:40
Learn about the motivations and challenges faced during the early stages of a successful career.
“So, you know, I forget, we had another name that we ran with for a little bit.”
Navigating Growth Challenges
14:40 to 15:20
Explore the complexities of managing growth and expectations within a business.
“You know, it's one of those, like in an organization like that, it's like, Hey, what's next?”
Understanding Business Mindset
15:20 to 16:40
Gain insights into the mindset necessary for effective leadership and decision-making.
“I think it's just been like, I was fortunate enough at 24.”
Defining Target Audience
16:40 to 17:40
Discover how to identify and serve your ideal customers effectively.
Launching Business Accelerator
17:40 to 19:20
Learn about the strategic decisions behind launching a new coaching program.
“We pivoted and renamed the coaching program Business Accelerator.”
Show all 29 chapters
Sales Strategy and Event Success
19:20 to 20:20
Understand how live events can significantly impact sales and brand growth.
Leveraging Podcasts for Growth
20:20 to 21:40
Explore the strategic use of podcasts in building a sales system and customer engagement.
“So we said, Hey, why don't we, you know, we didn't really do webinars for the planner because it's a$40 purchase.”
Team Dynamics in Fast-Paced Environments
21:40 to 23:20
Learn how to maintain team cohesion and effectiveness in a rapidly changing business environment.
“Like if you had to speak to somebody about their sales team, just based off what you just said, how would you coach someone up to go?”
Sales Team Mindset and Approach
23:20 to 26:10
Gain insights into the mindset needed for effective sales, focusing on building rapport and understanding customer needs.
“Like, I'm going to create a list and it's just, and it was survival of the fittest at that point for me.”
Communicating Product Value
26:10 to 28:01
Learn how to effectively communicate product value while focusing on customer pain points and needs.
“Like, but you're saying you coach them a little differently.”
The Power of Intentional Messaging
28:01 to 28:44
Learn how to effectively communicate product benefits in a concise way.
“So I always say ignorance is bliss a lot of times.”
Building Trust with Sales
28:44 to 29:44
Understand the importance of trust in sales and how to build it.
“The problem is you don't even realize it, but like, so watching it, I'm like, dude, they like they're in hook, line and sinker.”
Consulting and Transforming Sales Processes
29:44 to 31:01
Discover how consulting can reshape a founder's sales approach for success.
“And they're selling just based on charisma or relationships.”
The Journey with Donald Miller
31:01 to 32:16
Learn about the impact of storytelling on brand narrative and customer focus.
“So that was something I did on the consulting side.”
Adapting to Change: The Impact of COVID
32:16 to 33:59
Explore how businesses can pivot during crises and retain growth.
“Um, and then COVID hit and obviously they had to figure out virtual events.”
Mapping the Customer Journey
33:59 to 36:12
Learn the importance of understanding and optimizing the customer journey.
“You know, and back in the day, it was like the more, the more feels, the more questions you ask, the less people fill out.”
Using Products as Lead Generators
36:12 to 37:18
Understand how to leverage products to generate leads effectively.
Enhancing Customer Acquisition Strategies
37:18 to 38:24
Learn about the importance of detailed customer information for sales success.
“And not only, every form that we have, any lead generator and a phone number.”
Speed in Sales Follow-Up
38:24 to 39:58
Discover how quick follow-ups can significantly impact sales effectiveness.
“And so you're looking at cost per booked call, but you're having, at the best, the leakage from filling out a form and then scheduling the call, so the calls right after, 20%.”
Launching New Products: The Coach Builder Strategy
39:58 to 41:18
Learn about strategies for launching successful new products in the coaching industry.
“Okay, so then let's fast forward a little bit here and then bring us to the spot where you helped launch another product, which is Coach Builder.”
The Journey of Unreasonable Hospitality
42:01 to 42:56
Discover how Will Gadara's book highlights customer journey mapping in hospitality.
The Obsession Framework Explained
42:57 to 45:21
Learn about the Obsessed framework and how it helps businesses scale.
“And this is something that in the book he talks about.”
Key Elements of Business Growth
45:22 to 49:40
Explore the importance of observation and benchmarking in business growth.
“Let's wrap everything up around that and what you're doing now and how that's helping businesses and how people can think through that right now.”
The Balance Between Growth and Contentment
49:41 to 50:44
Understand the challenges entrepreneurs face between striving for growth and finding contentment.
“And people in the company don't realize how much risk the business owner is taking on a daily basis and 7 million and 50 million, depending on the industry may not be that much money in the owner's pocket.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Chris Cruz:Have you ever bought a digital course and never finished it? You are not alone. This was the reality Chad and his team faced at Michael Hyatt's company. They had thousands of customers buying their digital courses on leadership and productivity, but the transformation wasn't happening. They knew something had to change. Enter the full focus plan. They believed in it so much that they pre-sold it before manufacturing a single unit. That moment changed everything about their business. Sometimes the biggest opportunities come when you're willing to question your current success. What happened next still gives Chad goosebumps.
0:32Chris Cruz:So there's something about you and I that you may not know that I have a history with connected to the work you've done, which is Michael Hyatt and Platform, the book Platform, and building out Michael Hyatt's world. I remember reading, gosh, Platform was probably, it's over a decade now. Oh, 100, yeah. Yeah, it's so, it's like, it's a long time ago. I remember reading that as one, and then I remember modeling my blog after Michael Hyatt's blog. I remember seeing how he was kind of pushing out this whole platform building paradigm. But then there was some stuff that pivoted in a great way. And they started building out some new robust things.
1:07Chris Cruz:And you were kind of really pivotal to building out some of these things like the full focus planner, things like that. I want you to dive into the Michael Hyatt personal brand, then launching it into an actual other brand and the revenue behind that, because you have such a keen expertise and insight into driving sales for brands and how brands can drive revenue and growth. both from like a CMO perspective, but also from this revenue growth perspective. And I'd love to pull out more and more of that for the brands to understand that. Yeah, well, bring them back platform, man. That's the old days.
1:37So fun connection there. I was the VP of marketing at Thomas Nelson when that book launched. It was the first book I worked on. I had no book marketing experience whatsoever. First day I'm on the job, I get an email the day before the job. You're like, hey, we've changed the whole marketing plan of this book. 45 days out, Michael doesn't like it. your jobs you're leading this meeting at the time he was the chairman of the board and so we had to pivot he wanted the new york times list so we had 45 days to basically reallocate all of our funds um so what did you do what now you're throwing we're going somewhere but now we're going yeah it's crazy what did you do i mean we literally at that point um you know seth god had just done this big kind of launch and we really modeled after something he did which is around kind of the pre-launch order incentives which in the book publishing world at that time believe it or not didn't happen and now it's like everywhere yeah you know but it was like you know what that looked like and online content everything we ended up selling i don't know 10 or 11 000 books in the first week oh wow i hit the new york times list oh my goodness at the same time as the other book i launched on the same week was love does okay by bob goff and if we had time there's a whole story about that those two weeks of launching those books that are totally different really different brands at that point bob didn't have any online presence yeah no i remember um and bob would hate me hate me for saying this but this will be fun yeah is three days into the launch Bob called me like irate.
2:53Chris Cruz:No way. Yeah. And he's like, how come we're not doing the stuff Michael's doing? Oh gosh. You know? And because he had Michael on or Michael had Bob on like an interview and you know, he had an audience. Yeah. You know, and Bob, we were like at that time it was leveraging Donald Miller's audience because he was kind of known in a million miles in a thousand years. And the strategy with Bob's book was no one knows who this guy is, but the book's incredible. Okay. And so I had gotten our team, the company to approve up to 5 ,000 books to give away. Oh wow. So most get like 500. So we 10X'd it. And so 5 ,000 books.
3:24And, you know, Bob called me irate. And I was like, Bob, listen, your book three years from now is going to be outselling platform 10 to 1. You know, like platform is, you know, it's a hot topic right now. It's a niche book. Yours is going to be a much bigger book. Sure enough, you know, platforms, I think, sold 200, 300 ,000 copies. You know, Love Does is well over a million now. Wow.
3:45Chris Cruz:So you saw that long play and you go, like, this is going to work out this way. And so it was just fun to hear that connection. And so I was at Thomas Nelson for about six years, worked on 43 New York Times. Which is a massive publishing house, especially in the faith world, but also beyond. Yeah, so HarperCollins bought it. So now it's kind of rebranded HarperCollins Christian along with Zondervan. Worked on 43 New York Times bestsellers. I share this because this is how I got connected to Hyatt. Yeah. And then towards the end, a lot of the A-list authors said, hey, what would it look like for you to not only help launch my book, but take my IP and build a business off of?
4:17Yeah. Really build a brand. Yeah. And so I did that. And towards the end, Michael found out that I was leaving and called me. He was like, hey, will you come help me grow this company? And I said, well, I'd love to. Was it called full focus? No, just Michael Hyatt and at the time. I was like, I wish I could, but I can't because I had already signed four pretty big contracts with pretty big authors. I was like, I'm starting a marketing agency. Yeah. So then he hired me on a contract basis. Wow. And then about two years in, I went to try to fire him and said, hey, you know, you're 50 percent of my time.
4:48but only about 10 % of the agency's revenue. You know, we got to figure it out. You know, six to nine months, like, hey, I'd love to find someone to fit that role. Long story short, two days later, he's like, hey, what it'd like for us to hire you. Made him an offer. I didn't think he'd say yes to you. He did. And the goal at that point was, hey, how do you come in? And Michael had a big vision for the business. How do we, my job was to kind of oversee marketing. At the time, we didn't have a sales team. It was primarily marketing. And it was how do we develop non-Michael revenue?
5:15Chris Cruz:Just real quick, I want to put a pin in. How do we drive that? when you said sales marketing, how do you distinguish the two? Like what's, man, that's a really good question. I think in today's modern age of like, you know, people being able to buy through cart and all of that, and that's considered a sale. Yeah. Um, but to me in the world that I work in, the moment there needs to be a human interaction, I call that sales. Okay. So it's fair, you know, marketing, you know, if you go to buy clothes, things like that, obviously that's direct sales, you know, cart, like there's a sales process there that I would say you need to look at.
5:46But to me, it's when a person needs to be involved and marketing hands off the lead that was generated to a person. In my world, that's the way that I distinguish the two.
5:56Chris Cruz:That's great. So then we circle back to Mike. You just had marketing going. There wasn't no sales or was sales. I can't. No, no sales. Just like really a very small team of marketing. They brought over three or four from my agency. Oh, wow. And to kind of really bolster the team. And at the time, they were just north of seven figures. I was employee number three. We had like maybe 12 contractors. It was primarily kind of a contractor-led business. When I left, we were mid eight figures business. And we had, I don't know, 40, 50. We had a great team, great products. We pivoted. When I joined, 98 % of our revenue was digital courses.
6:34Within three years, that flipped. Less than 2 % of our revenue was digital courses. We got to double tap into that.
6:41Chris Cruz:98 % of it is online courses. What are you then going to go? We got to diversify this. We got to, what are you doing? What are you saying? How are you moving this team? So we literally had this conversation to say, hey, this is such a noisy market. We're in leadership and productivity. Those are the two things that Michael was an expert at. That was blogs about. Anyone can own this space. Anyone could do that. And from a digital course, like I called it digital dust. Yeah. You know, people buy these things and they sit on a computer and no one consumes the content. And Michael was all about transformation.
7:13So when you have 2 ,000 people buy a product, only 200 people go through the product. 1 ,800 people are sitting there waiting to maybe consume it on a rainy day or frustrated or whatever. It just wasn't working. It worked from a P &L standpoint, but from a transformation standpoint, it didn't work. That was a dirty little secret back then.
7:34Chris Cruz:I mean, that's the reality of course. And everyone was doing it. And we were like, there's a finite timeline to this. Absolutely. And there's a whole world that wants to keep you thinking you need to buy more and more courses. Totally. To then get better and better. And then realizing, I'm not going to get any better from this course because I actually got to go do the work. 100%. Instead of just watching it. But you're going, hey, from a P &L standpoint, this is great. But from a transformation standpoint. And the vision for the company, what Michael wanted to do. Which I don't know how many people truly look at it like that.
8:03Chris Cruz:like a lot of people would have rode that thing till it was over going like oh it was scary it was scary so yeah yeah it was scary um you know because i mean and goal goal setting was like our number one thing so we were driven it felt like yeah you know we we grew that thing from a million to mid-eight figures in five years and i would say you know this is a i would say an upside and a downside yeah you know we were super goal driven yeah um you know it felt like you were never winning even though we were winning like crazy because you constantly have a new thing a new thing you know and that was just that was kind of like we were just all hard chargers that wasn't like michael's fault or someone it was just us as an executive team we agreed that's what it was yeah you know and so it was just always more so then you you make this change you tell your team hey we're going to pivot we're going to diversify we know it's going to impact us what was the yeah so we actually as an executive team read the book revenge of analog okay and so there was a kind of about the like uh you know the reprisal of the record industry you know physical yeah the tactile experiences we as humans which i also think in this ai world i think we're going to be craving human interaction yeah like if you have if you as a brand can create human interaction experiences you're going to be ahead of the game you know so yes that's a whole other yeah episode next episode let's go so uh that's where the planner idea came in so the full focus planner because revenge of analog.
9:25We're like, Hey, how do we take the content that we have in our flagship courses, which are on goal setting and productivity? We know leaders, the thing that keep people from achieving goals is actually writing their goals down and revisiting them. That was the, that was the hypothesis. You knew this because the data you had from the courses you created. So you had
9:41Chris Cruz:this whole like data pool of what's working and what's not working. Yeah. So that was the hypothesis of the planner. Okay. And which that was only the first three pages of the planner, which is kind of funny because you know, you write down your goals in the planner and then the goal, it's like, Hey, every week you're going to revisit that but now you know and michael's a big franklin covey fan i remember you know and michael in his corner he had maybe 55 to 60 planners in the corner he had bought every planner in the sun yeah i remember my dad going to the mall to the covey store and buying all these planners yeah i totally remember that and michael i've never i'll never forget it because it was like it was one of those like um goosebumps moments okay um you know it's me and michael and joel miller michael joel's he was joel's michael's son-in-law he's married to megan the daughter who was also involved.
10:24And Michael was just kind of at a, like, he was at his wits end. Cause he was just like, I don't know how to create this. I know we need a physical planner, but I don't know, like, and Joel and I looked at her like, we already have the content. It's sitting in the courses. Now we just have to like productize it and become physical. And we're like, Hey, would you, and Joel was like, Hey, will you let me run with this in my team? And we'll get you a mock-up in 48 hours. Whoa. You know? And you know, and so literally this was a car, this was a car ride um it was joel miller and mike burns okay um went in a car ride to pick up one of their kids from school and or joel had to like make a 45 minute trek so he asked mike to sit in the car with him okay and literally told him and mike you know like he just sketched it out page by page on that you know 45 minute one way so an hour and a half and there was more work than just that but then ran it by michael and got it about 80 there michael finalized it and before we knew it we had a product um we pre-sold it i can remember to the day of like getting printers you know just like making a fake mock-up for marketing and branding purposes yeah but we did because we did a pre-launch
11:31Chris Cruz:campaign we didn't know how much we'd sell yeah i was gonna say what's this what's the logic behind a pre-launch campaign like why yeah so in a physical product like that um there's just tons of cost of goods you know and so what do we do we order 10 000 we sell 2 000 we're sitting on 8 000 inventory that's that sucks yeah um and with a digital course we were so used to like hey you sell it you deliver it via email it's you know so like our business model wasn't set up for managing inventory and holding inventory and all of it so we decided to do pre-orders and we kind of knew the timeline so we could kind of say roughly yeah um and first day we sold half a million dollars in planners oh my goodness we're sitting at a you know we're sitting at blackberry farm resort and I remember just, it was like cocaine.
12:15I've never done cocaine, but I hear it's addicting. And, you know, like just refreshing Shopify just by the second. It's like, oh, five more sales. Boom, boom, boom. It was like nothing like that in my career, I would say. It was just like we knew it would be big, but we didn't know it would be that big. Oh, my goodness. And that moment, that changed everything for the business because it started giving us a vision for different things and what people really wanted.
12:37Chris Cruz:And the evolution of the Michael Hyatt brand changed. Yeah. It was no longer just a personal brand of an individual. And so our strategy was, hey, we know we've got to launch this brand in the backs of our email list and Michael Hyatt, but the vision was that people wouldn't know Michael. They would know the full-focus planner. And so at that time, there wasn't plans to rebrand the company as Full Focus Co. or Full Focus Company. That really came about four years later where it was just like, hey, it just makes sense, and everything kind of fits. We wanted to own the word focus. That was the word we wanted to own.
13:12Chris Cruz:What do you say when someone's like, it's going to be too confusing for people? Like you got the full focus plan and you got Michael Hyde. Did you guys ever wrestle with that? Oh, yeah. I would say that's why it took us forever to do it. Because we've been in business and Michael's the name and all of it. But sometimes it just makes sense because if you're really trying to sell the business, you kind of almost have to. And that's not totally true. I mean, we actually did an evaluation of the top 100 brands in America. 60 of them started with a personal brand. Versace, like, you know, like things like that, you know, now Versace's dead.
13:46You do this whole research on like, yeah. To say, okay, could we, you know, it just as an argument. Yeah. We could keep it. You know, I mean, Franklin Covey, Franklin Covey's been dead for a long time. That brand is still, you know, doing well. I would have been hard with the hotels. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, we've always been like, yeah, that's very, very true. So, you know, I forget, we had another name that we ran with for a little bit. and it just didn't, you know, didn't do anything.
14:08Chris Cruz:Okay. So then for you, when you're, you go from doing that, building that out, massive success, it's working really well. You, what are you, what's driving you? And you're like, what kind of problems are you thinking you're trying to solve that even start to pivot your career when you're thinking in this space of marketing, CMO, the ways that your brain works. And like, even in this conversation, I'm seeing things you say so like natural language for you that aren't for other people. So what's driving you now, after you've had this success, the company starts to see the growth, what's going on next for you in that?
14:42Chris Cruz:Yeah. You know, it's one of those, like in an organization like that, it's like, Hey, what's next? How are we going to grow? You know, there's a, there's a ceiling to a planner, you know, like I think just the market. And I would say, you know, it's a high end planner and it's$50 a quarter. So I'm here. Okay. I need to say this because it's so good. You have such a, an ability to say the facts that people need to You know, like there's a limit to this. There's a ceiling to this. There's, hey, there's going to be a cap on that. I think so many people get almost fantastical. Like this is going to be unending.
15:09It's going to be, but there's something about you that feels like this responsibility to go like, no, there's going to be a cap on this.
15:16Chris Cruz:What is that in your brain that makes you say that and do that? I don't, you know, that's a great question. I think it's just been like, I was fortunate enough at 24. my like boss and the owner of a company that I worked for put me on the leadership team yeah in 2007 2006 pre-recession yeah I was at the leadership table making really hard decisions and looking at product lines and all that such a young age I think I just it's I've just been in the executive boardroom for so long and you know executives just have different conversations than the average employee I've owned multiple businesses so even working inside of Michael's business, I think like an entrepreneur, you know, like it's, it's not my company, but I know what he's thinking about and what's driving, you know, his decisions of whether he's going to invest in people, whether he's going to, you know, draw more money out, you know, because I can think like a business owner.
16:05And sometimes there's nothing more frustrating when you have employees care more about themselves and the business and start to make decisions for that. And so I think that was a, that's been a strength of mine because you're able to, you're looking at things through a
16:16Chris Cruz:different lens you're not just looking at it through your specific role you're looking at it through a little bit even of a like we look at things even too holistic you're like i'm looking at this at a bigger picture and this has a runway to it and has a totally insight yeah and so we started thinking through okay what do we like when we started to really dial in who do we serve and the planner helped us do that more than anything and we had did you do any exercises to dial in who you serve or was it just taking yeah so courses yeah so we had a product called best year ever which is our our flagship um product okay and you know we've had tens of thousands people go through that it's a four to five hundred dollar product okay um and we did a live event and then on the back end we sold what we called activation workshops okay it was like at the beginning of the year it was like hey you can come quarterly to nashville you know we didn't sell it this way but it's like basically goal insurance yeah you know it was like hey come together in a group you know you've set these big hairy audacious goals be part of a group yeah that was great it was high ticket problem is is it like it attracted groupies it didn't attract who we really wanted okay so what we started seeing is like who are the people that are having the greatest amount of transformation they were small business owners that had the money and you know that time was an eight thousand dollar product we started to say hey that's who we want to serve so let's figure out a product on how to serve them and so that's when we love that so much we we created a coaching program and this is a really fun kind of just evolution of the brand We pivoted away from activation workshops.
17:43We pivoted and renamed the coaching program Business Accelerator.
17:48Chris Cruz:Trey was involved with it? So Trey was the first salesperson that we hired. I want to have a conversation with Trey on the podcast at one point. He was the second salesperson we hired, actually. So we launched Business Accelerator. We had these hairy, audacious goals. I was still CMO, and I was kind of overseeing sales. But at the time, we said, hey, I don't think you can do both. And so we hired a director of sales to come in and basically prove the concept, build out the sales process. Six months in, he sold one seat. Oh, wow. And we didn't really have a lot to speak for it. Great guy, wrong position, you know, wrong, you know, all of that.
18:23And so I remember sitting at the table with Michael and Megan. We were halfway through the year. It's about this time of year. And our goal was to sell 400 seats at about 20 ,000 a pop.
18:34Chris Cruz:Oh, my goodness. No, I think it was 12 ,000 at first, 12 ,500. and they're like listen we can reset the goal you know and they know my personality you know so they're like they're like just laying it on thick you know we can you know reset the goal and kind of like come in and limp along the finish line or we can say hey we're going to put a stake in the ground right now we're going to we're going to go for 400 what do we have to do to hit 400 and so i was just like okay here's what has to happen i just hired a director of marketing courtney baker she's a rock star she proved it like like i was like hey i could step away and she could run the marketing without me and in fact probably better yeah and so i was like a testament to leadership when leadership doesn't have that kind of ego in the room yep and goes like i can actually put somebody in a role that does it better than me yep and not feel like it's a threat to my leadership yeah yeah just call calling these things out i love because people don't see it but it's the part that i love to just go like hey yeah that's a skill that people need to double tap into that kind of yeah yeah and so and cordy's incredible um you know so i ended up saying hey like and i've done sales before i ran sales team it's kind of funny i bounced back and sales and marketing um i was talking with someone earlier and they're like yeah so do you do marketing i'm like well it depends on how you know me and met me you know then it's like it's either sales or marketing it's kind of funny what i was in that season and so i i said hey like i want to like i want to figure out how to sell so i'll sell so we came up with a live event around the planner called achieve which we like decide hey it's like everyone wants to achieve so we said hey why don't we do a live event we did one here in brentwood okay from all over the country and that's when we launched business accelerator at the live event okay so we sold a hundred the coaching program yeah so we sold a hundred on site from that event okay so that was like well on our way and then we said we started maximizing our podcast all of it to book calls just kind of built out our sales system at the end of the year we sold i think just over 400 we hit our freaking goal so okay so for like six months i was literally seven calls back to back so how were you how did you look at even your podcast strategically as that like you're saying like we started to kind of point our things differently what were what were some of the things you were telling your team or to go hey here's how we're going to kind of utilize these outlets like our podcasts and etc how were you talking to them to get yeah great yeah so you know it was a team effort massive team effort um you know previously obviously the planner had changed our business and we were directing consumer and it was like hey cart purchase all of it but you know our we we were really good at webinars and so we sold really well you know our courses and stuff on webinars and things.
20:57So we said, Hey, why don't we, you know, we didn't really do webinars for the planner because it's a$40 purchase. That's a, it's a, you know, quick decision. You know, there's not a whole lot of trust and nurturing. It's like, Hey, if this is a need, we'll buy it. Yeah. Again, things that you say that no one else is going to see.
21:11Chris Cruz:You're like, Hey, the price point doesn't require as much nurturing as this price point. This product takes a longer cycle to get a customer at. So we've got to look at this differently. And so you're going, Hey, this is, we don't really need to do that for that. But again, that's just a frame of mind that holistically can be so quickly overlooked when it's the the speed of baseball is played so fast that i'm like totally no that's a skill set to remind everyone to think about going hey what's the price point of your product does it need a lot of nurturing what kind of nurturing does it need and what's the life cycle to get there yeah i think you just even it's interesting just even hearing you process that and talk about it like it reminds me how special our team was because we did we moved you know 100 miles an hour yeah but we were always in sync and we were always on each with each other and it's like that was a really fun season yeah you know it's like i don't get a chance to talk about this too much so it's kind of fun to go back and go back and relive it so you know it was like so there was two things we built a webinar i remember like seven pillars of i forget what it was but around you know here's the seventh the whole idea was here's the seven things that we say businesses need to have to grow okay and what we did is we pivoted we said hey you could be good at three of these things the thing that sucks as a business owner is you have to be doing all seven of these at the same time yeah if you're not doing all seven of these at the same time you're you're falling behind yeah and so like created a massive need yeah i mean literally i mean my calls like my calendar was booked left and right and then we would then it would stop working we have to come up with something different you know whatever um i mean they were crazy days like i didn't have time i literally had a notebook with the every day i'd start with the names and i would like after the call, I would write down like two or three words of like the template that I had to send.
22:52And like, if I had to pivot or like change the template at all, because then like,
22:57Chris Cruz:which holistically brands when your sales team and your marketing team, if they can pull from that going, Hey, sales team, think like this. Like if you had to speak to somebody about their sales team, just based off what you just said, how would you coach someone up to go? Here's how your sales team needs to be thinking. Like that's kind of universal. That's not just specific to a product, but going, here's some frame of mind you need to have for thinking about this kind of stuff. Like, was that like a thing you knew? Like, I'm going to create a list and it's just, and it was survival of the fittest at that point for me.
23:26Like, honestly, it was like either that or like, I'm going to spend three hours doing follow-up at the end of the day. You know, and I use it to my advantage. I told people like, Hey, I don't have time for follow-ups. You have to make the decision. Wow. You know, granted that's not like, I would not coach people to do that, but it was like, it was kind of in that season. It was necessary. Yeah. Cause there's only one of us yeah you know and so we got through that so leading into trey you know it's funny i met trey the following april and in on a you know on a beach in florida and you randomly met him randomly met him gosh that's funny so i was there for my birthday they were there for their anniversary okay our kids were young our kids kind of hit it off on the beach and just started chatting and told him about the planner send him a planner he started using it loved it was really trying to bring on a salesperson and so just over the next six months just kind of like got to know him and told him about what we're doing and um talked to you and his family and moved to nashville and he was sales rep number one um when i left that team i don't know it was seven or eight people on the team between reps and rev ops and if we could if we could revisit a little bit of let me
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24:30Chris Cruz:reframe the question i had before which is if you what were the things you were telling that sales team they need to be thinking like or acting like or behaving like what were some of the cultural things you were telling that sales team to move the ball forward yeah because i think brands can get lost in the visuals they can get lost and how is our website showing up or how is our marketing campaign like but you have this knack for this part here the sales and marketing together what was some of the mindsets you were telling to go yeah great question there's a couple things that come to my mind one you know this is this is always where it's like man you know sales people like the lead quality sucks.
25:04You know, no one, no one ever loved, you know, no one ever says that. Right. Um, and here's what I would, I always say is like, they're a lead. Like, who do you get to decide if they suck or not? Here's the, here's the thing I know to be true. And as a salesperson, they're here because like, they didn't just like, we didn't just buy it. Like all this was inbound leads that they had a pain point at some point that they're willing to give up their information and come to us. So talk to them about their pain rather than coming in and talking about the product or like trying to just get them on the phone.
25:37It's like, hey, we exist. It's like when push comes to shove, it's like we exist to help small business owners like you grow and scale your company in a way that doesn't require more of you, but less of you. Like who doesn't want that? Yeah. You know? So like if they don't want that, that's great.
25:52Chris Cruz:So your team is equipped with that deeper why. They're not just equipped with like, okay, let me just tell you. Yeah, here's my tactics. I'm going to send three emails and two texts and, you know, make a couple calls and say, this is Johnny from Full Focus. I'm here to talk to you, you know, when you're ready. Yeah. You know, which a lot of people do. Yeah. I was going to say, it sounds like the standard spiel. Like, but you're saying you coach them a little differently. Like, hey, this is a lead. They have a pain point. Remember why we exist. Totally. And I think the other thing, and this is something, you know, Trey listens to this.
26:19He'll appreciate it. And I've seen this in most coaching.
26:21Chris Cruz:And because Trey's now the, what is his role now at Belay? He's the director of sales at Belay, which is a$100 million company. Yeah, I want to bring him in on a podcast too. His office, I think, is like right above ours to the left. I know, I texted him. I was like, hey, I'm coming down. He's like, oh, I'm on a plane to New Orleans for an event today. I want to bring him on to talk about this stuff. He's incredible. And I remember Coach and Trey, there's never been anyone. You know, I've got a whole like call flow that I use for sales calls and all of it. But building rapport, number one, you know, all of it.
26:50Like there's no one better at building. like this whole point of the sales process is to build rapport, build trust, obviously communicate clearly about the product. But I think communicating clearly about the product is the least important part of your sales call. Wow. Okay. All right. Because I think that, and I've seen this time and time again, the more we talk about our product, we actually are creating more objections for the prospect than,
27:14Chris Cruz:you know, like I was just talking to my salesman about this. Like I literally, you know, when you go to buy an Apple watch, like think about a 60 year old that goes into the Apple store and buys an Apple watch. Can you imagine if the sales rep had to sit there and tell them every feature that the Apple Watch had? Right? Like they'd be there for two hours. They'd be confused. And the person would be like, I'm not going to use 95 % of that. So why am I paying$499? Right. I want to pay for 5 % of that because that's all I'm going to use. Yeah. Like, okay. So, but what does Apple do? They market that if you fall down and the new watch now can call an emergency and save your life.
27:48Chris Cruz:Yeah. So a 60-year-old, like, and that's like, that's a feature that's only been six months old. Yeah. But the watch does a million times more things than that. Yeah. But that may be the only reason you buy the Apple Watch. Yeah. Okay. So. Yes. So the more like. I love it. So I always say ignorance is bliss a lot of times. That doesn't mean that we hold things back about our product. But we need to be intentional about what we share about our product to say, and our brain can only think in threes. Okay. So can we talk about our product in three things that are going to help you? Okay. Okay. And sure, under these, that was three, there could be 10 things.
28:20We're not going to talk about all 10 things. We can send them something after the meeting. It makes me feel
28:24Chris Cruz:so much better about our, our agency website coming up where we got three things. I'm like, okay, good. We're in the right space. Totally. You know, and so I would say like, we spend too much time trying to talk about our product. Then we do uncovering their pain and just mirroring back their pain and confidently saying what we have will solve your problem. yeah and here's why i believe that yeah and kind of have to believe in the product don't need to know all the features exhaustively but you got to believe that's that's what i told trey like this is what some of the best sales reps i've ever had is that they will not do that they then get into features and benefits and they go through and all of it and i'm like yeah any like i'd like trey like they are eating out of your hand right now yeah anything you say and ask them to do they will do it because you have built so much trust yeah but the problem is those people big thing of brands is building trust.
29:11Chris Cruz:Yeah. The problem is you don't even realize it, but like, so watching it, I'm like, dude, they like they're in hook, line and sinker. And then those people are too, some of those people like Trey's just a super nice guy for him to like become pushy. You know, in his mind, he's going to become pushy as a sales rep. Yeah. I'm like, Trey, there's nothing in this world that's ever going to cause you to be pushy. Wow. And I'm using Trey as an example. There's all, that's, that's a lot. Like that's the, to me, those are the best salespeople, not the like, you know, obviously you've got the dirty salespeople are going to say anything and everything to get the product sold manipulators and yeah you know but i would never hire those people right you know and so um that that's just a totally different game and it's like knowing you know it's almost you got to teach them their superpower yeah and make them aware of it and they do it like it takes them about 10 times to do it and then they see it and then it unlocks something for them wow but then it also but then they forget and you got to recalibrate yeah makes sense it makes sense coaching a team keeping them focused you go from helping that extraordinary growth fast forward i don't know the timeline but then you start going somewhere else to build something else also that has this exponential growth to it and then tell me i want you to fill in the blank there yeah so i left michael i don't remember the year so but um ended up consulting for about two years okay um and just going back to kind of being like a fractional crol working directly with founders a lot of things like one of the things i love doing is coming in and uh Working with a founder who is still driving a lot of the sales and doesn't know how to get out of that.
30:44And they're selling just based on charisma or relationships. There's no process. Maybe they've hired a sales rep before and they failed miserably because they're just like, hey, here's leads.
30:53Chris Cruz:Go do it. And there's no coaching. There's no training. And it's like they don't have the origin story. They don't have the charisma that the business owner has. So I love helping them do that. So that was something I did on the consulting side. And one of those clients ended up being Donald Miller. Okay. and they brought me in to um for those that don't know donna miller paint a picture of don yeah so don don and i knew each other because i helped launch a couple books when i was at thomas nelson his book is a new york times bestseller yeah new york times bestseller wrote a book called blue like jazz you know i guess that's now 25 years ago 25 30 years ago um you know i was in college so i'm 45 or 42 now so yeah yeah 20 something years ago um and yeah he was a was a memoirist and then became just this like really like wanted to know everything about story.
31:40So became an expert in story, started helping businesses understand, you know, the narrative of the customer and the story of the customer, not the brand. You know, it's all about making the customer the hero, customer first. Most of us as brands tend to make the brand the hero, not the customer. And so that just really took off, started out as like a physical. It was an event, right? Yeah, like a three-day event.
32:04Chris Cruz:you came i think it was called something else it was like storyline or storyline was the first event yeah he transitioned to once they kind of realized the business storyline was like towards the consumer helping you kind of do your like life plan okay um and then realized businesses were asking him to do it and then they rebranded a story brand for that yeah started doing three-day events um in nashville you know 30 40 people would come and do that um obviously then they launched a book then they want certification where marketing agencies could leverage the framework. Um, and then COVID hit and obviously they had to figure out virtual events.
32:35Yeah. Uh, they threw the kitchen sink, you know, just like a lot of people in the online world and had a great year, probably the best year ever. They didn't hire people. So margins were crazy. You know, they got PPP funding before business made simple or was that the same time business
32:49Chris Cruz:made simple? It was about the same time. Yeah. So business made simple was kind of like the kitchen sink. Okay. Um, and, um, you know, so they grew and then about three years in a row, they kind of steadily just like just slightly declined you know um but still were ahead of 2019 numbers but not 2020 you know and so dom was just out of place he was frustrated with growth you know and so um he's like hey i'd love for you to come in and help us think differently yeah and so originally it started out as a consulting so i consulted for about nine months similar kind of with with michael yeah and then things happened and ended up joining the team full time and uh in 23 we grew by like 30 after years of decline wow which was great and then from 23 to 24 we had some pretty big goals we didn't hit them as much as we wanted to we still grew yeah but not the way that we that way that we wanted so what again same thing questioned with michael hyatt helping him move that forward what were some of your things that you did right away that you're like here's what we can if we can pull these levers yep so this is a this is something that I come in and I'm glad you asked that question because one of the things that I is so frustrating with brands in this space is, you know, I've got a 200 ,000 person email list, you know, you know, their name and email.
34:06I'm like, you don't know anything. Yeah. You know, and back in the day, it was like the more, the more feels, the more questions you ask, the less people fill out. I'm like, yeah, that's if you're giving them something crappy, if you're giving them something of value, they're going to give you any information that you want. And if you ask the right questions, they will actually give you more information because they feel like you're going to target them specifically. Yeah. And so.
34:29Chris Cruz:How are they perceiving your brand is going to help them? Yeah. And so just generically, I mean, this is an exercise I do with almost every client is on every form is like we try to. And there's a lot of work to this. It's not just super easy. But which best describes you is a question we ask. And there's a drop down. And we're literally trying at that point to bucket people based on the product that we're going to sell them. Okay. But we want to say it in a way that they don't realize that. Yeah. And in a way that's actually helpful to them. Yeah. And so, I mean, they had all these leads coming in, but they didn't know anything about them.
35:01Chris Cruz:So they were just capturing one element of it. Yeah. They didn't know the customer journey. So it helped kind of map out the customer journey. Um, and, and then all of a sudden we, when you say map out customer journey, again, I'm almost going, I want to pull people in. Like, what did you start to press on? Like, what did you, like, what did you start to get yeah so they knew that like they knew um a legion and the percentage of people from a legion would would convert to buy but we didn't know what what the triggers in between and how long it was and what needed to have happened to maybe shorten that sales cycle or um the people that fell out of that journey what how do we do to bring them back yeah um because this is all the stuff that takes your brand from having purpose and having a people you're serving to sustainability with profit because if you don't have this element here you're like you're so focused on one end where you're like okay we got this great product we did it awesome and then we're like okay we're making this change for this group of people and it's awesome but then no one has thought through this growth part or this sustainability part that comes from revenue and profit and you're going wait guys there's a system there's a way to think about this and this really needs to be thought about and the customer journey is one of those overlooked ones even at times with the stuff we're doing and the companies uh harboring union that we're nestled into here we've wrestled with what's our customer journey because we have to know these kinds of things totally you have yeah it's funny it's um i mean this is like as a marketing guy i mean i haven't i haven't had a website since 2016 i was just it's funny i was just talking to someone um granted i've had some w2 work but also consulting work and i've got great clients now and just all been word of mouth and referral um and it's like i feel bad because like i don't i should do it for myself but i don't i was just having this conversation is the interior designer whose house is a mess which makes everybody else beautiful yeah um you know so then we really built out the sales team with story brand too and um you know the like one thing that i would say both in hyatt and don and brands in this space um the books are the if people can consume books books are the number one lead generator in both of their businesses and even thinking about the full focus planner we didn't talk about that but the full focus planner ended up being our biggest legion we ended up when we really scaled business accelerator this comes back to like this is kind of combining everything we just talked about um the full we actually saw the full focus planner as a lead generator not a profit center in the business because business accelerator was the driving force for the business because we launched one-on-one coaching with it it was a 45 000 program yeah and so the planner was 135 yeah um you know the and we were willing to that which best describes you i mean it took me almost nine months to get the executive team to agree to put that on the website.
37:37And not only, every form that we have, any lead generator and a phone number. Because without a phone number, my sales team can't do anything with it. And so they did it. And then we built out a whole thing with our CFO. We were willing to lose$100 to acquire a customer through the planner because we knew the customer journey. We knew how many people that bought the planner would go fill out this long form that gave us all this information. and then if they and then we said hey if we know these three things about them they get identified as a sales qualified lead in hubspot and then our team of sdrs well first we would then give them an opportunity to book a call if they don't then our sdr follows up sdr means sales development representative some of it bdr business development but or a setter yeah you know but it's someone who's qualifying a customer and that's setting up a a call with an account executive yeah account executives the closer you really don't want closers prospecting it's just not a good use of their time and you want them them closing and so uh those that that changed our business you know
38:39Chris Cruz:and so so putting this form to be way more descriptive to get who this person is getting the right information to then line them up on the customer journey and you're mapping out all the i mean it's like and what i would say it's like it's it's getting every ounce of juice out of the orange yeah you know well and this is the thing is like a lot of people you know they they spend money on advertising to get a booked call in this space if you're selling high ticket. And so you're looking at cost per booked call, but you're having, at the best, the leakage from filling out a form and then scheduling the call, so the calls right after, 20%.
39:1120 % of people you're losing just from, they fill out an application, but then they don't find a time that works for them. That's the best I've ever seen. Most of them, it's 40%. So you look at cost per application, cost per booked call cost per close all that um and so but they're overlooking it all that leakage most organizations aren't doing anything about it they what we just talked about yeah you know they just start getting very descriptive and and it's like there's things you can do to improve but no matter how much you improve it there's going to be that leakage and if you've got a big enough and a good enough product and it's at a price point i highly recommend bringing in setters to follow up and prospect and call those people.
39:50But it has to happen in 72 hours because life moves. They're on to something else at that point. Yeah, that's so good. It's all speed.
39:58Chris Cruz:Okay, so then let's fast forward a little bit here and then bring us to the spot where you helped launch another product, which is Coach Builder. Is that correct to say that? Was that what it was called when you started working on it? I don't believe, I think it pivoted. I think there was a team decision on that, but yeah, it's close to it. You helped launch a whole other business that is Coach Builder. where did you what was the strategy there that you were thinking through to go build that how did you start to prop that up yeah great question man this has been a fun podcast just get to talk about the fun the stuff that i kind of forget about you know and it just kind of happens um you know so certification was a big part of don's business okay you know and story brand that was a very niche um you know towards marketing agencies or creatives and you know over the year sold two three thousand of those certifications and was super successful but really saw the coaching industry as a totally like blue ocean market okay and when they launched business made simple business made simple you know we had people saying coaches saying hey can i teach this framework inside of businesses and so we certified people in the business made simple framework which i know a lot of people here harbour and union are certified i've gone through it um and that's great but coach builder i love the podcast yeah like i really love the business made simple podcast for a real long time i would listen to it yep it's pivoted recently to a different kind of content yeah and it's not as i'm just honest not as appealing to me as it was before but yeah it's okay yeah and that's just don wanting you know focus back to story brand so it's more on the story brand side than than that um and so coach builder was a was really the idea of hey what what verticals can we own in the coaching space?
41:37So not just business. So Business Made Simple was business coaching.
41:39Chris Cruz:But I love that you asked that question. What space, what can we own in that space? Like, again, these are the clarifying questions when brands think holistically, when they start to develop their products. That question, like, what can we own? Like, wait a second, think about that. Yeah, and so the idea when we launched Coach Builder was we would work with A-list authors only, well-known brands that their book was selling really really well and more than likely that author didn't want to build a certification team and had no idea how to do a certification around their product okay and so the first one we went after was will gadara and reasonable hospitality book huge one there yeah massive win um and you know it was a perfect storm you know don and will were pretty good friends will left you know the the restaurant business and started doing consulting restaurant in the world that's like yeah number one in the world yeah those that haven't read unreasonable hospitality just go buy it right now amazon pull it up i think it's the best business book and that i've read in 10 years it's remarkable and it's not because i became friends with you know no will and all that i'd like it just it's that i mean he'd be he'd be another dream episode so if you ever he's here in nashville now i know he lives here yeah oh geez oh geez we're dreaming now and we're going uh he's he's starting some restaurants here okay let's go yeah it's gonna be fun okay um so will's the first one yeah so will's the first one in unreasonable hospitality where you know because he would go in he'd get paid 50 to 150 like yeah i mean i don't know this is i'm guessing i don't know those numbers um but i know what i charge and if i were will i'd be charging a lot more than i charge um you know and so uh to come in i mean one of the stories he shares is he worked with toyota one of like not toyota but like one of the largest toyota dealerships they own like 50 or 60 in the country and so talk about customer journey.
43:26And this is something that in the book he talks about. And this is like the core exercise that we teach through certification is you go in and you basically help map out the customer journey, which is every touch point. And he was doing it from the restaurant industry. Yeah, I was doing the restaurant industry.
43:39Chris Cruz:He was doing it from like working at a three-month-old start restaurant, looking at every step of the journey of a person coming in. Yep. Yeah. To the point, like one of the things in the book that's really powerful is that, you know, something like 35 % of people that came, it was their last stop. So it was Love and Madison Park was the restaurant before they went to the airplane oh wow for a flight so they would bring their bags you know they'd have their stuff all of it and so they said hey this is a touch point that we could really crush so every night they would make fresh food for people that were flying out if they knew they were flying out when they checked checked out they would give them this little goodie bag of granola which was one of their things that were really known for a couple of things gosh i love just to just to be able to go on the airplane and it's like oh like who's not going to come back after that and it probably cost them 50 to 60 bucks yeah but i mean the average experience the average ticket the average ticket there was i think 1600 a person yeah i was gonna say you're dealing with the three mission star best restaurant in the world yeah the bill is no less than a thousand dollars per person exactly yeah um and so the the vision was hey could we partner with people like that for the books working all of it um and i would say criteria yeah and i think the premise is still will that will it work um it worked with will yeah um but with don kind of going back to story brand yeah you know all of it and not i don't think there's anyone owning the like the relationship side of that to be but i think it's a massive still opportunity and i think they're still working on it so then you you so that means again you're alluding here that you pivoted out of building that and helping that drive and create that so let's let's wrap this thing up with the, the like obsessed, we'll, we'll go through in like less than eight minutes here, what you're doing now, I've gone to a couple of Zenith lab things and you have a little bit of your own framework, the obsessed framework.
45:23Chris Cruz:Yep. Let's wrap everything up around that and what you're doing now and how that's helping businesses and how people can think through that right now. So, so the obsessed framework, you know, I'm an aggressive guy. If you don't know the Enneagram, I'm Enneagram eight. So likewise, brother, we're in the same camp. A lot of energy. So, and I just think business owners are cut from a different cloth. There's always something we're obsessing about. Yeah. Or even just an executive or a leader. We're all just cut from a different cloth. There's something that keeps us up at night, even if you don't, you know, like, and so Obsess just came to us.
45:57And it's a framework that we would say every business needs to do to really be able to take their brand to the next level. Okay. And if they really want to grow in scale. So O is observe. Yeah. you know there's there's nothing like more frustrating than coming alongside i'm opening
46:14Chris Cruz:up if you're if you're not watching the show i'm actually opening up my journal from a zenith labs where i have the obsessed framework written out oh i'm gonna dude i'm gonna steal your thunder right now go for it o is observe b is benchmark s is strategize am i right so far yep yep and then um where we got where okay execute yep s is scale and then xs is sustain yep so you i'm just going over them quickly because I actually really like it and I had it in my notebook. Yeah. And so where I think a lot of people just focus is, uh, strategize and execute or scale, you know, and people don't take the time to observe their business.
46:51And it's one of the things that before I take on a client, I always will do a one day strategy session, which literally I'm coming in and observing your business. And then B's benchmark where it's like, Hey, Oh, you want your$5 million? You want to be a$40 million company? Well, like who's doing it? Like is the TAM there, total addressable market. Can we really do that? And like, it's easier outside to come in and challenge the founder and CEO to be like, Hey, it's probably not possible and doable. And your team's not going to get on board. You know, let's come up with a real realistic growth plan that we know that we can execute and scale.
47:23And so it's really, really fun. And then, you know, kind of the strategy session really helps with that.
47:28Chris Cruz:And in there, where does the challenger, the niche, the leader, the visionary, those quadrants, where does that sit? Is that in benchmark or strategize um that's in that's going to be in strategize okay cool yeah yeah it was one of the ones i took away where it's like are you the challenger in your market are you the niche player in your market are you the leader in your market or are you the visionary the industry disrupt because that's what's going to uh identify from a strategy standpoint how you're going to attack the market so it's like knowing who you are yeah and being clear about that and then if your team understands that they can they can make decisions based on yeah i've used that frame those four quadrants i've used that so many times with our thinking about brands that's building our own working at this company and going like, all right, who are we in this space?
48:07Chris Cruz:How are we disrupting and how are we challenging convention? Well, let me say, I have been, I mean, I've said this, I think we were in a room together recently. And I was like, if you're not following what Chris is doing and you're wondering from a social media standpoint, like creating content and from a brand perspective, I don't think there's anyone doing it better. Wow. Obviously, you know, there's people with larger numbers. It doesn't mean crap. Yeah. You know, and so to me, I just say the numbers will come. I mean, you're being faithful. You're crushing it. You know, like I'm sitting in a room with this podcast.
48:39It was a vision six months ago. Yeah. You know, we're going to do this, this, and this, and how much has changed from it. And it's one thing to have an idea, but you execute it. And you're working on multiple brands and everything. It's kind. You know, I wish I had as much, you know, like fashion and style. Style just comes from my family. So we're there.
48:58Chris Cruz:So you have, we'll finish up with the, so you obsess. You go from strategize to execute to scale to sustain. If you could say most people do, like you said, strategize and execute. What's the other overlooked one that you're like, we'll finish off with that one? Yeah, you know, I think I think sustain because I think entrepreneurs and business owners are so focused on growth that sometimes we forget that, like, we don't know how to be content anymore. and so what ends up happening is you burn out your people be for the sake of growth yep and you know what point is content and like i wrestle with this because like i get paid to help people grow okay it's like i'm gonna get paid to help you be content in your business yeah but at some point we've got to be content yeah you know and it's hard you know we work with people that are running seven million dollar companies and 50 million dollar companies and all of it and but what we don't always realize is like those are, those are top line numbers.
49:56Chris Cruz:Yeah. And people in the company don't realize how much risk the business owner is taking on a daily basis and 7 million and 50 million, depending on the industry may not be that much money in the owner's pocket. Right. Right. You know, it costs a lot of money to run a business. It costs a like, you know, so, um, the, it, when I say all those, it's like, yeah, it's, and what, what are the goals? You know, I, that's why I love being kind of a consultant because I can hear the business owner, the goals. Sometimes you're on the executive, you don't get like, they keep it close to their chests. You know, it's like, oh, I want to, I want to have$40 million in real estate and all this other stuff.
50:27And it's like, I can help you achieve those goals if you can be clear on those, you know, and then have the business be the driving force for that. But at some point you've got to be okay with your business sustaining. And that doesn't mean that your business isn't going to grow, but it's not going to scale. There's a ceiling for it.
50:44Chris Cruz:Bro, this has been phenomenal. We're going to need a part two for sure to deep dive into some of these other topics. Thanks for coming today. Yeah. Such an honor. Really appreciate being here. Thanks, Chris.
From the publisher
Chad Cannon has been behind the scenes of some of the most successful personal brand empires of the last decade, working directly with Michael Hyatt, Donald Miller, and other best-selling authors and thought leaders to grow eight-figure businesses from the ground up. In this episode, Chad sits down with Chris to talk about everything from book launches and planner pivots to sales strategy, team culture, and how to actually scale without selling your soul.If you’re a founder, CMO, or revenue leader trying to build a movement—not just a product—this one’s for you.Listen in as Chad breaks down what it really takes to grow a brand people believe in.Timestamps:00:00 – Chad’s connection to Michael Hyatt & “Platform”01:20 – Launching Platform and Love Does in the same week04:30 – Transitioning from publisher to brand builder06:00 – Why Michael Hyatt pivoted away from digital courses08:00 – The “Full Focus Planner” origin story11:00 – Half a million in a day: the moment that changed the business13:00 – Rebranding from a personal brand to a product-led company15:00 – Learning to think like an executive (early)18:00 – Identifying the right customer and the power of the “Best Year Ever” event20:00 – Building and scaling the Business Accelerator program24:00 – Sales mindset and how to coach closers28:00 – Why good sales isn’t about listing features32:00 – Helping Donald Miller reset StoryBrand’s growth path35:00 – How to turn your lead gen into a smart customer journey38:00 – The “Which best describes you?” form field that changed everything41:00 – The power of the Full Focus Planner as a lead gen engine44:00 – Building out the SDR/AE motion47:00 – Launching Coach Builder with Will Guidara50:00 – What Unreasonable Hospitality teaches about brand experiences54:00 – Mapping the customer journey as a key brand skill57:00 – Chad’s OBSESS framework for growth and sustainability59:00 – The 4 types of brand position: Challenger, Niche, Leader, Visionary—Subscribe for more episodes of Anatomy of a Brand, where we pull back the curtain on how the best brands are built.