Entrepreneurs Changing the World with Anthony Sarandrea: An EOFire Classic from 2021

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire. Brought to you by the HubSpot. podcast network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like Created with John Ushai. Today, we're pulling a classic episode from the archives and we'll be breaking down how entrepreneurs are changing the world. To drop these value bombs, I have brought Anthony Sanandrea into EO Fire Studios. Anthony is recognized as one of the top customer generators in the world, specializing in the financial services space and running a team that drove over 1 million customers in 2020.

0:35In today's foundation, we'll talk about how you need to have a sickening, delusional attitude to run things that are uncomfortable to those around you. And the idea of failing fast over and over again, it's so necessary. With how fast the world moves today, you have to run to stand still nowadays and oh, so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Anthony and our sponsors. The Next Wave, your chief AI officer, hosted by Matt Wolf and Nathan Lance, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Matt and Nathan are leading AI creators in your guiding light in the AI and technology frontier.

1:10AI technology is transforming the way we do business and the media landscape is fragmented. The Next Wave strives to be the leading podcast on AI technology and how you can apply it to growing your business. Listen to The Next Wave wherever you get your podcasts. Anthony, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with? What's up, everyone? I believe that becoming successful or wealthy is actually a spiritual or goodwill obligation that you have. And the reason why I say that, because being successful can have a lot of negative connotations.

1:46People feel like Jeff Bezos is dirty because he's so rich or sales are dirty, things like that. I think you need to create more value consistently in the marketplace in order to become successful. So therefore, I believe, you know, it really, at the end of the day, it's a call it a human goodwill, spiritual. if you're religious, obligation to become successful because it means you're creating value for your employees, your investors, your customers, your vendors, and everyone around you. Otherwise, you by definition cannot become successful unless you're creating an immense amount of value consistently.

2:15And you can create value to a lot of places in this world. I mean, I do believe in the phrase that people that say money can't buy happiness have never been able to give a blank check to a charity or a cause that they truly believe in because, man, that will make you thrilled and happy. And today we're talking, Fire Nation, about entrepreneurs who are changing the world. And as you heard in the introduction, Anthony is obviously one of those. But I want to start off, Anthony, by talking about the culture of selling and the culture of rejection. You have a story of going door to door selling solar panels, which that's all about selling and that's all about rejection because you have had some doors slammed in your face, brothers.

2:57So talk about that story. Starting off, I did exactly what you mentioned. I went door to door selling solar hot water systems in the Arizona 120 degree heat, right? But quickly found this little thing called the internet and pivoted, but found that the, you know, that same principle applied of gaining trust within the first few seconds and having to deal with, you know, now online, it might be campaigns not working, but then it's getting door slammed in your face. I think you need to, or, or, you know, entrepreneurs in general, you know, what, what, what is it? Les Brown says, you know, you do the things that are hard, your life will be easier, or you do things that are easier, your life will be harder.

3:34I think, I think you need to have like almost like a sickening delusional attitude to run at things that are uncomfortable for those around you. And, and, and one of those being that, that, that spirit of rejection and being able to handle that and being able to emotionally be ready for the next at-bat and the next at-bat and the next at-bat. And I think that's just so overwhelmingly necessary for an entrepreneur, even if they think they're more of a tech entrepreneur or there's someone like, oh, I'm not the sales guy or anything like that. Well, your product or your service or your software is going to fail over and over and over again.

4:07And people aren't going to like this or that or this about, you cannot please everyone. So starting to build that, call it attitude of resilience is, in my opinion, one of the most necessary skills that you as an entrepreneur or as a human can build to be able to carry on whatever your mission or journey is in this life. What was one of your tactics that you used while you were selling door to door to quickly attain trust? What did that look like? Yeah, a few of the things we would do is, you know, you go talk to the grumpiest guy on the street. I didn't even sell him. I just got to know him. And I would just literally talk to him and learn about his neighbors and everything like that.

4:43And then I would then take him, his name and his address to the next door neighbor. I'd say, you know, I just talked with John and everyone in the neighborhood knows John's the grouch. And I'd say, you know, John was telling me a little bit about how much his utility bills are and this and that. And, you know, I didn't know where you were, but, you know, I got to have tea with John and hang out with him a little bit longer. So essentially I leveraged like, in modern day would be like an influencer. In this case, it was like getting past the gatekeeper. The gatekeeper may have been the neighbor, but being able to go to the next door neighbor and saying, hey, indirectly, I gained the gatekeeper's trust.

5:20Let's have a conversation was a pretty effective tactic. What a tactic. That is fascinating. Go after the grouch fire nation. And that's the end of the interview. No, I'm just kidding. We're going to talk next about working with friends and family, because let's be honest, that can be trouble. So talk to us about that, working with friends and family and how you personally navigated that minefield. There's actually an immense benefit to that. I think you inherently have loyalty. You're not necessarily worried about them stealing trade secrets or turnover. You trust these people. And I think the business can grow in a lot of ways because of that.

5:56I think where it becomes a little harder is even in those early stages, but especially as you grow and you get past that, it's now are you overbearing, overstepping? Do you have feelings of setting in that, oh, my brother's not working that hard? Or maybe he's not the right person for this job. Someone else should be in there. And then you're micromanaging. Then you're losing that friendship and family relationship. And I think that's something I've learned the hard ways in a lot of ways and been able to manage around. And really what it comes down to me is if this person, if I'm running my personal life like a business, if this person is in my life, obviously if it's a brother or a father or mother, they're kind of by default in my life.

6:42But not really. You don't need to. I don't need to spend an immense amount of time with these people, maybe holidays and catch up on a text or two. But if I'm including them in my life, it's because I think that they, again, getting back to the add value, add value in my life and that they are positively influencing me. And then if work for me, this is my mindset and frame, if work for me is where I'm going to be spending a disproportionate amount of my time because it's where I think I can make the greatest impact in this world. and it's what, quite frankly, I now enjoy doing, why would I not want to have the same people I'm choosing to run my life as a business around, which is have the right people around me?

7:19Why would I not want those right people in my business? Now, does that not mean I've needed to help shuffle some of the people, friends and family to other positions in the organization? Yes. Does that not mean that there's not better people for those positions at times? Yes. But I think when you break it down to that level, for me at least, it made a lot of sense to include those people. and also put rails around it like bumpers as if we're about to go bowling. So, you know, for my brother, my little brother is the closest person on the planet. You know, we had a rough patch in work and it was quite frankly because I was overbearing.

7:52So we put in rules. He said, we're only going to communicate on Slack. If you get a call from me after 5 p.m., it's not work related. Even if the world is on fire, if I call you after, I guess no pun intended here, even if the world is on fire, if you get a call from me after 5, it has nothing to do with work. And so a lot of these open, transparent conversations around, hey, I'm thinking about someone potentially doing your position better, but I love you in the company. How do you think we can solve around that? I think that's – at least for me, it's bled into people that we've hired outside of my sphere of influencer friends and things like that.

8:28And it's allowed that personal connection where I think people – it forced me as a leader to be more of a servant leader and to be overly transparent with how I'm feeling, thinking, where I want to operate. And it's really allowed that culture for the inverse to happen. So even friends, family or beyond that to come to me with problems or come to me with, hey, my wife's being a pain in my you-know-what and saying I'm not making enough money. You know what? I love working here. How do I solve around that? And maybe we find a creative solution around that or maybe we do need to pay you more. Maybe there's value there.

8:57But yeah, that open, transparent organization, I think a lot of that was birthed out of necessity. Otherwise, I was going to lose all my friends and family. No one wanted to talk to me. See, Fire Nation, there's obviously pros and cons. And I like how Anthony talked about both of those because, hey, when you're starting off, you don't want to have a lot of churn. You don't want to have your secrets being taken to the competition. And that's a risk if you don't have friends and family. If you can trust those friends and family, you know that stuff's going to stay in-house. And a lot of other good points you brought up as well.

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10:41Visit HubSpot.com to learn more. So Anthony, a lot of people, and I mean a lot of people, They look at publicly traded companies as just untouchable. Like, I could never work with companies like that. How can we get our foot in the door with publicly traded companies? Because you've had plenty of success in this area. A couple of interesting things to look at. One is, what is your offer? So for us, the impetus of the company was, it was an internet marketing agency that would hire, you know, 10 grand a month, we'll manage your Facebook ads or your Google AdWords, right? Great. Awesome. Great business.

11:17I was very excited about that. In order to get better attention and make the sale better, we then pivoted to, okay, let me get a percent profit share on top of that of whatever we've delivered for the company. That was a great offer. And it helped us separate us from everyone else in the space, maybe doing a percent of ad spend. Next, we said, what if we productize the service? What if we were all of the risk? Only when you enroll a customer will we get paid. How is that for a no-brainer offer? And for us, it became just that. It became no-brainer. We now are on the other side of the table. We're now interviewing, is Geico better than Progressive with handling our customers?

11:53Because we only get paid when they actually enroll a customer. So it was really important, one, to focus on what is the unique differentiator and what is the offer you can't say no to, for lack of better words. But then to your point, how do you get in the door with those people? So now you've got a great offer. You've got a nice, unique differentiator. You're gaining traction. And in a lot of ways, this may sound funny, but I spend a lot of time with those people that are software vendors that a lot of people run from because they think they're going to get sold to. But in a couple scenarios, I found a software that was the CRM for some of these health insurance publicly traded companies.

12:34And I became really good friends with the CRM guy. And he already has the book of business of all these health care people. He's specific in the healthcare niche and I wasn't doing it to necessarily use him or not, but that was my in and I became great friends with him and he started trusting our work and understanding what we could do and it grew that relationship to where he felt comfortable to add value to his publicly traded clients and make direct introductions because it was a win-win. hey, publicly traded company wants better or more customers. Anthony wants publicly traded company because they can handle the customers better than, you know, guy in his basement or guy down the street or something like that.

13:08So really, it's finding people that already have those relationships with whoever it is you want to get in touch with, even if it's not a publicly traded company in one way or another. And sometimes it's being a little creative with it. It's thinking a little bit outside of the box, not just the employee that works there today or hitting up LinkedIn, the marketing manager. It's okay, who else has already that book of business in there that I can create relationships with. And in this case, I mean, he'd made introduction to several of these publicly traded companies because I created that relationship where it would have taken me years and potentially decades if I went one by one by one by one.

13:41A lot of great points here, Fire Nation. I want to circle back to something that Anthony shared at the top, just so you don't forget it, because this is key. What is your offer? You need to work on that and make it irresistible. Just as Anthony lined out his irresistible offer, how can you say no? Now, Anthony, you've driven over$100 ,000 a day in customers and leads to different financial and insurance products. How the heck did you accomplish that type of feat? I have a friend, he has a lawn company and in his eyes, he cut grass and he had huge turnover with low wage people. He was competing on price with everyone.

14:18And we really dug in to what do you actually do? What do you do? And a couple of layers deeper of the onion and the onion was, you give dads back their Saturday with their kids. Holy cow. What a differentiating conversation that is now to your employees, now to your customer when you're going around and trying to sell it. It's, Hey, we want to give you three hours back a month or five hours back a month with your kids. Like what, what? You're like, Oh yeah, by the way, I cut lawns. Like it's a much different frame of reference point. And I always joke, I become a method actor in some of our, and those that aren't familiar with the term, it's really putting yourself like deeply, deeply in the shoes of the consumer.

15:03So like I, for some of our debt consolidation companies we work with, I literally went delinquent on my credit card bills. It hurt my credit score. But I got to feel what it was like getting debt collector calls, getting letters in the mail that my bills were delinquent to see my credit score tank and feel that like kind of like a gut in my stomach of like, holy cow, what if I need to get approved for this or this or this? And all of a sudden the messaging, not only to the team of what we're doing, because we're not just running ads and driving leads, we're now solving for divorce, anxiety, depression, suicide, all these other things that come out of financial hardship.

15:35Like what a different conversation that is when you're attracting talent, which is massive to be able to get to a level like that, but also on the messaging on the front end that we're actually talking to the customer in a lot of ways, you're having a completely different conversation than we've been in business, 30 years or we've got the best service or BBBA plus. That's all great. But what if now you're talking about how a 65-year-old can get$1 ,000 a year back in their pocket by making a call? It's like, whoa, that's a much different offer than everybody else is potentially running on the planet when they're talking about checking your insurance coverage or other nice things like that.

16:09So really, it's deeply intimately understanding what business are you in? What are you actually doing? What are you actually solving at a deeper level? And I challenge anyone listening when you say, oh, you know, we drive leads. Okay, no, we don't just drive leads. We save Americans money. Great. So what does that do? Well, saving Americans money helped them be able to buy more things they want. Well, what does that do? And then eventually you land on, well, it stops potentially a divorce as that's the, you know, one of the number one factors into financial hardships or financial hardships, one of the number one factors into divorce, excuse me.

16:40So really figuring out what you actually do allows you to attract a team that's now there for a mission. I saw it, you know, it was in a Tony Robbins event and I'm trying to remember the exact reference, but you can look it up. Like reasons why employees choose companies and compensation was like number like seven on the list. Like it was so low and like some of the first ones were like transparency, you know, having more of a purpose in life and a why. And I think we're all so purpose driven, even if it's, we think it's money. It's really at the end of the day, it's to solve a purpose in some ways to be a good father.

17:13It's to, to have a good ego and be able to get that, that, that good looking girl with a hot, with a nice car, you know what I mean? Or whatever that is like it's that, that purpose driven. When you can give that to employees and customers and help them understand you really create, create some, some magic there. And of course, you know, John, we can get more into tactics, but I just wanted to paint that picture at a top, top level of like, what does your business really do? What does it really solve outside of the surface level stuff that you're thinking? What do you do, Fire Nation? I mean, it's such a fantastic question.

17:43And you probably don't have the best answer yet. Because I mean, how amazing is an offer of, I give you three more hours a week with your kid? Like, who's going to say they don't want that? I mean, come on. Then you can talk about a little more details about what you do. I mean, that is just a fantastic way of looking at things. And one thing that you do believe in is failing fast, Anthony. Expound upon that. I call it the bomb approach. A lot of people, when they create a new business or an idea or something like that, and what is it? Perfections, the enemy of something great. And I find more and more often, and I don't know if it's because of social media, everyone putting out their best foot forward now, or for whatever reason, people want to hoard their idea or their business, especially if you're an early stage entrepreneur, or maybe you're at a decent stage, but you're afraid, getting back to what we said before, the resilience of no's or people saying they don't they don't like what you have.

18:35I mean, man, that is where all the gold is at. It's if you can go through your competitors, Amazon reviews, Yelp reviews, what Google reviews, and look at all the negative, the one star reviews, like that's your angle, that's your differentiator. And I think the more often you're asking your customers, what am I doing bad? Like, seriously, no, we love you. No, no, no. What if you had to give me one thing, maybe even pretend like you're not even in the company. Hey, we're a third party survey company. You know, we've gotten a lot of complaints with company ABC, what are they doing poorly? What do they do bad for you?

19:04Like people are so afraid to ask these questions and do this. And I think a lot of times, because maybe they're so emotionally tied to their business potentially, and that, you know, it's, it's their identity, which we could, you know, talk for hours on, but you know, that idea of failing fast and over and over and over again is so necessary with how fast the world moves today. If, you know, you got to run to stand still today and not just in business, but in life with technology and the way, the speed of thing. So if someone is exponentially learning on where they can improve and consistently seeking those things out, both professionally and personally, they're going to, if they take action on it, they're going to have reach and will reach exponentially higher heights than you ever will when you are, just don't want anyone to tell you anything that's wrong with the baby, or you want to go to your mom and say, mom, what do you think about this idea?

19:53And she says, honey, it's the best thing I've ever seen. You're incredible. You know what I mean? 100 % and Fire Nation, this is why you need to be listening to these value bombs and I'm such a believer in good is the enemy of great. I mean, if you get comfortable and you're unwilling to get out of your comfort zone, Fire Nation, you're missing all the magic because all of your magic will always happen outside of your comfort zone. And guess what? Failure will happen outside of your comfort zone. Mistakes, missteps, all of that will happen outside of your comfort zone, but that's where the magic also happens.

20:22So Anthony, you've dropped so many value bombs. Take the mic for a second. Give us the one big takeaway that you really want to make sure Fire Nation gets from everything that we talked about here today. Also, share the best way to connect with you, your company, your business, any call to action you have for us for Fire Nation, and then we'll say goodbye. Takeaway I have for everyone listening right now is us as entrepreneurs, a lot of us, I talked earlier, your identity, or maybe you just love the heck what you do. My biggest problem is – not a problem, but my biggest thing I manage around is I love the heck out of what I do for work.

20:55And maybe you do. Maybe you don't. You just have the head down. But really what I would challenge everyone to do is take 15 minutes every morning and just be to think. And I know that sounds funny, but I bet you 9 out of 10 people listening right now do not take 15 minutes deliberately to spend time thinking away from technology, away from other things in life. And I think what you'll start to find, hopefully, my hope for you is what really matters in life because you work in 80 hours a week, maybe amazing for reasons that you think are incredible. And maybe they are the right reasons. Maybe they're not.

21:33Maybe there's different things you actually want out of life. Like we get back to what are you actually doing for your business? Have you ever put a mission statement to your life? Have you ever taken a second and wrote your mission statement, your why for living? and then are you tracking towards that and saying, I am taking the right actions, I have the right goals, I have the right schedule day to day, I'm taking the right phone calls and meetings to track towards that mission statement. And a lot of us said a nice massive 50 page business plan and vision statement in the company, but have you done that for your life?

22:05And I think that comes from a lot of introspection. I think that comes from a lot of deliberately scheduled time to think and spend time figuring out what do you want? Because I myself have found when I feel like I take two steps back, I'm now working the least I've ever worked and I'm making the most money I've ever made. And I think that's a very interesting oxymoron in life. It's when you're able to actually step back and look and where to strategically place your time and remove all the minutia, the 80 % of the minutia that you're doing day to day and focus on the 20 % that's already working.

22:39I think there's a lot of happiness in your life to be found. And I wish that upon everyone listening. As far as where to find me or my company or companiespocketyourdollars.com, we help Americans save money on different insurance and financial products. Myself, I'm very active on Instagram, Anthony Sarandria. I try and get to – not try to. I get to every single person who messages me for a question, entrepreneur-related, life-related, mental health-related, physical-related. Whatever it is, I respond to every single person. It might take me some time. But yeah, I do this purely as a value add.

23:15I've listened, John, I've listened to dozens of your episodes to learn and get to where I am today and continue to digest the beautiful people you have on here. So I just feel so honored and blessed to be here. And I hope this is able to give back to the community in some way. Oh, it is. You dropped tons of value bonds. Fire Nation has taken notes. This is definitely a re-listener, Fire Nation. And you know this. You're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with Anthony and JLD today. So keep up that heat and head over to eofire.com. Type Anthony in the search bar.