E111 - 18 Years of Marketing & Sales Advice That Will Make You Rich | Sabri Suby

31:16And then you take them to a landing page and then 20 % of people are going to opt in. So 80 % say no. And then you get those people to a sales call and only 60 % of people show up. And then other people you do get on the call, then you know, you're, you're doing a good job. 30 % of people close. So 70 % of people say no. So I think that those formative years in sales is like that thickened my skin to that level of rejection. You have a good communication as well. The way you speak, that definitely helps. Because I think if I was getting a cold call and somebody was on the other line and they had a very strong Indian or Nigerian accent, I'd be like, hmm.

31:55It's funny you bring that up. So at every sales floor that I ever worked, right, I was the top salesperson. But below me, the three guys below me were always the Indians. Really? And the reason for that is that these guys just had an insane work ethic. So in a lot of these sales companies, you have the ability to work seven days a week. The Indians are there. They're in the UK. More often than not, they've come from India. They're on some kind of student working visa. Their why is so big. They're like, I need to send money back to my family and I need to pay off this huge debt that they've gone into to set me over here.

32:34And so, their work ethic was so high. Yes, like people like, oh, you're calling me from India. Yes, people are being racist to them and slurring them off and saying all these things. But for those guys, they're wise so big that the how becomes easy. So, they just simply outwork everybody else. And so, that always taught me something. That was like, okay, cool. Like, you might not be the best. You might not have the best upbringings. upbringings. People might have the gift of the gab or have a British accent or gone to this school or have more training than you. But the one thing that you can control is your effort.

33:05And when I saw these guys just not caring about what people said about them or how they treated them on the telephone, and they just kept grinding and to be in the top three, that shows it. So, I think the way that I communicate and speak right now is purely just from volume, right? If you do anything for long enough, you're going to be good enough. And so I just got a sickening amount of volume in. Yeah, it was like me. You should have seen the first few videos I put out on YouTube when I spoke in front of the camera. It's like a completely different person. Me too. I go back. I still left them on my channel.

33:41I'm like, who is this dude? And I think that if you don't do that, then it just shows that you're not growing. You should be looking back at your work every year and you should be embarrassed by that. right like i often look back and i'm like man whoever that subree was i would kick that guy's ass right now and i want it to be like that in all realms but yeah we all suck when we begin and everybody is always looking at somebody's like chapter 10 and they're comparing themselves to that person it's like look at where that person began look at what they were doing look at their origin story so you want to look at people when they're on the climb not when they're you know at the summit but everyone is looking people at the summit they're looking at social media they're looking at people that have been doing this and they're like, that's what I need to do.

34:24No, you don't need to do that. You need to start. You are going to suck really, really badly. And then you're going to get enough volume in that you suck less and you're going to keep doing that process. And then you're going to look up in three years from now and you're going to say, wow. Yeah. You just have to do it. You have to start. Yeah. All right, guys, quick pause here. I've got a question for you. How is your summer physique coming along? We're only a couple of months away before you will be gracing the beach, the pool. Are you in shape? Are you not in shape? Is there work to do? Most likely.

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35:32It is pretty much this pocket-sized version of myself which I'm going to carry around with you all day, every day. So if there's something which might interest you, which it definitely will do, I highly suggest to check out the link in the description, head over to the Thirst app, get it downloaded. you will not regret it let's crack on with the episode so what did you do after you were number one salesperson you probably thought hey i'm pretty good at this i can do my own thing now no not necessarily i was still unsure what i wanted to do with my life and how old you at this point i was 19 i left the uk when i was like 21 or just before my 21st birthday.

36:13Did you get decent commission working this guy? It was okay. It was nothing to write home about. I remember my cousin, she was working as a journalist at Time Magazine on the Strand. And she went to the best private college that you can go in London, did everything right, like went to university, got a degree and worked at Time Magazine. And she often used to bitch to me and be like, you're 18 and you have no degree and you're making more money than me. So I was making money, but it was, it was nothing to write home about. It wasn't certain anything that changed my life, but I could, I could have a decent quality of life doing that.

36:51But I did that for so long and it was all like dead end jobs. Like I'd always were looking for a sales role that was like uncapped commission and inbound leads. And I could never find that it was either uncapped commissioned and I was cold calling. I'm always cap commissioned and it was inbound leads. And so everyone was like, Subbree, like you're really good at sales. Why don't you get into marketing? Go do a marketing degree. And I was like, didn't know what I wanted to do. And I was like, yeah, that sounds like a good idea. Let me go do a marketing degree. So I moved to the States for a short period of time, about six months, looked at like applying for colleges over here, realized that I had no money and I was like, I wouldn't get a, what do they call it?

37:35A scholarship. So then I went back to Australia, went back to the small beach town that I grew up in, moved back in with my mom. And it felt like my life had pressed pause. Everybody was doing the same shit. Nothing had changed. I was like, had a quarter life crisis for six weeks and was like, what the fuck am I doing? And it was day and night from London. And so I packed my bags and I put them all in my car and I drove down to Melbourne and I was like, ah, back to a city. This feels more like London. This seems good. And decided to go and get a marketing degree. So I enrolled in university, went to university, started studying marketing.

38:22Did you actually learn from the degree? I learned zero. Yeah, it is not even worth the piece of paper that it was printed on. Was that three years? Huh? No, so I did that for two years. And then I was like a nightmare student, because every lecturer that used to come in, I'd just be like, put my hand up. And I'd be like, so have you ever run a business? And they'd be like, no, but I do marketing. And I'd be like, okay how much money do you make right and they were like that's a very forthright question and i was like look we're in sales and marketing i think it's fitting and they brought in like the marketing manager for jaguar and she was telling us like what her day-to-day is like and how much work she needs to do and these quarterly reports and all this stuff and i was like man that sounds like a lot of work and then i was like how much money do you make it's just like i make 110 000 and I knew from asking that question and I knew from that moment that I was in the wrong room because$110 ,000 wasn't going to do anything for me.

39:29So, I was working part-time doing sales. Actually, I was working full-time doing sales and doing college full-time and I was working for a company that was selling Google AdWords and I was, of course, the top salesperson there and one day somebody asked me on the telephone, hey, Sabri, I don't want to be on the ads, right? I want to be in those organic listings on the left-hand side. Can you do that? And me being the young, ambitious salesperson that I was, I said, absolutely, no problems. It's going to be$750 a month and we can organize that for you. Got off the phone, went over to the business owner.

40:05I was like, I just sold search engine optimization, SEO. And they were like, well, you better figure out how to do that because we don't sell that here. And so that's what led me down the rabbit hole of like learning about online marketing and SEO and whatnot. And then that was over a summer break. Was that a big thing back then? No, SEO was not a big thing at that stage. What year was this? This would have been maybe 2016, I think. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And so it wasn't a big thing. And I was like, no, not 2016, 2008. yeah 2008 yeah so it wasn't a big thing and then i was working for them and then after figuring out how to do seo it was over summer break and i was like hey i see a lot of things wrong with this business i think that i could just run this better myself like i'm bringing in so much sales i know how to do this stuff let me start this by myself so i started an agency over a summer break and by the end of that summer break i had 12 employees i was doing 200 000 a month in revenue and i was like, why would I go back to university and learn about doing business when I have a business and I'm earning what these guys earn, you know, in a year, in two weeks.

41:23So then I dropped out of university and I built that agency up and to multiple millions. And I ended up exiting that to a business partner. What was that called? That was called the click factory. Okay. Yeah. And then so I sold that agency. And then from that point, I had like two units left at university. And I'm just like, I'm going to start something, I'm going to finish it. So I ended up finishing that one thing. And then I did a whole bunch of businesses. I did a group buying website with the equivalent to the NFL in Australia. Going back to my roots, I cold called all of these football clubs, got my way in the door by Relentless Brute Force, ended up closing the four biggest football clubs in the whole Australia to do a venture, a co-venture with them.

42:08I raised a bunch of venture capital, did that business, saw like the deal fatigue of like group buying on the wall and figured out that I'd need to go out and raise like$5 million in order to get the business to the next stage. So I decided against that. We all called it quits, closed that business, started e-commerce businesses. I sold some of those businesses. I ran a whole bunch of those into the ground. And I basically have been into a position where I've lost everything twice in my life. And then... Was one of them with the econ business? Yeah. And the other one was... It was, well, it's just like I went through periods where I took that money from the exit, ran businesses, went everything.

42:47And then I basically ran out of money all over again. So I built up, went back down and I had just gotten married and I had poured everything into this destination wedding because I was too proud of a man to let anybody help out with a wedding and so I did that and it was a beautiful destination wedding over in Bali arrived back home I had$600 in my bank account and I was like what the fuck am I doing like I just got married to my beautiful wife who had agreed to spend the rest of her life with me and I made this commitment to her and i was just kind of like fucking around and dabbling and i kind of got infected by like the four-hour fever and the four-hour work week and working the minimum amount of work and all those kind of things what were you doing with the the rest of your time yeah i had a whole bunch of like automated businesses that were working well and they weren't doing well it was like e-commerce businesses with three pls that were just dispatching everything and i had a bunch of people over in the philippines running them did you think you were better than you actually were when it came to running businesses no it wasn't that i was just optimizing for the wrong thing i caught this mind virus that was like you want to optimize your life around doing the least amount of work and making the most amount of money yeah and that was a realization for me it's like well okay cool what are you going to spend your time doing when you free yourself up of all that.

44:22And I successfully did that. Like I ran businesses that were doing, you know, 70 grand a month and had no employees, but I was like, not happy. I was like just sitting in my bedroom, all the people that you want to hang out with typically have jobs or they're doing something with their time. They're being productive. And so, you know, I was, I was a bit like that. I went through a phase where I had the exact same mindset and I noticed that I just started getting annoyed that people were doing better than me because they were just outworking me yeah so I did I mean I did everything that I kind of wanted to do which was just do traveling just fucking around and I felt like okay this is not really providing me with much fulfillment and then I saw I was doing okay I was making okay but then there was other people kind of taken over like in terms of whether it be like social media or just making more money and I was like fuck like I need to I need to get back on it like I actually missed working 100 % and that's what happened to me because I had that work ethic from earlier on in my career and then I was doing the same thing and I was like it's not about like avoiding doing work.

45:37It's about doing work that does not feel like work to you. And it feels like play and it looks like work to others, right? To quote Naval. And then I just went through of like, okay, cool. Like what would be the perfect day for you? Like, what is it that you would do every day if you had a choice to do it? Right. And the answer is not to sit on a beach. Like you feel worthless. You don't feel like you're contributing and you don't feel like you're growing. Like the moment that you stop growing is when you start dying and you feel that like when you're not sharpening the sword, you're not learning new skills, you're not putting yourself under stress and you're avoiding stress.

46:12So then that was when I was like, okay, cool. I had the realization with myself and my, um, then new wife had to basically go and help her, her family back home. And so she traveled over there. Where's she from? She's from India. Okay. Yeah. And then I ended up going to Dubai for a short period of time. I say short period of time. It was six months. And I was like scheming and plotting and planning what my next move was. And I decided like, look, digital marketing is like, there's a gold rush right now. Only at the time it was 15 cents of every dollar that was spent on advertising was put into digital marketing.

46:56So it was still not a huge amount of the dollar spend going in there. And I skimed and plotted for a while, came back to Australia. I was even more broke then. And I took$50 that I had and I bought a$35 Logitech headset. And I took the other$15 and I put it into a VoIP account and I started cold calling people. Back to the good old days. Yeah, back to the good old days. and it was very difficult. I remember it so clearly. I woke up at 5am. I went for a run, got myself in peak state. It was freezing cold, came back and was like, you're going to call 150 business owners today. And I did that and I hadn't done it for a while.

47:41It was like when you're out of the gym for a while and you go back in and you're like, oh, I'm getting sore. So, I got bruised up and batted up. It was really, really rough. And I did that for three days. And then I got my first client. And then I was like, okay, this feels better. And then the next day I got my next client and I was making 150 cold calls every single day to business owners. What were you selling them? Selling them SEO. I went back to my roots. Yeah. So we started just as a business selling one service, just SEO, just calling people that were running Google AdWords. I didn't have a website.

48:18I made a down and dirty PDF. I was cold calling people that were running Google ads and offering them to get them ranked organically. I did that. I was working from my bedroom and I was working like a dog, man. I was hunting by day and farming by night. So, I'll do all the cold calls during the day and then I do all the client fulfillment work by night. So, I was working like 16 hours, 16 to 18 hours a day and I did that for a year. At the end of the year, I had about 70 clients and we were doing well and I never forget, I was still working out of my bedroom and I had this big deal on the line.

48:53It was like a$70 ,000 deal, website and marketing. And that was like a huge deal for me back then. And I'd gone through the process and I never told people that I had an office, but I never told people that I didn't. And so this was really before like remote work was a real, very popular and stuff. And the guy's like, cool, got him on the line. He was like, yep, ready to sign up, Subric. Just want to come into the office and shake your hand. and I was like yeah look that's not really the way that we operate a business we don't we don't really do that you know everything is virtual he couldn't get his head around that he's like I don't understand I'm here I'm willing to sign a$70 ,000 check I just want to come into your office and shake your hand and I lost that deal oh did you I lost it and I was like again it was another one of those realization moments.

49:46Because you just said, I'm sorry, but yeah, you can't, we don't do that. And so that was another wake up call from that. I wonder if you could have, uh, I don't know, rented out a fake office or something. Yeah. I, I am big on like integrity and not like, like saying things that aren't true. Okay. Right. I don't, I, I didn't mind. Like I would, I would do things. I would put the appearance that we had a lot more people that were working at the company at the time. There'd be like different email aliases and stuff like that for the accounts people and all of those kinds of things, voice answering services that it sounded like it was the front desk of our office.

50:27But that is, you're not being untruthful. Yeah. It says that's the perception that people get from having all of those things. So I did not want to lie and say that like, oh, I've got like a team of 30 people and like, because I didn't, right? It was a one-man army. I guess you could have really dug your own grave if you went too far. Correct. So I was like, I used that as a learning moment. And I was like, what are you doing? You're doing this cashflow business. You've got great money coming in. The margin's amazing, but you're grinding your ass off. And what are you going to do? Are you going to keep this as a cashflow business or are you going to build something that's bigger than yourself?

51:03So I ponied up, I got my first office, which was a big step for me at the time, doing the fit out, paying for the rent in advance, doing the, you know, three-year contract on it, but I did it. I ended up convincing, you know, my wife to come into the business. She had like an, you know, an electrical engineering job at the time. She came in, she was helping me out, and it was just the two of us working out of this office. Oh, that's a risky one, getting the wife involved. Yeah. For me, not really. Like, my wife is absolute ride or die. She has been with me through everything. I had nothing when I began with her.

51:37Um, she's been with me when we've made money, we've lost money. Um, and she still tells me today, like, just go big. I don't care if we go back to a small flat. Like I know that you'll make the money back. Like she's a real one. She's a real one. Right. And so she came with me on the come up and she's still my biggest supporter in everything that I do. And so that's reassuring to have that as a backup and knowing that like, you can still put all the chips in and you can still go all the way. And so I got the first office, hired my first two salespeople. They didn't work out. I was like, fuck, am I the only one that can do this?

52:16You can sell this. Then the third guy worked out. Then I had my first dev. I ended up outgrowing that office, building it through a team of 13, outgrew it in the lease, moved into the next office, outgrew that. It was like a full-blown boiler room that was like people were sitting shoulder to shoulder. We had so many people crammed into my office that we were sucking too much electricity off the grid and the power would go out. And it sounds like a funny situation now, but I had like my sales team upstairs and I was looking at the weather every day, stressing out, being like, if the AC is on, all the power is going to cut out and I have to send everyone home paid for the day did that ended up building my my first office and i really just parlayed all of that into into what like i have today you know we're we're a team of 100 plus people this is king kong yeah yeah and we've got we've got offices um in multiple countries around the world we you know we've got clients in 136 different countries but it all started from those humble beginnings when you were taking people on uh as new members of staff would you basically try to teach them everything that you knew and had learned or were you already hiring people that you knew they were good beforehand i tried both i split tested both i tried hiring people with a lower base salary and saw okay i hire these people and train them how do they perform where it's like the majority of their earnings would come from commissions.

53:46So, cause I was first hiring salespeople and then I tried, okay, let me pay a higher base, bring these people in that are like seasoned salespeople and see how they perform. And after doing that, I realized that like, you want killers. Killers never come in and be like, oh, like how much is my base salary? They say, how much is the top guy earning? And so you use that as filtering questions. And then I knew is someone got stuck up on the base salary, they're not a killer. Yeah. Right? Because every single sales job in the world is commission only. Yeah. It's just, if you're going to sell, you're going to do well here.

54:21If you don't sell, you're not going to be here. That's the reality of sales. So, I was bringing people on. Even people that thought they knew how to sell, they didn't know how to sell like me. So, I trained them up on everything and it was a small office. It was like me hearing what they're saying, get up, don't say it like that. Don't say it like that again, right? And then you build the team, you build the culture. And I'm proud to say that the first sales guy that worked out for me is still with me today. The first two people that I ever hired are still in the company today in leadership positions.

54:54But yeah, there was a lot of training. A lot of the stuff that I learned in those formative years of my life have continued to serve me for the rest of my life. Because all businesses are sales and marketing. Yeah. I got hit by one of your ads. I think it's the one that's on your YouTube channel. It's like a four-minute one. I don't know why it came up. Maybe because I had searched for you and then it popped up. And that's genuinely the first time I've watched an ad all the way to the end. It's such a fucking good ad. Thank you. How long did that take to make? So that took five days. We did five days to shoot it.

55:36The scripting of it was probably - Do you, did you script all this? Yeah. Yeah. So I still write all the copy. The big, the transition that we haven't come to, so I'll come back to your question, but the transition for me was like going from selling one-to-one over the telephone to selling one-to-many. Yeah. So I was cold calling on 150 businesses a day, right? Asking them for money. And I realized, hey, like there's only so many hours in the day. There's only so many people that you can call. Like in order to get to the next level, you need to get more leverage and you need to start selling to multiple people.

56:14And the only way to do that is to transition from selling one to one to selling one to many. And so I took my sales expertise and the little money that I had at the time. It was$13 ,000 that I had saved up. I'd hoarded those nuts like a squirrel in the winter. And then I was like, okay, cool. you're going to go where the least fishermen are, right? The fishing is best where the fewest go. And in my space, funnily enough, the place where there were the least fishermen was radio advertising. Okay. So I took my sales pitch that I would deliver on the telephone and I wrote a sales ad. And it was a 30 second ad that was basically my opening hook on the telephone.

57:01And I was going to put that out on radio. I tried all this other stuff. I'd done courses. I'd read books. I'd read blogs back then with the thing. And I had tried to do a bit of digital marketing in terms of running paid traffic and none of it was working. And I was like, just like in back of my sales day, I was like, screw all this shit, man. Like, you just go back to what you know works. You're already calling these people and getting them to say yes. Just take what it is that you're saying on the telephone and put that in an ad. And then that's what I did. And I put it out on a radio ad, had my wife beside me when the ad went live.

57:38And I was like, man, I hope this works. And it was like five minutes after the ad and no leads came in. I was like, man, damn it. And then obviously I was on like drive in the morning and then drive in the afternoon, but then the leads started to trickle in and then that trickle turned into a flood. and we got like 750 leads in our first week. And then I was calling all of those leads and then closing them. And so that was when I fell down the rabbit hole of like direct response marketing and learning to copyright and learning to take my salesmanship that I had forged over the years and then turning that into a skill of actually writing ads and putting together these ads that I could go out and communicate to a huge group of people.

58:24That was the thing that really unlocked me to a whole different level of my earning potential. Yeah. So, I basically then became a copywriter and started looking at copy and writing ads and started to split test the same obsessive nature that I took to my sales. I started to do that in sales and in marketing and putting together ads and funnels and all of that kind of stuff back in the day when people weren't even, they didn't really have funnels. They weren't doing all of this stuff. They weren't VSLs. They weren't all these people doing high ticket. um i was you know quite early early to the game back then so i went through that progression of learning how to do all of those things so when you ask about those ads those ads that you see are many iterations right so that one took me probably you know a week to two weeks to script and then a week to shoot and then when you're saying script like how how much time are you spending on it per day because it's when you add it all up it's around just over four minutes of talking yep so it's about a 1300 word script okay so do you have like one long draft or do you do it bit by bit by bit great question so the way that i do it is i do the body i do like one hook and the body of the ad first.

59:45And so I'll start with the hook. I'll get like, that's like the big picture of like, what is he going to do? On this one, it was like, you know, I had like, you know, small people beating me up and then like feeding me Mark Zuckerberg blood. Yeah. Right. That was just like the hook. Cause everyone thinks like the secrets in the Facebook algorithm. So I had a dig at that. And then I'll write the body of the script. I'll do the first draft. first draft is always shit and then i go back and i think okay what are the comedic beats that i can add to this like what is like the transitions you'll start with something that's like way bigger than what the script needs to be and then you'll carve it down over the day so the magic's in the edit right the the magic's not in the first draft the first draft always sucks and then you look at it you think about it you leave it alone you marinate it it's probably you know an hour or two of writing a day and then you go on and run the business and then you come back with fresh eyes and go, no, that's crap.

1:00:40And then I write 12 other hooks for that one ad. Because when the ad fatigues, you switch in a new hook and it breathes new life into the campaign. And so you want the hook to be completely different in a different setting, different actors in it, completely different so that it feels like a new ad. And so I batch shot that one. So we shot that at the start of the year i'll film the 12 hooks the whole body and then every month i'll roll out a different so i could for example i could have been hit by one of the ads yes and then there's more coming mike yeah but i'd be i'd get hit again same kind of thing but just visually it's different and then the the hook is different yeah correct the hook is different the same message right it It speaks to the same pain points, right?

1:01:30We do different read. We edit it. We look at retention curves. We figure out where things don't need to be. We do slice up shorter versions of it. And we split test these things aggressively. I'm trying to think, why did I stay all the way to the end? I think, first of all, it was, I mean, immediately it felt different. It wasn't your typical ad. It was entertaining. entertaining i think people like to be entertained or amused and then i was like what are you where where's he getting at like what's he what is the set what's the point of the ad i was just genuinely curious and i think that's one way to do a good job is just to stand out from everybody else's dribble that is ads which are pumped out these days yeah you that's the first thing right you want to zig while everybody else is zagging the first thing that i do when i move into any business whether it's you know an investment from shark tank that i'm involved in or it's a client that i'm consulting with or it's my own business is simply look at what everybody else in the market is doing and do the exact opposite of that because it's like everybody's seen it right like all of these vsls and these ads from people who are out and like out in dubai it all just blends and becomes this mush and it's just like how do you even differentiate who that person is to who this person who's full of shit who's not who's legit if you guys all look the same right it's the same lights in the background it's the same whole thing selling in front of a lamborghini the same shit right so it's like from the get-go it's just like how could i be completely opposite of that and that's what you want to do because that's like an immediately pattern interrupt that is different and you're right about the entertainment thing, right?

1:03:18Everyone wants to go in with like their offer, their hard-hitting guarantee, all of those kinds of things. Entertain first and then you earn the right to sell. But we're living in the attention economy. No one wants to be sold to, right? So you have to find for ways, like we're competing with the Kardashians rolling around like half naked on Instagram and Joe Rogan and Elon Musk and all of these people. That is the chaotic arena for attention that we're competing in. If your ad is not as good as that, like then people aren't going to give you their attention because they're like, I could just keep scrolling and see something that is way better than what this person is talking about.

1:03:55So in order just to get yourself in the room, it has to be entertaining. What do you think of Hormosey's recent book launch? Yeah, I think it's like he's built a great brand. I've spoken to Alex a few times. and you get rewarded in public for what you practice obsessively in private right and i think that one thing that he did very well with that is basically not making an ask of his audience for six years and then putting a right hook in so it's like if you if you have a look at like everyone's like you know 100 150 million dollars in a day which is phenomenal and he's built so much goodwill in his audience if you also divide that up by the amount of months that he's been doing and putting out free content and never asking for his audience you know it's basically compressed all of those sales into a short period of time and making an ask um so i think yeah i think it's he's done an exceptional job yeah what he he sold well in 24 hours he sold over 3 million copies of the book okay and then i think it's that and then he's successfully managed to upsell a lot of people from that as well making what over 100 mil or something yeah i think i i believe so i don't know the numbers i haven't spoken to him yet um but yeah 100 to 150 million in sales um which is yeah it's like that it just shows that there was like he follows the fundamentals there's nothing that is like crazy and outlandish it's just like providing value to your marketplace well in advance of ever asking them for anything.

1:05:37And, you know, I think he's been making content for about six years. And he hasn't asked for anything more than a 99 cent book and built a lot of goodwill. And then you get an offer and you build up all of that pent up demand for something and you funnel them into something and you have the scarcity of them having to buy in a compressed time window. And then, you know, that might equate to doing like a million dollars a month in sales. is you were to sell every month for that time period, but instead he chose to compress that in and make one ask at one specific time. Who else or what other company or brand have you seen execute a really good campaign?

1:06:16Is there anything that stands out to you? Yeah, I think that it's more so and not about the one-time event, right? It's not about having a one-time offer. They're not the things that I'm the most impressed about. It's about building a brand And it's about building something that is going to last beyond an offer. You know what I mean? That's the things that keep me up at night of looking at. I've seen a lot of people that are phenomenal marketers that are here today and then gone tomorrow. But there's not a huge amount of people that it is that you can point to that have built brands that are still around for many, many decades after that.

1:06:52So, for instance, some of the copywriting greats that I look up to is the Gary Halberts. but then he was like an exceptional marketer that wrote very very good ads but a lot of the brands that you know he would promote or write ads for they're not around today but if I look at someone like David Ogilvie who's like the super OG of like copywriting who built monster businesses like a lot of the brands that he wrote ads for and promoted as a marketer are still around the Rolls Royce the Palm Olive like he's this is guys that wrote promos for like that sold the most amount of Rolls Royces in the world.

1:07:30So like most of the people that I look up to and most of the mentors are people that are no longer living. Do you think it would get to the point where AI could write a better script than you can? I use AI a lot, right? And I definitely think that it will get to the point where it is writing exceptional ads. So one of my businesses is a platform called Kong AI. And that's exactly what it does. I took the$200 million that I've spent on ads in a thousand different categories and verticals for my clients. And we took all the winning ads and we looked at what the CTR was, what the body copy was, what made it a winning ad.

1:08:13And we fed it into our own custom AI to learn those things. And we have all the ROAS, the cost per lead for all of these clients that we meticulously trained over the years um and now that writes ads that is beating my internal copywriters okay so that's that would do a better job than chat gpt for example it does yeah it does because it's like chat gpt it's all about like the information that you give it and the data set right and so a lot of like people are feeding it shitty ads so ai is typically only as good as the data you feed it so i have just done a very comprehensive job of feeding it lots of data.

1:08:54So, yeah, I do think that there will become a day and age where AI is writing stuff that outperforms everybody. Like, already it outperforms, like, trained copywriters that I have put together because it just has so much more data and it never forgets anything. So, yeah, we're entering into an interesting time And then the question becomes, it's not about like, is AI going to be able to write better ads than me? AI by itself is not going to be able to write better ads than me. Me with AI will beat AI every time. Because it's like, it's about the creativity that you bring to AI and the way that it makes you do stuff.

1:09:35Like, I'm sure that you would have used it to put together scripts and to look at things or just have a play around like everybody's done. Yeah. I wanted to see if it could come up with better programming than myself when it comes to giving people like a training program or a nutrition program. And it was okay, but it was a lot of things that didn't take into account more so just the individualistic needs of each person. And it always needed me to go over it just to tweak and improve some things. So it's definitely good but it it requires you to have a good degree of critical thinking as in like okay you know what to take from it but there's things that need to be adjusted to make it like next level yeah the way that i look at it is like it's like a nail gun right like no longer is a person on a building site walking around with a hammer and nail and hammering it in manually you give him a nail gun and he can do a thousand times more, right?

1:10:35So, it's always going to be the person that is looking over that, the inputs that I give it and the creative stuff. It's an amazing way that I look at it right now. Is this someone that I can go back and forth with? This is what I'm thinking. This is what I'm at. Give me five more ideas like this, right? Or I like this or I don't like that. So, it's just a creative partner. But it's not like you can just go to it and give it no context or nothing and expect it to produce magic. And still, I gave it a bunch of stuff and I said, like, write me a script, which I have many times, and said, like, give me five different versions of this hook.

1:11:10Like, I can't run with any of those yet. Yeah. But it's going to get to a stage where it will be really good, but you'll still need to edit it. So it's just about getting more output. It's simply a tool. It's not like a thing that I'm going to use and not be involved in the process. One thing that I've been enjoying is the YouTube videos where you're sharing the secrets of a lot of these luxury brands that entice you to buy their products so first of all i was interested to know if you've actually got any like blowback from making those videos for example uh the rolex one yeah have you had anyone from rolex try and come after you or say oh you got to take this down yes i got a cease and desist from rolex um where they were like yeah you got it you got to take this down and i was like but why right like everything that i'm saying is true i'm just documenting exactly how i've been treated and the process that i've gone through um so yeah there's been a little bit of a blowback but that's just you know you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs yeah maybe it should be like well we'll give you these watches yeah here's here is a suitcase of smoked hombres but they should be thanking me with the level of promotion that i have given them right yeah so So yeah, like it's a different take on it.

1:12:27Knowing what you know about all these brands, does it put you off wanting to buy from them or not? It's so funny. Like I had bought my wife like the Van Cleef necklace, right? And after she saw me make that, she said, I don't want this thing anymore. It's just because like the games that they play, but I never hate the player, right? You have to hate the game. Yeah. But it's because it's like the reason that all of these brands do this stuff is because it works, right? Yeah. And you see it like time and time again. It's like if you go to places that are using the things that luxury brands do, it works.

1:13:03Like Steve Jobs stole a lot of the things that Apple used to sell their products from luxury brands. It's like when there's a new iPhone drop and you want the new iPhone, if you don't want to buy it online and you call up a store and you're like, hey, I want to get the new iPhone. And they're like, it's all sold out. And you're like, cool, when are more coming? and they're like, we don't know. Or they'll be like, it's coming on Thursday and you're like, how many are you getting? We don't know, right? It's like the same thing. They keep all of their employees in the dark, even with luxury brands.

1:13:31If you go to Hermes or Chanel here in Beverly Hills, they'll be like, oh, let me go check if that's available and there'll be one more out the back or something. And they just deliver them in small batches and even their employees don't know. So that just passes that sense of scarcity on. and so it's just the way that the human brain is wired right we value things that are hard to get so they just manufacture that scarcity to make it feel more valued to play all these games and how you walk in and they're like someone will be with you for 10 minutes it's the anticipation i hate that though i remember i had an experience i think i was in um i was in milan and i forgot to pack a belt i was like i need to buy a belt and i'd always just wanted to get a louis vuitton belt yeah this was back then when that was pretty much in terms of luxury that was the only thing i could afford so let me get a belt so i went into the shop and then um i walked around very quickly i was like okay that's the belt i was like can i get this belt they said oh you just you have to wait for somebody to serve you i was like okay but i just want to get the belt now like i was in a rush i was waiting for like 20 minutes for somebody to come and serve me and then i was like fuck this and then I just walked out.

1:14:45Yeah, they qualify you at every step. They have the red rope out the front. We don't allow too many people in store. I get that about not wanting to clutter the store. Then they arrive you in. No problems. Do you have an account with us, Mike? Right? Oh, you don't. Okay, and they write down the name. Someone will be with you in 10 minutes. Nothing has prices on anything, right? If they do have prices, they remove the currency symbol because they have scientifically proven that someone associates like a loss of money when they see a currency symbol, when they see a number that they don't. So it's all these small little tactical cues, the lighting, how it smells in there, how they treat you.

1:15:20And it's like, even just by making you wait for those 10 minutes, it like, you further builds up anticipation and makes you value that whole experience more. For me, I'm like you, I'm like, bro, I don't need to play these games. Like, you know what I mean? But for people, by and large, those games work. otherwise they wouldn't do it right there's only there's there's a reason that all these brands do it ends up because it works so there's no point being like i can't believe that they do this and and it's like they've tested it and they know that it works yeah they know how to make people go crazy over their products that's why these guys are doing 10 billion dollars a year yeah have you ever implemented any of their tactics with your current business all of them yeah yeah i'd be a fool not to so like not all of them but a lot of them so say for instance like one of the things that we do is I think about like what the customer journey is like.

1:16:16So when somebody signs up to us, even though we're offering like a digital service more often than not, it's like we're doing their marketing, we're giving them a training program, there's some kind of software. We have like a big welcome hamper that we sent them out. It's all custom branded. There's a custom letter from me, the founder. There's a bunch of swag on there. It arrives, there's cookies in there, a mug, a nice little note because that feels nice, right? You had that association. People make the decision whether or not they're going to renew with your company in the first two weeks.

1:16:48The way that you onboard them, the way that they feel about your service. So, you want to make sure that you bring out some showmanship, that it feels special, right? If you're in the service-based business, there is a theoretical max to the number of clients that you can make on. why not communicate that right if you can only take on 11 clients per month people value things that are scarce say we take on 11 clients per month every time that you speak to a prospect you let them know like we get thousands of inbound leads every single month we can only work with 11 new clients why should we work with you right it changes the dynamic of the relationship because they are things that are all real.

1:17:33They're all present, but people just don't communicate these things, right? Like there's only so many clients you can work on one with one by communicating all the things that it is that they do. Price tiers, you know what I mean? Like I learned that lesson the hard way early on in my career is that everybody wants to negotiate. And if you just set a fair price of what it costs you to deliver this service with you making a margin, people are always just going to make you try to pull your pants down on price and squeeze you and get a deal and then it's like well i don't i've set the price of what the price is so i don't have anywhere to go yeah so instead you have three tiers like these brands do right and so that's what whoop has done recently they rolled out the new uh the whoop five and then now they have like the basic subscription tier and then they have the one above that and then the top one yeah and it's basically the device is pretty much the same there's one which is slightly more advanced but ultimately it's just how much of the access that they're giving to people inside of the app itself yeah and that's it's a smart play because 20 of people will always take the highest tier yeah but like yeah but zero percent of people will take the highest tiers you don't offer it yeah so then it's like you want to have three different tiers on pricing where you can sell to the middle or the higher package and then they're really price sensitive you always got the lower package to default to but you're not eroding your margins right you look at it with the teslas you look at with all these people like these are these are strategies that are that are proven that are working.

1:19:14So, I'm a student of the game. I look at all businesses. I try not to pay a huge amount of attention to what people are doing in my industries and categories because then you end up looking at like them and you don't want to look like them. I look at other sectors and other industries and try to adapt what they're doing to my business. And is that your business right now, that's the main focus? Are you looking to get into anything else or startup anything else what was that look i i have like my my main business which is king kong which is my agency and we also so we do done for you and we do done with you through courses as well um and then i launched my sas platform about a year ago that's doing very well and then like i'm on shark tank i got a whole bunch of investments that i do through that that lets me scratch that itch in terms of having deals come to me and and do deals and all that kind of stuff um but yeah that's the thing that's taking up most of my time i'm not really looking to get into a whole a whole bunch beyond that like in all reality it's not like the more things that you do the more money that you make history has showed me it's better to have like concentration on the one thing so even for me in those businesses they're all focused around the same customer right it's just the different levels of service delivery yeah so i try to meet my customers where they are but my business is centered around solving the number one problem that all businesses face, which is how do I get more customers?

1:20:43And then how do I make them worth more to my business? So it's either I'm going to reach you through like a book or my software, or like if you can't afford my agency, then I've got courses that are available for you. So it's about supporting that ecosystem. Which do you think for you has been more powerful in terms of helping you build your personal brand the appearances on shark tank or the youtube channel i think that youtube by reach has had more of an impact but also being on something like shark tank it just it kind of gives you a lot more credibility because like the barriers to entry to start up a youtube channel is a camera and that's all you need so there's not you don't need a huge amount of credibility to be on those platforms where to get on like a, you know, a network show like Shark Tank, there's a lot of vetting, there's a lot of process.

1:21:36So that comes with a lot more weight. So I would say by and large though, I'm just completely bullish on YouTube. I think that it's only going to get bigger and bigger. And I think that, you know, this is the first year that YouTube has overtaken television as the number one thing that's streamed on TV. Right. And I don't think that's going to slow down. I think it's going to continue. Um, so yeah, I'm, I'm super bullish on, on YouTube and the reach of where all of that's going. That's 100 % the future of media. I think that now the number one platform for podcasts is YouTube. No, that's where I, whenever I have to listen to a podcast, I'm going to YouTube.

1:22:16It's just convenience and ease, right? Yeah. Um, yeah. Well, I appreciate your time. It's been, uh, it's been good. I think now we need to get a lift in whilst we're here. as well yes what have we decided what what is the lift on what are we doing today yeah we don't we're not gonna do legs oh my god thank god i was like i need to get the ambulance on standby mike has just texted me saying he wants to do legs yeah i've not trained legs for like the past five days i've been doing collabs with people and i've just not surprisingly when you do these collabs with people nobody really wants to do legs oh i'm sure when they look at you bro they're like i'm not i'm about that life like i need to be walking seriously so we're gonna do um back and biceps think that's what you wanted to do yeah let's get it in yeah awesome where can everyone find you they can subry suby on all platforms s-a-b-r-i-s-u-b-y and if you don't find me i'll find them nice thanks for having me on thank you