Elon Musk: Live Events Are The Only Remaining Luxury

0:00So, did you know that Elon Musk said this? So Elon Musk said that live events are the only remaining luxury. Did you see the interview he did with one of your, the Indian billionaire? Mukeshambani? No, no. I forgot. Namath. Have you heard of this guy? So he did an interview with Elon. And then Elon was just saying that if we're looking at a world where you're going to have AI doing all the work, robotics doing all the work, then live events are the only remaining luxury. And argument is that live events are going to become even more expensive, which is interesting to me because I've done these live events over the last few years and people still keep asking me right now because I didn't do it this year.

0:38People were like, Eric, when's the live event coming back? Eric, when's the live event coming back? And then we talked about how live events are so important. Oh, not live like we're doing right now. You're actually talking about in-person. In-person events, yeah. So live events are the only remaining luxury. And I believe that to be true because even though you used to be more of a hermit, you're out there more engaging with people, talking with people. You're even doing your own events now, things like that. So I've always liked doing these things even though I'm more of an intro. You do my own events?

1:00Yeah, you do your own events. When you speak at a conference, you do like a mini event. Oh, I thought you meant like my own conference. Yeah. But even conferences, so your thing is like a mini event, right? But I'm just saying like even the YPO one, that's like a regular event, but like a big conference too. I've always enjoyed these things. And I feel like you have too. I enjoy them when I know some of the people. It's not that events aren't effective. But like when you have a few people to talk to that you know, it becomes fun because not only do you have the event and you're meeting people, You also can do dinners after or hang out.

1:37It's just like when we do these in-person podcast recordings. Financially, is it worth our time? No. But what's your favorite part of it? We get to hang out. We get to eat after. That's right. And we get to catch up with each other. We get to hear Noah's stories too. Yes. Noah always has amazing stories. Yeah. If you get to know Noah, he has a very, very interesting one. Check it out. Bikinisports.com. Is that your site? Yeah. Bikinisports.com. Oh, okay. Yeah. But just generally speaking, he's done quite a bit of different types of businesses. But yeah, we got to catch up. We got to find out who's doing what.

2:09I get to push everyone and try to convince them to get married. Yeah. I try to convince Eric. I try to convince Noah. One day you guys will listen to me. Yeah, maybe. But yeah, I would say in-person events are good. So I'm thinking at some point, I don't know if it's next year, but the year after, I'll probably bring mine back and then we'll see where it goes. I guarantee you if we did, I don't want to do the work, nor do you want to do the work. But if someone wanted to do the work for a marketing school conference and make it big, I guarantee you it'd probably do well. But I just don't want to do it because we have to focus on our businesses.

2:42So the return on investment from doing an event is no good. I'll tell you that much. And even you're talking about this podcast, which we can go into too. So you were just talking to a sponsor. I'm talking to one next week actually um one event that we usually speak at right um and finally i hope if we get that deal done then we don't need to worry because i'm talking to other podcast sponsors right now as well it's just not worth i realize it's too much hassle and then i look at all these contracts it's and it's just like it's a three-year lock-in and then you know we're gonna take this revenue split and then you it has to be exclusive this and that i'm just like no how about we just work with one of those and then we take these influencer deals these one-off deals where it's like you know 25 grand a pop or whatever and that's great now am i saying that's easy everyone's gonna get that initially?

3:22No, but we've been doing this podcast for like eight years or so. So if you compound for eight years or so and you keep going, usually something good will happen from it. Dude, I agree. On a side note, speaking about marketing, did I ever show you this? No. What is this? I think this is an old one, but I'm trying a new marketing format. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Did I ever show you this? Neil's showing me. Last week, Neil started doing a podcast with his two team members. No, not a podcast. What is it? It's just we just sat down in a room and we just recorded our conversation. That's still a podcast.

3:52Sure, but we're not going to publish it as a podcast. We'll just publish the video format. I think you should publish everything. Like Spotify, right? Like everything, podcasts. Where are you guys sitting, by the way? Where are we sitting? Yeah, where are you here? They're in LA. Same studio that I currently use. It was free. So they had to come up to LA? Because I know some of them are - Oh, yeah. They came to LA. Okay. And we used the same studio. It was free. So you're going to do it like what? Once a month? What's the deal? Some of the people on my team want to do it once a week. Yeah. That is going to be very tough.

4:22Yeah. But I enjoyed it because I have so many people that I work with. You actually dressed up in that video. No, I didn't. Look, I'm wearing yoga pants. They're gray yoga pants. Oh, you are? Yeah. Those aren't the Laurel pants? No. They're gray yoga pants for like 50 bucks. Yeah. Okay. Continue, continue. Hold on. Before you continue. So just so everyone knows, Neil in that video has two of his team members and they're just nerding out on marketing. They're just having a conversation about marketing. Was it like a 90 minute video? What is that? An hour. An hour. So you have an hour conversation.

4:51You probably hang out with them afterwards too, right? Yes. Yeah. And got to do lunch and got to talk shop. But the reason I enjoyed it was I have so many coworkers and colleagues and a lot of them have worked with me for so many years. I know them really well, but we don't talk as often. And I know a lot of these people really well because when we started, we were much smaller in headcount size. So for me, I'm just having a conversation with them about work and seeing what they think and how things are going. And it's just being recorded. Yeah. And the other thing too is one, you build a deeper relationship besides, because when you're remote or when you're just talking on the phone, it's much more transactional.

5:26It's much more, Hey, how's this going right now? Where's this going right now? Are we going to close this deal or whatever? But when you're talking to them, you start to understand more about their families, what their interests are and things like that. Cause we just did an annual planning or we call it three year planning. Now we just did it yesterday. We had a couple of people fly in and you know, it's much more different. Cause some of these people I've never met yet. Right. You meet them in person and it becomes a relationship, not a transaction. And then, you know, during dinner, you know, we get to know each other a lot better.

5:52But I actually wish we still had more time to hang out with each other because it was just like they flew in. It was like business all day, had dinner, had dinner the night before. And that was it. And now they're flying home today. You mentioned that you're meeting up for annual planning, but you mentioned three year planning at the same time. What's what's the difference? You actually do three years worth of planning or is it just annual planning? So there's a you're not going to read this book, but there's a book called The Three Hag. Right. So BHAG, you know what a BHAG is? OK, Big Hairy Audacious Goal.

6:17Okay, I know that one. And then 3HAG is the three-year highly achievable goal. Okay, so the reason is the years go by very quickly. I remember when Jeff Bezos was like, hey, whatever you see us building now, it's taking it three years to get here. So whatever we're working on now, it's going to be three years. Ryan Dice actually posted this too. They don't do annual planning. They do three-year planning as well. And so the point of the 3HAG is you plan out 12 quarters in advance. You might have the next four quarters the next year. That's probably a little more crystallized versus like it's a little more vague out there.

6:45but now for me, what I'm looking to do is I'm holding each person accountable. Hey, you said you're going to hit this number just quarter. You said you're going to do these things. I'm just looking at that. Hey, did you do this? Did you do this? Did you do this? That way, I don't need to worry about 20 different things per person. I'm still a little bit confused. So when you think about the big, hairy, audacious goal, most of them don't ever get achieved in the first 12 months or first year. No, that's like the first 10 to 25 years. Yeah. So then And you're running on this model of, what is it called?

7:16Three-year highly achievable goal or something like that? Yeah. In your annual meeting, when you're saying you really look at three-year and you don't do annual or Ryan Dice's new annual, I'm still a little bit lost in what you mean by you're looking at a three-year goal, but you're planning out 12 months. Yeah. So you have, obviously, if you're going to do three years, you need to have the next 12 months figured out too, right? But we're just planning more long-term out. And then the high level vision, like the mission of the companies were to be to be a marketing partner that companies never outgrow.

7:45Right. And so for us, like, OK, what do we need to build out? Not just product roadmap out like 12 months in advance or like, hey, who do we need to hire 12 months in advance? But how are we going to map things out three years in advance? That's what it is. And we're looking at each quarter. And I don't really find I kind of communicated yesterday, but a lot of people run on EOS. You guys were kind of on EOS for a while to attraction. Yeah. We did that for around two years and then it kind of, I want to say it broke. You modified it. Kind of just modified. I think traction isn't that great once you scale past like 40 or 50 or something like that million in revenue.

8:17It's not for us. Maybe I'm wrong, but at least for us, we found it not as useful. So I don't like the quarterly planning. I'm like, why do you need to plan like every quarter? You should talk about the metrics and revisit what the annual plan is or what the three-year plan is. But in my mind, the quarterly planning almost started to become theater for us. And so I don't like that, right? And so similar to what you said, a lot of my friends that are, that kind of similar comment to you, it's like once you get past a certain scale, it's like, yeah, EOS, you're not going to use it. You might do a modified version of it, that's all.

8:45Because the system breaks. Yeah, the system does break. But cool. And when you did your three-year planning, how did it go overall? So you're going to just, other than focusing on, hey, this is the number on your head for the quarter, I'm going to just keep on track of this. Yeah, so let me tell you the number one thing I loved about this. you take out your phone, okay? Remember I told you about the app Granola? So Granola is a note-taking app. So I literally had it on sitting the whole time I was recording. And so I have an entire transcript of the thing. And literally what I said was, because ChatTBD has memory of how I think, how I evaluate everything, how I evaluate people, teams, like how we're going, right?

9:21And I just said, okay, based on this team, you know, where do you think the deficiencies are for me, for other people? Where do we need to get better? Like stack rank me, and stack rank where you think we're going to, what we need to do to hit our goals, right? And so that helps, that gives me more insights as well because we have this transcript now. It records all the action items, everything, right? That's more tactical. But I would say overall, it went well because my objective going into that was to get that three-year Herodacious goal set because you know what happens when you guys were first starting MP Digital, it's like, it's very hard.

9:54For some people, it's very hard to hold them accountable. But when you hold them accountable to one thing and just keep pointing at that and it's one number, that's what I was looking for I was looking for that commitment from everyone. And that's what we got. Got it. And that's what Peter Thiel did, right? Back in the day. It's just like one thing, one thing, one thing. I don't like going back to you. When you work with like, who reports to directly? Nobody? I have no direct reports. Okay. So when you're holding, like you're working with like Michael Lixon, for example, like what are you looking at primarily?

10:20What are you talking about all the time? Sales. Okay. Sales and churn. That's it. But they go hand in hand. And what it's really going down to is how much revenue are we producing? Like that's the one real thing that I talked about is like, what's our revenue growth? Yeah. It's different for you because that is very much your operator and you can go to him while you can kind of like, you know, float around the organization type of thing. Yeah, but for every person, I have a different thing. More examples. So for our VP of marketing or head of marketing or whatever Salo's title is, I don't discuss leads with him or anything like that because those basic metrics like leads and traffic, he meets up with some of the executive team, I don't know who, on a weekly basis or monthly basis and they go over numbers.

11:04Like how are the ads performing and stuff like that. Where I focus on Salo is what are the channels that are getting RFPs and we already know what they are for us. how do we double them up? So when I look at 2023, I know we're in 2025 and about to wrap up, just in the United States, right? I don't want to take international because the numbers are really skewed from a percentage wise because we're much smaller. So the percentages are growing at an unrealistic rate because it's law of small numbers. But in the United States in 2023, we had 16 RFPs. 2024, we had 25. So it's a little bit more than to 50%.

11:43Oh, you're doing RFP count. Uh-huh. Yeah, I got it. We do it per country. In the United States in 2024, it was 25. So it was a little bit more than 56.25%. If I'm not, my math could be a little bit off. And 2025, so going to this year. If you've ever built a website, you know how tough it can be to keep a strong design while ensuring site performance is fast. That's where Framer comes in and it totally changes the game. Framer is the design first no code website builder that lets anyone ship a production ready site in minutes. I recently built a custom landing page in just a few hours, animations, fast load times, responsive layouts, all without writing a single line of code.

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14:02Go to shopify.com slash marketing school. Shopify.com slash marketing school. The year's not over. We're recording this early December. We're at 36 exactly. So I'm like pushing the team. We need 39, 39. 39 gets us to 56. So last year we're at 56.25 % growth. I'm trying to get at least 56%. So it'll be similar enough. I'll be flexible on the 0.25%, but I need 56 % growth. So I'm like pushing extreme. You don't need, you want it. Yeah, I need more than that. But I'm pushing really hard on the channels that produce RFPs. I'm like, double down, let's sprint. But my point is for everyone listening, so you see just with Neil's examples, one, Solo, it's just RFPs.

14:50With Mike, it's sales primarily. You might look at retention hand in hand, right? because retention helps sales compound. But when you're holding someone accountable, if you're working with a leader, if you just point out one thing, like a lot of people like to say, well, I did these five different things, these 10 different things. My mind, my cognitive load already starts to blow up and I start to get really frustrated. I'm just one thing. Yes. Like with my CFO, I don't even discuss revenue and profitability. I discuss cashflow with him and that's it. Yeah. Like what's a cashflow look like? And so much so, dude, I straight up get an email, not every day because they don't send me it on the weekdays or on holidays.

15:26Monday through Friday, I get an email every single day on how cash flow is going and bank balances in that email. Once a week, I get it including US and global accounts because it takes them quite a bit of time to collect all the data from all the other countries. But five days a week, I'm getting US numbers. One day a week, I'm getting US combined with global numbers. These are emails. Just one email. How many check-in, because you get check-in text messages and you get check-in emails as well regarding metrics. How many of those do you think you're getting for a week in total? Per week? Uh-huh.

16:03Revenue, cash flow, churn. I don't know, like RFPs. 20? Content. 20. Including text messages, correct? Yeah, including text messages. I would probably say 20. So my question with 20 is how do you make sure with humans that that's consistent? Well, I follow up with them like crazy every single week. See, the thing with you is your memory is really good. Your memory is really good. Yeah, I don't forget. So they probably forget. They probably start to drop off, but you never forget. Dude, straight up, I'm talking with one of my leaders who runs UK for us. His name is Brandon. I know a potential customer is going to get back to him this Friday.

16:41Today, I woke up a little bit later, but I woke up at 4.16. I don't use the alarm, but I woke up at 4.16 a.m. First thing when I woke up, I texted him. Hey, how'd that potential deal go? Did we close it? You didn't even brush your teeth yet. No, I didn't even brush my teeth. I just straight rolled out of bed, looked at the clock on my phone, sent the text on WhatsApp. I'm still in bed at this point. I literally sent the text. And he sends back a message being like, he's like, my meeting hasn't even been done with him yet. Right? So he's like, a few more hours, and then I'll give you an update.

17:14You have like a built-in AI with you that's like an auto-reminder. That's what you have. You've always had that. Yeah. Yes, because what I found early on in my career, and I started my career in marketing over anything else. I know, yes, you can call it entrepreneurship, but I really focus on marketing more than anything else early on. I learned that the more you push, the more you get done. The less you push, the less you get done. And when you push in marketing, if everyone's happy with you, you're not pushing too much. If they're really pissed at you 24-7, you're pushing too much. So I found this nice balance where they are a little irritated with me.

17:54That's when I know I'm pushing the right amount. That's a good clip. That's a good clip for you. And I like everyone being irritated with me just enough. And just enough where they blow up at me at least once every few months. Because if they don't blow up at me or to someone else about me in the organization, I'm not pushing hard enough. You know, I've actually never thought about that. But how true is that? because if I look at our last five years, the acquisitions, all that stuff, right? When everyone was really nice to me and I was very nice to everyone, things weren't getting done. But when I'm constantly nagging people and I can tell they're getting annoyed, things are getting done.

18:28But I haven't gotten to your level where there's a blow up every quarter. So maybe I'm going to push it a little more. Quarter's a little long. My blow ups don't happen. Every month? Once a month. Are you talking about per individual? Per individual. Yeah, so 90 day cycle. I would say once every two months. At the latest, maybe once a month, they're just not telling me. So if someone works with you, six blow-ups a year is the expectation? Yes. And they'll usually text me stuff like some of these experts. It's not yelling at you. It's like, hey, back off a little bit. No. I'll get texts. I'm not going to name who.

19:02But I'll get text messages. Be like, hey, you need to go for a walk. Relax. Go for a walk. And take some time off. But that pisses you off even more. Yeah, it does. It does. but I'm okay with it because I know they're pushing and they're doing what's best for the company and I do know I push really hard um and usually most of the blow-ups aren't like a text message like go for a walk it's usually like they're gonna feel like Neil can you just stop right they're like you're causing too much chaos or like let's say someone who's not as high but they're high enough and they're they're running like a country they're like hey right now is really stressful uh you know can we just talk about this in another week or two i don't have enough time to get everything you're looking for you're asking for a lot it's just not feasible can you just can we just talk about this a week later like at that point i know they're really pissed at me yeah but they can't say f you i'm really pissed at you so they're being really nice about it but yeah i know that sounds a little cruel i'm not trying to make people i don't think that's cruel pissed off at me i just know you got to push to get stuff done and when we started our careers in marketing like i'll be like all right oh we got on the home page of dig what else cool what was the conversions what were the backlinks for we need another one what's lined up for next week and you just got to keep pushing because if you don't push you become like every other corporation and you just move really slow and nothing really happens.

20:37Yeah. The Shopify founder said this. So Toby said this. It's like the founder's job is to increase the room of the temperature because natural what happens, the room temperature wants to come down, right? Yeah. So your job is to keep increasing, increasing, increasing the temperature. And then sometimes dial it back a little bit, right? But probably more often than not, you're increasing temperature. And what's interesting to me is - No, no. I usually don't dial it back ever. I'll dial it back with that person by just not talking to him for a few days, like up to a week. That's still dialing him back.

21:05No, but I'm still pushing hard. I just get him a week of breathing room. But my deadlines and what I expect does not change. It still stays the same. Yeah. But letting them go for a little bit is dialing back a little bit. You have to like, you know, you can't, you can't keep pushing on somebody. No, I'm still pushing. So if I pushed him to do something by a certain time, even though they're pissed off at me, my expectation stays the same. I just don't follow up every two or three days. I'll follow up a week later. Yeah, yeah. So that's what I'm, I get what you're saying, but that's still technically you're backing off a little bit, but then you ramp it back up.

21:42That's what I'm saying. Like it's still mostly this, but it's down a little bit and it's back to this. We're saying the same thing, but for anyone listening, I think the nuance here is when you push, you're pushing to get something done. The getting something done and deadline isn't changing. it's me following up and pestering and bothering them yeah that's what changes in which i'll slow it down and then i'll ramp it back up because they've cooled down from me pushing and they've gone over it yeah so then i can go back but they know that they still need to hit that deadline and get what i'm looking for done by that day you know what's fascinating i actually so because my chat chpd knows me so well right um it was like okay like me pushing doing everything i could in these last five years to bring us back, right?

22:28It's like, hey, this is good, but it's like, you can't do that at the next level. And I'm like, what do you mean? Like, you've been doing it. You've been the same person the whole time. What do you mean you can't do this at the next level? This is how I am, right? But this is why sometimes the AI can be wrong. So why does the AI think you can't do it at the next level? AI, because, well, those are very short shorts now. But anyway, so like we were talking about this yesterday, actually. So in the leadership thing, like I've been called a fruit fly where I'm just kind of hovering around. Right.

23:03And so the argument is that the me being involved with everything, me pushing on everything can cause chaos. And it does cause chaos. You can admit sometimes it causes chaos. Right. You just said earlier, just chaos. Right. But at the same time, a little chaos, like, you know, keeps people on their toes. and we keep moving along there. So that's, it's like, as long as I'm not being disrespectful, as long as we're moving in the right direction, what's wrong? Yeah, you should never be disrespectful, but you're totally right. You got to keep pushing and try to go into the right direction. And some people like it and some people won't.