Explosive Growth: From Zero to Millions - Tanner Chidester

0:00Welcome to the Proven Podcast, where it does not matter what you think, only what you can prove. Everyone's trying to scale a mediocre offer with better marketing. Tanner Cheatester proves that's backward. The founder of Elite CEOs has generated over$100 million in sales across 50 ,000 clients by doing one thing first, creating offers so bulletproof they practically sell themselves. The show starts now. Today we've got Tanner with us. I am going to absolutely fangirl for a second. I have been following him for a really long time, so it's kind of special. I know his girl doesn't want me to feed his ego, but this guy is a damn superhero.

0:33bro. So I'm really impressed. Thank you so much for being on the lab. Yeah. Thanks for having me, man. I appreciate it. That was very kind. So for the, it's like the two people on the planet who actually don't know who you are, which is embarrassing, but can you give us a little bit of backstory, kind of like what your story was? I knew, you know, you grew up and then give me a little bit of a lead in to get everybody who you are and what's going on. Yeah. So I, one of seven kids, four sisters, two brothers grew up super religious, uh, you know, conservative household. And my dad was a teacher, mom would stay at home.

1:02So not a lot of cash, not a lot of money. And at a young age, I just remember, you know, telling my mom, when I'm rich, I'm going to buy those prepackaged meals and meal prep. And I was really into bodybuilding and sports. And then I wanted to go to the NFL, took it as far as we go, had a little stint at D1, got hurt a bunch, don't think I was good enough either. But I gave it my all. So no regrets. And that's been like a big thing in my life. I've been really proud of. And then I had to start figuring out what I was going to do. So, you know, I was in petroleum engineering. I had a 3.9 GPA. When football ended, I realized I hated school.

1:33I was like, man, I was here to play football. And I just went to class or so happened to. And I sat down with my mentor. My mentor was David Fry, who comes from the ClickFunnels world. He's actually married to one of Russell Brunson's cousins, I believe. And he just taught me about funnels. And so I started learning all these things. I didn't make any money for years, but I was learning all these intangible skills. And I did door-to-door sales and I was a server. But right before I was about to go back to school, because I wasn't making any money. I was almost 25 now. I kind of hit it off in the online fitness niche, blew up, had tons of trainers start asking me for help.

2:06That blew up. And then Elite Shields was born after that. And I've been doing that the last six years. We crossed 100 million in sales and 50 ,000 clients and all these crazy numbers. So that's kind of the long story short. So I like that you're being very kind with it blew up. Could you give a little bit more details of what do you mean by it blew up? because I don't think people understand what blew up means in your world versus my world. Yeah, blew. I mean, it grew very fast. So I went zero to a million in a year. That was actually my slowest year of growth, which is crazy to think. And then we went one to 10 and then we went 10 to 15 and then we jumped to like in the twenties.

2:44And it was, I'd say my biggest craziest year was one to 10, right? Literally 10 X in revenue in a year. And that's, you know, obviously a massive jump. So that's kind of what I mean by explosive growth is, you know, it's pretty explosive and pretty fast. I just needed to frame it for the people who are like, oh yeah, he made 20 bucks. No, he didn't make 20 bucks. It's a very different conversation here. There's a reason it's called elite CEOs. So if someone's coming into this and they're like, okay, holy Christ, what, what, what happened here? If someone comes into the idea of scaling, if you're like, Hey, this is the most important thing out of everything we do.

3:19This is what you have to identify first and foremost, when it comes to scaling your business? What was the first thing you would say they need to do? Yeah, so it's going to sound boring, but it's getting a good offer, right? Mosey has a great book on it now, right? $100 million offers. Most people's offers just aren't that good. And so there's really two ways you can do it. Either A, you have something that's so unique that no one else is doing it, like Facebook, right? That's an example. Or you have to have a unique selling proposition or USP. And so typically that's going to be in the health-wealth relationship niche, meaning let's say I'm a trainer and every trainer is essentially workout plan, nutrition plan.

3:55And so all the trainers are fighting on price because they don't know how to position it. So the number one thing they need to start with is having the unique selling proposition. What's the thing or the mechanism that makes what they do different? And a lot of people, they don't really understand what a mechanism is. They don't understand like how to make it different and they really don't know how to market it. And so that's like the number one thing I can walk through that if you'd like, but if they didn't get that wrong, it's the base of the pyramid. Okay. So I'll walk through it. So for example, I'll just go, I'll just talk about when I was a trainer.

4:24So when I was a trainer, I realized, look, at the end of the day, everyone wants a six pack and they want to eat donuts, right? It may not be right. It may not be the healthy. It doesn't really matter. It's that's what they want. So when I started trying to sell it to people, instead of saying what most trainers do is they talk about the features and benefits. So you get a nutrition plan, you get a training plan, you get accountability, you'll get an app, like no one cares. They just want to know they're going to get the result and it's going to be easy. So what I focused on is I'm a big proponent of calories, right?

4:52So calories in, calories out. Some people aren't, but that's, I'd say most trainers would agree with that. So with that being said, I said, okay, how can I position it in a way where I'm not lying, but it sounds attractive? Because most trainers would say, yeah, I'm going to put you on a diet plan or, hey, I'm going to teach you calorie counting. Boring. So what I would say for one of my pillars, like I usually have three, so it's two are the USPs. Like what is that I do different than one's why me, right? So one of them was how to eat whatever you want without sabotaging results. And what I would teach is I say, look, I'm going to show you how to eat whatever you want without sabotaging results.

5:24Because as you get older, you go to birthdays and parties, you're not going to just eat chicken and broccoli, right? On your birthday, you're going to eat cake, right? So it's not about cutting out bad foods. It's about how to eat bad foods and still look good. So people would buy that and like, oh, that sounds different. Same thing with the training. I'd say, look, 90 % of your results is nutrition, 10 % is training. So I don't care if you don't train at all. It's not as healthy, but I can still get you to lose weight as long as you follow the nutrition. They're like, Oh, okay, that makes sense.

5:49And then finally, when I would get down to their options, I'd say, so now that you understand you have to learn these things, you can either hire an in-person trainer who is paid for you to keep coming back to the gym. And they focus on training, which we already said wasn't most of your results. So that's not a good idea. You could get Beachbody, but they give everyone the same program. And it's just, you know, set to get as much results in the first 30 days for their pictures. And then you go right back off because you can't stick with it. Or you can hire me and I'm going to teach you how to do this for the rest of your life.

6:18And you only have to pay for it once. So by the time they got that concept, I was selling three, four,$5 ,000 fitness packages. And a lot of trainers that were probably better than me couldn't do it because they don't know how to position, right? It's all about positioning. It's not even necessarily being better you want to be, but it's positioning. And so that's the number one thing that most people fail at and they don't think about it long enough to be different or they think what they do is different, but it's not. It's just what everyone does. So they can't sell it at a high price. I love the subtle brilliance that was in it.

6:53You were defeating their objections in your pitch. You're going through and saying, listen, I know you're going to go over here and you're not going to do this. That's okay. And that's not going to work. Or, hey, you're not going to get it in the gym. You're going to just have diets. You're already, as you're going through it, their objections, you already know where they're going to be. You've done the research in advance and you're like, I'm going to build my pitch in my unique selling proposition of this. It's already going to defeat you. It's already going to go in and it's already going to negate it.

7:17So now you're at the point where you're begging to be sold to versus having to sell. It's a completely different narrative. Well, yeah. And the thing in sales is if you don't beat the objections in the beginning, they just come up at the end. So when you get a sales call that has no objections, all it means is you already beat the objections in the beginning. They just didn't bring them up. Right. But they had them. So as you're going through a sales pitch or a presentation, the point is to beat all the objections that they might have. And so it's just you being aware of what they are before they even bring them up.

7:48I'm a little upset that I can't eat donuts and have a six pack. So we're going to talk about that later. As you go through and you've had all the success and you've been doing this, you created something called elite CEOs. And a lot of people have pushed back. Well, you're just the fitness guy. Yeah, you did it over here. What do you know about XYZ? What do you know about car sales? What do you know about, you know, cardiologists? You've only done it over here. I, I completely disagree with that narrative. Tell me why that is not the right way to come through it. When most people say, Hey, if you can do it fitness, you can only do it in fitness.

8:20It's not a truthful statement. Why do you know it to not be a truthful statement? Uh, well, I mean, some of the concepts, I mean, it's a lot of the same concepts, right? I mean, so yes, when you're selling fitness, like it'll take fitness to like business consulting. Right. But yeah, there's differences in fitness for sure. Meaning the type of avatar will be different. It's going to be someone who's 30 pounds overweight versus maybe a super ambitious business owner, right? Certain terminology will be different. It's obviously like different niche, but the sales process is the same. Like the marketing systems are the same.

8:53The backend systems are the same. So, you know, I do think for more people, it takes more skill to be able to do different things. but in the grand scheme of things, like when I'm teaching people concepts, it's all similar. The people who do better though, they usually have more of those tangible tactical skills, meaning they know how to run ads, they know how to do sales calls. So all they need is a strategy. What makes it difficult is if you get a beginner who has no tactical skills, so messaging, sales, marketing, they don't understand that. Plus you have to give them strategy. So it just takes a lot more to actually move the needle, if that makes sense.

9:31Um, so for, for me, it was pretty natural progression because I didn't plan on doing this. It's just, I had success in fitness. Then I had a bunch of trainers ask and then I had a bunch of, so it just naturally progressed, but I never really planned on doing what I'm doing. I was just going to stay in fitness forever at the time. It's the same way I fell into it. I always own an IT company. We sold it. We had an exit. And then it was like, Hey, you did it. Can you do this with this and this? And I was like, well, I guess. And it just progresses into it. It's the same strategy. I'm like, okay, you're not selling computers and you're not a dork.

10:00but you're a cardiologist, so maybe it'll work. So it does go into those. Before we get into some of the higher end stuff, if someone's listening to this and they're like, you know what, I don't have the skills of messaging and I don't know how to do Facebook ads and I don't know how to write copy and I don't know how to build funnels and I don't know how to do all these wonderful things, where can someone go? Where do you reckon go? Go read this, go do this, maybe work for someone else. What is the best way that you found to start building some of those core skills so that you can lay the strategies on top of it?

10:28the best thing I ever did was nine months of door-to-door sales. And the reason was, I didn't know this at the time, but I wasn't a really good communicator and I didn't understand human psychology. But once I knocked on 100 doors a day for nine months, you learn very quickly how to pick up on facial expressions, body movement, like certain rebuttals they would have. And when you're selling door-to-door, they don't want you there and they don't know you're coming. so the rebuttals you would get I mean exponential there's a I mean you couldn't possibly memorize everything so you'd have to have frameworks so once I moved into high ticket sales or like online business there's only four objections time spouse need to think about it or they have a belief issue that's really it because you pre-framed and they want to be there and so if someone does door-to-door sales they almost always excel in business unless they're not willing to learn some of the technical side, like setting up ads and funnels, but they usually do very, very well because one, they face a lot of rejection.

11:33And two, it's just an easier sell. They actually want what you're selling. So there's a million things people could do. But if someone just wanted to go take three months, you can even do two months. Just go sell for a security company. It's 100 % commission. They'll let anyone do it. Just go sell alarms or go sell pest control even. And I'm telling you, like that will be probably worth four years of college right there. That's like one of the best things I ever did. It's the hardest, but it's probably one of the most beneficial things I ever did. When I was learning human behavior, I volunteered at a suicide hotline, taught me more in the months that I was doing that than anything else.

12:08Any of the books, any of the stuff I was exposed to, because you're just, you're in the fire. And luckily there was people to help out, but that's how I learned it. So very similar process. So you've got someone who, again, we don't help people grow their initial businesses. We help people scale them. So if you come into this environment and they want to be an elite level CEO, they want to be at this high enough level that they're like, Hey, we're doing this. And I've already got the basic skills. I understand that. I've already understand a basic idea of my product. It's somewhat successful when they get into your environment and they start doing this high end coaching with you.

12:38And they do this. What are the things? What is the process of the life cycle that someone goes through? So I give a client, if they come in as like a client, for example, if they come into your client what is the result they normally get and then what are the things you make them do because everybody has their different strategies and their techniques i mean like okay there's first we do this and then we do this what are the things that you make them go through by default so yeah i mean in terms of results um obviously they're going to vary per person but you know i i would say like 80 of our clients will make their first 10k in like 45 days uh it's pretty high because you know especially if you're selling something for three grand.

13:17We're only talking three sales. I don't think it's that crazy of a claim. It's just people got to be willing to do the work. So when they come in first, we assess where they're at. I think one of the key things I've learned over time is making sure that the strategy stays not consistent. You're able to adapt based on where someone's at. So for example, if someone comes in, they have no sales skills, no social media, no messaging, they're starting from scratch. We got to start them. Let's just get you a basic offer. Let's gets you like doing outreach. Let's get a couple of sales. If I bring somebody who's got 2 million followers on Instagram, I can monetize that immediately.

13:51So I'm gonna have a totally different strategy. They don't need to do any outreach. We just need to monetize what they have. So the first thing is like we assess where it is. They come in, they fill out a check-in form, client check-in form. I'll assess it. I'll do it like a 10 minute loom. My account manager sees it and they implement whatever that is. From there, let's say they're a beginner. We're going to come up with their pillars and there's usually three pillars. So kind of like I said, the fitness one, It's like how to eat whatever you want, how to train however you want. And then the third one I called lifestyle recalibration, which was like, who do you hire?

14:19We'll figure that out for their offers so they can use it in their marketing. They can use it in their sales pitch. They can use it in their emails. Like that's really the core message they have. So for years, one of the things we used for elite sales was conversion conversations, right? Which was when DM ads were new. It's not that it's not new anymore. But at the time, I was like, yeah, like, I'll show you how to get 50 % more conversions, doing conversion conversations versus a webinar. And like, we crushed for like two years, just running that angle. It was just like same angle over and over.

14:49So that's gonna be number two. And it's usually gonna be health, wealth, relationship niche, right? Like, if the offer doesn't fix one of those three things, people usually are not very interested, they got to make more money, have better relationships, we're getting better health. Once that's done, if they're starting from zero, then we got to start doing outreach. So like, you obviously have inbound or outbound. Inbound is going to be what I would call if you go to my Facebook profile, you can see like a two step I did today. So the two step was, hey, most business owners stuck at, you know, below or 20k a month or like they can't get to 100.

15:20They have the wrong strategy. I did a 45 minute call with someone, they doubled their revenue in 26 days. Here's the document comment down below, like that's inbound. And you can go see, like, I told people to message me, but they're still commenting. But there's like hundreds of comments already. And people are DMing me. And so that's like a lead gen strategy that we can teach clients how to do. The other way is outbound. Outbound is the worst. So it's like direct cold DMs or followers or likes or comments. The only reason you would do that is if you're low skill and you don't have money for ads, right?

15:49Because that's usually the fastest way or you don't have a big following. So we'll go through that process. Once they get a couple of sales, two or three clients, take that cash, we'll put it into ads, whether it's boosted post, DM, straight to page. And then we start scaling from there, right? And then it's just rinse and repeat that process until desired income level. Along the way, as they start to scale, we start teaching them like hiring, training, interviews, back-end systems. I would say most clients, they don't really understand hiring and training, and they don't understand back-end systems.

16:19Like the highest level clients, that's usually what they need help with. Lower level clients, it's, I don't know what to say in a message, or like, I don't know what to say on a sales call. So it's more of the tactical. As they make more money, it gets easier to coach or consult because you're just telling them the strategy and you know they can implement it so it's like telling michael jordan hey do five layups in the free throw versus you tell like a five-year-old like shoot a layup like the five-year-old can't even get the ball off the ground right so that's kind of that's kind of our process i can go into more detail but that's how it would possibly look for like a beginner and then someone who's a little more experienced yeah i'd love to have more of the beginning tactics where they go through because most people's messaging is horrible and most people have never made it to the 20k a month because again they're not either they're not willing to do it or their messaging is garbage when when you talk about you know there's only three areas to do health wealth you know you know we get into that environment health wealth relationships when you get into that environment if you have someone that comes in and says hey i want to sell grandma's cookies do you have that how do you have that honest conversation with them going no one cares about your grandmother's cookies when do you meet with them say listen you're just not my fit or hey i can't do you so that you can't scale it?

17:25Or what do you do in that environment? Yeah. So I'm a pretty straight shooter, fortunately. I think that's why a lot of people maybe listen to me. And I'll just tell them, I say, hey, so this is terrible. And the reason it's terrible is it's not unique at all. Right? I just got off a call with a guy, for example, and he has a really good offer, actually. But the way he was presenting, he's like, I'm going to give you accountability so you'll get one-to-one coaching. I'm like, every business consultant says that's not unique. It doesn't even matter if it's true. The issue is when someone's on a sales call, they think you're lying or they're looking for where you're trying to be dishonest.

17:56So saying, I give you one-to-one, every coach says that. It's not unique. His next one was, you know, all, what was it? It was, I'm trying to think, he set up their funnels, which was kind of okay, but then he had another one, which was, I'll like do, I'll give you like a good portal or it was something kind of weak. I can't remember what it was. So what we did is I said, what's unique about what you do? How do you help clients get sales? And he has something pretty cool where he said, so what I do is I teach them how to set up these called RPV, but it's like an interview. And then somehow, I don't know what he said in the call and so forth, but from the interview, they then would get them on another call and close.

18:38And so I looked at his stats. He tracked it. 16 % of the outreach is his clients did. These are brand new beginners booked a sales call. well for anyone who's listening three percent from any from paid traffic or cold you're killing it like you're getting three percent like you're freaking making tons of money so i was like man you're getting a 500 percent increase you're not even talking about it at all so that's like a great example of now that i spoke with him i was like look this needs to be your mechanism that you talk about in the ad so his ad headline could be book 400 more sales calls without ads or like book 400 % more sales calls without a cold DM or whatever.

19:17Cause that's what he was pitching. So that, for example, that's like an easy example, but that's what a most people miss. And so if they don't have that, I just tell them like, look, this sucks. You're not going to sell it. Just period. And then if they, if they don't suck and they actually have something decent, do you help them? Which most of them do. Do you help them write their copy? Do you help do their funnels or how do you, and then how do you write good copy? Cause there's so many people out there like i'll just chat gpt it i'm like well it's not gonna work yeah so how do you get in the situation where you know where do you get good copy do you outsource it is it something just experience how do people get to the point where they do good copy yeah so it in terms of what we do for our clients i mean we can do anything a to z depending on the package they pick so we have an in-house copywriter we have media buyers we'll set up the funnels we'll do the pixels i mean we'll do it all like and we've just had to over the years because um it's not only just giving them strategy but is trying to help them implement, right?

20:10Like people need that help. So that's number one. In terms of writing copy, where I start is what's the biggest thing I'm trying to get across, right? So if I'm writing an ad or a headline or whatever, it's the number one thing is what am I trying to show or what do I want them to understand? So for example, I just showed you or I just spoke about the last guy. How to book 400 % more sales calls using the RPB method. Creates curiosity. It's unique. one we use for years. Those are results. Yeah. Yeah. It's usually the result from it. Right. Um, how convergent conversations books me 57 % more sales calls or, um, how to like how to use the, uh, what's one we're running, uh, recently it's like, um, get X amount more return using the boosted funnel.

20:59And then it's like, well, what's the boosted funnel and stuff like that. So I think the first thing is what's going to draw attention and it needs to create curiosity. You don't want it to be so weird where it's like, you know, aliens are, you know, running across the earth at light speed, but you don't want it to not be too simplistic. So one that I always use as an example is bulletproof coffee. They don't say coffee with butter, they say bulletproof coffee. So it's like, well, wait, what's bulletproof coffee? And it's like, oh, you put the butter in and then use it to keep whatever. I don't care if it's true or not.

21:27That's not the point. The point is like, it works in terms of driving curiosity. Once I have that, the first line, if I'm writing the body is then who it's for. So it's like, if you're, you know, if you're this type of person with this type of struggle, this is for you. So I just call it out immediately. And then I go right into the problem, right? Then I'll relate back to them. So like, hey, you're this type of person. I used to be here too, until I started, you know, whatever I started XYZ method. And then this is the result and then a CTA. So that's usually how I'll structure the copy. And you know, part of it for me, I think over time, it's gotten easier, because the more you do it, the more you kind of know what's going to drive curiosity and attention.

22:10But to be frank, what's like, it's all the same. And something I get away from sometimes like more organic content is I get lazy. And so we're just like throwing reels out there. But whenever I get feedback from a consultant, he's like, bro, like, just like treat it like an ad. Like, what would you say in the first two seconds to get someone like to click on your stuff? I'm like, Oh, yeah, of course. So as long as you have like a catchy hook a good headline and then if it is an ad just for anyone listening people are looking at the ad then their eyes go to the headline then the copy so it's in that order of importance where the image or video needs to be like immediately catches attention and then the headline then the copy so if you have a follow-up let me know hopefully that hit all the cylinders no that that hit a lot of them so if you've got the people who are like okay clearly my message is garbage i need to make it more unique.

22:57I need to sell the result. Shit. Once we get that rocking and rolling, the next question I get off all the time, especially by my clients, they're like, well, how much do I have to be involved? And I'm a systems guy. I'm going to automate someone. And whenever I'm scaling businesses and brought in, I'm going to fire the person as quickly as possible. I'm like, you're in my way. You're the business owner. Get out of my way. You've been in my way. I can't scale it with you being here. But my businesses are significantly bigger than most people. I'm guessing some people who are these, Hey, I'm just a coach or I'm just a, I haven't made my first 20 K yet.