The Brutal Reason Most Entrepreneurs Never Scale: Busywork, Sales, and Weak Offers | Tanner Chidester

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0:32I have to go out and find four new guys, not one, four. And I didn't want to do it, but I just knew that's what I had to do. And I think a lot of people avoid that. You don't win by following the playbook. You win by rewriting it. 700 episodes deep with the people who actually built something real. No theory, no fluff, no shortcuts. This is Right About Now with Ryan Alford.

1:26fitness industry when i was younger i wanted to play in the nfl i took that all ad one level i got hurt a bunch i don't think i was good enough i did play some first round draft picks so that was a blessing i started a fitness business and it did super super well and it did so well that i had trainers start asking me for help especially from the click funnels community i had my little two comma club award and they're like oh this guy he got it not being a business coach ironically all these people want me to business coach them and i said hey man i don't want to do that i hate business coaches after a while they keep asking you see the dollar signs i was a young guy.

1:55I was 25, 26. So I started doing it. And then that did so well that I started helping people outside of fitness. In short, when people ask what we do or what Eliseo's does is I just showed everyone what I did to become a multimillionaire from the messaging, the sales, the marketing, the ads, hiring, training, managing, all that stuff, backend systems. And there's just a lot of people out there who don't know what to do. What we're trying to do is just shortcut that for them. That's really it. It seems like there's this oversaturation of coaches. Obviously, more and more people are tuning in and hiring coaches and doing that.

2:26I don't think that's going away, but what's going to separate or be the differentiator for the ones that stick around and the ones that end up back in fast food? You got to be good. When I first got in, it was newer or it seemed newer to me. And so when COVID hit, it just accelerated everything because everybody was looking for things online and stuff like that. Facebook was loving life. They were serving all kinds of those ads. Now what's happened is that trust has gone down because trust is so low. It's just taking an immense amount of marketing to get people through. The first reason it's getting harder is when you think about it,$100 million offers came out and I've really hit on a lot of these things.

3:00Well, let's say you're a business consultant and there's 10 other business consultants. You're having to get people to understand, hey, I do similar things, but I'm better. And that's a harder pitch than I do something completely different. I build flying cars and no one's doing it. So that's the number one thing to understand why it's gotten harder because now the trust is lower and they see all these different options. And then a lot of people, what do they do? They pick the cheapest option versus the best option because pay value is what you get. A lot of people make mistakes there. That means the marketing has to be really, really good.

3:29And a lot of people just aren't good at marketing. That's why having a hundred million dollar offer makes it easier because the marketing doesn't have to be as good. The team doesn't have to be as good. The sales reps can mess up. You'll still make a lot of money. That's the first part. The second part is then thinking about what can you do differently? I'll give you one of my clients who has an amazing offer. He legally helps people get green cards and he can't guarantee it, but it's essentially guaranteed on his app. It's crazy. His app will say the price is 15 K. Can you pay it? They get on the call and there's no sales call.

3:58It's just basically they're just customer service rep who just processes the payment. To me, I'm going, wow, that is a great offer. That is a really good offer. And the final part is part of why I'm looking to do other things is not because I hate what I do. And I love it. And to be honest, it's helped a lot of people. And being back recently. I've been so out of the business for so long that it was kind of good to get back in the trenches to get reminded. It really helps some people. They'll send messages and say, I had a guy the other day, Hey man, I was doing$0 for three months and I hadn't told anyone.

4:28And then you helped me. We had a conversation and now I've done 70 K in 30 days. I don't care. I don't need more money. I was like, wow, that really is cool. Cause you kind of get really far away from that sometimes. But then the other part is I'm trying to do things that hit more of the criteria that billionaires seem to follow. And with all the conversations I've had, the reason a lot of them don't stay in the info space is that there's a lot of good. There's a lot of bad. It's 80-20. 80 % is bad. 20 % is good. But it's because it's not a no-brainer. When the offer is not a no-brainer, it's very hard to scale because you have to spend so much money on marketing and sales teams.

4:59And that cuts margins. A lot of these companies I've seen just scale to tremendous levels. They basically don't even have to market. If you get 60 % of your expenses back, it's a lot easier to scale.

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8:51making the offers is about making the offers about keeping the offer. Yeah, you have to be able to deliver. I think the best guarantee to usually make is performance based. If the client has to do some work to hit the goal, you have to do performance based. You can't just do unconditional, get it whenever you want, in my personal opinion. I own an ad agency and marketing agency and I've been in the industry for 20 years. Performance marketing has been both a great thing for marketing and a terrible thing because what it's done is it's made agencies certainly accountable outcomes, which is probably a little overdue.

9:22However, it's diminished the services that agencies do, the ideas that we create that take time to manifest outcomes, i.e. building a brand. It takes time for branding to seed and you don't see branding results overnight. Certainly, if you pay me$20 to run Facebook ads, I should deliver an ROA eventually on that. And that's reasonable, but the value and the things that I'm doing to elevate your brand value, your cash, your authority isn't paying dividends month one, two or three, or even month six. That's the only thing I've hated about all this guarantee performance driven stuff. First off, the funny part is when everyone's given the guarantee, it means nothing.

10:05The other thing is a lot of people, what they don't understand is they hear the word guarantee and they think it's like this amazing promise, but I'm going, look, think about it. Like if someone says, Hey, we'll work with you until you get the result. I go, well, if you haven't gotten in three months, why would you want to work with them for another three months for free? People don't think through. They're just so scared. They're so fear-based that they don't even think through the guarantee. And then like yesterday, one of my sales guys was talking to me about a convo. Some people don't even know what good looks like.

10:28And he'd spent 25K on ads and he's made 100K. And he's like, well, I think I should have made 10X. And I'm going, 10X? Who told you that? Like 10X? Like 4X is amazing. 4X, you're crushing. If you're collecting 4X, 2X to me is my goal. We can collect 2x. The rest is payment plans, whatever. That's fine. They think that the media buying company is the issue when I'm thinking, well, what do you do for follow-ups? Do you have emails? Do you have setters? Do you have sales reps? Do you have text messages? Do you do retargeting? No, we don't do any of that. Why are you changing media buying companies?

10:56The media buying company who's getting you a 4x return is crushing it for you. You just don't have any systems or follow-up processes, which is more important than the actual ad. There's a lot of stuff like that that makes me shake my head, but people just don't know what they don't know. Just because you turn on something overnight doesn't mean you immediately have the authority to sell it. Brand is a big word or a small word, depending on your position. But it's credibility, it's time, it's authority, all those things. People forget you got to play that game, too. I mean, I've been doing YouTube for forever.

11:25Not very well. I was just throwing stuff at the wall. But recently we started doing these one to ones and it's been great because one, I feel it's more in alignment with my brand. I'm not really trying to be flashy. I just want to put out like good info. And then number two was that the videos, I'm actually helping them build their business in a two hour window. And so what's been crazy is the videos are doing significantly better, way better. I might be on to something. It took me kind of years and years and years of sticking with it. I agree with you. A lot of people, they're just short term sighted that they're not willing to play the long game.

11:54We all got to make sales and we got to live. There's two sides of that coin. But if you're wanting to be an entrepreneur, keep the day job while you build enough to turn that switch and then move over. Everybody wants to become the entrepreneur overnight. Let that be the only thing they do immediately when it's just not always that easy. Let's talk a little bit about your book, Infinite Income. What are some of the key takeaways from that? The first thing I learned from writing that book is I didn't do nearly a good enough job. I just wanted to get a book out. My intention was part of it was I wanted to use it for marketing.

12:21I want to get out my story. I remember I asked one of my buddies who had a book that's crushed. And I said, why did your book do so well? He's like, well, I wrote it 10 times. I spent 5 ,000 hours, wherever it was. I don't know the numbers. I'm sitting here going, huh, how long did it take me? and it didn't take me nearly enough time. That was a hard lesson learned. It's a good book, but it could have been way better. Going from good to great, even that book, Good to Great, you have to put in 200 % more effort for 20 % more reward. That was number one. But in terms of the book, I tried to make it very short.

12:48It was like 100 something pages. It's just exactly what I did to be successful. It's a little bit of my story. So it's like, hey, here's my backstory. Here's where I came from. And then here's what I did. And here's how you do it. If I could redo it, I would have spent more time just thinking through maybe the chapters and what I would teach. you want to put them more links for videos or QR codes, because I think that's something that I really wanted to help teach. For whatever reason, you're gonna laugh when I was writing the book, I didn't think to do that. I just thought, well, I got to try to describe it with words.

13:14But obviously, there's something that are way easier to describe in videos. I think I was a little short side, I want to get the book out quick and stuff like that. A couple of mistakes. But overall, if someone reads the book, what they'll get is a little bit of my story. And then exactly what I did as I went, they're getting the story as they go. But then here's how I got my first client. Here's what I said on the calls. Here's what I did in ads, stuff like that. That was my intention was to try to help people know where to start because a lot of books I read, I hate them because they talk about a lot of mindset.

13:40Some people need that. Most people do. But for a guy like me, just tell me what to do and I'll do it. I don't need you to give me all this hard work stuff like I do that. I just need to know what to do. And that's what I tried to make my book is make it very tactical. I get and appreciate that we all have to get be in the right place and create habits that make us work hard. I'm not perfect. Far from perfect, but I don't need motivation. I don't need the mind tricks. Just cut to the chase. I appreciate the hell out of you being transparent about your process with the book. A lot of people resonate with that honesty, the authenticity, maybe using that as infinite income and your own experience.

14:12What are maybe a couple of things from your experience and things in the book or just what you know now that are the biggest shortfalls or things that people don't understand about that process and what it takes to make it happen? There's two clients I spoke to recently. I've been out for so long that it's fun to talk to you now because these are recent. So I had two clients. They're both struggling. One was doing 25k a month. They wanted to get to 100. They're breaking down crying because their family's going through stuff and her parents and stuff like that. And the other one was kind of more in beginning stages, but similar spot.

14:43Girlfriend left him, had to move home. It sucks. The first thing I do when that happens is say, tell me what you're doing. Just what do you do all day? And more times than not, what they're doing is things that do not produce sales whatsoever. It just mind boggles me. So I sit there and go, well, what do you do? How do you make sales? To make sales in a high ticket business, let's just assume a person has a high ticket business, you need to get sales calls. Well, how do you get sales calls? You need leads. How do you get leads, messages or ads? If you're not making the money you want to make, why are you doing anything besides talking to people with cold DMs or running ads?

15:12There's really nothing else you should be doing. And what a lot of times they're doing is like, well, I'm taking a course or I'm reading a book or I'm making content. Who watches your content? You have a hundred followers. It's more about what they need to stop doing more than what they need to do sometimes as well. What gets me kind of sad is a lot of people will say, this doesn't work, but it's either a, they're not doing it or two, they're not doing enough volume. When people will ask me, and I talk about in the book, how many cold DMs did you send a day when you were broke? And I said, man, I would send at least 200 a day, if not more.

15:42When I did that, I would make sales and people are like, well, I can't do it. I'm like, you just don't want to do it for eight hours because that sucks. But I was willing to do it. That really is the biggest pitfall as a scale, it turns more into team building. A lot of great solopreneurs, horrible with people, horrible at management, horrible at understanding that they need to think about them and not themselves. People don't work for you. They work for them. How can you make it advantageous for them to help your mission? Those would be the biggest three things. And that's what gets me frustrated because a lot of times they're just doing the wrong stuff.

16:11It's so fixable and they feel hopeless, but it's really not. They just don't know what they're doing. You've experienced it firsthand. I assume, I don't know. I don't even have the guy's name to give him credit for, but he's well known in the sales and marketing industry. And he pretty much says leads are everything. Throw it all away, but leads are everything because if you don't have leads, you don't have the potential for closes. You have to get at bats. It's volume. And you have to get in front of more people because the content, all that matters, but none of it matters if you don't have leads.

16:41I ran an ad back in the day. It was called Rich Trainer versus Poor Trainer. It was off Robert Kiyosaki's Rich Dad Poor Dad. A lot of people get pissed off, but it works really well. And the premise was all of these trainers are so good at exercising and the cardio and the meal plans and you're broke. I'm like, well, why are you broke? Because you don't know how to get sales. You don't know how to get customers. You're not convincible enough. It was funny that I'm probably one of the highest paid trainers ever. I don't know. Maybe someone makes way more of that. But I mean, even when I was just only doing a fitness company, I was making a couple million a year.

17:10Best paid trainers in Miami, probably 250, 300 a year. Best paid. It wasn't because I was the best trainer and I even said that. I'm like, there's a lot of trainers who are probably more experienced and better than me, but I was better at sales and running a business. You do need a good product eventually, but even marketing and sales supersede a product for beginners because they don't know your product is good or bad until they buy. If you can't even get them to buy, they're never even going to experience your product. It's a huge issue for most people. And honestly, the way they can fix it, they won't do it.

17:37But I tell people, go do door-to-door sales for three months. you'll never suck at sales again, but they don't want to do it. They don't want to. It takes them years and years and years and call and call and calls. Door-to-door sales was a blessing for me because I would do a hundred doors a day. The feedback loop I got was significantly faster than doing high ticket sales where you might only get two to 10 calls a day. So your feedback loop takes probably 10 times longer than if you did door-to-door sales and it's easier than door-to-door sales. I wish more people would do that. That should actually be required in high school instead of all the other nonsense that make you do.

18:07I mean, door-to-door sales, you can do that. You can do anything. Well, people do what they want. They enjoy filming the content. They enjoy doing the exercises. They enjoy talking more than they should to people maybe about things that aren't sales. They enjoy checking boxes on the page, but it's not fun to cold DM 400 people in a day or to cold call 40 people in a day. We can make all the excuses in the world, but we do what we want to do. That's the thing that frustrates me. You guys are doing all these things to avoid the work that you know you need to do it. Sometimes they know they need to do it, but they try to do other things to feel they're being productive, even though they know those are the wrong things to do.

18:43You can't avoid it. When I got back and I was looking inside my business, I just knew I have to cut all these reps. And it was the whole sales team for a division. I have to go out and find four new guys, not one, four. And I didn't want to do it, but I just knew that's what I had to do. And I think a lot of people avoid that and they'll try to go, well, maybe I can fix it. Maybe I can just work with this person. And sometimes you just have to look reality in the face and just go at it. And a lot of people, they don't want to do it. I guess other than just the hard reality truth that you get when you're working with people to get them over that hump, or at the end of the day, it's just that person's got to decide to do it.

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