Digital Marketing Expert Ryan Deiss: How You Can Scale Your Business in 5 Steps

0:00I had the unfortunate experience of being thrown in jail one night. It's a long story. Ryan Dice, digital marketer extraordinaire. When it comes to scaling a business, I bet you didn't know some of the insights he's going to share with us. I believe that media companies are the least valued, most valuable businesses out there. You need to be able to visualize how you're actually creating value. The mistake, the trap that entrepreneurs fall into is they think that success looks like just doubling down. It's true in the abstract, but if you want to scale a company, you need to pull out and think about what's the value chain that makes that happen.

0:36He's phenomenal at the subject of marketing. If you're really good at marketing and sales, you shouldn't need anybody because if you're great at marketing and sales and you have a good product or service, you should just be crushing life. Best ever Ryan motivational speaker. All right, Ryan, I got to ask your definition of success. As long as I can think, would my tenure in the past version of myself be proud of me today, then ultimately I'm going to call that success. And this is something I've struggled with a lot, man, because the goals keep getting moved. And, um, and I remember, you know, sold a company, had experienced what I thought was success.

1:11And I looked around and I didn't feel very successful. And I realized it was because I was comparing myself to other people who had maybe sold their companies for more, or I was comparing myself with, um, you know, just things that, you know, I knew I could have done that, that didn't go quite as well as I thought. Um, and I remember ultimately my wife, who is all source of goodness and wisdom in my life, said, when we first got married, if I had told you that this would happen, you would not have believed it. And you're right. You're right. So as long as I can, if I were to go back in time and tell myself, whether it's 10 years, five years, 20 years, whatever, if there's some earlier version of me that I could say, hey, here's what I'm doing now.

1:53And some version of that would have been like, well, that's pretty cool. I'm going to call that success. And for the win. So how did it evolve then your definition of success? Because obviously when we start out younger and then as we get older, it changes. How did it evolve for you? Well, for me, when people asked me when I was a kid, what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said a millionaire. And I don't know why I didn't come from a wealthy family, but no joke. They said that. And they were like, I think it was, I was, I watched, I love Batman. And you know, Bruce Wayne was a millionaire and he had like cool stuff.

2:23And I was like, I want that. And it wasn't clear what he did for a living. I guess he inherited it all, right? Trust fund kid. I didn't have that as an option. But for me, success in the beginning was, you know, was a million dollars. And I remember thinking my very first goal was, you know, if I could just make$10 ,000 a month, then I would never need any more. And then it was, well, you know, you find out pretty quickly you need more. So that's the thing, like the goalposts, But the first definition was a million dollars as as as maybe as shallow as that sounds. That was my first definition of success.

2:55Oh, look, I mean, it's so easy when you're a kid to get enamored with that which you don't have and do it from that perspective. Do you think that you chose success as a kid or did it come later in life? Where did you make the choice? I will be a success at whatever I do or in life. I always had ambition uh and I don't really know where it came from my neither of my parents were particularly ambitious and I don't mean that to say they weren't amazing humans my mom's a school teacher my dad's an electrician my dad's one of the most content people I've ever met in my entire life there there are seasons in my life where I'm highly envious of my father because he's just a good man he's just so damn happy um and has never wanted for anything has always been very proud of me, but was never, um, you know, proud, but not impressed.

3:43You know, if that makes sense, like he would have loved me and been proud of me no matter what. And, um, so there, but there was always this, this, this yearning there for wanting more. I remember my friend, I had this friend growing up, he was very artistic and he'd make these like origami things. I'd be like, we could sell those. So we go door to door in the apartment trying to sell these like little origami creations. and I didn't, it's not like I even necessarily needed the money. It's not like I got money and bought stuff. I just always wanted to do more, to produce more, to make more. I was never happy with the status quo.

4:19I don't know why. Probably that means I'm broken in some way. You know, I remember when I interviewed Gary from the Y Institute and you look at your Y, somewhere in there, there's a thing of making stuff better or making stuff, you know, it just is and I find a lot of guys like you and me who are teachers just love to help people make stuff better and and and do that stuff flip it back a little bit what is your methodology or formula or how do you see success happen what's your way of it happening so for me there has to be something I want that I don't have I am I get very very impressed depressed uh immediately post achievement like the the the feeling of the victory doesn't last very long um and so for me there's got to be something that that i that i really really want and so i remember i was in when i first started college you know i was i was happy like i made into the school i wanted to make it into like life was good but it wasn't until i met this girl my freshman year and i thought oh this is probably the woman i'm gonna marry now incidentally i didn't tell her that right away that's creepy but I knew in my heart of hearts, I knew, and I knew that like, I'd probably need to propose.

5:36I knew I'd probably need to have a diamond when I did that. I knew diamonds were expensive. And so I went, okay, I need to figure out how to make money. There was something that I wanted. And I started my very first business online from my college dorm room, just with the goal in mind of, I want to have enough money to buy a really nice diamond ring that is worthy of this girl that I will probably ask to marry me at some point in the next couple of years. So for me, success always starts from there's got to be something I want that I don't have. And sometimes it's something that is very noble.

6:07And sometimes, man, it's not. Sometimes it's just the most shallow thing in the world, but it has to come from I want this thing and I don't have it because that's what creates the thought process. And it's when I start asking the questions about, well, how do we get there? And what's the fastest way to get there and the most efficient way to get there. But it always starts from, I want something and I ain't got it. Let's fix it. What's your theory on the relationship between failure and success? I think that failure is the best teacher in the world, as long as you can separate yourself from the emotional aspect of it.

6:41And I'll explain what I mean, because I think a lot of people, when they fail, the worst thing in the world that can happen is that failure now becomes an aspect of your identity. You didn't fail. You are a failure. And that's when I think that failure has an inverse correlation to success. Because now if I identify as a failure, well, I'm going to look, you'll find plenty of failure in your life and in the world. And so that's what you see and that's what you'll pursue. And it's becomes this worst self-fulfilling prophecy ever that the flip side of that though, is also unhelpful. If you sugarcoat, um, if you spin every failure as like, oh, well, that's not that big a deal.

7:19And oh, you know, it just is making me stronger, but you never pause long enough to learn from that failure, then you won't grow. I had the unfortunate experience of being thrown in jail one night. It's a long story. I shouldn't have been there. The cop that put me there did ultimately get fired. It's now a matter of public record that I did nothing wrong. That being said, here I am in jail. Okay. And I remember we were in, we were in jail. Um, and they were, they had us, a bunch of us who had been put in this, in this big cell, we were waiting there to be processed and get put in a smaller cell.

7:57And there was this guy who clearly had been there many times. Like he knew the names of the officers and they knew his name. And, and this guy, I guess, felt like as the senior member of our little organization felt like he needs to dispense some wisdom. And so this guy says, look, everybody, I know what you're thinking. Um, you know, you're thinking like, what did I do? What got me here? And look, you shouldn't be thinking that that's not the right way to think, you know, you just need to like take it and like, it just happened and it just is. And, and like, and that's okay. And I don't know why I was like frustrated and sleepy and bored.

8:28And I figured I probably wasn't going to get, they didn't have time to make a shiver, chanker to stab me or anything yet. So I was like, I got to say, I completely disagree with that. I think now is an amazing time for all of us to reflect on exactly what got us here and learn from it. And the guy paused and looked at me and I was like, I'm going to get killed in jail. This is what I want to make. And he went, you know what? Yeah. Yeah, y 'all, that guy, what he said. And I think that's important. I think failure is a phenomenal opportunity if you can pause to reflect on it, externalize it, look back on it and learn from it.

9:04So every month I make a list of all my highlights and all my lowlights for the month. And I give myself time to swim in the stench of failure. And then I turn the page physically in my journal. I physically turn the page. I write the lessons learned, but I do not recount the failures themselves. Only the lessons that do I physically take forward. Love it. Best ever, Ryan, motivational speech given in the cell. In the jail cell. Hopefully we got some people to turn their lives around based on that speech. So when you look at successes, and there's an interesting thing you said there about moving on to the next thing.

9:47Have you learned to celebrate those successes so that you do carry them with you? Because you can turn the page on the failures. How do you carry the successes, I guess? If I'm being candid, that's the thing I'm the worst at. and I'm fortunate that my wife will force me to celebrate. But I expect success and so when it happens, I don't celebrate it because that's what we're supposed to do. I'm far more likely to celebrate failure. And this actually became pretty toxic because I brought this into my company. And anytime somebody would fail, we'd make a big deal out of it. I think there's a positive aspect to that.

10:30Where if you fail, we're going to celebrate it. We're going to learn from it. And you're going to get to see that, like, if you fail at this company, that's not a death sentence. But what we never did was celebrate when we won. And people were really discouraged by that. And some of my team members called me on it. And we actually eventually, and I had to go in front and apologize. They're like, we're going to start doing this. And I'm bad at this. And eventually, we built a core value and a reputation as a company that celebrated success. so we do that the couple of man i'm so bad at it personally i i need to get better at it you know it's interesting because i i go back to being when i was a young man and i worked i just worked i didn't do anything i had to add a segment to my life of creator of fun times because it's like i didn't i did need to celebrate success let me put that a different way but my team needed it so bad.

11:23They worked their tail off. I got the economic benefit of that success more than they did. So I needed to celebrate. What do you do to remind yourself of that? Or does your team just remind you of that now? So now it's baked into the, it literally is one of our core values. If we don't celebrate success, it's a core values violation. So I almost needed to make it punitive. You know, I mean, it almost needed to be a punishment if we didn't. And now what we have is good leaders who they embody those values and they offset mine. And they're very thoughtful, not just about celebrating as a company, but they will celebrate individuals who are successful.

12:05And they'll make a big deal out of it. And I won't. And we had a lot of people who were for me. It's why I'm frankly not a great CEO. I'm a good founder. I'm a good entrepreneur. but I'm not a great manager or operator because I don't do a good enough job of that. And I think you do, if you're going to be a great leader, you have to balance the two. You have to be incredibly honest with people when they fall short and do it in a loving, caring way. But that has to be balanced by elevating them. I'm proud of the fact that I don't treat my own children that way. Like I didn't bring that into the home.

12:44So I can separate it personally and familially, but when it comes to business, I just, I got some head junk about that, I guess. You know, it's interesting. The moment you don't understand yourself is when you struggle with those things. The moment you know who you are, you surround yourself with the right people that balance that stuff out. And that's one of the things I love. Big success podcast. We'll be back in just a moment. Ryan Dice is going to take us into digital marketing, scalability, all the things you need to learn to create that massive success. Start living your life on purpose and with a plan.

13:19As Brad Sugars teaches, you only get 4 ,000 weeks. So learn the principles of success and make the most of your life. Join Brad's Purpose event now and create the life that you deserve. Visit bradsugars.com to attend this program as a standalone or as part of Brad Sugars' Entrepreneurial University. And you're back. Big success podcast. Make sure you hit that subscribe button. Ryan, you sold Digital Marketer for billions and billions and billions of dollars if you read all the things. What did you guys learn by building that business? Because it was a phenomenal opportunity to learn in the early stages of marketing that didn't really exist.

13:57Yeah, well, point of clarification, we actually didn't sell Digital Marketer, the main company. We sold Traffic and Conversion Summit, the event. We got to maintain the media side of that, which is an important, you know, one of the learnings, which is I believe that media companies are the least valued, most valuable businesses out there. So media companies, what we're doing right now are so valuable because they're aggregators of attention, but they're not valued in the marketplace because they don't monetize that attention particularly very well. And so a lot of media companies, they monetize primarily through advertising, which can be kind of inefficient and it's just not that great.

14:40Or like maybe they got some premium subscriptions. But media alone doesn't necessarily make a great business by itself. And if you just look at what like just Google BuzzFeed's valuation and what's happened there and Vice and all these other pure play media companies, what they're great at is being the goose. They're great at being a goose that lays golden eggs. And so I'm fortunate, got a really sharp business partner in Roland Frazier, who helped us restructure that company when he came on board. And we realized that the event, Traffic and Conversion Summit, well, that was a business by itself.

15:14And so if we were to kind of send that out into its own organization, that could really be something. And Digital Marketer, that could really be its own thing in our different courses. But it was, I think the most fun aspect of that business was realizing that you could take something that was a quote unquote guru business and turn it into a sellable standalone business. And making that pivot from Ryan Dice talking about, from being the quote unquote Ryan Dice business, me talking about marketing, to making it more about frameworks, to making it more about ideas, and to inviting other people in to share their ideas.

15:51And as long as everybody was pointing back to the core frameworks and everybody's pointing back to the core brand, the brand was the recipient of all of that brand equity. And that worked really well. I have to ask, I mean, digital marketing was nowhere when first you guys started it. What did it feel like to build an industry or build a profession, a whole thing, not just a business? It was wild. When I made my very first sale online in 1999, Google was a science fair project. I mean, it was just, it was nothing. And to watch this industry emerge, and then I wouldn't want to tell people that I had online businesses.

16:33They assumed that it was a scam or it was porn or it was something super sketchy. But it was fun because I would ask at the start of our event, Traffic and Conversion Summit, I'd say, how many of you are here to learn how to market your own business? And the first year it was just about everybody. Great. How many of you are here to learn how to do marketing so you can do it on behalf of somebody else, coaches, consultants, though. And a few hands went up. How many of you are here because you do marketing within a company? Almost nobody the first few years. The biggest shift that I saw take place was the professionalization of digital marketing.

17:07The agencies and the consultants emerge. The roles begin to form within companies. And that really was when it blew up. Uh, when, when digital marketing was not just this thing that people did who wanted to sell stuff on the internet, when everybody realized that, well, all marketing is digital because all business is digital because you can't escape the web. Um, and we were the beneficiary of that if I, I wouldn't have predicted it. Um, but we were happy to ride it. And we were also happy from a brand perspective. It's why I wanted to choose a broad brand and digital marketer as opposed to one that was super narrow.

17:41Cause I knew that they were going to be rolled up under a single umbrella. So we were pretty intentional about that as well. So that brings us to scaling businesses now. The big thing you're teaching right now is scalability. What's the core factors that someone needs to understand to scale a business today?

18:00Everybody's heard it, but it really does come down to systems. And I want to clarify that a little bit more and speak to it because when people hear systems, they think, oh, okay, so I need to just create checklists and standard operating procedures for everything that everybody does. And the answer is no, don't do that. I did that. I basically shut down my entire company for a month, asked everybody in the business to, you know, systemize, I need you to document everything that you did. And at first everybody was pissed off because they didn't want to do the work. And then they got scared because they thought they were all getting fired.

18:32And then when I finally convinced them, no, it's okay, this is a good thing. You know, I read this book called the E-Myth and you know, this is something that's important and you should, which by the way, I love the E-Myth, Marco Verbe, like all that's great. I'm not knocking it. My way that I chose to go about deploying it was not the right way, which is the way I see most people deploy it. And so that they'll either try to document everything, which you don't want to do, or they'll say, I think the biggest mistake that I see entrepreneurs make is they just believe that they don't have what it takes to scale their business.

19:03they they believe that you know i'm good at the start but i don't really have what it takes i need to bring in you know i need to bring in some more like adult management in here like and and i just think we sell ourselves so short and and and as a result we kind of sell our companies and our people down the river like this is something that is very figureoutable very very figureoutable there is a system there is a process to this um and you know and it's fun it's so much fun it's a different challenge but um but it's one that we can as entrepreneurs all do we can pull off yeah so if you look at i mean when i joke with people about scalability i just say listen a billion dollar company is just x times y it's a four million dollar operation in 250 locations or it's a two million dollar location in 500 locations around the world like a billion is not that complex.

19:59If you can get to a million or multi-millions, you can do that. When you look at the strategy behind scaling business, what's your thinking around the strategy behind people scaling? So the first thing that you have to do is you need to be able to visualize how you're actually creating value. And I think that's the part that a lot of entrepreneurs don't do. They don't actually know. If you were to say, hey, how do new customers happen? Like how do clients happen? They could generally describe it, but they couldn't show you, you know, if you were to say, okay, well, when you get a new customer, when you get a new client, how do you fulfill in the promise value?

20:37How do you do that? Or, you know, how do you come up with new product ideas, new feature ideas? If you're more innovation focused, like what is your process for that? And I think the biggest shift that startup founders need to make to become true scale up CEOs is instead of the focus being on singular value drivers, we need to shift to thinking about value chains. So a value driver is something like, I'm really good at buying Facebook ads, right? For me, when I first got started, I was really good at search engine optimization. That's a value driver. Or somebody could say, I'm really good at sales.

21:14You put a prospect in front of me, I'll close them. Or, you know, I'm really good at delivering this particular service. I'm the best in the world. You put somebody in front of me, they got a smoking issue. I'm going to hypnotize them. They're not going to smoke. All of those things are value drivers. And the mistake, the trap that entrepreneurs fall into is they think that success looks like just doubling down because you heard like double down in your strengths. It's true in the abstract, but if you want to scale a company, you need to pull out and think about what's the value chain that makes that happen.

21:47All the stuff before, all the stuff after, and even the independent steps during, because you're going to need to add additional people to that. But if you just hire people before you have the systems in place, we say all the time, good people don't fix broken systems, break broken systems, break good people. And if you've hired for a role a half a dozen times and people keep failing, it's not a people problem. It's a systems problem. And usually the system's problem is we haven't broken down our value creation process into its steps. All we think about are the individual drivers. Yeah. Let's look at that then for your decision making when you're investing or buying a company these days.

22:27Are you looking for companies that don't understand scale and you look at it and go, hang on, I can see how to scale this. How is your decision around buying companies today? So when we're acquiring companies, we're always looking for companies where we can add value. I am not doing passive investing. If I were to do that, I could just go and buy index funds and stuff like that. So when we're looking at buying companies, we're looking at where can we add value? And we can add value in a number of ways. We can certainly add value on the marketing side, really good at marketing. We can generally add some value on the sales side, pretty good at that.

23:04We can add value in the systems and upside. And so what I'm looking for is a business that is typically succeeding almost in spite of itself. And they've got an amazing product. The customers love them. And if they were to go out of business tomorrow, they would be missed. But they're just struggling. Those are the businesses that I love because, one, we can add the most value. But, two, they're the ones who deserve to win. There's a lot of people who are really good at marketing and sales, which means they're really good at selling stuff that's kind of crazier. happy. So if a business comes to me and they're phenomenal at marketing and sales, but they're still really struggling, I'm probably not interested in doing an acquisition on that because one, I can't add value in an area that I know.

23:47But if you're really good at marketing and sales, you shouldn't need anybody because if you're great at marketing and sales and you have a good product or service, you should just be crushing life. Now, somebody who's good at marketing and sales, their customers are all happy, but they haven't figured out how to productize what they're doing, if it's a service, okay, different animal, different animal. But a lot of times we'll see these companies who are good at products and services or good at sales and marketing and you look at their reviews and they're all in the toilet. It's like, yeah, no thanks.

24:13Yeah. You're on the Big Success Podcast. Make sure you hit that subscribe button. We're going to be back in a moment. Ryan's going to talk to us about the difference between good and great. Ryan Dice is a serial entrepreneur, author, investor, and according to Shark Tank star, Damon John, his companies practically own the internet. He also quite literally wrote the book on modern marketing, Digital Marketing for Dummies, which is now in its second edition. To learn more about Ryan Dice, please visit scalable.co. All right, you're back. Big success. Ryan, you've coached a bunch of people, bought a bunch of companies, taught millions, I would guess it is the numbers these days.

24:51What's the difference between someone who sets goals to do the million and someone who sets goals to do the billion or the good versus the amazing type thing in your mind. How do you see the difference? I think it's less about the goal setting and more about the people who do the consistent action to achieve the goals. So if you're going to set the goal, that's great. But the question you have to ask is, why don't I already have this? I think it's a question that nobody asks when they set a goal. You know, I want to lose 20 pounds. Why am I not already 20 pounds lighter? Like why? If it's a goal, it means you don't have it, why don't you have it?