How To Make Money So Fast It Feels ILLEGAL | Ep 808

25:25You go from 100 reach-outs a day to 200 reach-outs a day. Paid ads, you go from$100 a day to$200 a day. You go from posting content, you go from posting once a day to twice a day, right? Those are how you do more. Again, when I talk to the most experienced advertisers that I know, the most experienced business people that I know, the most common thing we talk about is we kind of laugh in the back room of like, if people just don't know how much more they can do. That's the real, is that when I have conversations with small business owners, they're like, hey, I don't think I can do any more ads.

25:54You know, I'm already running$1 ,000 a day. I'm like, I mean, dude, there's businesses that run like$2 million a day. You usually have so much more runway than you think you do. Sometimes you just need someone ahead of you to be like, dude, you can like 10x this and nothing's going to change. But they think because of whatever mental limitation they have, or like, you've never spent that much money on an ad before. You've never made that amount. Is it going to hurt my account? No, they want you to make good content. Is it going to hurt my ads? No, they want you to spend money. Is it gonna hurt my heart?

26:22You're going to people who've never met you before, so why would they know that you've sent it to another 100 people, right? Is that there's these perceived fears, but most of the times it's just between your ears. Yeah, I'll tell you guys a quick story about this. So when I had my first, I would say, real business, which was my first location in my first gym, I had a mentor and he was a really good local marketer. He had a strategy for his tanning salons where he would bring in, I mean, thousands of customers every single quarter. And what he did was he would put out flyers. He just put flyers on cars and then had like a free VIP gift card and people would come in, redeem them and he'd flip them into memberships.

26:58And so I figured, okay, I'll just run the same play. I did the flyers and I put 300 flyers out and I waited by the phone being like, oh my God, I'm gonna get 300 people in here. It's gonna be sick. What happened? Well, my phone only rang once from the flyers and when I picked up the phone, the guy was like, hey, did you put the flyer on my car? and I was like, yeah, I did. Like, what time do I do? And he cut me off and he was like, you damaged my Mercedes. And I was like, oh, click. And I didn't know what to do. As soon as I, and thankfully, he never called me back because I definitely didn't have the money to fix any Mercedes at that time.

27:31I called my mentor back up, you know, a week or two later once it was clear that no one else was going to call. I said, he said, hey, how'd the flyers work out? And I was like, well, they didn't work out at all. Actually, you know, I was like taking some attitude with him. He was like, oh, well, what was your test size? And he didn't take the bait. He was like, oh, what was your test size? I said, well, what do you mean? He was like, well, like, what did you test with before you, like, did the real campaign? And I was like, oh, well, I mean, I put 300 out. And he was like, 300? He's like, you can't know anything with 300.

28:00I was like, what do you mean? He's like, I test with 5 ,000. He's like, and then we put out 5 ,000 a day for 30 days. I was looking at his results from 150 ,000 flyers over 30 days and comparing them to my results of 300 in a day. And once I saw that juxtaposition, I was like, got it. I will never make this mistake again. It was very embarrassing for me because I was on the right path. I just didn't do enough. And so one of the big meta lessons of this is that what presents as volatility is typically a symptom of low volume. So if you're like, man, I only get like, you know, a sale every week or every other week, it's kind of like, you know, it's, you know, most days I don't get a sale and then every once in a while I get one.

28:49It only appears volatile because you're doing so little per day. But if I looked at your year and saw that you closed about, let's say, 12 customers in that year, you closed one a month, for example, every three or four weeks you get a customer. Well, all I would do is look at your entire advertising activity for the year and say, okay, if we wanted to get 12 customers a day, we would have to do 365 times more advertising than we currently do. And if we did that on a daily basis, we would get 12 customers a day. And so you just take your calendar horizontally and then you flip it vertically for a day.

29:23And that is how how much volume is required. And so most people just think that it's like, oh, they can't be doing more than twice as much as me. But in my experience, the people who are crushing it literally are doing a thousand times more than you. And that's the part that like, until you sometimes you hear it or you have someone ahead of you say it, it doesn't become real for you. And it's why I make these videos is to try and like, push as much out of my brain and history so that you can just get the story without the scar. And that's the whole point. So once you're like, okay, I have something that's working, I should just do way more of that.

29:54Awesome. Well, the next thing, the next power lever here is word of mouth. And it's not the way that you think. So word of mouth, people are familiar with referrals. You know, customers tell other customers or other prospects that your stuff is good. What a lot of people don't understand is that negative word of mouth is significantly stronger and faster than positive. Disney did this big study where they found that it takes 37 tragic moments to make up for one magic moment. Versus there's basically like a 5X versus 37X on, if someone has a good experience, they tell five people. If someone has a bad experience, they tell like everybody.

30:29A new business owner often will get customers pretty cheaply. And then all of a sudden costs start going up. And part of the reason that costs go up faster, because you can actually put math to this, which is understanding the difference between CPM, which is cost per impression. And it's like, why is it M? It's mille, which is French for thousands. So cost for a thousand impressions. Versus CPL. which is cost per lead, all right? And so if your CPMs more or less stay the same, but your cost per lead has 2x'd or 3x'd or 4x'd, well, if it's not costing you more to reach those people, then it means that fewer of them are responding.

31:05And if that's the case, and you're just going to still relatively warm markets, the issue is that instead of having positive word of mouth working for you, which should be actively lowering the amount of cost that it takes to get a new customer. You have word of mouth working against you. And so people who would have otherwise purchased from you heard something negative and then choose not to. And so now all of a sudden you have to reach three times the amount of people because two out of the three people who would have gone and bought your thing heard it was bad. And then now you only have one person who's just heard nothing.

31:39Over time, the percentage of the audience that's neutral or hasn't heard of you gets smaller and smaller and smaller. And so it's way harder to grow off word of mouth that's positive but it's really easy to get crushed on negative word of mouth. And for whatever reason, no business owner ever claims that they have negative word of mouth. But I can tell you, half of you are below average. That's a fact. And this is why I emphasize the proof over promise earlier on so much. Because if I'm going to get negative word of mouth, which I know I am if I'm starting out, I want to keep that as concentrated and quiet as possible.

32:13I don't want anybody to to know, right? And so of course I'm not going to charge them money because the last thing I want to do is also have their money when they're upset. So it's like, hey, I'm making this trade. You're going to get stuff. It's probably going to not be that good. My only ask is you give me feedback, right? Tell me how I can make this right. Tell me how I can make it better, right? And when you ask those types of questions, you get the types of answers that can ultimately create more value for the customer. And then once you get positive feedback, positive feedback, positive feedback, now you have something that people actually want, then you can need to introduce strangers to it.

32:40And of course you're going to roll into the next issue, which is, okay, how do I keep that consistent because now it's not me doing everything. I've got a team and we'll get into that. So the next big growth lever is steal from yourself. And so everyone's like, oh, he's going to steal from his competitors. No. So think about it like this. All of your competitors are copying your stuff and taking what's working. When you find something that works, keep doing it. Deviation from what works is more likely not to work. Think about it like this. If you demolish a building, so let's say we build a building and it takes us two years to build a building.

33:13Demolishing it might take five minutes. Just put a bomb, boom. Because the place of the bricks and the steel in that building, every other potentiality that those bricks could go to create not a building. But there's only one placement of that brick and steel that creates a building. And so you have unlimited options for destruction and only one for solution. And so when you do find something that works, the likelihood that when you change it and you move the brick and you move the scaffolding, that you destroy the building is very high. Something can literally go anywhere except for the right place.

33:45And so you can have more options and all of them be wrong. So one of our portfolio companies, which is very large, hired a new advertising director. And that advertising director came in with lots of new ideas. And so the founder, because he wanted to teach an important lesson to the advertising director, said, sure, let's do all of your ideas. And so he sat there, he said the scripts, he recorded all these ads, he took multiple days to do it. And what ended up happening is that they ran all the ads and they didn't work. And so he said, hey, crazy idea. What if we use the same hook that's been working for three years?

34:18And they used the same hook and the ads worked. Think about it like this. Nike, on its second year after Just Do It, wasn't like, hey, Just Do It's kind of old. Let's switch it up. It's like when you find a message that converts, you keep hammering the message. When you find the ad hooks and you find the processes that work well for you, Most times, you'd be better served just continuing to reuse it because you will get bored of it far before your customers ever do. So, believe it or not, there's actually math to support this. So, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, I can't remember which one of them, is like a brilliant mathematician and actually was able to prove this ratio out.

34:58So, when you're stealing from yourself, you want 70 % of all of your effort to go into basically carbon copying the thing that works. And this works across all functions. This works for a sales script. This works for product. This works for reinvestment activities. Like, this rule works. The second is adjacent. So something that's just like one degree removed, right? So it's close to the core of what you normally do, okay? So instead of saying, starting a school community is the fastest way to start an online business, right? I could say that would be a hook, and it's a hook that worked. I could say, one of the fastest ways to start an online business is start a school community, right?

35:30That would be a variation of something that we knew that those words worked, but it would be adjacent to it. Not the exact carbon copy, but similar. Now 10 is, that means that one out of 10 of the things that you're putting your effort towards, all right, would be something that's brand spanking new, completely, you know, out of left field. And when you look at your effort in your business, I can almost guarantee you that you have this flipped. And I only say this because I speak from experience, is that this is what I would do. I would spend 70 % of my time on new crazy things, new ideas, all the stuff that excited me.

36:01And then 20%, I'd be like, oh yeah, I'll do something kind of different from what I was doing before. and then 10 % I'll be like, fine, I'll maybe. And this is a maybe. Most of the time it's like, oh, I already used that. Use that hook once. I don't want to use it again. I don't want to use the same hook that worked before in another ad. It's silly. Also, a different version of this from an advertising perspective of the 20 % is you use the exact same hook, but you have a different background. So it's just like a different variation. So it's like, I could wear a different shirt. I could have a different setting and I could still deliver the same hook.

36:27And to me, that would still be kind of a 20 % variation. So once you're done stealing from yourself, then let's talk about emotional versus logical buyers. This is a huge, monstrous increase in business for me. Have you ever heard from the marketing world, there's logical and there's emotional buyers? I had heard it growing up, and I kind of repeated it over and over again because I hadn't really thought about it. I don't actually think that's true. And so let me explain. I actually think that there's a continuum of buyers that people sit on, and you've got people who require more information, so they're high-info buyers, and then you've got people who require less information.

37:02There's two elements to this. One is their information requirement, and secondarily, how much info they have received. And so you could have a high information buyer that's further closer to this dollar sign here that only needs a little bit more information in order to buy. And then you have some people that just generically buy lots of stuff. Everybody loves those people, of course, but guess what? Everybody fights over those people. The thing is is that the amount of low information buyers is like this. The amount of high information buyers is an order of magnitude or multiple orders of magnitude greater.

37:33Only crazy people buy immediately. It's very normal for people to want to have more information before making a decision. When we think about our advertising, the reason that the direct response community typically can't grow very large businesses most of the time is because they only advertise to these people and this pool of buyers is significantly smaller. But the reason building a brand, for example, and investing in an audience is because you're trying to move them down this line. Now, when I heard this in the earlier days of my career, I was like, I don't have time for that. I need to make money.

38:07I get it. Sure, in the beginning, you just advertise the six-inch putts. But when you want to scale, you have to educate a higher percentage of the audience because they will require more to buy. The way to move people through this is something that Eugene Swartz pioneered in his book, Breakthrough Advertising. And he talks about the five levels of awareness. So he has unaware people, so people have just no idea about anything. The next is problem aware, so they have some sort of pain. You have solution aware, you have product aware, and then you have most aware. So those are the five stages. Now, a customer will basically move in this direction, going from unaware to most aware.

38:51If you want to go to broader and broader audiences to get their attention, the unaware audience, audience, you typically have to go off of broad curiosity. And so if you've ever seen those crazy like ads that are like weird articles, like, you know, Arizona State, blah, blah, blah, has this new blah. Like they're trying to go after a massive audience of people who have no idea what's going on. That new, you know, scientific breakthrough could lead you to buying a supplement. It could lead you to buying a weight loss thing. It could lead you to buying some sort of equipment. It could lead you to buying insurance.

39:22Like it could go in any direction, but it's the curiosity that gets them in. Problem aware would be something to the extent of like, do you wake up to pee three times a night? Does it hurt when you bend over to tie your shoes? Do you get out of breath when you play with your kids? Those are going to be problem aware. Now they, again, that could lead you to a supplement, that could lead you to insurance, that could lead you to whatever, but it's a slightly more aware person. At least they're problem aware. Solution aware is that somebody knows of the potential things that they could buy and you're helping them select between them.

39:52Product aware is at even more micro level. And most aware is typically your existing customers. So here is where you just make offers, right? This is why the book Offers is where I started because the people who are here is the tiny audience here. And so you just make an offer to get them to buy. But that only works for this tiny audience. So you will make money quickly doing that, but you will also cap yourself quickly. In an effort to figure out, okay, well, how much should I allocate between these most aware, less info people and the maybe problem, unaware, high information people who require more education in order to make a purchasing decision.

40:28Well, I had one of the most enlightening conversations I've had in a really long time with Ben Francis, who's the CEO of Gymshark, and then he introduced me to Chris Davis, who's the CMO of New Balance. And so we had an awesome conversation talking about what Chris had done at New Balance and helped them just skyrocket their sales. What they did is that when he took over, 30 % of their advertising budget was going to here, was going to the broad awareness level, storytelling, emotional stuff. And then 70 % was basically geared towards buying shoes, saying, hey, go buy these shoes. What he did when he took over was that he flipped them, that he ended up with 70 % going to big, high-level pairings, endorsements, specific athletes that they wanted to recruit that they felt represented their brand.

41:13And only 30 % of their advertising budget went towards actually telling people that they had shoes and that they were for sale. After he made that flip, here's the crazy part. It took 18 months for them to see the return on that budget. And so if you're in a rush, this isn't going to work. But if you're in a rush, you're never going to get big anyways. Keeping this ratio made this concept tactical for me. And so when I think about my marketing effort, my marketing dollars, and most importantly, how I measure it, my marketing impressions, I want to make sure that 70 % or more of the advertising impressions that someone's going to get are going to be around the pairings that I want of me giving something rather than asking.

41:54So when we look at this ratio, this is actually super well studied between 70 and 30 % here. Because right now, it's actually three and a half to one is the ratio that has been studied to basically not lose audience. And so if you look at television, for example, and they've already studied how many commercials can we jam into the show before people stop watching. And so they figured it out that it was every three and a half minutes of content, they could basically put one minute of advertising in. If you look at your Facebook newsfeed, for every three posts you get when you scroll, you'll get one ad.

42:28And the platforms that grow the fastest have a larger percentage of this give and a smaller percentage of ask. TikTok for years had zero ads on the platform and just wanted to grow as virally as possible. And they acquired more users because they had a give first, give all the time strategy. The fact that they settled on this ratio and it has been corroborated, fancy word for it, it's worked in multiple other places, made me think, wow, there's something to this. And so this makes this concept of how do I balance high information buyers, people that need more brand, people that need more education prior to purchase with me making money, is that you basically start with that ratio, add patience and time and then it becomes a snowball that compounds unto itself and then you will get to a point in the future where you're still you're doing so much more than you could ever possibly do if you only focused on the direct response on the less information but you're actually still digging the well for what you're going to do next year and so basically you can see when a founder stops running a business and then the corporate execs come in because what they do is they flip the ratio they basically pull forward demand from the future the the founder dug the well and then they just suck all the water out of the well, but then they didn't dig the next well.

43:40And so you always want to be ahead of demand. B2B businesses and B2C businesses do this differently. And this was something that took me a really long time to figure out. And so B2C businesses, so like business to consumer businesses will typically do these types of pairings in terms of high information buyers by telling emotional stories, making associations, getting endorsements from athletes and influencers or organizations that represent the values that they think resonate positively with their ideal audience. Once they do that, they then can place the product next to those associations so that they can then pair them and then the person wants to buy the product as a consequence.

44:15That is what it looks like in a B2C business. But it took me a really long time to think through, well, what does this look like for a B2B business? And so I break this down into several tactical things. So number one is aspirational outcomes that you have achieved or the business has helped facilitate. Secondarily, people like this person, like your avatar, that you have helped facilitate. So just to be clear, it's stuff that you did, stuff that you help other people do. The third is stuff that you help them do, the prospect themselves, which you can only facilitate, at least in my opinion, in two major ways.

44:51One is that you give them free content and education, which is why I make this stuff. And the second is that you give them free products and services, which is why the books are free. They're on my site. You can read them. You consume them. There's a scaling roadmap there. it personalizes it. All that stuff is free. Because fundamentally, it's two degrees of separation if some person does it. Alex had a big exit. Now he's a big portfolio. Cool. That's two degrees of separation. There's other companies in the portfolio or other businesses who look just like mine that he helped scale. One degree separation.

45:19I used his stuff and made more money. Zero degrees of separation. And so we want to have, and this is always going to be stronger than anything else. But it'll take longer. And so in understanding the difference between B2C and B2B in terms of what do I do top of funnel here? How do I allocate my resources? It means that I'm spending time putting together the course in my spare time so that you guys can go consume it on how to make offers, how to get leads, how to scale a company from zero to 100 million. Like that's time, that's effort, that's my team who's behind the camera right now, that's budget that goes towards that because I'm not looking for demand today.

45:53I'm looking for those of you who are gonna scale your companies and in five years hit me up. Here's the thing, if a new, let's say acquisition.com went public tomorrow, and I got ousted for being rude, which I probably would. And then they put in a new CEO. And that new CEO says, I need to hit quarterly earnings. So what would he probably do? He'd probably switch to lots of direct response, and he'd probably cut down all the budget on the gives and the books, and all this stuff, be like, well, there's no ROI in a book. Like, books don't make any money. It's like, yeah, not today. But they bring people into our world, and when they do have the next billion-dollar company, they will hit us up first.

46:29And that's the goal. But that guy will just say, well, you know what? Screw all that. I'm gonna recapture all this marketing spending effort. We're gonna focus it all on these direct response ads, tell people to buy, buy, buy. And you know what? For a quarter, it'll work. Maybe two quarters, it'll work. But all of a sudden, it'll start slowly going down, slowly going down, slowly going down. Then what happens? They call the founder back up and they're like, hey, help us fix this. And then the founder's gonna say, I can't do it in a quarter. It's gonna take me a year, year and a half to basically right size the ship because you sucked all the wells dry and I'm gonna have to start digging again.

46:58So the next one is some of my marketing laws. So I'm going to give you a few of them, and I'll start with the first one that you, if you've heard my channel, then you should know this one. It should be ingrained in your brain, which is state the facts and tell the truth. And the reason this is so important to me is that it forces me as a advertiser, business person to change reality. And so rather than try and exaggerate, it makes more sense to put all of the effort into doing epic stuff and then telling a truthful story rather than telling an epic story about something that was underwhelming.

47:31And I think the vast majority of marketers and marketing do the second thing. They have something normal and then they try and tell an exaggerated story of it rather than having something absolutely insane and just stating the facts and telling the truth. And I can tell you that the second, this one, stating the facts and telling the truth is the best long-term strategy. How do I actualize this, all right? So number one is that we make the truth more compelling. We actually change reality. The second is that we show only what we can show. I remember I was talking to a martial arts guy, and he's like, there's all these other martial arts studios in my area.

48:03How do I stand out? And I said, well, what's your specialty or whatever? And he said, I'm a double-secret black belt of something. And I said, okay, well, how many double-secret black belts? He's like, well, there's only six in the nation. And I was like, okay, well, do any of them live in your area? And he said, no. And I was like, well, why don't you say that, right? Why don't you say that? So every business, if you get narrow enough, has something that's unique about it. You might have the best parking. You might have the fastest introduction to getting somebody to sit down. You might have the most gyms, whatever it is, the most customers, the most customers at a certain price point.

48:35You just need to slice the data of the business to figure out what is unique about your business. And I remember this moment in Mad Men, which is an advertising show. It's like an old 50s show. Well, it's a new show about the 50s. And Don Draper, who's the lead character, who's an advertising guy, is pitching a client who's a cigarette company. And they're trying, they're like the third or fourth in the category. They're highly commoditized. They're competing on price and they're losing. So he asks them to explain how cigarettes are made. And they kind of roll their eyes. They're like, why is this important?

49:04He's like, okay, well, first we have the plants and then we take, and he keeps going through it. He's like, and then we, you know, we let it sit out in the sun. He's like, what do you mean? He's like, you know, to dry out the leads. He's like, so you toast them? He's like, yeah, we toast them. He's like, it's toasted. And so that was a unique part. He just sliced down and got really narrow about one particular part of the process and was able to pull that out and emphasize it so that people were like, oh, this is different than other things. And the really important part about this is that maybe some of the other cigarette companies also toast it, but they don't say that they toast it.

49:41And so the perception is still that it's different, even if it is the same. The best version of this is finding something that's truly unique. The second best version is to just say something that's unique about something that everyone else already does, but that your customers don't know. The corollary to that is say what only you can say. So you show what only you can show, and you say what only you can say. So the showing part is going to be like, okay, with the toasting thing, how do we display that visually? With the super secret black belt, then how do we display that? You could show the black belt.

50:10You could show you shaking your hands, getting the certification. You could show you winning some tournament, right? If you're toasting, you could show the bed of all the tobacco that's getting toasted and the smells and the wafting through the air, whatever, right? And then you describe it in a way that only you can say. To do this, it's more important that you are the best than what you are the best of. I would rather be, from a marketing perspective, not absolutely, I'd rather have the 10th biggest company in the world, right, than the first biggest company in Indiana. But from an advertising perspective, it is more compelling to be the best.

50:42And I'll tell you a story that I haven't told. John Rockefeller, when he was early on in his oil empire, bid to buy the biggest oil refinery in Cincinnati. And he was the second biggest. He ended up overpaying for the business. And the business owner of the oil refinery laughed at him and kind of laughed his way to the bank. He's like, you completely overpaid for this thing. And so then what John D. Rockefeller did after he bought the first biggest and he already had the second biggest is that he then was able to say he was the biggest. And then in the next 30 days, he had over 20 M &A deals in the next 30 days to consolidate the entire rest of the market because he became the gorilla.

51:26He was willing to overpay for the asset to get the story. The difference in value between what he should have paid for those 20 deals and what he was able to pay by strong-arming those smaller competitors because he was now the gorilla more than made up for what he minorly overpaid or maybe even majorly overpaid for the one company that he bought. And when he recants the story, when he tells the story again, he talks about how that competitor didn't see the bigger picture. I remember reading it in the letters that he wrote to his son and thinking to myself, that is powerful. he was willing to overpay for the story.

52:04He saw it as an investment in his brand, in his reputation. And so the guy who sold it just saw it as him overpaying for a product, but he wasn't appropriately valuing how much true brand value that would give Rockefeller as a result. The next big growth lever is all about the list, right? So when I talk about the list, people immediately think that I'm talking about email list, direct mail list, and sometimes that's true. But I'll give you a hypothetical example. So let's say I am selling winter coats and I advertise an amazing offer on some killer coats that people love, they look amazing, and nothing comes back.

52:40Well, what could have happened? Well, if I showed my advertisement to people who live in South Florida, the likelihood that they buy my very expensive, really heavy and hot winter coats is very low. It has nothing to do with my offer, nothing to do with the ad creative, nothing to do with my pricing, nothing to do with anything. It's just the wrong people are seeing it. Many smaller businesses think that marketing doesn't work when in reality, they were showing it to the wrong people. And so the first thing that you have to get right in marketing is targeting the correct audience. This is different by method of advertising.

53:14If we pull up our core four here, you want to reach out to people that you know are suffering from the problem that you solve or have a high likelihood of suffering from the problem that you solve. and the narrower the problem, the smaller the list. From a paid ads perspective, this is where the targeting by platform gets more important. And this is why some ad platforms tend to be more profitable than others because what makes an advertising platform successful is how well targeted it is. In fact, Facebook was so good that they had to roll it back because of privacy laws, but it was so effective at targeting people that people complained because it was so good.

53:46It felt creepy. Posting content, this is where the algorithm itself, based on what you look like and how you talk and what you say will impact what the AI serves your content to. The same works with paid ads. And so if I want to get more women to buy a product, guess who I'm not going to have in the ad? Me. Because this is not what attracts lots of ladies, right? This is just usually a bunch of entrepreneurs who tend to have beards and like fitness or whatever else, right? But like my audience is like 89 % male. And sure, for my 11 % females, keep rocking. and I appreciate you. But by and large, I have a male-driven audience.

54:26Now, maybe it's because I talk about money, but there's tons of female entrepreneurs who talk about money and don't have predominantly male audiences. And so it's just that my way of saying things and or the algorithm just tends to display it to dudes. One of the easiest ways to make sure that you're displaying your ads to the right avatar is make sure that the person in the ad looks like the avatar. And I'll tell you a funny story. So when I was running the Gym Launch 1.0 version, which is where we used to fly out to gyms and do the turnarounds, I found out that when I put the thank you page, this is before automated schedulers even existed, so it's kind of wild.

54:58I remember when I had my first automated scheduler to put it on the thank you page, I thought I had cured cancer. I was like, this is the coolest thing where people can automatically book. Like, I don't have to call them and work to leave. The thank you page that I set up was just like, hey, text this number. And then the second version of the thank you page was, hey, my name's Alex, I'm gonna be able to call you. So I put a picture of me, and I said, I'm gonna be calling you from this number. So I tried to put some visual to it. Then when I put Layla's picture on the thank you page and said, Layla's gonna be the one contacting you, what do you know?

55:26Our response rates went through the roof. People were immediately responsive. They were showing up to appointments. They were, oh yeah, sure, I can make five o 'clock. For me, they're like, oh no, I don't give a shit, right? And so if you want to attract a certain avatar, try to make sure that what is in your content, how you talk, matches the way they talk. Because fundamentally, all marketing works as long as you get the targeting right. Think about it this way. If you walked into a room, this is how I like to visualize marketing because people overcomplicate it. If I walked into a room and I got on stage and there was a thousand people in the room, if those thousand people were my ideal customers, then even if I had just like a really mediocre offer and something that they like kind of wanted, I would get some response.

56:11Now, it might not be efficient, it might not give me the return I want, so I might lose money, but I would probably make something, right? I would get some clicks. I would get some leads, right? And so it would allow me to start the feedback loop so I could improve. But if nothing is coming through, it's typically because the wrong people are seeing it. And so one of the highest leverage ways of getting more from advertising is just making sure that the right people are seeing it, which is a perfect transition into the next one, which is how do you know that you've mastered something, which is that masters have more ways to win.

56:42Now, what does that actually mean? They understand the many different ways that you can measure progress. So if you were to talk to an HR professional, okay, you ask them, what do you do? A lot of times they're going to give you a couple of vague answers. They're like, you know, I'll payroll and I'll make sure that people get in their benefits and whatever. But when you talk to someone who's a master at this, and I remember the first time I had somebody who completely improved my understanding of talent and acquisition and recruiting. In the interview, the candidate said, oh, well, what's your time to fill?

57:14And I was like, what do you mean? She was like, well, the average time to fill a role? I was like, I don't know. She was like, oh, well what's your two-sided fit? I was like, I don't know what you mean. She was like, okay, what's your cost to acquire talent? I was like, I don't know. She had all of these different metrics that she was using to measure, which completely made sense to me. Like I have cost to acquire a customer, I should have cost to acquire talent. What's my cash conversion cycle? How quickly do I get my first sale? How quickly do I fill a role? And then in terms of customer satisfaction, it's basically employee satisfaction of how likely is it that the manager and the employee both say at day 90 that this is a 10 out of 10 fit.

57:52And so when I started looking at that, I was like, oh wow, there's a whole nother level of understanding this that I had no idea about. Because masters have a higher quality and quantity of metrics that they use to measure progress. If I am trying to fix this function, I have nothing to know how well I'm doing. And so a beginner will try to advertise or will try to sell and they will have binary outcomes. They'll just say, I didn't sell or I did sell or I got leads or I didn't get leads. But there are so many nuanced steps between that. When you have the milestones, the progress markers, it allows you to fix things so you can keep moving the buck along until you get the outcome.

58:30And so I'll tell you a story about this. When I was starting Outbound way back in the day, it was a new channel for us and I'd never done it. And about 90 days or four months in, my executive team kind of did like intervention. So they came together. It was like I was getting like a drug rehab, right? They were like, we think this is a problem. We think this is shiny object. We think you're, you're distracted and we should double down on what works. I was like, how dare you use my words against me, right? And the thing is, is that strategically, I knew we needed to have a second acquisition channel for us to sell the business.

59:00I was like, no, it's because they could only see that we'd only done one sale in four months and a hundred percent of my time was going towards this, but what they didn't see was all the progress that we were making. And so I had higher degrees of mastery in this. Now, to be fair, it was just because I had learned it along the way, but when it started, it was like, okay, well, we have to get a list. So where do we get the list? So we bought a bunch of different lists. A lot of lists didn't work. One of them did. We're like, okay, this is a good provider. And then we start, you know, like, oh, we got to enrich the data.

59:26So we start learning how to enrich the data. Then we started calling them, but then no one was picking up. And then we had to learn how call wrapping works. So we get local numbers. And then all of a sudden, people started picking up, but then started hanging up on us. So then we had to fix the hook in the script. And then we fixed the hook in the script, people would make it a minute, but then they'd hang up on us. So then we fixed the hook and then we fixed the offer and then people would then go to the second call. But then they weren't showing up for the second call. And so it's like, we have to just keep moving the buck along the way.

59:47But if you looked at it, two months in, it's like a heart surgery looks like murder to somebody from the outside who doesn't understand the milestones. As you master something, if you don't know why something's not working, look closer. Look for the smaller attributes that you can actually zoom in on and say, okay, well, we'll get a sale eventually if we just keep moving in this direction. And so look for directional correctness rather than binary. And so this is a perfect example of masters have more leading indicators to success than beginners to. Beginners typically look at purely the lagging indicator.

1:00:18They just say churn is up, sales are down, revenue is down, cash collection is down. Those are all lagging indicators. If I looked at you and said, increase revenue, you can't do anything. If I said decrease churn, you can't do anything with that. You would then have to do something else and then the result would be a decrease in turn the result would be more revenue the result would be more sales we have to identify what all those steps are that are high correlates or increase the likelihood that that ultimate outcome occurs