The Brutal Truth About Scaling To 7-Figures (Nobody Admits This)

0:00If you look at the news, everything is always negative. Why? Get your attention. Because the way our brain is wired, we're more driven by fear than anything else. So my name is Charlie Johnson. I help online business owners escape the golden handcuffs at like delivery, helping scale from 10 to 100k a month with simple repeatable systems. I built two seven-figure businesses under 12 months. So if you look at why MrBeast crushes on YouTube, if you look at his YouTube, everything is a curiosity gap. the title, the thumbnail, like the curiosity, but there's also fear. Those two things like kind of paired together work very well.

0:3650 % of coaches will be extinct in 2026 because of AI. Here are the five things you need. If you don't have the minerals to start a business and not want to do the work and do X, Y, Z, then keep scrolling.

0:53Charlie Johnson:Before we get started with the episode, our books are now open. If you need help getting in front of the right people, finding your dream customers or winning new business, we might be able to help. Why not outsource your sales to We Have A Meeting? Just go to wehaveameeting.com. Charlie, welcome to the podcast. How are you? Thank you. Very excited for today's conversation. So am I. So am I. So big open question. We're going to kick it off. Who are you and what problem do you solve? so my name is Charlie Johnson I help online business owners escape the golden handcuffs of like delivery helping scale from 10 to 100k a month with simple repeatable systems I built two seven figure businesses under 12 months and we've helped over 1200 people scale their own online businesses I've helped in my previous business 17 ,000 people get in shape as a fitness trainer and the big thing we're focusing on right now is helping people scale with It's predominantly AI and ads and organic content over the next two to three years.

1:53Charlie Johnson:Nice. Okay. So if it was a doctor's surgery and I came to see Dr. Charlie, what are the symptoms that I may be facing in my life and my business that you can help solve? That you're being kept up at night, paranoid where the next lead in sales is going to come from. Because this is what I see every day is that people are worried. I see you smile. because you know it's true because as business owners you're always wondering like where is essentially like the next punter coming from from an English perspective and our job is essentially to solve that and then create repeatable systems where you constantly have lead flow coming through and actually building a brand around that because over the next three to five years people's brand identity and also create trust with people it's going to be the most important thing because someone showed me at the gym this morning an AI of someone the whole thing's not even real but everything back and this is where like authenticity is going to become even more important so take us back into the the origin story so in terms of the the two seven figure businesses in 12 months that's that's really rare to get that in 12 months what were those core ideas and how did you get there so fast uh so the first one was in 2019 i left my full-time job as a real estate agent so i used to work sorry i reckon i used to work as an estate agent in the uk out in a place called sorry and i left my job then went into online fitness coaching had no kind of really idea what i was doing but i realized okay i could get traffic from social media i kind of figured out how to kind of sell and and systematized the way through that pretty quickly in terms of just blasting traffic in through like dm ads to then high ticket sales calls to then into clients uh it was a very messy unorganized operation fast forward three and a half years later i had people kind of knocking down my door to help them do the same thing in fitness businesses.

3:46And I decided, okay, I should probably do this. And it took us, I think, three and a half months to get to a seven-figure run rate with that business. Way, way quicker because I just knew what I was doing straight away. And I think this is probably a good example in terms of when someone has experience already, you know what problems to solve in the right order. And one of the biggest problems I see with people in businesses is they're fixing the right problem, but at the wrong time, which is why the business doesn't grow. so i think it's important to play devil's advocate throughout the conversation right so always you you you will have some natural traits about you you seem like a charismatic guy i've only just met you're a good looking fella people will naturally think okay well did he get lucky two businesses hitting that yeah okay but why would that work for my business people would naturally probably argue the case of how could charlie then take that and bring that into my business okay so the highest level authority of someone who's someone who's done the thing and they've taught other people to do the thing i had a guy i just told you before this we had a podcast with actually a client of ours and he's an addiction specialist completely different he helps people who have a cocaine addiction guy's making a lot of money now because that's a very big problem that a lot of people don't realize completely different has nothing to do with the way he looks at where he looks and this is where you actually have to look you have a red ocean the blue ocean a red ocean is actually what i've done in both those businesses fitness coaching and then helping people scale fitness businesses what's actually a blue ocean is being someone who can help cocaine addicts online because that's a very unique offer and a very very high pain point so that would be my kind of counter argument to that is i'm swimming in a red ocean where actually it's not a great offer in that respect so i have to have a high skill set was if you have a blue ocean offer it's way easier to skirt so i don't know how much is

5:40Charlie Johnson:gated charlie and i'm not asking you to give away all of your secrets so feel free to give away as much as you want but okay so i'm there and these problems are keeping me up at night obviously you've got solutions that you you're aware about that people probably just don't know they don't have the information they've not found it so what are the what are the key things they can implement straight away to start getting that movement the first thing i'd look at is like do you actually have the numbers with business so like what is the problem you need to solve so the majority of businesses we work with will take sales calls and on zoom and they will sell their products essentially that way so we would look okay how many calls you're booking what's the close rate what's the offer um what's the price point where is the lead generation source and try basically find the bottleneck in the funnel.

6:28So one of the most important things I'd say for everyone to do is actually A, have all those numbers, and then look, okay, what seems to be the point of constraint that's off? And it's that kind of theory of constraints. If you fix the problem, then the business will grow. The easiest way to generally look at that is actually normally higher up that kind of funnel pathway. So if you say, for example, you take an, if you were running a VSL, for example, the video sales letters are running ads or organic traffic to a funnel which is going to book a call if you take that to a 10 % opt-in rate to 20 % opt-in rate you will double your entire business theoretically provided everything else stays the same which you should so I would try and find what the actual problem is so firstly would be like looking at the data and the numbers I think a lot of business owners that I work with and I speak to and I'm not sure the same for you a lot of them don't charge enough and that's also because it's a a fear thing and sometimes it's a self-worth issue and partly that can also be a skill issue so one of the things we also look at is very heavily as a sales aspect because we look at predominantly businesses go out of business because well they only go out of business because they run out of money so if you can focus on generating revenue that kind of solves all problems so you do that from two ways with what we do which is booking sales calls and closing sales calls and we can help people a lot in terms of like booking calls but if they can't sell to save their lives, the whole thing doesn't work.

7:51So we'd also be looking at, okay, can you improve that back-end process from the sales aspect? Because sometimes if you tweak that a little bit, it can make a massive difference to the whole ecosystem.

8:02Charlie Johnson:Nice. So lead generation is obviously the game and the problem that we're trying to solve. From my experience, I think we always say that not all meetings are created equal. So that's like a bit of a mantra that we throw around. So if you've sent someone a LinkedIn DM and a cold email and you've cold called them and you've cold called them and had a 15 minute conversation and you've actually asked the right questions, there's different levels, isn't there? So what can you tell us about when you're talking about like these VSLs and using your system? What can you tell us about the quality when it gets to that meeting point?

8:38So the most important thing is I think it's like a seven hour old school by Google. is you basically they did the studies like how much content does someone need to absorb information before they kind of bought and they're willing to buy it it's roughly around seven hours so that would be a lot of reels or a lot skim through short form content so one of the things that we push very heavily for people to do is have some type of long form assets like a podcast like this that you could send someone before a call and the goal is you get them to kind of binge through that type of stuff because if you can increase their exposure to your organic content beforehand hand it makes a dramatic difference now the second thing you can do is you can actually orchestrate and engineer this with paid advertising by forcing paid ads to people that that are organic content to people who have booked a call that haven't had the call yet so they keep seeing you coming up in their feed all the time with things that happen that likely to come up in the sales calls in terms of maybe like limiting beliefs or objections you can kind of pre-handle that and also a lot of social proofs those would be kind of like the two big things um we would look at that help a lot from that aspect.

9:42We are entering a new era of outbound. Four years in, we have a meeting that's leveled up our entire offer. That's why multi-billion pound brands trust us.

9:53Charlie Johnson:And we've put meetings with Netflix, Spotify, Facebook, even Barcelona Football Club. We've helped close deals up to 950 ,000. We're doing it all. Phone, LinkedIn, email, direct mail, and there's a few weird and wonderful possibilities that we're keeping in our back pocket. So if you're struggling to get in front of the right people at the right time, inquire today.

10:19One of the really interesting things about this kind of top of funnel piece is obviously you can potentially close a lot of deals with all the wrong types of people and have this big kind of fluctuation where you're not bringing in people you can actually retain. So I suppose what have you learned about how to set things up properly from the start so that the people you work with end up being sticky and stay with you for a long time um the goal is not just acquisition but it's retention so we are so lucky now in terms of having ai that a great hack for anyone is if you just take the last three months sales calls run it through air take all the transcripts put them through ai and ask it what are the biggest pain points of all these clients that keep them up at night what the top 10 negative hooks that are going to trigger these people.

11:08You could also get your best client to do a ocean personality profile test and also run that into the AI and basically create ads and creative on the front end that is going to appeal to that type of avatar because you want to try and be very specific in terms of the messaging you use so you get the right type of clientele come through. And the way I try and think about marketing is like a push, the same sales, like push-pull technique. It's like, this is who this is for, this is who this is not for. So if you don't have the minerals to start a business and not wanting to do the work and do X, Y, Z, then keep scrolling.

11:43We actually filmed an ad like that two days ago. And I think also understanding the market if you're looking to target. So I filmed some very brash ads on Monday, which are going to be targeting the U.S. market. Now, I probably wouldn't try and run that to the U.K. Well, I probably will, but I'll probably get some flap for it. But I think in the U.S. it will do very well because they like that type of advertising. whereas in the UK we're kind of reserved. So I think it's also understanding the market of who you're looking for and also the language. So the last piece of that I'd say is from an organic perspective is I would try and avoid things around like mindset issues or the problematic clients that you don't want to have.

12:23If you start to talk and advertise those type of things, you start to pull those people in. Nice. So when you think about the relationship between ads and AI, where is the opportunity? between them crossing over okay so the two twofold so one is your ability like i kind of touched upon to be able to harvest essentially and mine huge amounts of data so you can be super specific so you can find out the exact things that are going to resonate and the way i'd frame this zach is that i always say to people like have you ever felt like someone just read your mind that's literally what we're doing because we're taking the exact language the exact terminology that people are using on calls.

13:04And then we're pulling that data out. We're getting personality tests. So we're effectively creating propaganda to manipulate these people then into taking the action we want. And then also with the second part of that, the way Facebook meta ad algorithm works now is run an AI. So it will analyze the copy of everything you say and try and match it to the individual who's going to respond to that, even to the clothing you wear or the background. So for example, if I was working with a fitness trainer, I would tell them to film on either in the gym, in a kitchen, or maybe in the beach looking in great shape.

13:40That would be it. Nowhere else.

13:44Charlie Johnson:So when we think about where the world's going, we're starting to dabble as we grow the business. So I thought there's no one better than ours. But when I think about ads, there is that fear that actually it's a saturated market now and everybody's just skimming through them and actually there's this bias floating around when i go out for dinner with some friends like do ads actually work what what what do you find goes into making a compelling ad i would say ads work if you have strong organic so like you have to have also a brand behind what you do so i think if you're if you have no organic content and you don't look presentable online you are going to struggle in paid advertising it's like two legs of a chair kind of holding itself up if one of them is not there then it's kind of not going to work the chair's going to fall over so i think for everyone you have to have some form of organic alongside paid advertising i think in particular in the info space right relying purely on uh paid traffic to cold is very very difficult unless you a very unique offer and a very high skill set so what i think is important from a creative standpoint is making ads really stand out because what i find in particular with this we actually had this last month we increased our ad spend quite a lot and our revenue increased a lot which is great you made a lot of money but some of it wasn't even like our ads weren't much more profitable than months before but our revenue went up why because our ads are really good and interesting so then people actually come into our organic funnel as well and they'll follow us so then our setters will then go after people from that point of view so this is where that you have to see the whole thing is like i call like spider web marketing because it's like an ecosystem whereas a lot of people just look at the direct ad rather than like the whole of the business if that makes sense so i think if you can make the creative really good really engaging and then have it like with the right copy which you've used with ai and then the third hack i'd give to everyone is look for ads that you see that like well that caught my attention is engaging from a completely different niche.

15:49So I don't know if you've seen it, but I filmed an ad, which is me like running along with like three boxes with like a Ferrari in the background. I stole that off someone else who was a content crew who was sending a content course. It's like, that's sick and that's really engaging. So I just took the same kind of framework and then manipulated it to my niche.

16:05Charlie Johnson:Nice. Okay. And then you said something there that I think it's probably worth like doubling down on in terms of will the audience get it? So you're pushing people through to this organic and then you've got setters going going after them now i've obviously been in the space set as closed as i feel like i'm down with the kids charlie but what what is your strategy around that so like obviously you've got your ads and you're trying to get people to come to you but it sounds like you're actively doing outbound as well so talk us through that uh yes so the easiest ads funnel for anyone to run which is like the most consistent the lowest risk and it is very very difficult for it not to work if you have any ability of skill is running like a boosted follower campaigns.

16:51So if you have an Instagram profile and you make decent content and it's specific and it's targeted, you boost, push that out of paid advertising to your ideal client. They then like, oh, I really like this client from Charlie, content from Charlie. They will then follow you. We would then have the setter engage with that person and basically send them a message. And a great framework for anyone who has a message we find works really well that you can write down. And if you message me, we'll do this to you. um sorry just follow me uh is hey thanks following are you following because you know one of our clients or are you looking to scale your business so like it's like a this or that so you're giving someone an easy way to answer like oh no i don't know your clients i'm just interested in the business content you make so trying to make it easy for people to reply but what happens if you have really interesting ads people will click on your profile because the ad is interested them and then a lot of them will follow you so even though that ad that ad can't be attributed back directly your revenue will go up which is why i say you have to kind of look at the thing as a whole so we will have and i know there is ai setters out there who can do this for you we've tried lots of them in my opinion there's not if you have really high level dm setters or isn't the people are worth having and paying instead because the the cost to us if ai messes up is not worth just having someone who's competent and that's kind of the framework we would use nice okay so let's say then i'm kind of going through the journey a bit now we're sort of in a linear path right so the ad is i'm using kids word here it's slapping yeah wow it is it's doing well and it's giving us that traffic you mentioned before around sometimes clients aren't even charging enough so creating that compelling offer and i suppose not only creating it but also knowing it's ready and there's a market there for it how do you define that i would define that in terms of um how you get people to engage a curiosity gap would be the first thing and then whether there is a demand for it is i would essentially test on organic content for free and then see if people want the thing so i think a lot of the times and i'll give a good example we i did a webinar two weeks ago and it was i came up with this idea that the morning off it was genius that like we could build these five ai tools this is classic entrepreneur thing we could we build these five ai tools i can pitch this on the webinar and this will crush and i did it and it crashed and we hadn't even built tools so like i sold the thing before i built it we have now built them and delivered it for transparency but um like actually try and sell a market the thing and see if people actually want it so i think testing the messaging and the language and see if people respond to that support so what does that look like from a practical sense um dan priestly would say we send an email to a list and create a wait list of like i'm creating this thing would you like it put a poll on your instagram story if i'm create a group for men to be better fathers is this something you just to be interested in yes or no if no one's engaging on it and you've got somewhat of an audience is probably not the right offer then i'd probably say no to it what data do you use to have as many sales conversations as you do at We Have a Meeting.

20:05Jack, what's the answer?

20:06Charlie Johnson:It's Prospeo. I'll stop you there. It's Prospeo. Oh, thank you. And there's a reason why we use Prospeo, Jack. What is it? It's because it's 98 % more effective than any other data provider on the market. And for those people that are wanting to cold call and make a difference right now, there's a little link in our bio. But if you are struggling, it's Prospeo. That's P-R-O-S-P-E-O, Prospeo. get on them and start making some bloody calls and i know what you're thinking i hope frostbio is better than their relationship haha frostbio there's probably people listening who need to ask themselves some core questions around even building them so i suppose what are those kind of first principle questions on why they need to ask to even build it that's a pretty question so i think the best framework i like for people to think about is like what big problems have you solve for yourself before you can help someone else solve so i if i use myself as an example i struggled to get in shape i then got in shape and then i could then help the younger version of me i then struggled in terms of building my business because i didn't have any help me i was like super anxious and stressed all the time so then i care my second business i then helped the other version of charlie and you kind of work your way up from that so i say like what problems have you solved yourself before that other people have and then secondly is there a proof of concept that anyone else is doing this now there's two ways to kind of look at that that if you think there's a lot of people coming to the market and it's saturated that's actually a good thing to some degree because it shows there's money there it just means like do you think you have the ability to take a piece of that pie essentially so you you mentioned webinars before means that hosted our first webinar the other day so this is going to be a very very selfish question but what what is why should people be thinking about hosting webinars is that not just another thing to to worry about and sell i think if you have a platform and you have an audience and you have assistant anyway it's very easy to then and you're comfortable talking like a group environment it's very very powerful and it's also something you can improve if you do it monthly you can keep trying to improve the thing over and over and over again um transparent is something i was kind of reluctant to do because it's like it's another thing we already do this this this and this but then i like teaching and then also selling in a group setting now why i think it's getting more and more um impactful is because people like to see authenticity and it's not like super polished and teleprompted and you can kind of like mess around have a bit of a joke on it whilst kind they're going through some of these things so the people will actually buy from the person who's selling because they resonate with the way he carries himself where he communicates so i think that is um having more a personal element a webinar allows that much more than a vsl which is teleprompter and it was like so manufactured it's like another level in in six months time would just be ai probably doing them anyway okay so let's let's put you in the kitchen for it for a moment charlie if you are the chef and you're creating the perfect pre-webinar and post i guess what are the the key ingredients what do you need to do to make it a success uh first thing is how do you get people onto it so i've done free webinars i've done paid webinars i would personally always prefer to do paid because then i know the people on there have some skin in the game and the likelihood of them also turning up is much higher so um i made from the webinar we did two weeks ago two thousand dollars to sell to people for an hour just from the tickets we sold so it's like and then i also made a youtube video out at the same time so like if no one buys anything i'm okay it's not it's not the end of the world um so i would always say have some type of price on the front end because you're creating a quality of person who's going to come on the call for that the less likely to be a tire kicker now how to actually make that profitable and actually to give more value to people is say what we did is it was 27 dollars for or 27 pounds for um the ticket to the webinar and then we had an order bump that was 47 pounds for a load of ai prompts that people could buy and our average order value was around 50 pounds it worked out so the person coming on so i'm like a cool like people kind of bought in that that's great and then when you come into the actual sorry when you're marketing the webinar the ads that i find work best that type of thing are super basic and like the ugliest thing in the world so like we use black text i'm sorry black background white text and then the most powerful word you can use in marketing is like new so ours was like uh new ai or new ai system to get you your next 10 clients or something and then like the date and it just took them to the website it's like it looks so different that people just click on it because it kind of stands out because it's kind of really ugly so sometimes thinking outside of the box with that and just testing different creatives why i like text graphic for stuff like that is because you can test multiple variations very fast i don't have to film 10 different ads i can just change the first line um so that's what i would do on the front end and then with the paid advertising for that we just ran that on warm audiences retargeting so like the easiest people to sell and our email list we have a school community with 6 000 people in it and then a bit on my organic social media so we didn't push that to cold because i wanted to try and test the whole thing and see how it went the one we do the end of this month we will push to cold traffic and then try and crack the volume up a little bit more when it comes to the webinar i use like the framework dan henry kind of teaches which is very heavily in terms of like storytelling and start about myself so like the hero's journey so I have a few slides about you then basically creating a gap so like what I spoke about was how 50 % of coaches will be extinct in 2026 because of AI here are the five things you need to make sure that you know you have from a software perspective so you're not actually part of that 50 % I then went in and taught two to three things on AI that preach sick but they weren't the five things i then come into then the pitch which was we've actually built out these five ai things in the tool and we're creating a case study group we were doing this for the first time which we were this is going to be five thousand dollars but essentially if you join our program today this is free so it's like like a value ladder through that and then throughout the whole presentation which is showing examples of social proof of clients who've made we had a client for example we went from$39 ,000 to$120 ,000 in four weeks in August.

26:52So he was one we showed a couple of times. So like storytell with yourself, clients, and literally just screen share going through it so then people can see people's own words, which is very powerful. That's really cool. Very thorough. I think the bit that people will probably be interested in, it's probably a thing that people don't talk about on podcasts a lot. You've got the top of funnel. Obviously, that's exciting, sexy to get people in. then you've got the retaining people which you've talked about and then there's probably you start to get this bucket of maybe people who haven't worked with you for six months 12 months two years what do you do to make sure that's just not a graveyard of people that you're never talking to again how do you make the most out of those as in previous clients yeah previous clients people who maybe have like dipped a toe in and not there's probably loads of things that we could just totally ignoring so i kind of touched on that earlier and interestingly we've had a lot of clients coming back to us the last two months and i think a lot of that is down to like we have innovated and changed sort of stuff but it's from a marketing perspective so you constantly have to innovate and have like a new angle you're kind of pushing so we literally very heavily push like new way up to a new ai like ad systems automation systems and try and create that curiosity so people want to come on and there's the curiosity but there's also fear those two things like kind of paired together work very well from a targeting perspective you can also if you wanted to run ads at those people you could take your email list take all the emails of ex-clients and run ads specifically at them uh but that would be kind of the main thing i would look at it's just the marketing hooks and the angles like the offer on the front end and what the big pain point is in or specific industry but i think the combination of like curiosity plus fear is what pulls people in there's probably also a thing to ask you about on on mindset i suppose so yeah you've built two big business that you continue in to build businesses and make money from all different creative angles there's probably like a tipping point of i mean you just said before ai could potentially come in and totally take over there's probably a tipping point of is it now time for me to just ride out the storm and go quiet for a while but it doesn't feel like you're doing that it feels like you're still pushing so how do you maintain the mindset to to keep going keep innovating and keep keep pushing uh can i be honest yeah i'm addicted i just love it so like for me it's like the podcast we did before this was an addiction so i'm like dopamine addict so it's like okay like what cool next thing can we build so for me specifically i can see you nodding out of this red next act like i'm a builder i like making stuff transparently i don't like running businesses i like building businesses so like i like coming up with like the offer the idea the new thing um which is a massive strength but also has been a downfall in the past because i can easily get distracted and i've started software businesses and done other stuff that was probably not a great idea because i'm like oh it seems like a good idea until you start it and so i think it's also understanding that like the first principles what people really need people will always want some form of coaching regardless of whether you have ai or or not people will still want to work with people but the second thing is very powerful is we do a lot of in-person events so we're focusing very much also in terms of branding top of funnel we do events like every single month we have a very big event in uh mid to november in dubai which is kind of like a business mastermind around ai ads and kind of content link is in my bio if anyone wants it But that's where I think it's going to get more and more powerful because people want to be around other like minded people in particular.

30:55Charlie Johnson:So you are right. I think it's the people thing. People want to have that human connection. Obviously, there is only one Charlie Johnson, and there's probably not enough Charlie Johnson to go around. And as you scale as well, you want to keep that authenticity, but you also want to be like, yeah, I'm away building, everything's running in the background. So how do you maintain that from a delivery standpoint that you're getting the solution, but you're not necessarily always just getting me and my time? Okay. So that's probably the game is scaling a business, but you not being burnt out, having to do everything.

31:37And we built, there's two Charlies. We have Charlie AI, which is an AI version of me, which is also in Slack. So we have like 4 ,000 hours of calls where people can literally message me on Slack and reply to me. um would be one example but my job is essentially to build the frameworks and build all the trainings of like this is specifically what you need to do and find the latest stuff that's working and be like jack this is what you do exactly this is what you can do this has just come out because information half cycles are getting faster and faster and faster so if you can learn things before other people you have an unfair advantage the second thing is we have a team in our business who are like navy seals so one of them actually was in the british special forces they're very all in and they're very um full-on in terms of learning so my goal is like cloning myself into these guys so they can perform at a very high level and we have a very cool culture within that where everyone enjoys what they do we have fun and we kind of mess around a little bit as well inside of things i think that's also important for anyone who's listening to this probably the biggest thing i've learned last 12 to 18 months is important important team culture like people actually enjoy the people they work with they work way way harder so then

32:48Charlie Johnson:if we if we think about like obviously money motivation is one thing but you started off being charlie johnson that was kind of coaching people and now you're leading a team and building things what have you what have you learned about leadership along the way not everyone just wants money so like a good example for everyone here is you could go and do get people to like a an ocean personality test like you can see like what really matters to people because i've tried to motivate team members before by just throwing more money at them it made no difference but if i'm like do you know what like zach if you do xyz we'll fly you to dubai for our event in november with the whole team and we'll do we'll we'll go out to the desert and we'll do this like that's what people actually want to do because similar to like clients when you're part of events team members want to be like part of cool stuff and experiences so if you can build that within your business of what you do and it's a tribe kind of mentality then that is a big thing because i think that i think actually second thing is certain individuals will want freedom so like if i was working for someone else i wouldn't want to be micromanaged so if you can find good people who have the ability to execute their job role and kind of give them the free reign they need that they've earned they will love that because what i'm building in our business is also like entrepreneurs within our business so they can be an entrepreneur but they don't have to deal with the whole thing just their silo if that makes sense nice have you found anything that works really well when it comes to the actual building of the teams from a hiring standpoint so where to find the right talent that that is one that comes up all the time that people's that's a great question so uh we're kind of going full send on the hiring thing at the moment i think we have four sales people starting the next three days so the two things so one is and this is the why i say to everyone here it's really important to both personal brand and organic social media and this is what's really kicked me into high gear of realizing the power of this is i put up a story maybe like four weeks ago for look at the sales people we had like 50 people apply some of these guys are really good and then it cost me nothing to hire these people and bring them in it cost me nothing to advertise and we did it again like a week ago piles more people again straight away so i was like okay cool if you can create an attractive offer where people want to come in and work and people want to be part of something called like a brand like why do so many people engineers go and work at tesla because they want to be part of his mission and be around elon musk so if you can create a cool environment we do cool stuff people want that the second thing which is maybe slightly unpopular to say is we maybe have a slightly toxic masculinity culture in terms of the way we work where like we're very competitive we kind of have games we're kind of piss out of each other a little bit and and with that people enjoy it we have to bring the right people into that environment so like one of the best questions i i always ask people i look for people who are very driven so i'll ask what's the hardest thing you've been through in your life in my opinion that's one of the greatest tests to people if i give an example of someone we hired last week what he left his job he then set up a copyright business that was then wiped out pretty much by ai and he basically wants to make money to fund his mum needs like a really expensive back surgery i said okay cool so like you have the minerals to go and start a business and you have a really strong why like you're clearly driven and you'll back yourself so like we hired him and he's doing well so that's kind of what i look at is yes have they got this the ability but do they also have the drive and the competence to then actually kind of figure some stuff out themselves you said the biggest thing you'd learned in the last 18 months was around culture importance how to build it i suppose what was happening say two years ago compared to what's happening now it was just a charlie johnson show maybe where like i would just try and do and i think a lot like you're both laughing as well because i think a lot of entrepreneurs do this as i would try to jump in and do everything myself around the best i can do xyz and i become burnt out and i hate the business and i would step over people who are working for me all the time whereas now i would try and be like this is your realm you you deal with if you need me just kind of ask so i think that was a big thing and probably not correct communicating enough with our team in an effective manner so two big things we've done is we have um we use slack and we have channels which are called progress every day so anyone who reports to me will send me a loop video at the end of the day with like what they've done today um what they need help on what their big focus is tomorrow and anyone reports to them will do the same thing so that means everyone's in the loop there's not those and those meetings the second thing is we have a channel which is called better every day where a lot of this is kind of like personal development so i'll share like cool podcasts books i'm listening to uh anything i kind of feel relevant sometimes we'll have a laugh and kind of take this out to each other in it and but like we would create that kind of like fun environment and also try and upscale and develop the people we have personally as well nice so i want to so ads is obviously one world but i think there are so many different platforms now and organic content is it it's hard like people are like you say like borrowing or taking ideas and what what have you learned i guess from like a psychology standpoint about capturing attention online okay so do either of you watch the news no no okay good because you definitely shouldn't but if you look if you look at if you look at the news which is the most minute collecting world if you look at the news that's another story if you look at the news uh everything is always negative why get your attention so like on everything you do you always want to have a negative hook so if if for example i'm like uh here's the five best ways you can run your facebook ads or here's three things you should never do with facebook ads you're more likely to to watch and continue listening to the negative one than the positive because the way our brain is wired we're more driven by fear than anything else so that's probably the easiest hack i'd say to anyone is to try and create that um you're always trying to use negative hooks a lot the times in terms of your marketing because it tends to pull people in more the second thing i'd say is storytelling so a great way you could do this with ai within content and marketing now is if you create a document which is to write every story you can think of in your life from like childhood like your dad teaching you to ride a bike whatever if you create that in a document and upload it into ai you can use the ai to then like weave that into some of the stuff you're doing so maybe whether it's linkedin captions whether it's instagram reels whatever and it can add to kind of like personal flavor into what you're doing do you this this is something i've been thinking about recently and i don't know whether it's true so you you can call me out but do you think i think buyers are more aware now than they were 70 years ago so you go and buy an american car and you say yeah it's gonna be great and i take the word we're all a bit more skeptical now and as we're kind of going through the podcast world and all those things i think are people getting bored or tired or fatigued from this like negative drive and things like that like do you think there's a uh a time where it's just gonna go full circle and actually the mundane and the boring cut through i don't think they're mundane and boring world but i think one thing always will which is a curiosity gap so if you can create if you can say something that intrigues someone they will continue to watch or continue to listen so i think uh yes i said like negative hooks work better but it doesn't mean necessarily every single piece of content has to be like the world's coming to an end i think there's a balance to that but i think um the curiosity gap thing is everything so If you look at why Mr.

40:44Beast crushes on YouTube, if you look at his YouTube, everything is a curiosity gap. The title, the thumbnail, you're trying to get the person to take that next action. I think I would agree with you 100 % that skepticism increases, and I see a difference between, I don't know if you guys work with different geographical locations, but if I look at, say, for example, the mainland European market versus the UK and Ireland or the US, the strategies work really really easy in mainland europe because they haven't been sold to with vsls and direct ads as much as like the us and the uk is kind of a pillaged buyer so there's a consumer awareness where they get used to getting sold a certain way which is where i see it's going to kind of go in cycles where maybe webinars will work really well for a period of time and then they'll exaggerate that then it will go to something else and then it will it always kind of goes and cycles i think i've loved this charlie i didn't know what to expect i feel like i've been inspired so yeah thank you so much we always end the podcast the same way so when you think of people broadly listening to this right now it could be outside of the topic we've been talking about what do you think is one question people don't ask themselves enough what do i want in life and why so i and the reason i say that is because i asked like literally i mentioned this couple times this guy i had podcasts earlier he said the most dumbfounding thing for him with his business when he started is he had to fill in a document of like how much money do you want to make and why what does your life specifically want to look like and then if you actually take the actions like that every single day then you finally get the life you want and you get happiness or fulfillment you're looking for amazing um where do we send people in charlie where do they go next they're probably ready to run for a bit more if you check out my Instagrams at Charlie Johnson Fitness and on my YouTube we have a YouTube channel Charlie Johnson Scaling Systems has tons of nerdy business stuff if you want to learn about ads and marketing and then we also have a podcast which is called The Charlie Johnson Show which you can find everywhere else as well if you search it amazing thanks so much thank you Charlie appreciate your time thank you