Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Brandon Willington - Where U? Founder & 2025 Marketing Entrepreneur of the Year | How To Get Customers When Nobody Knows Who You Are

Transcript

Brandon Willington - Where U? Founder & 2025 Marketing Entrepreneur of the Year | How To Get Customers When Nobody Knows Who You Are · Success Story with Scott Clary

• 0:00
  You describe yourself as arguably the most attention-seeking person you'll ever meet.
• 0:06
  Why is this important to get out of the way first?
• 0:08
  I've always had this weird God-given talent for getting attention on the internet, often quite accidentally.
• 0:14
  Do you think that most people play it too safe with their marketing?
• 0:17
  I think a lot of people try and get immediate validation and approval from everyone.
• 0:22
  Whereas I come in admittedly a little bit arrogant.
• 0:24
  Today's guest is Brandon Willington, an entrepreneur and marketing expert who has built his career around capturing attention and turning it into business growth.
• 0:32
  In this conversation, he shares why standing out matters, how to reinvent yourself and why letting go of an old identity can be the key to creating a better future.
• 0:41
  What's your advice to somebody who's trying to figure out if they should kill an identity that's not serving them anymore?
• 0:47
  If I repeated my actions for the last 24 hours for the next 10 years, where would I end up?
• 0:53
  And do I like it here?
• 0:54
  What would you say to somebody who knows they need to let go of an old version of themselves?
• 0:57
  You'll only really change when the pain of staying where you are outweighs the pain of changing.
• 1:05
  And there's two ways you can get there.
• 1:09
  MyFitnessPal is a success story partner.
• 1:11
  Now, there's this thing that happens when you start paying attention to what you eat.
• 1:15
  And I think we can all agree that we want to care about our health and our wellness and our nutrition.
• 1:19
  But more often than not, we just kind of think we eat clean.
• 1:22
  We think we eat healthy, but we're not really, really paying attention to every single meal and what makes up every single meal.
• 1:29
  But.
• 1:29
  Just by paying attention and starting to log and track what you eat, you start making better choices without really trying.
• 1:37
  And that surprised me because when I first started using the MyFitnessPal app, and I've been using it for a while now, it's a nutrition tracking app, and I started logging what I was eating, it started showing me my macros, which means how much protein, carbs and fats I was getting.
• 1:50
  And then I started to understand why some days I felt good, high energy.
• 1:53
  Some days I felt like garbage because those three things, proteins, carbs, fats, that's what your food is made out of.
• 2:00
  And the balance between them affects everything.
• 2:03
  So my fitness pal app truly changed my life when it came to managing my food, which managed and helped everything else.
• 2:11
  Now, on the premium version of the app, it breaks down those numbers by meal.
• 2:15
  So I'm not just seeing one calorie number for the day.
• 2:18
  I can see what's happening at breakfast versus lunch versus dinner, where my protein actually lands, whether I'm eating enough earlier in the day or piling everything on at night.
• 2:27
  And all of a sudden,
• 2:28
  When I'm crashing at 3, 4 p.m., well, I can take a look and see it's not so surprising anymore based on what I ate or what I didn't eat.
• 2:35
  So that's what I mean when I say that MyFitnessPal is a great app for awareness.
• 2:40
  It's not obsessive.
• 2:42
  It's not stressful.
• 2:43
  It's not time consuming.
• 2:44
  It's actually the opposite.
• 2:45
  Guessing is stressful.
• 2:46
  When you have all the information, the food you eat, your nutrition becomes way easier to keep up with.
• 2:53
  Also, a lot of people stress out that logging food is going to be very time consuming.
• 2:57
  It's not.
• 2:58
  And if it was annoying, I'd stop.
• 2:59
  But what I love about the app is that they've made it super, super simple.
• 3:03
  They've removed all friction in food logging, right?
• 3:06
  They have the largest food database out there.
• 3:08
  So whatever I'm eating is already in it.
• 3:10
  I can voice logs.
• 3:11
  I can just say what I'm eating.
• 3:13
  They have a barcode scanner that handles all the package stuff.
• 3:16
  They have a tool called meal scan, which lets me point my camera at my plate and it breaks down all the macros and then logs it for breakfast, lunch, dinner, whatever.
• 3:24
  And the app remembers my regular meals.
• 3:26
  And I'm really just in and out of the app in seconds.
• 3:29
  And on top of that, it connects with over 40 fitness apps and wearables.
• 3:32
  So my workouts, my nutrition, they're all in one place.
• 3:35
  See, food is the foundation of everything.
• 3:38
  your energy, your sleep, your weight, your recovery, your performance, at work, at home.
• 3:43
  And I really believe that when you start to pay attention to what you eat, every single part of your life improves.
• 3:47
  And to be honest, for me, it's the most useful tool because when I see the information, when I see what I'm eating,
• 3:54
  and I feel the effects of having good nutrition and good food at the right time, the decisions on what to eat become obvious.
• 4:02
  Not because someone told me to eat better, it's because I have the data.
• 4:06
  And the data makes it super, super easy to stay on track.
• 4:09
  So please do yourself a favor, go to podcast.myfitnesspal.com and use code Scott.
• 4:13
  That's S-C-O-T-T, all uppercase letters, for 15% off MyFitnessPal Premium.
• 4:18
  That is podcast.myfitnesspal.com, code Scott for 15% off.
• 4:23
  My Fitness Pal Premium.
• 4:30
  So Brandon, you describe yourself as arguably the most attention-seeking person you'll ever meet.
• 4:38
  Why is this important to get out of the way first?
• 4:41
  Why is this who you are as a person?
• 4:43
  I don't know.
• 4:44
  I've always noticed this trend across my life where I've had this...
• 4:50
  Weird, God-given talent for getting attention on the internet.
• 4:54
  Often quite accidentally.
• 4:56
  Like back when I was a DJ, I made this mixtape, and my PR agent isn't going to let me swear, but it's called literally F Genres.
• 5:03
  And it accidentally went viral.
• 5:05
  It was actually how we met, right?
• 5:07
  And...
• 5:08
  It was actually meant to end my career.
• 5:09
  I didn't want to DJ anymore.
• 5:10
  And so I was like, I'm going to make the worst mixtape ever.
• 5:13
  So no one wants to book me anymore.
• 5:15
  And then it was completely counterproductive.
• 5:16
  It was on every major EDM publication in the world.
• 5:19
  I did two tours of Australia and a gig in the US off of it.
• 5:22
  I'm like, all right, I guess I'm going to DJ for another year or two.
• 5:25
  And then with advertising, I've just always had a knack for emotionally trivying people.
• 5:31
  I still haven't worked out what it is.
• 5:32
  Maybe it's just my face.
• 5:33
  Maybe it's just my voice.
• 5:34
  Maybe people just look at me and go, man, this guy's a dick.
• 5:38
  But I've had a knack for emotionally triggering people accidentally or intentionally.
• 5:44
  Why do you think that's important as a marketer, as an advertiser?
• 5:49
  Obviously, getting attention is important.
• 5:51
  But I think a lot of people are trying to get what they consider to be the right attention.
• 5:56
  Like, I want attention, but I don't want to upset people.
• 6:00
  I don't want to disrupt them.
• 6:01
  I don't want to piss them off.
• 6:04
  You do a good job.
• 6:05
  Apparently, a lot of people see your ads and they don't love your personality to leave you in real life.
• 6:11
  I just learned this two seconds ago when I was looking at your Instagram.
• 6:13
  It didn't seem that bad, but apparently people think you're an asshole.
• 6:16
  But obviously, it's working because you're successful and your agency is killing it.
• 6:19
  And the work you're doing for your clients is also doing well for them.
• 6:23
  So talk to me about right attention versus wrong attention.
• 6:26
  Is there such thing as good attention, bad attention or?
• 6:30
  Oh yeah, there's absolutely like wrong attention.
• 6:32
  Like if I was getting like horrible criminal charges, that would be, and they were legitimate charges.
• 6:38
  Like that would be terrible attention.
• 6:40
  But if the attention is just, this guy swears in his ads, I dislike that.
• 6:44
  Or you know what really pisses people off?
• 6:46
  If I put my feet on the table in an ad, dude, people get furious.
• 6:50
  I don't know what it is.
• 6:51
  Like if I just casually put my feet off, they hate it, bro.
• 6:55
  like I seem arrogant or something I just have tight like psoas muscles that's what that is if you're wondering they'll just come off arrogant but
• 7:04
  If they just dislike me for a little bit, that's fine.
• 7:06
  Because often that can just go away.
• 7:08
  You ever heard a song on the radio that like the first time you heard it, you're like, I hate this song.
• 7:13
  But then given enough times, you just, you know, it got really, really catchy.
• 7:18
  It's actually, it's called effective frequency.
• 7:20
  So back in, I think it was the 1960s and I can't remember the professor's name, but they did a science experiment with a bunch of college students.
• 7:29
  It's always broke college students.
• 7:31
  And they offered them all like 20 bucks, took them into a room, and then they flashed up a bunch of symbols and logos fast enough that often they didn't even consciously recognize what it was.
• 7:41
  But slow enough, they could go like, yeah, it's a triangle, it's a crown, whatever.
• 7:45
  And then they took them into another room and had pairs of those shapes and logos kind of on the table and just asked them like, hey, which one do you like the most?
• 7:54
  And they consistently picked the logo or the symbol that without knowing they saw it the most times.
• 8:00
  And so the joke that I always make to people in our workshops is like, you don't really like your friends and family that much.
• 8:06
  They just served you the most impressions across your lifetime.
• 8:10
  You just saw them a bunch of times.
• 8:11
  And so there's a bunch of people that see me and the first time they see me, they just think this guy's a dick.
• 8:15
  And to be clear, like if I'm filming an ad where I'm trying to annoy you and your reaction is that you're annoyed, can I really like blame you for that?
• 8:23
  I'm trying to piss you off and you got pissed off.
• 8:25
  Surprise, surprise.
• 8:26
  But over time, they just see me more and more.
• 8:30
  And that annoyance turns into, you know what?
• 8:34
  I think this guy's raising some good points.
• 8:38
  Do you think that most people play it too safe with their marketing?
• 8:41
  I do.
• 8:41
  I think a lot of people try and get immediate validation and approval from everyone.
• 8:48
  And that's why...
• 8:49
  It's probably why I get a lot of hate comments on my ads.
• 8:51
  Because a lot of people, if you look at my competitors' ads, they're very polite and professional and trying to please everyone.
• 8:57
  Whereas I come in, admittedly, a little bit arrogant.
• 9:01
  My attitude is very much like, I know I'm right.
• 9:03
  You know that I'm right.
• 9:04
  Eventually, everyone comes around in the end.
• 9:06
  And it just kind of rubs people the wrong way because it's very different to other people's ads where they're trying to get them to agree to them really nicely and politely.
• 9:14
  When did you fear...
• 9:16
  that that worked as a marketing strategy?
• 9:18
  Like at what point in your marketing career?
• 9:20
  Because you said that you being attention seeking was really when you first started putting up this shitty mixtape that went super viral.
• 9:28
  But when did you realize as a marketer, this was like a business strategy?
• 9:32
  Right.
• 9:32
  It was actually the very, very, very first ad that I filmed for my business.
• 9:37
  I don't think I would be technically incorrect to say the ad went viral, but it was very well recognized in Australia four years ago when I ran it.
• 9:47
  I filmed this ad that was just no script.
• 9:49
  I was doing a lead magnet ad.
• 9:51
  I just ranted about the lead magnet.
• 9:54
  I think the opening was like, I'm sick of recording this effing ad and stuff like that.
• 9:59
  And it was genuine frustration.
• 10:00
  I was just like, I didn't want to film this ad.
• 10:02
  And that ad just ripped.
• 10:03
  It just printed for like, I think I used it for like two or three years.
• 10:07
  And the comments were overwhelmingly positive because they're like, man, this is like the realest, rawest ad I've ever had.
• 10:13
  It was just a rant and it worked really, really well.
• 10:16
  And I've had a few friends kind of break that ad down or we've talked about it in retrospect.
• 10:24
  And
• 10:25
  Everyone reached independently the same conclusion that it was this real emotion that you can feel through the camera.
• 10:32
  Because, okay, let's do this for an example.
• 10:35
  Like, if you watch a news station, you know when the news reporter's reading off the teleprompter.
• 10:39
  Of course, yeah.
• 10:40
  It's a little bit too perfect.
• 10:42
  It's not just news.
• 10:43
  It's when I see creators read off the teleprompter for their phone.
• 10:46
  And I'm like, bro, I can tell this is like you reading a chat GPG script.
• 10:49
  And do you trust them more or less?
• 10:51
  Way less.
• 10:51
  Yeah, less because of it, right?
• 10:53
  And I think it's because, this is my theory anyway, humans, you go for your entire life speaking to humans like this where it's not off a script.
• 10:59
  And so as soon as someone is reading off of a script, your gut feeling is like something is incorrect here.
• 11:05
  This feels odd.
• 11:06
  You get this weird gut feeling about it.
• 11:08
  You trust them less because of it.
• 11:10
  You grew up in Perth, Australia.
• 11:11
  It was, I guess, a really isolated town.
• 11:15
  I don't know.
• 11:15
  Perth is, I'm pretty sure, the most geographically isolated city in the world.
• 11:21
  Yeah.
• 11:22
  Just furthest from anything.
• 11:23
  It's just literally the middle of nowhere.
• 11:25
  So that's where you started your agency.
• 11:26
  That's where I live.
• 11:27
  Yeah.
• 11:27
  What is building?
• 11:29
  I mean, we're all connected online, but does it, does it change you as an entrepreneur when you build in a city that is physically isolated from everywhere else?
• 11:41
  You don't have proximity to the people that could help you in real life.
• 11:45
  Yeah, your environment definitely influences who you become.
• 11:48
  And I always try and optimize my environment to be the best that I can.
• 11:51
  I think the first thing that it did for me was, and this isn't a good thing, it kind of set limitations on my own mindset of what's possible.
• 12:02
  And because it's just very small.
• 12:03
  And then the other thing with Australia, not just Perth, but Australia in general, is this, do you know what tall poppy syndrome is?
• 12:09
  Yeah.
• 12:09
  So for those that don't know, I don't know if this is a common term in the US.
• 12:13
  Tall poppy syndrome is as soon as someone does well, other people try and take them down.
• 12:17
  Super common in Australia.
• 12:18
  It's starting to go away now, but it's still pretty common and prevalent.
• 12:23
  So whenever anyone does well, it's very common for Australians to kind of drag them back out.
• 12:27
  You just don't get that in the US.
• 12:29
  You guys are super encouraged people.
• 12:31
  And then-
• 12:33
  I'll give you a perfect example.
• 12:35
  I just posted on my Instagram story an hour ago.
• 12:36
  I was just going for a run down Miami Beach and seeing all these, I don't know what it was, all this little river laneway thing and all these houses with yachts parked out the front.
• 12:45
  And I'm like, man, I'm so poor.
• 12:49
  You just don't get that in not where I'm from in Perth.
• 12:52
  And your eye is just open to, oh, that's possible.
• 12:56
  But driving around little Scarborough and Perth where I'm from, you just don't see it.
• 13:02
  And your brain will just make up stories in your head and agree with it with the evidence that's available to it.
• 13:07
  And so if I was only in Perth and the only evidence that's available to me is what other people in Perth have achieved, then I kind of just limit myself to that, kind of like a goldfish in a fishbowl can't see beyond it.
• 13:18
  Whereas traveling to, like, I love Miami.
• 13:20
  Like, if I was to move anywhere else in the world, it would be Miami.
• 13:22
  I really like it here.
• 13:24
  It's chilled like Perth is, but there's so much money and success and achievement and drive.
• 13:30
  I'm sure there's some other things like it's very, like, very visually flashy, which can be a negative thing.
• 13:37
  Being able to see what other people have achieved financially, visually, that's very, very driving.
• 13:43
  You've been successful in spite of the fact that you grew up in, you know, quote unquote, small town.
• 13:48
  I don't even know how big Perth is, and I'm sure people are going to hit on me for calling it a small town in this podcast.
• 13:53
  But it's not New York.
• 13:55
  It's not Miami.
• 13:56
  So...
• 13:57
  What's your advice to somebody?
• 13:58
  Because I think that tall poppy syndrome, it does happen in the U.S.
• 14:03
  It happens probably more in other countries where entrepreneurship is not as praised as it is in the U.S.
• 14:11
  But I think that the places where it does happen, it's in the small town in the U.S.
• 14:18
  I don't think it happens as much in New York or SF or Miami where achievement and aspiration is...
• 14:28
  It's kind of like everybody expects people to be going for more and to be trying and building and failing and succeed.
• 14:36
  Like that's the de facto mindset, because if you aren't doing that, you can't really afford to live in those cities.
• 14:43
  Like you can't be lazy and apathetic and really be living a great life in Miami or New York.
• 14:50
  Yeah, well, to be honest, like,
• 14:53
  Obviously, there's a sliding scale of how driven I've been.
• 14:57
  I'd say I've definitely been sliding more aggressively on the driven side since my first trip to the US back in, I think it was October of last year.
• 15:07
  Because up until then, we were coasting around half a million dollars a year.
• 15:11
  And to be honest, I was very comfortable there.
• 15:13
  Because in Australia, and particularly in Perth, that's a lot of money.
• 15:17
  If you place me on the bell curve, I'm pretty far to the right.
• 15:21
  But...
• 15:22
  Dude, I remember the first time I got to Miami.
• 15:24
  This is going to sound super vain, by the way.
• 15:27
  I got to Miami with my girlfriend, Tanisha.
• 15:30
  We checked into the hotel at midnight.
• 15:33
  I stepped out on the balcony, just heard two V12 engines downstairs.
• 15:37
  I'm like, man, there's two Aventadors downstairs.
• 15:41
  I only have an Audi R8 right now.
• 15:43
  That's barely a Super.
• 15:43
  It's a nice car, though.
• 15:45
  It is a nice car.
• 15:46
  It sounds like it's a V10 to change the exhaust, which I've done.
• 15:49
  But just looking around, I was like, people are capable of achieving.
• 15:52
  This is so common here.
• 15:54
  And that was actually the first month we hit a million, a month, actually.
• 15:59
  So the story was, we got to Miami and I went to Jeremy Haynes' Inner Circle Mastermind.
• 16:05
  And I just realized, I was like, man, you got way too comfortable.
• 16:08
  Like, all you have to do to make more money is spend more on ads and hire more sales reps. Why are you overcomplicating?
• 16:13
  You've been stuck at half a million dollars a month for like three or four months now.
• 16:17
  Why are you not growing?
• 16:18
  You know exactly what to do.
• 16:19
  You just got comfortable.
• 16:20
  I just got comfortable because on turf, I was making a lot of money.
• 16:22
  Then I got here.
• 16:23
  I'm like, oh, this is nothing.
• 16:25
  There's so much more potential.
• 16:27
  And I...
• 16:28
  I actually, I got on the phone with Tim, who at the time, he was my head of sales.
• 16:31
  Now he's my COO.
• 16:33
  He's my best mate too.
• 16:34
  And he's like, oh yeah, our run rate for this month is, the sales reps just came out of the gate swinging the first month of October.
• 16:40
  He's like, just so you know, our run rate's like 9.50.
• 16:44
  like 950,000, I was like, dude, if we just gas this a little bit, we can hit a mill.
• 16:49
  And then the other thing we can do is one, two things.
• 16:52
  One, I can say I did it before I was 30 because I was going to turn 30 in November the month afterwards.
• 16:57
  And then two, we started this, we call it the with you bull run.
• 17:01
  Like when we really started growing, it started in October of 2024.
• 17:04
  And so I was like, dude, if we do it this month, we can say we like fought, we hit a mill.
• 17:09
  We went from $25,000 a month to a million in 12 months.
• 17:13
  We have to do it this month.
• 17:15
  There's 22 working days.
• 17:16
  Next month is 19 working days, but we have to do it this month.
• 17:20
  I just ran a webinar, spent on ads, and we hit it.
• 17:23
  We hit like 1.1 million or something like that.
• 17:25
  How important is it to travel as an entrepreneur?
• 17:31
  Well, in my instance, it has opened my eyes to new possibilities and reshaped beliefs so that they weren't limited by the geography that I just had in Perth.
• 17:42
  Um, I think it can be a distraction from time to time.
• 17:45
  Absolutely.
• 17:46
  I actually really don't like holidays very much, but I like traveling.
• 17:50
  Like I like traveling and seeing other cities.
• 17:52
  I don't like touristy stuff though.
• 17:54
  Charlie, my PR guy found out afterwards because like, we were like going around London.
• 17:58
  He's showing me all these sites.
• 18:00
  Then like the week after, I'm like, yeah, I don't really care for touristy stuff.
• 18:03
  It's like, you could have told me that last week.
• 18:06
  So everything you're talking about was sort of expanding what you think is possible.
• 18:11
  I've experienced that my own way because I mean, I grew up in Canada, was in Toronto, which is not a small city by any.
• 18:16
  That's the accent I was hearing.
• 18:17
  That's Canadian.
• 18:18
  It's not like super Canadian.
• 18:20
  No, it's not.
• 18:20
  You've been here a while, right?
• 18:22
  Exactly.
• 18:23
  And, but I was in a much smaller city growing up and, and then moved back to Toronto, but then moved back, moved down to Miami about seven-ish years ago.
• 18:32
  And then you see what's possible.
• 18:35
  And then your ceiling about what you think you can accomplish, it doesn't exist.
• 18:38
  It just erases.
• 18:40
  Of course, because down the street, I remember I moved in to Fort Lauderdale and now we're down in Miami.
• 18:44
  But when I first was in Fort Lauderdale and down the street was a guy who sold the company for half a billion dollars.
• 18:50
  And I was doing pretty good for myself.
• 18:51
  And I'm like, I'm not doing like that well.
• 18:54
  So then your perception, like your whole reality shifts.
• 18:58
  Changes, yeah.
• 18:59
  Changes completely.
• 19:00
  And you did this in a much more meaningful way.
• 19:05
  You changed your identity.
• 19:07
  And I think you've changed, now that I'm sort of understanding your story, you've changed your identity multiple times through your career.
• 19:13
  And I think that, I think you have to.
• 19:16
  So I want to talk about like how you change your identity because you did it in what I think is a very extreme but meaningful way.
• 19:23
  Before I talk about what you've gone through with drinking by changing your Instagram handle, why you did it.
• 19:31
  I want to understand what the back cave is.
• 19:33
  The bigger question there is the identity shift, which by the way, my favorite question, because I actually did a talk at one of our member summits about how changing your identity is like this cheat code to just like hitting goals one after the other, one after the other, one after the other.
• 19:48
  And I gave a speech, well, not a speech, I suppose, like a workshop to our members about how to do this.
• 19:54
  And so the basic premise behind the Batcave, which is just one small part of...
• 20:02
  everything and changing my identity is that the human brain will just behave in a way to prove that you're correct in your view of the world and so there's this concept called like naive realism which is is very uncommon for you or i or any humans to go through life assuming that our view of the world and how it works is incorrect we generally just had to float through life thinking
• 20:24
  we're right and we're objective it's why people like on the comments on my eyes that like bernie's a scam artist i had to stop and think like well with the evidence that this person has and every and them just connecting the dots i look like a scam artist can i really be that mad at them right and so one of the strongest ways to change your environment
• 20:42
  So change your identity is the environment that you're in.
• 20:45
  There's other things you can do, like the uniforms that you wear and things like that.
• 20:48
  The number one's environment.
• 20:50
  So I used to drink heavily because I came from nightlife.
• 20:53
  And that environment just means I get free alcohol all the time.
• 20:56
  And then when I left nightlife, I was making good money.
• 20:59
  And so that just meant I couldn't just out drink my bank account anymore.
• 21:02
  I actually had decent cash flow.
• 21:04
  And so...
• 21:06
  It was around May of 2025.
• 21:09
  I was drinking a lot.
• 21:11
  I was going through some other stuff as well, but I was having a cigar on my balcony and I was like, all right, you're starting to make really good money now.
• 21:19
  You're not going to be able to out drink this.
• 21:22
  This has gone one of two ways.
• 21:23
  Either one, you keep doing this and you know where that trend line ends and it's not a good spot.
• 21:29
  Or option B is if you want, you could literally try and become Batman.
• 21:34
  Yeah.
• 21:36
  Because what man, if they're truly honest with themselves, if they look deep down in their soul, doesn't want to be Batman.
• 21:43
  And so I started, the first thing I did was I texted Zach, who's, he's my full-time trainer now, but he wasn't at the time.
• 21:50
  I texted him and go, oh, I got a weird idea.
• 21:54
  I want to try and become Batman.
• 21:56
  Do you want to be a full-time trainer?
• 21:57
  I'll make you a staff member and you'll get a full-time salary, super, leave, all that stuff.
• 22:02
  He goes, hang on, I'm about to take a group boxing for fitness class.
• 22:06
  I'll call you in 45 minutes.
• 22:08
  Calls me back.
• 22:08
  He goes, are you serious?
• 22:09
  I'm like, yeah, let's do it.
• 22:10
  At first, what we were going to do was just train out of a couple of different gyms.
• 22:14
  We'd go to this gym for MMA, this gym for weights, whatever.
• 22:17
  But then I did the math and I was like, hang on.
• 22:19
  If I want to train twice a day, six days a week, it's 20 minutes to the gym in the morning, 20 minutes back, 20 minutes to another gym in the morning, afternoon, 20 minutes back.
• 22:26
  That's...
• 22:27
  80 minutes a day.
• 22:28
  If you extrapolate that over a full calendar month, I think it was like 46 hours of travel.
• 22:33
  And I was, after I calculated like how much I make an hour, I'm like, I think I should just build my own gym.
• 22:39
  And then, so I started going on, admittedly, chat GPT and just asking for quotes of like, how much would it cost to build a gym?
• 22:44
  And I was like, oh, that's way less than I thought it would be.
• 22:48
  And our lease was about to expire on our, at the time, current office.
• 22:52
  And so I was like, hang on, should I just get an office attached to a warehouse, paint it black, and then build a Batcave?
• 22:59
  Actually build a real Batcave.
• 23:00
  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 23:01
  And so that's what it is.
• 23:03
  So in the morning, I get up at five.
• 23:05
  I have an ice bath.
• 23:07
  I get to the Batcave.
• 23:08
  It's seven minutes from where I live.
• 23:10
  I get there at 5.30.
• 23:11
  Zach gets there at six.
• 23:12
  We'll train from six to 7.30.
• 23:14
  I turn around.
• 23:15
  My desk is there.
• 23:17
  I work until usually about two, turn around again, and then I train again in the afternoon, and then I go home.
• 23:23
  Was there anything outside of you just being more successful?
• 23:28
  Was there any event or thing that happened that made you realize that I actually do need an identity shift from nightlife, partying, to serious entrepreneur?
• 23:43
  Because the issue with success is like,
• 23:47
  if you achieve it, even if you have all these personality flaws, like I don't think, you know, I don't want to hate on people that drink.
• 23:53
  I drink too, but I mean, drinking obsessively, there's a slight personality flaw that's causing you to do that.
• 23:59
  It's not healthy.
• 24:00
  It's not helping you in your career.
• 24:01
  But a lot of people, if they're making money and they're still doing it, they don't wake up one morning and they just think, I should just stop doing the one thing that's super fun.
• 24:09
  Because even though...
• 24:11
  I know it's probably not the best.
• 24:12
  I'm still successful even while I'm doing that thing.
• 24:16
  So was there like a life event or did somebody say something or was it just you really woke up and you're like, this is not who I want to be anymore?
• 24:22
  It was kind of like that, but it was also just I was so many different instances over the course of four or five years.
• 24:29
  Like I wanted to quit for five.
• 24:31
  four or five years and I tried multiple different times and just failed, but I always tried it the shallow way of, I'm going to make a to-do list and the to-do list is don't drink today and I'm going to tick it.
• 24:42
  It's like, that doesn't work right.
• 24:44
  I think the longest I went once was two months.
• 24:48
  I think that was the longest maybe, maybe less, 45 days or something like that.
• 24:52
  But it was just a number of different things over, like for example, you mentioned the Instagram handle change.
• 24:57
  Because...
• 24:58
  From age 18 to, I think I quit DJing when I was 23 or 24.
• 25:03
  From age 18 to 23 or 24, my entire identity was Wilco, which was my DJ name.
• 25:10
  And my whole brand was just drinking and girls and partying.
• 25:14
  And I got a lot of attention because of that.
• 25:16
  And so for half a decade, it was grained into me.
• 25:19
  If you drink a lot, people will pay attention to you and think you're charming and charismatic and funny.
• 25:23
  Probably not.
• 25:24
  But in my drunken stupor and hangovers, I thought I was charming, funny and charismatic.
• 25:30
  But-
• 25:32
  It was grained into me for half a decade that it's very important that you drink.
• 25:36
  This behavior is a successful action in my delusion at the time.
• 25:40
  And so I had to let go of that.
• 25:42
  So for example, my username used to be, it was like Wilco Enley Charles.
• 25:46
  So they were like Wilco but Enley Charles because I'm an Enley Charles.
• 25:50
  It took me years to change my Instagram username.
• 25:53
  I was actually like in a mastermind with a couple other lads in another business coaching program that I'm in.
• 25:59
  And they had to like, I was like, they're like, what's the first thing you would do if you wanted to quit?
• 26:03
  I was like, I'd change my Instagram username.
• 26:04
  They're like, do it now.
• 26:05
  I was like,
• 26:07
  I'll do it later.
• 26:08
  I just like didn't want to do it because my entire identity was tied to, it's very important that you drink and this is your identity.
• 26:15
  It was like letting go of that.
• 26:17
  And then I got a sobriety coach.
• 26:19
  And then the other thing was, he was actually a member of the Withy program.
• 26:22
  I went to his funnel.
• 26:24
  I went to book a call and then close the tab and then book a call and then close the tab.
• 26:30
  I did that like six times for like every, like all morning until like lunchtime.
• 26:34
  And then I finally booked the call.
• 26:36
  Because booking that call was like an admission that I had a problem.
• 26:42
  Because up until then, in my own head, I didn't have a problem.
• 26:45
  But then what he actually...
• 26:47
  There was a number of things we did to let go of the old identity.
• 26:51
  One of the things I had to do was journal to my former self and write letters to myself of like...
• 26:58
  Like why we're not doing this anymore and what we're doing instead.
• 27:02
  It was really like this subconscious journaling.
• 27:04
  It was really interesting to like let go of this old version of me.
• 27:09
  And how was that?
• 27:10
  Was it hard to do?
• 27:11
  It was odd because it was like, the other thing I had to do was I had to write it with my left hand.
• 27:19
  I can't remember why, but I think it was something about like the subconscious.
• 27:21
  And you're always like spelling mistakes.
• 27:22
  Like my body was trying to reject it.
• 27:24
  It was really odd.
• 27:26
  It was really weird.
• 27:27
  Yeah.
• 27:28
  when you eventually you finally did work with the sobriety coach i'm assuming yeah so you finally went through with that yeah the funniest thing was um because i nailed the identity thing when i was working with conrad as the addiction coach i think i i paid up front for i piffed for like a 90-day program but after three weeks i was like bro not gonna lie i think we've nailed this i don't think we need to meet next week
• 27:54
  the weeks after he was texting me like, hey, do you want to use the other sessions?
• 27:57
  I was like, no, man, I think we're all good.
• 27:59
  We just nailed it.
• 28:00
  Once I did the identity shift, it was done.
• 28:02
  I've never had it.
• 28:03
  It was like a switch to flip.
• 28:04
  That was it.
• 28:05
  Yeah.
• 28:05
  Yeah, and there was a number of other things I did as well.
• 28:07
  Like one of the, this sounds so trivial and silly, but...
• 28:12
  We talked about environment change and then we talked about uniform as well, right?
• 28:17
  I just got rid of my old wardrobe.
• 28:19
  I went clothes shopping.
• 28:20
  I just bought like 12 new black shirts that were a different material and a belt.
• 28:24
  And all I did every morning was just wear a different shirt, tuck my shirt and wear a belt.
• 28:28
  It just felt like I was wearing a different uniform.
• 28:31
  Prior to that, I just never wore belts.
• 28:32
  Super trivial.
• 28:33
  Just felt like I was putting on a different uniform in the morning.
• 28:36
  Yeah.
• 28:36
  What's your advice to somebody who's trying to figure out if they should kill an identity that's not serving them anymore?
• 28:43
  Like, what's the checklist that they should go through?
• 28:45
  One really simple journaling prompt that helped me was at the end of the day, or in the morning if you wake up with a hangover, just write down a journal prompt, which is, if I repeated my actions for the last 24 hours for the next 10 years, where would I end up?
• 29:00
  And do I like it here?
• 29:02
  That's a brutally honest question.
• 29:06
  That's not comfortable.
• 29:08
  What would you say to somebody right now who knows they need to let go of an old version of themselves, but they can't?
• 29:15
  You'll only really change when the pain of staying where you are outweighs the pain of changing.
• 29:24
  And there's two ways you can get there.
• 29:26
  Number one, and this is why I'm being careful with my answer, is maybe you haven't hit rock bottom yet and you haven't felt that pain.
• 29:34
  Like sometimes people just like really got to feel that pain and be like, absolutely this can never happen again.
• 29:40
  But again, trying to be careful with my answers because that could be very bad for some people.
• 29:44
  It's difficult because rock bottom is the greatest teacher.
• 29:48
  Yeah.
• 29:48
  It really is.
• 29:50
  but you never want somebody to hit rock bottom.
• 29:53
  So that's the difficult part about this, right?
• 29:56
  So you know that if that person hit rock bottom and they survived through it,
• 30:02
  that person on the other side of rock bottom would be a better person because they'd see what...
• 30:08
  Instead of journaling out what the next 10 years of their life look like if they kept this habit going, this destructive habit, they'd live it.
• 30:16
  And lived experience is the most powerful teacher ever.
• 30:19
  But the issue is that some people don't survive that rock bottom, so you don't want to send anybody there.
• 30:25
  So I think the journaling is a really smart answer.
• 30:28
  Yeah, because that was going to be my second part, which is if you can journal hard enough and really sit with that so that it becomes perhaps not real, pretty close to it.
• 30:38
  And then one more thing, I actually learned this from a lot of different coaches.
• 30:42
  Cameron Norsworth is my flow coach.
• 30:44
  Didn't know you get a PhD in flow.
• 30:46
  Did you know that?
• 30:47
  Yeah, he has one.
• 30:50
  He taught me process goals, performance goals, and outcome goals.
• 30:54
  So it's much easier to achieve a flow state when you just focus on the process, just the next step.
• 31:00
  When you focus on the outcome, this big, hairy, audacious goal becomes very, very overwhelming.
• 31:05
  And so the question that I'll ask is like, what's one small thing you could do?
• 31:11
  today that just, it's like a small little win.
• 31:14
  And then you're just trying to stack these tiny little wins.
• 31:17
  Like for example, this is a financial example.
• 31:20
  Like when I was in all of that debt, the process that I focused on was I made a forecast of like what revenue looks like and all my different account expenses look like on a perfect month where we're profitable.
• 31:31
  And then literally every single morning at 8am, I just looked at it and just updated the values and go, yep, still on track.
• 31:37
  Just literally every single day an alarm went off at 8am saying,
• 31:41
  And it was just like every single day, every single day, just that.
• 31:44
  That was literally all I did.
• 31:46
  Let's talk about that year.
• 31:50
  I also want to understand the year that we're sort of alluding to.
• 31:54
  You were a quarter of a million dollars in debt to the tax office.
• 31:57
  You had 60K owed on Amex.
• 31:59
  You had 20K owed or unpaid on super, which for people who don't know, it's, it's, it's
• 32:06
  Yeah.
• 32:06
  Just like, I hadn't been paying my own retirement fund essentially.
• 32:09
  Which is an Australian?
• 32:10
  Yeah.
• 32:10
  Australian thing.
• 32:11
  When was this year?
• 32:12
  It wasn't, was it close to when you were going through this, this identity shift?
• 32:18
  No, it was before it.
• 32:20
  So this was- Oh, so you had this really bad year that you actually survived while you were still drinking I was still drinking and hungover.
• 32:25
  I still just ripped my way through it.
• 32:28
  This was late 2023, Fruita, late 2024.
• 32:30
  So-
• 32:40
  The mistake that I made was just overhiring employees.
• 32:43
  And so I learned at the end of this, I wish my accountant told me sooner, wages to revenue ratio, which is basically in a typical service-based business, usually your wages and salaries line should be no more than like one third of your revenue.
• 32:57
  So if you're doing, we were doing 100K a month on average in revenue.
• 33:02
  Should have been doing like $33,000 a month in wages and salaries.
• 33:05
  Mine was like $67,000.
• 33:07
  So I had like twice as many people as I needed.
• 33:10
  I think we went down from...
• 33:11
  I had a nightmare about this last night, actually.
• 33:13
  That's not a common thing, by the way.
• 33:16
  For whatever reason, last night I had a nightmare about this period of my life.
• 33:20
  And we went from 11 team members down to six because I had to make a bunch of people redundant.
• 33:28
  I think I had to do all of that in the same month.
• 33:31
  It was just like literally every single team meeting, it was just like one less person that I had to explain why they weren't there anymore.
• 33:35
  And it was because you hired too many.
• 33:37
  You had massive amounts of debt that you had to pay off, like personal debt.
• 33:41
  It was company debt, yeah.
• 33:43
  So what I was doing was I never missed payroll.
• 33:45
  I just wouldn't be able to live with myself if I missed payroll.
• 33:47
  But I didn't mind if the government had to wait on my taxes for a little bit.
• 33:51
  And so I just used them as a, at the time, interest-free line of credit.
• 33:54
  They attacked on interest eventually.
• 33:56
  And penalties.
• 33:57
  Leah, I understand, Russo.
• 33:59
  Future Brandon dealt with that.
• 34:01
  We just wanted to make payroll on Monday.
• 34:02
  You know what's funny?
• 34:03
  You're not the first person that's ever told me that.
• 34:05
  Like so many entrepreneurs have said like, so we didn't pay tax for five years.
• 34:10
  Yeah, dude, I'm like- And by the way, this is not financial advice.
• 34:13
  This is not financial advice.
• 34:15
  But like, yeah, because I've been pretty public about this story, the number of people I've had privately message me and say, yeah, I'm in a similar situation, sometimes worse.
• 34:23
  Because you think I can make more money, even if there's interest in penalties, I can make more money on that cash than paying to the government.
• 34:30
  But to be honest, and I've said this before, and this again is not financial advice, what kind of fully grown adult hasn't at some stage in their life owed hundreds of thousands of dollars to a government agency?
• 34:41
  I think it's a formative life event.
• 34:43
  I think you just have to go through that.
• 34:45
  Like what, you just pay your taxes on time, every time, like a pussy?
• 34:50
  You just do what you're told all the time.
• 34:52
  Life at the Speed of Play is a success story partner.
• 34:55
  Now, this is a book by Mark Pincus, the guy who founded Zynga.
• 34:58
  I've actually had him on the show.
• 34:59
  I met him in person and Reid Hoffman wrote the foreword, calling him one of the best idea people in Silicon Valley.
• 35:05
  The book is Life at the Speed of Play, Launch Products People Love.
• 35:09
  About 170 pages.
• 35:11
  It's already a national bestseller.
• 35:12
  It's his framework for figuring out whether an idea is actually worth going after before you put serious time and money into it.
• 35:19
  not theory, the way he actually does it.
• 35:20
  And he's repeatedly built successful businesses.
• 35:23
  On top of that, you can read it in a weekend.
• 35:25
  It can change your entire life and give you the right direction if you're an entrepreneur.
• 35:28
  So right now, if you go to getmarksbook.com slash success, you get two copies for $32, that's $16 each.
• 35:35
  Mark is paying for the second copy himself because he wants you to give it to somebody, a friend who's been sitting on an idea, someone who needs to push, whoever.
• 35:41
  That's getmarksbook.com slash success.
• 35:44
  Mark with a K, buy one, second one's free.
• 35:47
  My Fitness Pal is a success story partner.
• 35:49
  Now, a quick story.
• 35:50
  A few weeks ago, I was in the middle of a very heavy recording week.
• 35:53
  So five episodes back to back.
• 35:55
  By Wednesday, I could feel it.
• 35:56
  I felt tired.
• 35:57
  And I pulled up my food log in the My Fitness Pal app, and I could see why I felt tired.
• 36:04
  I was heavily under eating.
• 36:06
  I was not keeping up with my meals.
• 36:08
  My macros were all off.
• 36:09
  On weeks like that, staying on top of your fuel and your food and what you eat is the difference between being sharp on episode five and being flat.
• 36:17
  And that's the kind of thing you only catch when you're paying attention.
• 36:20
  And that's why I keep logging every single meal I eat in the MyFitnessPal app.
• 36:24
  It's not because I'm obsessing over numbers.
• 36:26
  It's not because I'm trying to diet, because I'm trying to have an awareness about what I eat in the day.
• 36:32
  And the app makes it so easy to maintain that awareness.
• 36:35
  I can point my camera at a plate with MealScan.
• 36:38
  It'll tell me exactly what I'm eating, all my macronutrients, proteins, fats, carbs.
• 36:43
  There's an intermittent fasting tracker.
• 36:45
  If I want an intermittent fast, it keeps my eating window honest.
• 36:48
  And it all syncs with my watch and all of my fitness apps, and it just runs in the background.
• 36:53
  See, food is a foundation for energy, sleep, recovery, performance.
• 36:57
  It is the one input that you cannot skip.
• 37:00
  So do yourself a favor, track what you're eating.
• 37:02
  It'll make you feel better, perform better in everything that you do.
• 37:06
  Go to podcasts.myfitnesspal.com and use code SCOTT, all uppercase for 50% off MyFitnessPal premium.
• 37:13
  That's podcasts.myfitnesspal.com, code SCOTT.
• 37:16
  HubSpot is a success story partner.
• 37:18
  Now.
• 37:18
  Every entrepreneur, founder, CEOs listening right now needs to pay attention.
• 37:23
  I have a question for you.
• 37:24
  When a buyer asks AI for a solution or a product that your business sells, does your business come up?
• 37:32
  The answer is that most companies have no idea.
• 37:35
  They don't know if their name shows up in any of the AI tools, chat, perplexity, Claude, and by the time they find out, they have lost tons of traffic and tons of deals to someone who did show up.
• 37:49
  HubSpot AEO.
• 37:52
  It helps you show up in those moments with the right answers that your customers and your buyers are looking for when they go type in a question.
• 37:59
  It's before the first click, it's before they fill out some form on your website,
• 38:04
  That is the moment that HubSpot AEO is built for.
• 38:08
  So if you want your company to show up in AI searches when your customer is looking, check out HubSpot.com.
• 38:14
  They are the agentic customer platform for growing businesses.
• 38:18
  You had way too expensive a payroll.
• 38:20
  Company owed a ton of money.
• 38:23
  You tried to raise money to cover staff salaries, but the investors pulled out.
• 38:27
  It's like...
• 38:28
  No, that was actually before.
• 38:29
  So this was like the start of the whole thing.
• 38:32
  So this year was not a good year financially.
• 38:34
  No, it wasn't a great year.
• 38:35
  Personally, professionally, romantically, everything was going wrong.
• 38:39
  So when we first came up with the Whitney program, which is our workshops now, and by the way, I just, I want to, I love this story because so much, you know, this podcast is called Success Story.
• 38:49
  And I started it kind of ironically, because I knew that anybody who's built anything meaningful, there's so much shit they've gone through.
• 38:57
  And there's a light at the end of the tunnel for every entrepreneur.
• 39:00
  But just so that people who are listening understand that when you build something and you're ambitious, even if shit's not going right, you're not the only one this is happening to.
• 39:09
  This is uncommon.
• 39:10
  Well, yeah, I mean, like, to be quick, but shit not going right is common.
• 39:15
  That's the thing.
• 39:16
  That it is common and you'll survive and you'll figure it out.
• 39:19
  But, I mean...
• 39:22
  I feel like entrepreneurship is so lonely.
• 39:24
  So when you're going through something like this, some people, and I don't know, I'll ask you too.
• 39:28
  Did you have other people that you were talking to that were kind of like de-stressing you?
• 39:34
  Because some people, they just deal with this shit on their own.
• 39:36
  They can't talk to their team about it.
• 39:37
  They don't want to talk to investors about the debt they're in.
• 39:39
  They don't talk to their friends about it.
• 39:41
  They can't talk to their parents about it.
• 39:42
  No, no one are the only people that knew my parents.
• 39:45
  no one else knew.
• 39:46
  Like I had one of my best mates.
• 39:48
  I told him after, he's just like, oh, and he knew all the other stuff that was going on in my life.
• 39:52
  He's like, oh, that was happening too?
• 39:54
  I was like, yeah.
• 39:55
  So it's fine now.
• 39:56
  But the investor story.
• 39:58
  So this is, this is how it all started, right?
• 40:00
  So this was early 2023.
• 40:02
  Yeah.
• 40:05
  So we just came up with this workshop model and it was like doing really like showing early signs of life.
• 40:11
  It was just our downsell, but a lot of people are buying this.
• 40:14
  And I was like, I think I want to take a stab at this.
• 40:17
  And I was talking to one of my mentors about it and like raising money and investors and all that stuff.
• 40:22
  And he verbally said, I would put $50,000 in.
• 40:24
  I was like, okay, sick.
• 40:26
  All mates in.
• 40:27
  I won't say it's that we're actually still, he actually owns 5% of one of my other companies.
• 40:31
  We're still on good terms and I'm an investor in one of his.
• 40:34
  And, um,
• 40:36
  He verbally said he'll put $50,000 in.
• 40:37
  So I was like, sick.
• 40:40
  I'll hire three people because that will cover those expenses.
• 40:44
  And then I found out, so all three of these people started.
• 40:47
  Two of them are still with us now.
• 40:48
  One of them left a couple months afterwards because it wasn't working out.
• 40:52
  But I had Tim, who's now COO, Sophie, who's an ad specialist, is still with us now, and this other person start.
• 41:00
  They all start the same Monday morning.
• 41:02
  And then my bookkeeper is also, who was meant to be an investor, or he's verbally said he would be, his EA.
• 41:11
  And then she told me on Slack, she's like, hey, you know, I won't say his name, isn't going to invest until he sees the business as more profitable.
• 41:19
  I went, what?
• 41:21
  I was like, I just hired three people.
• 41:26
  Again, I was just young and stupid.
• 41:27
  I was verbally said yes.
• 41:29
  And then...
• 41:31
  I'm looking at all three of them in the office going, I think I have to get rid of all of you now before lunchtime.
• 41:38
  And so I went to Shay, who's my bookkeeper, she still is now.
• 41:42
  And I was like, I'll message you in a bit if we're getting rid of them.
• 41:45
  I just need to figure this out and go for a walk.
• 41:48
  And I just went for a walk.
• 41:49
  I was like, calm myself.
• 41:50
  I've never had, still to this day, I've never had so much cortisol flood my body at once.
• 41:54
  Went back, messaged Shay, I went, keep them on payroll, take me off of it.
• 41:59
  We're doing this with or without him.
• 42:02
  And then I was just like, I'm just doing this one way or another.
• 42:05
  I'm not getting rid of them.
• 42:06
  I'm taking a stab at this thing.
• 42:08
  And then, yeah, Tim, it was his first week in sales.
• 42:11
  He beat me his first week in sales.
• 42:13
  I was like, oh, thank God.
• 42:16
  Yeah, he did really, really well.
• 42:18
  Sophie did really, really well.
• 42:20
  And then that was the start because I was like, I'll just take myself off payroll for a little bit, like when I need to.
• 42:26
  And then that was when I was like, I'm just going to use the ATL as like an interest-free, like lighter credit.
• 42:32
  How do you keep yourself level-headed when that much shit is hitting the fan at the same time?
• 42:39
  For me, it was, what was helpful was breaking things down into small chunks and like process orientated goals.
• 42:47
  So the goal for me was just make sure you make payroll on Monday.
• 42:50
  So I was always doing math, doing the cashflow forecast.
• 42:53
  I was like, am I going to be able to make payroll on Monday?
• 42:55
  I'm like, sweet.
• 42:56
  But I'll open, I still, to this day, do not check my own mailbox because I have like PTSD of getting letters from the ATO and like the fonts just get bolder and redder.
• 43:03
  I still like, I don't have any ATO debt right now.
• 43:05
  I still can't open the mailbox.
• 43:07
  I just refuse.
• 43:07
  Tanisha can do that.
• 43:10
  But at the time, it was just, are we going to have enough money in the bank on Monday to make payroll?
• 43:15
  I just focused on that and just small, small things.
• 43:19
  Absolutely, to be clear, I absolutely could have handled it a lot better.
• 43:22
  I just drank a lot.
• 43:23
  But we got there in the end.
• 43:26
  Just brawled my way.
• 43:28
  Do you think that level of debt is reckless?
• 43:32
  Yeah, I think about that a lot, actually.
• 43:34
  I think, like, was I reckless in that?
• 43:36
  Should I have, like, not hired so many people?
• 43:39
  I think about that all the time.
• 43:40
  Like, there was one time...
• 43:41
  This is going to make me look real bad.
• 43:43
  There was one time I hired someone and then...
• 43:47
  Literally, my accountant, like, the day after he accepted the offer, he was meant to start in, like, two weeks' time.
• 43:52
  My accountant was like, dude, you cannot hire anyone.
• 43:54
  Like, this debt is now, like, $200,000.
• 43:57
  This needs to go down.
• 43:58
  Like, half of this team has to go.
• 44:00
  Or else, like, you're facing serious issues with the government.
• 44:05
  And then, so I had to call him back.
• 44:06
  Dude, I had tears in my eyes.
• 44:08
  I had to call this, we're actually still mates now, but I had to call him and be like, dude, I can't give you this job anymore.
• 44:15
  He's like, dude, I just quit.
• 44:16
  Like, I can't go back.
• 44:20
  And then I ended up hiring him like part-time for I think like two or three days a week just so I didn't completely screw him over until he got another job.
• 44:31
  But absolutely, I was young and reckless and how old was I at the time?
• 44:35
  26, 27.
• 44:35
  I think I should have known better.
• 44:38
  But I think about that all the time, like the moral implications of my naivety.
• 44:44
  But it worked out.
• 44:46
  In the end, I think it worked out.
• 44:48
  Like when I look at it now in the long run, there were some tough times in the short run, but everyone, literally everyone worked out better.
• 44:55
  Like even team members that left are in jobs that are better fits for them now.
• 45:00
  How do you as an entrepreneur going through that, not fold, not crash out, not give up and quit?
• 45:08
  No, to be honest, like, it's not that I didn't crash out.
• 45:11
  There were definitely, well, I don't think I crashed out.
• 45:13
  There were definitely moments where I was like, this is a lot.
• 45:16
  I'm getting a margarita.
• 45:18
  That happened a lot.
• 45:20
  But in terms of quitting, like, I remember, actually, I remember one time I was talking to my parents.
• 45:25
  And, like, this, I think it was when we were, like, 250 came down, like, the peak of it.
• 45:30
  And my parents were like, can you get out of this?
• 45:33
  And I was like, I don't really have a choice.
• 45:36
  I don't see any other way out of this.
• 45:37
  Like, I just have to.
• 45:38
  And I think I just had to, like, grit and just, like, I literally just, like, brawled my way out of it.
• 45:45
  I was like, I'm getting out of this one way or another.
• 45:49
  There was a time where I was, like, I was genuinely thinking about, I'm going to run away from the country and just move to Thailand or something like that.
• 45:56
  That thought ran through my head for about a week.
• 45:59
  And then I was just like,
• 46:00
  no, that doesn't seem like a viable solution.
• 46:03
  You just got to like grit your way through this.
• 46:06
  Yeah, it's tough.
• 46:06
  I, you know, I'm trying to figure out how somebody can prepare their personality and
• 46:15
  to be an entrepreneur.
• 46:16
  In retrospect, I would handle that situation a lot better now.
• 46:20
  And I actually, I don't just say this to business owners.
• 46:23
  I say this to staff members.
• 46:24
  I say this to friends.
• 46:27
  The way you do something is the way you do everything.
• 46:29
  And so I'm a lot better at stress resilience and handling stress now because I just train martial arts twice a day, six days a week.
• 46:36
  So it's like your hobbies sort of fortify your mind for all the other bullshit that you have to deal with.
• 46:41
  Dude, I'm stressed in the morning because Hilton's trying to kill me with his bare hands.
• 46:45
  So it makes the rest of the stuff not so stressful.
• 46:48
  Yeah, I was talking to...
• 46:51
  So Zach has a couple of trainers that train me in different martial arts disciplines.
• 46:55
  And we have Hilton, who is a black belt in Kraft McGuire and a brown belt in BJJ.
• 47:03
  And he would train me Friday mornings.
• 47:05
  And it's like disarming guns and knives and then like sparring, but with weapons and stuff like that.
• 47:10
  And I tell Hilton every Friday morning, I'm like, man...
• 47:13
  Whatever I've got on for the rest of the day is so much less stressful than you just trying to gouge my eyes out for the last 30 minutes.
• 47:22
  I want to talk about the anti-agency agency.
• 47:26
  So this is your book, F Your Agency.
• 47:31
  So this is out September 25th.
• 47:32
  You can get it wherever you get your books, Amazon, anywhere else you can get is your website for it.
• 47:37
  Yeah, if you go to FYourAgencyBook.com, but spelt correctly.
• 47:41
  Yeah, spelt correctly.
• 47:43
  My PR guy was just like smiling and he was like, don't swear.
• 47:48
  We can swear a little bit.
• 47:49
  I just want to, if I'm going to drop the book name six, seven times over the podcast, I'm just going to give all my editors a whole bunch more work.
• 47:58
  So why are you the anti-agency agency?
• 48:02
  So your premise is that business owners should always be the best marketers in their business?
• 48:08
  Right.
• 48:09
  Most agencies are built on the opposite premise that the owners have no idea how to market.
• 48:14
  So, and I'm like, I've gone through this even before we press record, I've hired so many agencies that were complete wastes of time, uh, burnt so much budget.
• 48:22
  I've advised companies that were spending upwards of 20 to $50,000 a month on agency work before they were even generating revenue, like for launch, they just raised money, uh,
• 48:35
  Why do agencies suck?
• 48:36
  So to be absolutely clear, there are rare agencies, rare instances where agencies can work out.
• 48:42
  It's just 90, 95% of the time, it's just not a good fit.
• 48:45
  And we were a done for you agency.
• 48:47
  We're not anymore.
• 48:48
  And people always go, oh, did you just like pivot this thing?
• 48:51
  But-
• 48:52
  They forget that I was turning away 90% of businesses that wanted our done for you services.
• 48:57
  Like if you go through our Google reviews from like 2023 or something like that, you'll find a couple that were like most honest sales pitch I ever had, like branded and try and sell me something that wouldn't work for me.
• 49:06
  Because I just did the numbers for them.
• 49:08
  And I was like, man, with the revenue right now, 10 to 30k a month, you're a one person team or we've got a couple of subbies.
• 49:15
  Like, it doesn't even make sense.
• 49:17
  Whether it's us or anyone, you shouldn't be paying this onboarding fee and this retainer and this minimum ad spend.
• 49:21
  Like, the best case scenario is you get busier and break even.
• 49:23
  You're just not at the scale where this makes sense.
• 49:25
  I think you should just learn the basics and do the basics well yourself.
• 49:29
  And then I was doing that for, like, 90% of the goal.
• 49:32
  It's probably why I was in debt.
• 49:33
  I probably should have sold them and I wouldn't have had the debt.
• 49:35
  But then...
• 49:38
  But I had one time, this guy was just like, it was actually his second time applying to work with us.
• 49:43
  And he's like, dude, like, there's got to be a way we can work together.
• 49:46
  And I was like, uh, like, it doesn't make sense.
• 49:50
  And he's like, can you just show us how to do it ourselves?
• 49:52
  Um.
• 49:53
  And I was like, I don't want to be like an online course, bro.
• 49:55
  He's like, no, no, no.
• 49:56
  I'll fly out to you.
• 49:57
  I was like, oh, that sounds like fun.
• 49:59
  And so we just picked a random date in the calendar.
• 50:01
  Him and his wife bought a ticket.
• 50:03
  And then we booked that one in.
• 50:04
  And then 30 minutes after that, the next sales call I had, I still remember her name was Kelly.
• 50:09
  Same conversation.
• 50:10
  I'm like, doesn't make sense.
• 50:10
  I think you should just learn the basics.
• 50:12
  I went to go find a YouTube link for her or something.
• 50:14
  She's like, appreciate the honesty.
• 50:15
  Is there any way we can work together?
• 50:17
  I was like, well, the last guy's fined a pair for his wife.
• 50:19
  Do you want to do that?
• 50:20
  She's like.
• 50:21
  yeah sick when how much i was like huh next person bought a ticket i was like oh this is odd and then what i noticed was they all get incredible results for a couple of reasons
• 50:33
  One, they know the customer better than anyone else, better than I ever will.
• 50:37
  They've been talking to their customer for years, some of them decades.
• 50:40
  So whoever knows the customer best can speak to their pain points and their aspirations better than anyone else.
• 50:45
  So you can't do a, what, you do a 45-minute onboarding call to me or anyone from an agency and expect me to understand your customer if you've been talking for a decade?
• 50:52
  Of course not.
• 50:53
  Number two is, I mean, we're just talking about debt.
• 50:55
  No one's more financially incentivized than the business owner for the marketing to do well.
• 50:59
  Check the bank account every morning.
• 51:01
  You get the letters from the ATO.
• 51:03
  It's just like, well, you're going to pay someone like $2,000 a month and then like you're 1 15th or 1 20th of their attention because they've got 15 to 20 other clients at the same time.
• 51:13
  And no one's going to move faster than you.
• 51:15
  So it's like you email an agency.
• 51:17
  It's like, hey, can we make these changes?
• 51:19
  And then they take a day to respond to you, another week to action it.
• 51:22
  It's just there's all this inefficiency and just whether it's marketing agencies or external agencies, there's always that communication inefficiency.
• 51:29
  And when you simply know what buttons to press,
• 51:33
  and you know the customer, and you're financially incentivized, and you move really, really fast.
• 51:37
  I was like, of course you do better.
• 51:38
  You just didn't know what buttons to press.
• 51:40
  So I agree with you completely.
• 51:41
  I've actually, not on the marketing side, but most of my career is on the sales side of building businesses before I did podcasting.
• 51:49
  And the biggest issue I had, especially when I did some consulting work, is the CEO would try and hire – or founder, excuse me – would try and hire like a VP of sales to figure out.
• 52:00
  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 52:01
  Right?
• 52:01
  Because they couldn't figure it out themselves.
• 52:03
  Try and delegate a system you haven't built.
• 52:04
  100%.
• 52:04
  And it –
• 52:07
  The difference between a successful and an unsuccessful startup was, is the founder good at selling?
• 52:13
  And I've been part of companies where the founder has sold $5 to $6 million a year before they hired somebody.
• 52:19
  And then, and that's one person accountable for $5 to $6 million a year in revenue.
• 52:23
  They hired somebody who then emulates the system, doubles the revenue.
• 52:27
  But the point is they figured out how to close a significant amount of deals before they hired somebody.
• 52:32
  And then...
• 52:34
  I've seen founders that were technical founders.
• 52:37
  Usually, like, the developer codes an app, doesn't want to talk to a customer ever because they have social anxiety.
• 52:43
  Yeah, they're a vice versa.
• 52:45
  A hundred percent.
• 52:46
  But then they try and outsource the sales, and it never works because that first hire, the first sales hire, doesn't matter if it's a VP of sales or it's a very expensive hire or if you hire somebody who's more junior –
• 52:59
  They don't have the playbook.
• 53:00
  They're testing everything, every messaging, every strategy.
• 53:05
  It's going to take them probably six months to figure out something because they don't know the customer as well as you starting day one because they're hot.
• 53:11
  And so I've seen this on the sales side.
• 53:15
  And I never understood.
• 53:18
  I never understood why anybody would think that marketing is any different.
• 53:22
  So when I started the podcast, I had to learn how to book guests, how to close advertisers, how to sell based on a CPM, how to position.
• 53:29
  I had to learn all this shit so I could sell my podcast, then I hired a sales rep.
• 53:33
  But it was like, I had to do the job first.
• 53:35
  Yeah, exactly.
• 53:36
  Why do so many people
• 53:39
  give up on learning how to market and just outsource it.
• 53:42
  They had this like avoidant relationship.
• 53:44
  All right.
• 53:44
  So this is another point that I often make with people sometimes is like, do you really want a business in this field or do you just want to do this skill?
• 53:52
  Let me, this is what I mean.
• 53:54
  So let's say you start an AI business because you want to do a bunch of stuff with AI and you're like, all right, I don't, I don't want a job in AI.
• 54:02
  I want to start a business in AI.
• 54:05
  Great news.
• 54:06
  You're not going to do anything in AI.
• 54:08
  You're going to have to learn marketing.
• 54:09
  You're going to have to learn sales.
• 54:10
  You're going to have to learn operations.
• 54:12
  You're going to have to learn finance.
• 54:13
  You're going to have to learn how to hire people.
• 54:15
  You're going to have to learn how to train people.
• 54:16
  You're going to have to learn how to manage people.
• 54:18
  You're going to spend four hours a week doing AI stuff.
• 54:21
  The rest of the time, you're going to have to figure out all this other stuff.
• 54:26
  And then when it doesn't work, you're not even going to have a business in AI.
• 54:29
  You're basically going to make less money.
• 54:32
  than if you just went and got a job in AI because you can't build this business.
• 54:36
  If you want to have a business in whatever field that you're in, you had to learn business owner stuff.
• 54:41
  You can't just learn that one skill.
• 54:42
  You had to learn how to market your skill set.
• 54:45
  You had to learn how to sell it.
• 54:46
  You had to learn how to train it to other people, how to find those people.
• 54:49
  You had to learn business owner stuff.
• 54:51
  Being able to get attention for your business and sell your services is business-oriented stuff.
• 54:57
  It's not enough to just be good at your craft.
• 54:59
  Congratulations.
• 55:00
  You have to do business-oriented stuff now, business-oriented skills.
• 55:03
  Why don't people know?
• 55:04
  Like, why don't people learn?
• 55:06
  So said differently, I think that following your passion is the worst advice because say my passion is AI.
• 55:14
  Well, then, okay, to build the AI company, the thing that I'm passionate about is like 5%.
• 55:21
  Yeah, what you actually do, like I said, yeah.
• 55:22
  I love podcasting.
• 55:24
  You know how much of my business is me talking to somebody?
• 55:28
  5% to 10% max.
• 55:30
  And what's the rest of it?
• 55:31
  All the other shit.
• 55:34
  None of it's that sexy.
• 55:35
  When I'm doing payroll and when I'm doing P&L and I'm doing HR and when I'm reviewing legal contracts, this is not...
• 55:46
  This is not what I'm passionate about, but this is the business owner shit that you have to do to build a business.
• 55:52
  So people think they're going to start a company.
• 55:54
  They're going to outsource everything they don't like.
• 55:55
  This is how marketing agencies make a lot of money off business owners.
• 55:59
  Yeah, they have a limited mindset.
• 56:01
  You've obviously heard of like growth mindset versus limited mindset.
• 56:05
  I think there's limited mindset where, let's say marketing, for example.
• 56:09
  You just logged into Facebook Ads Manager.
• 56:11
  You looked at the interface and you're like, nah, not worth the smoke.
• 56:15
  I'm going to get someone to do this for four grand a month because I don't know what button to press.
• 56:19
  I'm scared.
• 56:20
  Even though there's a big green create button.
• 56:22
  But that's going to be such an expensive decision.
• 56:25
  It's so expensive.
• 56:27
  So where does somebody start?
• 56:29
  So when you say F your agency, okay, the person's like, great.
• 56:33
  Now I got to fucking learn marketing.
• 56:37
  Where do they start?
• 56:38
  First thing you got to do is pick like what corner do I want to kind of stand on?
• 56:42
  Like, do I want to advertise on Meta?
• 56:44
  Do I want to advertise on Google?
• 56:45
  First, we just got like pick a platform, Meta or Google.
• 56:49
  Easiest way to decide is does your customer just already know that they have this problem and they need to actively find a solution?
• 56:56
  If so, we're going to Google.
• 56:57
  For example, if my tap starts leaking and I'm not enough of a manly man to be able to fix it, I don't just sit around on Instagram all day going, oh, geez.
• 57:07
  Really hope a plumber serves me an ad today.
• 57:09
  No, I'm just like going to Google and searching plumbers near me, right?
• 57:12
  If that's the case, we're going to Google.
• 57:15
  If not, we want to create demand on Meta.
• 57:17
  So we pick that platform.
• 57:18
  Second thing that we want to do is pick a funnel architecture.
• 57:21
  So everyone's probably heard of like funnels.
• 57:26
  We just teach one step and two step funnels.
• 57:28
  Real simple, real beginner friendly.
• 57:30
  And so I know there's others, there's like webinar funnels, lead macro funnels, DM funnels, all this other stuff.
• 57:35
  Let's just keep it simple.
• 57:37
  One step funnel is when you've only got a relatively short conversation, like five minutes, pretty common for like home services and trades.
• 57:44
  I heard you learned in the last couple of months, you US guys call them contractors.
• 57:49
  Yes.
• 57:49
  We call them tradies in Australia.
• 57:51
  So if you're like a contractor, you're a one-step funnel.
• 57:53
  That's real simple.
• 57:53
  Someone sees another clicker, the one-step, fill out this form.
• 57:57
  Two-step funnels, sometimes people will refer to them as coal funnels.
• 58:00
  They're really common for consultants, education, coaching, professional services, where there's like 30, maybe 45-minute discovery call.
• 58:09
  And then we just got to build our ads.
• 58:11
  Now there's a number of different things that comes to building your ads, but like I've got principles in the book.
• 58:15
  The number one thing you need to lean on, like if you just take anything away from this, it's my principle and philosophy and meet them where they're at.
• 58:23
  So what that means is you don't just want to talk about your service and the features and what you do.
• 58:27
  Your goal in your ad copy, what you say in the video is like, I repeat back your internal monologue to you and your view of the world.
• 58:36
  So that in your head, you go, how is this guy reading my mind?
• 58:40
  If you can do that, it's much more important that they feel understood than that they understand you.
• 58:48
  It's far more important.
• 58:49
  And that takes an insane amount of understanding of who your customer is.
• 58:53
  It's real easy for you because you've been talking for years.
• 58:55
  You've been on all the sales calls.
• 58:56
  You've been delivering the service.
• 58:58
  But without knowing, and often, this is one of the most common things.
• 59:02
  They underestimate how much they know because they go from, they're like unconsciously competent.
• 59:10
  at speaking to their customer.
• 59:11
  Because they speak to their customer all day, every day, the stuff that they hear over and over and over and over and over again, they take as a given and think it's just like everyone knows this.
• 59:19
  But it's like, no, that's the stuff you had to talk about in ads.
• 59:21
  That's so interesting.
• 59:22
  So a lot of it is...
• 59:26
  You're teaching the business owner the fundamentals of marketing, but then you're helping them uncover what they actually already know that is going to drive the highest ROAS, return on ad spend, that they can ever get.
• 59:37
  They would never get this kind of result from hiring anybody outside the company.
• 59:42
  What are the lies that agencies tell business owners?
• 59:46
  Uh, there's a couple.
• 59:48
  Um, number one is they over explain how like technical it is.
• 59:54
  All the like three lettered.
• 59:56
  Overcomplicate it.
• 59:56
  Yeah.
• 59:56
  They just overcomplicate it and they hope that you don't understand it.
• 1:00:00
  So they're like, don't worry about that.
• 1:00:02
  They'll hide behind vanity metrics as well.
• 1:00:05
  So that's like an easy way is like.
• 1:00:08
  I filmed an ad the other day and it was doing well.
• 1:00:10
  It's like, you look at the report your agency sent you, you look at your P&L, and then you look at your bank account.
• 1:00:16
  It's like, this isn't lining up, right?
• 1:00:19
  Because they'll talk about like CPC, CTR, like look how much traffic we got here, but it's like clicks aren't keeping the lights on.
• 1:00:25
  They'll talk about cost per lead too, but even return on ad spend, even return on ad spend can be a little bit of a vanity metric.
• 1:00:33
  Because in my opinion, net profit should be the end metric that your agency is reporting on, how much net profit did we add?
• 1:00:44
  Because even return on ad spend can be a vanity metric.
• 1:00:46
  Let's say they say, oh, we got your 10x return on ad spend, but you only spent $1,000 on ads.
• 1:00:52
  I was like, all right, well, I made $10,000 after your fees, $5,000.
• 1:00:56
  Maybe I broke even, maybe even lost money off of that, right?
• 1:00:59
  Right.
• 1:01:00
  But if you have someone that's... Let's say, for example, I tell you I know someone that gets a 2x return on ad spend.
• 1:01:06
  Most people's knee-jerk reaction is not great.
• 1:01:09
  But if they're spending a million dollars a month on ads, doing 2 mil in revenue off of that, after their expenses are at like 20-25% profit, I'm sure they're happy with half a million dollars of profit a month, right?
• 1:01:19
  Right.
• 1:01:19
  Also, return on ad spend, it doesn't capture, for example, I guess you can bake it in, but like people that are already searching for your product or service and you're capturing those leads, which technically you'd be closing anyway.
• 1:01:32
  So they could be inflating their performance to sort of tell a better story to you who's paying them the retainer or the percentage or...
• 1:01:40
  Yeah, exactly.
• 1:01:41
  Attribution and advertising is one of those things.
• 1:01:43
  There's a lot of different software solutions out there for it.
• 1:01:45
  I have a little bit...
• 1:01:47
  I don't know if this is a controversial take in advertising paid media buying nerd world.
• 1:01:52
  I have this thing called revenue return on ad spend, which is I literally just go the top line of my P&L statement, look at revenue, divide it by ad spend month to date, divide the first number by the second number, and if I like that number, I just spend more on ads.
• 1:02:05
  Because...
• 1:02:06
  It's, I think, impractical to think, someone saw this ad and then converted on this and that's why they became a lead.
• 1:02:14
  It's like, no, like, how many organic pieces of content did they say?
• 1:02:17
  We can't, like, track all of this stuff.
• 1:02:19
  It's, marketing is not as clear cut and simple as I saw this ad, I clicked this ad, I converted on this landing page.
• 1:02:24
  It's like, that ad could have just been the one that after they saw 17 other ads, they're like, that was the, I suppose, straw that broke the camel's back, but it gets all the credit.
• 1:02:33
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  It's a software that a ton of companies use to basically manage everything.
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  Their finances, their inventory, their HR, it's just all in one place.
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  Now they just came out with NetSuite Next.
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• 1:04:52
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• 1:05:00
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• 1:06:17
  That's what gets confusing for people.
• 1:06:20
  So yes, I think that measuring revenue is super important, especially if you're holding agencies accountable to their work.
• 1:06:28
  But then the business owner saying, okay, I put out 30 pieces of organic content.
• 1:06:34
  I ran 10 pieces of different ad creative.
• 1:06:41
  How do I actually know what contributed to the money coming into my bank account?
• 1:06:47
  And that's where it gets confusing.
• 1:06:51
  Well, this is the thing.
• 1:06:51
  So a founder probably gets stressed and hopes that somebody understands it better than they do.
• 1:06:59
  But if it's not the founder, if it's somebody like an employee that's hiring an agency, the employee, of course, they kind of want the agency to work out.
• 1:07:08
  But what they also don't want is they don't want responsibility if it doesn't work out.
• 1:07:12
  So I can just say I hired an agency and they dropped the ball.
• 1:07:16
  That happens so much.
• 1:07:17
  I know.
• 1:07:17
  So then the employee is like, well.
• 1:07:19
  I feel like this happened to you, Scott.
• 1:07:21
  Yeah.
• 1:07:23
  It's happened many times.
• 1:07:24
  So I'm trying to just help that business owner and that founder not get screwed.
• 1:07:28
  Have confidence to understand what's actually driving results and also not get screwed by their own team or by the agency.
• 1:07:37
  Yeah, exactly right.
• 1:07:38
  Because if you just blindly delegate, let's say you're in that scenario we were talking about a couple of minutes ago where you're like, don't understand it, going to delegate it to the experts.
• 1:07:45
  But then you don't know why it's working when it is working.
• 1:07:49
  So you don't know what to do more of.
• 1:07:50
  And then when it stops working, you don't have any reasons as to why.
• 1:07:54
  And so you just have to trust anyone else.
• 1:07:56
  So it's like, you don't know why it's working when it is and you don't know what to do when it's not.
• 1:07:59
  And so if you just have at least like a basic understanding, at least then you can speak the same language and not have to take every single answer they have as gospel.
• 1:08:08
  You can at least have a debate.
• 1:08:11
  What is chatvertising?
• 1:08:13
  I actually trademarked that.
• 1:08:15
  I trademarked chatvertising and chatvertiser.
• 1:08:18
  It was the first thing I got my lawyer to do when I actually got a lawyer.
• 1:08:22
  So chatvertising is basically...
• 1:08:25
  So you can tell, and I can tell at least, a lot about someone by looking at their ad account.
• 1:08:30
  So for me, I came up with the ad spend archetypes.
• 1:08:34
  They're like star signs and horoscopes, but for ad nerds like me, right?
• 1:08:39
  So the first one he got is the conversion cuck.
• 1:08:42
  So this person just doesn't spend any money on ads at all, but he'll do scroll and like talk shit on my ads, right?
• 1:08:50
  Then you got like the interface avoidant.
• 1:08:52
  So this person is like the one we talked about before, like logged in,
• 1:08:57
  looked at all the buttons, was like, nah, and then just like delegated it, right?
• 1:09:01
  Then you've got the cautious calculator.
• 1:09:03
  So the cautious calculator, it's super common with engineers or anyone that's like really, really data-driven.
• 1:09:08
  So they're kind of a coward.
• 1:09:09
  They just like, they'll spend 30 bucks a day on ads and then they'll want to squeeze like an extra like 0.1% out of their conversion rate before they go from like $30 a day to like $35 a day, right?
• 1:09:22
  Then you've got the chat advertiser.
• 1:09:24
  This dude is just a degenerate gambler.
• 1:09:27
  Like, he's literally just treating his ad account like a sports bet account.
• 1:09:33
  Just, like, can't be bothered optimizing anything.
• 1:09:37
  He's just like, 2x, close enough, and then, like, quadruple the budget rather than, like, just doing numbers and stuff like that.
• 1:09:45
  But then you've got the plotter.
• 1:09:46
  So the plotter's the last, like, archetype.
• 1:09:48
  Plotter is kind of a combination of the cautious calculator
• 1:09:52
  And the chatvertiser.
• 1:09:53
  So the plotter will want to aggressively spend on ads, just like the chatvertiser, but we'll do it based off of math, rather than just like laying in bed with a hangover and quadrupling the budget from his phone or something like that.
• 1:10:06
  But to be absolutely clear, I can't advertise, I can't identify as a chatvertiser.
• 1:10:12
  I, I do, I can't do webinars because I'm too much of a degenerate gambler.
• 1:10:17
  They'll just like...
• 1:10:19
  I lost 30 grand in a webinar once just because I was like, I just threw money at it.
• 1:10:23
  I was like, no, it'll work out eventually.
• 1:10:24
  I just could be like making new ads and stuff like that.
• 1:10:27
  But I've got a perfect example of the plotter, right?
• 1:10:30
  But no, but who should people be?
• 1:10:31
  The plotter.
• 1:10:32
  The plotter, right?
• 1:10:32
  You want to spend more on ads, but you want to do it based off of math rather than just like, man, if I like double the budget, we'll learn eventually.
• 1:10:39
  So we talked about October of 2025 was the first time I hit a middle of the month.
• 1:10:44
  So the way we did that was the run rate for the sales team was only 950k.
• 1:10:47
  So I was like, all right, well, I don't have time to hire a sales rep.
• 1:10:53
  I don't have time to put myself in the calendar.
• 1:10:55
  I need to see how much money I can make in an hour and a half into a webinar.
• 1:10:59
  And I had done webinars previously in like March of that year.
• 1:11:02
  And I got about a 4X return on ad spend.
• 1:11:05
  I'd spend about $25,000 and then make about $100,000.
• 1:11:08
  So I was like, all right, I don't want to just make $100,000.
• 1:11:11
  I need to make $200,000.
• 1:11:12
  So a bit of an insurance policy to make sure we don't just hit a mill.
• 1:11:16
  We go way past it.
• 1:11:18
  And so I launched and it was running out of time in October.
• 1:11:22
  Like literally, me and Aiden filmed 17 ads in 13 minutes.
• 1:11:26
  Like just going so fast.
• 1:11:28
  And then I calculated it based off a 4x return on ad spend.
• 1:11:33
  So I was like, all right, 200,000 divided by four, I need to spend $50,000 on ads.
• 1:11:38
  But I only had a week.
• 1:11:40
  And when you launch your ads at like whatever that was, like $5,000 a day or something like that.
• 1:11:45
  doesn't do very well.
• 1:11:47
  And so when I recalculated a couple of days in, I'm like, oh, I'm only going to get a two extra turn on hard spend.
• 1:11:52
  Do you want to guess what I did, Scott?
• 1:11:56
  Double the budget, only winners and quitters at the cast.
• 1:12:00
  So I spent a hundred thousand dollars in like one week.
• 1:12:05
  And then dude, it was the most nerve wracking experience of my life.
• 1:12:08
  Because I think on top of the coal funnel, I,
• 1:12:12
  I had gone from spending $10,000, like averaging $7,500 to $10,000 a day on ads to like $35,000 leaving the bank account over 24 hours.
• 1:12:21
  And then the other thing is with webinars, it's a one shot.
• 1:12:25
  I can't redo this webinar.
• 1:12:26
  Dude, the Wi-Fi could have gone out in the warehouse.
• 1:12:29
  I would have lost all of it, bro.
• 1:12:31
  And so...
• 1:12:32
  But I did the math, right?
• 1:12:33
  The plotting.
• 1:12:34
  I was like, all right, you're going to get 2x off of this.
• 1:12:36
  I was dead right.
• 1:12:37
  I was dead right.
• 1:12:38
  It was exactly what happened.
• 1:12:39
  I spent, I think, $95,000 on ads.
• 1:12:42
  And I think I did 205 or something.
• 1:12:44
  I can't remember the exact number.
• 1:12:46
  But about $200,000 on ads.
• 1:12:47
  And then we hit 1.1 mil.
• 1:12:49
  So the math worked out.
• 1:12:52
  The plot.
• 1:12:53
  I feel like a lot of this podcast is not financial advice.
• 1:12:57
  Yeah.
• 1:12:59
  But at the same time, I rather somebody at the beginning just to, because when you're starting out marketing, you can't be a plotter because you don't really know what anything means.
• 1:13:09
  You really don't.
• 1:13:10
  So I think that at the beginning, you're not doing with a hundred thousand dollars, but like take some risks and be, I rather you chadvertize and blow 10, 15 grand, and then learn.
• 1:13:23
  Because if you lose 10, 15 grand, you're gonna learn.
• 1:13:26
  But if you never do anything,
• 1:13:28
  then you're never going to learn and you're never going to get better.
• 1:13:30
  I think everybody starts out as a chatvertiser because you really don't know what the hell you're doing.
• 1:13:34
  That's actually a point I make in the workshops.
• 1:13:35
  So in the workshops, I try and talk people out of like a perfectionist mindset because they'll want to keep getting feedback on ads and landing pages and nurture sequences without just turning the ads on.
• 1:13:46
  And I had to make this point.
• 1:13:46
  I'm like, look, this is going to sound silly, but it's true.
• 1:13:50
  If your ads are off, you have a 100% chance of your ads not working.
• 1:13:55
  If your ads are on,
• 1:13:57
  You have a really good chance with us in your corner, but at least we can talk about numbers and not just feelings.
• 1:14:02
  And advertising is dials, not switches, right?
• 1:14:06
  The only switch is if it's on or off.
• 1:14:08
  The dial is like everything works to a degree, but it's like to what degree?
• 1:14:12
  And so it's about finding which dial I want to tinker with.
• 1:14:16
  Is it the ad?
• 1:14:17
  Is it the landing page?
• 1:14:18
  Do I need to tinker with the nurture sequence?
• 1:14:20
  Like maybe sometimes people will say, they'll make binary statements like my ads didn't work.
• 1:14:25
  But if they've got leads, let's say they've got a really expensive cost per lead.
• 1:14:28
  I'm like, well, it worked to a degree, just not to the degree that you want.
• 1:14:31
  So if your cost per lead was 400 and your target is 100, I'm like, all right, we need to find some variables to tinker down so we can cut this down by 4x.
• 1:14:39
  Is it the ad?
• 1:14:40
  Are there not enough people clicking the ad?
• 1:14:41
  Is there too much resistance on the landing page?
• 1:14:43
  Just tinkle that stuff and then leave it for another couple of days.
• 1:14:46
  At the end of the day, you just, ads are just putting your product in front of people that could buy it.
• 1:14:50
  Yeah, people massively overthink it.
• 1:14:53
  It's like if more people know about your stuff, the chances that more people will buy your stuff is more than zero.
• 1:14:58
  Well, I've always thought about this.
• 1:15:00
  Mr.
• 1:15:00
  Beast has a quote about the algorithm.
• 1:15:04
  The algorithm is just humans.
• 1:15:05
  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:15:06
  I've heard him say that as well.
• 1:15:07
  It's so smart.
• 1:15:08
  Like if your content sucks, or sorry, if your content is not performing, it's because it sucks.
• 1:15:13
  Humans didn't like it.
• 1:15:14
  Humans didn't like it.
• 1:15:14
  There's no algorithm, no shadow banning, just your content sucks.
• 1:15:18
  And it's kind of the same with your ads too.
• 1:15:20
  I would actually, you know, one of, one strategy that has worked decently well for me is just taking my best performing organic content and run that as ads.
• 1:15:27
  And I don't know why people think it would be different if the content is entertaining to somebody who sees it for free.
• 1:15:33
  It's also going to be entertaining to the person who sees it if Facebook puts it in front of them.
• 1:15:38
  Yeah, that's all it is.
• 1:15:40
  It's just like, well, I'm just showing my stuff to more people and a bunch of them will be relevant.
• 1:15:44
  People overthink it.
• 1:15:45
  That's a mess of it.
• 1:15:46
  You've got to turn off your frontal lobe and just run ads.
• 1:15:52
  Don't overthink it.
• 1:15:54
  Do you think that ads are required for any business?
• 1:15:58
  It's going to be surprising coming from me, but no.
• 1:16:01
  There are some industries that can go by perfectly well without ads.
• 1:16:04
  It's not a lot of them.
• 1:16:06
  Like, for example, I think the big four accounting firms.
• 1:16:09
  My accountant told me this.
• 1:16:10
  I don't know if it's true, but I'm going to take his word as gospel.
• 1:16:12
  I think you said the big four accounting firms have marketing budgets of just flat zero.
• 1:16:17
  It's very much word of mouth and referrals.
• 1:16:19
  Yeah.
• 1:16:21
  And then there's some other industries or certain products that the economics of running ads just doesn't make sense.
• 1:16:27
  Like you'll just lose money on days.
• 1:16:28
  I'll give you a perfect example.
• 1:16:29
  This is a very ridiculous example.
• 1:16:32
  This person that wanted to be a client, but he sold shoelaces for $2.
• 1:16:37
  $1.99 actually.
• 1:16:39
  I'm like, dude, this clicker is going to cost $3.
• 1:16:41
  $3.
• 1:16:43
  That's before we even get any purchases.
• 1:16:45
  I'm like, this isn't going to, sure, bundle them.
• 1:16:48
  Like, what, you get four shoelaces for $6?
• 1:16:50
  I'm like, we need a conversion rate of, like, 80% to make profit after gross profit margins.
• 1:16:58
  I've heard that for, like, cheaper CPG products, for example, if you can be profitable on, like, if you have, like, a positive ROAS, you're a unicorn.
• 1:17:09
  Oh, yeah, yeah.
• 1:17:10
  Especially with inflating advertising costs.
• 1:17:12
  Yeah, because now you've got to figure out how to have a healthier lifetime value of that customer.
• 1:17:19
  So that's why all the consumer goods that you buy in CPG is consumer packaged goods.
• 1:17:24
  All the consumer goods you buy, they all have subscriptions tied to them and they have bundles.
• 1:17:28
  It's because they're trying to grow their business with ads and they can't justify the cost unless you sign up for a year.
• 1:17:35
  Yep.
• 1:17:35
  Yeah, and CPMs can only go up.
• 1:17:37
  It's why whenever a new advertising platform comes about, it's like a gold rush.
• 1:17:41
  Like, remember when, like, Google, you got clicks for, like, a cent?
• 1:17:45
  All the people that made, like, Tai Lopez.
• 1:17:47
  Like, he just printed off of that, yeah.
• 1:17:53
  Everyone's going to say it's ChatGPT.
• 1:17:55
  It's not very good now, and I haven't heard very good feedback about it.
• 1:17:58
  But to be clear, pretty much no ad platform is fantastic when it first comes out.
• 1:18:04
  The first couple advertisers are absolutely guinea pigs.
• 1:18:07
  So it's a balance between...
• 1:18:09
  So you're talking about spending money to run ads on ChatGPT.
• 1:18:13
  Yeah, it's like a cost per click thing.
• 1:18:15
  But the balance is spending money on a platform that's early doesn't have its ad system figured out yet versus getting a way more expensive cost per click or cost per whatever on like a Google or a Meta.
• 1:18:27
  Like Facebook really, Facebook and Google really have a massive competitive moat because their algorithms have been trained with...
• 1:18:35
  billions or potentially trillions of dollars of ad spend, whereas Chajibiji just popped up.
• 1:18:40
  And sure, it has lots of data on people, but it has gotten no results in person.
• 1:18:46
  Is there more like a Bing or something like that?
• 1:18:52
  You know what I love about Bing?
• 1:18:54
  Are there places that work well but are less busy?
• 1:18:59
  and less expensive?
• 1:19:00
  At least in Australia, TikTok, but their conversion tracking is not great and their algorithm is not great.
• 1:19:06
  I'm not a big fan of LinkedIn ads.
• 1:19:08
  I haven't seen anyone, like, really print with LinkedIn ads.
• 1:19:12
  But then again, like, you'll be able to make, like...
• 1:19:15
  When you factor in LTV and things like that, I wouldn't try and overcomplicate it.
• 1:19:19
  Just stick with Meta and Google.
• 1:19:21
  Meta is...
• 1:19:22
  I don't think people understand how incredible Facebook is at predicting human behavior on the internet.
• 1:19:30
  Dre bought...
• 1:19:32
  a little carry-on luggage bag that I got.
• 1:19:35
  You ever had a dream about a product and then you get an ad for it the next day?
• 1:19:39
  Yeah.
• 1:19:40
  How else could you possibly do that?
• 1:19:42
  It's like, it's following you everywhere, has so much data.
• 1:19:46
  It's like, oh, you probably want this in the morning.
• 1:19:49
  And then shows me the perfect carry-on travel bag.
• 1:19:52
  You've gone through all these identity shifts in your career.
• 1:19:55
  And you mentioned that one shift, there's been many, but the one shift is when you came to Miami and you saw like what was possible.
• 1:20:02
  And then you just, you know, pedal to the metal, hitting your million dollars.
• 1:20:06
  And that was, I guess, the first time when you made a significant amount of money.
• 1:20:11
  Like, I mean, $500,000 is still a significant amount, but when you are really turning it up.
• 1:20:15
  So what was the mindset shift?
• 1:20:17
  I want to talk about because you speak about a few different mental models that I think will be useful for entrepreneurs that have shaped who you are as a successful founder.
• 1:20:24
  So what was that mindset shift, the before and the after?
• 1:20:28
  What did you think before about business, money, and then was that coming to Miami just opened a world of possibility to you or how do you describe it?
• 1:20:37
  Yeah, the first thing was that at least coming to Miami and visually seeing everything just opened my eyes up to what's possible.
• 1:20:43
  But one of the biggest shifts that happened with me around money is, particularly in Australia, making money is viewed as almost evil.
• 1:20:52
  or selfish, but there's a lot of unselfish things that you can do with money that you cannot do when you come from a place of poverty.
• 1:20:59
  So for example, when you have extra cash flow, you can donate to charities that you really like.
• 1:21:04
  So for example, in Australia, they have a...
• 1:21:07
  They have like a cat adoption service called Cat Haven.
• 1:21:11
  I swear to God, they must have me on some email list where I'm just tagged.
• 1:21:14
  Like, don't you know, if they send me a photo of an ugly cat, I'm definitely donating money.
• 1:21:20
  I'm like, oh man, look at this poor cat.
• 1:21:21
  And then I just like Apple ID, pay IDs.
• 1:21:24
  Right?
• 1:21:24
  You can't do that when you're worried paycheck to paycheck.
• 1:21:28
  Right?
• 1:21:29
  Right.
• 1:21:29
  One of the other things I really like doing is sponsoring fighters.
• 1:21:31
  Like I sponsored Cody Haddon, who's in the UFC.
• 1:21:34
  And at first, like the way that came about was so Cody trains me in wrestling.
• 1:21:39
  And Zach, who's my full-time trainer, is his striking coach.
• 1:21:42
  And Zach just made a passing comment.
• 1:21:43
  He's like, oh, Cody's got a fight coming up.
• 1:21:45
  Like if you know any sponsors, just let us know.
• 1:21:47
  I was like, oh, how much does he need?
• 1:21:49
  He told me the numbers.
• 1:21:50
  Oh, yeah, sick.
• 1:21:50
  Like I'll do it.
• 1:21:51
  And I was like, sure.
• 1:21:52
  I'm like, yeah, of course.
• 1:21:53
  Like we're mates.
• 1:21:54
  And then I didn't realize sponsors getting fired.
• 1:21:57
  I'm sorry.
• 1:21:57
  Fighters getting sponsored was a big deal.
• 1:21:59
  I was just like, I genuinely was just trying to help out a mate.
• 1:22:01
  And then I told Zach, I was like, yeah, like Cody.
• 1:22:04
  And he goes, no, I want you to tell him.
• 1:22:05
  I'm like, just tell his manager.
• 1:22:06
  Like he needs the money now.
• 1:22:07
  He's got to book flights.
• 1:22:08
  He goes, no, we'll tell him tomorrow.
• 1:22:09
  I was like, all right.
• 1:22:10
  And then when Cody rocked up with Zach and then our other mate, Bond, came, I was like, what are you doing here?
• 1:22:15
  I was like, I want to see Cody's reaction.
• 1:22:17
  I was like, what?
• 1:22:18
  And I told him and he was like, and then Zach told me, I think the next day that apparently when after training, he got in the car and apparently he called his manager Jazz.
• 1:22:25
  And it was like, I feel like this massive weight has been lifted off of my shoulders.
• 1:22:28
  I was like, I had no idea.
• 1:22:30
  And then I talked to some people like, yeah, dude, there's no money in fighting.
• 1:22:34
  There's no money.
• 1:22:35
  So them getting sponsored is like this massive deal.
• 1:22:37
  Wow.
• 1:22:38
  And so...
• 1:22:39
  I think actually I've heard that people give, like, Dana White shit for this, no?
• 1:22:44
  Yeah, I think that's because my understanding is only the fighter and one coach gets their flights paid for, and I think they only get a few days of accommodation.
• 1:22:53
  Whereas if Cody's traveling from Perth to the U.S.,
• 1:22:57
  And flying over his team and giving him the best chance of success so he's not rocking up jet-lagged a day or two before his fight.
• 1:23:04
  Me being able to pay for flights, longer accommodation, can help out.
• 1:23:08
  He won his flight in Macau, and his head coach, Rommel, messaged me.
• 1:23:14
  And it was like, bro, just like thanking me and stuff like that.
• 1:23:16
  I was like, no, dude, thank you.
• 1:23:17
  Like, there's a lot of dumb shit you can do with money.
• 1:23:19
  Like, I've bought cars and dumb accessories and stuff like that.
• 1:23:23
  But like the coolest thing I've ever done with my money, I swear to God, hand to heart, coolest thing I've ever done with my money is pay for the lads.
• 1:23:30
  To go on a lads trip to some random foreign country, bash some dude I've never met in my life, still don't know his name.
• 1:23:36
  And I get to watch it live on TV.
• 1:23:37
  That was the sickest thing I've ever done with my money.
• 1:23:40
  What else did you notice when your agency started making more money?
• 1:23:44
  Um, the weird thing I'm going for this weird identity crisis at the moment.
• 1:23:49
  We talked about identity a lot.
• 1:23:51
  Um, for the last half decade, really decade.
• 1:23:56
  me being productive and grinding looked like sitting at a laptop, furiously typing for like hours on end.
• 1:24:02
  But now that I have like a really talented team in place, being productive is not sitting at a laptop typing stuff out.
• 1:24:08
  If I need something done, I send a message on Slack.
• 1:24:10
  I get messaged three hours later saying it's done.
• 1:24:13
  Arguably better than if I had done it myself with my split attention.
• 1:24:17
  So now being productive...
• 1:24:20
  looks like sitting in a chair and trying to think clearly and make one or two really good decisions a day but that looks weird and I feel guilty like the team knows this because sometimes I'll be like sitting in my bat cave chain smoking cigars and a team member will come downstairs to ask me a question and it looks like I'm goofing off it looks like I'm just slacking but I'm like I'm trying to
• 1:24:45
  see through time and think of like eighth and ninth order consequences of this one decision and i like i honestly i feel guilty that is that is the word i would use is i feel guilty because it looks like i'm goofing off but fortunately like because i've communicated this to the team they know like i'm just trying to think but why do you feel guilty for delegation yeah i don't know it's one of those things i really got to work on it's because if i talk about i was thinking about it this morning again because i was feeling guilty
• 1:25:13
  If I talk about how hard that I work and how it's important that everyone works hard, if I'm not doing that style of work, I feel guilty.
• 1:25:22
  It's just, I'm still working on it.
• 1:25:24
  The only way you would ever be able to scale, ironically, is to delegate and not do hands-on keyboard work 24-7.
• 1:25:31
  Yeah, exactly.
• 1:25:33
  Like I was talking to Aiden, who's like my only person in the marketing department at the moment, about who we're going to hire next.
• 1:25:39
  And I've been thinking this in the back of my mind for the last few weeks.
• 1:25:43
  I'm not a great CMO.
• 1:25:45
  I'm good at marketing, but I'm not a great CMO.
• 1:25:48
  And I was like, I think we need to hire a CMO because I'm a CMO for four hours a week.
• 1:25:53
  And like, it's not 40 hours of my attention.
• 1:25:55
  I'm four hours of CMO, then I'm filming ads, then I'm trying to think, then I'm CEO, then I'm overwatching this thing.
• 1:26:01
  If there's someone that like knew as much as me doing this 10 times more than I am, of course they'll do a better job than me at growing the marketing department of this business.
• 1:26:09
  All of their attention's on it.
• 1:26:10
  But my identity is the marketing guy.
• 1:26:12
  I've got an old book about it and everything like that.
• 1:26:14
  Wouldn't it be hypocritical?
• 1:26:15
  That's what's going through my head.
• 1:26:17
  How do you figure out as a founder what you want to delegate and hire for versus what you want to keep doing?
• 1:26:23
  The way that I approach it, and I'm not saying that my way is the best way, is I always try and delegate the things that I love doing and that I'm good at doing last.
• 1:26:33
  Right?
• 1:26:35
  So that's why the last department that I'm really in is the marketing department.
• 1:26:41
  I'm not in the product department anymore.
• 1:26:42
  Finance was the first thing I got removed from.
• 1:26:45
  I think it's probably smart.
• 1:26:48
  I'm non-operations.
• 1:26:52
  Marketing is the last...
• 1:26:54
  Right now, the all chart, I sit as CEO and CMO.
• 1:26:58
  But if I really want to grow this company, I can't be CMO and CEO at the same time.
• 1:27:04
  You speak a lot about deleting things.
• 1:27:05
  So I think that, you know, we're talking about delegating.
• 1:27:08
  Delegating is also deleting tasks.
• 1:27:10
  But you've also deleted parts of your personality, deleted, you know, things that you're doing in the day to day that don't serve you.
• 1:27:16
  So why is deleting things so important?
• 1:27:19
  I'll ask that because I want you to talk about.
• 1:27:23
  the mindset of deleting.
• 1:27:25
  So sort of like addition through subtraction.
• 1:27:27
  Um, so that's the first part I want you to teach people.
• 1:27:30
  But the second thing is what have you deleted in your life that people would be surprised about?
• 1:27:35
  Yeah.
• 1:27:36
  So there's mastery and simplicity.
• 1:27:37
  And this is something that I've been talking about and thinking about a lot for the last couple of weeks and months.
• 1:27:42
  There's this, you probably know, and Jiro Ono.
• 1:27:46
  I don't know him.
• 1:27:46
  No.
• 1:27:47
  So he's this like legendary sushi chef.
• 1:27:49
  I was watching a podcast about him and, um,
• 1:27:54
  He's like the greatest sushi chef of all time.
• 1:27:56
  He's been doing it literally as...
• 1:27:57
  He might have passed away now, but he'd been doing it for like nine decades or something like that.
• 1:28:02
  Very minimalist restaurant.
• 1:28:03
  There's only a few ingredients, like a handful of ingredients that they have, but they just know the ingredients in crafting the sushi so well that it's just the greatest sushi on earth.
• 1:28:16
  Because when you try and learn, talking outside of food now, when you try and learn and do so many different things, it's just impossible for you to focus all of your attention on something.
• 1:28:28
  I'll give you another perfect example actually.
• 1:28:29
  So I did this Muay Thai training session with this guy called Ajan Watt in Thailand when I was there with Zach.
• 1:28:36
  And he's...
• 1:28:38
  It was interesting because he speaks English, but not well.
• 1:28:41
  It's not his first language, but I can only speak one language poorly.
• 1:28:45
  He can speak a little bit of English.
• 1:28:48
  And when he was giving me instructions, he had to do it with the limited English vocabulary that he had.
• 1:28:53
  But because he had limited words to choose from, I could very easily understand.
• 1:28:59
  He'd go, you control them.
• 1:29:01
  I know exactly what you mean.
• 1:29:03
  where like over communicating and over explaining simply wasn't an option because of the language barrier.
• 1:29:08
  And I thought about it a lot because there's a lot of things that people will add to their business and then they do all of them really, really poorly.
• 1:29:16
  Like we've grown as a business, both in quantity of clients and the quality of work they've done by just simply deleting stuff.
• 1:29:22
  So for example, when we're in all the ATO debt,
• 1:29:27
  We do about 100K a month and 75K a month was our done for you service.
• 1:29:32
  But then there were so many different packages you could choose from.
• 1:29:34
  It was all bloated and all this operational drag.
• 1:29:37
  And then we just had this one with you thing.
• 1:29:39
  And then we just cut out like 75% of what we offered and just focused on this one thing.
• 1:29:45
  And even then and that, like we focus on fewer and fewer types of customers.
• 1:29:48
  It used to be service-based and e-commerce.
• 1:29:50
  Like, all right, we're better at service.
• 1:29:51
  Let's just do service-based businesses.
• 1:29:52
  That's where you said no to 90% of outside of the different categories of customers.
• 1:29:57
  Also the wrong fits.
• 1:29:58
  You're just like hyper-focused on what works.
• 1:29:59
  People think I'm lying when I say we reject people every day.
• 1:30:02
  We reject people every day.
• 1:30:03
  Like if we're not confident, this is an absolute home run for you.
• 1:30:06
  We just won't let you in.
• 1:30:08
  And so we just focus on fewer and fewer customers.
• 1:30:11
  I actually made a post actually in our school community two weeks ago.
• 1:30:14
  I was nervous about making it because what I had done was, so we have advisory calls for members, right?
• 1:30:20
  They're like calls you can go onto for support.
• 1:30:22
  We've got like MetaCalls, Google calls, all that stuff.
• 1:30:24
  But then I started adding guest speakers.
• 1:30:27
  So I went, oh, my mate's good at organic content.
• 1:30:29
  I'll let them do a weekly call with him.
• 1:30:31
  Oh, my AI guys, I'll let them do calls with them.
• 1:30:34
  Oh, like this other person.
• 1:30:35
  And so I just added stuff onto the business
• 1:30:38
  because I thought I was adding more value.
• 1:30:40
  And then I realized my mistake.
• 1:30:43
  The business has gotten better the more I deleted stuff.
• 1:30:45
  And so I made a post in the school that I was nervous about making.
• 1:30:47
  I said, I accidentally made the program worse, but I've fixed it now.
• 1:30:52
  And so I said, I accidentally added all these calls
• 1:30:56
  I'm going to delete all of them.
• 1:30:57
  You're not going to get them anymore because I think I just need you to focus on getting your ads on and making them do well because that's what you paid us to do.
• 1:31:04
  I was expecting backlash and everyone was like, yeah, actually, it was kind of overwhelming.
• 1:31:08
  I felt like I was missing out on stuff.
• 1:31:10
  This is a good call.
• 1:31:12
  It's so funny how your perception as a founder is so different than what your customers see.
• 1:31:18
  Like you think as a founder, you want to do more, you want to give more, you want to give more options.
• 1:31:23
  And then your customer is like, no.
• 1:31:24
  Yeah, just make my ads do well.
• 1:31:27
  Yeah, I think that also that's a big issue with founders in general.
• 1:31:30
  Sometimes we get so in our head and we have to for a second just pause and like zoom out and remove ourselves from like the business and objectively look at what we're doing and think is this actually serving the most urgent important.
• 1:31:44
  Right?
• 1:31:44
  Like the Pareto's principle, what's the 20% that's going to lead to the 80%.
• 1:31:49
  And I think that more often than not, most founders, they do succumb to shiny object syndrome and they just keep doing more and more and more and more because they're just trying everything.
• 1:31:58
  Yeah.
• 1:31:59
  Do you know Kaizen philosophy?
• 1:32:01
  Yeah, so it's just like 1% better at a few things.
• 1:32:03
  That's what I'm trying to really focus on now.
• 1:32:05
  Like I have literally every single thing that a customer experiences on a mirror board.
• 1:32:10
  It's like clicks, add, converts on this landing page.
• 1:32:12
  Like literally every single thing they're experiencing.
• 1:32:14
  And I just look at it from time to time and go, which one's the worst right now?
• 1:32:18
  And rather than trying to add stuff, I just like look at one of the little post-it notes and go, how can we make that less clicks or like easier to access without adding post-it notes?
• 1:32:26
  So it's like the deletion and the boundaries.
• 1:32:30
  So you're creating boundaries about what's important.
• 1:32:31
  You're deleting everything else.
• 1:32:32
  And that's forcing you to hyper-focus on that.
• 1:32:35
  And that's going to make it that much better.
• 1:32:37
  How do we go from here to here in as few clicks as possible?
• 1:32:41
  I like that a lot.
• 1:32:43
  I like that a lot.
• 1:32:44
  You know, I've always... A couple ideas that I hate.
• 1:32:47
  I hate the idea to diversify in business or in investment at the beginning.
• 1:32:52
  Yeah.
• 1:32:53
  Because how everybody who I know who's made a shit ton of money, like in the hundreds of millions or I've interviewed billionaires, they made it doing one thing.
• 1:33:02
  One thing, like hyper focus.
• 1:33:04
  And all the stupid advice about diversify and... Side hustles.
• 1:33:08
  Yeah, it's like, no, just do one thing better than anyone else and you'll make more money than you know what to do with.
• 1:33:13
  Yeah.
• 1:33:13
  But people are so, Hermose speaks about this a lot.
• 1:33:17
  He's like, you know, the average entrepreneur who's unsuccessful starts something, it gets hard, they give up.
• 1:33:23
  They start the next thing, it gets hard, they give up.
• 1:33:25
  And then he'd repeat that cycle for the rest of their life.
• 1:33:29
  You speak about, so your goal is to hit $100 million a year in three years.
• 1:33:34
  Right now you're roughly about, you know, 20 to 20, $25 million per year-ish ballpark.
• 1:33:38
  So...
• 1:33:44
  You speak about how founders hit a number, they get comfortable and they stop.
• 1:33:52
  Now, two thoughts on this.
• 1:33:55
  Why do people stop once they spend so much of their life and their energy building something?
• 1:33:59
  Why does somebody stop?
• 1:34:00
  Why do they say this is, or why do they subconsciously think this is enough?
• 1:34:04
  But also, is that a bad thing?
• 1:34:06
  I guess the point that I'm getting to is, how do you know what your number actually is?
• 1:34:11
  I still don't know.
• 1:34:12
  I can't lie to you and say that I know the answer to this question because even when I pick that number out, I've had conversations where I'm like, well, if we get to 100, why don't we just spend another two years to get a quarter billion?
• 1:34:25
  And then we're already quarter way there.
• 1:34:27
  Why don't we just go to a billion?
• 1:34:28
  I don't know the answer yet.
• 1:34:30
  I think the reason for that is I'm 30 years old.
• 1:34:33
  The amount of experience I've had compared to significantly more successful entrepreneurs is dwarfed by them.
• 1:34:41
  I don't have an answer.
• 1:34:42
  I think if I gave you an answer, it would be naive.
• 1:34:44
  I think I have enough.
• 1:34:45
  I don't have enough of an ego to say I know the answer to that one.
• 1:34:47
  Do you think about, in all seriousness, more money, more problems than what you want your life to actually look like?
• 1:34:56
  I thought about this a lot.
• 1:34:58
  Vivian too, your rich BFF on like YouTube, she has a good following, she speaks about finance.
• 1:35:02
  And I think her number is 20 million cash, because if you invest that conservatively, 4% will allow you to live off the dividends and give you like a very, very comfortable life in terms of what you can actually spend per year.
• 1:35:17
  But I think that not enough people go through that exercise about figuring what they want their life to look like.
• 1:35:22
  And also,
• 1:35:24
  20 million cash is a massive amount of money for most people.
• 1:35:27
  But we're just we're speaking about people that are super ambitious, that are looking to sell their company.
• 1:35:30
  If you're doing 25 million in revenue, you're getting a multiple on that.
• 1:35:33
  You're getting a decent sized exit after tax.
• 1:35:36
  Yeah, it's cut down a little bit.
• 1:35:37
  If you took investment, it's cut down a little bit.
• 1:35:38
  If you have partners, it's cut down a little bit.
• 1:35:40
  But you're still thinking about, OK, what's the amount of cash I want on my bank account if I exit or if maybe I don't want to exit?
• 1:35:46
  Maybe I like, but the point is, you also have to know where you want to live.
• 1:35:51
  Is it 20 million paying 4% in New York or 20 million paying 4% in Perth or 20 million paying 4% in Bali, right?
• 1:36:00
  So I think people don't map out their lives enough.
• 1:36:02
  This is something I'm struggling with because I've been trying to map this out for the last couple of weeks and months.
• 1:36:08
  Because, and this is going to sound cocky, I hope that it doesn't.
• 1:36:13
  I look at goals as being goals, doing goals, having goals.
• 1:36:17
  In terms of doing and having, I'm not going to lie.
• 1:36:22
  I kind of have everything that I want and I'm doing things that I love doing.
• 1:36:27
  Like, I don't really like traveling on holidays anymore.
• 1:36:30
  It frustrates me because...
• 1:36:32
  Like, honestly, for me to leave my postcode, the house that I like with the view that I have, the Batcave that I get to train in, I love what I do.
• 1:36:40
  Like, my average Tuesday afternoon is gangster.
• 1:36:43
  If I went to, like, 18-year-old Bren, and I'm like, bro, you drive your two dream supercars and you're literally LARPing as Bruce Wayne, you'd be like, sick, let's do that forever.
• 1:36:54
  And then you take me out of that, I go somewhere else that I have less cars and I can't train, and it's just like, my holidays are admittedly a downgrade.
• 1:37:00
  The thing that I'm trying to focus on now...
• 1:37:03
  is who do I be?
• 1:37:04
  But that's very difficult to write out because it's easy for me to write down, train twice a day, try and live as Batman, have this car, have this house and stuff like that.
• 1:37:16
  But the being thing is a little bit difficult because...
• 1:37:20
  it's not, I think it's not visual, right?
• 1:37:22
  So it's like, who do I want to be?
• 1:37:23
  So I want to be someone that's helpful and enables people to achieve their goals.
• 1:37:26
  That's why I like sponsoring fighters.
• 1:37:27
  Right.
• 1:37:28
  And so how much money do I need to be the person that I want to be?
• 1:37:32
  I haven't figured that number out yet.
• 1:37:34
  It's like, what, how much money do I need to start the literal league of shadows and just sponsor like the best fighters in Australia?
• 1:37:41
  How much money do I need for that?
• 1:37:42
  So this season of, in this season of your life, that's your goal.
• 1:37:46
  Yeah.
• 1:37:46
  That's the thing.
• 1:37:47
  It's going to change and it could change next year.
• 1:37:50
  And I think the approach that I've got, for the time being anyway, in my 30-year-old naivety is I'm going to keep doing things and optimizing for fun.
• 1:37:59
  That's what I like doing, is just optimizing for fun.
• 1:38:02
  And right now, driving a McLaren that spits fire and then doing Krav Maga on a Friday morning before work, that's fun for me.
• 1:38:10
  You optimize for fun.
• 1:38:12
  What happens when somebody optimizes for comfort in their life?
• 1:38:15
  Yeah, like I used to optimize for comfort a lot.
• 1:38:18
  Like ages 18 to 25, I was probably... How much heavier was I, Dre?
• 1:38:24
  Like 30 kilos heavier?
• 1:38:25
  Oh, boy.
• 1:38:26
  Yeah, yeah.
• 1:38:27
  I was a big guy.
• 1:38:27
  I was optimizing for comfort.
• 1:38:30
  I didn't train.
• 1:38:30
  I think if someone had...
• 1:38:33
  known me at age 21 and they did not see me at all and then saw me today they certainly wouldn't recognize me like who was this person very very different change like even dre's nodding um optimizing for comfort just sets you in like the middle of the bell curve and so
• 1:38:48
  You can't grow from a place of comfort.
• 1:38:51
  All the growth happens from places of discomfort.
• 1:38:53
  It's why when you go to the gym, you had to put your muscles through stress so that they grow back bigger.
• 1:38:58
  I preach this to the team every single monthly company-wide meeting.
• 1:39:03
  All of us sit somewhere on a bell curve and your behavior sits on a bell curve as well.
• 1:39:07
  You are constantly trying to push
• 1:39:10
  yourself to the right of the bell curve because you'll just find this new area of oh i didn't know that was possible and then that will become your new standard but until then nigh realism we're talking about about an hour ago your brain will just make up a story and agree with it and if the if the agreement in your head and the story in your head is this is all that you're capable of you're going to behave in a way that proves that you're right i love that um
• 1:39:35
  On the book, you have David holding Goliath's head.
• 1:39:40
  Who is Goliath?
• 1:39:41
  Well, this is one of the things I like about the cover.
• 1:39:44
  So I talk about in the book, advertising is an art versus science.
• 1:39:48
  So the art is in advertising anyway.
• 1:39:51
  You can do or say whatever you want.
• 1:39:53
  and people will interpret it differently.
• 1:39:55
  So people are going to look at this cover and interpret it differently.
• 1:39:58
  It could be that they're David and Goliath is their agency.
• 1:40:02
  It could be that Goliath is their competitor.
• 1:40:04
  There's so many different...
• 1:40:05
  It could be that I look at it and go, that's me with the rest of the industry.
• 1:40:09
  I was going to say Goliath could be your own ego too.
• 1:40:11
  It could be.
• 1:40:11
  There's so many different ways it could be interpreted, right?
• 1:40:13
  That's the beauty of art is you can look at it and interpret it all differently.
• 1:40:17
  Where do you want to send people?
• 1:40:18
  Where do you want to send people on social, website?
• 1:40:22
  I'll put all the links in the show notes.
• 1:40:23
  Yeah, just whereyou.com.au.
• 1:40:25
  You'll be able to find everything there.
• 1:40:26
  What's your handle on Instagram?
• 1:40:28
  Like brand only ads.
• 1:40:30
  The last thing I want to leave the audience with, you've learned so much over your career.
• 1:40:35
  You don't have kids yet.
• 1:40:37
  Do you want kids at some point?
• 1:40:38
  So at one point in your life, you're going to have to pass down the most important piece of advice to your kids.
• 1:40:44
  What do you want to teach them?
• 1:40:45
  What do you want to leave them with and why?
• 1:40:49
  I said it before, but the way you do something is the way that you do everything.
• 1:40:52
  So the way that this shows up in staff members, for example, is what I'm trying to work out when I interview someone is what do you like on the weekend?
• 1:40:59
  Because given enough time, you're just going to revert back to your average.
• 1:41:03
  Like if you're just a degenerate drinker on the weekend, sure, for a period of time, you'll be able to put your goody two shoes on, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday to Friday.
• 1:41:12
  But if you get a little bit of comfort, you're going to slip a little bit.
• 1:41:15
  And so you should be optimizing your life and thinking,
• 1:41:19
  How can I optimize my behavior outside of the activities that I'm trying to get better at so that when I get to those activities, it's just way easier.
• 1:41:28
  And what would be the lesson that you would tell your younger self?
• 1:41:30
  I don't think I would tell him anything.
• 1:41:34
  I think that I had to go through all of that to learn all of those things myself.
• 1:41:39
  And to be honest, with the ego that I had at 20 years old, if 30-year-old Brandon came in and said, hey, bro, go do this, 20-year-old Brandon wouldn't listen.
• 1:41:46
  He'll just learn the hard way, but he'll get through it.