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Founders Are Working on the Wrong Things · The Expert Method

• speaker-0: A lot of businesses don't stall because they lack strategy. They stall because the founder slowly stops facing the market. You start spending more time on systems, tools, and internal work and less time talking to real people, your customers. Then, growth slows down even though you are working more. So with that, I'm excited to be joined today by Kelly Roach. Kelly is a business coach who has built multiple companies to eight figures by focusing on what actually drives revenue, not what looks impressive on the surface. In our conversation, we discuss why most founders overcomplicate growth, how staying close to the market creates momentum and helps you to identify the gaps where you can fit in and create more value and what it actually takes to build trust in a crowded space. If you get value from this conversation, be sure to subscribe and share it with a friend. And now here is my conversation with Kelly Roach. Kelly, thank you so much for being here. speaker-1: So happy to be here. speaker-0: Kelly, a lot of your teaching seems to come back to simplifying growth into a few core revenue drivers instead of adding more tactics, which can be the fun stuff that you see a lot on social media. But when you look at a business that feels stuck or plateaued, how do you determine what the real revenue drivers are in that business? And then secondly, what tends to be distracting them from those fundamentals? speaker-1: Yeah, absolutely. And I love that this is the first question that you asked because I have a phrase that I use often, which is that eight figure CEOs obsess over the basic fundamentals that six figure entrepreneurs are too advanced for. And I myself have built an eight figure company. I've helped multiple other people build eight figure companies. My background is in working for a billion dollar fortune 500. So to your point, when a business is stuck, Typically it is because there is too many barriers between the business and the people that it's meant to serve. many times what's happening is in the pursuit of shortcuts and in the pursuit of tools and strategies that are going to amplify or automate or accelerate the business, what happens is the business owner and the team spend less and less time market facing. and more and more time internal facing. And you can basically assess what the growth rate of a company is going to be based on how much time they spend market facing versus how much time they spend internally. And so that's a huge one. And then you said, how do you determine, like, what are the levers that you have to pull to get a business growing? Well, the first thing that you want to look at is, like, historically, where has their 80 % that came from their 20 % come from, right? We know that 80-20 is in everything. So 80 % of your growth has always come from 20 % of your activities. You can always look back in order to project forward. If a business has had 80 % of its success from referrals and they were only getting those referrals organically, but they had no outbound marketing program to multiply and duplicate that, a business can probably 10x its growth on that strategy alone. And you could take literally any kind of business and you could look at what is the 80 that came from the 20, multiply that strategically and see growth right away. But I go back to my first point, which is that usually when a business is stuck, it's because people are working really, really hard on the wrong things. speaker-0: From what I'm hearing, sounds like you reach a point in your business, maybe you're plateauing, but you feel like you always need to be innovating, right? Doing something different. It's like the whole idea of what got me here won't get me there. But what you're saying is that you should really look back at, what has worked for me in getting me to where I am and how can we just do more of that instead of inventing some new thing that we haven't actually done. Why not just look back at what has worked so far and just do more of that. speaker-1: And the thing is, the innovation and the reinvention can happen within that core strategy, right? So a lot of times what people do is they strategy hop and they tactic hop, which means they're always a beginner at everything. They're always starting over all the time. They never develop mastery, which is why so few businesses actually scale. You have to run a very significant amount of reps. to develop the mastery that's gonna give you the momentum and the velocity that's ultimately gonna scale a business. People choose many times to pivot into something new instead of reinventing and innovating within the thing that's already working. A lot of times when one little thing shifts and that thing that you had been doing is no longer working the same way, people are like, okay, we're gonna go do this other thing. Instead of saying, okay, let's assess what's the next like 10 degree shift that we need to make that's not only gonna get this working, as well as it was before, but even better, because a lot of times there's a core fundamental behind that that's timeless. And I think that's the part that people miss is like, there are timeless principles that are always going to work in business. And so many times people are layering these like ultra complex strategies on top of this very shaky foundation. And so it's like, no matter how much they keep layering, it's just kind of like digging a deeper hole. It's not actually moving the business forward. speaker-0: And one of those timeless business principles is the power of compounding, right? And doing something for a long time and being able to tap into that compound growth. you just kind of got to stick with it. A lot of what you're saying reminds me of a quote from Charlie Munger. Most of the things that I do on a day-to-day basis is just protecting me from myself, right? This is like me making these decisions that completely throw things off. Sometimes you just got to like let it go and just stay boring, if you will, but just like keep doing the same things and just stay out of your own way. because a lot of times we'll get involved and we'll shake things up and we'll just over complicate stuff. And then we end up being the, you know, causing all these problems. speaker-1: You're exactly right. And I think that, you know, for most businesses, they're doing a lot of the right things, but they're so chaotic and they're so diluted in their focus that they could take any one or any two or three of those things that they're already doing and do them really well and actually begin to create velocity and scale. But because they're doing a hundred things, nothing's really working. And so they keep trying more and more things because nothing's working. But it wasn't that the strategy or the tactic couldn't work. It's that they're not doing enough of any one thing for it to work. And that's the part that people miss. I say this all the time. Like everybody thinks it's about picking the right tactic or picking the right strategy. They all work. You could go research and find someone that's doing any strategy that you can find and they're killing it. But the thing that's different about that is that the person who's killing it with that thing is being absolutely relentless. are ruthless. They are doing that thing at such a high level with so much intensity that it's like, of course it's working. Like you bang a hammer against a wall enough times you're gonna get old, right? And I think that's what people miss is they just keep starting over and starting over instead of being like, okay, let me apply some critical thinking here. Slow down. Where can we intensify to multiply? speaker-0: really just comes down to focus. Just like pick one thing where you could make any one thing work, whether that's the strategy for generating leads, you could do mailers, you could do cold outreach, you could do cold calling, could do whatever. You could pick any strategy, any tactic, and if you just focused on that one thing, you could make it work. But all of that value and your ability to make it work doesn't come in the first, second, third attempt, right? It's the thousandth, fifteen hundredth, five thousandth iteration of doing that same thing. which is where you're gonna tap into that mastery and really get any one thing to work. It's just being bad and sucking is just a part of any journey. But one thing that you had mentioned is a lot of business owners, a lot of founders can spend too much time inward facing as opposed to market facing. It sounds like you want to spend more time market facing, is that right? So like what do those two things look like and what do market facing activities? speaker-1: Yeah, so market-facing activities are when you're directly interacting with your market. It's as simple as it sounds. So basically, what are we talking about? You could be doing a live stream. You could be doing a webinar. You could be doing a sales presentation. You could be running an in-person meetup or event. You could be on the phone with a prospect. You could be doing a podcast interview. You could be doing a summit, right? There's endless things. But it is you interfacing with the people that you would like to know, like, and trust you to buy from you. We know, and we have statistics, that it takes between seven and 11 hours of someone consuming your content to feel a state of trust and readiness to buy. And what so many founders do is they start off in the beginning of their business, and they're all over the place, right? They are market-facing. They're talking to prospects. They're booking calls. They're getting out there. They're getting visible. And then as the business starts to get more established and starts to grow, they pull back more and more and more. And now they're working on systems and now they're working on automations and now they're working on evergreening this and automating that. And now they're managing the team. And all of a sudden the business completely stalls out because the thing that was driving the business forward was people discovering them and falling in love with the brand and consuming their content in some way, or form that led to people being ready to buy. But I will say that is not just specific to the founder. One of my biggest things that I focus on with businesses is not just the skill process. It's building winning teams to break founder dependency. One of the key things, like I have someone on my team that is the president of a few of my companies. She runs them completely independently. I'm not the face of the brand. My name isn't even, or my picture used in association with those brands. She is the person that is the driver for that business, right? So it doesn't need to be the owner of the business. but the same thing happens with the team that happens with the founder. And now everyone's hidden behind the business and everyone's internal facing. They're in meetings with each other. They're talking to each other about what they're going to do. It's like best laid plans, right? But then where's the execution? speaker-0: what you're saying hits pretty close to home for me in my business. Because you know, like when I started this business, right, I was out doing workshops every single week. I was just talking to people. was just trying to create as much momentum. right. And then now, at the end of last year, speaker-1: Now you're like, I need to run the business. speaker-0: Yeah, I need to build out the click up operating system to make sure that all projects are flowing seamlessly through this pipeline and we know the current status of everything. And when I spent a couple of weeks doing all of that stuff, I noticed that, wait, I'm not actually talking to any customers right now and I don't have any new business coming into the door. So yeah, I fell into that exact trap. speaker-1: Listen, everybody does. That's why we're talking about it, right? And that's where you then have to assess as a CEO, highest and best use of your time and energy. Like for me, I run multiple companies. I took my first company to eight figures. I built other companies that are seven figures, six figures. My highest and best is doing what we're doing right now. It's being on camera. It's serving. It's teaching. It's talking to people. It's being market facing. I have a whole team of people that they can work on the automations and the email sequences and the copywriting and the branding and all day long. But I know highest and best for me is getting out there and building the brand. And I think that's what happens to all of us, right? Is like, first we start doing that, then we get pulled into the business. Then we're like, we need to do all these things, but then we have to reassess again and say, okay, if we want to take this brand to the next level, there has to be, we to cast a wider net. We have to make a bigger imprint in the market, touch and reach. more people so that we can serve more people and have more growing customers. So we have to kind of keep giving ourselves a promotion to elevate up again where we're spending our time. speaker-0: how did you realize that this was what you were most effective at? Is it something that you just, you really enjoy this? You found that it was kind of required of you because everybody associated your brand with your face. You had to be in this situation or how did you kind of find that? Because a part of effectively delegating is just working your way into your zone of genius or what you're uniquely great at and just putting yourself in the position where you can have the biggest impact and then hiring other people who are way better at doing these internal systems things or whatever. that is for you to take ownership of that. So how did you kind of discover that this was your zone? speaker-1: I built sales teams for a living. So like that's what I did before I came into the world of entrepreneurship. So I had a chance, I ran 17 locations and I had a team of a hundred people. So I had a chance on a very broad scale to observe like what happens when the team's market facing? What happens when the team's not market facing, right? How does volume of activity and volume of interface? affect growth rate and there's like a hundred percent correlation, right? The teams that are out front, they're meeting with customers, they're on the phone, they're having meetings, you know, they're making calls, they're growing. And the teams that aren't, they're fidgeting around doing paperwork and doing internal ops and all of that, they're not, right? So for me, it was just kind of lived experience. And then when I came into the online world, I was like, ⁓ my gosh, this is freaking amazing because the way we were used to doing it in corporate, everything was one-to-one. We didn't have all these tools that we have now to like, Go live to hundreds of people, be on a podcast and speak to thousands of people. Now we have all these mechanisms where we get to leverage our time being market-facing, whereas 20 years ago, everything was one-to-one. So we have a lot at our disposal now that makes it really easy to do this. speaker-0: Whether it's you or not, somebody within the organization needs to be performing the function of market facing. And that really does need to be the priority, right? The internal facing stuff is important, but not nearly as important as the market facing activities, which just need to happen. Me as more of like a systems thinker, I guess, like I definitely come up with any justification for why, no, I should just take this entire day and just focus on building out this funnel and like sequence and stuff. But it's just. that doesn't actually move the needle and that's in reality for my business just not the problem for me. It's not the problem that I should be following. speaker-1: And listen, it all comes down to also like who you want to surround yourself with in the business and what complimentary players you want to have and what you want your team structure to look like and all of that. Because if you were to have, you know, a right-hand person in the business that they just love to be market-facing. All they want to do is sell all day. They love to be on camera. They love talking to people, total extrovert. Hey, then maybe you do just focus on the internal stuff, but you need to make sure that you get your yin to your yang. You know what I'm saying? Like if it's not going to be you, it can't be like, it's not me and also it just doesn't happen. It has to be like, okay, it's not gonna be me, but I do have this person on my team that is excelling in this area and is gonna be the driver every day. You know I mean? speaker-0: Yeah, it's not exactly the same idea, but rhymes a little bit with the idea from the book Rocket Fuel, where in every successful organization, you have two personalities or two functions being performed, where you have the visionary who I would imagine is definitely the market-facing person, and then you have the implementer, who's the one in the back-end making sure that you can fulfill on that function and just makes things happen kind of thing. But I love it. You describe conviction marketing as leading with your deepest beliefs and using them to serve the market at a higher level. When that is done well, what does it actually change in the way that the business positions itself, attracts the right buyers, and stands apart in a crowded market? speaker-1: My experience was that I went from being no one to being a category leader in the business coaching space. I was very bold and convicted about my ideas of what I wanted to do differently. It was never about like other people being wrong or other, you know, leaders like falling short. It was about where I really saw the biggest gaps in the industry and what we were doing to address them. And we were very, very clear about what we were doing to address them at the time. When I came into the online marketing world as a business coach, I saw that there was a lot of mass market coaching programs where there was hundreds, sometimes thousands of people being thrown into these huge containers. And there was just no way that people were going to succeed because they weren't getting any of the hands-on customization, accountability, or support that was needed. And so I built my entire large scale coaching program around those three principles and the business just exploded. because we were the first to market, to really articulate what was wrong with the industry, not blaming or pointing fingers or being negative, but just saying, like, here's what's lacking and this is why you're not winning. This is what we're going to do differently. And here's how we're going to follow through on that promise. And we build our programming around that. And we've done that over and over and over and over again over the years. But yeah, conviction marketing is like... the strategy that's gonna allow you to become a category leader even in a zero barrier to entry space by creating this like ultimate feedback loop where you're building solutions better than anyone else is because you are obsessing over the gap in the way that people are being served. Like they're so caught up in like their ego, their brand, their product, their program, whatever. They're not even like thinking anymore about the people. Like that's why there's so many rising stars that just like implode in the online space because people can sell for a while. But then what happens is their turnover is so high that they can't scale or sustain the business profitably because they can't retain people. So conviction marketing is really about taking a step back and having this unique perspective on the opportunity to be of service at a higher level and then developing marketing that allows you to capitalize on that, but then making sure you're actually backing it up and what you deliver, which gives you this massive advantage in literally any market. And it's even easier to have an advantage now because there's zero barrier to entry, which means there's just like a lot of junk. There's a lot of junk. There's a lot of noise floating around. There's a lot of people that like are swimming around at the bottom and aren't really doing anything. There's not a lot of people up at those higher levels. So I think people need to like dream bigger and realize like, You need to say, why not me? People need to say, why not me? And not be like, ⁓ there's so many people. It's so saturated. It's so hard. It's like, yeah, there's a lot of people, but no one's really doing anything. Just get in there. Get in there and make it happen. speaker-0: The idea of conviction marketing and your dialogue around category. It's funny how whenever you read a book, right, you find ways to bring it up in every conversation. But like I just read through the, 22 immutable laws of marketing. And obviously the first law in there is the law of category. So it makes me think that, okay, so with conviction marketing, you are looking at the marketplace of existing solutions of products and services that exist within this market. And you're likely going to be a user of these things, right? If you're going to create a business. that solves a specific problem. Typically, the most successful businesses start because you, as a person, experience that problem and you're gonna come up with a way to find a solution. So you look at the marketplace of existing products and services and then you identify where are the gaps? Where is everybody missing something? And then you own that gap, like fixing that gap, solving that problem becomes then your category. Do I kind of have that right? Yep. Sweet. And then what you can then do per the... 22 immutable laws, and then also if you listen to your content, instead of selling yourself, selling your brand, you then sell and promote that category of solving that gap, right? And then that just becomes a lot more compelling in your messaging and in your marketing, which is awesome. So if we could kind of slow down and kind of go back to when you entered this space, what exactly were those gaps that you saw? And then what did you do to then kind of carve out your category? Like how did you message? once you identified that gap, and we're kind of building around that category. speaker-1: Absolutely. So I mean, I did it in multiple ways. going back to you as the systems person, Ian, I talk about the fact that you elevate the system as the celebrity. For me, I created the Live Launch and like literally for like 10 years, people called me the Live Launch Girl because I taught 100,000 people how to Live Launch and then they taught millions of people how to Live Launch and it just kept going and going and going. It was never about me. It was never about me. It was about... What's the gap in the market and how are we going to solve it better and different than anyone else is? So we approached it in two different ways when we were entering the market and looking to take category leadership. And by the way, what I'll say to everyone is like that category leadership can continue to evolve over the years. I've reinvented myself so many times as the market has shifted and changed. And as I've built different things, I keep reinventing myself. I keep establishing category leadership in different ways. But now it's almost like people come to me as the innovative leader that has the best pulse on the market, that people know they're going to get the relevant, timely strategies that are working right now. That's what we've become like the trusted name for. So you have to think about like, what is integrity for you and what do you want to be known for in the market, right? But we did it through the design of our program. And we also did it through the design of how we brought people into our program. And that was really, really smart. And we just did this again last year actually with the trust recession and the trust building offer, which really like blew up and we brought many, many people into that as well. So when we were first centering the market, we looked at the coaching space and we're like, okay, all these like really small one-on-one coaches that may or may not have the best strategies because they've never scaled a business themselves. So you can get super hands-on one-to-one, but you're getting super hands-on one-to-one from people that like have never scaled anything. And then there's the people that have scaled something that are only running these like massive multi-hundred, multi-thousand person programs where no one's going to have success because there's no hands-on accountability. There's no support. There's no custom tailoring to the strategy. It's like a one size fits all. And so there was this huge canyon in the middle of these two things. And we were like, well, we'll step in and take that. So we built the first large scale group coaching program where Every single person in this massive 500 person plus high ticket $30,000 program had a one-to-one accountability coach. Every single person. And we were the first people in the market to do this. And so they got to learn from me as someone that had scaled businesses before. So they got the benefit of that global large scale organization, but then they got the custom tailoring. They got the accountability. They got the personalized experience to take what I was teaching up here. and drill it down and apply it to their own business. And it was really the first time that that was done in that way in the online coaching space. And it just grew and grew and grew and grew. And it was so obvious when people heard it that they were like, duh. So that was the first time that we did it. And when we sold our programs, we just walked everybody through. Like, this is the problem. This is why you're struggling so much. This is why you keep signing up for great programs with great people, but you're not getting any results. Here's what we're doing about it. And people were like, yeah. Right? They're like, yeah, let's do that. And then, you we did the same thing again last year. You know, I was the first person that really came to market talking about the trust recession in the coaching space, in the business coaching space. I don't know where the word originally stemmed from. I don't know if I heard it somewhere else or where it came from. But I know I was the first person to speak about it in the online business coaching space. I was really like very open talking about like the decline of the economy, the contracting, know, wages, inflation, all the things that were happening while all my peers were pretending like everything was going great. Like everyone that was at my level was not even acknowledging what was going on. I came out of the market and I was like, let me tell you guys what's actually happening. And everyone's lying to you. Like here's what's really going on. And this is why. what you were doing isn't working anymore. And so I flipped our business model. I showed thousands of other people how to flip their business model. And I really created this thing called a trust building offer to really combat the trust recession. And so once again, people were like, yeah. And it's not that I'm genius. I just was speaking the truth in a market where no one had the balls, excuse me. to say what's going on and hey, here's a solution for what you can do about it. Everyone else just lied and pretended. And then what they did is at the beginning of the year, the beginning of 2026, we saw a huge surge of all the biggest brands. I'm shutting this down. I'm retiring from that. I'm closing this. We're not doing this anymore. And it's like, you people knew all along, but you were just trying to suck it dry. You didn't want to admit it. You didn't have a solution. You didn't make the effort to be a leader. and to actually have the conviction to say, you know what, I don't have all the answers, but this is what we're doing and this is how I feel like this can help you. And I feel like we've garnered a lot of trust in the market by speaking the truth about what's going on. And it doesn't mean that you always have the perfect solution. It doesn't mean that you're gonna have everything. You don't have a crystal ball, but I think that. For us, we're one of the only brands in the online space that this entire time since 2012, we've been able to keep rising, keep sustaining, keep growing. And I think a lot of it is that we're not on this pedestal of perfection. We're in the trenches with people. And I think that's a very different way of walking through the world. And I think it produces a different result. speaker-0: You know, obviously your customers have responded to that by continuing to buy from you because they know that you're going to be authentic. You're going to be honest. And I think when you put yourself in the shoes of somebody who has this huge program and they can see clear as day, because we all can, right? We're going through this contraction in the market, right? Times are tough, but they feel as though that that's a threat because they think that, okay, if they come out and they talk about it, people are going to say, They're not gonna buy it with stuff. Exactly, right. So you can kind of understand where they're coming from, but in reality that's just not... If you just pretend like that doesn't exist, like people aren't dumb. Like they're gonna be able to... speaker-1: Yeah, and I mean, I think that's the difference between brands that have a season of success and brands that endure. And to me, it's far more important that we endure sustainably than we have a season. And I think that's the other thing is like, it's just like, what kind of business do you want to build? But the Conviction Marketing book is really about helping people to identify their core values, be able to articulate their beliefs in a meaningful way. and then build a marketing system around that that allows them to be authentic and create in an authentic way that they feel excited and empowered to build their brand. Because I think a lot of what's happening, people just feel like they have to like comply or be complicit with like whatever's going on in their marketing. And like, I'm not talking about anything like political or social economic or anything. I'm talking about the trends. If I see one more AI post in my feed that tells me I'm going to be left behind and not have a business in six months if I don't become like AI everything, like I'm to lose my mind. And I don't believe that. What I believe and what I know is just like the internet, we use the internet all day every day for everything that we do. Guess what? AI is going to be built into every solution, every tool, every off the shelf resource that we use in our business will be driven by AI. Yep. And the fact that people aren't even thinking for themselves to say, there's multi-billion dollar companies building AI solutions for small businesses right now. What makes you think Joe and his basement is going to come up with a thing that's going to reinvent the universe and be why his business is going to grow when he doesn't even have the basic fundamentals working in his business? And there's so much pressure in this vacuum. in the online space that like, just wanted to give people a tool to help them to see that like, you don't have to follow the leader, you can be a leader. And it's helping people identify and kind of excavate those principles on which they want to build their market leadership so that they can become a category leader. speaker-0: I'm going to take that clip of you talking about how AI is going to touch everything, but it doesn't mean that nothing is going to exist. That's an exact message that I use in my workshops when I'm teaching people about what AI is, where it's going. And people ask me the question all the time. It's like, where is AI going to be? Like, what's AI going to look like? And it's going to be everywhere, just like the internet is exactly how you explained it. Like it's going to be involved in every job. Like it's going to have some role in every single job. And that's just the reality, right? There's not going to be. a ton of jobs that are just completely eliminated unless your job is only the tasks that you're doing, right? You talked about the idea of like multi-billion dollar corporations are building AI solutions for small businesses. So what makes you think that like Joe is going to be able to build something that actually useful when he doesn't have the basic fundamentals of his business going? I 100 % agree. Like there's a lot of people and like with vibe coding and with these tools that you can build whatever and same thing with coaching, right? Like you can go into chat, GPT or Claude, just say, outline a curriculum for a business course for me and that it'll just fit something out right away, right? Like you have to have lived experience behind the product or service that you're creating. But I think like it is pretty common throughout history that, you know, those huge corporations can, it's pretty easy for them to overlook some of these opportunities because they're focused on maybe like bigger, more important things, but. speaker-1: Let me circle back and clarify my point because I agree with you. Do I think that average people can invent unbelievable things that change the course of history? Yes, that's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that the MAT research just came out that showed that 95 % of AI projects in companies last year produced a zero ROI. And the reason why that's happening, again, is that AI is going to amplify the quality of thinking and the quality of execution behind it. People are treating AI as if it's a, can do AI instead of the basic functionality of what makes a business run. Whereas AI is going to take and amplify, it's like the quality of the prompt that you use, the quality of the training that you give it, the quality of the input is going to deliver on. the output. And so it's not that I don't think that a singular human can come in and like use AI to build something great. It's that the people that are going to build great things with AI, they were already great builders. They were people that were executing and because they're executing, they understand the thinking that needs to be used to engineer AI to drive superior growth. Does that make sense? speaker-0: Yeah, they're going to be able to use AI in the right way because they understand what already needs to be done. So then they're going to be able to place it and use it in the right. Yeah. Okay. That makes 100 % sense. So, and your point about AI being used to help in execution instead of like AI being responsible for all of it, 100 % totally agree with you in that even like the core problem that I'm trying to solve, right, is that the gap, the problem that I had run into in my own personal life and then in some other programs that I had started is that You know, I've always been a voracious reader, consumer of coaching programs, like buyer of courses, all this stuff, Like I would have no problem consuming the content, showing up to the group calls, watching the course, highlighting, page corners of books. But I would always struggle when I would get to the end of a chapter or I'd get to the end of a module or I'd get off the coaching call and it'd be time to actually do the work. Right? It'd be like, okay, you get to the end of the chapter and it's like, here are these three exercises that you got to go do. I'd be like, oh yeah, that'd be great if I did it. And then I'd just keep reading, keep highlighting, keep bending page corners. No problem consuming content, right? Which sounds like a very similar problem that you were attempting to solve, maybe slightly different with like the accountability and like making sure that you're actually getting things done. Right? Because the reality with info products, with books, courses, coaching programs, is that in order for your consumers to get the result that your program promises, they need to do the work that you tell them to do. Where you're going to lay out clearly exactly what they need to do. But if they don't do it, they don't get the result. Right? You need them to do the work. I call that the client execution gap. Right? My attempt at, you know, the category, you know, coming up with your own language and whatnot. And what I did for myself and what I've done for my clients so far is like, you can take all of your curriculum, the exercises, like you can kind of train a custom AI tool basically to guide the consumers through doing the work that you tell them to do, making it easier for them to do it. Thus more likely that they do it, get the value, become a more satisfied customer is the idea there. But that's like one of the gaps that I had seen. beyond the, the trust recession right now. Is that still kind of the core gap that you're seeing in the market? speaker-1: Yes and no. So I think if you talk to different people, you would hear different things, right? For me, I had been talking for almost two years ago. Like I started talking about the trust recession. So in my sphere of influence, people understand very well that it's a trust recession. In my sphere of influence, people understand very well that they needed to change their product suite, that they need to create trust building offers, all of those things. I feel like there's a difference between like, your realm of influence and the problems that you're going to solve in your realm of influence versus outside of that. Like if I went to speak in a community that didn't know anything about me and hadn't been listening, watching, consuming my content, the trust recession might be still brand new to them. For us, the main problem that we're trying to help people solve right now is the fact that a vast majority of high ticket buying decisions are really moving off of social media right now. And a lot of high ticket buyers are now buying based on more analog strategies. So we are teaching people a lot about using the Miracle Hour, which is a trademarked hour a day predictable sales system that I teach people. actually have a book coming out later this month about it. And we're really trying to help people once again, going back to the idea of being market facing, focus on at least one hour a day of activation over activity. Because the core problem that we see happening right now, especially with the onset of AI, it's made it a thousand times worse, is that a lot of businesses are stalling out and even going backwards because there's a lack of activation of the opportunity already sitting in people's networks. So it's the direct connection with current customers, past customers, your network, warm leads, people that are... 85 % already there to the readiness to buy category and just getting them across the line. So we're doing just a ton of work with people on that right now because that has gotten very, very bad, especially with AI now that people are starting to use AI for their content. They're losing the little bit of differentiator that they once had. And so it like took things from bad to worse for people because They're losing that one thing that was how you made yourself unique. So we're really trying to bring the conversations about relationship-driven sales back into the center of the conversation. so, I mean, we have people doing unbelievable things with the Miracle Hour, closing licensing deals, managing deal pipelines for acquisitions, closing high-ticket consultancy deals. I mean, everything you could possibly think of. And it's not magic, it's getting people refocused on the basic fundamentals of what actually drives the buyer and its trust and its relationships. And when you spend your time interacting with high ticket buyers and people that can open million dollar doors for you, you're going to see results in your business. speaker-0: Love it. That is such a good point. Spend more time or at least an hour a day on activation over activity. So how I interpret that is spend an hour a day connecting with or talking to or, you know, following up with the people that are already in your sphere, right? Past customers, people in your pipeline, as opposed to trying to create new contacts. So how would you, how are you planning on teaching or how do you teach people to, you know, initiate those conversations with the people that are in their pipeline? Like how would I, as somebody who, I haven't talked to this client in two months. after I completed the project with them, how could I reengage and start a conversation with them again? speaker-1: One of the biggest reasons why people don't do this, by the way, is because of the question you just asked me. They're like, what do I say? So I created an entire toolkit. It's totally free. I will give you the link to put in the show notes down below this podcast for everybody that listens to it that basically gives messaging for each of the stages of the process, high conversion DMs, emails, templates, et cetera. It's probably more than what we can cover here, but I will say like in the book, and when you get the book, you get instant access to the audio book. which is amazing because you can start implementing right away. But also the toolkit is free. Between those two things, you will learn how to organize your list, how to set up your communication, how to move people forward through the process, how to think about what your messaging should look like for the various stages, all of those things. But usually it's way simpler than you think. A lot of people get caught up on the semantics, but it's like really it could just be a one line text message. speaker-0: like hey haven't talked in a while you speaker-1: And talked in a couple of months, I love to catch up and see how things are going for you. Boom. Now you have a call with a, you know, a past customer or a warm leader, whatever the case, like it doesn't need to be so complicated. But this is what I mean about the fundamentals. The fundamentals have been completely lost and people are working harder than ever for less results because they're working on level eight things, but they don't have the level one things working. And that's why no matter what they do, the level eight things aren't going to produce results for them. speaker-0: As you were saying that, I was thinking to myself, wow, this really goes back to what we mentioned earlier, where it's really easy to just overcomplicate things when it's stick to the basics, stick to the fundamentals. Going back to what I was talking about before, I think one of the challenges of being market facing is that you can sometimes set yourself up, like you're setting yourself up to be rejected, right? Which is a hard thing to kind of get over, but like it's just something that you have to learn as a part of the game. But in the solution that I'm. speaker-1: That's it? speaker-0: trying to build or the category that I'm trying to create, is execution infrastructure, which is building the systems that guide your clients step by step through doing the work that you assign to them, thus making it more likely that they complete it, get the result, become a satisfied customer. What's your take on that? speaker-1: Yeah, I mean, I think the idea is right. Listen, we know that's why people don't get results. I think the execution of it needs to be like ridiculously simple because I think that the problem is like when people get caught up in like a lot of steps and a lot of tech, know, logins and platforms and these things, like that's why it doesn't happen. So I think just keeping it simple is going to be the key to success with it. And then I always say like feedback loops are the number one thing that are going to drive your business forward. And that's making sure you're getting real world, real time feedback from the kind of people that actually would be paying you to make sure you're not building something that people aren't going to buy. And, know, I basically ask for feedback, like anytime I'm doing anything, even when I'm pitching in the middle of launch, I'm always having my team like send me audio messages. What are people saying in the DMS? What are people saying in the chat? Give me the feedback that you're hearing. Like I want to make sure that. everything is built on feedback loops and not created in a vacuum. I think that's the number one thing that kills people's big ideas is that they have the great idea, but then they're not getting the feedback that they need to cultivate the idea in a way that it's gonna work. speaker-0: Anybody listening also listened to the episode that I did last week with Lindsay Friedman. She talked about that exact same idea, right? You can spend all your time just building an amazing product that nobody actually wants, right? You need to actually get it in the hands of the people that are going to use it, get it in the hands of the people that are going to be paying you for it and getting feedback from them about, you have your own ideas about what they might want, but you're not your customer, right? You need to actually talk to them, get their feedback, what actually matters, what do they want? I love it. Kelly, thank you so much for the time today. But if you had a giant billboard. that everyone in the world could see for 10 seconds, what would it say and why. speaker-1: put your faith in family first. And it would say that because that is the meaning of life and what actually makes all the great things that we do in our businesses worthwhile. speaker-0: I love that. Really overwhelmed and stressed out with things going on in the business and then, you know, taking those couple of days with family really helped me to zoom out and realize like this is what matters. I 100 % agree with that. love it. Kelly, thank you so much for the time. Thank you for listening. My main takeaway from this conversation is just how easy it is to drift away from the work that actually drives growth in your business. Most founders, including myself, are not doing the wrong things. I'm just focusing on speaker-1: Thanks for having me. speaker-0: doing too many things that do not matter as much. It feels really productive to build systems, refine messaging, or add new tools to the process. But none of that replaces direct contact with the market. Growth usually comes from doing a few simple things consistently and long enough to get good at them. The hard part is not knowing what to do. The hard part is staying focused and patient enough and not getting pulled into everything else. Strong businesses are built by people who keep showing up where it counts. even when it feels repetitive. If you want to get connected with Kelly Roach, you can find her website, her books, and other links in the description of this episode. If you run a coaching program, course, or mastermind and your clients aren't completing the work, download the free Program Execution System Toolkit in the description. It shows you how to install execution infrastructure so clients actually follow through and get the result that your program promises. Thank you for listening, and I'll see you in the next one.