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How To Make Your Book Actually Sell · The Expert Method

• speaker-0: Time is the resource that you do not get back. When you realize that life is short and when you realize that the most valuable thing that you have is your time, you start to treat it differently. If you don't value your time, nobody else is. But I'd rather be known for something than known for nothing. Systems are boring, but they'll set you free. speaker-1: What do you think they usually misunderstand about the purpose of that book? What that book is actually supposed to do for them. speaker-0: People don't want to limit who they're talking to with their book. Pride is boring. Niches lead to riches. speaker-1: Your sheer effort won't build an eight-figure business. As a founder, eventually you get to the point where your effort just stops being enough. You can work harder, take more meetings, answer more emails, create more content, and push the business by sheer force for a while. But eventually that approach starts to break. And when you get to that point, you have to ask yourself the question, how do I create leverage? How do you turn the work that you are doing into something that keeps creating value without needing you every single time? So to help answer that question, I'm excited to be joined today by Chandler Bolt. Chandler is the founder and CEO of Self Publishing.com, and he has spent years helping authors and entrepreneurs turn their knowledge into books, and those books into effective business assets that help you continue to grow. In our conversation, we discuss why broad positioning makes a book weaker, how Chandler thinks about leverage through content, systems, people, process, and AI, what business owners are wasting way too much time on, and the most important operating decisions you need to make as your business grows. If you get value from this conversation, be sure to share it with a friend and subscribe. And now please enjoy my conversation with Chandler Bolt. Chandler, thank you so much for being here. speaker-0: Great to be here. Thanks for having me. speaker-1: Absolutely. So Chandler, you're the founder, CEO of selfpublishing dot com. And one of the things that you talk about is a lot of people write the book with the wrong objective in mind, especially as a business owner. So when somebody writes a book for their business, what do you think they usually misunderstand about the purpose of that book? What that book is actually supposed to do for them. speaker-0: When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And so I think sometimes when people publish a book, they think that it's just book copies sold, but Stephen Covey says begin with the end in mind. So I like to instead reverse engineer outcomes. Now, when you ask an author what their book is for or what's the purpose of the book, they typically tell you the altruistic purpose, which is, I want to help people XYZ, which is great. I think you could you should be really clear on that. Like you gotta know, we call it the four P's, person, pain, promise, price. So you gotta know who you're writing the book to, what's the pain that they have, what's the promise that you're making. Yes. But I would argue more importantly, because this is what's gonna give the book an economic engine, is you gotta know how this is gonna benefit you and strategically how do you want it to benefit you? So is the goal to bring in customers? Is the goal to book more speaking gigs? Is the goal to just sell books and you maybe wanna be a career author, like what is the goal? Let's reverse engineer based on that goal. And then I think people will have more successful outcomes with their book. speaker-1: Absolutely. How does the decision that you make when you're writing the book adjust based on what your goal is? Like if your goal is to sell as many copies of the book as possible versus your goal is to use this book to s book speaking gigs, obviously you don't have to use those two examples, but how does the book itself actually change depending on what your goal is? speaker-0: I would say it largely stays the same because if if you've defined the four Ps, right? If you know who you're writing to, what's the pain that they have, what's the promise that you're making. Now, if the goal is strictly to grow the business, I might niche it down, right? So just using my book as an example, published, the proven path from blank page to ten thousand copies sold. It's a very specific and clear promise, but it is a still, I would argue, a little bit broad. And it talks about too many, I think, different genres where if I was To do that again specifically with the goal of getting high ticket clients for self publishing dot com, I would maybe write the book that's how to write and publish a book that that adds six or seven figures in revenue to your business or something like that and make it very oriented towards business owners writing books to grow their business because those are the best and highest ticket customers for us that we can deliver the best outcomes. So it's like I might change the positioning a little bit based on the outcome, but the book itself is is Largely the same. It it just how the the end objective changes how you market it, who is it important to get it in front of and that sort of thing. speaker-1: Yeah. Okay. That makes a ton of sense. So kind of how you niche it down, who you're making it for, will change based on the objective, the end result that you want it to create. And then I would imagine that there's subtle differences like throughout the book, throughout the content within the book, where you're going to be speaking and referencing to that specific niche example that you're targeting based on the outcome. And if you want to just sell tons of copies, right, you might make it a little bit more broad. But I would imagine, as I've learned in other arenas, the more broad you are, the more difficult it can actually be for it to resonate with the right people. speaker-0: Broad is boring. Niches lead to riches. I mean, it is just people don't want to limit who they're talking to with their book. I get it. It's scary. But then you end up just screaming into the void of nobody. Whereas you know, you go the other route and you you get very specific. You'd be surprised how many people love to hear what you have to say. And so I'd rather be too niche than too broad. And When you do that, you it's gonna end up resonating with this massive audience. If the goal is to grow your business, obviously gonna do that. And the beautiful thing about that is if the goal is to grow your business and you do that successfully, well then you've got a ton of money to invest in selling more copies. Whereas the flip side is not true if if if you know the goal is to grow your business is you sell a ton of copies where you don't have money to grow your business and you didn't successfully publish a book that actually grows the business. So that's where I'm If the end goal is the business growth, which for I'm sure a lot of people watching or listening to this is and a lot of business owners it is, it's like okay, well let's re let's reverse engineered to that. Because if we do that, well then that's gonna give us kind of this these this coffer of a lot of money and resources to go sell as many copies as possible. And when we sell more copies, that leads to more business and there's kind of just this flywheel that keeps spinning. speaker-1: Yep. Building productive flywheels. That is that is the objective and you want to build some Yeah. Right. speaker-0: Yeah. That's what life's all about. speaker-1: Yes, absolutely. Build productive flywheels like in every arena of your life, hundred percent. So why do you think that idea of like the more niche and specific you are, why does that work better than being broad? Like why does that actually happen? Like why is that the case? speaker-0: Mm. I think because we live in a society where people want to know that it's specific to them. There's never been more vanilla content. There's never been more AI slop. There's never been more just boring, broad talking head stuff. And that's why you see these, you know, it's like the YouTube horror film that is just blowing out the box office because it's they made that for a specific weird group of people that likes niche YouTube. horror films and then that almost became a cult following in itself. It's like the guy that's blown up on Instagram right now, the Kumar the accountant or whatever. But I mean he's just very niche in counterculture to all of these finance bros on Instagram. It's like this old Indian guy and he's and he's saying hey I'm Kumar, I'm gonna be famous and put you guys out of business. It's different. So people want unique, people want different, people want specific to them. And so when you do that, I think it's just causes this knee jerk reaction where people say, my gosh, this is my person. It's kind of the classic thousand true fans theory of just, Hey, you you want a thousand true fans, not this big, broad and wide audience. So I th I think that's probably why it works. speaker-1: Yeah, a hundred percent. Like it just resonates so much more with them. They can recognize themselves in the messaging, in what you're saying. Like that is exactly what I want. Right. And it you know, there are a million people doing the broad stuff talking about how to market, how to grow your business. But if you can talk about how to grow your pest control business from fifty thousand dollars a month to a hundred and twenty thousand dollars a month in a small suburb town, the people that are in that situation are gonna like, Holy, that is exactly me. Like I need to read that book or I need to follow this guy. Right, like you're gonna just create so much resonance in the people that they're gonna become so attached because you're speaking directly to a very specific person that it's just gonna I can't think of a different word than resonate. But I think you get what I mean. And and again, this application is goes far beyond just the book that you write, but it's also the business that you build, the offer that you create, the product that you build, right? You should the more niche down and focus that you get, like you're gonna be able to charge more because you're built and tailoring it specifically to a very specific kind of person. speaker-0: It's so counterintuitive. And I think that's why people are so scared to do it. Myself included. I mean, it is scary to niche down because you just think, but I could help this person, I could help this person, I could and but it doesn't. We see it work with books, we see it work with businesses, we see it work with Just every facet of growing stuff is is the riches are in the niches. speaker-1: Yep. And I'm in that issue right now. So I learned this lesson with my marketing agency and I'm learning this lesson right now again with this new business that I'm building. It is hard. It is hard to make that commitment and just say no to these other opportunities and be like, Yeah, but like what we do could also help these people. It could also help these people, it could also help these. It's just making that commitment. It's just like I haven't mastered it, right? I need to look myself in the mirror and take my own advice. But I guess if you were advising somebody and when you do with the process that you take your Clients through with self publishing.com, how do you help them decide what their niche is going to be? Like how do you help them decide? And then how do you help them commit? speaker-0: First off, I'd rather be known for something than known for nothing. And I think people worry about getting put into a box and say, well, I don't be not f I'll use myself as an example. I don't want to be known as the book guy. And I'm like, Well, you're currently known for nothing. So would you rather be known as the book guy or not known? And and you can always reinvent yourself later. That's the beautiful thing about building something successfully, is it makes it easier to have a jumping off point versus trying to create from obscurity But I think how I would think how I think through this is what is the most profitable thing that you could do that h or basically what's the biggest outcomes that you could drive for customers that's in your wheelhouse and there's an audience of people that want to pay you to solve that? And so it's kind of, you know, Perry Marshall's bleeding neck theory. Like first off, there's gotta be a real problem that people are trying to solve. It's easier to channel demand than it is to create demand. And so as Russell Brunson talks about, you know, pioneers return with arrows in their back. And it's the second mover advantage or the third mover advantage, because if you got an educated market, well then that market doesn't exist. It's aikido. You know, someone's trying to punch you, don't fight back, just channel it to miss your face, right? And so that's what you're trying to do with demand is say, okay, there's already this rushing river. I just want to put a little wedge in that river and then have some of the water flow over to me. So there's got to be demand. you've gotta obviously be able to add value in that audience so or or to that group of people. Now hopefully that fits your skill sets and there's leverage there. So if there's no leverage, well then yeah, you're just running on a hamster wheel of revenue. So it's kind of a lot of those things into one. But that's how I think about it and package it. And you gotta have leverage once you nail that equation. speaker-1: Yeah. I'd love to dig into the the what you mean by leverage and and how do you create leverage. But one little thing that I'd add to what you shared about finding your niche and how do you how do you see that? And in this expert space, in this info space. So that one line that really stuck with me about how to kind of find your niche is just you can obviously provide a ton of value to the previous versions of yourself. Like what were the previous versions of who you were? And get as specific as you possibly can about that situation. Like maybe for me in my at this point in my life, I was the you know, college senior or one year out of college, trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, didn't want to go into corporate America, but wanted to start a business. Or like so that could be a very specific person that I could r target and reach and try and help. Obviously that person probably doesn't have a lot of money, so it might not be the best kind of audience to serve. But that is a previous version of myself that I could create some kind of info product or I have some expertise in like I could help that person. And it's a very specific kind of niche. So maybe that's a helpful anecdote to throw out there to the people listening if you're struggling to find your niche is like what were the previous versions of yourself and what did you get through that you could now help somebody else get through and do? And then apply everything else that you just shared as well to that. But you ended your last answer with a note about leverage. So what do you mean by leverage? speaker-0: Hm. So leverage means the ability to scale from one to one to one to many. And well, I would take it a step back and say the root word of leverage is lever. So that you need a lever in which to pull. And that lever can be in in many forms, but it's the Archimedes quote, you know, you give me a a lever long enough and a fulcrum with which to to pull it on and I can move the world. Yeah, or yeah, fulcrum with which stand I can move the world. So it's it is the core of everything. And so there's leverage in your business model, there's liv leverage in your distribution mechanisms, there's leverage. I mean, a book we you say is a book is leveraged impact. You do work once, you create the book, that book goes on to impact thousands, tens of thousands, maybe even millions of people. So how do you do work once that lives forever? Or how do you do work through other people maybe. You know, I've heard it say multiple wa I've heard it said multiple ways that there's no I think Naval calls this talks about the four types of leverage. It's it's it's code, it's capital, it's media media. Yeah and what's the other? Yeah, yeah. People. Look at that. speaker-1: Yeah. I was looking for it. I was gonna try and go find a quote from it, but I'm using it as a part of my laptop stand right now. speaker-0: Well, it's it's so so good. It's it's so media, it's people, it's code and capital. I've heard Dan Martell say that it's he calls it code, content, capital, and collaboration. So but however you wanna say it, it's mechanisms with which you make one collaboration and then that collaboration generates hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions of dollars in your business. You create content in the form of a book. a podcast like this, a YouTube video that continues to bring new customers. You invest your capital into ads or into infrastructure, into employees. You deploy code or these days with AI, I mean, it's building things that then it's a mechanism to create value beyond just your time. And so I think however you want to do it, you gotta have leverage. You got to, and I I mean people, process, product like there's all these ways that you can do it. But you need to start looking for looking for how to do it and then keep leveling up the ways that you do that. speaker-1: Yeah. And it sounds like before we started recording you were talking about how you are using AI to create leverage in your current business. And now like a big focus of yours is, you know, building a system that can help build eight figure businesses. I probably butchered that, but anyways, would love to kind of dive into how you are leveraging AI to create leverage within your business right now. speaker-0: man. Everywhere. It's crazy. It's really crazy. So gosh, we're we're rolling out a bunch of videos right now on my personal YouTube channel, Chandler Bolt channel, all about scaling eight figures. And so there's there's the way that we're doing it at an eight figure company, which I kinda lay out in one of the videos, which is you gotta get everyone in the game. You gotta identify your builders. We did an AI hackathon with our company and we're just kind of Turning people's brains on all throughout the organization. That's one thing. Right. Then there's how AI is totally it's totally reinventing the modern org chart. And, you know, Jack Dorsey talked about this at Block. It's used to be these massive companies with huge layers of middle management. They fired four thousand people at that company, eliminated all the middle management. We're doing the same thing at self publishing dot com right now, which is we're just eliminating middle managers. It's AI can do the job better, at least 80 to 90% of the job better than managers can. And managers, if you think about it, provide no value to the customer. It's no value. The the builders provide value because they build the thing that the customer's using. And then, you know, your service providers or your individual contributors, they provide value because they're actually helping sell or service the client. So within that, we're building whole sales manager and lovable. I was on Andrew Warner's podcast about that recently. That was nuts. did you that was your face lit up. Did you see that? speaker-1: I didn't know, but that sounds incredible. speaker-0: It's crazy. So that whole thing is is crazy. We're just we're I mean, we're innovating and iterating with it so much. And it's so interesting how a lot of the problems that I've had for years that I would just want to beat my head against the keyboard. I mean, it's just infuriating. It's like I've had this problem for years. I've known about this problem for years. I've tried to solve this problem for years, and now it's being solved in months with AI. I mean, it's absolutely insane. And but it takes thoughtful structuring and design and all that stuff. And so what a time to be alive. It it's been really, really fun to work with a team, empower the team and start building this stuff. speaker-1: Yeah. I mean AI really is the the great leverage, right? It is the greatest source of leverage. Like if you can you can build, you can train an employee once to do the thing the exact way that you want it done, and it will do it that way twenty four seven every single time, every day for the rest of time. Right. This is the great multiplier, the great piece of leverage. And yeah, no kidding, what a time to be alive. So for scaling a business to eight figures, right? There's a lot more that goes into doing that than just leverage. Like what does a business have to do to go from seven figures to eight figures beyond just creating leverage within the organization? speaker-0: I love this question. So we just did this whole series. It's called the the eight-figure profit bridge. And I think there's five core components of getting to eight figures. Some of them you already hit at seven figures and some of them you don't, right? So the first few is the you obviously gotta have paying customers. If you don't have customers, you don't have business. And so you've got to get those to get into business. Then you've got to get product market fit. That's a big jump. For a lot of people, because you can muscle your way to six figures. Sometimes you can even muscle your way to seven figures. If you don't have product market fit, you don't have a business, you have a product or you have a fad. Or you just maybe are really good at sales. But then how do we get from that to eight figures? Well, this is that's kind of the demarcation line where a lot of people get stuck. And so then we got to move into the third P, which is profit. So you've got to be able to. Profitably and scalably acquire customers. Your unit economics need to be good. Your CAC, so your costs acquire customer. You gotta have a lot of those things dialed in. You gotta be able to predictably and scalably do that. Then there's the people. And so that's the fourth P, which is okay, you gotta have great people and a great team because you're now scaling beyond you. Now, you probably need less people than you used to because of AI. That's great. That gives you even more leverage. Maybe you need some people that are actually just AI employees in your business. And then you need the process. And so if you have all these other things, but you don't have process, it's going to keep breaking. Which by the way, your business is going to keep breaking anyway. That's just business. That's, you know, capitalism, that's market disruptions. This is everything's always break broken or breaking. But you gotta have process. And that's what I think is beautiful about AI is it's forcing some of those things. Cause I think I'm a pretty elite operator. And I'm very good at the operations stuff. But and we have playbooks and process and all this stuff. But even us, like there's a bunch of stuff that just is not that good. And AI is forcing us to then say, as we're building these AI managers, to go back and say, if we're trying to replace a sales manager with AI, well then what's our conversation structure that people follow? Let's make sure that that is actually being updated and used. What's the rubric with which we grade a good call or a bad call? That was living in my sales manager's head. He's really good at it, but we never to find it in a real so it kind of forces you to think like an engineer and start building these systems that actually when it's all said and done just makes the company better. Even if he kept doing it, it would make the company better, but even better now that he, you know, we built it with AI, it's saving him five to fifteen hours a week. And then he's able to apply his strengths and skill sets elsewhere in the organization. speaker-1: Yeah. And just spend more time, more human time with the people, the salespeople on the team, which is the most valuable time that he could spend, not at his desk reviewing sales calls and generating rubrics and grading and whatnot, when that can just be done instantaneously by a tool that is trained on your proven process, your proven rubric of doing so. And I think just to build on that point that you made about the importance of process is it's everything. And like when I started, when I was building the marketing agency, everybody would talk about the importance of process. And it's like, okay, that's great. What the hell does that even mean? Right? What is processing? In your mind, like what is process? Like what does that like if you have process, what does that look like? speaker-0: I love this question. I'll never forget when I read a couple books back to back that totally changed the way that I see systems and process in general. First one is the emith revisited. It's obviously an old time kind of fable. So you read that and you think, okay, awesome. Systems. Love it. Then to your question, what is it? What the hell is it? I don't know. I I can't how do I create something that I've never even seen before? And why don't they teach this in school? And then I read Work the Systems, Sam Carpenter, and that really kind of opened my eyes to some things. But then I had someone do explain it to me this way and it just changed the way that I think about and teach creating systems. It's really three questions. It's if you just ask the question, one, is this something that I do more than once? So is it so I do this every week or every single client in your agency, we're gonna we gotta do onboarding. Yep. And we do it more than once. Then secondly, is it something that takes more than five minutes to do it? And then thirdly, is it something that I don't like doing? And if the answer is yes to one or especially all three of those things, well then you have got to have a system or process for that. Otherwise you're just flying blind and working wildly and efficiently. Right. And so I'll give an example. So I remember the first time I heard that, I said, hmm, let me think about this. And it was right around tax time. You know, we're preparing our taxes and I'm talking to my financial people and I'm like, all right, guys, well what write-offs do we have? And I was like, huh, well, we got, you know, this charitable giving. We got this. And okay, well then what about what do we need to do? What documents do we need? And I realized in that moment, it's all three of those questions. Do I do this more than once? I'm gonna do this until I die, or in maybe until they abolish the income tax, which I'm not holding my breath on. It takes more than five minutes for sure. And I hate doing it. So why do I not have a checklist for this thing so that next year and every year moving forward, I don't even have to be involved. I just have to say, here's the checklist, make sure that you execute the checklist. So systems are boring, but they'll set you free. And I think those three questions help you identify what to systematize. speaker-1: Yeah. And it's really funny, those three questions are almost identical to the questions that I encourage like when I'm working with a business owner to how do I identify the use cases, the high impact use cases for AI in your organization. Those are like three of the four questions that I typically am looking for, right? Is like is this something that you do more than once? Is this something you do regularly and repeatedly? Is it something that takes you more than five minutes to do? Is this something that you could Teach somebody else to do, right? Could you have a documented process for how you want them to do this thing? Could you train somebody else to do it? Because if you could train somebody else, you could train a AI to do it. And then obviously it's just like, is this something that can be done by AI? Right. So yeah, that's really interesting. And then if you hate doing it, the only way for you to not have to do it is to delegate it. And the only way for you to effectively delegate it. is if you give somebody that step by step checklist, that step by step guide on exactly how, like the best way that you know how to go about doing it. 'Cause if you can't Yeah, like if somebody can't take a thing and then just follow this step by step, you're just never gonna be able to effectively delegate. So like systems and process enable effective delegation is the critical factor there. speaker-0: We call it SAD time. If you're spending time on something in your business that you don't like doing but has to be done, it's SAD time. SAD's an acronym. The only way to get rid of SAD Time is to follow the acronym. So if S stands for stop doing it. So sometimes you just need to say, should I really be doing this in my business? That'll eliminate a ton of unnecessary work. Most people in their business, over 75% of the stuff you're doing and spending time on is not moving the needle at all. And I bet I could look at your calendar and find two hours in your calendar that is actually 90% of your output or growth in your business is because of those two hours. And so we got to find those and stop everything else. Then the A stands for automate. To automate something, you gotta systematize it clearly and you can use that with AI. And then the D stands for delegate. So you kind of work through those in that sequential order. Should I first stop doing it? Okay, perfect. If it shouldn't be done, well then why would you delegate it? It's like, well now I'm just gonna tell somebody else to do something that shouldn't be done. And then if I can automate it, why would I delegate it? Right. And so delegation is kind of the last resort or the last step in that chain. But either way, you've got three kind of bullets in the gun to get rid of your sad time. speaker-1: Yeah. I love that. Sad time. I'm definitely gonna steal that. I'd love to dive into like what are some of those common things that you're seeing people spending time on that they just should be deleting, right? They should just be stopping because I think that would be really helpful, both for myself because I'm sure there's a lot of things that I'm doing that I could just stop. But the other point that I wanna make just to kind of underline this conversation that we're having about process and the importance of it, is that once you have process established, it shouldn't stop there. And this is something that I stole from Jeff Bezos. And his book Shareholder Letters from Bezos, the core value that he built Amazon on is it is always day one. And what he meant by that is that the excuse of this is how we've always done it is never going to be the excuse. Like nobody's ever going to use that excuse. So every single time you go through a process, whenever I delegate something to like a VA or somebody on my team, one of the parts of the process is identifying ways that that process could then be improved. Looking for ways of like, okay, you just went through that. What are the ideas and how what you just did could be made better? And then that is what we review on like the one-to-one calls that we have together is like one of their KPIs is improvements made to process. Because if you don't intentionally design that into the organization, because the process is the organization, right? The process is everything that you do. So if you want to get better, if you want to grow, you have to improve the process in which you do what you do. Right. And when you establish, when you create a process the first time, it's just the best way that you know how to go about doing that thing right now. But there's always ways that you can be getting better, right? That's the it's always day one mindset. We're gonna look at how we do what we do with a fresh set of eyes every single day and always be looking for ways that we can improve and be made better. So that is something that was super helpful for us at the marketing agency and still something that I apply today that is vastly helpful. And it's just like it intentionally incorporates that reinvention and that improvement process and that growth into the organization, into the process, right? You process that you standardize the the improvement process. speaker-0: Yeah. When it's really interesting, I d I would have never thought about this, but one of the guys on my team mentioned this is that AI can do that for you too. Where if you just train it to self-iterate, I'm like, yeah, we've got these things that are taking up all this memory and all these tokens. He's like, Well, ask AI how to make it more efficient. And you've got it's because we have repeating tasks or like, you know, we've got Claude doing recurring tasks or whatever. And he's like, Well, as part of that, build into it to you know, make itself better. And he's he's like, that's how I basically pulled the the tokens that we're using, shortened it by ninety five percent on some of these workflows because the first time it's just like a human. It creates it in the dumbest, simplest way that it knows how. But then if you keep prompting it to make the thing better, well then the process will continue to to tighten up. speaker-1: Love it. Chandler, what are you seeing most business owners wasting their time on? speaker-0: So much, so much. I would say email first and foremost. You gotta cut email. I haven't I haven't read or responded to an email in years. You gotta cut lunch meetings, lunch and coffee meetings. They're mostly a waste of time. It's the pick my brain kind of thing. It's and then meetings in general. I mean you should just radically cut those. There's so many meetings that should have been an email and so just do that. And one on one delivery, repeating yourself, doing anything that you've done hundreds of times that is not three dollar sign on Yelp activity. It's not that you know, like I've given a webinar hundreds, if not thousands of times. I'm spoken at events hundreds of times. But when I do that, that is a ten thousand dollar or a hundred thousand dollar hour. And so I love the framework from Perry Marshall kind of about labeling your time. I think everyone should do this. It's just do a two-week time study and track yourself hour by hour. And then just go back and say, okay, this was a $10 an hour task. This was a $100 an hour task. This was a $1,000 an hour task. This was a $10,000 an hour task. And then figure out, anything that's not on that high end, well then delegate it. And you know, take your yearly take-home pay, divide it by $2000. That's your hourly wage. Whatever you were spending time on that you could pay someone less than that hourly wage. So you're making a hundred grand a year, that's fifty bucks an hour. Well then what are you doing that you could pay someone f 50 bucks an hour or less? Probably getting your groceries, probably cleaning your house, probably doing your laundry, probably meal prep. You there's a bunch of services for this is so easy to just instantly gain back five to ten hours. And I think people get really weird about that because You know, I grew up in a blue-collar household in in the the south in the middle of nowhere. And it's like, well, we're w rich people have assistance. We're not that. Our rich people have house cleaners. Hey, an hour's an hour. I don't care whether you're spending it cleaning or whether you're spending it looking at your email. Either way, it's still one less hour than you got in your day, in your week, and in your life. So pay people to do that stuff or run it through that sad framework to stop doing it, automate it, or delegate it to somebody else. speaker-1: Well said. And again, it reminds me of a lot of what Naval has said, where like you kind of establish an hourly rate for yourself. And anything that's under that hourly rate that you set for yourself, you need to delegate. Like you need to stop, automate, or delegate, right? Use the SAD framework, apply it to whatever those tasks are. But yeah, I haven't taken that step because it does feel weird. It does feel weird to be like, I mean, really? Am I gonna pay somebody to come and clean my house for two hours on the weekend? Like, I don't know. I guess I probably should. I probably should for sure, because it would be You know, two hours every single week that I would get back, but speaker-0: You gotta Meal delivery is the cheat code, man. Meal delivery, if you're not doing that. I mean, that's just the the obvious one where it's say I haven't been to a grocery store and I don't even know how long. When I met my wife, she made fun of me because she said, When's the last time you went to a grocery store? I'm like, I don't know, four years ago or something. She said, Are you kidding me? I'm like, No, why would I do that? I'm not trying to sound pretentious or anything, but it's just not a good use of my time. And so for me, meal delivery is that. Where it's it accomplishes multiple things in one. One, it buys back my time. Okay, that's automatically worth it. Two, it helps me eat healthier on autopilot. It portion controls, it keeps things healthy. Three, it just takes out way decision fatigue, which I think that's what people don't realize is that there's hundreds of decisions that you're making in your day. And if you can just eliminate As many of them as possible, well then you've got that extra brain power for the ones that really matter. And so you end up making better decisions. So if I'm not thinking, shoot, what am I gonna eat for lunch today? And should I go out to eat? Should I pack a lunch? Should I meal prep on Sunday night? well then I've meal prep, I gotta go to the grocery store. Well then if I go to the grocery store, what I go and I end up going to the grocery store, I a huge sweet tooth. I come home with a freaking bag of cookies or something. Now I'm not eating well, now I just spent more money. It's like All of that can literally be solved in one hour or less, setting up a meal delivery. I've been on meal delivery for dang near a decade. And it's just, I mean, one of the simplest, best decisions that I've made in my life. It literally just shows up to the office now. And I mean, it's just it's great. So highly recommend stuff like that. Where can you spend an hour and make a singular decision that will then save you hundreds, if not thousands of dollars? And hundreds of hours over the course of years. I mean, it's just so powerful. speaker-1: Leverage. Yeah. I love it. when I'm hearing you talk about this, it sounds like you have an extremely healthy respect and awareness of the value of your time. And value of your time might be the wrong way to say this, but you like it seems like in order to make these decisions, it starts with the awareness of like the finite nature of your time as like the most value. Like you treat your time as the most valuable resource in your life. And I'm listening to you explain this and I'm looking at myself and I'm just like I feel like that's almost where the gap is for me where I just don't quite have that kind of value or level of importance that I'm placing on my time. Because if you recognize that time is your most valuable resource, everything else will become secondary to that and you will do everything to protect that time to spend your time, spend your time on the things that either A, you just want to do, right? You want to do these things 'cause like what else is life about other than doing what you want to do with your time here, your limited time here. And then also the things that you are good at, like the things that only you can do within your organization, within your business, those are the things that you should be spending your time on. And it sounds like you have an extremely healthy respect and and value of your time. And again, I feel like that's where I'm seeing my gap. speaker-0: It's a really important distinction. I definitely wasn't always like that. I had a friend pass away right in front of me when I was 19 years old, or when I was 21, he was 20. And it rocked my world and showed me how short life is and how much of a sense of urgency I should be living with. And I mean that just totally changed my life. And I live with a greater sense of urgency after that. And when you realize that life is short, and when you realize that The most valuable thing that you have is your time, you start to treat it differently. And but I think where it what gets really weird is you've got to demand that other people treat it differently. And this feels really douchey. It really does. And I I still feel really uncomfortable with this. But time is the resource that you do not get back. And so when you do that exercise we talked about earlier, when you take your dollar amount that you earn a year divided by two thousand, you see that number. Well, the only way to make that number go up is to spend more time on the upper side of the ledger and eliminate the lower side of the ledger. So you gotta have more thousand dollar an hour tasks and all this stuff. And I just remembered when I did this number because I've made millions of dollars a year for a while now. And so then you just do that number and you're like, well this is that time is worth actually worth thousands of dollars an hour hour. And so it feels so douchey. So douchey. But you have to just start telling pe I would have to tell my assistant, if it takes you twenty hours to figure out something that saves me thirty minutes, that might be the best twenty hours that you spend. And when you look at my calendar and you optimize my calendar, I need you to say no to meetings that are above X length. podcast interviews that are above X length. I need you to default no on invites to certain things. I need you to guard my calendar. And I am just going to show up and look at my calendar. And even if it is something as simple as my flight or my hotel, I'm going to spend zero minutes thinking about that. But when I show up at that hotel, I'm going to pull up my calendar and I'm going say, okay, cool. Well this is this looks like this is where I'm staying and it looks like I've got a room here. Here you go. And if that's not dialed in and I spend 20 minutes figuring that out, we've got a problem because I don't want to be wasting my time on that. Now it feels very pretentious if you know people can roast me in the comments or whatever you want, but it is your time. And if you don't value your time, nobody else is. And so you you gotta set standards and you gotta set boundaries to say this is below the line for me. And guess what? This is the real hard part. That standard always races. If you're making more money, if you're growing, well then you have to raise the level of your no so that you can raise a level of your yes. And that feels really uncomfortable because the people around you start to resent that or start to say, well, hold up. You used to have time to meet with me. I'm sorry, now I don't. The company is bigger. We have 50-something people here. I cannot take your random meeting that you send me one off on a whim at the end of a day. Like that's just, I can't do that. Yeah, I used to do that. can't do that now, I gotta raise the level of how I'm spending my time. speaker-1: Yeah. Yeah. And I think for me, the note that I'll tell myself is the recognition that time is my most valuable asset, I need to treat it that way. And you do that through standardizing the treatment of your time and the protection and the gatekeeping of your of your calendar and of your time. But yeah, I think that's like the a big takeaway for me. It's time is the most important asset. Treat it that way. And If you don't treat it that way, it just like will never happen, right? It's not gonna just accidentally happen. It's not something that you can just like read on a in a book one time or hear in a podcast episode one time. It's like you have to actually intentionally take actions, make different decisions and do different things to reflect that priority in your life. Amazing. So you made a point earlier that when you're identifying a niche, you need to channel demand, right? You should find the demand that already exists. And right now I'm personally in a situation Where I a hundred percent agree with that idea. But like I have identified what I believe is going to be something that exists as a standard in the future. And I've gotten feedback from, you know, a few people that have kind of validated and affirmed that idea. So like, how would you what would you say to the person that maybe has this idea or they have this demand or this service that they want to create that's going to fulfill on some demand that they think exists out there, but people maybe don't recognize? How would you approach maybe like validating it first, like like what would you say to that person who is working on an idea like that where they're not channeling existing demand, but maybe they're creating demand for a new thing? I know you mentioned like probably don't do that to start, but if somebody were, how would like what would you say to that person? speaker-0: It's really hard. It's really hard to do. And I would say it doesn't fit my skill set. I'm not very good at it. There's people that are very good at it. And I would say this the quote of Henry Ford saying, Well, if I would have asked people what they wanted, they would have just set a faster horse. Right. I'm I'm listening to the Netflix biography or memoir right now. And that's kind of interesting too, because they're talking about getting into the DVD business to disrupt that. Which was in a new emerging technology, but the problem was still the same. They were people were currently paying to solve the problem, but they were finding a different way to solve that problem. Now, whether it's Henry Ford and horses versus cars, whether it's Netflix and DVDs versus blockbuster videotapes, and then ultimately creating an on-demand streaming service that still solved that problem, which is I'm bored and I want entertainment for my family, and I want Access to that entertainment in the quickest, fastest, best way possible. Well, it's still the same thing, but it's a different innovation that solves that problem. So I think there's got to be core underlying demand for the thing. And I would say the way that I would validate it is I would get people to pay. Because people who pay pay attention. And so if everybody's gonna tell you your idea is great, and then you say, okay, perfect, Amex or Visa, then say, well, you know, but so you gotta prevalidate that even if you don't have anything to sell yet. Just get people to give you their credit card. And then right after you can say, well by the way, I haven't really fully built this yet. And but you at least that that is a signal because they vote everybody votes with their wallet. And so you got to get people to vote with their wallet. speaker-1: Yeah. Love it. Yeah, and as I hear you explaining the idea that this is an extension, it's just like a new way of solving the already existing problem that people are paying for through other means, right? Like Henry Ford, people were paying they had the problem of needing to transport, right, to get around places. And he just came up with a new innovative way for them to do that. That resonated with me. So good point. And then get people to pay, right? That's the only way that you can really truly validate. People can be complimentary and say, that's an amazing thing, a hundred percent all they want, but until they put their money where their mouth is, it doesn't really mean anything. So amazing. Chandler, thank you again so much for the time. I have one final question for you before we get to that recurring question. Where can people get in touch with you? speaker-0: Yeah. So you can go on self publishing dot com's YouTube channel. we just hit a hundred thousand subscribers, which you'll find milestone. That's all about books, publishing books, growing your business with a book, as well as Instagram over there. And then on the Chandler Bolt side of things, that YouTube channel is all about scaling to eight figures. I just created my first Instagram like nine months ago, doing content around that. And so those are the two kind of best mediums. And then I'd say beyond that, I think we create a link. for your folks, self publishing dot com forward slash Ian. You can book a call with our team if you're thinking about writing a book and we'll map it out and see how how we might be able to help. speaker-1: Amazing. We'll have all the links in the description, so go check that out. But Chandler, my final question for you is a recurring question I ask all my guests. If you had a giant billboard that everyone in the world could see for ten seconds, what would it say and why? speaker-0: Well done is better than well said. So stop saying you're gonna do the thing. Go do the thing. Stop complaining about the way something is that doesn't even affect you, or the way the government is, or the way you know something's unfair. Go change it. You can create or complain, but you can't do both. And so bet well done is better than well said. Just go do it. Go make it better. You don't like it, make it better. And you're capable of so much more than you think and you're you're worried about other people judging you and and all that. Screw that. Life's short. Just go do the thing. speaker-1: Well done is better than well said. Well said. But Thank you so much for the time. speaker-0: Ian, you're a great interview, man. This is really fun. Thank you for having me. speaker-1: Thank you for listening to my conversation with Chandler Bolt. The main thing that I'm taking away from this conversation is that I need to take the intellectual understanding that time is my most valuable asset and apply it to how I actually show up and what my calendar looks like. This is an idea that I've understood, right? Time is the one thing that we'll never get back, but I haven't been letting that belief and that understanding really show up in what my calendar looks like and what I actually spend my time on. This is gonna be a difficult transition for me to go through because it's gonna require me to stop doing a lot of things, delegating certain things, and creating a lot of systems, like the ugly work of creating systems. But this conversation with Chandler really was a kick in the face to remind me that, like, hey, this is the most important thing in life, is your time and you need to treat it that way. If you wanna get connected with Chandler and his team at the self publishing.com, click the link in the description. And if you're an author and you want your readers to more deeply engage with the ideas in your book. Download the free program execution system toolkit in the description. It'll show you how to build what I call execution infrastructure, which will help the readers of your book do the work that you assign to them and get more value. Thank you for listening, and I'll see you in the next one.