Latest / Beyond Fulfillment Podcast / I Collected Cans to Feed My Sister: From Beer Cans to a 100-Person Company With Dennis DM Meador
Transcript
- 0:00you've got your mother bruised behind you and your sister crying
- 0:03and you're trying to convince somebody to let you in so you know that
- 0:06you and your family is safe for the night,
- 0:08knocking on the door and asking somebody for twenty bucks to mow their lawn
- 0:11is nothing compared to that.
- 0:13You have to sell people what they want,
- 0:15but if you want to keep them as a client,
- 0:16you have to give them what they need.
- 0:18What I always do is I take the product to market myself first.
- 0:22I've got this idea.
- 0:23I'm gonna act as the first salesperson.
- 0:25I have always valued freedom over dollars in the bank.
- 0:33All right, Dennis DM Medor. Welcome to Beyond Fulfillment.
- 0:37Thanks for having me. Beautiful day and good opportunity to talk about life,
- 0:41liberty, and this pursuit of happiness.
- 0:43So let's get at it, my friend.
- 0:44Yes, sir. I'm glad you could make it.
- 0:46so DM, you've been an entrepreneur for over thirty years,
- 0:49scaled several companies, and you've got quite a fascinating story about your latest
- 0:54venture and how you very quickly scaled that.
- 0:58but just to set the stage for our audience,
- 1:00can you talk about your backstory and how you became an entrepreneur?
- 1:03Sure, I think it really boils down to a child of need became
- 1:08an entrepreneur to meet that need.
- 1:12at a very young age I had to start paying attention to money around me,
- 1:16eight, nine, ten years old, to make sure myself and my sister were fed,
- 1:20clothed and safe on a daily basis.
- 1:23And so ~ that made me very aware of money and how to obtain it at a young age.
- 1:28And so I was always, doing things like every morning we would get up and
- 1:32we had a stack of beer cans in our house,
- 1:34two, three hundred of them. We would take those,
- 1:36clean out, and that was usually how we were able to eat for the day.
- 1:40Beyond that, fast forward a few years,
- 1:42I'm now living with my father and we're no longer in a place where I have to
- 1:48get money to get food on the table for me and my sister.
- 1:51But I'm now the oldest of It was five at the time.
- 1:53There ended up being six eventually.
- 1:55But my dad remarried and we lived kind of on the edge
- 2:00of the nice neighborhood, but we were definitely the poorest.
- 2:03So I like the poorest kid in school,
- 2:05the poorest kid in church, you know,
- 2:07and what I ended up doing was one
- 2:12day we had like a snow day and myself,
- 2:15my stepbrother and his best friend,
- 2:16somebody had told me about shoveling snow that you could get,
- 2:19you know, twenty dollars for a walk.
- 2:21If you do a few walks in a day,
- 2:22you could make a hundred dollars or more.
- 2:24And so I went with my stepbrother,
- 2:27his best friend, and we started knocking on doors and we were about an hour into it.
- 2:31And I think we had maybe done maybe two snow shoveling jobs.
- 2:35I had gotten both of those jobs.
- 2:37And we came up to the next
- 2:40door to knock on and my brother was like I don't want to knock on a door.
- 2:43His friend, I don't want to knock on the door.
- 2:45I said, Fine guys, it's not my turn,
- 2:47but I'll go ahead and do it again.
- 2:48I went up, I knocked on the door,
- 2:50and the lady said, Absolutely,
- 2:52here's a ten and two five dollar bills.
- 2:54You know, you do down the sidewalk here,
- 2:56out the sidewalk there, and there's twenty dollars.
- 2:59So I got down to the bottom of it.
- 3:00I kind of kinda thought about it on my way down.
- 3:02I hate this shoveling stuff. My brother and his friend like the shoveling.
- 3:06They hated knocking on the doors.
- 3:08So I handed each of them five dollars.
- 3:10I put ten dollars in my pocket and I said,
- 3:11All right, guys, I've got a great idea.
- 3:13I want you to stay here. I want you to shovel out this walk.
- 3:17I showed him where to shovel. I'm gonna keep knocking on doors so that
- 3:22by the time you get finished with this,
- 3:24the next job will be ready for you to go.
- 3:27And out of that was born snow shoveling continuously,
- 3:33then lawn mowing, then leaf raking,
- 3:35then ~ paper routes, and I had five or six
- 3:39young men two years younger than me in my neighborhood and I managed
- 3:42all of these jobs and these routes
- 3:45and they went and did the work and I went and got the jobs and got
- 3:48the money and split the money with them.
- 3:50So I learned very quick at a young age that by empowering others to work,
- 3:54it was something that I enjoyed doing that aspect of it that most people
- 4:00We're deathly afraid of. Fast forward a few years,
- 4:03I'm now in my early to mid twenties.
- 4:05I've been in marketing for a couple of years,
- 4:06selling advertising, doing well at it.
- 4:08And I had a friend come to me and say,
- 4:10Hey, I'm starting a company. I'd like you to be my partner.
- 4:13I think I was twenty-two, maybe twenty-three at the time.
- 4:15We started the company within a year.
- 4:18I'd come up with a product.
- 4:20it was a six by nine magnet with twelve to fifteen numbers in the middle,
- 4:24poison control, animal control,
- 4:25on call nurse at the hospital.
- 4:27This is two thousand one, two thousand two.
- 4:29and we sold ads around that and then they were distributed through community
- 4:34organizations, police community liaison officer,
- 4:37fire department liaison, Red Cross,
- 4:39groups like that. And so
- 4:42within one year we were doing three and a half million dollars.
- 4:45We had thirty five, forty people working for us.
- 4:47And I kind of then signed off because I had created the processes.
- 4:51I had created the product and I ended up managing the company from a home that
- 4:56I built in Romania via calling cards and dial up internet.
- 5:00~ that partnership after about four years or so kind of dissolved and
- 5:05I spent the next number of years doing different types of consulting
- 5:08I kind of fell into working with attorneys in two thousand five.
- 5:12really enjoyed it, and that's kind of been my career ever since.
- 5:15I've had agencies with SEO, I've had social media marketing agencies,
- 5:20text message marketing agencies,
- 5:22and I've seen three or four companies go from just me and an idea to
- 5:26three to five million dollars within a short amount of time and that's kind
- 5:30of been the trajectory now for the legal podcast network.
- 5:32I was in a partnership with another individual for over four years
- 5:36and I started hearing towards the end attorneys asking me,
- 5:39Do you guys do anything with podcasting?
- 5:41And I went to my then partner and I said,
- 5:43we should be doing something with podcasting.
- 5:45He decided instead to start a intake answering firm.
- 5:49I said, Okay, if you want to go that route,
- 5:50that's fine.
- 5:51when my contract came up, he bought me out and I was just like living
- 5:54on an island in Belize, five months away from my wedding,
- 5:57I went to my then fiance, now wife and mother of my child that'll be born soon
- 6:02and I said, Hey babe, the money that I was making X,
- 6:05Y, and Z for the last four years,
- 6:07that's gone. I've got six months to replace the income 'cause I had like
- 6:10a stair step buyout. So I got to work.
- 6:13I had my VA from the Philippines,
- 6:15a young lady named Jenny, who's worked with me now a number of years.
- 6:18I had her kind of helping me with me administrative.
- 6:20I had another guy named Uzer out of Pakistan that has done like peace work
- 6:25for me over the years as well.
- 6:27And we kind of started with this idea of the legal podcast network creating what
- 6:31we call authority podcasting. Now here we are,
- 6:34two and a half years later. We have about a hundred people on the team.
- 6:37including like hosts, contractors,
- 6:39things like that. And we have over two hundred and fifty shows that
- 6:43we produce with over four hundred episodes per month going out.
- 6:46Okay. Wow.
- 6:47appreciate that backstory, DM,
- 6:48and a whole lot to dig into there.
- 6:50the one theme, just hearing your story,
- 6:52and several parts connect to this,
- 6:54at least for me, it reminds me of the quote:
- 6:56Necessity is the mother of invention.
- 6:58so going all the way back to where most kids
- 7:00think about their childhood years,
- 7:02you know, seven, eight, nine. It's,
- 7:04you know, outside playing with their friends,
- 7:06riding bike and maybe, you know,
- 7:07happy memories, doing different things with their family.
- 7:10and you literally had to find out how to feed you and your sister.
- 7:13And growing up in that type of environment and just being exposed
- 7:17to those realities very soon seems like it's
- 7:19shaped you as an entrepreneur and really was a blessing in disguise where really
- 7:24taught you how to hustle and how to use your ingenuity to make money at
- 7:29an early age as you kind of progressed through the teenage years.
- 7:32And it seems like you had the light bulb moment that went off when you
- 7:35did the snow shoveling and found expertise around building teams and kind
- 7:39of scaling out the work. Is that fair to say?
- 7:42Yeah, absolutely. my parents always teased me.
- 7:44I I'm the oldest of now six. delegation has never been an issue with me.
- 7:48they would jokingly say, we don't like to ask you take to take out
- 7:50the trash 'cause we know you're not gonna take out the trash.
- 7:52It's gonna be one of your younger brothers or sisters,
- 7:54you're gonna somehow convince them that it's the funnest game in the world to do.
- 7:58They're gonna come alongside, they're gonna hold the trash bag,
- 8:00they're gonna hold it in the trash and you're just gonna walk beside
- 8:02I think being the big brother
- 8:04having the necessity of what was going on in my life.
- 8:06Yeah, it certainly shaped and formed how I live life and how I've been able
- 8:11to really find people and put them in a place.
- 8:14To me, success is about helping others find success.
- 8:18And I found way more success doing that than I have by just solely doing something
- 8:23on my own.
- 8:23And it seems like you were just a natural born salesperson,
- 8:26right? You didn't have any fear of knocking on doors,
- 8:29you seemed good at it, you were able to get the jobs and most people,
- 8:33in your circle at least seemed shied away from that role in the early on.
- 8:36When you've knocked on the doors at two,
- 8:38three o'clock in the morning because you've got your mother bruised behind
- 8:42you and your sister crying and you're trying to convince somebody to let
- 8:45you in so you know that you and your family is safe for the night,
- 8:48knocking on the door and asking somebody for twenty bucks to mow their lawn
- 8:52is nothing compared to that. And so,
- 8:55I often remind myself to get where I am,
- 8:58I had to be where I was. And so I don't tell you these things for sob stories,
- 9:02but that was the school that put me in a position of not being afraid
- 9:05to knock doors because I've knocked
- 9:08them in much more serious types of situations previously.
- 9:11So now asking the question, knocking the door,
- 9:14making the call, sending the inbox,
- 9:17sending the email, all of those things,
- 9:19it's like to me, if I don't ask,
- 9:22then the answer's already no anyway.
- 9:24So why not ask the question? I already have the answer.
- 9:27So it's a hundred percent pure upside to ask rather than not asking.
- 9:32And that's just the way I've always looked at it.
- 10:09All right. And so you had several other businesses kind of in your early twenties
- 10:14before you scaled the legal podcast network.
- 10:17And it seemed like several times the the trajectory was it starts off with an idea,
- 10:21You're able to scale those to three to five million relatively quickly.
- 10:25do you have a system in terms of scaling out that you've kind of been able
- 10:29to repeat through a couple of these?
- 10:31Yeah. What I always do is I take the product to market myself first.
- 10:35I I believe that, you know, a lot of people,
- 10:37they find so much value in their idea of a business that they don't actually take
- 10:43the time to take the product to market and find out the questions that
- 10:47get asked about the idea, the things that people doubt about the idea,
- 10:51the things in the marketplace that it mirrors that you have to kind
- 10:54of differentiate yourself from.
- 10:56So they come up with this
- 10:57quote unquote million or billion dollar idea.
- 10:59And then they spend all this time with a website and branding
- 11:03and product and sourcing vendors and everything else.
- 11:06And then they bring in some salesperson to take the product to market.
- 11:10They give them a sliver of it and the salesperson has to kind of invent a process
- 11:16on its own and that's why more often than not you'll see this like business
- 11:20and they'll seed up and they'll get money and people and invest
- 11:23and everybody thinks it's such a great idea,
- 11:26but then when it's time to actually take it to market,
- 11:29it either slows it way down, costs it way more money,
- 11:32they get mad and they feel ripped off by a salesperson when in
- 11:35all actuality they never armed the sales team to be successful in the first place.
- 11:40So I've always just been like,
- 11:42all right, I've got this idea.
- 11:43I'm gonna act as the first salesperson.
- 11:45I'm gonna take it to market. they don't like that.
- 11:48Let me tweak this. I need to add this to my product.
- 11:50I didn't even see that coming.
- 11:51And I kind of
- 11:52take it in with the fluidity so that by the time I start to duplicate six months,
- 11:57a year down the road sometimes,
- 11:59people are coming in to a set sales process,
- 12:02a set product that I know sells,
- 12:04a set, cadence of how to reach people,
- 12:07a set amount of like rebuttals,
- 12:09all of the things are already there for them.
- 12:11So now it's just finding the right people to put in your system that
- 12:14you can duplicate out with.
- 12:15~ okay. obviously you did it the first time and it worked really well
- 12:18and you repeated that. and given your sales background,
- 12:21it seems natural that you would just participate in I'd call that founder
- 12:25led selling.
- 12:27absolutely.
- 12:28Okay. you got into working with attorneys,
- 12:31right? And your previous partnership was ending,
- 12:34right? your partner bought you out.
- 12:36It was a stair step buyout. And so you have six months left before there's
- 12:40no other income, you didn't know what you're gonna do.
- 12:42you were hearing people ask about podcasting.
- 12:45take us back. What year was this when you started Legal Podcast Network?
- 12:47This was
- 12:48So there's two stories. There's my very first business I started in my twenties.
- 12:52And that business, kind of the same thing.
- 12:54My partner basically wrote me out of the will.
- 12:56Then I did a lot of consulting for a while,
- 12:58sales process development, things like that.
- 13:00Then I started some small companies that I kind of ran on my own,
- 13:03more of like jobs of one I had a couple more breakout businesses that
- 13:07I either sold off because of life transitions and things like that.
- 13:10But this particular iteration with the Legal Podcast Network,
- 13:14December of twenty-three, December first is when I got the email.
- 13:17But here's the thing, like I'm a big
- 13:19business geek. Like I keep a notebook of business ideas because my brain just runs
- 13:24twenty four seven. So I might go into and just be like,
- 13:27well man, why does anybody do this?
- 13:29Why does anybody do that? And sometimes it's restaurants and like
- 13:32I have no intention on ever starting a restaurant,
- 13:34but I've got about three pretty cool ideas to me But I just I write them down
- 13:38in a notebook.
- 13:39Sometimes if I really get excited about I figure out the margins,
- 13:42I look at vendors, I do a competitive analysis.
- 13:45I've had people because I'll say,
- 13:46I'm a business geek, and they're like,
- 13:48What's the difference between building a whole world in Dungeons and Dragons,
- 13:51or you taking a business idea and flushing it out and building a whole world
- 13:54in your head with it? And I thought about that and I was like,
- 13:57Thanks for that analogy, because I always kind of felt weird.
- 13:59But
- 14:00The Legal Podcast
- 14:00Yeah.
- 14:01Network was one of probably I usually have about five to seven actionable ideas that
- 14:07if podcasting became illegal tomorrow,
- 14:10I would dig into that notebook and by the following week we would
- 14:13be doing something different. We could pivot.
- 14:15I've always believed in just having a bank of ideas and a bank of things
- 14:19to work off of. And so the legal podcast network was something that
- 14:22was already existing primarily on paper and
- 14:25I just was like, all right, I took the month of December,
- 14:27I played a little bit with branding and what I wanted in my head.
- 14:30Come January, we started building everything.
- 14:32May first, twenty twenty four is when I actually officially took
- 14:35the product to market and launched the Lego Podcast Network.
- 14:39so let's let's dig into that more so about what they do and who it helps.
- 14:43obviously attorneys and why specifically did you niche down to attorneys
- 14:46for this network?
- 14:47So back in my first business when I transitioned away from that,
- 14:51I got recruited into legal sales.
- 14:54and I started selling to primarily personal injury attorneys,
- 14:57internet based, marketing products.
- 14:59And I've always enjoyed working with attorneys.
- 15:03I think they act in a place of logic instead of pure emotion.
- 15:07They're also open to a back and forth discussion,
- 15:10unlike maybe some other niches of blue collar business owners.
- 15:14They don't wanna they, you know,
- 15:15I told you no and then, you know,
- 15:17just kinda like get really aggressive and angry.
- 15:19So I really liked the opportunity to sit down and talk to attorneys.
- 15:25For the next twenty-one years,
- 15:26that was kind of like my core audience of people that I sold to.
- 15:30No matter what I was doing, it's like I can always sell to attorneys.
- 15:33And, it's not like something that everybody wants to sell to real estate,
- 15:36everybody wants to sell, something that a ton of people are in the niche.
- 15:39I've been working with attorneys twenty one years.
- 15:41I knew what they really wanted in a product.
- 15:43So when I launched the podcast network,
- 15:45I launched it with a few things in mind.
- 15:47Number one, it's built for very busy people.
- 15:49There are 400,000 law firms in the United States.
- 15:52Of that, 360,000 of them,
- 15:5690%, have 10 or less people in that law firm.
- 16:00That's who my audience is, solo to small law firms.
- 16:03Well, what do I know about them?
- 16:04I know they're super busy. although they don't typically have the resources
- 16:08of some of these big huge firms,
- 16:10they still need to market, but they don't have time to market.
- 16:13So I needed to create something that was very low friction for their time.
- 16:18Well, I don't know if you know this,
- 16:20and I imagine having your own podcast you do.
- 16:22Podcasting can take up a lot of time.
- 16:24The typical solo podcaster takes about six to ten hours per episode.
- 16:29Now that's if they're doing their own editing,
- 16:32creating the shorts and reels.
- 16:33they're doing all the work in behind it.
- 16:35But it takes anywhere from six to ten to some of them have quoted me
- 16:38up to fifteen hours per episode if you're doing all that on your own.
- 16:42Even just to come up with questions and get guests takes hours,
- 16:46until you get good at it, especially and you've been doing it for a while.
- 16:50So I knew that would be a huge barrier to entry.
- 16:52So although attorneys were asking for a podcast,
- 16:55I knew that the majority of the attorneys I would talk to would not really
- 16:59be able to have a podcast in its purest form of what we know it.
- 17:03So what I did is I kind of thought through the process of the second thing,
- 17:08which is the podcast has to actually bring them clients.
- 17:11And what I heard from a lot of people who've done podcasting.
- 17:14especially if they host their own podcast is yeah,
- 17:18like I enjoy it. I get to meet great people.
- 17:21I don't know that it's brought me a lot of business per se,
- 17:24but I built some great relationships and you know it's it's been good for me.
- 17:28And I knew that wouldn't fly for attorneys long term.
- 17:31So I was like, okay, how do I do this low friction with their time?
- 17:35How do I make sure it actually is going to produce them clients?
- 17:38And then number
- 17:39three,
- 17:40How do I do it in a way that it's something that they're proud of?
- 17:42Because any eight-year-old with an iPhone can have a podcast,
- 17:45let's be honest. But having a quality podcast that actually brings some value
- 17:52to the listener and is aesthetically and in audio a pleasant experience,
- 17:57you know that's not always the easiest thing to do.
- 18:00And so that was the thing that we sought out to
- 18:03solve and that was the original intention that we had.
- 18:06How do we solve these three problems?
- 18:08Low friction, bringing clients and good quality.
- 18:11So what I thought about was the fact that in most podcasts,
- 18:15the person being positioned as the expert is not the host,
- 18:18it's the guest. is that a fair assumption?
- 18:20Yeah, in an interview style podcast,
- 18:22absolutely.
- 18:23Okay, so and I thought about that and here's the thing you can have like
- 18:25a thought leadership podcast that your buddies at the bar association will tap,
- 18:29hey, I listened to it, they'll pat you on the back.
- 18:31I like that one guest you had.
- 18:33But to actually bring them clients,
- 18:34I had to flip the script. So what we do is when somebody comes on as a client,
- 18:38we find out who their client is.
- 18:40We call it the client profile,
- 18:42the jurisdictional profile, and the brand profile.
- 18:45Essentially,
- 18:45what types of clients do they want?
- 18:47Where are these clients located?
- 18:49And how do they present themselves?
- 18:51And I thought, well, what if I had my hosts ask them questions that
- 18:56are targeted to their clients so that they're positioned as the expert?
- 19:01They have somebody that makes them look and sound good.
- 19:04And then I have a professional producer there that makes sure it's being done right.
- 19:08a professional production team that makes sure it ends up right.
- 19:10And so then they sit down for a half hour,
- 19:13and out of it comes a professionally produced podcast where they look like
- 19:17the knowledgeable expert and you know they've had a comfortable conversation.
- 19:21That's where we started. We were a production company giving out three pieces
- 19:25of content. And what we've done is we've just continued to add on to that.
- 19:28Now we do 30 pieces of content per episode,
- 19:30which is a 30-minute time slot.
- 19:32So 30 pieces that we distribute on 10 outlets.
- 19:35Plus we do guest matching. we have a television network,
- 19:37we're looking to to add in more pieces,
- 19:39and we call it now the podcast ecosystem,
- 19:42where they just show up and talk for thirty minutes like they would on
- 19:46a Zoom call with a potential client or a friend.
- 19:48We then take that and we just multiply it,
- 19:51chop it up and do all kinds of fun stuff with it and get all kinds
- 19:54of different iterations of it.
- 19:55And that's why we've also had to launch the Authority Podcast Network,
- 19:59because we had about
- 20:00twelve people that I looked and I was like,
- 20:02why is this baseball coach who helps kids get scholarships in
- 20:06the legal podcast network? Why is this real estate agent here?
- 20:09Why is this football coach here?
- 20:11they were like, well, they came to us and they knew we were legal,
- 20:14but they liked our tech stack and all the stuff that we do.
- 20:17So they signed up and I was like,
- 20:19okay, well I was going to wait for this,
- 20:20but I guess we have the authority podcast network now too.
- 20:23So we've duplicated our systems to be able to enable us to help.
- 20:27financial professionals, real estate professionals,
- 20:30medical professionals, anybody that wants to come to us and have their time
- 20:34multiplied and build a whole ecosystem out of just a little bit of their time.
- 21:18okay. So it all started with solving a problem.
- 21:21And like you said, you knew attorneys well.
- 21:23They're always busy. You understood from the podcasting game what it really took.
- 21:28And no attorney is gonna spend the time to actually create this and do this
- 21:32on their own. So, you said prior about always taking the product to market first,
- 21:36you had this relationship with the attorney ecosystem,
- 21:39you knew what their pain points were,
- 21:41you created a company that solved those pain points.
- 21:44so you've scaled from nothing to a hundred plus people on the team in about
- 21:49two and a half years at this point.
- 21:50when you put this out into the market and came up with the system,
- 21:54what was the response initially from the attorneys in your network?
- 21:57So initially they they just wanted a podcast.
- 21:59And here's one thing I've learned working with businesses through the years.
- 22:03You have to sell people what they want,
- 22:05but if you want to keep them as a client,
- 22:06you have to give them what they need.
- 22:08So when we first started, like I said,
- 22:09we gave them three pieces of content.
- 22:11So we put together a nice podcast,
- 22:13distribute it on all the different outlets and networks,
- 22:16three reels for them to put on their social media.
- 22:18And we said, Hey, here you go.
- 22:20Good luck with it. And what happened is they'd come back,
- 22:22you know, however many months later and say,
- 22:24Nothing's happening. well, did you use that marketing?
- 22:26Well, yeah, I put up that video once.
- 22:27And well, how else did you market your show?
- 22:29Well, I just thought if I build it,
- 22:31they will come. And it's like,
- 22:32not in today's day and age. That's not really how it works.
- 22:35I sold the first hundred clients
- 22:37in about seven months. So I was bringing on 10 to 15-ish clients a month while
- 22:42I was building systems, while I was hiring,
- 22:44training, writing out processes and all the other stuff.
- 22:47And, as most entrepreneurs who love what they do and do what they love,
- 22:51I was spending, fifteen, seventeen hours a day from five,
- 22:54six in the morning till eight,
- 22:55nine at night at my desk grinding,
- 22:58selling during the selling hours,
- 22:59training when I had time with other people,
- 23:01writing out
- 23:02Things that I was writing out,
- 23:03but I kept seeing it over and over,
- 23:05like the attorneys are like, I love this,
- 23:07this looks great, I'm proud of it.
- 23:08But we weren't really seeing them get clients from it.
- 23:12then that was when the everybody was now talking about AI.
- 23:15And I just told my team, like,
- 23:16I don't know AI. I'm computer literate,
- 23:18but with this stuff, I don't understand it.
- 23:20But we're gonna figure out how we're gonna use AI,
- 23:22not to replace our team, but to empower our team.
- 23:25And so
- 23:26we launched LPN 2.0 where we went from three pieces of content that we gave them
- 23:31to thirty pieces of content that we actually distribute for them on 10 outlets.
- 23:36And then that's when we really started seeing things happening and people coming
- 23:40to us and saying, Yeah, people are saying I saw you on social and I want
- 23:43to work with you. You seem to know what you're doing.
- 23:45so that's been the typical response
- 23:48Like even when we lose clients,
- 23:49they love what we're doing. And what's funny is a lot of the clients that we've lost
- 23:54come back to us six months to a year.
- 23:56My first year I sold a guy, one of the very first people I brought on,
- 23:59he's a criminal defense lawyer in Michigan.
- 24:01he says, Yeah, you know what? I'm going to go ahead.
- 24:03I'm going to take the year off.
- 24:04I want to try something else. lawyers are very guilty of this.
- 24:07even something works for them,
- 24:09they'll say, Well, I want to try something different this year.
- 24:11Come January of 26th, he comes back and I do a thing where I tell
- 24:16people,
- 24:16As long as you remain a live client,
- 24:18I will not raise your rates. And anything that I add into the ecosystem,
- 24:22you will get it no additional charge.
- 24:24But I do have to raise my rates over time as I add in things and cost
- 24:28to the base cost. So I have
- 24:30people that pay 40% less because they've been with me for years now.
- 24:34but if you leave and come back.
- 24:36You're gonna have to pay the new rate.
- 24:38And so he comes back and he's like,
- 24:39I'm ready to go again. We All right,
- 24:40here's our rate. And he's like,
- 24:41Well, that's more. And I said,
- 24:42Yeah, here's all the extra stuff we're doing that we weren't doing before.
- 24:46And on top of it, this is our pricing now.
- 24:48I was more than willing to stay with you at that price.
- 24:51what we're seeing is they like it,
- 24:53they stay, they leave. Not everybody,
- 24:56but we're seeing a significant portion even coming back because of the cumulative.
- 25:00effect that podcasting has. Some people will do six,
- 25:04eight months of podcasting and then walk away from it.
- 25:06And then all of a sudden, two,
- 25:07three months later, they start getting calls and they start having things happen
- 25:10from it. And they're like, boy,
- 25:11I missed out. And then they want to come back and do it.
- 25:14So that's kind of what we're seeing overall.
- 25:16So looking at your whole journey,
- 25:18DM, From where you started with some very tough circumstances,
- 25:21had to really figure out how to make money early on,
- 25:24really thrived in your teenage years,
- 25:26building out systems, several companies in your twenties and beyond,
- 25:30and now really scaling out this podcast network and really figuring that part
- 25:35of the ecosystem. looking at your whole journey,
- 25:37what's been the best part of it for you?
- 25:38I have always valued freedom over dollars in the bank.
- 25:42Now that's not to say that I don't think it's important to be paid and
- 25:45be smart with my money. the fact that I've been able to live a life that although
- 25:50I've had seasons of very hard work
- 25:52I've still been able to live a life that I enjoy.
- 25:55I lived on the island in Belize in the Caribbean for three and a half years.
- 25:59Now I moved up north. I live in Mexico in a a nice,
- 26:01town that we really enjoy. we traveled five or six months of the year,
- 26:05went to Thailand, Bali, Europe,
- 26:07different places. I think that that has one A and then one B
- 26:12has been the people that have gone on this journey with me and believed in me,
- 26:16like Jenny, who lives in Manila,
- 26:19Philippines, who the year before,
- 26:21she said, Hey, I'm getting ready to build a house.
- 26:23And I was like, that's cool. And she's like,
- 26:25you know,
- 26:25No one my family's ever built a house,
- 26:27no one in my family's ever gone on vacation.
- 26:29It's because of working with you these years how you've taken care
- 26:32of me through what I brought to the table.
- 26:34So it's stories like that where I could tell you a young man on my sales team
- 26:39two years ago, living in his parents' basement,
- 26:41doesn't have a car, depressed about life in general.
- 26:44Now here he is making really good money,
- 26:47has his own place, his own car,
- 26:48he's in a relationship, he's actually getting ready to come spend a week with
- 26:51me because he won a sales contest.
- 26:53So I'd say really those two things,
- 26:55the ability to live my life on my terms because of my businesses,
- 26:59and the ability to impact other people's lives and see them be able
- 27:03to do things that maybe they didn't have even in their own mind of being able to do.
- 27:07But because we've worked side by side,
- 27:09they've been able to see success because of it.
- 27:11Love that. Okay. And DM, if people want to find out more about
- 27:15the legal podcast network or the authority podcast network,
- 27:18what's the best way people can find you online?
- 27:20if you're a LinkedIn person, look me up on LinkedIn or my company.
- 27:23I tend to be pretty active there.
- 27:25If you just want to check out the company website,
- 27:27there's thelegal podcast network dot com and the authority podcast network dot com.
- 27:34That kind of tells you our deliverables.
- 27:36You can click through. You also check us out on YouTube.
- 27:39We've got all of our shows on there on our channels.
- 27:42We just put it right out there.
- 27:43We're not hiding what we're doing.
- 27:44but if you want to connect with me personally,
- 27:46I would say LinkedIn's gonna be your best bet.
- 27:48Okay. All right. And we will link all that in the show notes for everyone.
- 27:51DM, thank you so much for taking the time to be here and sharing
- 27:54all this incredible wisdom from your journey with our listeners.
- 27:57We greatly appreciate it.
- 27:58Thank you for the opportunity.
- 27:59I appreciate it.