#35 From $0 to Millions Selling on Amazon (What Actually Works in 2026) with Nathan Bailey

Why your business isn’t growing, how to make money online, and how to start an Amazon business from scratch—Nathan Bailey breaks it all down.

In this episode of Based Business, Nathan Bailey shares how he built one of the first Amazon selling courses, scaled multiple businesses, and why most entrepreneurs fail before they ever succeed.

We dive into:

• How to start an Amazon business (even with no money)
• The biggest mistakes new entrepreneurs make
• Why mindset—not money—is holding you back
• The truth about “passive income” and online business
• How to scale without burning out or getting stuck

Nathan has helped thousands of entrepreneurs build real income streams through e-commerce, Amazon selling, and online business systems.

If you feel stuck, overwhelmed, or like your business isn’t growing—this episode will show you exactly what to fix.

Subscribe for more episodes on entrepreneurship, mindset, and building real businesses.

⏱️ FULL TIMELINE

00:00 Introduction & Why Most Entrepreneurs Stay Broke
 00:35 Meet Nathan Bailey
 01:40 Early Days Selling Online (Pre-Amazon)
 03:50 eBay Hustle & Learning the Game
 06:10 Transition Into Amazon Selling
 08:45 Building One of the First Amazon Courses
 12:00 Growth of the Amazon Seller Community
 15:20 Why Most People Never Start a Business
 18:10 Fear, Risk & Taking the First Step
 21:30 Mindset vs Strategy (The Real Bottleneck)
 24:00 Scarcity vs Abundance Thinking 
 27:10 Breaking Limiting Beliefs Around Money
 30:25 Income Ceilings & Self-Sabotage 
 34:40 Why Entrepreneurs Plateau

💰 Making Money Online / Amazon Section

38:10 How to Start With No Money
 41:30 Arbitrage Explained (Beginner Strategy)
 45:00 Finding Products That Actually Sell
 48:30 The Fastest Way to Generate Cash Flow
 52:15 Why Most Beginners Fail at Amazon
 56:40 The Truth About “Passive Income”

🧠 Mindset, Failure & Growth

01:00:10 Why You Need to Fail Daily
 01:04:30 Fear of Failure vs Fear of Success
 01:08:20 Overcoming Self-Doubt
 01:12:10 Confidence Through Action
 01:15:40 What Nathan Would Do Differently Today
 01:18:00 Investing in Yourself Earlier 

🚀 Scaling & Business Systems

01:22:30 Scaling Beyond Yourself
 01:26:10 Delegation & Building Teams
 01:30:40 Becoming the Bottleneck
 01:34:20 Systems That Actually Scale
 01:38:50 Building Multiple Businesses

🤝 Networking, Relationships & Opportunity

01:42:30 The Power of Proximity
 01:45:50 How Relationships Make You Millions 
 01:49:10 Getting in the Right Rooms
 01:52:00 “Luck” vs Preparedness

📣 Marketing, Content & Offers

01:55:40 Hook, Story, Offer Framework 
 01:59:20 Copywriting & Influence (Dan Kennedy, Gary Halbert)
 02:03:30 Why Most Marketing Doesn’t Convert
 02:07:10 Building Offers That Actually Sell

🧩 Business Model & Ecosystem Thinking

02:10:30 Stacking Businesses Together
 02:14:20 Increasing Customer Lifetime Value 
 02:18:00 Monetization Strategy
 02:21:40 Serving Clients at a Higher Level

🧘 Mindset Deep Dive (Late Episode)

02:24:00 Identity, Belief & Success
 02:27:00 Law of Attraction & Consciousness 
 02:29:30 Let Go of Control
 02:32:10 Obsession vs Alignment

🎯 Closing Section

02:35:00 Final Advice for Entrepreneurs
 02:37:30 Gratitude & Reflection
 02:39:00 Where to Connect with Nathan
 02:40:00 Closing 

Transcript

SPEAKER_04 0:00

We created the very first online course on how to sell on Amazon.

SPEAKER_00 0:04

We were the first to the dance in 2007. He's like, Parker, that's your$10 million a year business. I got three people in 30 seconds telling me that this is what I need to be doing, so I'm gonna go all in on it. If you're a new entrepreneur, money's not worth holding you back.

SPEAKER_04 0:16

Holding you back is not having the knowledge, direction, and tools. All their goals and dreams and everything comes down to two words freedom and control.

SPEAKER_00 0:25

Welcome back to Base Business. I'm your host, Parker McCumber, and today I'm here with Nathan Bailey. And I think we've uncovered something really cool: the concept of failing every day. Nathan, would you just introduce yourself real quick? Tell us what you do, and let's jump into it.

SPEAKER_04 0:42

Awesome. Yeah, my name is Nathan Bailey. Um, the my elevator pitch is this I run the largest community in the world of professional online sellers, specifically Amazon right now, but before that it was eBay. Um, but uh as far as Amazon goes, my partner and I, Jim Cochran, we created the very first online course on how to sell on Amazon. We were the first to the dance in 2007. If you Chat GPT, hey, what's the best Amazon course to take? We're gonna come up. If you go number one podcasts in the for Amazon that I should listen to, we're gonna come up at the very top of that list. We've been doing it longer than anybody. And um with Amazon, I mean, we even have a relationship with Amazon. They bring us out to their events every year. They let us interview their top executives or their podcasts. They let us use um Amazon in the name of our course-proven Amazon course. Um, you know, they like us because we do it right. We um, you know, and that's and that's what the what what it needs is is someone to actually show you how to do it without tripping over yourself. But like you said, the concept of failing every day, failing up, failing forward. I see a lot of it because people are so afraid to fail that they don't do anything. They'd rather not do anything, maybe than fail. Me, I embrace it. Like for me, like some of the failures, and uh, I mean, the leading cause of success for me has been fail. Right. Amen. And and it's it's it's one of those things where though at the same time where I have this abundance mentality about, hey, embrace it. I'm still having scarcity with it too. I'll just be real honest and open here. It's like it's hard to be at my stage of the game, be a dad of two, right? I've got an 18-year-old and a 14-year-old now, and it's insane that they're even still alive with me being their dad. Like I mean, I should never be a dad, but I'm a great dad, though. They it's weird, they love me more than they love their mom because I'm just cool and like you know, I don't I don't enforce on them. But um, it's like failing at that, even has been an adventure and a journey, and I've learned so much from it, it's been so fulfilling. But running this community, I I teach people how to sell on Amazon, right? But not only that, uh, and this has gone way over an elevator pitch, but um aside from having the the very first coaching company in the world in history ever on how to sell on Amazon and training education, we have a huge Facebook community. We have 84,000 people in our Facebook group. We've got about two and a half million people on our email list. Um, we've been doing it since for 25 years together, my partner and I, Jim Cochran. But from that, I've started this other business called Humminbird, H-U-M-N-B-I-R-D. And it's basically if you don't know all the labor pains of learning how to do all the Amazon stuff through coaching and training education, you just want the baby, come to me and I build it. So I build brands, right? So what I do is is I will take your brand. We have a division where we do uh intellectual property. So we do trademarks, we set up the brand registry. I have a team of 20 VAs in the Philippines where we build your Amazon listings. I we do product photography, we do all the images, we do, we run the PPC for it. You know, we can we can do a lot of different things on the the technical side of build out, right? So Hummenbird also we do you we can help you with financial stuff, setting up your entities, doing trusts, uh, you know, setting up your your um you know, your living trust or your business trusts. Um we do corporations, entities, Nevada Corps, Wyoming Corps, Delaware Corps, whatever. We also, we also uh with that, we do a lot of stuff on the tax side, you know, tax financial as well. So it's kind of the Humminbird business, and there are a lot of people that come to me for coaching that on the back end, they need the things that we do for you rather than we teach you to do for yourself. Because you should never be like a real estate dealer, you're gonna do all the title work yourself? Never, right? Like it's you that's why you have a real estate attorney or your title company. So that's what Humminbird is, is a services business. Then I also own a 3PL company that we all those clients now that we build a brand for, they need warehousing. So I have a shipping application called Integra Ship, where it's like ShipStation, and uh it's basically uh set up to connect to your Shopify, to your Amazon, eBay, Etsy, any of the, you know, the WordPress um uh platforms, WooCommerce, whatever. So all your shipments go into one place. We give you a discount shipping rate. We can do your LTL. Um that's a partnership with Descartes that we have. And I also have a warehouse where we do your prep, pack, ship. We can manage distribution, and I work with companies all over the world doing their warehousing and that stuff. Then I own a software company with some partners called 3P Mercury. We develop this through this model that we teach with Amazon, because what we teach is the lowest hanging fruit strategy. The best thing to do is not go out there and oh, I'm gonna build a brand and go buy a bunch of stuff from China and private label. If you're new to selling on Amazon, that is the fast. If you really want to fail, if we're talking about that's how you fail. And you fail big when you do that.

SPEAKER_00 5:46

Oh, yeah, yeah. You invest more money, you go buy the products, and it hurts. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 5:50

Risky. We teach what is called arbitrage. We've been doing it for forever, right? So there's there's online arbitrage and retail arbitrage. I can go to Walmart and go to the health and personal care section and clear the shelf of equate. And instead of selling equate laxative one unit at a time, I'll bundle them together as a three-pack or a case pack. And I'll I'll go right to the Walmart manager and say, hey, listen, I don't want to clear your shelf because I know someone's gonna come in here. They're gonna be constipated, they're gonna need to buy this equate laxative, and there's not gonna be any there. So can you just order it in for me by the case? And if you do, can I get a discount? Oh, sure, we'll sell it to you for 10% above Walmart's cost. And now that increased my margins. So I'm literally getting stuff out of Walmart, Target, uh uh GameStop, um, Trader Joe's, or you know, I mean these retail stores, right? That you can off the shelf, or we've evolved to having a tool that you can find it online through online arbitrage, where you can buy stuff online and then turn around and flip that stuff on Amazon. We built a software that is a workflow specifically for that, that it manages everything from tip to tell, your sourcing, your inventory management. And what we did is we created an AI in it that basically I can scrape ASINs off of Amazon. That's products, all the products, load it into the software. The software watches it and it tells you which ones are the winners. So it brings filters the winners up to the top. Very, very innovative. This is uh this was built by a coaching student that I coached that saw had a SAS that he sold for a hundred million dollars and decided he wanted to come into our community and do what we teach and was very successful, became like a three, four million dollar a year seller. And through we came up with this concept for the software, and he said, Well, I'll just build it. So he built it for his own business, and then we just launched that um about a year and a half ago, and it's just going gangbusters. But what's cool is it goes through and it it basically helps you manage your VAs. So let's say you have VA's out there sourcing stuff for you online and they're loading ASINs and it manages their KPIs so you can watch all their KPIs, and it's basically just a complete workflow management for your Amazon business, keeps all your invoices, very, very cool software, very innovative. So it has never been done. But for me, what happens, and this is the big fail, right? Is I just keep adding all these things onto my plate and just trying to build infrastructure. And I fail where I fail is I fail to delegate things improperly because I'm the visionary of the company. Yeah, I'm not the structured sequential. Have you ever seen heard of that book, Traction? Yes, very familiar. So I'm trying to like get that together, but I'm the visionary. I'm like as ADD as you can get. Like every idea that we have comes from me, and then my partner, who's the structured sequential. I've got a few of them that I've surrounded myself with. They elevate my good idea to the right idea. Yeah. And and then we act on it, right? And it's it's like uh, you know, I've I've really kind of I really need to, I need to sign up for your coaching program because here I am, a guy that's owned businesses for almost 30 years now, right? But I still can't seem to get it together to scale it the way that I mean, I should have a hundred million dollar business. I should be making a hundred and fifty thousand dollars personal income every month right now, and I'm not because of a couple different things. There's it's good and bad, and it always comes back to fear and scarcity. But the good side of it is, is I do this out of the love of the game.

SPEAKER_02 9:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 9:31

Like I don't care. I'll work Saturday because it's fun, because I'm an addict. I'm a class A workaholic. And it's like, but it's these people, I can't let them down. And I've built so many relationships and all these, like if I sell coaching to somebody, um, I don't care. You're gonna be successful. I'm not letting you slip through the crack cracks. I can lead you to water, I can't make you to drink, so don't make me drown to you. Like that's that's how intense I am about this stuff. Um, it's my heart, it's my passion. When I get up on stage and speak at our events, like I don't plan a slide deck and a whole presentation. I just get up there and go from the heart and roll like we're doing today, you know. But it's like the side of it that's bad, though, is I've let my heart get in the way of doing what is really practical and most sensible for business. And it's my lack of real business background, you know, going through the school of hard knocks rather than going to any real type of formal education for business, right?

SPEAKER_00 10:30

A lot of thoughts. I'm gonna put school here too. Okay, uh, the show. I try to keep the show in line with how do we help people that are looking to start a business or maybe struggling through their first obstacles. Uh, I want to just go and teach really quickly on arbitrage. If you don't know what arbitrage is, essentially you identify a gap in the market where you can purchase a product for less than what you can resell it for, and then you provide that resell. Uh, I started with e-commerce arbitrage. So, my my background, I would go find the man, I can't get this uh microphone right today. I'd go find products that I knew would, and I did this a little bit uniquely, so I'll share the model in a minute, that I I knew that I could resell, that I could do a better job positioning them in the market, or that I could do a better job marketing those products so I could sell them for more. So I would go and find an initial product. The way that I did that, just for the knowledge base here, I would find products that had a value ladder associated with them. And what I mean by that is like if I was going to go sell a phone, the phone also sells phone cases, also sells screen protectors. So then I could bundle those things together to make more or upsell the, like if I'm selling the phone as a base, upsell the uh protectors. So that was my how I got in was arbitrage. I think that's a great way, especially if you're interested in learning about e-commerce or retail. Second thing you touched on is you're the visionary. And you need help to maybe figure out how to actually grow and scale. My one of my coaches, uh Mandy Keene, she teaches a concept called the Rainmaker Triad. So pivoting away from traction a little bit, she reframes this problem. All of the Uber successful businesses in the world have three key players. They have a rainmaker, that's usually the charismatic entrepreneur, the person that makes the relationships, goes out, sells the product, sells the service, makes the deals, and they bring in the revenue. But those people, while they might have great ideas, are not necessarily the best when it comes to putting together the system. And that's where you need an engineer. And the engineer is who refines the back end, refines the process, builds the system and the steps, and makes it so that your business or your uh delivery can be optimized, right? Then you have the creator. And the creator is the person that makes the business or the product or the service beautiful and good and packaged in a way that the consumer can't deny its goodness and value. So you put those three things together. Uh, and that is typically where you start to have an optimization platform because now you have someone who is responsible for every direct driver to the business's growth, right? You have the engineer who can go in and make the back end good and the product and the service deliverable in such a manner that it is going to be profitable and optimized. You have the rainmaker who's still out there going on the podcast, talking to people, building the relationship, selling the product and the service. And then you have the creator who's just constantly making it better, making it more presentable. So I typically start with that idea as the foundation for the system that scales. Uh, and and you mentioned system here. I wanted to bring up holy smokes, you have done an excellent job of building businesses that feed each other. I'm talking about um this concept as I try to do it in my own life, right? My coaching business, I needed to ramp my content production. I needed to be more omnipresent. I buy a podcasting studio. Podcasting studio now helps me make all of that content that my coaching business needs and they feed each other. Why? Because now all of the podcast studio people say, hey, wait, I want to monetize my podcast like Parker monetized his podcast. So now they're all ripe for coaching. And then my coaching clients, all of them need help building their authority and their um more higher quality content so that they can be regarded as a reputable person. So those people all are coming and joining the podcast studio. So these businesses are fueling each other. And as you're talking about, hey, we offer Amazon coaching. And if the coaching isn't what's getting you across the finish line, we'll build it out for you. And uh, if you need help sourcing your products, we've got the program that will help you find profitable arbitrage products. And by the way, it'll manage all your KPIs and your back end, and we've got this AI, like all of those things support each other. So the next thing that comes to my mind is you're talking about I should be doing$100 million a year. What's how are you raising the lifetime value of each individual customer? So then my thought is what's the follow-up look like? So if I come to you for Amazon coaching and uh, you know, it gets me to go build my own Amazon platform, but I'm like, ah man, you know, I'm just spending too much time doing this. I wanted to have a little bit more freedom. Okay, you have the tools already to help me with that, but you have to identify that problem. So, what's the follow-up when you have somebody come to you for one of these products or services?

SPEAKER_04 15:49

You know what's amazing about what you're this is the bottleneck. You when when the owner becomes the bottleneck, right? I know so much, and I've developed this new these businesses, and it's a Dan Kennedy concept because I used to do all of his coaching. Big fan of Dan Kennedy. So I used to run his coaching program right here in Orm, Utah. And I introduced that whole community to eBay back in the day, right? But like it's all about the back end to your back ends, back ends, back end, right? That's what I learned from Dan. Dan's a genius. Dan, I would say the two top guys I've ever worked with is Dan Kennedy and Jay Abraham. But Jim Cochran, my partner now, if you go to Silent Jim, you can check out the podcast or whatever. The intellectual intelligence by way of people and not the profit side of things. I mean, you get on a Monday morning meeting with Dan, and what were the numbers? What was the dollar per lead acquisition? What was the what was the DPL?

SPEAKER_00 16:42

Uber focused on the data.

SPEAKER_04 16:43

Well, when you're a CEO, you have to be numbers, numbers, numbers, because that's what decides the direction of the business. Right. As a CEO, if you're not, if you're not also the CFO, you're you're gonna fail. Like that's what I've learned the hard way. Um, but like that back end to the back end's back end concept, right? For me, um, was that was where that was learned. But I mean, with Jim, we have such an amazing opportunity. But uh at the same time, too, we are so like there's there's this threshold of quality versus quantity. Yeah, right. We could run quantity, but in the game of e-commerce, coaching, there's a lot of fast buck operators, right? Yeah, hate that. You can't hide a bad reputation online. Think about this. I've run this particular coaching business for 25 years, and we have no naked, I've got 10,000 success stories. But what I've done, and my biggest problem, my biggest failures, I'm generous to a fault. I don't charge enough money, I do it for cheap, I'm and I will move mountains for people. And I don't know if you've experienced this yourself, but the the more you the harder you bend over backwards, the harder you get screwed.

SPEAKER_03 17:54

Oh, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 17:55

You know, but but for me, it's weird. I have this weird malfunction where I'm okay getting screwed as long as everyone. It's like it's the concept of okay, the airplane, it's going down, the oxygen masks come down. Here, let me put oxygen masks on everybody else first before putting it on me. That's the exact opposite from what they tell you to do. That's my biggest failure in in business. I, and I'll admit it. Curious. But it's it's one of those things where I just keep coming up with great ideas and finding ways to serve and serve well. Yeah. And even at the sacrifice of my own well-being, right? Because I don't know, you know, this has all become so much bigger than me. I I think the term is the mission is bigger than the man. And I've been so bought into that, and I've made so many sacrifices, and I've had to learn the hard way that that no one is gonna sacrifice like I have. And and and I I've I've never really fully accepted that. I've always, you know, I mean, like the term after all I've done, I never say that. I that that to me is so below the the line of maturity and professionalism, like that's victim stuff. Yeah. And it's hard for me to to ever play victim just because unless I make myself the victim and I realize and I laugh and I go, yep, you're a sucker for the punishment again, bro. And but I mean, as an entrepreneur, just I think you have to accept that. I think so many people, when they're a new, like you talk about, you know, this needs to be for new businesses. Like the fear and the scarcity mentality is your biggest enemy. Oh, yeah. The only reason why I'm not making 150 grand a month, like that's personal income that I can pay myself personally, which anybody who pays themselves that much money and not putting it in a trust is just crazy. If you have a death wish to the IRS, right? But like um, for me, that whole process and and trying to like hold it all down in the scarcity mindset. I should be making a hundred thousand a month. It's all a mindset. And if you it's like you miss 100% of the shots you don't take, yeah. I'm just hitting, I'm like, okay, base hit, base hit, base hit, base hit, base hit, base. Eventually you got to load the base up and swing for the fences. Yeah. In fact, in in if you're new to this business, go out and and swing for the home run every time. Because I know people that have built businesses and failed, and build businesses and failed. And like one of my mentors, he started a business um called Cellular One, and he sold it to AT ⁇ T for$300 million. And man, he hammered me not too long ago. We were looking at doing a business acquisition. He was looking at buying my business, and he went, Nate, you are absolutely the biggest asset to your business, but you are by far the biggest liability.

SPEAKER_02 20:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 20:31

And that hit me so weird. Like, like I wanted to be offended, but all I could do was agree to and be like, you're right. You're absolutely right. I cannot be mad at you for saying that, even though you're I've gotten on your nerves enough that you've just can't had to drop the hammer on me, right? Yeah. And don't be afraid of that. Let people tell you, you know, where and take it and don't let just drop the ego, right? That was that's that's a hard one for entrepreneurs when you make all this money and you, you know, you drive a nice car and you've got hundreds of thousands of dollars in your bank account and that sort of thing. Get low, like the ocean. All streams flow into the ocean. Humility, humble yourself and take those criticisms and don't beat yourself up because it those failures for me have led to where I'm at. I feel like right now I'm about to have a massive breakthrough. I really feel like I'm I'm at this place where but the only thing that's gonna get me through that wall is two things, I think. My mindset about what I believe, because you you have to believe it true.

SPEAKER_00 21:43

Yep.

SPEAKER_04 21:43

And relationships. There's always a relationship that you can create the and that that will be the the process. Because it really it's it's like we talked about the who, not how a bit. Um for me, it's always been a series. I've been lucky. I've been in the weirdest situations with, you know, I've been I was in the music industry. And I mean, I've I've been around people, I could tell you stories about bands that I've hung out with and all day long and experiences I've had with musicians and things that have happened that you would be like, no way. And then I'd pull out the receipts and show you, no, seriously, look here. Look at these pictures of you know, all of this stuff, like way back in the day. And and you know what though, that to me, like I used to think that that was my dream. I used to think that, like, you know, you have this killer car collection, right? And you're being like, like, this is my dream. And then you have kids, yeah, and it all changes. And then you realize being a dad, okay, whoa, this is my dream. And so I kind of let all that go. Right. But you know, I I I could have been anything I wanted in that business, although I didn't, I figured out that I didn't want it because the people in that business are really ugly. I just, it's not, it's not good. But I just didn't believe it. I didn't believe I was that guy. And at 52, yeah, I'm starting to get to that place now where I can believe it true and believe that I am that guy.

SPEAKER_00 23:06

I'm curious about um the mindset here because I I feel like some of these uh things conflict a little bit. It's it's massive.

SPEAKER_04 23:18

It's a huge, it's a huge like the forces of I think it's spiritual, because I think money in business is all spiritual. But I think I'm being pulled on almost being ripped apart by scarcity and abundance. Like I flow to the abundance sometimes, and then I flow to the scarcity. Yeah. And it's like, it's like as I'm human. I'm not this guy that the people that see me when I'm up on the stage. I'm I'm I am that guy in that moment. But really, deep down, like there are some insecurities there. And I think it's just human. And I think dealing with it and accepting it and saying, okay, you know what? Let's let's let's do what's hard. Because on the other side of hard is everything that you want. The other side of that comfort that you long for is everything you don't want.

SPEAKER_00 24:08

So let me ask, you know, because we've we've talked about the who, not how a little bit what's stopping you from bringing in the people that you need to bring in to put the systems together? And then and then okay, so I want to touch on that, but I'm I'm curious too, because you talked about your desire to serve and to pour into people and to you'll bend over backwards to make sure they get a great result, even at your own expense. But don't they get a better result if they pair some of these essentially offers that you have together? Like if you're building the Amazon and you doesn't it just make sense to sell them that AI and and have that KPI tracker, like and and put that back in their business because you know it helps them more. But then you also have to have the revenue. So here's the overarching thought. You have to generate revenue from doing this to continue the service and to scale the level of service that you can provide. Right. The more money you earn, the more money you can invest in your clients. Right. If we go back to Dan Kennedy, it's kind of the concept of he who can afford the most to acquire a client wins. But it's it's also who can afford the most or who can spend the most to help the client the most, if that makes sense. So my my theory is if you're really serious about the service, you have to find a way to increase the lifetime value of each customer. And I think the immediate opportunity in front of you is pair that with your other each of these businesses should be feeding each other. Yep. And then you just implement the coaching aspect and uh because you already have this business, but that coaching aspect is how do you actually marry those together for the individual? So almost like a done with you type model. And that doesn't actually have to be delivered by you, that can be delivered by anyone who's trained on how to use your systems. Well, well, I have a really neat opportunity, right?

SPEAKER_04 26:09

Where like let's say you're brand new and oh, I don't really like this arbitrage strategy. I don't see myself dumpsters dumpster style dumpster diving and going into stores and doing R A and O A online arbitrage and that stuff. I want to build a brand. Well, right now, there are literally thousands of brands all over the place that are absolutely clueless about how to get their business on Amazon. And what I do is I say, go out there, connect them to me, I'll manage everything, and all you have to do is be the connector, bring the deal to the table, and I'll take care of everything else, and I'll give you 20% of the revenue on that client for the life of that client and working with them. And I I hate the term agency because there are so many agencies, and the and that's a whole other like when you talk about fast buck operators out there. That's a whole other thing. People claiming that, oh, we're the be all end all of marketing, and and they just people go into the case.

SPEAKER_00 27:00

Yeah, it's I mean And I'm not saying that like I'm the best. I'm just saying people are quick to make that claim, and I don't ever find it to be supported.

SPEAKER_04 27:08

Boom. It's it's it's a huge thing, you know. And for me, I still I try to stick within my wheelhouse of what I'm good at. I I'm not gonna tell you, oh, hey, let me go run your meta ads. Yeah, right. I'm gonna, I'm the master of cold traffic. I'm not. That's not what I do. Um, you know, what I do is instead of trying to drive traffic like herding cattle, right? I go to where the traffic's already going. Yeah. That's been my concept since the beginning. That's that's the marketing strategy I teach. People come to me and go, I want to learn how to do affiliate marketing. I'm like, no, you don't. I'm like, you want to waste your time and spin your wheels? Good luck with that.

SPEAKER_00 27:42

So before I started with arbitrage, I started with affiliate marketing back in high school. That was my first attempt. And it was funny because you brought up uh ClickBank earlier. I was I was selling on ClickBank 2005 through 2010, maybe. Like that was how I was trying to get rich and man.

SPEAKER_04 28:03

That was the marketing affiliate fraud was happening. Yeah. Oh yeah.

unknown 28:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 28:08

It's scary. If you have like if you have an offer, if you have an offer, I'm like 15 years old and I'm watching this world collapse around me.

SPEAKER_00 28:15

At 15? Yeah.

unknown 28:16

Wow. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:17

I was like just getting into it, and I I can remember my my uh parents were like, you're gonna go to jail.

SPEAKER_04 28:22

And I'm like that's hilarious because my parents did the same thing. Like, but but at the same time, they just got out of the way because they knew there was there was no telling me, like, I'm a little bit stubborn, right? If and and that's how I've always been. If I want something, I'm gonna go get it. I have every guitar, right? I'm a musician. I have every guitar that you could possibly dream of. I've got$100,000 in guitars right now. Like you have cars, I have guitars and music equipment and gear. I play every instrument, and I'm just a nut like that, right? And I never wanted to really be in a band and get on the stage and do it. I like being the guy behind the the mixing console. Like with my partner Jim. He's the face. You talk about the the guy that's the you know, the the rainmaker. Jim is the rainmaker by far. I've never met anyone like him. Um, charisma, like, you know, um, just we've had we've had a uh a relationship over 25 years now. We've been partners for 25 years. We've never had an argument or disagreement ever once. Wow. And I mean that's pretty rare. And usually, you know, the only ships that don't sell in business are partnerships, right? And Jim, we have sailed and check this out. You talk about lead generation. Yeah. For the last 25 years, other than the last two years, we've had to start running PPC, running ads, running ad spin to generate leads. But for before that, we never spent a dime on lead generation.

SPEAKER_00 29:46

Out of curiosity, why'd you start running paid ads?

SPEAKER_04 29:48

Because organic stopped working. Did because you know why? Because in the Amazon space, we were the first one to the dance first course. Now, how many Amazon courses have you seen? How many Amazon gurus are out there?

SPEAKER_00 30:00

Oh my goodness. I mean, I actually have seen probably a half dozen get arrested and shut down and in just in the last year. It's scary. Yeah. And you know why?

SPEAKER_04 30:11

Because they I think two or three of them were like here in Utah County, too. Yes. Yeah. Um, it's the Amazon done for you. I'll tell you what. Yeah. You can find me an Amazon Done For You program that's real, I'll give you a$10,000 reward. Anyone watching this, if you can find me a real one, I will literally pay you a$10,000 reward. It's not real, it's fake. It's a scam. See, that's the thing, is at my age, like when I started in business, I mean, everything was a scam. And now I'm like this, I'm a little bit I don't want to be a pessimist, I don't want to be an optimist, I want to be a realist. But on first sight, on everything, for me, everything's a scam because I've just seen so much. Yeah. And what happens is people go out after those scams and they they find out that we're the real thing and they come back to me and I've got to fix the mess. People come to me with a well, I tried private label and now I've got a pallet of inventory in my garage that I can't sell. I want you to fix me. I'm like, yeah, well, we'll try. Going to that.

SPEAKER_00 31:07

Let's do what works. The private label stuff is uh starting with a bad habit.

SPEAKER_04 31:11

Kind of, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I can do it, though. I can show people. But the key is why take all the risk to build your own brand when there are so many brands out there struggling. So I'll tell you a story about one that we that we did, right? And we this is using the power of community. Um, have you ever heard of the coffee brand Deathwish Coffee? Yes. So Mike Brown um was a student of mine about 15 years ago. My and my partner, Jim, he signed up for our mastermind group, came to us with an idea. He was living in his mom's garage, was a barista at a coffee shop, and he said, Man, I've got this idea to make the strongest, most caffeinated coffee in the world, right? And I went, Oh, dude, coffee. I'm like, dude, that's saturated. Because that's what I look at is how many competitors, how many searches per month? Is it viable? Do you even have a snowball's chance in hell? Yeah. I kind of told him, I said, coffee, dude, it's hard. Yeah, you're gonna struggle there. But back then it wasn't as saturated. And he was like, no, man, I'm gonna go for it. All right, cool, we'll help you. So we helped him build it. But what we did is we kind of shared it with our community and we let him be the sponsor at one of our conferences, and everybody had Death Wish Coffee. Well, along comes this into it QuickBooks competition. Win a Super Bowl commercial if you get the most votes, right? So we've got this massive community. We've got the biggest audience, the biggest email list that uh for the space, right? And so we just started emailing everybody, hey, vote for Deathwish Coffee. So everybody voted for it. We helped him win a Super Bowl commercial in 2017. Like crazy. Yeah. Like it's just like like that's what I'm talking about when you talk about divine appointments. Like, how is that happening without some type of uh spiritual divine intervention happening? Sure, you know, Mike's gone on to win entrepreneur of the year twice for this state of New York. He started with us. Here's a guy that came to me, and I gave him just the the right direction, and now he's got a hundred million dollar a month business, and I was dumb enough to go, okay, cool, awesome. Instead of getting, hey, should give me like 5% equity of that thing, right? But at the same time, Mike, we love him. He's the greatest guy in the world, and he speaks at our events and stuff. But now, yeah, you know, it's like you know, building somebody from zero to a hundred million dollar business or being part of it, I didn't do that. He did it. Yeah, I was just a catalyst. And you know what? I love that. I love the fact that I can tell that story because the shortest distance between you and what you want in life or the relationships or the business you want to acquire is a story. And I tell that story to people and they're just like, whoa. And they, when I say, Yeah, hey, if you want to work with me and have me put your brand on Amazon, it's whatever price I throw at them, they're like, okay. Because you have some type of real credibility and you've got the receipts, right? We have the receipts, right? But what I've done is is I've kind of put myself in a trap. Do you ever feel? This is kind of like I don't want to get too far off this topic, but do you ever feel like everything that you've built that you've committed yourself into is now your prison?

SPEAKER_00 34:10

Yes. I talk about it very often. Help me get out of that.

SPEAKER_04 34:13

So because that's where I'm that's where I'm struggling right now.

SPEAKER_00 34:16

I'm uh currently a student in Dan Martell's coaching program. He's great, right? Yeah, uh, love Dan. Great. I realized listening to his book uh Buy Back Your Time while I'm walking the dog in the evenings and stuff like that. And I'm like, I've just got to do this, man. I've got to commit to it. Um because I we were talking maybe before the show a little bit. I have this, I call it my mental illness, where if I have a free moment of the day, I will fill it with another business. I will find a way to start another company. And it's it's so bad. Like I will do it just on a whim. Oh, I have 15 minutes. Let me just go register a new LLC real quick. I ended up um I'm running multiple e-commerce brands. I'm coaching. Uh, I started the, you know, with this podcast studio. I run a property management company. We're investing in different uh, you know, I run a business called Time Pieces and Exotics of Buy, Sales, Trades, Exotic Cars, and Watches. Um I was coaching high school football. I got elected to city council. I'm in the Utah National Guard. I'm like, at one point, I'm sitting here and I'm counting, and I've got 11 different businesses that I'm or organizations that I'm actively working in. That would be just a job for anybody else. It's prison. And I realize, holy smokes, Parker, you've built a life now where sure you're doing all this really cool stuff and you're everybody thinks you're awesome. But I'm trapped. And so I okay, what do I need to start offloading? And in doing this, I've had to say this is uh something that I'm still personally working on, I'll admit. Um, is I'm saying no to more. So I'm not gonna coach high school football again this year. And that is painful because I've done it for the last decade and I love it. You love it. Me too. I it's it's actually probably the thing I enjoy the most. A close second would be the business coaching. The business coaching is really rewarding because you can help people, you know, immediately make a difference in their life and their family. It's the same thing for football coaching. I get to make a difference in the youth. I get to, I get to see their progression. I get to see them become a better version of themselves, not just in the sport, but I approach that very much as this is the future leaders of our community. And I'm investing in that with that time. But I realize I would never have been able to do that if I wasn't able to build a business that allowed me the time and money to be able to take off, right? Because I mean, most of this like high school football, they start practice at 3 p.m. right after school gets out. So you got to be in a position where you could walk away from the job to go do that.

SPEAKER_04 36:57

I had that for a while.

SPEAKER_00 36:58

This was uh I so I got to stop coaching football. Okay, I've still got too much on my plate. Well, I can't offload National Guard and I can't offload city council, but I can hire a VA to handle some of my social media management and outreach, and I can hire an executive assistant to handle my inbox and to handle my scheduling and to worry about those kind of things. And so I've started trying to just strategically put in people that will take the bulk of my time, my workload, my the the work that is taking up the majority of my time. And I'm offloading those things very quickly.

SPEAKER_04 37:35

We do that too. We actually hire and train VAs for our clients. So John Jonas, uh, online jobs pH, he speaks at our events, he's a good friend of mine too. And and uh, you know, that that site, online jobs pH, um, like getting a VA for five bucks an hour. I mean, there's an art to that. And I do that, you delegate it, but it's like for me, it's like shiny object syndrome, but I'm not like someone that's like, oh, I'm gonna try that. Oh, well, that didn't work. I give up. Oh, what's next? No, it's like I'm gonna keep trying that until I fail so miserably that I make it work. Yeah, like I don't care. You, oh, hey, there's dirt right there, Nate. Go get gold. I'm like, I'm the hardest worker, and that's part of the problem. It's like delegating things. I'm I I can do it, and I've been doing it and building this infrastructure. Yeah. Well, you talk about the prison. Check this out, the other side of that. So, about seven, eight years ago, I made my businesses passive. That was my goal. Like, okay, I've got everybody in their place. I didn't put have too much on my plate. I made everything passive, and I'm like, I'm gonna get good at golf. I'm gonna get good at golf, playing out playing every day, you know, playing Fox Hollow every day, every day, golf every day. I was getting good. I got out there, you know, one day, and I was just miserable. I was like, why am I so unhappy? Like this is the most beautiful day ever. I'm hitting I'm I'm hitting the seven iron like nobody's business. This is just beautiful. But the thing that fueled you wasn't there. Serving people. I wasn't serving anyone. And so I then it's like it's like I can, I don't think I'm an all-or-nothing nothing type of person, but then I was like, well, this is making me miserable. Oh, I need to go back to serving people. And then I went overkill into like value ladder, value ladder, and all these things. And I'm gonna come back in and you know, 10 hours a day, 12 hours a day. And you know, I think if you if you're a new business owner, right? And this is what they told me when I first started my business, all my friends that own the business. Oh man, when you own a business, you get to work half days. I didn't realize that meant 12 hour days.

SPEAKER_00 39:31

Yeah, yeah. It's half of your 24-hour day.

SPEAKER_04 39:35

Yeah. But you know what though? What's weird is over time people be like, oh, I hate this. I live for it. I you know what? It's that next success story that I create. It's that next person that goes, Man, I'm able to quit my job of 27 years doing what you taught me how to do. This is really cool. Yeah, right. And you never get jaded to that. No, serving people. And and and my whole philosophy is why do anything you don't love doing with people you don't love doing it with? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. So I but I'm still on this hunt for alignment of partners and people that I can serve. Like you, dude, I'd love to work with you after everything that you just said today. Like, I'm like, dude, I'm I'm your new biggest fan. I'm if I have to become a client, you know how you do it. Here's the game. If you're out there and you like you want to attach yourself to somebody and leverage what they've got, go become their success story. Oh, absolutely. Go sign up for their course, become their success story, sing their praises, and they'll let you have access to their audience and to do whatever you want.

SPEAKER_00 40:36

But how that works. The connection then is just unreal because every time you do that, you're entering a new network with all of these untapped possibilities, right? I'm a I'm a big advocate of that as well.

SPEAKER_04 40:49

Um all of you You're a two comma club guy, right? Russell Brunson, like Yes.

SPEAKER_00 40:54

So I was one of the first people in the world to get a two Comma Club Award. I was one of the first people in the world to get a two Comma Club X award for the 10 million in the single funnel. Um, since then, I joined his inner circle program, I joined his Atlas program. Um, but that network and community has paid dividends way beyond the investments and the time spent, you know, participating in those events or anything like that.

SPEAKER_04 41:21

Actually, Russell's the coolest.

SPEAKER_00 41:23

All of this, all of my current endeavors stem from me joining his inner circle. Well, yeah, and click funnels. I um it's funny, I was at my first inner circle meeting presenting, and I'm on stage. I'm like, what am I gonna teach these people? Because I'm, you know, that that community is largely info products and coaches. And at the time, I was exclusively e-commerce. There was one other person, one other e-commerce person in that entire room. And so I'm just like, I don't know, anything I teach these people, it's not gonna be relevant, it's not gonna help them. What can I do? What like I had the imposter syndrome to the max. So I said, you know what? Okay, the one thing that I know I can teach these people is leadership. I know I can talk to them from the military-inspired leadership that I've adapted to business because that's something unique. Most of these people haven't been in the military, let alone any leadership in the military. So I was just gonna go with that. So I prepped my slides the night prior, and I was gonna get up. I was speaking for 20 minutes on how to develop a military-inspired command philosophy. So, command philosophy in short is combining your mission, your vision, and your non-negotiables into how you are going to lead an organization, how you want to be perceived as a leader by that organization. So I get up and I give this presentation, and I am walking off stage thinking, I don't know if a word of that landed to any of these people, if any of it was going to be significant, if any of it was gonna help them. And I literally step off the last step, getting off the stage, and I lift my head. And Fred Yelma and his wife Jackie are running up to me and they're Parker, Parker, oh my gosh, it was so good. Like, do you do you teach this? Can we can we hire you? I'm like, I have never done this before. He's like, Parker, I'll I'll pay you$50,000 to come teach my company right now. And I'm like, What?$50, I'm like, I was making good money, obviously in e-com, but I've had never had, you know, e-com is like a$200 purchase here, a$200 purchase there. This guy's like, I will pay you$50,000 to come teach my company right now. That's killer. And I'm like shaking his hand and I'm like, thank you so much. Like, a pleasure to meet you. I will be in touch. I turn from that and I've got Herman Blanco running over to me. And Herman is a guy that um he owns a company that that helps IT professionals get six figure jobs. Like he's just bolstering the IT community that way. And he's like, Parker, do you have a coaching program I can join? I'm like, no. And I know that that's the wrong answer, but I had never, I had never even thought about that before. So I'm shaking his hand and I'm like, I'll be, I'll let you know, you know, I'll be in touch. Uh, I walk away from that interaction. And Edward Collins, who's the founder of uh Up Level, comes over to me and he's like, dude, Parker, you know, he had presented the day prior and he shared um, you know, coming up with these$10 million business ideas through AI and leveraging AI to help you build that business plan. He's like, Parker, that's your$10 million a year business. Like, you need to be coaching this. And I'm like, I got three people in 30 seconds telling me that this is what I need to be doing. So I'm gonna go all in on it. And I was like, all of those people I was regarding as uber successful, right? And they had done it in different fields than me, where I'm just I'm looking up to them and I'm admiring them. And I'm like, oh my gosh, all of these people are telling me that this is what I need to be doing, and they all have faith in me and they all want this. I didn't realize that there was a market gap in the leadership, the team development, the systems that were allowing people to scale. So I'm like, okay, mission-ready systems, here we go, or military-inspired leadership and team development systems that scale your business. And that was kind of how we came into that. And as I started doing that more and more, again, I have the need for the content creation. I started investing heavily in my home podcast studio, but I'm at like$20,000, and there's still a lot of room to improve. And I'm like, there's just got to be a better way, which led me to the full production studio. And that allowed me to start, you know, renting out the studio, collecting, you know, revenue that way, but also then feeding the coaching clients. And they, so the whole thing grew just because I was at that meeting, meeting those people. And there were other ways that were really beneficial too, some of the connections that I made when it came to um the property management and how we establish our trust in LLCs, as well as working with dudes who were like better than me at meta-ads, and I could learn from them and I could copy their frameworks. And I'm like just getting into those circles, meeting these people is exponentially valuable to a point where you probably won't even realize it until you're looking back a decade later and you're saying, holy smokes, there's millions of dollars derived just from those interactions.

SPEAKER_04 46:21

You have the brilliant mind, and and you just have to put yourself, people say, Oh, you gotta get lucky. No, luck is where is where preparedness and a brilliant mind meets opportunity. Yeah. That's exactly what you did. That's a killer story, man. Because you know, it's like you you you you had the limiting self-belief that how am I gonna, how am I gonna even impress any of these people? As you're walking off stage, did that even land? And yet your story, which was the core of what happened, yes, military background, your story was what connected. It's like music, right? People think, oh, this really killer riff that I've got that I learned from Eddie Van Halen is gonna make people go, wow. But no, it it was the lyric that says that they resonated with.

SPEAKER_00 47:06

It connected. So I mean, uh Russell says this often, he got it from Dan Kennedy, but it was the everything's a hook, story, and an offer. There's always going to be those three components. And if there's not one of those three components, you're doing it wrong, go back and redo it. You know, even obviously in music, but a hook, a story, and an offer.

SPEAKER_04 47:27

I love that. Okay. Dan's greatest. I gotta tell you, just props to Dan Kennedy. Um, there's another guy that just anybody watching this um uh podcast, if you're into ad copy, if you're one of those people that's like, hey, I can't just rely on AI to come up with some slap for me that I can throw up there and it's gonna convert, this guy, Gary Halberton, that I learned about from Dan Kennedy. And I got to meet him before he. Dan still talks about Gary. Gary's the greatest. There's no better ad copy writer. If you listen, if you read the Gary Halbert letter, I'm just telling you, it will change your life if you're into writing sales letters or ad copy or you're running an offer. And I could tell you though, that here's the thing is like everybody, like everybody has a book in them, everybody has an offer in them. If you're if you're uh, you know, I'm an e-commerce guy, I'm selling widgets or whatever, selling on Amazon or whatever. Everybody has a story, everybody should have an offer, offer, and everybody should be an author. And I think we're getting to a place in the world where like if you get on an airplane and you sit next to somebody and they go, Oh, hey, what do you do for a living? You go, I'm an author. They're gonna look at you and go, huh? Not everybody was an author. What are you talking about? Right. But now, right now, we're in a like we're in the weirdest place in time, like in history. I don't think there's a better place in time in history where there's more of an opportunity for a little guy like you and me, coming from nothing, nowhere, to be able to actually build something wildly successful in the information marketing space. I think we're kind of going through that the info era, like we went through that with the the rise of the internet kind of happening now, and now with AI there, and I think we're all as a world on information overload. But the it goes back to that principle. There's always going to be an opportunity to help somebody get what they want. If you help somebody get what they want, you're always gonna get what you want, right? And that's what you got to find. And that's kind of what you found in that was okay, my military background, there, there are people that they're really, and this is where we're struggling in this country more than anything. And this is a little aside from business, is leadership. Think about it. Look at the look at the talent pool running for president right now.

SPEAKER_00 49:35

Oh, yeah. This is scary stuff. This is why I ran for city council. I'm looking around and I'm like, these these people aren't smarter than me. They're not more uh educated than I am, they're not more articulate than me, they don't present better than me. I don't think they're thinking through the problems as well as I would. Yeah. So I'm like, then do I have an obligation to run? Be careful what you wish for.

SPEAKER_02 49:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 49:57

So I did it, but now I look at the next level. And I have the same thoughts. Where it's like, okay, I we have as a nation collectively, to get on my political soapbox for a minute, we have not done a good job of electing our best to be representatives. And there's probably some sublime reasons for that. Things like our bests don't want to put up with all the crap that people will give them in those positions. I get hammered every single day from someone who is presenting a very illogical argument that doesn't understand the nuance or the second and third order effects. And I'm just thinking, you know, as a society, we have to do a better job of one checking our emotion and looking at what's the logical position and logical arguments. But it's hard to get to that position because anyone who's getting involved in those conversations in politics isn't willing to put up with the crap that people are gonna give them the throughout, you know, working to make that improvement.

SPEAKER_04 51:02

And there's so much cognitive dissonance in all of it.

SPEAKER_00 51:05

Oh, yes. Well, and you run into I okay, so I'm gonna use the term identity politics politics, but I'm gonna use it in a different way than most. You build your identity associated with certain groups, collectives, people, neighbors, thoughts, viewpoints. And those could be proven to you to be wholly wrong, right? Logically, the facts don't align with what you're saying. But if you admit that you're wrong, now your entire identity is challenged. So it's easier for you to just be content being wrong and maintain your social status and the status quo in your neighborhood or your community than it is for you to actually admit that you were wrong and change your opinion. And that is something that I just cannot abide, but I can't force other people to change. But it's human nature.

SPEAKER_04 51:59

And think about think about it this way, right? It's better to be kind than it is to be right. No, I disagree wholly. But let me tell you why I believe this. Okay, right? I don't have to compromise my beliefs, right? To be compassionate to someone because of what they believe, whether they're wrong or they're right. Now, do I have to live in their fantasy?

SPEAKER_00 52:24

Absolutely not. And that is, I think, an important factor to differentiate there.

SPEAKER_04 52:28

But here's the thing, right? Is you get these people that are so stubborn about being right, right, and then it turns into a negative conversation and humility, get low, like the ocean.

SPEAKER_00 52:43

Okay, so I will agree. I'll go back. I'll I'll reagree with what you're saying now that you've uh explained it.

SPEAKER_04 52:48

Versus being right, we'll always win.

SPEAKER_00 52:50

And this is something I was talking to my wife about just yesterday. I was just talking to my wife about this, where it's like I'm I'm trying to be kind to people that I know don't like me, who are mean, you know, in public. But I'm just trying to be kind because my theory is if it's not putting good into the world, I don't want it to come from me. I want everything, I want everything that comes from me to be doing a net positive. My original statement in this, where I said, Oh, I'll disagree, was that I'm I'm thinking holistically, I would rather belong to a society that was focused on doing things the right way, that was focused on truth and taking care of the second and third order effects and understanding what was actually being debated or discussed versus lip service. That was my initial thought. Because it's so frustrating where you have somebody who they prioritize kindness to your face, but they are horrible to you behind your back, and they're subverting the truth of a situation.

SPEAKER_04 54:06

That's just that's being fake. That's not being fake.

SPEAKER_00 54:08

Correct. That's being fake. So after you explain this, right? I'm like, ah, okay, I see where you're actually going with this like green.

SPEAKER_04 54:14

That's the thing is you'll sit in a city council meeting and someone will get up there and they'll, and and because you're on the city council, and this is my problem because I'm in the public eye, I've got this huge community. Yeah, I can't come out and say, hey, let me espouse this political belief on Facebook because of my ego or whatever, right? I'm sure I don't care. I mean, but I mean, I'm always gonna stand up for what I feel is right, and I and I'll be unabashed about it. But on the other side of that, like, um, I've learned my lesson because I mean, unlike you, I'm not a politician. So nobody cares about what my political opinion is, but you have to sit up there as a politician and I mean, pardon my French here, but someone's gonna get up and they're gonna espouse some some some garbage and that you've ruined their life, which I don't I can't really point a finger at any politician that my life was completely ruined because of their policy. But like, um, but I mean, there's things that I don't like, right? That I I could go on and on, but you have to sit there and and and you can control your thoughts and feelings and actions. You can't control theirs when all you want to do is just say, go fuck yourself, man. Pardon my French.

SPEAKER_00 55:26

It it's funny that you're bringing this up like this because I actually just last Tuesday at our city council meeting called bullshit on somebody and I just said it. I was like, that's bullshit. I don't mean to offend anybody. I'm sitting on the council hold some people. I got the audience, the audience is like half of them gasp and they're oh he said bullshit. And then the other half was like, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 55:45

But you can't. It's like but that's the thing is it's like you have this concept of okay, I'm gonna be as real as we can get. If you can get to like that Gary Vaynerchuck level, you've won the boss level, right? Like you can, there's nobody that can be as real as him, but I'm not impressed by that. That doesn't, you know, when all the guys started dropping the F-bombs live, it was like everybody was so shocked, right? And now for me, like, um for me, like I I can do I I I apologize for even going there on your podcast, but at the same time, being real, I think that's what people are here for. Yeah, but at the same time, it's not professional, that's for sure. But at the same time, sometimes there's that bridge that that just for your own sanity, like in politics right now, because it is it is it politics is like like think about this. You think about the politics in business. Like I've escaped that. I don't even remember what it's like to be an employee anymore.

SPEAKER_02 56:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 56:39

I mean, I've been employee before way back in the day, but I mean, I don't know what you I've forgotten what that's like, but I but out of all of that, I do remember the politics of it. And it's like you talk about the frustration of convincing someone that is absolutely so cognitively dissonant that that their belief is so correct, right? That they're they're willing to just die on that hill.

SPEAKER_02 57:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 57:02

And and there is no way, you know what though, though, that you can equate that to coaching. And that's what we do professionally is convince people that they are what they don't think they are and that they aren't what they think they are. Right. And that's what you have to do. Yeah, cheerleading is a big part of coaching. Well, you have to help them build a bridge and get over themselves. Yeah. And that's what I've gotten good at. Like, and doing it really nicely to them, right? And it's, I mean, there's a lot of psychology involved in that that I call the victim's triangle. Let's hear about it. Okay, this is fascinating because I learned this from a coach who taught me coaching. Okay. This guy, Michael Bailey, he's a genius. Um, he used to do all the coaching. Any relationship? No, not related, not related at all. Um he taught me about this concept where you get a client, right? And and you've got a coach, and then you've got the salesperson, right? And you got the client. That's the triangle. The client decides one day that, well, the way that that guy sold me, he sold me something, and I'm gonna say that he said this, but I'm not gonna go to him and confront him about it. I'm gonna go to the coach as the victim and say, Yeah, this guy told me this, and I'm unhappy, and this is kind of, you know, put me in a victim's position. And what he wants that coach to do is say, Oh, really? He did that? Well, I'm gonna have to have a talk with him and I'm gonna become your savior. Yeah. See, that's what the victim's trying to do, is they're trying to make that coach the savior, right? Well, in the coaching business, here's what you do is you have to learn how to identify when victim's triangle is being played. And the coach has to go, oh, that's strange that you're saying that, because I've never had anybody tell me that they said that. And it goes both ways. Clients will come to me and go, Oh, my coach did this and that, and I'm a victim. And I'm like, oh, that's wild. Because I've never had anybody tell me about that coach. But question for you, and just being real honest, did you go to them and talk to them about it? Because I'm pretty sure that you coming to me and telling me, I mean, we'll keep this between you and me, because that's probably what you want, right? But I would go to them because they would just be mortified to know that that you feel the way that you do, or that they made you feel this way.

SPEAKER_02 59:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 59:13

And I know this coach, they're not that way. They would never want to make you feel this way. Have you talked to them about it? So here's what I do for victims triangle stuff. And this is just technique that I picked up from sitting in the back of the room at a Stephen Covey symposium with Xerox and Procter and Gamble and Boeing in the room, right? The business journal. I make every single one of my clients keep a business journal because what happens is, I mean, with Amazon, you're gonna knew people. Man, I can't find any products to sell. Man, I can't find any products to sell. And really, it's kind of a belief structure, but it's it's a learning curve, right? And it's not, it's not something that instantly side hustle, you know. So for some people it works that way, but you got to work towards it. You got to learn. There's a learning curve to it. It's not a get rich quick business. And basically, I can't find anything in, oh, my business isn't working out. And boy, I'm, you know, I'm trying your coaching program, but it's just not you working for me. And this is where we have the build a bridge and get it over yourself moment, right? You go, well, hey, listen, could I make them write in their business journal everything that you do? I want you to document everything that you do in your business. If you sourced this, you know, learned that, learned this module, um, reached out to these suppliers, did what whatever you do, I want you to keep track of it in a business journal. And anybody that ever comes to me going, oh man, it's just not working for me or poor me or I'm the victim, right? I go, Hey, can you go to your business journal and just kind of read to me the last thing that you wrote in your business journal? And they always, this is always what happens. Oh, well, uh I haven't written in my business journal for a while. And then my next question is always, yeah, why not? And then you just those long pauses.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:52

And then they realize they didn't act, they haven't actually been doing anything. And so they can't get the results because they haven't been taking the action. You're right.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:59

And then and then I can start pumping energy because really, when either it's if if it's sales, like I've Brian Tracy sales, I mean, I've every company I've worked for, right? I I was either the worst at the sales, and then I became the best at the sales. Yeah. Right. Um, you know, in those scenarios. And it was always like um in the sales, it's it's always about belief. That number that you do in sales every week is what you believe you can do in sales, but it's a transference of energy. Understanding the principle of of and in coaching is the same thing too. It's a transference of energy from you to another person, making them think, feel, and act in a positive manner. Some people just don't have that ability. They weren't built for that. But I have you noticed that there's the guy that's the rainmaker, and he sometimes has it, usually they're the sales guy, but they have other people they attach themselves to that are their hitters, that are their closers, right? I've been all of those roles. I've been the closer, right? I have people that work for me now that do all the sales now, and they're masters, like they're high level, right? But the but it isn't, it isn't a matter of closing a deal, right? It's always what is best for that person, and how can you try the best possible energy to make them think, feel, and act in a positive manner? Because nothing you're going to do or say to somebody is going to convince them that they need to buy something. In fact, people don't want to be sold, they want to buy something. And you know, it's like making it the psychology of making it someone else's idea. Right? That's what I found that I'm really good at. But and that's the role that I should be. I shouldn't be the CEO of all these companies. I've just by necessity and I feel like I've trapped myself there. But like, same thing with the politics, going back to the politics. We have trapped ourselves in where we're at. There is no way, in my opinion, to fully unravel the shit show that is America without everybody saying, okay, we're gonna have to make a serious sacrifice now for future generations.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:12

And and and we're just not at a place where we're ready to do that. We're we're pretty selfish as a collective, so it's hard to sacrifice for the future when you can't even comprehend the future for yourself.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:23

Or or or you know what it is? It's always coming from the past. See, like you're in military. I for me, all my family's military. My grandfather was a purple heart in the Korean War, my other grandfather was a CB in the Navy. Um, my uh grandmother's this is this is really cool. You're gonna love this. My grandmother's cousin was Audie Murphy. Oh, right on. So I have all this killer memorabilia, stuff that belonged to him. And if you don't know who that is, you're watching this podcast, he is the most decorated war hero of all time of history. So my background comes from a very patriotic my grandfather, was the sheriff of Weber County, the sheriff, um, all my you know, family, sheriff deputies, and military and police officers, and and that sort of thing. And you know, there's one common thread to it, right? It's like doing the right thing. Because not because you know, it's character. It's not because someone's watching you, it's doing it because you know it's the right thing to do. And that's the one advantage that we have as Americans that I think we discount is that we have that blood running through us to do the right thing. But we're but the but the people that are the powers that be, the controllers, the people that aren't just rich, they're wealthy, they've got to divide and conquer us to keep what they have. Don't you think that? Do you believe that? I mean, that's a little conspiracy theory-ish. And I really don't kind of go there when it, you know, it's like it's like that's a that's a slippery slope, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:04:52

Yeah, I actually I I don't necessarily agree with that last part. There's a lot to unpack here, so let me hit that and then I'll jump back for a second. Uh I think that last part, that comment is largely a scarcity mindset type comment. Uh because I don't um, for example, I don't need to prevent anyone else from winning for me to keep what I have, right? Uh I believe very much in the mindset of oh, if you run out of pie, bake some more pie. Not we have a fixed amount of pie and there's only so many slices to go out. Yeah. Oh, that was something else I want to talk to you about earlier, but I forgot to bring up. Let me put that down. Pie bigger. That's my note to bring it up. Okay. Uh, you touched on something that I think is an important part uh that I want to just har harp on real quick for the listeners. It's the concepts of ethical sales and ethical coaching. We mentioned previously in the conversation that, you know, there's some bad rap that coaching gets sometimes. And a lot of that stems from a very low barrier to entry. Anyone can come in, they you know, promise the world. You get nothing because they probably weren't qualified to be helping you to begin with, and no one can determine your results except for yourself. So these things fall apart, makes people frustrated, they get upset, they brand coaching is this horrible thing. But when you genuinely recognize that what you have and what you're selling helps someone, you probably have an obligation to at least present them with how you can help. And I like what you said. You're only selling to people that you can actually help. Oh, yeah. Ethical sales. Well, you're gonna go out of business if you don't. And then you pair that with the ethical coaching, providing them with the information that helps them, providing them with the resources that are going to position them for success. That's the way you do business. Love that. Then the bigger pie thing. Okay, so me and other partners, you know, we've we've thought about this in the past. I believe it is better, generally speaking, to have a smaller piece of a big pie than to have a big piece of a small pie.

SPEAKER_04 1:07:11

I I would totally agree with that.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:12

That's a small moment for me. A really big piece of a small pie just feeds you. Couple. So how do we make more to support more, to give more, to help those, like you said earlier, you're talking about how do we help people spend more time with the people they love doing the things they love. That's one of the things I like to talk about too. It's make bigger pies. So I'm glad you brought up the big pie concept. Um, if you're not operating in the scarcity mindset, you can recognize when you run out of something, you can make more of something. And I think that that extends to service, that extends to offers, that extends to how you actually provide for your community. It's never gonna be that you have to sacrifice everything you have, everything you've built, everything you know so that your community can succeed without you. It's gonna be how do we all build together so that we can all win. I think that that is the better mindset to approach. So when you bring up the comment of um, you know, all these rich people that have to keep us down so that they can keep what they have. I don't think most of those people actually believe that. And I know that that's a a really common theory is that all these mega corporations are trying to keep us down. Those mega corporations know that if we make more money, they make more money because we're all consumers and we have this sickness embedded in American society now where we just spend the money that we get in. Then you run into maybe an inflationary conversation. So sorry, I think down the rabbit hole. Maybe it's about control.

SPEAKER_04 1:08:52

Maybe. Maybe it's about control. Because I think that's really because it we at the end of the day, and this is if you're if you're doing a sales pitch and uh like if you're in the coaching industry, you're selling coaching or anything, right? Know that people, their goal, they can sit there and tell you about, oh, I want the I want to, I'm not gonna retire, so I want to retire. Or I want all their goals and dreams and everything, it comes down to two words freedom and control. As humans, that is our most primal need, really.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:25

Well, I mean, there are others, but yeah, you got to cover your food, shelter, those kind of things. And then you move up the hierarchy of needs.

SPEAKER_04 1:09:30

So once you find out what people want in terms of freedom and control, that's the gateway, that's the pathway to that whole concept of you help people get what they want, you're always gonna get what you want. But you when you talk about sales, I mean it's manipulative. And I can tell you just to add to what you said, these big companies that I've worked for, I know all the biggest coaching people in the world. I mean, I'm talking, I used to work on a coaching sales floor where we did a million dollars in sales a week. How do you coach 120 to 150 new clients coming on every week into coaches? And the only way you can coach that is to have coaches that that's all they do for a living is coach.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:10:06

And coach, coach, coach. They burn out. All of my coaches, none of my coaches are allowed to work more than four hours a day coaching. That's like max. They have to be doing the business that they teach full time. That's the difference between my coaching. I've learned a lot of people because I've worked with and around all these coaching companies over the last 30 years. I've seen all of them get shut down. And why? I've seen every mistake that you can make at this.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:30

So let me ask you about the facilitator model. Are you familiar with that at all? No. So, okay, the facilitator model uh was started by Gary White. Um, and then like Russell Brunson adapted it for his prime mover coaching program. Um, and it's so it's trickling out in popularity. In short, you have the primary coach instructor films the material, course material, right? They refine it as they go through the first couple of iterations of coaching clients. They take the QA, they bolster the program, those kind of things. And then they pass it off to a facilitator. So instead of having a weekly call with a coach, you have a weekly call with a facilitator. It's a group call. And when somebody has a question, the facilitator typically refers you back to the course material on that section or the PDF or whatever it is. Um, and then if there's a need that that doesn't address, then the facilitator makes the connection with the coach or somebody at the next level. It goes back to the facilitator.

SPEAKER_04 1:11:34

It goes back to the facilitator, but the facilitator align them with the coach?

SPEAKER_00 1:11:38

Correct. The student never goes to the coach directly. The student goes always to a facilitator. The facilitator's first role is connect them back to the material. If there's a genuine gap in the material, the facilitator takes that to the coach, and the coach comes back with the response, the material, the supplement, whatever.

SPEAKER_04 1:11:58

Wow, that concept's interesting. I've never done that. But group coaching? Correct. For it's for group.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:03

So it's not uh your highest ticket stuff or anything like that.

SPEAKER_04 1:12:07

We've done it recently. Like we did it in the last six months, right? Because one-on-one coaching, really for me, it gets down to a very personal level, and everybody has their own entrepreneurial fingerprint. None of us are the same. I'm going to be different. You and I, we have a lot of the same tenets and a lot of the same concepts and a lot of the same experts that we've read, a lot of the same books, and it's all rings true with us. But we're completely different in our uh approaches and our entrepreneurial fingerprint, right? Sure. Um, but at the same time, in that in that entrepreneurial fingerprint for me with group coaching, I never found that that anybody was ever fully truly successful. We would have we have trainings that are group trainings, but that always funneled into the back end for a one-on-one coach. And then having that one-on relationship, what I incentivize my coaches to do is I would, this is the kind of culture I want. I want you to become friends with them, right? And then I want you to look for opportunities that you can partner with them in business. Think of the liability on that. Okay, you paid us for coaching, and now we want to partner with you in business, right? Yeah. That's where these done-for-you companies get in trouble. Like they just go off the deep end. But then I want you to become like family with them. I want you to be like, oh, your kids are getting married. I'll come to your wedding and and we're calling on sending Christmas cards. And now it's like family, and that's the culture I want in my business. Now, what I want isn't always what I get, but I mean, I can't tell you how many relationships I have over the last 30 years that I got really sick. I have I'm type two, I'm type two diabetic. I brought it back, I've got it out, I've I fixed it, I got it under control. But because I got so crazy with business and wasn't taking care of myself, I got ketoacidosis. And I was about 20 minutes away from dying by the time my wife had come and picked me up and taken me to the emergency room. And they figured it out pretty quickly that you're dying, you have ketoacidosis. And they put they morphined me. And I woke up in a the ICU. I was in ICU here at American Fork for five days. I thought I was invincible. I'm like, whoa. And that was the first time that I'm like, man, I almost just left my kids and my wife. And I literally, they were like, you were dead. You were dying. I was throwing up blood, and I had no idea what that was. I did because it looks like coffee grounds. When you're in ketoacidosis, yeah, it'll kill you. It's diabetes is nothing to mess around with. Um, and in that moment, I I cried because I thought that it was almost like a loved one died, like you lost somebody, like in that moment, because I just I had no idea, you know, what I had just gone through. And it was just so emotional. And in that moment of like realizing what had happened, right? Um, like like with coach, it's the same thing with coaching. I don't care about the money. I care about the result, I care about the relationship. I care too much about relationships, so much so that it is physically killing me. It is physically hurting my business. And I know it. I'm not willing to let go. I'm not willing to really enforce these boundaries, right? Um, I let people walk all over me at times because you know I value that relationship. And then when they don't value the relationship like I do, yeah, it hurts. So that was what that was like coming out of ketoacidosis, is that you did that to yourself, man.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:38

Yeah, you talked about um culture eating business strategy, right? Yeah, and fruits business strategy. Culture for breakfast. The more important aspect. Uh, and then you're talking about how you want your coaches to interface with the clients and how that develops in the relationship you have between them. Those almost seem so I like symmetric. Yeah, I was gonna say some some explanation, or I guess they seem to be combating in my mind, where the more you move into that familial type relationship with people, you're the more it seems just inherent that you're going to get taken advantage of and walked over because you've now you've blurred the professional boundary.

SPEAKER_04 1:16:23

And and it's and you know what's weird about that? My feeling is always like, well, that's on them, it's not on me. But at the same time, it's like there are boundaries. And that's what I as a as a business owner, being generous to a fault and setting these boundaries a little bit more clear are what are going to move me away from uh a big piece of the small pie to the big pie, small piece analogy they made. That's brilliant. Dude, I just became the hugest fan of you. Well, thank you. I am a huge fan of you at this point.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:53

I appreciate that after today. So we've talked a little bit about your business and who you serve and how you're serving them. Moving forward, let's talk about the strategy. So, again, I'm I mostly tailor the shows to young entrepreneurs, people who are starting a business. If you could go back, you know, you've been doing this for 30 years now, since 1995. I think you said when you started your first website. What would you change knowing what you know now? How would you adapt your strategy to be more effective, more efficient, a little bit more successful quickly, right? I think back on my own story, and and my biggest takeaway were one, I would have invested in myself faster. Two, I would have overcome my fear, the fear that was preventing me from taking action quicker. And if I could do those two things, I could win a lot faster and I could grow a business quicker. I'm curious what you would do differently with the knowledge of the successes that you've had, the failures that you've had, how would you do it again?

SPEAKER_04 1:17:59

Yeah, you know, I mean, that question, I've I've I've had that question. Like there are people that have said, like another good question that relates to what you just asked is hey, we'd seen that you've had massive success, but what were your failures? Right. And my response is always how much time have you got? But but the failures, like what would I change about those failures? I think the number one thing is the limiting self-belief. Yeah. I I you know what there's a there's a level of income that you make in a year that that's where you're scared. You hit that glass ceiling where your fear lies.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:35

You know, there are people that come it's really curious to frame it like that. Sorry, I I'm thinking okay. I hit that every year. Like I hit that um 2019, 2020, 2021. And I'm it's it's I was able to move past it every year, but I noticed a tendency to self-defeat a little bit. That's what you believed. Yeah, because it was so far outside of the realm of what I ever thought was possible. I mean, because like sorry, and now that I've derailed, I want to go back to the question, but I was a food stamp family, you know, in high school. I have no prospects. I had I thought that football, high school to college football, I thought that that was going to be my way to go to university and like get an education. I had really bad luck. And I broke my back and I um had uh had other little nagging injuries, and then I got viral meningitis, and I'm hospitalized for that. And like football just went out the window. There's no no chance of me playing, no chance of me getting a scholarship. Uh, it just wasn't gonna happen because I was hurt. I played corner and I played halfback. Oh, wow. Um I was very fast and I leveraged my speed, but fast people aren't so fast when they break their back. No or uh, you know, other nagging injuries. I tore my Achilles tendon, like a bunch of just dumb. I was very injury prone. Um and part of that in hindsight, I just didn't know how to take care of my body yet. That was a big lesson I learned. I miss out on football as an escape. So I joined the army. I'm like, I have no other prospects. I've got no money. I can't like mom and dad aren't paying for me to go to college. So what's next? It's join the army. That was like I ran away from home, enlisted, um, went to basic training, and you know, I did five years on active duty, deployed to Afghanistan, did a career rotation. Thanks. We moved to Germany. Um, so I got to travel the world, and I just in that role, at the highest, I was a sergeant on active duty, and I'm making$35,000 a year. And I'm thinking that I'm on top of the world at$35,000 a year. I'm like, I got a cool fast car, you know, my bills are paid, I'm living good. But while I was on active duty and I'm going to all these places, I got to see the entire spectrum of wealth. Afghanistan and people literally living in mud huts. Germany, where there's like Bugattis driving down the cobblestone streets of Nuremberg. South Korea, everything in between. And I started to like realize the levels of wealth and the differences in lifestyles. And I started trying to study the people that were being successful, and I started learning what they did and how they were different. And I realized, you know, they weren't smarter than me, they didn't have better tools than me, they just had a different set of operating principles and ideas, different mindsets. And that was kind of what like those experiences when I come back from active duty let me actually have this mindset and this belief that I could start a business and I could generate some money and I could live a little bit of a better life. And it maybe took me, you know, way too long to put all those things together and implement them in a way where I was taking action consistently and I was, you know, ignoring the fear that I was going to be judged or how my friends were going to perceive me or how I was going to fail and if they were going to look at me funny for being a failure. And when I got all those things in check, then everything else fell into place and I was able to win. But it took a lot of time to get there. So how do we do it faster? Going back to the original question.

SPEAKER_04 1:22:48

That's a you know, that's genius. You know, um, you know, that that concept of the building blocks of getting to where not only you believe that you can do it, but now you have systems, processes, and a framework that you can do that in. And I mean, I've been doing this for a very long time. Yeah. The difference between, you know, like really you look at what I could have done differently, so much changed during that time in the space. We talk about Clickbank, it's like that's it's all different. Like marketing in general has changed more in the last 10 years than it has the last hundred. Yeah. Right. And it's going to continue with AI, it's going to change even more. It'll change more in the next two to three years than it has in the last 200. Right. So adapting, overcoming, and you know, um, the limiting self-beliefs is a tough one. And I wish, you know, I got lucky because I got to be exposed to Earl Nightingale and um Norman Vincent Peel and all the OG personal development guys. I worked for Nightingale Conan. I went from Stephen Covey to Nightingale Conant to, you know, the the real estate and marketing gurus that I worked on the sales floors, do selling coaching. I mean, literally the like the movie Boiler Room, I was a character in that movie. Right on. So I've I've sold things that I when I was naive that I wasn't proud of. Sure. And I escaped that. I'm one of the very, very few people in the industry that was able to start his own business that's still around, that escaped it. Right. Um, but for me, right, like you go back to like what would I have really changed, right? I would have changed habits. I would have changed the habits of comfort and what I thought was was really important because, you know, I mean, I don't know, you know, I mean, you're a dad too, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:24:47

You're dad. Yes. We're expecting baby number four any minute. Oh, dude, that's awesome.

SPEAKER_04 1:24:52

Dude, there's nothing I want that, like the a new baby, and you're like when you for the first time when you hold your own flesh and blood and like that feeling, you feel probably like the purest form of love. The hair, the hair stands up on your arms, yeah, the goosebumps. That feel you cannot get that feeling anywhere else. Um, but yeah, I mean, I started late on kids, but I mean, the fear, the fear of loss, that was the biggest thing that held me back and the thing I could change. All of these fear mindset things, because I, you know, that fear you hit this glass ceiling. The first time I broke six figures was like, I've made it. Yeah. I've made it. But really, what I made it to was another level of limiting self-belief that I had to overcome. And then, you know, you make 280 grand and you're like, wow, this is great. And you don't do your corporate stuff properly, and then you end up paying a bunch of it in taxes, and you're like, oh, that was stupid because you just didn't know, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:25:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:25:47

But I mean, going back to that question though, I wouldn't change a thing though, really, because I had to fail forward and fail up the way I did. And I, and even to this day, I still have to keep accepting that that if I don't embrace it, I'm going to fall by the wayside of the same people right now that are resistant to AI. I'm being resistant to AI because it's not human, it's not real, it's slop, it's it's not authentic, it's not this or that, or it's going to change the world. There's no doubt about it. It's kind of like the yellow pages. All those people that work for the yellow pages at one point, where are they now? Well, maybe they went to go work for Google, but they had to do something. Yep. Right? I mean, and that's what's always going to happen. But but in this world, there are things that are always changing, and there are things that will never change, right? And if you don't and you know, accept that change is the only true constant, you're going to get left behind in a world that is going to evolve beyond you because you're afraid of doing what you have to do the hard in order to actually have the comfort that you really want.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:54

So the question that I was gonna ask was if somebody's approaching you today and they want to start a business, what's your advice? Is that Amazon? Is that arbitrage? What do you think is the best practice for them right now?

SPEAKER_04 1:27:07

What I look at is who is that person, right? And what is their goal and what do they actually need to get out of it? And and and let's say, let's take, you know, maybe it's it's your your mom or your family member that, you know, they're just bootstrapping. Like, like let's talk about somebody who absolutely has nothing. I have no money. I've I've taken people where they sign up for our coaching, but they and they lied to us saying, Oh, yeah, I've got money to buy inventory and do things, and you've learned, oh, you have 250 bucks to their n to your name, really? Right? And and I have strategies for bootstrappers that are broke, right? Because they're I I call it the pyramid of e-commerce. And I would say using the internet creatively to make income, not even an Amazon business. Everybody kind of segments it as an Amazon business, an eBay business, an Etsy business, Shopify. Dropshipping. There's there's so many different tenets of using the internet creatively to make money. And I call this my pyramid of e-commerce. I have a course that I created that's within our proven Amazon course. There's like 40 courses, 50 courses in the proven Amazon course that teach all kinds of different strategies. And this is the very bottom foundational, foundational layer of what we teach. It's called buy local sell to the world.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:24

Right? This is a common uh conversation in arbitrage circles.

SPEAKER_04 1:28:31

Yes, buy local, sell to the world. You can go to buy local sell to the world.com. You can see my course. Um and uh I love yard selling. I'm a junkie. I can't not do it. I mean, I can't drive by a yard sale. I've learned my lesson. I pull over every time. If I'm late for appointment, I will stop. Because there was the one time where we stopped. No, no, no, no, I've got to pull over. And I bought a whole Leica camera kit from this guy that there, oh, we're moving to Florida, we're retiring. And I'm like, oh well, okay, all this this camera and this I'll give you 50 bucks for it. Oh, I paid a lot more than that back in the 60s for it. And the wife came out and it's all gotta go. We're moving. And uh uh I bought a$4,000 um Leica camera set and lenses uh that I sold for four grand for 50 bucks. I have a junk pile like you wouldn't believe because I'm I'm uh I love it. But that's how I would start. You're in the the Gary V hustle. Very well, we taught Gary. Gary was a client of mine, like Mike Wolf, American Pickers, bought our original software back in the day called HammerTap, right? It was the analytics software for eBay. I mean, I didn't make any money on the internet until eBay in in 1997. My partner was was eBay PayPal user number 158. Oh, wow. That's how far back we go, right? Um, but it's all changed. I wouldn't recommend somebody, yeah, go start an eBay business because it's dead. It's it's changed so much. Yeah. But but still with Facebook Marketplace, eBay, there's so many ways for free. And literally, like at Joanne's Joann's just went out of business. So we went to five different Joannes and we bought every single sewing pattern out. I literally in my warehouse have boxes, boxes of them, and we're selling them for six bucks free shipping. I bought them for 10 bucks, 10 or sorry, 10 cents a piece. I mean, and and some of the vintage collectible ones, I mean, I do vintage collectible, but you gotta realize that there's on the average household, there's usually about four or five thousand dollars worth of stuff that you're never gonna use. You're never gonna play that board game again. And board games sell, it's crazy. Yeah, there's certain things that sell really well on eBay, there's certain things that are gonna sell really well on Amazon. There's great things on whatnot. Whatnot's killer. My son and I, my 14-year-old son and I, yeah, sort of whatnot. I let him take them over and they shut it down because we were crushing it on pop puckop. You can't be a 14-year-old running a business on whatnot. You know, you're underage. So they shut us down. I just met with them actually. But whatnot is unbelievable. Live selling, live selling. You can do a five-second auction and just whip through stuff. I mean, we we crushed it for a minute there, and they they just got my account back, so I'm good there. But like, look at whatnot, look at why live selling. Look at selling stuff on Facebook Marketplace. But what I do is I go out and I'm a musician, guitar pedals. I know something about guitar pedals. I know what they're worth, I know what they are, I know what guitars are, I know what they do. And usually when a musician is going to part ways with an instrument, it's a very emotional thing. And it's more than likely because they're broke. When you understand this, you become the pawn shop in your area of that niche. And so you go out, and we used to what I'd do is I would hit 20 different listings on Facebook Marketplace or on KSL.com or wherever, you know, back in the day it was Craigslist. And then after I'd give him a lowball offer, I'd have my buddy that works with me in the office, hey, call this guy and tell him 10 bucks more. And then you know what I'm saying? And that like, and we would work it in a way where I would find flips, flips, it's like real estate, multiple offers, right? That's what it's all about, right? Um, but literally, I can literally make money out of thin air using the internet critically. If I have a cell phone, if you if you left me for broke, if you said, Nathan, I'm gonna take all of your money away from you, I'm gonna take all of your credentials away from you, all your credit, right? I'm gonna leave you in the small, any small town in America for broke, right? Left me, leave me with a cell phone and access to the internet. If you came back a year later, I wouldn't be broke. Yeah. Because of what I know, right? But here's one diabetic test strips. I run ads in the paper and and bandit signs around town, just like the we buy houses, but mine say we pay cash for your diabetic test strips, right? I can buy a box of diabetic test strips. Someone will call me up and oh, my dad just passed away. Oh, I'm sorry to hear that. I almost died from diabetes too. And they go, Well, he's got all these test strips. I got like 20 boxes of them. You'll buy these? Yeah, I'll buy them from you. Yeah, well, my mom could sure use it. How much you buy them for? I'll give you, I'll give you 10 bucks a box. How does that sound? Right. And then I will send, I will go and drive and pick those 20 boxes up, give him$200, and then I will sell each box on eBay instantly that day for 60 bucks a box. Instantly. Right? You don't have to have a ton of money. Money is not, if you're a new entrepreneur, money is not worth holding you back. What's holding you back is not having the knowledge, direction, and tools to know about diabetic test strips. What about baby formula? Women, they get a free can of formula from the hospital when they have a baby, right? But guess what? They don't, they breastfeed, they use, they don't use that can of formula. Hey, need formula, get on free cycle. I need, you know, free uh I need books. Um, um, I'm I'm looking, I need books. Give me books, right? I I've made a that's how I started on Amazon because when I started Amazon on FBA, that was the only thing that you could sell. That was the Amazon was a book business. Yeah, bookstore back in the day. So, I mean, I would go to all the yard sales here in Utah and I would get all the LDS Mormon books, and I would buy those books up and I would ship them to Pennsylvania to the book, and then they would ship right back here when they sold. We made three to five grand a month on just books. I can buy book. I the my record is I bought a book for 50 cents that I sold for 375 bucks. Wow. I mean, there is money hiding in plain sight in this buy local sell-to-the-world level, like you wouldn't believe, whether it's yard sales, estate sales, marketplace flips. Um, talk to your neighbors, you know, um, clean out the clutter and the junk and use that as your startup capital. But here's the thing is I've never been a debt guy. I have bootstrapped this business with cash flow. If I if the business didn't have money in the bank, you didn't spend it. I didn't use that to grow the business. I used straight cash flow. But the problem with that is I learned recently that, you know, from one of my mentors is you're not running a profit business, Nathan. You're running a cash flow business. Sure, you're doing millions of dollars in sales every year, um, you know, but it's cash flow. It's not more around the profit side of things and managing and and you know, you're running from a cash flow standpoint. But this is how you generate the cash flow to get going, right? Whether it's for you or somebody else. Because think about this, you don't have the money to do it. When we're starting out with somebody who's completely broke, guess what? You don't have the money, you can find the money using leverage, leverage other people's time, leverage other people's knowledge, leverage other people's money, leverage other people's resources. It is there. You just have to be industrious, you have to believe it true. Now, once you get to that level of you've taken advantage of buy, local, sell the world, now you have some cash flow. Yeah, I would say start with arbitrage. I would say start get an Amazon account going at that point. Because while it's also getting harder, it's also getting easier. And I can tell you this with Amazon, I would say Amazon is the lowest hanging fruit opportunity for somebody that's a new, you know, startup trying to, you know, start from humble beginnings, bootstrapped, because the playing field is pretty level there. And there's so much underserved shelf space at Amazon. There are people, Amazon, they've told us we can't keep the inventory. 60% of what's sold on Amazon is sold by third-party sellers. So that means the opportunity to find a wholesale account, to find an online arbitrage on a website where, hey, the websites put something on sale and they're liquidating this stuff out. But people on Amazon going to Amazon, they don't care. They're buying it and selling it and buying it and selling it.

SPEAKER_02 1:36:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:36:16

And they can't find it now. And they're looking on Amazon. And you can fill that underserved shelf space. It's there. Literally, there are billions of ASINs to go after. There's no shortage of opportunity. It's just you have to learn how to source. And it's hard. And in the beginning, it's going to take you a little bit of time. But retail arbitrage, online arbitrage, that's the what we call replense, replenishable items that you can go back to the well and sell over and over and over. Grocery. Go check out the go check out the Pop Tarts aisle, right? And then go search that on Amazon and see what they're doing. Pop tarts, three packs, bundles. Give you a little hint here, um, pumpkin spice. But anything pumpkin spice during the fall goes crazy, right? But like, so I mean, just because I've seen this for years and years and years, the seasonal cycles and all this stuff, I now know, and that's what I share with people. Not just here's how you do it, here's what you sell and where and when and how you get it. That's why we're so good at what we do.

SPEAKER_02 1:37:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:37:12

Because you can do that on small scale. But if I went after the big scale on that, it would saturate, right? But here's the thing is once I get to this buy local sell to the world and then up to the arbitrage level, repuns level, then there's the next level in the pyramid. And as you get up the pyramid, layers of the pyramid, right? Um, it gets harder and it gets more expensive, but it gets more rewarding. There's higher risk, but there's higher reward. So up here at this next level is wholesale. So what you start doing is you go to trade shows and you find wholesale opportunities to buy inventories. And then from there, you move up to that. Once you figure out, oh, wholesale, man, I bought this uh product wholesale and it sells over and over and over and over, man. Well, why wouldn't I just go and make my own brand and learn to source it from a manufacturer here in the US or China or wherever, India, Mexico, there's source, there's sources of product everywhere. They're so cheap, unbelievable, right? But once you figure out wholesale, then you move up to the private label, brand building. And then at the very tippy top of that pyramid is what I call proven product partnering. And that's what I do. I spend most of my time doing that, where I find businesses that are absolutely clueless about how to sell on Amazon and they've got a great brand. They've got a great product, they've got a product that's in retail, that's doing well, and they have they have no Amazon presence, or they have a bunch of other people that are just cannibalizing their brand, creating price erosion on their brand, causing all kinds of problems because they're doing, you know, they're not representing their brand and putting on Amazon. The brand's just not paying attention, right? And so I go in and fix that for those brands. But here's where it gets interesting. And going back to your question, if someone's brand new, what they would do is they would find someone like me and leverage my knowledge, my skills, my resources, my software, and go and hunt and say, hey, I've got one of the top experts in the world for um selling on Amazon, right? In general, and not just Amazon, but just e-commerce in general, right? Um, I'm we've got the receipts. I can I can make an introduction to him, but I mean, is this what you want? Are you are you needing this help? I'm just not getting people telling me no when I I ask them when I go to trade shows and and show them what I can do. They're just not telling me no. I'm turning people, I'm the one saying no. I'm turning them away. Yeah, right. But as a brand new person, you can learn just enough to be dangerous or even deadly, right? And bring them to someone like me. And then I'll pay you 15 to 20% of whatever revenue I'll do a contract with you, right? Where you make 15 to 20% of that revenue. And this is a new offer I want to run. I'm looking for somebody that can help me take, I've already got the course and everything, but I want to run that as its own standalone offer, right? To where you can bring your, your, your uh relationship that you find to me. It's your relationship, but they enter an agreement with my company, we make them a proposal, we manage it. We can either do it on a Rev share, we can do it on a retainer, they can just pay us up front for these services or whatever, right? And for the lifetime value of that client, you're making mailbox money. That to me is the lowest hanging fruit opportunity. But if you think about it, it's arbitrage in a way where you're relationship arbitrage. Yeah. Huge, huge. If you think about it, though, but there's a danger to that because there are people that are like, oh, well, I hooked you up with this person, so what do I get now? And they don't structure an agreement up front. Yeah. And say, if I make this introduction, this is what I get. Here's the agreement, here's the non-circumvent, non-disclosure agreement. That that would be another thing, too, because I have a one of my best business relationships is handship, handshake agreement. No contracts, nothing.

SPEAKER_00 1:40:45

Well, and that's the old way of doing things too, but now you get burned on that a lot.

SPEAKER_04 1:40:49

Absolutely. The world's changed. So have solid agreements. But I that's what I have. We have it in place. I have a solid agreement. I have a whole team that manages this. I've been spending the last five years building the infrastructure of just this. And I feel that's the biggest opportunity right now. Are are, you know, not you going out and finding the products and selling them. That's good too. I mean, that's a that's a that's a hamster wheel, right? I mean, it's a it's a it's uh a war of attrition. But find there is no shortage of companies out there and people and businesses starting businesses and want to leverage the power of the internet, yeah, they absolutely are clueless or have no idea. You can bring them to me and I'll coach them and you can make money off of that as a referral. But why not have equity in a business? Go to the business and say, listen, if I hook you up with the right guy that can help you blow this up, here, look at Deathwish Coffee, hundred million dollar business. He helped him blow that up, right? Why wouldn't he be able to do that for you? Right. And you come to me and you bring me that deal, right? I'm gonna honor that relationship. I'm gonna go above and beyond, right? But the reality is this, right? Is how much money did it cost to do that for that person? Nothing. Right. And if you think about it, if I build a business with them and think about this, if they're just doing a hundred grand a month, if I take them from that person to doing nothing, and now we're doing a hundred grand a month. And let's say we I have a revenue share with that brand of 20%, 20% rev share after Amazon fees. So they do 100 grand, Amazon's gonna take 30% of the sales, leave 70 grand, and then I'm making$14,000 of that just for bringing that deal to me, right? You're making$2,800 a month mailbox money, and that's just on one deal. Yeah, you could bring me five that average that, and you know, hey, there's a there's a you're pocketing 60 grand a year just to chill. Six-figure income. Yeah. But, but, you know, I mean, why would you not want to learn how to do that for yourself and build your own team of VAs and and leverage the opportunity? I believe that is the greatest opportunity right now on the internet is is to go out and find the people that have the influence, that have the followers, that have the TikTok, that have the Instagram, that have the Facebook groups or whatever, and leverage their audience. List swaps and say, hey, I can I can um bring a great service or product into your audience and become the relationship connector. I think that that that right there, I mean it but you what you have to accept with that is that it takes time for those deals to happen.

SPEAKER_00 1:43:22

It's kind of like Yeah, you have to build the relationships.

SPEAKER_04 1:43:26

Relationship building is like, dude, that should be a course in and of itself. Like relation does anybody that you know of relationship masterclass? What are the rules of engagement in relationships? Right? Like and what I mean, I could I could write a book on that.

SPEAKER_00 1:43:43

Relationship masterclass. I love it. Let me ask um I'm curious about what are you doing right now when it comes to your online presence, the authority building. I mean, you talked about um leveraging other people's lists and things like that. So I'm curious what other aspects are you doing to fuel that like because that's a a multi-purpose thing. Yeah, I mean, it helps you with your lead generation, it helps you with your authority building. The authority building is the trust building.

SPEAKER_04 1:44:18

It's it's so weird. The world is and the internet has moved so fast that it's so hard to keep up with. Oh, now we got to get on TikTok.

SPEAKER_02 1:44:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:44:28

Right? Oh, you know, now we have to leverage this or that, and and there's always gonna be gaps, right? But the best way, and I don't know, I mean, this this might be something that like I know Russell Brunson's been talking a lot about this, and it's opposite of what I'm gonna say is proof. Oh, yeah, social proof, success stories, testimonials.

SPEAKER_00 1:44:47

I mean, that's where like all of my coaching sales come from. Is that I've got you know a handful of people that have been pretty successful with it. Uh, they give me the video testimonial, those video testimonials go on my landing pages, I run them as ads, those kind of things. And then that drives more traffic and more sales. So we so we have a podcast, silentgym.com.

SPEAKER_04 1:45:06

If you go there, it's called Silent Sales Machine Radio. And um, that I think has been the biggest driver in what we do, all the podcast is. It's not about us getting on there talking about how cool we are, right? It's we bring our success stories on and we tell we have them tell their story. Awesome. That's that is an awesome way to do that. That's been the huge driver. That's how we do it. Um, but at the same time, though, see, my role is to continually churn out those success stories to put on the podcast. Yes. So you it's it's you, you know, you can't have the one without the other. And so you have to have a team, you have to have a relationship, you have to have um um, you have to have the tenacity really to like uh and and not only that, but have something that's real that works. I mean, like me, I don't just teach what kind of works, I'm actually doing it. Yeah, you're in it. I'm I and that's part of my problem, though, is you know, how do you run all these businesses while you're out hustling your art sales and and you know, uh hustling store managers to say, hey, can you go to the dollar store? Here's one for you. Go to the dollar store, all the religious candles that they have in there, go hustle the store manager and say, Hey, I don't want to just buy them individual, I want to buy them by the case. And if I buy them by the case, can you get me a like a quantity discount and sell them by the case on Amazon every time?

SPEAKER_02 1:46:32

Yeah, works every time.

SPEAKER_04 1:46:33

It's just easy. So I'm I'm man, there's a lot, a lot to unpack. I'm uh it's but I'm doing that stuff, and while I'm there doing it, I'm thinking, man, why am I not at that's the biggest mistake I make as a business owner is I I've convinced myself that it's okay to major in the minors instead of majoring in the majors and being this level of your business owner.

SPEAKER_00 1:46:58

Let me uh let me posit this thought for you. You can be the business owner and not be the CEO. And the reason I bring this up is that you seem to have a passion for a lot of the miners, like you're saying. I think that there's a good connection there. Because you're in that and you're passionate about that, you will always be involved in the customer experience that your your customers are gonna have.

SPEAKER_03 1:47:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:47:30

But that doesn't mean you are going to be the person that makes those businesses grow to$100 million a year. One of my my friends, uh Myron Golden, if you're familiar with him. Yes. So Myron shares a story often about the thing that took his company from like a million dollars a year to$10 million a year, was he fired himself as the CEO and hired a CEO that could actually grow and run the company to$10 million a year and then build that, right? He wasn't the guy that could build that. He was the guy that was going to coach and was passionate about helping those people and sharing the stories and and bringing it together in an experience that was going to be excellent for the customer, but that didn't mean he was the most qualified person to run those businesses or to grow scale the operations back end, right? So I mean, a lot of what you've brought up today, and we've kind of talked about it a few times, is it's there's some self-defeat going on. And I think the one of the easiest ways for you to get out of the self-defeating cycle is to do what you do best, outsource the rest, hire somebody to actually scale the organization. And then you, I mean, you hire them as a CEO, you pay them as a CEO, but you still control the vision and the direction of the company as the owner, right? But there's somebody that can, there's someone out there that can run that so that you can pay yourself the$150,000 a month.

SPEAKER_04 1:48:54

I would, I would do that. I would do that now because you talk about that prison, you talk about that trap. When you're the fudiciary of something like this, and everybody is so dependent upon what you do, the pressure that comes with that and the stress, it creates the scarcity, it creates a little bit of that fear, and it will it kneecaps you a little bit as a leader. But that's the thing. That's where maybe I could take a couple pages out of your book, because I know a lot about leadership. I've been around the greatest leadership personal development in history. And I it's like, and I know it, I just don't take my own medicine. And I and I need to want me to you know where I've always thrived? This is the weirdest thing ever. When somebody kicks my butt. When somebody says Nate. It's a great motivator. When someone says, like this guy I was telling you about his name's Cal. Uh he used to own, like he started Cellular One. Like I've got a few, like my my other buddy, they came in to buy the business. They wanted to buy the business. And this is another big mistake. Everything's so messy because I've got so many businesses, so many people involved in this and that, and you know, and you can't call me. Books, you got to be very careful with that, right? But um, these partnerships that are on handshakes, and yeah, this guy's over here doing this and that, and and there's it's just so messy that I I they wanted to do an aqua hire, but it was too messy, and that's what they just said. It was like, clean this up and we'll come back and we'll do this because we love you, man.

SPEAKER_00 1:50:20

I mean, and it sounds like you you you need to be the owner, you're the one who's passionate about all of this, and you're gonna connect all these businesses together. I wouldn't hire one CEO for this stuff. I mean, I'm talking you you should probably have clearly delineated lines of effort.

SPEAKER_04 1:50:35

Could you find the right CEO?

SPEAKER_00 1:50:36

I I don't even know. This is this is a great question. Uh you and it's gonna be different for everybody, right? The more I talk to you, the more I get the vibe that you might be more of a creator than a rainmaker. Oh, yeah. Um, from my previous cover or uh comment on those. Yeah. So then I think you already talked about having a sales team. You probably have somebody that runs the sales team already. I don't know if that's you or if that's somebody else. Um so the most immediate, urgent thing in my mind is you need to find the engineers. And the engineers are the people that are gonna structure how each of these businesses are operating and their lines of effort. You're gonna share how to connect them all with those the different businesses because each of these should be feeding each other, is how I see that. Your creativity around the passion of how we're gonna do the arbitrage, how we're gonna coach the clients, all those kind of things, that's what's making the products and the services good and palatable for the customer. But the engineer is the need, is is what I'm I think I'm identifying.

SPEAKER_04 1:51:42

You've the nail, I don't think the nail could be hit so squarely on the head.

SPEAKER_00 1:51:45

Now, how you find these people, oh man, the million-dollar question. Because I'm very much a rainmaker. My first hire always has to be an engineer. Because I will go and I will make deals and I will sell and I will generate revenue faster than we can actually build the system or the structure to provide. Build the plane on the way down, jump off and that is my uh lived experience, perhaps. Um because I get in my head and I'm very much of the mindset that if I have 80% of an idea, I am going to 100% send it until that is created and it's real. Not always great for the business operation. And I I can be an engineer from time to time, but I'm not strong at it, especially not, you know, prolonged. Um, so I have to hire engineers. In my e-com business, that was uh I think one of the most pivotal moments for our us to grow. And I mean, we we took that company from uh, you know, it was a literally a bootstrapped company to like, you know, now it's$20 million a year in revenue and it just runs and we've got the team there. But the only reason that that was able to happen was because we found an engineer early, developed him. And it, you know, I didn't even know that that was the I hadn't been familiar with the triad yet that we were talking about, but it was it was hiring for my weakness. I wasn't somebody who could come in and do the systems and the software and the automations and all of those different things that were necessary for the company to continue to grow at scale. I was just, you know, prop selling and problem solving on the fly. You're the leader that people were willing to hitch their wagon to. Yes. But that's not always the most you still have to build the efficiency. That's the thing is with without an engineer guiding the ship. Oh, correct. Because like I was paying a check$15 an hour just to literally copy and paste from Google, like a Google Sheet, into uh, you know, the shipping software type stuff, right? Not a very efficient way of doing things when I can get an engineer, and I eventually did, and the engineer goes through and he's like, Well, let me just build this program, and this program will extract the shipping information, run it through a price check on all of the shipping providers, get the most affordable price to ship that product in its specific packaging, and then purchase the label, print the label.

SPEAKER_04 1:54:21

I own that business.

SPEAKER_00 1:54:21

And then the manufacturer just has to go and, you know, or not the manufacturer, the warehouse guy just has to print the label and pull the label out.

SPEAKER_04 1:54:29

Correct Zebra and I own that business. That was it. You just explained that's it's called Tiger Ship. It's a shipping platform, like it's a multi-carrier, multi-channel shipping platform. And you know what's crazy? I give it away for free. You know what's weird about that? That's another lesson in that. If you give it away for free, people won't value it. Um, it's true. It's it's crazy to me. Like we did this experiment. Um, me and Skip McGrath, my old buddy, giving people hundred dollar bills. Walk up to somebody, like aggressively handing them a hundred dollar bill. No one will take it for a while. What's going on?

SPEAKER_00 1:55:04

There's a guy who's actually uh, I forget his name. Oh, he's famous on Instagram. He walks around New York City Times Square and he tries to hand out one ounce gold bars and people won't take them. I'm like, this guy's giving you$4,000 and you're just snubbing your nose at him.

SPEAKER_04 1:55:22

Like it's hilarious. It's value. It's it's a value thing. And this shipping platform thing that you just explained, how I make money is I give it away for free, but I make a small sliver off of their shipments.

SPEAKER_02 1:55:33

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:55:36

But I make more money off of the 3PL warehouse that it I because it's 3PL software that runs the go hand in hand. So it's just, you know, I mean, there's so much opportunity, but you're right.

SPEAKER_00 1:55:45

I well, and some of those might be able to be the same business, like in that instance, right? That would make sense. You pair those together, and maybe you have one CEO that that can run those. But I would say, and and granted, I don't know your full background when it comes to like the technological literacy and code and AI and all those kind of things, but I would venture to say, based on you know the conversation that we've had for the last two hours, you're probably not the best coder. No. So there should be, you know, a developer guy that is like the expert in that. And then you can stop worrying about it. You just have to worry about what's this this guy. You're worrying about the person and going back to the relationships because it seems like that's what you value more. Then you don't have to be as involved in it's the leverage points. Correct.

SPEAKER_04 1:56:34

It's use uh uh leveraging all those people in those relationships to make uh it's like it's like um what I like to do with music. I don't I I can sit down and in in my studio and write the guitar part, the bass part, the drum part, you know, come up with a lyrics. I could even sing it, and it's not gonna sound good, but um, you know, but it's I'm I'm always better at saying, okay, I want you to be on the guitar and I want you to be on the bass, and you're gonna be the drummer here, and you're gonna be the singer. Yeah. And then help helping them, you know, uh I'll germinate the idea, or they'll germinate the idea, and then I produce I'm a producer.

SPEAKER_00 1:57:10

Yeah. So I'll produce the arrangement. Think of your business in that way. Yeah, I know.

SPEAKER_04 1:57:15

So where you find these people then, no, I'm good. I don't need to be the guitar player.

SPEAKER_00 1:57:19

I'm looking for, if this is me in your position, I'm looking for people. Uh, and I I would be asking for referrals. Boom. Like I I only I exclusively hire from referrals at this point. Really? I I yeah, I have okay, sorry, sorry, story time. I hired somebody from Indeed. Oh. We posted it, you know, we interviewed 20 people type thing. And this was just for like a back office employee, so nothing crazy. Um, and we hired who we thought was the best fit based on the resume and the interview. And no joke, she comes to work for one day, and that afternoon gets in a meth-fueled car accident that kills two people. Oh, and then she's taken to the hospital. Uh, then she goes from the hospital to rehab, like this whole but I mean, like we hired one employee from Indeed, and that was the outcome. So I'm like, hey, I ex we're only hiring referrals. I know and and the reality is when you hire from the referrals, you just get a higher quality of applicant because somebody who is invested in the relationship, it all goes back to the relationships, but somebody who's invested in the relationship is putting their name on the line. Yep, they're vouching for somebody, they don't want to have a bad relationship with you. And uh, you know, at this point, 29 out of 30 have been really good referrals.

SPEAKER_04 1:58:41

You know, what's funny is all of my coaches, almost all of them, they were all coaching clients.

SPEAKER_00 1:58:47

So I turned coaching into coaching. That's a great model for that. That's why it works. So, and now I would say, you know, some of those, I would look at maybe top performers, people that you know are are are going to do the work, they're invested in the success, they want to do well. Those might be candidates, right? But I would I would look at those, I would look at um referrals, and I would only ask the people that you trust the most. But I'm looking for people who have a specialized knowledge base related to the company. Oh, yeah. So, like your best coaches, those would be the candidates for the coaching aspect. The best performing Amazon students would maybe be candidates for the Amazon, the uh humminbird. Yeah. Like, and then the people who are the most technologically literate and sound would be maybe the for more of the uh the 3P mercury software. Yeah, yeah. So I I that's how my mind goes with that. And even if they're not good fits in and of themselves, those would be the people who maybe have the connections that could get you to the right person to run that.

SPEAKER_04 1:59:52

Yeah. Yeah, I think that's I think that's amazing. That's exactly what I'm gonna do, man. I'm absolutely gonna go crazy. But that's the thing is I do that, is I I just get so like intense about and that's I think that's as an entrepreneur, that's that's what you you have to actually just Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:00:08

You have to be delusional to the I mean, to your the reality of what success actually is gonna look like. Otherwise, you can never achieve a high level of success. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 2:00:18

And and through that, that's it's like the struggle, it takes you to that place where you can believe. Yes. We become what we think about. Amen. These these thoughts that are in your idea, they're not just vapor swirling in your head, they are real, tangible, measurable things that if you write them down and keep a business journal and have that discipline and it goes back to habits.

SPEAKER_00 2:00:42

I gotta write down the business journal thing again.

SPEAKER_04 2:00:44

Like that was such a good my habits really are the the hardest part because um, you know, you're your own worst enemy at this game. You're you're the biggest asset in your own business, and you're also the biggest liability. And as soon as you can like come to terms with that, and if I mean it took for somebody to say that to me in such a way that was so harsh that it hurt my feelings for about a millisecond, but the realization of the pini, the epiphany, like if you told me like you, you the when you said that I don't need to be the CEO, I but I can still be the owner, like I kind of knew that in the back of my head. It didn't seem like that concept was just so complicated to grasp. And but now I fully get it and I'm I'm bought into that, absolutely. And you know what's funny about that is I think that when the other people that know me, that work with me, that are part of these organizations that I'm involved with, I think that that that there isn't one of them that wouldn't agree with you so much that, and it's not that I'm you know, like you some people that are business owners that are tyrant, you never want to be that. You don't want to be the tyrant that I'm the boss or whatever. In fact, I'm quite the opposite. People don't work for me, I work for them. I don't build businesses, I build people. Yeah, but but to a fault in a way that that is an enabler type of a thing. I have a history of being an enabler. Um, but the beauty of this is that people, man.

SPEAKER_00 2:02:04

You can be the people builder and not just CEO, just let somebody else be the business builder. You need an engineer, and you get out of my own way.

SPEAKER_04 2:02:10

You need engineers. Yeah, I'm in my own way. But it's so hard as a business owner, like it's your baby, right? To let go.

SPEAKER_00 2:02:18

That that's a consciousness thing. 80% done by someone else is 100% freaking awesome. Yeah, no doubt. That's how I let go. Yeah, I mean, it's for better or for worse. I am pretty much completely out of the daily operations in my e com business now. And it was necessary to build it that way because I'm in the military and at any time I like go into a training at least annually. I'm gone for a month. That's just uh uh the reality of my military commitments and stuff. So it was always necessary for that team to be developed to such a way that I could step out at any moment. Now, if I can get the team to be able to accomplish what I could do, or at least 80% of what I could do, that becomes a lot easier. So that was the initial focus. I've got a really good engineer, I've got a really good creator. The rainmaker is, you know, the sales team at this point. And and to be honest, most of that is still ran by like uh me and my partners. We were doing, you know, the meta ads and things like that, and that's where most of the leads come from. So then that's the rainmaker. We just need, you know, sales team to pick up the phone, answer the questions, take the credit cards over the phone type thing. Um, because we have the online platforms and stuff. But the point being, I can step out of that business. That business is still doing 80% or better of what it was doing with me, you know, engaged in the daily activity. That's 100% awesome.

SPEAKER_04 2:03:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:03:54

And that just frees me up to do the coaching, the consulting, the podcast more.

SPEAKER_04 2:03:58

The ability to grow within that. Correct. Because that's the key that I've learned about having people in leverage. They want to grow. Like, I don't do any employees. I've got 60 people that work for me worldwide, and not one of them is employed. They're all independent contractors. Every single one of them. Um, because if I have to manage you, I'm out.

SPEAKER_02 2:04:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 2:04:15

I'm like, I'm not looking for an employee, and and I'm not looking for, you know, all of the labor commission garbage and just everything that goes along with that, right? I'm looking for people that I can basically partner with rather than having to manage. I prefer that they manage me. My VAs in the Philippines, they manage me. In fact, one of them, she's very special. She's very talented, very smart. I've made her an owner of the bit one of the businesses. She's a shareholder. She's not just a VA that works for me. She's the highest VA, uh paid VA that I know of, but um, she's an owner of the business. She's not going anywhere, right? Yeah. Oh, yeah. She's committed long term. Locked in. But what's what she's given me the ability to do is to walk away from certain things or step away because she's got it, because she's got the greatest thing going, and she's not going to blow it. And that that's what I mean, when you can get to that point where you can hand it off to somebody like that.

SPEAKER_02 2:05:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 2:05:08

Um, but you got to be very careful about that. I mean, certain things are delicate and you know, I mean, you don't want to, you want, you don't want broken systems, right? Because not because of that you didn't give them the right standard operating procedure, the SOP. That's another thing I'd recommend. That if I could go back, I would have done SOPs from day one, written SOPs on everything. And uh, you know, um like like getting those types of people in your business that are willing to take ownership of your own business is magical. And I have some of that, but I still think I have a long way of getting out of my own way to do exactly what you recommended, which is get an engineer and get some other CEOs in place and delegate better and get out of my own way because I am definitely the bottleneck. I'm definitely the bottleneck in my business. That's a common theme in what you do.

SPEAKER_00 2:05:57

Oh, yeah. Yeah, I I it's the two most common themes in people that hire me are one, they have this fear and they can't take the action. The second is they bottleneck themselves. Like one of my um most famous success stories owns a car detailing company. Uh dude was doing a hundred cars a month by himself. He takes about three hours per detail. So that's 300 hours a month that he is working. And he comes to me and he's like, Parker, I mean like I'm just absolutely capped out. I've got no idea like what to do. I'm like, dude, it's it's so obvious. You just gotta hire somebody. Oh, no, Parker, I could never hire like uh that then I'm losing my connection, my touch point with the customers, and I can't maintain the quality of the work. Like, there's gotta be another way. Limiting self-belief. I'm like, you can teach somebody, right? Like you can train somebody. You learned how to do this. What makes you think somebody else couldn't learn how to do this too?

SPEAKER_03 2:07:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:07:03

So it took him months. I mean, like, I I wish I could have been more effective at getting him to hire somebody quicker. It took him months. But the second he hired somebody, and and the way we we convinced him to do it was we showed him, you know, the mathematic breakdown of if he gets this person to take 50% of his cars, how much more business can he generate? And if he can generate that much more business, how much more is his bottom line, even if he's paying that dude 60 bucks a detail or something like that? And he realizes, like, oh my gosh, I hire one person and I make another 60 grand net take home every year. Okay.

SPEAKER_04 2:07:36

It's this cognitive dissidence.

SPEAKER_00 2:07:38

Correct. Is that we talked about earlier. So it's it's the same concept, just at a much larger scale, right? And that's, I think, that's what makes it easier from my perspective, at least, is to look at that and say, okay, I can make more money and I can be so like I can free myself of all the things that I'm not maybe the best at or that are draining of my time and energy. I can pour into the people that I'm coaching and helping to the max. I can serve more, I can help them more at a at a way higher level because I don't have to worry about all the things that were preventing me from helping more people. The minors. Yeah. Well, the miners, I think, are something like you were saying that you're very passionate about and they give you a unique perspective that helps people. I don't think the miners are your problem. I think running the business is your problem. Oh, it is. I would I would if you can remove running the business, how much more energy do you have to pour into the people that you serve and that you coach? That's where I'm I'm seeing this big opportunity for immediate improvement, I think, in your mindset and the way you serve people.

SPEAKER_04 2:08:41

Yeah. I I definitely need it today. I definitely need it.

SPEAKER_00 2:08:44

That's what I've diagnosed in one hour. I hope that it's good and not, you know, uh crackpot.

SPEAKER_04 2:08:50

No, it's not at all because I mean, it's like I already know it to kind of be true, but it's that affirmation, right? And and like the people that we that we surround ourselves with, I mean, obviously you're the sum of the top five people you surround yourself with. I know hammered, but you know, if you hang around four broke people, you're gonna become the fifth. The fifth, right? Or and vice, you know, in the other way for you know, five four successful people, you become the fifth. And that's kind of where I need uh, you know, more alignment. But that's that's what that is, is you bring somebody else to come in and be the fifth instead of you have you being the fifth person, bring somebody else so that you can be 10, 12, 15, 20. You know, it's like to believe that at that level, because I think that people they don't they they most people and what I do with coaching, it's not like what I showed them was all that magical and that it was all that technical and that it was just this secret sauce. It was more about making them believe that that they they could do it.

SPEAKER_00 2:09:48

Well, and that's the reality of coaching, I think, right now, especially with AI and how you know popular Chat GPT and Cloud and things like that are now, where it information isn't the problem anymore. Right? In the past, it used to be we were selling information products. Now it's information helps us sell what we do. What I mean by that is if everyone has access to AI and they can all just learn infinite information to the point where it's overwhelming, that's not what they need anymore. What they need now is somebody who can help them one, believe in themselves. So there's the cheerleader aspect of coaching, but two, help them condense both, I think, the knowledge and the understanding of how the business actually works because you've done it, and put that into a more palatable and more uh time and effort friendly package for them to unpack and unravel and figure out how to work through. Wow.

SPEAKER_04 2:10:44

I just I mean, just talking to you about that, that's a product, right? There, what you just what you just laid out, that's that's a product. Like how to stop, you know, uh putting yourself into information overload and actually using it to get people to give people what they really want. They don't want to buy your course, they want the result.

SPEAKER_00 2:11:04

Yeah. If I come to you, it's not because I want a course on Amazon, it's because I want to make$10 billion a year on Amazon. I want the result of what it can get me. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 2:11:13

So that's kind of where I think the shift that I'm making in now, like the ASD product trade show, we just we just put together a deal with them where they want me to be their whole educational track for all their brands, people and all of that stuff, right? And I'm scared.

SPEAKER_00 2:11:29

Oh, please forgive me. My phone's ringing and I have to look because my wife could be in labor. I'll call him back later.

SPEAKER_04 2:11:45

But I mean that that that whole thing right there where where we're you know, where I'm scared, right? Like I'm I'm scared of what that can of worms looks like because it's always a can of worms. It's like yeah, every time you do something good, there's Always another side to it where there's every time I launch something new, there's a new set of problems where broken systems have to be fixed. Yeah. Right. Because I'm I'm an innovator. I'm like, I my partner and I, we've done things that nobody's ever done in this business. We were the first one to do it. You know what we did back in the day when we were just eBay coaching? We ran an eBay auction for coaching on how to sell on eBay. That's kind of cool. And it was the ultimate coaching program. You're gonna get it with me, you're gonna get with Jim, you're gonna get with Skip, you're gonna get all this stuff. Our top coaches, everything. We started at 99 cents. The top winning bidder 48,000. Wow. We were shocked. And then we went back to the top the five uh second chance offer on the last five people that did it. We did over like$150,000 in sales on one eBay auction selling. No one's ever done it. Yeah we tried to do it again and it just didn't work. Like it was like, oh, that was a one-shot deal. Like and and when you do something like that, like that you you like I always teach.

SPEAKER_00 2:13:01

How did you repackage that and continue to sell it? You said you went back and did it again and it didn't work. But in my mind, I'm saying I'm taking that that sale as social proof, and I'm gonna say, hey, we did this and it was bid for$48,000, but we can give it to you today for$20,000 or something like that.

SPEAKER_04 2:13:18

We kind of did stuff like that, but it was also we'll write a book with you. Ah, okay. You can only write so many books with somebody and do certain things, but it's like the novelty of it. Like it's like with our audience, you have you, you know, you got to shoot your shot, you got to make sure that it's it's the right thing. It's not good ideas are the enemy. Because we can always see a bad idea and we always know, yep, that's a bad idea. Don't do that. Good ideas are hidden, bad ideas. And and sometimes you can't see it, but we only execute on the right ideas. We were never able to elevate that to the right idea again. Doing that. I mean, I suppose you could do it, but eBay kind of had its run, right? Yeah. Um, but that would be a good, that would be a good uh thing to do is to kind of recreate something along that same vein. But doing it because you should do it versus just yeah because you can. Yeah. That's where I, you know, it's like that kind of thing.

SPEAKER_00 2:14:15

Go back to the principle of the ethical selling.

SPEAKER_04 2:14:17

Well, yeah, with the can of worms that comes out, and that's the thing you have to accept as an entrepreneur, that you're gonna do good things, and as a result, there's gonna be bad things that come out of it as and broken systems that you have to fix. And don't do good things if you're not willing to take the the bad with the good. It doesn't have to all, and it's not always bad. I'm not saying that, but it's the duality of life. You can't have your in without your out, you're up without your down, you're black without your white. It's always a duality, right? You know, you can't have war without peace in the military, but you but you have to have peace through strength. Isn't that an interesting concept?

SPEAKER_00 2:14:51

I'm a big believer in that. You know, yeah Oh, this one is my wife. Uh oh. Okay, forgive me. I gotta take it. Oh, anticlimactic.

SPEAKER_04 2:14:59

No, but that would have been the coolest thing ever for a podcast. It would have been cool. But I I gotta tell you though, man, you are such a unique guy. The energy that I get from you, and just the the today I needed, you have no idea how much I needed this. Like I it's almost putting me in the place, I'm an emotional guy, I'll go into tears here. But like, like, um, if if you're watching this podcast, right, take this to heart because there is a divine spark in you that that you you can do things that are so much further beyond what your expectation. It's all about raising that expectation. And for me, that's what that's what I've gotten out of this today. It's a whole other level of expectations for myself. Um, you know, like you you think that you've done these things, and I'm a little bit jaded to this pioneering. I've been pioneering using the internet creatively to make money for for since the beginning. I mean, I built in 1995, I built a Pentium 100 computer because it because every time I got close to a computer, it broke and like it didn't work, and it was like I cursed, right? So I'm like, okay, I'm gonna learn everything about this and how to how to use it, right? And and how to build with it and grow. I was just fascinated, I was obsessed. You know, you're up till three o'clock, four o'clock in the morning because wow, this internet thing is so cool, man. This is unbelievable. You're searching crazy stuff or whatever. But I think that that now I want something different from it, right? Yeah, like, like as a dad, as a parent, as a as a entrepreneur, as a CEO of multiple businesses, as a leader of a huge community. Um, you know, I've kind of come to that realization that I'm not just gonna be happy with with what it's I mean, I have gratitude and I have expectancy, but um, I'm so focused on helping everybody else grow that I didn't focus enough. I didn't put the oxygen mask on me. And I'm not growing to where I want to grow. Yeah. And now I'm very, you know, now I it's not that I feel resentful about it, but it's I like how do you how do you feel resentful to yourself?

SPEAKER_00 2:16:58

Because yeah, yeah. Um well it's the recognition, I think, in part that you're you have room to grow. And so if you can recognize that you have that room to grow, you have to then acknowledge the fact either you are growing or you're not growing. And those are the result of choices that you've made to date. So it gives you the opportunity. Are you going to choose to grow or are you going to choose to stagnate?

SPEAKER_04 2:17:24

Yeah, I think I'm I'm at a place now where where I've got to make a change. I've got to. And it's not because, you know, it I could tell you this. If you don't, you slip into this pattern where all of a sudden the diminishing returns happen. And and um it's not before too long, before you know, you look around and go, oh, wait, I'm not in business anymore.

SPEAKER_01 2:17:48

Right?

SPEAKER_04 2:17:48

It's just it's that's the one thing that I think I kind of got out of the pattern of of over the years, because I mean you get so far down the road with this that you think, oh, I'm just always gonna be, you know, the guy. Yeah. And it changes on you, and you're like, whoa, it's like the yellow pages. Like, wow, best guess I better go over. So that's kind of, I think, what I need to do as an entrepreneur is evolve into that next change. Like, I think maybe I should do a, you know, um, what I'm doing with AI and and e-commerce, it's amazing what you can do. Manus. Oh, yeah. Um, are you are you playing with AI or like are you playing what are you doing with AI?

SPEAKER_00 2:18:21

It's really I primarily uh I wouldn't say I'm doing anything crazy. That's actually uh an area for a lot of improvement. Uh we use primarily ChatGPT and Claude. We're experimenting with Manus now to get it to do everything for us. Um we have some uh essential, oh, and we use Revio too uh as an AI. So AI does most of my outbound messaging, uh not necessarily automated, but what I mean is it will scrape my followers, like you talked about data scraping at the start of this, um, collect as much data as it can, create custom tailored outreach messages to those people to send them a message to start the conversation on something that will build mutual interest. And then I have an AI chatbot take over to sell them on coaching, consulting, social media management through chats.

unknown 2:19:14

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 2:19:15

Uh so that's the big, big AI effort for me right now. And obviously, if if it identifies that that they need a call or something like that, it uh has my calendar link. It'll schedule the call for us to get on the phone. Um, it has my tiered offers all built into it so that if somebody's not a good fit for one, it can go down to the next one, or get them into a lead magnet or a free school community so that I'm not losing people. Um you're still retaining their interest. Correct, in one way or another. Because if I can get you into a lead magnet, then I can get you into my email list. And if you're in my email list, I'm cultivating that relationship over time. Or if I get you into my school community, you're engaging in my community. We're building trust and you're cultivating the relationship over time. So I'm just trying to not, I'm trying to build any of those things with the chat. Uh, and that actually, I think, has been really cool. Like last week it sold uh 15 books for me. Like, but that's 15 people now into my email pipe pipeline, and those 15 people are all gonna get, you know, offers over time and cultivated. Um, so we'll see how that plays out because I've been I've just been using that um system now for like the last month, month and a half. So this is a new, newer endeavor for me. Uh, and then we obviously use it for uh some smaller custom code and things like that when it comes to our website and how we are collecting customer data. Um and then we use it for uh enhancing copywriting or editing the copy. So like I'll I do all of the copy myself.

SPEAKER_04 2:20:42

You have a lead generation. No, I do that all myself. See that's what I that's my next thing is I need a lead generation company.

SPEAKER_00 2:20:48

So so many offers. Like you said, the podcast. This is my lead generation, which is uh crazy now. So it's it's the podcast and it's the um chat bot.

SPEAKER_01 2:20:58

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 2:20:59

So when I say the podcast, I mean it's the social media aspect. So I I this one has blown me up a little bit. Um I started teaching a concept called the authority engine. Okay. In short, it's I call the authority engine because it's the four-piston system to building trust and authority online. Um, the first aspect of that was omnipresence. So it's me being on all of the platforms that my audience is on. So every single day I'm on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, uh, in Facebook, X, right? Like LinkedIn. I just am everywhere. I post everywhere. Um, and we actually automate all that here through the studio. So I make one long form, at least one long form piece of content every week. Like actually last week and this week, I have a podcast filming like every day. It's awesome. Um, so we do long form content. The long form content is really important because it allows an audience to see how you think, how you solve problems, how you interact with people. That lets them put themselves in that position like we're having a conversation with them, right? So they can see how I will talk and how I'll engage with them if they were to come on. So all of those things are really important. Then we clip it. So that's how we we take our long form content, we chop it up into our shorts, our reels, um, the things that we would use on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube shorts, those kind of things. We also make some structured short form content. But the purpose of all the short form content is to drive views back to the long form content where the trust is built. Uh, and we we put those things together with a consistent content posting schedule. So, like every single morning at 9.03 a.m., I have posts go out on Instagram. And every afternoon at 2.07 p.m., I have posts go out on Instagram. And it's like that every day without fail. It's a content calendar. Correct. Uh, but in doing that, right, algorithms, people talk about the oh, the consistency, yada, yada, yada. But there's actually the reward for consistency being that it can learn who is engaging with your content, how you're holding attention, how long you're holding the attention for, if you're doing it on a consistent basis. And if you go, if you deviate from that, now you're targeting different pools of people, it can't collect that information as easily. So the content calendar is actually really important. So I put those four things together. And before I even knew what any of that stuff was, people started reaching out to me and they were like, Hey, Parker, uh, every time I open my phone, I see you, whether it's on Facebook or Instagram or on YouTube, like you're there. I know you need to coach me. Can I hire you? And about the time I got the third text message like that, I said, okay, there's something here. I gotta figure out what's going on. So I reverse engineered the process. And and those four things, that's essentially what I was doing.

SPEAKER_04 2:23:56

You figured out the algorithm, just like what I do with Amazon.

SPEAKER_00 2:23:59

Well, and it's not that I'm doing anything fancy, right? I'm not uh getting millions of views, right? It's actually prior to getting sales from it, because all three of those people, all three of those people came on as$20,000 a year clients. So I'm like, okay, I made$60 grand doing my podcast, but that was how I monetized my podcast, right? It wasn't from downloads or views or anything like that. And then since then, we've brought on three more people at$50,000. So I'm like, now that we know what's working and how to make it work, I can one position myself better with that. Two, I can leverage the case studies from myself and now doing it for other people. Like it's like it's it does your brain ever hurt? Oh my goodness, all the time.

SPEAKER_04 2:24:45

But you know, because it's like it's it's so intense, but it's just brilliant, genius, and and it's like I have so much respect because um, you know, I have a lot of that going on too in different ways. And it's, I mean, it's it's a burden sometimes as much as it is a gift what you have. It's it's incredible. Um and I can tell you though, that that looking at it from perspective, right? The the key to what you're going after and getting, and I've figured it out. This this key to using the internet creatively, it's all about attention. Attention is the greatest commodity right now on the internet. It's not having this winning product that sells because that's fleeting. You're gonna have the winning product in the next six months, and then all the China sellers are gonna come in and and do it cheaper than you are, and and you know, now there's 50 other people doing the same thing, and yeah, and you have to keep finding the next and the next and the next. So I think about it like this. But you but you'd hit the nail on the head. Attention. Because all that's that's really all you need to get. It doesn't matter what product you have as long as you have attention.

SPEAKER_00 2:25:44

Views lead to follows, follows lead to conversations, conversations lead to sales. That's my model.

SPEAKER_04 2:25:52

That's that's great.

SPEAKER_00 2:25:53

So I build the views, the views give me the followers, I cultivate the followers in conversations. That's where I open them all with an AI generated chat message, but it's customized to them based on what we can scrape from their profile. And then that's how I sell.

SPEAKER_04 2:26:09

Do you know how random it is that I found you and like like I don't think it's super random.

SPEAKER_00 2:26:14

I'm uh I'm out there posting in the Facebook groups. I think that's how we found out. That's how we connected, yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 2:26:20

That it's that it but that attention, you definitely have the you you have the the energy and the soft, and and that's what it's kind of emanating from. I, you know, that you have this algorithm, you know, that we know that exists out there or whatever, but really I think it's it's just the energy and the the law of attraction that you've got going on.

SPEAKER_00 2:26:39

I'm a big believer in the law of attraction. You've got to go in a few. We we talk about it on the podcast often about manifestation and starting your day with affirmations and things like that. It's undeniable.

SPEAKER_04 2:26:47

Yeah, yeah, consciousness too. I have a I have another mentor, this guy, uh David Newran, and he teaches consciousness. And it is really super relaxing for me to listen to him and uh kind of go down that route of because I because I find myself having to let go of things because when you're an entrepreneur, you obsess. Yeah. You know, you lose sleep over things, right? You obsess and and like being in tune with that consciousness. I think that's the energy when you're most in tune with that consciousness that you can attract the most attention in the right way. Absolutely. In a positive way. So, man, I am so like blown away. I'm so energized right now. Like, I'm I'm yeah, I'm feeling I want to feel pumped. I want to go, I want to go take on the next project, but but I shouldn't because like I don't I just don't want to have space for another business. Right. I need your well, your next project is getting the referrals.

SPEAKER_00 2:27:39

Yeah. Nathan, you have given the audience and myself so much value today. Is there anything that I can do for you and your audience?

SPEAKER_04 2:27:46

Man, um, you know what? Um man, you know, um keep doing what you're doing because it's real and people need this kind of realness and they need they need what uh what what you possess, they need what you have. Man, it's like I I you know, I look at it, I mean that question, I mean, um, it's hard for me to go, okay, what can you do for me when all I can think about now is the gratitude I have for this conversation of what I can do for you. Like I'm like, that's this kind of how my mind works is through service, you know, I I I can have everything that I want as long as everybody else is getting what they want. But I'll think of it. Give me a minute to think about that and take pause on that question. And uh and uh yeah, man, I'd love to, you know, um recap this, see how this goes. Um rewind it back, maybe try and do another podcast with you. I love podcasting. We can we can have a this this podcast, this is all spontaneous. Yeah. There was no Okay, we've we've gone for three hours. Yeah, I know, dude. It's awesome. I know. And it's like um um, you know, on the next one, I mean, maybe having a little bit more of a uh uh format and an agenda. I'd love to continue this conversation, man.

SPEAKER_00 2:28:54

Okay. Well, I appreciate you, Nathan.