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[00:00:00] The challenge remains

[00:00:03] That. What’s happening, everybody? What’s going on, Jeff?

[00:00:14] I was going.

[00:00:19] What’s up, everyone, Patrick? Give me one second, guys, we are at a new location today trying to get organized. All right. Neal, who do we got? We got, we got Neal. We got Brian Jones grim. Harry, my man. Harry, Kyle Spencer. How’s everybody doing? Great man. Patrick in there. Awesome. Awesome. All right. Who’s got some wins? Let’s hear some wins. Now, whoa, will take it back a notch, not everybody at once. I got one. What do you got? What do you got, Neal? It’s a pretty good collaboration with someone else in the group. We’ve had some Zoom meetings and stuff is really starting to take

[00:01:11] Hold on some things we’re going to do together. So I’m excited about that. He’s from across the pond, so there’s a big time difference,

[00:01:20] But it’s we’ve we’ve worked it out, so I’m excited about it. That’s cool. That’s super cool. Spencer can’t unmute. Let me see if I can request that you unmute from my end, Spencer. So I challenge Spencer, and I know that Spencer is one who likes to step up to the plate and go. After those challenges, I challenge him. He had his biggest month ever at 10K and then he had twenty five k a month. He was trying to match that and I said, Spencer, let’s let’s hit twenty six cat. Let’s see if we got there. Still, can’t I will go. He’s going to come back in. All right, so. That’s congrats, Neil, on setting up that that connection there. That’s awesome. Who else have some wins? Anybody else?

[00:02:10] I got one of my first jobs from the using the Craigslist method verified, I mean, that was I’ve had to go into suspension for some reason, so I finally got that it worked out, but it’s fun.

[00:02:21] Yeah, that’s that’s a whole like waterfall of. Well, yeah, that’s a whole waterfall

[00:02:34] Of

[00:02:35] Opportunities when when you can when you can find that stream of GMB to come in, you know, so congrats on that man. Really cool. So. All right. So I have a special guest here for us tonight. So I started this business about, you know, I entered this business model in twenty sixteen. And one of the first people that I connected with was my friend John. And you know, my wife and I, we don’t like the cold weather. So we pulled our RV out of storage this last week and we are on our way to Florida and we wanted we’re passing through Atlanta. So I came through my buddy John here. So we were kind of when I was trying to figure things out and we were I didn’t have the business in place. I didn’t understand how it works. And you know, John and I were kind of in the same page. We entered this business model at the same time. There’s a group of us. So we were struggling with a lot of the things that you guys are struggling with now, and we kind of figured these things out together. John built a pretty successful business, and he kind of had a background as a like. You’re doing sales for roofing. Yeah, John was doing like roofing sales, and he started building his Legion business so that he can get more sales. That was, I believe that was. You want to come over here, John. That was his original intention. So this is this is this is my buddy, John Miller, who we kind of cut our teeth together in this business. And we’ve both had a lot of success in this. But I want you guys to kind of hear it from a different angle a little bit, and John took it in a different direction. I think their original reason you were doing this well, it was kind of like a prospecting method to get more sales coming in so that you could get commission from selling the roofing jobs. Is that

[00:04:29] Correct? Yeah. So I was in the process of leaving the fire department and I wanted to make sure I had a steady source of leads for myself to be able to sell jobs. And we weren’t really getting anything guaranteed through the company that we were working for. And so I needed to figure out how to do something on my own. And, you know, I found that program that we talked about and we kind of started doing what we were doing together and growing it. And then, of course, that was around July of twenty fifteen and then around January of 2016. The owner of the company I was working for came to me and he was like, I don’t know what you’re doing, what are you doing something? And we want everybody else to have it too. And I said, OK, so we sat down and talked about it, and I kind of showed him what I was doing and. We had at the time we only had a small sales team, three or four guys and. He wanted me to basically take over the marketing side first and then start training the sales guys to sell like I did do all those things. And so I did that and kind of grew that company up. And then around 2017 or now is a summer of 16. When came out sat with you in Vegas and we you were kind of doing some of this stuff then and like kicking it off? Yeah, yeah.

[00:05:46] Actually, John was I had been building. So we met in two thousand, I think, 17, right for an event in Vegas. I think so. I didn’t go to the first. I didn’t go to the first one. Yeah. So we joined about the same time. We started kind of the business model at the same time and we connected in twenty seventeen at an event in Vegas. And that’s where we kind of started building that friendship. And I think it was in twenty eighteen or twenty nineteen. John was actually the first person I ever showed regenerated to and had been building it for about a year and a half. And I had only used it internally like my original plan was never to sell this. It was more of like, let me build a tool that’s going to give me an advantage because I, like myself was all over the place. I remember that we sat outside and one of those benches out in the like in the conference area there, and we just went through the software.

[00:06:46] I remember that. Yeah, I remember seeing that thing going, Holy cow. What? What did you feel? What is like? What is this? I’ve seen all these CRM systems that we had in the industry. And I was like, Do we need that? I need that right there and you’re like, I’m not doing you. I just got started.

[00:07:01] Yeah, yeah, it was. It was cool because it was great feedback. When you you guys look at this now and it looks like, well, a lot of you guys, I know that you guys love it and I appreciate that. But when you first release it, when we first like, show it to someone, you don’t have any feedback, it’s it’s a little scary. You put a lot of time, you put a lot of effort money into something. And that was really when I started. Like my wheels started spinning. I was like, Oh, like, why didn’t I think that I could have like other people using this right? It seems like so stupid to not make that realization. But like part of your reaction to it, I was like, Oh shit, maybe I’ve got I’ve got something here that’s like, it could be special, right? So so that was cool. That was super awesome feedback. And then obviously, you guys know where it’s gone from there. But so let’s get back to you kind of your story. So you came into this and your plan was to get more business for roofing and then you kind of realize that like, Hey, and I think you were having some issues with the company you were working with at the time, right?

[00:07:59] Yeah, it ended up going sour after I came in and took them from. So this is what’s crazy. I took this like the skill set that we built and came into a company just as a sales guy made it up to a sales and marketing director, implemented the systems that, like me and you and some of the other guys were working on. We implemented these systems and took them from $1.5 million in revenue to over $8 million in revenue in less than 12 months and literally blew them up with everything that we were doing. And then the owner comes to me in January, the following year, when it’s time for me to get paid, my commissions for everything I’ve done for the revenue side. And he owed me a whole bunch of money. We’re not going to get into the specifics here, but a whole bunch of money. Yeah, and he was like, Hey bro, I can’t pay you like, I’ll buy you in the truck and give you a hundred grand, but I can’t pay you. Yeah, it’s like,

[00:08:42] I’ll tell you one of the things that I think is is really important. I’ve got a training that I’m kind of like building, and it’s going to be about sourcing the best talent and kind of like filling up your talent pipeline. I’m doing a lot of work in other areas and there’s a lot of learning going on here, and it’s it seems so obvious to me from seeing big successful companies how important it is to have like. Amazing talent in there, and if you have somebody that helps grow your business like this, you need to do everything you can to secure them within your company for the future. Right. Because it’s it’s very it’s very costly to lose somebody like that that has is at least in large part responsible for a lot of this growth.

[00:09:25] What was crazy is so we basically started the conversation in January that he couldn’t pay me. And by February, I made the decision that it’s in my best interest to walk away from the situation, find a new clientele to work with on a new set of people to work with and or just like, do something different, right? Well, I walk away in February. That’s when we kind of terminated the whole thing and I took like a two week. I’d never taken time off before I was, you know, I grew up, it worked in construction and was a firefighter and then got run into this. I never taken time off, so I took just two weeks to myself, and that’s how I was able to start the agency to begin with working with them. And that’s what it was like, you know, learning to work with clients for the first time, like actual marketing clients. And it was very it was weird at first because, you know, you’ve got I don’t know what all you guys do and stuff like that, but you know, you can go in and you can do SEO for people and you do all these different stuff. But at the end of the day, you don’t control the asset if you don’t have a system to really keep them in your pipeline and they’re going to fall out. And so it was very frustrating. And that’s how I ended up starting a company that I own today, which I own a marketing agency. Still, I love it. And obviously, you’re some of your stuff’s in my agency. It’s being used all the time. And then I own the contracting company and your stuff being used in there all the time.

[00:10:48] So so the the marketing agency, I think you don’t like your main focus is on the contracting

[00:10:54] Now, right? Yeah.

[00:10:56] And you kind of got the the marketing thing more on autopilot now, right? So what were some of the things that were important for you to like? I’ve gone through the same thing where I could I would not have been able to build the software company, had the marketing agency not been like largely on autopilot. And I had my own systems and I know that you and I, we kind of went through a lot of back and forth trying to like figure things out through the years, right? But you did your things different than I did. And I’m just curious, what were some of the big decisions that helped you get things on autopilot? And like guys, he didn’t build like this isn’t like what a lot of our contractors that we work where it’s like one truck in one guy you were telling me on the on the way back from dinner today that you had three full time sales reps right for your contractor and then you’re hoping to get to nine. Like, I think we’re gonna get you get this is like how we talk to ourselves. Well, we were talking about a few weeks ago. That’s the attitude right there that I’ve noticed that a lot of people that are successful, they have. It’s just like it’s it’s just a foregone conclusion that we’re going to be successful with this stuff, right? So you’re going to get to nine by the end of twenty twenty two. How many people are in your contracting company now?

[00:12:11] Oh, smoke. So Cobra kind of banged us up a little bit for sure because we actually lost a couple of employees. I don’t mean like lost. Like they didn’t come back to work. We lost them. But we have my office staff is small. You know, I’ve always ran lean. That’s how I run my businesses. So I have an office manager, I have a general manager, I have two superintendents out in the field that manage our crews. And then we have. So our roofing crews are eight to 10 people and then a superintendent. So I mean, I’d say full staff, fifty five sixty people within the company, we

[00:12:49] Oh, it’s a big company. That’s that’s it. That’s a big company. And he’s so he’s got this. This company didn’t exist like two or three years ago

[00:12:56] On September twenty

[00:12:58] Eighteen to twenty nineteen. Company does not exist and now you’ve got 60 people right. And the kind of came from this combination of we’ve got the digital marketing skills, we have the sales skills from the roofing company. You have a lot of like contractor knowledge to kind of the marriage of these. Two things are in my mind what allows you to go from like zero unemployed or one employee by yourself in twenty nineteen to sixty people, right? Right. So let’s go back to it. So what were some of the things that were key for you to? Automate the marketing agency so that you’d be able to grow this thing on the side. Like what were some of the big steps?

[00:13:36] You know, I ask you when we were having dinner real quick before we did this thing, I was like, What are we going to talk about? You’re like, We’ll do it off the cuff and just like, shoot it right? One hundred percent, what helped me get my business in order? You like you, your systems, and you remember the little Google Drive thing you sit to that one day with like how to train VAS and how to get them all? Yeah, yeah, that

[00:13:57] That’s a training I should put into this next

[00:13:59] Rational basis. Like that was everything for me.

[00:14:01] Yeah. So so what he’s talking about, guys, is I basically went through and everything I was doing. I’ve made videos of it and then I put it in your Google drive and I separated it by role. You got to kind of start with like an organizational chart where you say, like, Hey, maybe when you start off, you’re going to have like the salesperson, you’re going to have the website build or you’re going to have the back linker you’re going to have like someone who’s getting your jobs and like whatever other roles there are. And it’s OK to put your name on all these spots. But let’s get organized and then what you want to do is you want to assign the roles and the responsibilities to each role. And again, this could be all to you. But what you’re setting up the framework to replace that. And then what I did is I built training on each one of those roles. So that’s and I put it all in Google Drive. And then when someone signs up or like someone comes on to our team, I don’t have to go through and take them through everything again. So we’ve kind of like expanded that. And now we have it on a WordPress site and we have all of our training. So we kind of have this like onboarding process and it’s not perfect, but something that things have changed so much in the last, like five years. But I think the idea of the system and learning that to like systematize the string, did this come into play when you were building the roofing company? Did you kind of apply some of that to or do you? Well, I’ll start coming

[00:15:19] From the beginning. So like that started my understanding. We’re having a bunch of phone calls. You go in Patrick, I know, but I need to do a know how to do this part and I know how to do this part of it. But you really were logistically like like you talked about, you broke down the roles, the responsibilities, and you made it very crystal clear how I needed to do it. And I think if you really remember back, there was about a three to four month period that I think I called you like every day, and I was so frustrated because it was like, you know, Upwork and all these freakin VA sites that I was trying and we were just getting garbage and you were like, quit paying four dollars an hour to like pay seven pay ten, pay twelve. As soon as I did that, you said it in your conversation a minute ago. As soon as I went higher level talent, it changed my agency. I went from five hundred dollars a month client to $5000 a month client. I paid more money and then all of a sudden had fifteen thousand clients and it was like shit. Like, this dude was on to something he was trying to tell me, like, listen. And so that is what automated my my, my marketing agency. And here’s the deal. Like, I got to a point in my agency where I think I had like four or five in-house employees and then we had like a really good virtual team, right? And it’s very happy with things, though, and I was still doing feedback with you all the time.

[00:16:37] You were kind of walking me through like the next step, right? Like, I knew how to run a business. I knew how to make a lot of money, but I didn’t know how to let go. And like, you were like, dude, like, I travel around the world and do all this like, Come on, man, let go. And for me, it was that let go at first. But then once I did it, I was like, shoot. And so I was just about to take a chill pill and like, relax. And I don’t want to say retire, but almost just enjoy my life because I’m not somebody that needs to make a million or $5 million a year like I’m comfortable with. Three hundred grand in my life, right? I don’t know anything crazy. So I was ready to, like, take a chill pill and then our largest client in the agency. They came to me and they were in our hometown. I had built them for a. I don’t like saying that where I didn’t build them. They put in a lot of work, but I had taken them from a two to three million dollar company and they were kind of stagnated for three or four years at nothing, and I blew them in one year to 12 million. And then the second year, we were pushing 16 million and they had all these systems implemented and then they cut me out.

[00:17:34] See, that’s that’s that’s kind of right there the difference between like the CEO model and the Ouija model. I think what happened to as part of the story, which I think is like, super cool, is like you are working for this company. And then like, they didn’t pay you what was owed to you despite like this growth and then now you’re competing against them, right? Yeah, you kind of like,

[00:17:55] Hey, you’re literally five minutes down the street from my office. Yeah. And like when the owner like when it first happened, he came to him and he kind of got a little threatening and, you know, all this stuff and I was like, Do? The thing is, is we’re so good at what we do, we can dominate a space. You can’t beat us in the marketing game, right, so quickly it affected their business within 30 days. It affected their business. This is why he comes to you, upset and like, threatens

[00:18:21] You, right? Yeah, so. Unfortunately, unfortunately, in some way, it’s like whoever is like, if you do the best work and you are like the best company, you’re taking care of your customers, it doesn’t matter as far as who’s going to rank to some extent, right? The reviews and stuff like that are going to kind of like tilt the scale. But you had this skill set and this is why it’s so valuable right now. I’m sitting in this house and we’re in this beautiful house and this beautiful neighborhood, and this would not have been possible without kind of the the marriage of these two different skill sets, right? It was like this whole thing has come from both of those, right?

[00:18:59] And one of my lead first and my operations manager for the marketing agency works inside of my office of my contract company. So I have a area inside of my office for them to be so that I can touch them several times a day just to make sure that everything’s OK. Because that, like with you, you were like, You’ve got to let go. And I was like, OK, I’m gonna do my version and let go if they want to touch it two times a day and I want to make sure it smells right and make sure everything’s working. But I got a person that runs it now. Yeah, she runs it from the top

[00:19:27] Down, right? Yeah. This idea of letting go is,

[00:19:30] Is

[00:19:31] It’s hard. It was tough for me too. And I’ll tell you, like kind of looking back on things like when it was me really like putting all my attention into the business. We have problems in in in our business now, and Jeff and I and the rest of my team are trying to work through these and get to the other side of this. Because what happens is as you grow, things break and as a part of the ability to grow is to be able to let go and let other people take care of things with you so that you can leverage their time, their efforts, their skill sets, right? But when that happens, like things are going to start to break and that’s kind of where we are, we’re in this spot where we have to re structure some of our stuff. We have to redesign things. We have cars that are going down the assembly line and maybe sometimes they don’t have a steering wheel. But we’ve grown so fast and we have all these different moving pieces. Now we have two businesses, it’s like, it’s a lot. So you have to sometimes take a break and then like, you know, regroup a little bit and then prepare to grow again, right? So it’s all a learning process, despite what it might look like where we’re traveling and doing these things. There’s a lot of work that’s happening, like if I stop growing, this business could remain on autopilot. And for me, that’s not really what I want. And it’s not so much about the like, Hey, I need. I need more money in my bank account because essentially I could fire a lot of my staff and we wouldn’t. We just wouldn’t.

[00:21:07] Jeff, can we lose them?

[00:21:09] I think we may have a technical difficulty here. Yeah, he completely froze, you completely froze. Patrick, are you really? Am I still frozen? No, just the last 15 seconds or so.

[00:21:25] Oh, was the audio still working? No. Oh, OK, well. No more secrets of the universe that you guys missed out on. Yeah, exactly.

[00:21:34] Go back a couple of sentences and you’re good.

[00:21:37] Yeah, so basically what I was saying is that, you know, we have broken the business because we have been growing and as you grow the growth, I’ve said this much times growth doesn’t look like this. It shouldn’t look like this like like that. It kind of looks like this. You’re going to. Things are going to break. You’re going to hit a threshold and then you’re going to go up again and again. And that’s how it is on each step as you’ve got to retool the business a little bit. And this is this is for me, it’s like a game, right? And I enjoy this. There’s so much learning that comes with each one of these stagnant spots, like there’s a bunch of more complex problems to solve. And when you do this, you’re not. It’s not that you’re learning like legion skills or you’re learning the business skills, which are way more important than the actual business that you’re applying these to, right? Because this is how you’re able to grow a roofing company or you guys do more of the roofing, you do all sorts of different contracting out.

[00:22:36] We do mainly exterior. So we do some interior for certain people. But man, we’re next to your contractor with your roofing siding gutters, windows, doors, stuff like that.

[00:22:46] Do you feel like running this, this contracting business? So like you kind of like, I have no experience with contract, like being a contractor or like being involved in that type of business. Do you feel like you’ve kind of got an advantage when you go to try to do the marketing because you understand the the mindset of these? I mean, I feel like it would be so valuable in sales to be able to view things.

[00:23:09] Man, I’m going to tell you, I think that, you know, and I haven’t just worked on this side. I’ve worked on interior remodels I’ve worked on. I do not have laid concrete. I mean, I’ve worked in the blue collar side of it. Like, I’m not just a white color guy, I’m a definitely a blue collar boy. Like, I’m, you know, that’s I understand these trades, understand these guys problems. I promise you the contractors that are on our books right now, they know I understand their problems. They come like we have guys here in the state of Georgia that do business with us. And like, I had a guy drive down to my office. He drove down January 4th to meet with me to bring me $5000 cash to get his marketing started. Let me tell you something funny, this man joined Hi boot. I don’t know how many names I can say on this thing. You could say whatever. Okay, so I don’t like join who he left our agency like a year ago and went and joined. But the men had to pay twelve thirteen, twelve or thirteen thousand dollars to cancel his contract with him and walked into our office with $5000. He’s like, I need to get back home for because y’all understand me and your answer. My call is going to solve my heat pump septic tank. How about I don’t know nothing about pump and septic tank? Right, right. We do. And that’s the thing is our agency, we understand it different and we understand how to solve the problems. And we’re not a one trick pony. We don’t look at SCA. We don’t look at just legion. We’re constantly do I make your phone ring all the time? That’s right, right? And that’s what the boys will tell you. And that’s all that matters too, right?

[00:24:29] So when you were like, I found that one, when I’m working with a contractor, it seems that we get somewhere around like seven percent of like whatever the business we’re sending. It’s just seems like kind of a rough number for what we’re going to get. Now, when you take the other side of it, obviously you’ve got a lot more costs, right?

[00:24:48] You get seven percent.

[00:24:49] So let’s say I sell like seven percent of the the revenue that’s generated by our leads is what we’ll get somewhere around there for a referral between five and 10 percent.

[00:25:00] Right. Let me tell you something, y’all doing good because most people, they pay their sales, guys are running around in their car, driving around eight to 12 percent my industry. So if you are getting seven, how you’re getting the sales reps, commissions, you get to work on your laptop. We do. We do. But when you’re running the business right

[00:25:14] Now, I know that you’re going to have a lot more costs, right? So what if and maybe you don’t wanna share this? But like, can you kind of give us an idea of what your profit margin is or profit percentage is from, like the your business that you’re running here for the contracting business. So let’s say you sell like one hundred thousand job. How much of that is going towards, like all the parts and labor and like whatever licenses and expenses versus how much you actually get to stick in your pocket?

[00:25:39] Oh yeah, you really are getting some download information. So most construction companies operate, believe it or not, it between 30 and 40 percent. So to answer your question, if a $100000 job, you’re going to have probably sixty thousand in job costs. So labor materials permits, dumpsters, et cetera, et cetera. And the other 40000 is going to be 40000. But that’s right. So you have massive overhead. And that’s what I that’s when you talk about seven percent. It’s like we’re moving into a brand new facility March 1st, 6400 square feet. Right. So three thousand square foot warehouse, four thousand square foot office, there are utility bills. Thirteen hundred dollars a month, right? You don’t talk about the rent, you know what I mean? Fifteen to twenty thousand dollars a month. Rent on a building. And then you’ve got these trucks, you’ve got all this equipment, stuff like that. So that $40000, you’ve got to at least equate 10 to 15 percent of that money. Of that, $100000 revenue is going into overhead to run that job. Right? Right. Because at the end of the day, you’ve got to run the. To get around the boys you got.

[00:26:38] So those are like. So just from an accounting perspective, guys, these are overhead costs. So there’s like fixed cost, variable cost, right? So variable cost are things that you’re going to be that are going to increase as as you do work. Right. So like, for instance, variable costs would be the cost of roofing like the actual like if he’s putting shingles on a roof. Those are variable costs. Those are going to be or the labor it’s going to be dependent on on the job. Right. Fixed cost might be like the cost of the building. It’s going to be the same. But really, what you should be doing is that building should be kind of like attributing to all the work that is done. So there’s like a piece of it, right?

[00:27:13] So and that’s what we’re moving into the new buildings because our current building, we actually had a lease on this building through twenty twenty three, but we have a really cool landlord. He’s awesome. I basically went to him, told him, Look, we are rolling this building. We need more space. The the place we’re moving to, we have a thousand square foot warehouse space now. Now we’re about to get three thousand square feet of warehouse space. We need to have a store of materials because I’m sure everybody else knows this is going on right now. There’s massive material shortage across the nation and it’s getting worse. And so we care about our community and we care about our customers. We’re already ordering stuff for the spring in the summer, when everybody else is going to be busy and can’t get material, we’re going to have it. And so we’re shelling out Money Capital right now, right? New material.

[00:27:52] And you’re kind of making an investment knowing that, hey, these materials might not be available or it’s likely that it’s going to be more expensive, like way more. Yeah, smart. But now you’ve kind of like after running these businesses, you’re like, I know from dealing with some of our contractors, it’s like, we’ll send them a ton of business and somehow like, we’ll hear them like closing jobs and stuff like that. And then when it when it comes time to pay, there’s some of these guys that are like, Where’s the money? Like, Hey, I need to pay like ten days late because of like X, Y and Z, right? You just you see that a lot, but you guys are kind of like on the other side of the coin where you have stockpiled or you’re stockpiling stuff and you’re kind of planning for the future. So it’s like, I think it’s a deadly combo to be able to have this. We talked about this in the past, guys. There’s still the skill stacking, right? So for me, when I learned, I learned about software first and then I learned the marketing stuff, and then we combine them to create this. And he’s kind of done the same thing where he like, learn the roofing side of things first. And then he learned the marketing. And now, I mean, I imagine you know what you’re doing running a roofing company with 60 people, there’s a lot more moving parts than like a marketing agency where you have to like think about supplies and the timing of those and like all the insurance and all sorts of stuff that we don’t really have

[00:29:13] To like, it was fun and the right people

[00:29:16] Finding the right people, how are you sourcing your people? So you’ve got a lot of great people within your company? What are what like, what kind of pipelines? And I don’t want it to be like, Hey, for roofers, I’m going to like, Do this? Like, how are you locating like from a higher level like that? We could maybe extrapolate and apply to our business. How are you locating really good talent in your business?

[00:29:38] Number one, it starts with asking the right questions. And what I mean by that is you need to figure out what you need like. You need to figure out where my strengths and where are my weaknesses and figure out what you need. And once you figure out what you need, it’s really easy to go find the right people right. Like you might have to interview three five. But if you interview three or four or five people and you knew exactly what you needed and you were up front about it, like, I don’t even let people come into my office and interview with me until I get a phone interview. So I call them up and I got a series of questions that we ask them and we talk to them and before they ever. Same thing with sales reps like it don’t matter. However, you coming into our company, we’re gonna phone interview first, then the right candidates. We’re going to bring in and sit down in a room because then we want to see you. They want to see how you carry yourself and see how you walk around and do things. And then by the time we get to the end of that interview, we’re going to know if we want you. And after that, it’s we’re going to go about our own. So we’re going, we’re going to sell you on working for us after that. We’re going home, right?

[00:30:35] That’s I think that’s a big part is like if your guys are trying to capture really good candidates, then just like just like when you’re on the other side of the coin, when you’re trying to sell a contractor on Legion, I think it’s important that you’re not desperate, right? So if you’re trying to capture a candidate, like if they’re really good at what they do, they’re probably going to have other options. And it’s almost like on some level, if you if you kind of like feel the fact that, hey, I’m going to have to like, sell this person, it’s it’s like, that’s a positive thing because it’s like, Hey, like, this guy’s got other options. He’s going to go somewhere else. Like for the people that are like desperately looking for a job. There’s probably a reason why they can’t get a job, especially if they’re not like 18 or 20, right? If they’ve been in the workforce for 10 or 12 years and they don’t have a skill set like most people that are really good at what they do, they’re like leaving their current job to go to another job. That’s a better opportunity, and they’re kind of like continuing. See, moving up there, there’s some people that you guys think about the red flag that it is, and if you start hiring overseas, like maybe this doesn’t hold to be as true. But if these people haven’t had a job in six months or a year, then like why? Maybe, maybe they were like, you know, pregnant and they had a kid. And that’s a good reason. But if it’s like, Hey, I’ve been looking for work and like, if like if you can’t get a job in a year in this economy where people are. Everyone needs like people to work. There’s a serious problem, right?

[00:32:12] I don’t know if it’s the same way across the country, but I’ll say here, it’s hard right now. It’s hard to find people. Yeah, we interviewed. So I mean, obviously, we’re growing all the time. We’re always growing just for as an example, we were looking for another cruelty in December and high. We’ve had the ad running for 35 40 days. I think we had 13 applicants. We literally brought every one of them in to give them an opportunity because we knew we needed a crew lead and we ultimately end up not hiring clearly because out of those 13 afterwards, there was not a qualified advocate.

[00:32:45] Yeah, that’s an important decision

[00:32:47] To not make too right.

[00:32:49] It’s it’s pretty like you guys. We were going through this and I’m kind of moving in the direction of my agency now where I really want our pipeline to be like fifty seventy five people for one position, right? I want to go through a lot of people I want to have. I want to get to the end and have like three or four people and be like, Man, I wish I could hire all these people, but I’m going to choose this person because it’s the best. So as as I’ve said this on a lot of other calls in the past, it’s like when you start a business, your your job is not is no longer just to like. If you start a business or a marketing business or a roofing company, you’re no longer a roofer, you’re a problem solver. That’s what the entrepreneur does, right? So if you’re not getting enough people in your pipeline, that’s not the end of it. Like, Go, go, solve that problem, right? There’s all kinds of like we’ve mentioned a lot on our calls online jobs about pH and Upwork. So I have a similar process to you where like, I’m getting people before they get to me, like right now, I’m looking for an executive assistant. So. I want I have one of my managers go through and she will like, interview them and go through and see how they qualify, and we actually have a scorecard. We have a hiring scorecard that we use where it’s like, Hey, these are the desired results, these are the skills. And then we kind of go through and rate these people.

[00:34:07] So you need a lot of people that you should never be settling. Because if you’re starting to see flags when you barely know this person, that’s going to be a huge problem later on. Like they’re not going to like miraculously recover when there, recover when they’re showing you like, Hey, this is my best. This is the best that I am in an interview because I’m doing my best to try to earn this job right? So if there’s flags, then like there’s all kinds of other stuff that you can’t see that’s hiding under the water. One of the things that we’re doing now is we’re I require a video like now our people are going to be doing like tech work, which like. Hiring someone who’s going to be like installing countertops, like asking them to do a video is like, that’s yeah, it’s probably not in their wheelhouse. But if they’re going to be working for a tech company, there should be no reason why they can’t get a video together and upload it. And that weeds out a lot of people for two reasons like one, like people just are not motivated enough. If they’re not motivated enough to be able to put together a video, then like, how are they going to be a rock star? Am I a company, right? Like. So the second thing that that you want to do is I want to have them do a test project. So this is going to be like a throwaway thing for us where it’s like I’m going to assign the same test project to everyone that comes in. And I want it to be about 10 hours long and I’m going to simulate the work that is going to be done in their role with this test project.

[00:35:26] And then I can kind of compare and see. And if there’s somebody else that exists in that role, maybe that’s in my company. Maybe I can have them do the test project to kind of set a benchmark where I know this person’s really good at it. Let’s see how they do. Now let’s compare it right. So so you could like theoretically, these people go through if we were able to like, get your pipeline full enough. And I know that like roofing and contracting, it’s like super hard to find people like trying to find people to show up, right? Right. But with what we do, we have the ability to hire people from all over the world, right? So like if you can find enough sources. So I just did a search the other day because I’m looking for this executive assistant and I want like fifty one hundred people in this pipeline, right? So I did a search for like best virtual assistant websites around the world best in the Philippines. I like the Philippines because I do too. Yeah, I mean. They work hard. They seem like good people. Their accent is like, you compare the accents from other countries. It’s really good once you’ve worked with some of the Filipino people and you like, if you try to call like your internet service provider because you’re having such an issue, you start to recognize that that Filipino accent, they’re everywhere in American companies, right?

[00:36:32] I love their schedule. Exactly 12 hours off. Right. It’s a really easy to get your normal workday like for me as I’m wrapping up my contract today. If I do need to jump down the rabbit hole to do anything is if I do it at seven p.m. eight p.m. before I go to bed. They’re up there working. Yeah, so it’s easy and it’s like, Hey, I need you to do it. Like, take care of it.

[00:36:51] It’s easy, right? Right. And I would say, guys, you can find you can find these people for two dollars an hour, three dollars an hour. But like John was saying, that’s probably not what you want. Like, what does it say about that? Are there? Are there people that are like? Brilliant people that are willing to work for that, probably, but yeah, they’re probably out there, but the other ones that are like, Hey, I’m not going below like whatever in the Philippines, if if they want, like six dollars an hour, that’s that’s like they’re a decent percentage above the minimum for people that are willing to work there. There’s a reason for that. I made the same mistake when I was hiring some developers. I thought like, Well, hey, I’ll get these guys. And then I started hiring a lot more expensive ones and better ones like the result and the result. Yeah, it actually like it actually costs you less. It’s counterintuitive because you don’t want to, like, tell them to do something and then they do it wrong. And then like, it’s just that back and forth you end up paying them for like four times the amount of work. So maybe it’s better to just pay them twice and have somebody that can figure things out, right?

[00:37:54] Right. So don’t waste your time. That was the biggest thing wasting time on. That’s why we couldn’t scale when we first started. We inside the agency because we were constantly trying to teach me or I was in my agency trying to teach VA to teach Vas. And it’s like, Why are you not getting this? I thought you five times, 10 times, like, whatever. It’s because I’ve hired the wrong people.

[00:38:13] Yeah, yeah. There’s I mean, you’ve got it. You’ve got to source great talent, right? And you have to use your problem solving skills to apply. All right. Let’s change gears a little bit. So. You understand where a lot of these people are on this call, because you and I were there in twenty seventeen twenty eighteen. I’d love to hear some of your biggest learning experiences over the years that like looking back, what would you tell yourself from where we were, where we were having those like phone calls like four or five times a week, just like trying to figure out how stuff works? Yeah. Like what are the biggest learning lessons? Like, we’ve talked about some of them already, right? What are the biggest learning lessons that you would go back and? Tell yourself from two or three years ago.

[00:39:00] Let’s see. No one, I mean, obviously, however, the relationship I have with you and having the relationship we had with Justin and some of the other people that Chris Patterson, Chris,

[00:39:12] There was a there was a lot of people who we all started at the same time, right? It was like a crop of people that we went and we all

[00:39:19] Held each other like, we kind of did that funny thing there for me. We were like accountability group. And like, we were just like, if you’re not on the call, you’re not serious about, you know, you need know.

[00:39:27] So these guys are all in accountability groups now, and I’ve told them like each

[00:39:31] Other and I’m saying this guy’s like straight up. At first it was a joke. It wasn’t. We didn’t take it seriously. We were cutting up about it and it was just like, Oh, you’re not going to call today, like. And then one day Patrick was like, Why weren’t you on a call? What do you mean, fortune like it became real, and that’s what I mean by like the process, the system and then like we started doing it. So I think number one, you’ve got to surround yourself with good people like it doesn’t matter what background they come. Here’s the thing. You see, people say stuff like this. It doesn’t matter if you know somebody for 10 years or 10 minutes, it’s all about the people that you bring into your life. That means something like me and you. First night I met you, we sat down on a table and had a conversation for five hours, four or five hours, whatever it was. I just sat there and chatted. We talked about like things we had in common hobbies, things like that. And then you show me this thing and I’m like, OK, what’s up? Like, we met each other. But outside of the business, like, we became friends. Justin and I became friends. Chris and I became friends. And Chris lives in Hawaii. Justin lives in Louisiana. You live all over the freakin world and I’m down here in Georgia, right? And but we purposely make it a point several times a year to go see and visit with each other. We talked about our other friends, you know, just in the night at dinner and like, Man, I miss that guy. Like when you sit right, you surround yourself with good people and good people, motivate you to be good and motivate you to do good. So. Number one tip I say is surround yourself with good people. That’s the first thing as far as what was what was a foundation of the question again.

[00:41:00] Some of the lessons that you’ve learned that you would go back and tell John Mueller of twenty eighteen twenty seventeen where when we were kind of coming up trying to figure these things out.

[00:41:12] I think number one, you’ve got to surround yourself with good people. Number two, like I don’t know how it’s the word this other than like trust the process, like when we kept going through stuff like I was doing my thing and you were doing your thing and Chris was doing this thing and everybody was doing their thing. And like, we were funding what was working right. Like, I would find things that worked and you found things at work. And Justin and Chris and everybody,

[00:41:31] Yeah, there was that like. So it’s kind of weird because as you go through this and when the friendship is new and you learn something cool, you’re like hesitant to kind of share it with other people. And then at some point we got over that hump and all of us started. We were all kind of like, really serious about the business, and we were exploring all these different ideas. And just like, we’re all doing it differently, we’re talking to different people or making different connections. And we were all kind of bringing value from all these different directions back to the group, and it kind of like accelerated the ability to level up, right? Yeah, yeah. Big time.

[00:42:07] And that’s what like we talked about you and like Chris and Justin, like we talked about a couple of years later, like how we almost cut off three or four or five years of learning because we all did it together, right? Like we all ripped like rip through it together. Like, I always felt like you kind of led the pack. But like, we all contributed to a certain degree of what we were doing. Like, I’m a business guy, I’m a construction guy, I’m a blue collar boy. But you had this game like you knew it and me and you like, we were doing our thing. And Justin was just as a blue collar boy, too, right? And like Madison, like, he’s a freaking rock star now doing this. We all kind of had our lanes and we all kind of help. Like, I hope you understand the contracting space. Yeah.

[00:42:44] I mean, you can’t play with a lot like you might view it as like, maybe I helped you that that’s not how I view it. I kind of view it as like, man, like when I was going through it, I was like, God, these guys are like. I kind of felt the opposite, I kind of felt like I was learning so much from you guys and I’m like,

[00:43:00] Well, we were so dumb when it came to this, though. I’m like, We still are. If it wasn’t for the thing, like the I don’t know what you. What is this like? What do you teach in here? Is just the lead generated group.

[00:43:08] This is the lead generated and the lead snap of the original, the CRM. But but a lot of it is just like coaching, for coaching, for the like, just the business model.

[00:43:19] That’s what I’m talking about. How like you kind of led the pack like you were so much smarter than us when it came to software and technology and understanding the internet. And I remember when I was like trying to learn WordPress, and you’re like, You got to do just get somebody to do this for you. Yeah, because it was just so much like, I’m not that guy. But yet you could pull that little do that out right there and just put it together, right? I couldn’t do that. That was a week ago, right?

[00:43:39] Yeah, yeah. But like, I think the key about is like, and I’ve said this, so I don’t build our stuff. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should do something right, right? Like I could, you know, I could mow my grass every week if I had a house in a yard that I could. But I’m not going to like unless there’s some other positive thing like as far as like my time versus like what it would, what I would pay someone that’s like, that’s not a good hour. Now, if I’m relaxing from it or I find like some other benefit being outside like that kind of, then OK, that makes sense. But like, it doesn’t make sense for us to build WordPress sites or that would be one of actually one of the first things I would hire for. It’s like, have what? They’re so relatively cheap based on the rest of the stuff we could do.

[00:44:25] What I’m trying to say when I say that Patrick led the like when you did that. So you got guys like me and Justin, right? Like, we’re blue collar boys that came from busting our backs and we’ve spent money with white people. We spent money with high boot. We spent money with all these people that took our money and didn’t do anything for us, right? And then we got pissed off and we were like, No, we’re gonna figure how to do this. And so we came in and we thought we were going to figure out how to do it. But then we really didn’t know what we were doing. That stuff was just too complicated. And then we meet you, and all of a sudden, like, we built this bond and we built this friendship. And so we’re showing you the back end of our businesses and how we do things and how we make hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars. And you’re showing us how to do all this fancy stuff and we’re like, All right, cool. And so we’re like, I built an agency, so did Royce. Like we built an agency and it’s still in existence today. Like it makes us money. We have a team of people that are way smarter than we are. Like, there’s you’re kind of smart that do that.

[00:45:20] But yet we know how to relate to the client, right? And I think that’s where

[00:45:23] The thing is, if you if you don’t understand how to relate, you can’t do business with those people because they’re never going to respect you, right?

[00:45:29] I think some of this is like, you know, like. When you hang around people that have these different skill sets, we can look back on it and say, like, Hey, I learned this piece in this piece, but it all kind of melds together. You start like the conversations and just like even the vocabulary, the mindset just kind of like starts to become. It’s just like another tool in your tool belt where where like you’re learning stuff that you don’t even realize that you’re learning because you’re surrounded by the people like you normalize things that before seem like, oh man, like ten thousand a month. Like, That’s whoa, you know, like that becomes normal in like, you know, this is what I was trying to say last week with with Spencer, where he’s kind of gone from 10 to twenty five and like 10 was like mine. It was like life changing for him. But then when you do twenty five and you look back at 10, it’s like like that would be a bad month for him now. I would think, right, right. So like a lot of that happens when you surround yourself with somebody who successful people and I encourage you guys, there’s a lot of them in this group, but there’s a lot of them that are in other walks of life and they’re in your community and just making an effort like a conscious effort to go out and seek these people.

[00:46:41] So we’re getting ready to move, and I’m not exactly sure where we’re moving. We’ve been traveling for a while, but I can guarantee you wherever we land, I’m going to. I’m one of my first order of business. I’m going to build like a community friendship. One of the trainings I want to do pretty soon is like a a founder’s dinner, and it’s going to be kind of a training around how we can, like, set up like a monthly local thing that we can just bring all sorts of different business owners, people that are serious. How do we build relationships with those people? So I’m kind of working through that right now, but I hope to have that released pretty soon. But it’s an important skill to be able to build this friendship. I know that, Jeff, you went to you moved from Orange County to outside of Austin and talk about some of the stuff that you’ve done to kind of like you’ve inserted yourself into this like really high level group in pretty short order. You’ve got some great relationships with some of these people, right?

[00:47:37] Yeah, that’s true. I mean, I tend to have network a lot in the past, so I have a little bit of insight into how to do that. And I know that people have gone into local business organizations like BMI and other Chamber of Commerce type groups and gotten a lot of success, even if it’s just a launch pad into a new sort of group of clientele or to cut your cut your teeth on some some of these deals. But there is a group in in Austin called the Internet Marketing Party that’s been around for like 15 years and has been very well attended. So I had wanted to go for multiple months, like six months, and I was always out of town doing other stuff with Patrick and whatever. So a couple of months ago, I show up and the guy who runs it, a super cool guy, and he got on stage. They have pretty high level speakers every week or every month. Sorry. And so he got on stage and he’s like, just off the cuff. He’s like, Hey, I’m going to start a mastermind, and I’m just kind of open it up to five people. I don’t really know how to run this thing, but it’s going to be x dollars to join it. Who wants to join? And I was just like me, you know, and I raised my hand and joined the next thing I know I’m at a getting invited to like dinners and then every month before the event, they have like a roundtable. And the one that was for that night that I joined they they posted something on Facebook like a a video of like the think tank kind of thing that they call it. And there were some really high level people in that room, like really high.

[00:49:14] What does that mean, high level, like, like Marissa Murgatroyd?

[00:49:18] If you know who she is, she does a thing called live your message with, you know, she coaches coaches, but she’s she’s doing very well, like probably 10 figures a year. The people who did marketing for on it that just sold out in Austin, Texas, company the guy who actually helped him build that from the marketing standpoint that just sold for, I think, you know, over a hundred million, maybe even multiple hundred millions of dollars there. Those were just two of the people in that room, and there were many others at the dinner that I got to go to before I came out of town. Still in Florida, before I came out of town was the guy John Mauro, who started smart blogger. And he’s just this amazing guy. He’s in a wheelchair, he can only move his face. And he told a whole story about how he kind of got into blogging. And now he owns this multimillion dollar copywriting sort of coaching program, and he’s kind of known as one of the top copywriting guys and all the companies come to him for the top copywriters that are certified through his programs. Just just a ton of people like that that are just living really good digital nomad lifestyle. Miles and out to win it and just doing all types of different kind of different versions of this model, like like John is kind of made it his own. Patrick has made it his own. I’ve made it my own. I’ve seen so many people just build amazing lives for themselves through the core of like digital marketing legion. And it’s just amazing to see how everybody is just, you know, prospering in this space and the way I see it. I see so much opportunity. Like I’ve heard, people say, Oh, it’s saturated, like, don’t tell.

[00:51:06] It’s like I see a million opportunities a day, right, Patrick? It’s like, we have to really.

[00:51:11] Yeah, it’s is what we do. It’s almost like we were having this conversation that we got. You know, it’s saturated. It’s filled up. Yeah.

[00:51:18] Some of the stuff from people. And you know, I so I had a major realization over the last week or so for myself personally, where I always see the best in people. It’s just like what it is, whenever there’s somebody, I see the best. So when somebody is negative, it’s not the first thing that I notice, but that like negativity kind of has a weight on my shoulders and some of the relationships that I have in my life. There’s people that are, like, really negative. And it’s just like over the last week, it’s become obvious. It’s just like, I need to get away from these people after a little while, which I thought, maybe I’m like, I’m too like close to these people for spending too much time with them. And maybe that’s what it is, but it’s not what it is because I could spend a week with you and not feel that way. It’s that positive energy. So, Jeff, let me ask you something. So these people are all like you’re mentioning like someone selling your company for one hundred million dollars and another person, I think you said it’s doing like 10 figures. I know the answer to this, but I want to phrase it this way because I think people will have this inner doubt is like, why would they let you in? Why? Like, who are you? That like, they’re going to let Jeff in there where like, you don’t have this like multimillion dollar thing, why would they let you in?

[00:52:32] Wow, I’m not sure I can give you the answer that you’re looking for, but, you know, I think that people at that level understand that they have to be open to new connections and relationships and that there’s all they’re always going to keep themselves open to be on the cutting edge of whatever’s happening. And it gives like that whole internet marketing party is set up for that exact reason. I’m not going to be back in Austin before the next party, which is, I think it’s on the 8th or the 10th or something like that. But this guy, Alaric Heck, who Patrick knows personally through the Nashville people. This guy lives in Austin. If you google his name, like, forget about it, like he’s going to be on every platform in front of your face for the next.

[00:53:18] This guy we’re going to, you’re going to get mail in your mailbox somehow. You’re never going to see

[00:53:22] The end of this guy. It’s like if you

[00:53:24] Google his name,

[00:53:25] He’s the incognito and from a VPN or like someone going to be knocking. It’s unbelievable. He was actually telling me that they could figure out, if you like, trigger his stuff, they could figure out your IP address and then they will actually run ads like so if you’re like on like a an Amazon Fire Stick or one of these other these other programs, they can actually drop an ad just to you. So it makes it appear like ALEC will make it appear that he’s like running like TV ads, but he’s not. He’s only running TV ads at your IP address, which is like, unbelievable. You go to his page, they can actually send you a postcard somehow. Like, if like, it’s like, I don’t like.

[00:54:11] So to your point, Patrick, like, that’s the level of people that you’re exposed to. But but Alec only got to where he is because he got to learn these things, and he learned from building great relationships with other people. And if I were in Austin on that day, I would be invited to that think tank because I’m in this mastermind with the guy who runs the program now. So those are the types of people that you’re kind of rubbing elbows with. And I feel like I have value to offer. I mean, it is a little bit pay to play. It wasn’t a lot of money to join it. I took a risk. It was Patrick’s money. At the end of the day, I had a client pay me that day and I was like, I know that Patrick is going to be supportive of me joining this because it’s good for all of us. And I just took the risk. And even if Patrick was like, I’ll I’ll I’ll fund it myself. It’s not that much money and it’s just worth it. It just kind of even a small amount of money can show the commitment that you have to be involved in something special and. And I really felt the energy behind what they were trying to create. And I’m like, Wow, I’m really good at that kind of stuff. I’m really good at networking and being involved in groups like that. Like I can help them build that group. I should be. I should be there. I deserve a seat at that table. I don’t care who’s sitting at it. I still deserve a seat.

[00:55:24] That’s right. So this is this is kind of what I wanted to go through is I wanted you like, I think people are going to think that they don’t have anything to offer these people because they’re not at the same financial level as they are. But these people, a lot of them, I mean, they’re going to fall into two different groups, right, like some of these people are. They don’t care about other people, and they’re, you know, there’s like there’s this stuff, there’s a higher percentage of psychopaths that are CEOs and successful people, but the ones that are are focused on having an impact like you’re welcome for a lot of these, these people and you don’t have to be like scared because these people are doing bigger numbers and think that you don’t belong. Like if you if you can just go there and kind of like be humble and open minded and like, you know, like. Don’t be, you know, just be polite and and do your best to show that you’re putting in the effort like a lot of these people, that’s their why they want to help people, right? And they’re welcoming to you. So the second thing that you really hit on there is like. There are certain skills that we learn through life, like imagine trying to run this business if you didn’t know how to read or you couldn’t speak English, right? And. Now you start to kind of like saying, well, let me run a business without any of those skills, right? So what about like digital marketing starts to become a foundational business skill? Right.

[00:56:45] And that’s kind of what John has going on here is like. He basically has this like foundational skill for marketing, and it applies to all these different businesses, right? And the way Jeff, that you do marketing is a lot different. There’s a million different ways to be a digital marketer, right? So like, I found that as I’ve gone outside this like little bubble of Legion and I start to interact with other marketers like though our business model is so different than theirs, like even Brian Jones is on here, he comes from like a CEO background and some of the strategies that we’re doing here like. I think he told me that he didn’t know, like like these, these are new like new strategies, even though he’s like, he’s been in this game for a long time. So like this becomes a foundational skill set, and it doesn’t matter whether you apply it to this business model or you apply it to another business model. It’s a great way to start training like I’m looking for opportunities to apply what we’ve done to other business models like it’s always important to diversify, right? So I don’t think I’m going to start like a remodeling or roofing. I don’t think so. Business, but whatever business I go into like this is going to be a part of it, right? It’s just like such a foundational.

[00:57:58] Well, and to your point, Patrick, you know, all the people in that room, they were like YouTube, guys, and they’ve done big sell. Like one guy was like, was he had a partner of his in the room? I don’t think he was BSM, but he’s like, We have actually done a billion dollars in product sales based on the ad run that we’ve that we’ve done over the years. Out of the past 10, 15 years, whatever was this is ridiculous. But I guarantee you and Patrick, I don’t know. Maybe you can back me up because you actually sat and broke bread with our we could teach these people something because we have a skill set that they don’t have. You know, they’re running ads. They don’t do lead gen. But you start putting these things together and then you make something even more powerful out of it. And that’s where you can kind of add your value.

[00:58:39] Hundred percent. Yeah, I totally agree. And like you guys, you guys all have like these different backgrounds and you guys have skill sets that that we don’t have, and maybe they don’t apply right to this. But when you learn this, this is the skill stacking that I always go back to is such an important thing. And learning this is opens up everything else that you’ve learned. So like, OK, if you know how to market now, you can know how to monetize other skills that because you can kind of combine those, if either one of those is missing, then it’s much less valuable, right? So the skill stacking is everything. Every skill you learn that can be related doubles your chance of success. So it’s almost it’s not quite exponential, but it’s almost like, you know, there’s a multiplication factor that’s happening faster than if it’s not like, Hey, I learn how to read now. I learned how to write. Now I learned how to break a website. Now I learn how to sell, and I learned how to do public speaking. Now I can speak at a marketing event and I can sell to a lot of different people, right? So I learned how to to do the software and I learned how to market. And then one of my biggest first days is I got put in front like I had niche down and then I kind of went into a sub niche and I created a relationship with the manufacturer and the manufacturer put me in front of a bunch of their top clients for like the contractors that were buying their materials, right? So I had some like public speaking, and I went and I spoke in front of these people.

[01:00:04] There were twenty four people in there and I think we signed up like 16 of them, right? So it wasn’t any either one of those on its own. It was the combination of all that stuff together, right? So this is a very valuable skill set. You guys don’t really realize when you’re in it, how you can apply it to so many other things. I was talking today to like somebody that has been in this group for a little while, and now he’s going into like more commercial real estate type stuff and this marketing stuff is going to play a big part of that for him. So, hey, we’re at an hour now. I want to keep it on an hour. I want to spend some time here. I don’t have a lot of time with my buddy John, but you guys give John like, show John in the chat, your appreciation for him being on there. Definitely appreciate it. Do you have any other final words of wisdom that you could give to these guys that are kind of like on the other side of it, whether they’re like, Hey, one day I want to own my own business, that’s not a marketing business and apply this to or any parting words.

[01:01:01] Yeah, man, definitely. I’ll say this about this space. You know, I’ve told my story a little bit and told you guys about me, but this space can change your life completely. You can do anything you want to with it. You can open up any type of business that you want to with it. Like I’ve helped my mom, I felt my sisters. I’ve helped some of my friends get just ideas off the ground that were just meager ideas, and I showed them how to take off with it and just do something with it. So understand that, yes, you can go to an agency model with this. And if you love the agency lifestyle, the laptop lifestyle and this is what you’re passionate about, you can do this for the rest of your life and make all the money you want to. But if you have something else that drives you some other type of passion for me, I’m going to be honest with you. I love that. I know how to do this now. I love the back end of it. I love everything about it. But what I love the most is that it allowed me to go into what I love doing, which is making people’s homes beautiful, building things.

[01:01:58] I studied architectural design for three years. Those are the things that I love, and so I wanted to work in that space. And so I decided to take the skill set that I learned here and allow it to. You know, I was telling somebody this morning in my office, I literally get to wake up every morning and I get to walk into my office and I get to have a cup of coffee with some of the coolest dudes around and we get to talk about what we’re building that morning or what we’re building that week. We’re going to build next week or whatever I get to literally do that and I get the top sports, I get to talk about my dogs every day like I get to do what I love to do every day. I still got my agency. I’m also helping other people change their life. I have that guy I was telling you about earlier came back, changed his life, made him a million dollars in two years, made of a million dollars. He went to a big, massive divorce and lost everything in two years. He literally got everything back. He restarted his whole life.

[01:02:47] That’s the part that’s so amazing to be able to like, have this these people that do this because there’s a lot of people that we can provide all this business to that don’t have that become their story. Look, I’ve seen that a lot where we’ve like rotated from my client to client to client, and then we finally find one and it’s just like that. So it’s not like we’re the reason for it, but we’re we’re increasing the the possibility for them to have these type of results and they look back on it like we were such a big part of it. And that to me, is like a big part of why I do what I do. I love that part of it. Hearing those stories and like kind of looking at it when one of these people come in and my crystal ball and be like, like, if you are who I hope you are, you have no idea like what is going to come because we’re going to blow this thing up, right? It’s like, it’s so it’s so rewarding. And and, you know, like back to what we were just talking about with Jeff, where like these people that are like doing big numbers like a lot of them, they’ll shift. We talk about the Maslow’s pyramid and needs all the time, right? Once you kind of like, got your stability and security and you kind of move into self-actualization, then your focus becomes on trying to have an impact on people. And like, I think this is part of why these people are so welcoming to people. They want to help. They want to have a purpose in life, putting more money in.

[01:04:06] If you’re in the right circles, that’s absolutely the truth.

[01:04:09] For sure, yeah. Putting more money in their bank account doesn’t do anything is like it doesn’t change anything for them, right?

[01:04:15] So I think the coolest part, too is like, like what you just said, I know Jeff, I’ve seen. Yeah, just a part of my yeah, I’ve met Jeff before Bob Beck. But exactly what he said. You like me and you and like Jeff and some of the other guys we hang out with when we go get clients right, we find clients that are similar to us and we get to help good people win, right? And so the more good people that win, the better like the whole world gets. And I know that sounds so high level, but like I’ve watched it happen in my community because now these guys like like my hometown, now all the good guys are winning. Like all the good guys, all the local guys that I grew up with, people that I know that are good people. They’re the ones pumping the septic tanks, and they’re the ones painting your house and they’re the ones doing your electrical. They have real businesses. That’s right. And so good people get to win and you get to help them be a part of such a colorful, self fulfilling.

[01:05:09] All right, guys, I appreciate you guys. Thank you guys for jumping on here. I know this call was a little bit different than our. But I want to mix it up for you guys and give you stuff from a different angle. So, Jon, thanks for joining us on here and adding value to this. So you guys have an awesome week and you guys have got seven days to do the things between now and next Wednesday that create wins in your business and move the dial for you guys. All right, you guys, stay safe. We’ll talk soon. Take care.