Guts, Growth, and Gratitude: A Leader’s Path

Google comes along in late 2013 and releases an algorithm update that completely wipes away all my traffic. I didn’t even know Google algorithm updates were a thing. Anybody that ever says that their business isn’t the best should close their fucking business. We started figuring out how can we help them figure out what they need and give it to them again?

Revolutionary business advice. If I could put you in a room with five or 10 of your best customers, would you be interested in that? Yeah, of course. Well, if you make a video and it only gets five or 10 views, that’s 10 of your best customers. You just spoke. My God. Like the difference between winners and losers is they both get nervous and winners do it anyway.

Personal branding, use, do that. You have to be prepared for people to hate you. You could be the nicest person in the world and some people are still gonna hate you. So your passion has to be something that makes you money. But you also can’t do something nearly for money. That’s what having a job. So you have to hire people, and one thing that there’s a cap to in this world is time.

Only way you can get more time is to get money.

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We’ve got Mr. Chris m Walker, who is the founder and CEO of legit. Now that is legit. What is up Chris? Hey, thanks for having me. Looking forward. It’s a pleasure. Alright, so I, um, as we talked about, let’s, let’s get into it a little bit, but let’s start off with giving our audience a little bit of an understanding of who is.

Chris m Walker, like how did you get your start? Where did you go to school and uh, what was the first job outta school? Alright, uh, well first of all, uh, the reason my, I go by Chris m Walker is there was a one hit wonder in the nineties named Chris Walker, who, uh, if you Google you’re gonna find him. So make sure you and everyone knows you have 10 hits.

Yeah, exactly. Uh, anyhow, uh, like I, and I guess we’ll start out. I grew up in, uh, Myrtle Beach. North Myrle Beach, Myrtle Beach, same thing, more or less. Uh, and we had, I was raised by a single mom for most of that time. Uh, and I learned a lot from that. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I learned a lot from watching her do what she needed to do to like, make sure I had a good life and training and, you know, things like that.

I was actually homeschooled from, uh, fifth grade through 12th, because, which was rare back then. Now it’s a little bit more calm. It’s pretty cool, man. You broke the matrix. That’s probably why you’re very normal. I, I honestly, I think it helped me a lot looking back at it. ’cause like I had to learn how to do things.

Myself mm-hmm. Rather than follow up the group. Now there’s definitely downsides to it too, but yeah, you had to be all five players in the high school basketball team. Mm-hmm. Well, I’m short, but it wouldn’t been, wouldn’t develop much. Uh, anyway, from there I went to, uh, my fir, well, I had 2D three college experiences.

Really. The first two, uh, the first one was in computer technology. I wanted to be a programmer. Uh, and then I went for my bachelor’s to information technology again, to basically be a programmer. But that never really worked out like I would. I ended up working in it for a while, but I never got to do development.

I just did like support and I worked as a service technician. Mm-hmm. Who was telling you Yeah. For a while. And, uh, then, uh, I got a master’s degree in, uh, public policy, uh, which is kind of like political science. Okay. I haven’t used that, but it was very valuable to me as far as. Helping them how I think.

But uh, professionally, out of college, I didn’t really get an out of college job. I just, even after I grad, I worked at Circuit City while I was in college. Uh, for those of you that don’t know, circuit City is a defunct company that was kinda like Best Buy. Yeah. Uh, I figured there might be some. It was the original best fight, wasn’t it?

Yeah. It was Best Buy before Best Buy. Yeah, exactly. I figured there might be some younger folks that don’t know what you’re talking about. Yeah, no, I recall the, I recall the trips to Circuit City with Dad to buy the Zenith. Yeah. You know, and the Panasonic, right? Yeah. And the world has changed. Worked. I worked there in college and I kept working there until I got outta college and even for a while afterwards.

And then, uh, I got a job doing various jobs in that were loosely related to it. And I was never really happy with that. I never made enough money in it and just, it wasn’t. I liked it, but it wasn’t enough. You know, I if that makes a lot of sense. There’s always savings, but it’s about way more than savings alone.

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Yeah, you’re chasing some purpose that just didn’t fill the void. Yeah. And for a while, I, uh, I, I told you I had a public policy degree. I went and started working in politics as like a field organizer. So a field organizer is, if you have, there’s a, if there’s an election, those people that have like an office in your city that are there, that’s kind what I did.

Yeah. Uh, and that, that was actually very fulfilling. But even no matter how good of a job you do, you get fired in November because the campaign is over. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, you need money to buy stuff. So I went back into it after that because I just, I didn’t have, I couldn’t live like a on, you know, I was kind of t I’m part-time work essentially.

Right. Yeah. It’s like project work. Yeah. ’cause like you work 18 hours a day for, from January to November, and then you get, you work zero hours a day. Mm-hmm. So not only does the job go away, but that’s like a, a weird shock to the system. Yeah. To go from one extreme to the other, literally overnight. So, yeah.

Uh, but that was very fulfilling work, but again, not very financially fulfilling. So what were you doing in that role? Were you like. What does a field so rep do for a politician? So, I mean, it depends on the individual, like within the office, but what I was good at was, and this is gonna come up later when we talk about business, but I was creating communities within the community.

So I would find the people that were committed to that particular, I’m not gonna go into what side I was on, just so don’t ask. Yeah. But, uh, uh, that person’s values and like that would want to go help and go out into canvas and door knock and make calls. What I was good at was finding those people and bringing them together around that cause.

Okay. So Comm Creating communities has been a recurring theme in my life. Yeah. So, okay. So you’re using messaging to essentially identify the people that would want to come out and go tell the story to some extent. Almost like a recruiter kind of a thing, like you’re recruiting then building this community of people.

Yeah. I mean, to some extent. I mean, the campaign itself would often have the data and I would have to identify the people Yeah. Within that, that were good for it. And I was just naturally good at that for some reason. Like getting people to. Rally around a cause. Okay. So, you know, we had our wins and losses, but you know, at, well you think you were naturally good at that or did that come from previous experiences?

Like where, where do you think he got that? I don’t know. Uh, I’ve thought about that before. I don’t know. ’cause there’s nothing in my background that would suggest that. Yeah, yeah. Oh, well he did this and that’s why he got good at that. Like, there’s nothing there that suggests that could Interesting. So like I said, so it is innate.

Yeah. I mean, I was homeschooled so it’s not like I learned it in school. Yeah. It was literally just me. Yeah. So, I don’t know. I wish I had a better answer. Okay. Well guess what? You don’t need to know it’s working. Yeah. Uh, because you’ve built what, five businesses at this point? Somewhere in that? Depends on how you looked.

Get it. A lot of them are legally, they’re under the same umbrella, but Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, so I’m very, very technical that way anyhow. Uh, so after that didn’t work out, like I know I went back into it ’cause that was how I could make the most money at that time. I didn’t even, I. All I ever thought was, the way you make money is you get a job and they pay you.

It never occurred to me that you could do it for yourself. Yeah, yeah. Uh, unfortunately I managed to accrue a lot of like credit card debt in that time. I, I say a lot now I look back at that number and think it wasn’t Yeah. That much. Yeah. But, uh, it was like, you know, five, six grand. So what they always say is, money is relative.

Right? Absolutely. Like what’s a lot of money to you is maybe not a lot of money to somebody else and vice versa. Right. So money’s all relative, but when you’re in the situation, in the moment at that tur current time with your current financial situation, it’s a lot of money. Um, but you’ve obviously grown out of that.

You’ve built the organization. You probably look back and giggle at that now, huh? I mean, you’re absolutely right about that. I remember hearing a story, uh, about when Elon Musk was trying to buy a then called Twitter and he was talking to Larry Ellison, who he wanted to get to be an investor. And he’s like, they were talking about should I put a billion or should I put two in, like you and I would tell him out the lunch bill.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. You wanna get this one or, yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, very relative. But anyhow, I, you know, I had some credit card debt and I had to figure out how to get outta that. And, um, one day when I was just not doing my job at my job, because I was, I wasn’t a bad employee, but I wasn’t, uh, I was good enough to not get fired, employee.

Okay. You know what I mean? Like, I didn’t have any desire to do better than just enough to not get hassle. I dunno if you’ve ever seen office space. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. Right. What do you do? I I really don’t do much. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, and for the record, uh. Well, I’m gonna tell a story about that job and then, but before I do, I wanna say that I’m still friends with a lot of folks there and I’m gonna say some things about it that are not positive.

Okay. But it isn’t them. It was me. Okay. Well, let’s, you know, like I feel bad ’cause like I talked shit about that job. Yeah. ’cause it was kind of the catalyst to what I’m doing now. But anyway, um, but you, what you’re saying essentially is that you had an opportunity. You, you, it wasn’t your thing, it wasn’t your greater purpose.

So it wasn’t lighting a fire. So they probably got the short end of the stick because you weren’t fully productive because it wasn’t something that you wanted. Right. But you had to use that to catapult you to maybe find that fire. Mm-hmm. And go start building. Yeah. And then there were stuff that stuff, there was stuff that they did that.

Made that burn a little hotter. Yeah. For example, um, they, uh, they would have these big company meetings at this golf course ’cause they, they were a real estate development company. Mm-hmm. So one of the things they owned was a golf course. So it was just like a big meeting room. And I remember the last one, one of the last ones before I was like, this is, this has gotta go and I’m gonna have to back up ’cause I skipped a part of the story.

But, uh, was they had us all there and the CEO was giving, you know, the, we’re doing this great and this great and our shareholders are making this much extra, like it was all, everything was all good. And then that day we get back to our office and they had reduced the amount of benefits they gave us to pay for our cell phone bill, which was already very generous.

Mm-hmm. The, the messaging there is like the, just, they just sat and told us how much money they were making for their shareholders and their kind of maybe bad timing on that one. Yeah. So that was like the final straw. But, but backing up, uh, when I was looking for ways to make extra money and also just kind of playing around rather than doing my job.

’cause I didn’t care enough to be learning that. I stumbled on, uh, a blog that guy used to re read that used to be a, like a professional wrestling blog, but the guy had stopped using it and he just had a one pager there of what he was doing now. Mm-hmm. And he said he was earning, making his living now doing something called affiliate marketing, which, uh, if anybody doesn’t know what affiliate marketing is, where.

You promote somebody else’s product or service or whatever. Mm-hmm. And you get a commission for it. So those doing that, and I was like, well what the hell is that? That sounds pretty cool. Uh, so as, again, not doing my job as most of my time, like reading up on what that was and you know, I stumbled across, there’s a forum called the Warrior Forum back then if anybody’s in internet marketing, they’ve probably have heard of that.

Uh, and I, you know, read that all day. Read some other ones. I bought like a course that was for like 47 bucks, which was a big investment for me at the time. Yeah. ’cause I was literally paycheck to paycheck. Uh, I took that and I started making a little bit of money through like a website. Like basically it would teach you how to make like, blog websites that would promote products and then you’d get rank them and Google and you’d get commissions.

And I did okay with that. Like, I didn’t really even realize what I was doing was called search engine optimization, but it was. Mm-hmm. And I was making a little bit of money. I had the first site I have actually still exists, but, uh, it doesn’t make any money anymore. But it was a. Like a review site for like streaming devices and streaming services, which Okay.

This was like 2013, so that was still, yeah. So I mean, that was early. Yes. You were early in. Yeah. It’s still kind of novel at the time. And I did pretty well. I was make, I say pretty well, I was making, you know, a hundred, 200 bucks a day off of that, which Okay. You know? Yeah, yeah. And getting your jump. Yeah.

And like, and then Google comes along in late 2013 and releases an algorithm update that completely wipes away all my traffic. I didn’t even know Google algorithm updates were a thing at that time, but, uh, it wiped away all my traffic. But that, by that point I had, it was like, uh, I, I don’t know how good this analogy is, but it was like when the drug dealer gives you your first hit and that’s when you Yeah.

You’re addicted. I’d gotten my first hit of making money on my own. Yeah. And I was like that. So now I gotta figure out how to make this work. So, uh, from there I bought another course. Uh, people like to shit on courses, but they’ve changed my life undoubtedly. Okay. So, uh, I bought another one called, uh, I don’t know if you know who Alex Becker is.

But, uh, anyway, he, uh, put out a course called Source Phoenix, which was a SEO course. And in that they talked about SEO stands for search engine optimization. Mm. I know you know that, but yeah. Um, and they talked about doing SEO for clients, which is something that had never occurred to me, but I was like, maybe I’ll try some of that.

Uh, so I started sending cold emails to random businesses. Again at my job, well not doing my job. Yeah. You were a stellar employee. Yeah. Uh, and that started to work like, uh, I got a few, and it’s funny ’cause I’m at my job so I can’t really freely like, converse with people. So I would go in the bathroom to take like client calls.

Yeah. Because, so I didn’t get in trouble ’cause I still needed my day job and that started to work. I started getting a few here and a few there. I wasn’t a salesperson at all. Mm-hmm. But I figured it out. ’cause which is kind of what you have to do isn’t Yeah. Right. Figure it out. You better learn how to sell quick.

Yeah. Well, and not just that, but you, you have to figure out shit when it comes mm-hmm. When it comes up. Yeah. It’s, there’s no, or get a training course for $47. Yeah. Right. Yeah. But, uh, you know, that started that doing okay. And then, um, that same person that made that course, he built a, a, a freelancer marketplace for SEOs, uh, similar to in concept to like a Fiverr or something like that.

Okay. And it was just sios. And on a whim I listed a service on there. I didn’t even know how to do the service. I listed, I just resold something from another freelance marketplace and marked it up and just you, whatever, just figured it out and didn’t, I think I’d ever hear about it again. One day I’m at the gym on the elliptical and uh, I get a PayPal notification.

I’m like, well, what the fuck is this? And it was for $10 and then I, it took me like 10 minutes of researching to figure out where it even came from, and I realized it was a Salem on that site. And then I got another one, and another one and another one. And then like an influencer in the, like SEO industry, who’s still a good friend of mine to this day, uh, like endorsed my services.

And then I started getting a bunch of sales from that. So between those sales and the, the client, SEOI, uh, that was right when that incident with the, uh, and there’s a funny story about this too, but that with the, the, the CEO telling us how great they were doing, and yeah, that’s right. When that happened, I was like, I’m done.

So you’re starting to get all the signs right? Yeah. Like the, the messages are happening. Yeah. And I remember after that. Uh, that meeting, I, I, I emailed my mom and said, ’cause she knew I’d thought I’d been thinking about quitting anyway. Mm-hmm. And I told her that, and I was like, I think I gotta do it now.

She’s like, well, and this is something I love about her. She’s like, yeah, you can do, you gotta do whatever you think is best for you. I, I, I joke with her sometimes that, uh, because she’s always been so supportive that I’m never gonna have that. Everybody told me I was stupid and now I, now I proved them all wrong.

It’s like she killed my future book sales. I was like, thanks, mom. Yeah. Uh, anyway, I’ve called my boss in the office and told him I, you know, I gotta quit. So, yeah, I, I did it the right way. I think I stayed on more than two weeks. I stayed on until they found someone to replace me, and then I stayed on and helped train them.

Okay. I don’t know why it’s important that I mentioned. Well, it is important. I mean, it means that you’ve, you’ve walked out with some class, right? Even though you kind of, you know, were playing the game, but you still left with some, some dignity in some class. You did the right thing. Yeah, I think so. And, uh.

You know, and from there, my goal with my quote unquote business, looking back at it, I was just a glorified freelancer, but not that there’s anything wrong with being a freelancer. Mm-hmm. But I, I thought of myself as like a business owner, but really I was just a freelancer. Okay. Yeah. Anyway, my goal with that was just to replace the income from the job.

And my thinking was, well, I was surviving on that I can survive on and making my own and not have to deal with a dickhead, dickhead middle manager. Boss. Yeah. Not exactly that. He’s a dickhead, but, you know. Um, but I know then the first couple months went okay, and the money was starting to dwindle and I got down to around like, I don’t know, a few a thousand bucks, which is not much when you’re living off of it.

Yeah. And then again, I got another influencer endorsement and my sales took off and it was great from there. Now that freelancer marketplace was really what turned everything around and led me to where I am now. And one thing I did on a whim, I. When I would deliver my orders, I would, and this goes back to community building, I would say, Hey, I, I created this Facebook group.

Why don’t you join that too? And the only reason I created this Facebook group in the first place was just to own all the, uh, the brand versions of my, uh, my URL. So. Mm-hmm. That’s something you should all do, by the way, whenever you have start any business, any get every URL Yeah. Every single one. And even some that are close.

Yeah. Yeah. Just get ’em all. And that was the only reason I had that, but I was like, maybe I’ll just send them there. Yeah. Uh, and you know, that worked like they started joining and I would just, Hey, this is what I’m doing right now. Uh, share, share it with them. They would ask me questions and I’d be like, answer it, and then they would buy stuff from me.

I was like, I figured this. Yeah. This is, we got something. And it, it clicked to me. That’s the same thing I did in politics. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, format’s a little different. Put something out there and find a way to get people to just gravitate to it. Yeah. Yeah. And that, that worked. Like, and for a while things were going great.

I was making more money than I thought was ever possible. I don’t know the number or I would lay it, but more money than I ever needed, I thought at the time. What do you think the, what was the trick to that, do you think? Was it the way that you wrote copy? Was it, you know, did you have like an amazing hook?

No. Like, like what do you think was the, the trick to first off to get influencers to endorse? Because. This is an influencer market right now. Yeah. I think we can all agree with that, and I don’t think enough businesses, especially small to midsize businesses understand the power of, number one, building a personal brand.

Yeah. Number two, finding brand champions within your own organization to become characters above and beyond the role. Mm-hmm. To tell the story, like you don’t need to be in sales to sell. Oh, absolutely. If you’re a maintenance person, but you got, you know, you have the ability to communicate, turn ’em into a brand champion, put ’em on social, make ’em into a character, right?

Mm-hmm. And then the third thing would be, um, rather than commodity driven marketing, why not align with a few influencers that will tell the story for you to their following, and essentially you just start giving them a kickback commission for, for generating sales for you. So that is really working the marketplace.

It sounds like you figured that out fairly early. No. Or maybe you haven’t figured it out, but somehow the influencers gravitated to you, so that’s pretty cool. Yeah. What was the trick? Uh, I mean, I got lucky. Like, okay, you know, that’s something that not enough entrepreneurs are willing to say is that they got lucky.

We were at the right place at the right time. Fair. Yeah. Uh, the influencer that did it was affiliated with the owner of the platform. And I, I don’t really know, but he wanted to like. He was an SEO also, he’s a good friend of mine, Gregory, Gregory Ortiz. Uh, still a good friend of mine. Um, and he, I guess he just wanted to promote the marketplace and get some affiliate commissions for himself.

Okay. So it found like the freelancers that were doing the most volume and like the most reliable and stuff like that. So I think So he saw an opening and you happened to be the opening. Yeah, and I capitalized on it. Yeah. That’s why I say that. I, I’m reluctant to say it was all luck. ’cause yeah, some people would’ve been like, cool.

Took the few thousand bucks they made from that and that was that. Well, it’s like golf. I mean, you could, you could hit a drive that hits a tree and you get lucky. It bounced back in the fairway. But if you shank the next one out of bounds, then yeah, you didn’t really take advantage of your luck. So yeah, you, you had to have taken advantage of your lock.

And I did. And all those orders, like again, I was telling them, go to my Facebook group, go to my Facebook group, and I then I would start posting videos. ’cause that was new to me. Funny story about that. Now I’m, you know, flying, I don’t know how far Chicago to South Carolina is, but you know, yeah. Far 500 miles or something, whatever it is to be on a podcast.

In my original videos, I was wearing sunglasses. Indoors. Yeah. Because I don’t, I don’t know if I thought I looked cool or what, but looking back on it somewhere psychologically, that was my way of like, feeling like I wasn’t on camera. Yeah. Like getting a persona, like you’re slipping into like, you’re, you’re, you’re well, yeah, but that’s what I mean.

Like, you know, Jim Morrison writes his first few performances, he stood with his back to the audience. Hmm. I didn’t know that. Yeah. And you know, there’s a lot of folks, you know, that go on talk shows or whatever that are, that are actors or people that are out front. And you think that they’re extroverts because they’re an actor and they’re actually really introverts, but they’re really good at their role.

They’re able to get into that role. Yeah. So you see them wearing the sunglasses and you think, oh, they think they’re super cool. No, they’re actually petrified underneath. They hate the fact that they’re sitting there with a studio audience looking at them. Mm-hmm. And they’re not playing a character, they’re not playing a role.

They’re having to be themselves, which for them is probably the most uncomfortable role that they have to do. Yeah. So I can understand being somebody who came from some of the roles you were in and now is starting to have to market your own business and you’re realizing, hey look, I gotta, I gotta get on social media, I gotta tell the story.

I can imagine you were probably like, Hey, this isn’t actually who I am, so I gotta like, put these glasses on and create a little bit of a persona to overcome the imposter syndrome. Yeah. I mean, I didn’t, I don’t think I, at that time, I don’t think I consciously thought that. Yeah, I think there was, but that might’ve been the, the what you were doing.

But I mean, even now, sometimes people will be like, how do you not get nervous before you go on stage? ’cause I’ve spoken at a lot of events now where you go on camera. I was like, what did you think? I don’t still, oh gosh. Yeah. But you ch you trick your brain though. You say you’re excited. Yeah. Instead of nervous, you go, oh, I’m so excited for this.

And meanwhile, you’re, you’re like dying inside. Yeah. And the character thing you mentioned is interesting because I’ve, I’ve created. I told you my name is Chris Sam Walker, which it is, but I think of that as the character and then like Chris is who I am. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I get it. Sure. Some people like that have never done this sort of thing.

Don’t get that. But like, I, I, it’s important to me to have that differentiation. Yeah. Well, it’s, uh, where were we? Um, I. Anyway, I guess I, I was using, I would start making videos and stuff, and it would help, you know, everything. People would buy stuff from me. And like, I just started doing that. Well, that was working well and told that that website that I was making a good portion of my money through at that point started having all sorts of problems.

The owner didn’t really give a shit about it. And like, uh, again, no offense, Alex, but you know, you didn’t, and, uh, yeah, sorry, Alex, and, and he would probably agree too. Yeah. But I, it would get hacked. It would crash, it would be unreliable. So I was like, well, I gotta replace this income. So I had my, you know, at that point I had my own agency and I like.

Again, whether I was a freelancer, an agency up for debate, but I had my own website and I just to set up, uh, WooCommerce on that and started selling my services through that because like I needed the money, you know? Yeah. And plus now I had the built-in traffic from my group and the, like, the small, very small at that point, personal brand.

So like timeline, what year is this? 2017. 2017? Yes. Okay. So, so I was 19 in 2013. And pretty good time for you to start this, right? Like the economy at that time was kind of in a pretty strong position, right? Yeah. It was kind of moving so that like the time, like the stars are lining up for you, right? Yeah.

So anyway, I’m telling stuff through my own site and that starts going well and I had made friends, uh, not like on purpose, but just made friends with other freelancers on that site I was using to, um. I just made friends with ’em and they started coming to me and were like, well, can we sell some shit through your site too?

And we tried to with a couple of ’em. It didn’t really work that well, but I was like, I think I’m onto something here. And a couple other people suggested I should start my own marketplace. But to me at that point that was like this huge thing that you had to have years of like design experience and developers.

Isn’t it amazing the things we can tell ourselves? Yeah. Well, I mean, I didn’t really know what was involved, but fortunately one of the customers I had, uh, on that marketplace owned a web development and design agency. Uh, his name’s Jim, he’s still my partner to this day. Um, and uh, he offered to beat, do partner with me and do like the technical stuff.

Mm-hmm. The actual building of it. ’cause it’s a funny story sometimes people ask me, did you actually write the coding for Legit? I was like, if it did, it would, if I did it would still say Hello world. Yeah. Because I don’t know how to do that shit. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And I learned a little bit, but we all have our own gifts.

That’s not what Yeah. And if you remember, my Degrees were in computer programming, so that was money well spent. Yeah. Great job. You paid attention to that too. Yeah, I mean I did, but like by that point it had been 10, 10, 15 years since I graduated. Yeah. It just didn’t sync. Yeah. Well, I mean, it’s completely different world.

Mm-hmm. At that point in programming. But anyway, so I was like, all right, let’s do it. And figuring it would just be like an extra product for my SEO business, you know? ’cause I had services and courses and training. I was like, this’ll be another thing that I can offer them all. Well, within the first month it was my base revenue stream by miles.

So again, I don’t, I’m not good at remembering what numbers were, but by an astronomical amount. Yeah. And it’s grown every single month. That was, or we launched in February 7th, 2018. And it’s grown more. It’s been up into the right every single month since then. That’s awesome. So, yeah. And um, you know, uh, it continued the SEO business, it still exists.

And, uh, I mean, I guess that kind of. You know, seven years that we’ve been launched. I don’t really know what to add to the story, but you asked for the origin of the story. Yeah. So that’s a, that’s great. Give us an idea of, um, like, there’s two points of entry for you, right? There’s, there’s a business mm-hmm.

That could utilize your platform, your service, and then there’s freelancers or creators or influencers or, um, um, you know, social media experts or writers mm-hmm. Whatever it might be that can use the other side of it. And you’re kind of playing like a matchmaker. Gi give us an understanding of like, what is the business model, how does it work?

Sure. So it’s, it is, it is evolved since then. So I’ll start with where it was and then where it is now. Cool. In the beginning it was just, as I say, just it was a two-way marketplace. And what I mean by that is there were freelancers that would offer a service, SEO links, writing whatever, and then there were customers that would buy.

The service. But they would buy, they would pay us, the people would do the work and then we would pay out 85% of it to them and we’d get 15. You’d take your 15, right. Okay. 10 in the beginning, but that’s a 15. Well, when you’re in hot demand, you raise prices. Well, it was impossible to make work the math work at 10%, but let’s, that was how it was from, for the first, I don’t know, five years.

I guess. I don’t timelines, I’m not sure. But like that, and that is a challenge all in, in itself, it’s a kind of a chicken and an egg problem because like you have to have, I don’t like referring to them as supply and demand because it’s human beings, but you have to have enough supply of freelancers to do the work that the cus the demand customers.

But you also, yeah. But you also have to have enough customers to make sure the freelancers have enough to do. Mm-hmm. And you, if you have too many freelancers, they start whining and they’re never gonna stop whining. But they, they start whining that they’re not getting enough work. But if you have too many customers for not enough freelancers, they either don’t find what they need, or the people that do, they are there to get overwhelmed and they can’t keep up.

Yeah. So you can’t just focus on growing one. You have to focus on growing both. And I would imagine when the businesses come to you, there’s a level of urgency. So they’re looking for an immediate fix. And if you don’t have enough freelancers at the time, there’s a delay there. It can be. And that co could cause them to go look somewhere else.

Yeah, it can be, uh, it, it, it depends on their level of whatever. But yeah, I mean that’s part of it. Uh, ’cause there are other sites that do what we do. I mean, not what we do as well as we do, but comparable. At least they think they’re comparable. But anyway, um, look at ’em, planting the flag. I love it. Let’s go, you know, spike that ball.

Chris, not to get off on, off tangent, but like. Anybody that ever says that they’re not, that their business isn’t the best should close their fucking business. Yeah, that’s the point. Like can’t stand if you’re not the big biggest champion for your own business. Not the biggest advocate. Yeah. I mean, there’s being humble and being like, Hey, look, there’s other companies that do what we do.

We believe. Yeah. And we have proof that we happen to do it the best. There’s nothing wrong with that. In fact. I would encourage any business to, to form their copy in that way. I mean, sure. Um, I just had a guest on, in fact, the episode dropped this morning. Uh, his name is Frank t Ziti and, um, the Humble guy, right?

Mm-hmm. He’s writing a book and he is got a, a mentor who’s also an author. And the mentor essentially said to him like, stop the humility. Like you’re writing the book from the position of an expert. Yeah. Nobody, nobody wants a humble expert. They want you to be, matter of fact, I’ve done this. It’s proven to work.

If you do it as well, it will work as well. Right. Um, and he was coming from a place like, Hey, in my humble opinion, and finally his, his, uh, mentor was like. That is serving nobody. Yep. So he changed that little thing of just kind of having that pride and having that belief and knowing that what he’s talking about from an expert level is expert stuff.

And it’s kind of changed the way that he’s writing this book and he feels better about the way that he’s presenting it. So to your point, and I fully agree, like you gotta spike the ball a little bit. Yeah. I was taught by a guy early on in my career. He said, um, and, and this was like internal advice, he said, within an organization of 800 people, when you’re performing, everyone’s in their own siloed lane.

They’re paying attention to what they’re doing. So if you’ve done something absolutely phenomenal, do not be afraid to go and tell your boss, tell your boss’s boss, and to promote yourself. Promote that you’re doing fantastic work, because otherwise they’re caught up in their day-to-day. They might completely miss that.

You just did great work. Yeah. Why give that same advice to businesses? If you’re doing great work and you’re not telling that story as much as possible, you are missing the boat because I gotta tell you. Your customers, as much as they love you, they’re not gonna tell that story for you very rarely, unless you ask them to.

And even then they might not. Yeah. So you better be telling the story and man, if you can influence those customers to tell the story with you. Yeah. Like on a podcast, that’s probably a great idea. Yeah. A great example of that is one time, uh, I don’t remember if it was Twitter. I think it was Twitter. Uh, I, I, by the way, I call that Twitter even though it’s X now, because it irritates certain Yeah.

People on the phone. I just stay away from the whole thing. I think it’s a cesspool. Yeah. I, that’s why, anyway, it’s like. Uh, politics, porn, and, you know, sports announcements. And it’s like, okay, well I like the sports announcements. I’ll stay away from the rest. Anyway, somebody was like, who is, has the, what site has the best link building services?

And I, of course put mine and they’re like, of course you would say that, Mr. CEO. I was like, yeah, of course. I would fucking say, yeah. Why would you not? It would be disrespectful to my customers. For me to say somebody else is better. They have to paid me their hard of money. Yeah. For me to say that somebody else is better, might as well just walk ’em right out the door.

Yeah. By the way, why would an employee come work for you too? Like, if you’re like, Hey, we’re kind of good. Yeah. You know, I mean, like, okay. Yeah. Um, I, where were we at? Yeah, so you, you’re, you’re going on these sites and you’re talking about how you’re the best in the business and people are starting to gravitate to that.

Yeah. So I guess we, what I was saying was we had launched and then we’re, uh Oh, okay. We were doing, we were talking about having to have freelancers and customers. Yeah. So that, that went well for a while, but. I think my, I’m a big believer that if you have a business, you have to have a big goal for that business beyond just make enough money, more money than you did last month, which is great.

Mm-hmm. Don’t get me wrong, but, and people would say, we get compared to Fiverr a lot, which drives me fucking insane because we’re doing something totally different. But people would ask me how we were different and I didn’t really have a great answer for them. Uh, and you know, on top of that I would say, well, I wanna be the Amazon of digital services.

And they’d be like, what does that mean? I was like. They’re big. And I do, I don’t know. Stop asking. Yeah. So I, I, I spent some time thinking about who we wanted to be and who we wanted to help. And there were two things that I came up with. The first was, I don’t want to help everybody. I don’t want to help.

Like five, or it was kind of like the Walmart mm-hmm. Of these sites. Yeah. Like they appeal to everyone and there’s a market for that. Sure. But I, I want to help businesses ’cause I believe that business is what changes the world. I believe that’s how you can get the most out of your life. ’cause that’s what’s made my life as good as it is.

Mm-hmm. And so I was like, that’s who our, we want our customer to be. We want to focus on helping businesses rather than helping everyone. So on that end of it, we said that, uh, you know, if you want a guy that looks like Jesus, hold, it’ll hold up a sign with your name on it. You can go over to Fiber if you want to actually make some money for yourself, you can come visit the grownups over here.

Yeah. So, you know, I, I say I use that example ’cause that’s quite literally their most selling gig. Yeah. Guy that kinda looks like, so you created, you created a villain. So Fiverr is your villain and you’re the superhero that beats the villain. That captures the villain. That gets rid of the villain. That’s a good branding play.

Yeah, it is. And it isn’t. ’cause like after a while I wanted to be disassociated with them altogether. Sure. But, uh, funny story from this morning of all things, uh, one of my regular customers, he, he messages me and he says, did you know that Fiverr owns a lot of the different misspellings of your site? I was like, really?

And he, he gave me an example. If you put in like L-E-G-I-I-I-T and it goes to their site. Interesting. Yeah. I was like, and I’ve always wondered if I was on their, you know, ’cause they’re a publicly traded Yeah. If you’re on the radar, that’s pretty good. Yeah. And so that means we’re doing something right.

So anyhow, we wanted to focus on helping businesses and not everyone, there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just not what we wanted to do. And then on the freelancer side. Uh, Fiverr per and other sites promote themselves as a great way to make some money online. And what that does is it attracts, I don’t wanna disrespect these people, but it, it attracts people who wanna do the absolute bare minimum and get a, a few bucks for it.

And we get a lot of those folks too. And they’re just not worth it. Yeah. Like, don’t give. So you’re very selective as to what freelancers that you allow in. So what I want, they need to have a certain level of attention and detail and purpose and wherewithal and capability. You’re not just creating a place where, because I’ve gone on Fiverr and, you know, it is kind of a crapshoot sometimes.

Mm-hmm. You know, and it, it’s unfortunate because the vetting process is difficult. You almost gotta, you know, you gotta get, you like, you’re kind of winging it the first time somebody’s profile and their pr previous work. You look at it and you’re kind of like, okay, well that looks pretty good, but. That might just be the surface.

And then you get their work back and you’re like, okay, they’re working on 20 things and they just totally shortcutted this. They, you know, they said it was 12 hours to do the work and you know, they waited till the last second or whatever. And then somebody else who doesn’t have as great of a, uh, of a profile and doesn’t show as great of a body of work, you stumble upon them and they blow your mind.

Yeah. So there’s not a, the point of entry in the five is pretty open. You’re saying that at legit you really have funneled it down or honed it down to people that have a higher level of, of quality. Yeah, so I was, when we were thinking about who we wanted to help on the freelancer side, and I realized that who I wanted to help was people like me, because like being a freelancer changed everything for me and I built a whole brand around it, and those were the people that I wanted.

Yeah. And unfortunately those are much harder to come by. Yeah. Because they just, a lot of people view freelancing as side hustle work and not as an actual business. So I. I, instead of that being a problem, I turned it into an opportunity to make sure that we had people that were really good. Now they still get people that fuck up all the time.

Sure. But you weed ’em out as best as we can. You know, the problem with a lot of, like, a lot of what we have is like SEO and marketing, and that’s not a concrete thing. What I mean by that is like, it’s kind of abstract. Um, like you and I could look at the exact same thing. You could think it was great and I could think it sucked.

Yeah. So it’s kind of hard. Like I don’t want me, well, that is marketing though. Like marketing is ivy holder. There’s an art to it. Sure. So, but, but because of that, it makes it hard to judge who does a good job. Sure it doesn’t. Sure. Because again, it’s like, you know, I could put the greatest piece of content out.

12 people tell me that it’s absolutely amazing and it doesn’t get any traction. And then, you know, I’ll see somebody else that’s got, you know, a thousand likes on their, on their post and it’s like a graphic with a standard quote that they got off of some poster and it’s like, well, I guess the eye of the beholder people really like that.

Yeah. Or they’re part of one of those pods. But it’s, it’s interesting to me, and there is really a, there’s an art form to marketing. Um, so I, I’m curious, help us to understand here. Explain this to me. Like, explain it to me like, I’m six years old. Alright, so I own a business. Mm-hmm. Let’s say I’m a plumber.

I got, uh, 45 employees do about $6 million in revenue. It’s residential. And you and I both know that I’ve got people that are going out and stuffing stuff in people’s mailboxes. I’m putting, I’m putting, uh, you know, door hangers on in neighborhoods. Um. I’ve got a Facebook page and a LinkedIn page that aren’t really active.

You know, I’ve hired my daughter to do the Instagram because, you know, she seems to know how to do the dances and the trends, but she’s got no understanding of how to talk about branding or services, whatever. But she’s handling my Instagram and, and then other than that, you know, when I’m working on the project, they put a sign in the yard and I got magnets on the door.

Mm-hmm. Right? So, and I’ve been in business for 30 years and my business has hung around five to 6 million for 15 of those 30 years. It’s just not going anywhere. Mm-hmm. Why do I use legit, why do I call Chris m Walker? Okay. First of all, that’s, that’s, it’s off topic a bit, but isn’t I, I love that you used an example of a plumber making millions of dollars because like, we have this perception that you, like, power businesses are the only ones that can make millions of no ppl.

I say plumbers, some plumbers and electricians. It’s like I was telling somebody on a podcast. So I, I started off in small business consulting. A lot of that is, you know, small to midsize contractors. Right. And, um, you know, they’re, they’re, they’re 30 to 40 employees, four, $5 million a year in revenue.

Mm-hmm. And meanwhile they’re taking home an 18% net profit on that. Yeah. And, um, they’d be more profitable if they didn’t pay so much in, in taxes, but 18% net profit, net net profit on 5 million. And meanwhile, you go to their business and they, they’re like driving a beat up Ford F-150. You know, they got on work boots, there’s stains all over their jeans, you know, they’re wearing a t-shirt with their logo on it.

What, you don’t realize if you followed them home Yeah. Right. You followed ’em home. They’re at an estate. Yep. Right. With horses running in the estate, they’ve got three, uh, muscle cars that they work on, on the side in some back garage. Right. And so the, the, the brand they’re showing is, I’m a plumber. Yeah.

The reality is. They’ve built generational wealth. Yeah. And we take them for granted. Yeah. I love when like blue color, things like that make so much money. Oh, it’s so awesome. Yeah. It’s so awesome. That’s why I tell my kid, I tell I got three boys. One of them I know is absolutely an academic, like he’s gonna college, he wants to be a lawyer.

Mm-hmm. My other two, uh, probably are more like me and I’m like, guys, learn a trade. We can figure out the business of the business part. But if you have a specialty, you can turn it into a business. Yeah. Learn a trade. Plus there’s nobody doing trades right now in your generation. Yeah. ’cause I think it’s like, yeah, it’s not, is it, is it beneath you to make 2 million?

Exactly. Exactly. So, yeah. So I’m glad to hear you say that. Yeah. Absolutely. Not many people seem to agree with, so that analogy, that company, yeah. They go. They go, all right, this is like multiple years in a row. We’re stuck at this five to $6 million range. Like, I’m seeing all these companies, they got commercials, they got content, they’ve got a brilliant copy, they’ve got, you know, a podcast.

They don’t even know what copy is. Yeah. They’ve got all this stuff going, like, and I don’t know how to do any of that. Yeah. So, so a lot of them are thinking is like, I know I need this online stuff. Yeah. But I don’t know what exactly. Like, I know what’s happening, but I’m kind of like making a lot of money.

But Yeah. You know, I, I know we gotta go next level, so, so step one, they, okay, so I told you, let, lemme back up and weave this into the story because we started realizing after we figured out who those two people we wanted to serve were that. Yeah, we talked to a lot of our customers, you know, shocking thing to do.

You’d be surprised how many businesses don’t do that, but talked to our customers and figured out what their problems were. I know, again, revolutionary. This is crazy shit, man. Yeah. Wow. But they have an epiphany. Yeah. There were two things that they told us. The one is the, what I call the Netflix problem, is that our site offered so many services that they didn’t know what to buy, so they didn’t buy anything.

Got it. So he hence the Netflix problem. Yep. Hopefully some people get that analogy and I don’t have to explain it, but uh, and then the other one was, I bought this thing and it didn’t work. So your site sucks when in Right reality, they bought a. To use an analogy, they bought a hammer when they needed a screwdriver.

Mm-hmm. So we had to solve those two problems. Some of those are not really fair for us to have to solve, but it’s still my problem to solve. Sure. So we started figuring out how can we help them figure out what they need and give it to them again, revolutionary business advice, right? Yeah. Edu educate your marketplace.

Yeah. So we came up with a few different solutions and uh, and the biggest one was becoming more than just a marketplace and becoming a platform. So I was a bit inspired by, uh, the Steve Jobs biography. I saw, I was looking at your books earlier, so I think we read a lot of the same stuff. But, uh, the, the Steve Jobs biography, it kind of inspired me to take this direction.

Uh, the Walter Isaacson one, I don’t know if you’ve read it, but you should. I have not. Uh, but, uh, he envisioned Apple being. Not just your phone or whatever, but as like the hub of your digital life and how you would have he and originally envisioned it being the, uh, what’s their computer, the iMac as the center of it.

But then eventually it became iCloud because you know, that’s the way the world went. Mm-hmm. But he imagined you having that as the core and then all you have your phone and then your, your entertainment and all of that being a whole, you all connect. Right. It’s like a one community. Right. And I kind of, I wanted to build a platform that did that for businesses.

So we started building some software. Uh, it’s been slow and then adding to it, but that helped businesses figure out what they need. So now, if you go to our site, and you, by the way, the site is www.legit.com and I wanna clarify, there’s two i’s, so it’s L-E-G-I-I t.com. Yeah. And now that plumber that you just talked about can go there.

And, you know, put in his website, uh, if he has one, um, hopefully it does. Uh, yeah. Be shocked. If not, we can help with that too. Yeah. Yeah. But, uh, be shocked. Yeah. But, uh, let’s just assume for this exercise that they have a website they can put that in and their email because we’re marketers and for email.

But, uh, and then within less than a minute they’ll have a bunch of like, things that they need to do. So what is it an, is it you have like AI that analyzes the site? Yeah. I’m gonna get to that in just a sec. I love this. Yeah. So I’ll just sit back. You go. It’ll will give you like a technical analysis based on just a few seconds.

’cause we don’t have that much time. We wanna give them something right away. Yeah. Quick cable’s attention spans 8.2 seconds. Yeah. So it gives them like a technical analysis of their site and miss some basic things. And then they can go and connect like their Google analytics and their Google search console and all these other things.

The, to feed it and give it more information. And what it does is it takes our eight years of data and crunches that and looks at what other businesses like them have done that has worked. And it’ll give them suggestions using ai, uh, that will tell them, this person has a business similar to yours. It’s not quite this plain English.

We’re still working on the of it, but this person has a business similar to yours, and they bought these things to fix this problem that you have. Uh, here you can buy it from this freelancer who does a great job with that. So that’s kind of how, I don’t wanna say you’re never gonna fully solve the problem, but that’s how it’s, it’s interesting though.

You’re like a matchmaker. It kinda, yeah. Yeah. It’s like a business matchmaker. I have this problem, you know, and, um, I don’t know what to do about it. So they can enter this in and it’s gonna essentially, uh, give them an analysis, but the analysis is based on. The experience that other customers have had successful results with.

Yes. So it creates that, that commonality like, Hey, you’re not alone. Other people had this problem, here’s what they did to solve it. Mm-hmm. And by the way, here’s two recommendations of freelancers that solve that problem very well. And then what happens? Then they get an email or they get a, they, they get the freelancer’s email or they get a link to click to engage with that freelancer, or they do that through you and you engage the freelancer?

No, so I mean, there’s different ways they can go about it, but that thing that I just talked about builds what we call a dashboard for them. So it’ll have like their, and they can again add more tools and more ranking and more information to it. But it’ll have, you know, their traffic and their stuff there.

And it’s so they can log in every day and look at it. And that right there it will right in there. It’ll say it’ll, each section will have the freelancer that can fix the problem of that section, their site website speed, or the SEO or the marketing or whatever. And it like asks them their goals and creates their persona around that.

The idea being, you know, from our side of what’s in it for us is that. Once you get hooked on something like that, you can never stop. Well, yeah, once you, once you have a problem, somebody solves it, then there’s a tendency for, uh, you know, I call it, um, I call it, um, diversi, uh, uh, di diversification through demand.

And it’s kind of like, you know, if I go to a company with one problem and they solve it and I enjoy the experience, then I ask them about other problems I have. If they can solve that, and whether they solve it or can guide me to somebody within their network that can do it. But you see that happening often, and I see companies grow where, you know.

A customer. I told you the story of TTSG, right? Mm-hmm. Selling copy machines, selling ’em to Dick Portillo Portillo’s, huge company. Dick Portillo says to our CEO, Tim, Hey, you do you. All you do is get shit done as it relates to selling copy machines. We love your service. Nobody provides faster, better service than you guys do.

You really should get into it because you do this so well. You should start an IT company. So Tim diversifies out of the demand. Of a customer who’s happy with another service starts another company called GSD Technologies to do it because of that demand. And that just continues to grow. And it sounds like that that’s how you’re building it.

If you do great work for somebody, um, they’re gonna, they’re gonna demand when they have another problem Yeah. That you, that you find a solution for them. Yeah. And on top of that, some solutions, once you have them, even if for some reason you did want to stop, you kind of couldn’t. Yeah. Like, I don’t know if you use like an email, like autoresponder, like an active campaign or get response or something like that.

Sure. But. Once you get on one of those, it’s a fucking nightmare to like, to get off unwrap. It’s like the bundle when you bundle with Comcast, once you’re in, you’re in baby. Yeah. And that’s, it sounds evil when you put it that way, but like, but I mean it, that’s what we want, but it’s, it’s pure, it’s brilliant business.

Yeah. And it’s, it’s the same, you talked about the Amazon model, it’s the model. It’s like, okay, we can buy books, but guess what? You could buy a bike too. Yeah. Oh, guess what? You could buy a car stereo. Guess what? You could, you could get your plane tickets. I mean, you could like do anything on Amazon now.

It’s crazy. Yeah. And I mentioned like the Steve Jobs analogy and like, it’s the same kind of ecosphere that we’re trying, I think that’s the right word, that we’re trying to create ecosystem, uh, echo sphere, uh, where like if you had an Apple TV and a iMac, but you had an Android. That would like such pain in your ass.

So like you want to get the other apple thing and then the other apple thing. Mm-hmm. To where you can never leave. We want to have that for business. Yeah. It’s like Apple music. Yeah. You, if you get a, if you get a Samsung, you lose all your music. Yeah, exactly. So you, you stick with Apple ’cause you don’t wanna lose all your music.

Yeah. And that’s kind what we wanna be for business. And that’s what we’re building the platform for. And the, the great thing about that is it helps them too. Sure. You know it. Decision makers, this might sting frustrated with IT issues, security threats and the stress of your technology infrastructure.

Your technology should blend seamlessly with your business objectives. Technology infrastructure management with limited resources can be exhausting and counterproductive. Do have an MSP but still have problems and technical hiccups. GSDs advisement, proactive maintenance, cutting edge cybersecurity, cloud solutions, data backup and local 24 7 help desk can change the game.

Your technology should outpace your business operations to allow for growth and proactive strategies should prevent issues before they arise. Get back your time and your money with GSD drive business forward. Leave the technology to gsd gsd now.com. Well, they’d, people would rather have you, I had a old boss who used to say, you know, the, the idea of creating a holistic approach is consumers want one back to pat and one neck to choke.

Like they don’t want to go to 10 different places to get 12 different things. Yeah. If they can go to 1.1 source for all 12 things, and it’s one point of contact. They feel a lot safer there. Yeah. It’s a lot easier to manage. Yeah. That’s why Walmart and Amazon are basically the only two retailers left at this point.

Yeah. Because you get everything. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah. Literally, uh, um, Bezos’s book was called the Everything Store. Mm-hmm. So yeah, there you go. You literally get everything there. So that’s kind what we’re trying to do on top of that. And then I could talk, I talked about the Netflix problem. That was the other problem we had, is that we were letting everyone on and we were still letting capitalism decide who got the most sales, but it was apparently still not good enough because they would look at all the options, even if people that they wouldn’t use and get like overwhelmed because it went outta glycogen.

And then there’s too many options and they, so we’ve, uh, made it, we’ve set up some criteria to where everybody can still list their stuff, but you don’t get seen until you prove to us that our, you deserve to be seen by our customers. Got it. And there’s a lot of different, there’s, so what do you have, like a rating system?

There’s a lot of different things that go into it. The, just to get it to where it’s even. On the site at all. There’s a 66 point step that they have to go through. Fun story about that was we, we figured out all the things that they needed to do and there were 65. It was like, can we come up with one more?

Just ’cause it’s six, six is a better number. Yeah. So anyway, I just, I always find that funny. That, but there’s that. But then on top of that, once they get past that barrier, it just shows on their profile. It doesn’t show in our search or in our categories or anything like that. And they have to go out and earn sales to prove to us, uh, that they deserve to be shown to our customers.

That got it. Pisses off some freelancers. ’cause they want to just, there’s this per the thing that per that marketplaces give you traffic for free. And Fiverr actually pushes that where you sign up and we’ll send you a few sales. They, they, they do the drug dealer thing. Mm-hmm. Or they give you a few to like, get you that and they, it’s like, these people sign up.

I’m, I’m, I feel bad talking about it ’cause I love some of our freelancers, but, uh, they. They sign up and they expect money to just fucking fall on them because they open a business. Yeah. And I usually not gonna work it. Yeah. And I use the analogy that if I open a pizza shop, it doesn’t mean that some, I’m entitled to have people come in and buy a slice.

Yeah. You know what I mean? Like you kind of have to get them to come through the door and try it one time. Yeah. And it’s really good. They’ll come back. Yeah. And they expect that to be on us. And to some extent I get it, but I don’t have enough traffic to give to everyone, and I wouldn’t want to anyway.

You know, I’ll get feedback from some of your site’s, not beginner friendly. I was like, you’re right. I don’t want beginners talking to my customers. Well, that’s interesting. You know, the 66 point test, if you will, that that they have, I would imagine that that alone. Yep. Um, disqualifies a good portion of people that don’t have follow through.

Yep. Right. Are not willing to put in the work just to answer the 66 questions. You’re disqualified. Yep. Like, if you really want it bad enough and you’re gonna, you’re gonna be a driver who’s gonna really go after it, then you’ll, you’ll answer those 66 questions. Yeah. And that’s the minimum. Make sure, yeah.

That’s the bare minimum. So that’s the point of entry. So. You’re disqualifying the lazy mm-hmm. The, the, uh, uncommitted just with the 66 questions. After that they have to then go and find some of their own business. Yeah. Is that what you’re saying? Yeah. On top of some other things, but Yeah. Yeah. And once they get, it depends on the category, but once they get a sale or two truth’s told, I don’t even remember.

And once they prove that though, you’re, you’re tracking that. Mm-hmm. And so then you start to move them up the list because they’ve shown to be a top performer that’s getting great. Right. Then results and value and, and Right. Then they’ll get some visibility. And if I think, not just me, but if we think that they’re really good, then we’ll like actively send our audience to them because you start becoming their agent.

Yeah. Because we’ll be like, Hey, you guys have often told us you need somebody that can do I-I-F-T-T-T and then these people are, we just found this great person at it and we’ll send, send them traffic and then, uh, what’s it, that’s the flywheel Get set in. You set in motion for that way, assuming that they continue to not suck, you know, that is key.

That’s a try not to suck. That was, uh, Joe, Joe Madden’s. Joe Madden, the coach of the Cubs, you know, last time they won a World series that was like his slogan the first year was Try not to suck. That’s again, I thought that was pretty good. It is. You know, and like, being good in the past doesn’t guarantee that you get to keep doing it too.

Sure. Like we’ve had, I have somebody in mind, I’m not gonna say any name, but somebody who’s one of our big sellers for a long time, and then for through, they kind of know, I mean, everything is your fault, but through no fault of his own, you know, he let a lot of this stuff go. He is not delivering, he is being late.

And again, when some one of our freelancers fucks up, they blame us. Yeah. Which is again, not fair, but like Yeah, well it comes with a turf, right? Yeah. So, you know, we stopped sending in traffic because he couldn’t keep up. Mm-hmm. I was like, once you get your house in order, we’ll of course send you traffic again.

’cause our customers like you when you’re doing a good job. Mm-hmm. So, so, um, 18,000 followers on LinkedIn. Um, and you’re creating, you’re doing a lot from your, your, your office. You know, you’re on a mic, you got the headphones on, you’re doing some creation. Um, and you’re se you’re selling it, you’re promoting your brand.

I love the fact that you’re using LinkedIn as a vehicle to do that. I also love the fact that you have willingly put yourself out there as a CEO to go lead the charge as, as the advocate for your own brand and for your employees to go tell the story as much as possible. Mm-hmm. On podcasts, multiple podcasts.

So you’re, you’re really in line with understanding that, what that push needs to look like. I’m curious though, what has been some of the biggest challenges that you have had to overcome some of the adversity that you’ve faced, um, that has made you bigger, better, and stronger because you had to face it and you overcame it?

Uh, well, the number one is fraud. Like the amount of attempted fraud that a platform like us attracts is just interesting, mind boggling. Uh, if I tell you one part story or can you like cut that part out? You. Oh, so you’re gonna tell a story and then I cut it out? Yeah. There’s just some legal stuff pending.

Uh, maybe don’t tell the story then. Okay. There’s one story I’ll tell in the future. Yeah. That will, yeah. Okay. I’ll take May. Maybe, maybe, maybe a different story. Okay. Point is that it’s like, uh, it’s like cockroaches. Every time we stomp out one type of fraud, they find another one and they find another one.

Yeah. They find another one. One of them cost us hundreds of thousands. The one I’m not gonna tell you about Yeah. Cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars. Wow. Uh, but, um, that is by far the biggest challenge. Jim, my partner and I, we talk about how I. Much better we could make the platform if we didn’t have to spend so much time figuring out how to stop shitty people from being shitty.

Mm. Uh, and you know, there’s like people that will, there’s like friendly fraud where somebody buys something and they get what they bought and they do a chargeback because they know that we’re gonna lose most of the time because Yeah. Credit card companies do not give a fuck. Mm-hmm. It doesn’t matter how much proof you have.

And credit card companies tend to take the side of the consumer over the business. That’s what I’m saying is no matter how much evidence we give them, we’re probably gonna lose. Mm-hmm. So we get that’s friendly fraud, but then we get like actual fraud with people with stolen credit cards and that sort of stuff.

And then there’s the review manipulation, that’s another big one. People will sign up with two accounts and then try to manipulate. You’d be surprised how bad they are at that. But anyway, uh, that has taken up so much mental head space over the last decade. Has that hurt your belief in mankind too? There are days.

Yeah. You know, I try to be, uh, pretty optimistic by nature, but there are days when I’m like, man, everybody sucks. Yeah. It’s crazy. Yeah. It’s so discouraging ’cause like I’ll have this great idea I wanna work on, but I have to go deal with these, these fucking scumbags that are trying to rip us off. Yeah. Uh, another good example, uh, this was in the beginning, uh, PayPal was our only, uh, processor and I’ll get the payment processors as another challenge I had to overcome.

But, uh, well. Deal with, I wouldn’t say overcome, but, um, they had this thing where you could pay with, I don’t know what it was called this, some sort of like a eCheck or something. Uh, and like, I guess it worked like a check. You would pay PayPal. I don’t really understand it. But basically we would get a sale right away, but we wouldn’t get the money right away.

’cause it was a type of like, like a hold, like a credit card processing hold. Yeah. But they called it some sort of check thing. Mm-hmm. And I didn’t realize that. And like people would buy thousands of dollars worth of shit and then like, go cancel the check before we ever got our money. Wow. So, you know, we had, so how did you, how have you solved for that?

Well, you can just turn that feature off in paper. Okay. So that how I solve for that particular. Got it. So you learn your lesson on that one. Yeah. The hard way. A lot of, and a lot of these different things we didn’t learn. Learn. And so, especially the one I can’t talk about ’cause pending litigation mm-hmm.

Uh, until it was, you know, we lost a share. Yeah. So that, that’s a big challenge that. I don’t know that you ever will ever really overcome it, but we’ve had to build a better business to deal with it. ’cause we have a full-time, uh, what do you call it? Loss prevention division. We have software that helps track that.

And just our customer support people, which I’m very, very proud of by the way. It’s like our number one thing that I’m most proud of, I’ll talk about that in a second, but, um, have come to where they can just identify it by the certain like trends and things. Mm-hmm. So we’re never gonna fully win that battle, you know what I mean?

It’s gonna be something we’ll always have to deal with, but I didn’t expect that going in. Yeah. It’d be a problem. Yeah. So that’s interesting. Yeah, that’s a big challenge. Um, another one is I didn’t expect people not to know what they needed to buy. Uh, ’cause. Again, don’t wanna look down on humanity, but I am smart enough to know, buy what I know what I need to buy.

Yeah. Most people weren’t. Yeah, it’s interesting that you bring that up ’cause I think there really is, um, that might be a huge benefit, but I could see how that would be frustrating too. ’cause you’re like, well, it’s a tough, it’s right here in front of you. Like this is exactly what you need. And, and that’s a hard thing as a seller.

I know you’re not a trained seller, right. You had to learn that as you go. I’ve been fortunate enough to be trained as a seller and that is very difficult oftentimes because, you know, you’re trained, um, not to sell a customer what you think they need or what you want them to have, but to understand what it is that they want and what it is that they need, and then to put that in front of them.

But there are so many times that you’re meeting with somebody and you’ve done it enough times and you know enough about business. To recognize that what they actually need is different than what they’re requesting. Yeah. Well, and they just won’t see that to be the case. It’s even worse for us because like it’s a self-serve platform.

Uhhuh, people will buy stuff without talking to anybody. Yeah, yeah. Is, yeah. Yeah. So they’ve, they’re really, and what’s really, and again, light’s not fair. I’m not complaining, but what’s really not fair is if they buy the wrong thing, they don’t even blame the person that sold them the wrong thing. They blame us.

Yeah. And I, I, I don’t get the thinking because if you go to the mall and you buy something from the Gap, I think that’s still a store. I don’t go to malls. Yeah. You buy something from the Gap and it doesn’t fit you either. You might blame yourself, you might even blame the salesperson at the Gap, but you don’t blame them all.

Well, yeah, certainly. If, if you’ve, if you tried it on Yeah. And it kind of didn’t fit in the dressing room, and then you took it home after having a hamburger and it really didn’t fit then that’s kind of on you. Yeah. It’s not on the gap. Right. But even if it was on the gap, you certainly wouldn’t blame them all.

Yeah, no, you wouldn’t blame them all. You wouldn’t blame them all. Or the gap if it said size 34 waist. Yeah. And it, it, there was nothing that said that they run small and a 34 is actually a 33 and now it’s, you know what I mean? Like, I know it’s a weird analogy, but yeah, I think that that would be a difficult thing when you have a platform, you’re kind of expecting that people are gonna buy the thing and they know what it is that they’re buying, but it could also understand some of the services that you’re offering.

The people that are buying them are buying them because they are not experts in that service. They don’t know. They know that they have a hole. Mm-hmm. And they know they need to fill it, but they might not know exactly what materials they need to fill that hole. Right. That could be an interesting challenge.

I still don’t think it’s our fault, but it’s still our problem. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Because yeah. You know, so that’s frustrating. As again, a challenge will never fully overcome as long as we’re completely self-served. But you know, that’s a big challenge to overcome too. And then like. I don’t know what else. I guess just the, uh, the chicken and the egg problem I mentioned earlier is, is still a, is never gonna go away.

Like they have to have enough customers to serve freelancers. That’s a huge, so these, like, all these triggers as like, you know. Well, and what I’ve learned is it’s super easy to get freelancers. All I have to do is make a video or a post or something saying, Hey, if you wanna make an extra thousand dollars a month, sell this service.

Mm-hmm. And we’ll get flooded with freelancers. Uh, so we don’t spend a lot of time focusing on that. Yeah. Anymore. You’re trying to bring more of the con the, the companies, the, the, that you want to help customers Yeah. Customers to the, to the platform to identify the freelancers. Yeah. What’s hopping right now, you’re an expert at this.

Like what are you seeing is in the most demand for small to mid-size business owners? What are they using your service for the most? Well. In a perfect world, it would be much broader. But they mostly come to us for SEO because the audience came, the initial audience came from my SEO following. Mm-hmm. And that kind of led into our whole business.

So it’s what we have the, the strongest of. So SEO and that’s usually backlinks or, uh, like the stuff that people don’t know how to, they can’t do with ai. Yeah. Basically like links content, not really content anymore. I’ll talk about that in a second because that’s another challenge. But, uh, links, uh, local SEO stuff to rank in Google Maps is very, very popular.

’cause I. That’s a bit more abstract. Uh, things like that. We used to, and you talked about challenges. Uh, we used to sell a lot of content, like written content. Mm-hmm. Blog posts, website content, that sort of stuff. And was our number two category behind SEO. And it was consistently climbing. And then since October, 2022 when chat CPT came out, it is absolutely cratered.

Yeah. Because people don’t want to pay content writers anymore. Yeah. Push chat. They wanna push three buttons and get content. Write this for me. Yeah. And it’s not as good. I don’t care what anybody says. No, but I mean, they don’t care. Here’s the thing. It’s fast, but you have to edit it. Well, you would, you would have to edit it.

You, yeah. I mean, people don’t, you want to, you want to do something really fun. Download Grammarly. And chat GTP and then go into chat GTP and request it to write something for you. Then copy and paste that and put it into Grammarly and watch Grammarly just go nuts. ’cause it freaks out. ’cause the editing and the, the word usage is terrible.

Yeah. Then you copy and paste that and you put it back into chat, GTP and it almost explodes. They’re like, they don’t know what to do. Yeah. And that, that was a big hit to our revenue. But it also, it affected a lot of freelancers, which is hard for me to watch because, um, I’ve gotten a lot of really wonderful messages from freelancers in particularly in other countries, lesser developed countries mm-hmm.

Who like this, they’ll tell me how it completely changed their life. You know, making a couple thousand dollars a month to them is like making a million dollars to us. Mm-hmm. Like it got them outta the streets. And I’ve gotten some really, really personal stories from that. And a lot of them were content writers.

And that business has a shame. Yeah. Completely gone away because of that. Yeah. And you know, you talk about you gotta edit it first. You would think that you have to edit it first, but most people, they don’t. They don’t give a shit. No. They just go fast. Yeah. Yeah. So that has been a challenge that we’re just not gonna overcome, you know, because that’s just the way the world is going.

So we’re just building in things to help people write their own content and hopefully make it better. And you know, hopefully the really good free freelancers that sell, like really like high-end well researched or direct response copy will still do well. But the people writing blog posts, I think that business has gone forever.

So that’s tough. It’s getting tough. So SEO, what’s the secret sauce? Just, just for example, right? So we have a YouTube channel. I’m just like any other person. I’d love for our YouTube channel to spike and to grow. I refuse to buy subscribers through India or whatever. I refuse to do that. Um. So, and so I wanna build it completely organically, but I also understand that SEO is a magical thing that you could use to puts it out in front of more people.

So like, what would be, what’s kind of like the gimme two or three things that people don’t know about SEO that they should know? Okay, so there’s two things here. I I wanna answer your YouTube question first. Sure. Um, YouTube search is not where you get most of the traffic from YouTube. Interesting. It’s more from like recommended videos and showing up on people’s homepage and stuff like that.

Okay. So to do that you have to work the algorithm. Uh, I’m not great at that. I mean, I have a decent channel, but considering I’ve been doing it for nine years, it’s not nearly as big. And I hired an agency myself to help me with that. Um, play stack.co check them out. But, uh, they do a great job ’cause it’s like about the click through rate.

And you know how a lot of thumbnails are like stupid shit like. Like that. Yeah. Like that works. It sucks. It’s, it does. So, no, I, I will tell you, like, initially we were doing a very generic thumbnail, and I, I started looking at it and I thought to myself, you know, we need to do like some photography where we’re doing like an interesting pose or whatever, and immediately I saw a spike.

Yep. And then I’ve had people reach out to me on LinkedIn and be like, Hey dude, you could take your thumbnails to an even higher level where you essentially say, you know, in this po like there’s a quote on the thumbnail saying, here’s what you’re gonna get in the first 10 minutes of this podcast. So if the podcast is an hour and a half long, it’s, you know, a thumbnail that essentially says you’re gonna get this value outta the podcast.

Yeah. And that has to happen in the first 10 minutes of the podcast. And then people will last longer. People will click on it more often. I don’t know if that’s true or not. Haven’t tried it yet. Might be true. But I do see a lot of, a lot of content where the thumbnail says specifically, you’re gonna get five tips on how to increase your sales by 25%.

And so it’s podcast title, host and guest, and then it says, five tips on how to drive your sales by 25%. Yeah, I would think that’s actually will click on that. I think that was actually like too much text for thought maybe. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, you, you get what I’m saying though? Yeah. Yeah. Uh, yeah. For YouTube it’s the click through rate being the amount of people that were served.

Your video clicked it and then watch time is more important than views. So like a thousand views of one second is not worth as much as one view of the entire video. Yeah. So stuff like that, uh, so might be cracked that I have not cracked that code myself. So it might be positive if you have a YouTube channel.

Mm-hmm. And we’re putting out hour and a half, two and a half hour podcast somewhere in between. It might be wise for us to have a few podcasts in between that are five minutes long, probably 10 minutes long. ’cause you’ll get the full, people will watch the full five minutes. Well, it’s not the percentage, it’s the, um, actual amount of hours.

Yeah. Of watch time hours, watch time hours. Yeah. But that is a factor too, if people watch like 10 seconds of a video and dip. Yeah. That, that hurts. So it’s not something I’m good enough at to do myself either. Yeah. So, uh, and then as far as like website, SEO, there’s, it depends. That’s a kind of an inside joke in SEO the answer to every question is it depends.

It it, it really does. ’cause we do, we do SEO too, and like there’s a lot of variables to it, but just so people know, anyone who tells you that they’re gonna get you to one, two, or three on SEO, um, like they’re gonna guarantee it. Um. Expect to pay a lot of money for that because the big corporations have recognized that if they spend a whole bunch of money, they’ll get on that top.

Yeah. Uh, so I guess if I had to give like specific tips, it would be that the content is important. It’s not as important as it used to be. I mean, it is for conversion, but as far as ranking not, it’s not as important as it used to be. You still need to get it right and then links, despite what people are gonna tell you still work are more powerful than anything in Explain that a back, a back link is a link from another site to your site.

Hopefully everybody understands that the more powerful they are, think of it as votes. The more of them you get, the more power you’re gonna. But it’s not just about quantity, it’s about quality. So you have to get like the right relevance, the right power, and the right authority for lack of a better term.

Uh, I try not to say authority ’cause there’s a third party metric that uses authority as a ranking factor and it’s like nonsense. And where would these links go? Where are they presented? So yeah, what, where, where do they show up? When you say back links, so if you are on, let’s use our plumber example again.

He would find, uh, sites that sell what are called guest posts is one, is the more popular ways about it. There’s a million different ways he would find a, a site that is very powerful, meaning it has a lot of traffic and a lot of ranking, and a lot of stuff like that. Making a relevant post on that site and then linking to his site tells Google that, Hey, this site is this, this big authority site is saying that this other site is about plumbing and it’s good.

I should reward that. Ah, so that’s a very simple I simplified version. So would it, uh, in, in essence, would it be kind of like taking, like, let’s just take Instagram for instance, right? So you go on Instagram, there’s a post, somebody else originates the post, and you look at it, it’s got a ton of likes, a ton of shares, it’s got a ton of engagement.

So there’s a button you could hit that’s remix. Mm-hmm. So you could take that same video and remix it on your own Instagram and put it up. I kind of look at that as being like a soft analogy to it. It’s like this is already proven, I think to get a ton of traction. So why wouldn’t I leverage that traction?

Yeah. To my, to my Instagram. Yeah. I guess that’s sort of similar. I’m not good at Instagram, so I don’t Well, you get the analogy right? So you, so people are gonna go to this bigger site. I think in a better, uh, analogy would be an influencer. Shout out ick. Um, I, I can’t, I don’t do know, do enough pop culture to use a good example, but if, uh, one of their Kardashians says This lipstick brand is really good and I use it, and like they link over to it, then that’s gonna help that person get more.

Got it. Like the, the, I don’t know if you, how much you follow trends, but the guy with the morning routine that’s popular right now mm-hmm. He, where he is drinking like a certain kind of water, I bet that like. That’s a great example. I bet their water, that water, uh, I forget the name of the brand, but like I bet it’s taken off tremendously.

So, but that’s a, so when you say, that’s a very loose analogy. Yeah. So when you say these, the, the, the back link. Mm-hmm. How, how are you posting onto this other site? So it depends. Um, you, you can buy them. That’s where a lot of our business comes from. Uh, technically that’s against Google’s terms of service, but they don’t own the internet as much as they’d like to think so.

So we’ll do what works. Yeah. Fuck them. Um, basically you can just reach out to them and be like, Hey, I have a relevant site. Uh, I think that your audience would love my site. Can you link to it? You’d be stunned how well that works. Um, there’s, you know, there’s illegal ways you can get it. I’m not gonna share those ’cause I don’t want people to do them, but you just, there’s a lot of different approaches to it and like links that you might not think of as links are important too.

Setting up like your social media profiles as a type of link building because you always have the link that you mm-hmm. The get shit done experience. I’m sure you have like a Facebook page that links over to your website. Mm-hmm. That’s actually more important than people will tell you because it’s not, there’s do follow a no follow link.

A guest post is a do follow link which tells Google’s algorithm. They can follow that to the target. Something from like a Facebook is a no follow link where it tells Google, don’t follow it past this, but they still see it and they still helps them understand what your business is about and creates what’s called topical relevance or topical authority and it tells the Google or in other search engines, I’m trying to stop saying Google as the only search engine.

’cause that’s just not the case anymore. Yeah. But uh. That this site is trustworthy, so we should reward it. So it’s about building trust in the way and authority and the way you build trust is through, uh, having relevant sites mention you. It’s one of the reasons I’m here today. Yeah. Uh, is because I want to help our business by pe your site leaning to it, but also people viewing this and hopefully like searching us out and clicking Got it.

Through Google from us. So it’s, it’s almost like, Hey, look, I have a following now that you are on this show, my following is now seeing you. Right. Because you’re on the show, I vetted you. Mm-hmm. So I’m saying, Hey, this is a good, this is a good person. This is a good guest. This is a good businessman. So it’s, it, it, so that’s the human side of it.

Now, because you’re on this show, you have a following. Mm-hmm. And because you’ve agreed to come on the show, you’re essentially saying you’re following, Hey, this is a good show. You should follow that show. Yeah. In human terms. Yeah. That’s how that works. But you’re saying that it works in technology terms as well.

Yep. And there’s another advantage to it too, because like. Branded search traffic is actually very, very powerful. So if you, uh. Somebody’s watching this might go search legit after this and click. Yeah. That tells people, tells the search engine that people were looking for this site and they chose to go look at it.

So that means that it’s important and has some value and they know who that person is. As much as we wanna pretend like they, we don’t, they know who you are and they know that if you’re the right person for that, they’re gonna reward that even more. So there’s a search value to that. And again, it’s part of why I’m here.

And then like. As the world is changing, AI is becoming a type of search engine. It’s different, but people go to that for information. Yeah. People are going to chat ETP for answers. Yeah. And one of the ways that, I haven’t fully proven this yet, but I believe backed by some data that one of the ways you influence that is being mentioned as often as possible.

Mm-hmm. It doesn’t even have to be a direct link. Like if you were to just post information about me and not link to my stuff chat, BT again is gonna read your site whether you fucking want ’em to or not. Yeah. And they’re going to, they’re gonna see your name. Right. And like that way when people say, who’s somebody that’s good at this?

It’ll have that information. So is this a also a reason why, um, you know, quality content is important? Sure. Okay. But consistency and volume of content can be just as important because it, it’s gonna cause your name of your brand and you know the players within your organization to be seen on search engines, to be seen on chat.

GTP. In addition to being seen on those platforms. Yeah. So companies should be creating a ton of content all the time. Yeah. So I see these companies, you know, they have a company page and they, you know, they post on LinkedIn, let’s say once a month. Yeah. If that, if that, yeah. And they wonder why they’re not building a following.

They wonder why people are not migrating to their website as, as often as possible. Yeah. Um, that is an indication. You’re not creating enough, you’re not posting enough. So it’s not just the following in the algorithm of the platform, it’s also the fact that. Nobody, nobody knows who the fuck you are. Yeah.

And PE and, and including, including technology. Yeah. Doesn’t know who you are, so therefore can’t present you to more people. Yeah. Yeah. I often, this is a bit off topic, but I, I often say that the biggest problem that every single business has, and I got this from Grant Cardone, but uh, is obscurity. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. You have to overcome obscurity. And there’s two things to that. You have to get people to know who you are, and then that’s why you do as much of this kind of stuff as you can, but then you also need to make sure they don’t forget you. And that’s why I do a lot of what I call omnipresence marketing.

So, front of mind, baby. Yeah. So I run ads on every platform that you can think of, uh, to traffic from our website. So everybody that visits our website and then everybody that buys something and they get these two different variations of the ad. And I run that on Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, uh, Pinterest, YouTube, and even like stuff that you might not think of, like Reddit and Quora.

Yeah, you can, it’s put ads there that. We’ll show two people that have already visited your site or already seen one of your videos or something. And I have one video of me doing that across all of those. So you’re gonna see, if you visited my site researching this, you’re gonna see my face for the rest of your life.

Yeah. And I want that. Yeah, absolutely. And you know how, you know when it’s working when somebody tells you they’re sick of seeing you. Yes. I get, I get that. But the, the other, the nice way of saying that is I’ll often meet somebody, you know, I just had coffee with this, uh, this really nice gentleman and, uh, we’ve been following each other on LinkedIn and, you know, the ultimate compliment I can get as a creator is when I meet somebody in person for the first time and they say, I feel like I know you.

Yes. Yeah. That is the, be that, that like warms my heart because it makes everything worthwhile. It means that, um, I’ve broken that. That wall of comfort where I’m not in their eyes, just somebody that’s on their feed. They feel like they know me. Yes. Because I’ve given them reasons to know me and I show up consistently.

And, and then when they need the thing that you do, they associate that with you? Yes. When they’re ready. Yeah. They will buy when they’re ready. And this is the thing that I think a lot of CEOs and organizations don’t realize is that, you know, yes, you wanna sell to them right now, but people aren’t ready to buy right now and they’re gonna buy when they’re ready to buy.

Yep. So if you are constantly showing up when they’re ready to buy, you’re automatically in the first three. Yeah. Because you’re front of mind. They, it’s just name recognition. They constantly have seen. And if, if you’ve created content that shows who you are as a person and who you are as a brand mm-hmm.

It’s even more powerful because you all the ice is broken. Yeah. That some of that trust is already established because it’s like you, you’ve shown up authentically. And they feel like they know you. Yeah. And that goes, no matter how big you get, like Tesla doesn’t market at all. It’s based entirely because people know who Elon Musk is.

That’s, yeah. That’s it. Like he’s the ultimate, like, uh, and I don’t really like him as a person, but, uh, he, as he’s the ultimate influencer, he is like, yeah, his business is sell because of who he is. Well, that’s the same thing. I mean, there’s people that are loyal to Apple because they’ve are fanatics of Steve Jobs.

Mm-hmm. And, you know, there are people who will only buy Nike because they just, it feels like they get a piece of Michael Jordan. Yeah. Right. And, and so this is like the ultimate branding play. Yeah. Yeah. And re retargeting like I was talking about, it’s one of my favorite marketing strategies. ’cause you can get so granular too.

Like if you do YouTube, you can target people that watch X percent of your video. You can target your subscribers. You can target people that are like your subscribers. You can take your customer list and upload it and tend tell it to you, send ads directly to them. Or you can say, look at these people and find people like them and let me advertise to them too.

It’s just so, so how much should a company be spending? How, how? Like, well, let’s just ask you this, like, what is your budget monthly for paid ads? Like, what are you, what are you putting into paid ads? 15, 20,000. Not, not as much as some bigger brand a month. Yeah. That’s crazy. Crazy awesome. ’cause you’re not doing that.

You’re, the only way you’re doing that is if you’re getting a two to one return. Yes and no. Some of it’s branding. So it’s like indirect. Yes. And we know the branding is more of a long, long-term play. Yeah. But it’s not true. Direct response advertising us, A lot of people can get that kind of return at much higher ad spend than that.

Okay. So yeah, I, I mean, I know people spending six, seven figure a month on, on x. That’s what I’m saying. Yeah. That’s why I say like, SEO like it, you know, companies that like some boutique shop that comes in and goes, oh yeah, we’re gonna get you to the top of the Google list. It’s like, what’s your budget?

Well, a thousand a month. Okay, well you’re not getting to the top of the coast. Sorry. Yeah. ’cause there’s companies spending a hundred thousand Yeah. To take that number. I could, I could get somebody there for that. But for a thousand for a boutique shop, yes. Wow. I’m not saying that you should charge that.

You shouldn’t. No, no, no. I’m saying a boutique marketing company. Oh. Oh, okay. I haven’t meant have flour. No, no, no. A boutique marketing company that goes to, let’s say a contractor mm-hmm. That has a ton of competition in the area. Yeah. And let’s say they’re the fifth or sixth biggest and there’s two that are juggernaut huge companies that are playing the game.

Sure. Like it can be done, but Yeah. It’s, it’s tough. It’s funny you bring up that because like, uh, this kind of ties into both things we’re talking about. Like I, I do. A lot of like live streams on my YouTube channel. It’s the way I’ve found to engage with people. And uh, one of the best types of content you can do is just show people what you do.

And, uh, I did a, a case study or a live case study recently where I created a fake business in Pueblo, Colorado, which is a fairly big size city. It’s like a hundred thousand people. And we created a home remodeling company there. Uh, it doesn’t even exist. Uh, and we got number one for like. Every home remodeling term in Pueblo and in Google Maps, in organic in less than a month.

And I did the whole thing in public. And that’s driven us so much business. Yeah. People wanting to do, because you showed them exactly what is possible. Right. And it was less than a month. There’s a lot of people in Pueblo that are like, when is this legit general contracting coming to my house? We called it home remodeling Pueblo too.

Like there you go. Yeah. It gets calls all the time. Like I’m starting to sell ’em now. ’cause like I feel bad because people are genuinely, so this is the next business. You’re actually gonna start the home remodeling company in Pueblo. I probably just sell the leads. There you go. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, but that’s, you know, that’s how easy it is.

And for me, the value in that was one, it shows, look at what Chris did, because even though I showed them everything I did, I still come off as like a miracle worker. Yeah. Even though it’s like I literally just showed you, you can do this yourself, but they’d rather buy it from you. Yeah. Well that, see that’s the interesting thing.

I love that you just said that because I’ve had people say, you know what is too much? When you’re doing content, like I don’t wanna give them the secret sauce. And it’s like, no, you absolutely want to give them the secret sauce because they know that they can’t do it. But they need, they need 100% proof that you can.

Yeah. And so if they’re 50 50 on whether or not they can take this actual fact that you just prove to them works. If they’re 50 50 on that, they’d rather spend the money on the hundred percent guarantee and not have to worry about it. They want the return. Anybody that says that has a course they’re trying to sell you.

Yeah, exactly. And again, I don’t, you know, courses changed my life, but there’s also a lot of people that they gate keep stuff. Because they wanna sell you the information. Yeah. So, yeah. DIY you know, is there, there’s a lot of people out there that, that do that, but you know, there’s whole shows that are made on people that started a DIY project and screwed it up and now the contractor’s gotta come in and fix it.

Yeah. You know, there’s a television show on that. So like, you know, there’s a lot of people that want to do things on their own, but I think naturally the most prefer to hire an expert to do the things that they can’t do better than they ever could. Well, especially like people of a certain level of success.

I don’t give a shit about how to re learn how to remodel. Yeah, no, I just wanna give you my credit card and have you do it. Yeah. ’cause my time is better spent doing the thing I’m an expert at. Right. And you’re an expert at continuing home modeling example. You, you know. You know how to, I don’t even know enough about it.

To give a good example, you know how to do home remodel. I know. Yeah. I need my home remodeled. You know how to do that and I don’t. So you go do it. And plus I don’t want to know how, so, yeah. Yeah. So it, by giving the information out, there’s no, there’s very little downside to that. Alex, her moey is very good about that.

Yeah. Yeah. So he gives a lot of the secret sauce out. Yeah. As does, you know, as does Cardone. Yeah. Gary V these guys, and by the way, these guys have all built empires, whether you like what they stand for, what they have to say, what their beliefs and purpose is. What, let’s just throw all that out the window.

Yeah. And let’s just get to the even playing field. They have built businesses on essentially creating content daily. Mm-hmm. Like documentary style, where, you know, they just start talking about what they know. Yep. And just putting it out nonstop. And they’ve built empires. Um. From doing that. Think of all the businesses out there that literally, if they just flipped the camera on Yeah.

And spoke into it, and then just sent the clips out, nicely edited, they would. Double their sales. Yeah. I tell, I do some consulting and the first thing I tell everyone to do is get on YouTube and they’re like, well, I won’t get very many views. I was like, probably, but, and the way I get around that objection is if I could put you in a room with five or 10 of your best customers, would you be interested in that?

Yeah, of course. Well, if you make a video and it only gets five or 10 views, that’s 10 of your best customers. You just hope, my God, IJI love that. I literally, I literally, like four years ago, I called up my podcast advisor, different podcasts, call him up. I had a this episode and I thought this was the one man, this one’s going viral.

This, this guy that was the best guest. He’s got some name notoriety. Like, I felt like I was really good on it. I promoted it well, and the thing gets like two interviews, right? I’ve been there. And so I call him up and I’m like, I, I’m like, what am I doing? Like, what am I doing wrong? Right. And he had the best statement.

He goes, he goes, first off, I love you, but please shut up. Right? I’m like, okay. Um, and he says, let me ask you a question. How many times a week do you get a chance to stand up in front of 200 people and pitch your service and your brand and your thoughts for 30 seconds? Much less. An hour and a half. Yeah.

And I was like, probably once a year at best. He goes, well, you’re doing it every single week right now, so stop your whining. So your point like, who cares if you get five or 10 views or 2000 views? It’s more it, you’re, you’re speaking to your audience. Why would you not keep doing that? Yeah. Yeah. And it’s like the number one thing, and I know people, it’s funny that, like, that do like public speaking, like events and they’ll fly 15 hours to speak to 200 people.

Yeah. That won’t turn on their fucking camera friend in to speak to 40,000 in a week. Yeah. It’s like no sense to me. Yeah. It’s been like, I’m not a big youth. I relatively, I have like a 20 thou, 7,000 subscriber base, which is fine, but it’s That’s awesome for you two. Sure. But you know, it’s not, it’s not, you know, Mr.

Beast or anything, but like it drives so much business and creatively I find it very fulfilling. Yeah. But, uh, I don’t know why people are afraid to do it. I mean, I do, but get over it. Like the difference between winners and losers is they both get nervous and winners do it anyway, so. Ooh, I like that.

That’s a clip. Yeah, that’s clip worthy. I love it. Yeah. But it’s true, right? Like we, we’ve talked about it already. Like, you get nervous. I get nervous every time. Sure. I still do it. That’s the difference. That’s the difference. 100%. So let’s talk vision here for a second. So you’ve gotten the business to this point.

That’s no accident, obviously a lot of hard work. Mm-hmm. You talked about luck, but you took advantage of your luck. Clearly. You have a really strong understanding of what the hell you’re doing. You’re building a big falling. Um, so. What’s the next step? What’s the BHAG, the big hairy, audacious goal? What’s the vision for the company in the next few years?

Our ultimate goal is to have every business on earth using our platform. That’s what I, how we make all of our decisions is does this help get us closer to that? Mm-hmm. Now, is that possible? Probably not, but every decision we make is reverse engineered from that. Worth worse towards that. Yeah. So if it doesn’t serve that goal, we don’t do it.

So that’s obviously, you said a few years. That’s obviously more than I’ve used, but Sure. But meaning you’re creating a, you’re trying to create a platform that is, that markets to the masses. Uh, I suppose, yeah, there, according to chat, GBT, there are, and I’ve seen how much research I’ve done on this.

There’s 320 some million businesses in the world. I want every single one of them to be able to use us. Again, probably not possible, but like, that’s why not set aim for that. It’s definitely not possible if you don’t, if you don’t aim for it. Right. If I get 10% of that, that’s like billions of his You failed forward.

Yeah. You know, so that’s kind of the ultimate goal and it kind of goes into our philosophy and our slogan is think big. Uh, and I, I want everyone in their business to think as big as they possibly can. And that’s our goal too. So you talked about values. That’s our values to think as big as you possibly can because there’s, there’s no reason not to.

Like if. Yeah, it’s the way to be secure. Like when the war, when the world shut down five years ago, the only businesses that survived were everybody lost business. And if you’re at the top, you lose business too, but you still get to live. Mm-hmm. So there’s that reason to do it, but there’s also, if you have something that you believe is that good, and if you’re doing business, you should, you should want everybody that, that it can possibly help to see it.

So if I say that we help businesses, why would I wanna limit that to not all of them. Yeah. You know? Right. And, and again, it’s probably infeasible, but I, it helps us also have a framework for our decisions. Because otherwise you fall, I said at the very beginning, you have to have a reason other than to make more money than last month.

You still have to make more money. ’cause that’s how you keep things going and that’s how you keep score. But. If you don’t have a vision, it doesn’t, you’re gonna make bad decisions. Mm-hmm. Short term decisions, we have that vision for our, for ourselves. So I don’t dunno if that was the answer to that. No, it’s great.

I mean, it sounds like you’re very purpose driven. You have a pretty good idea of collectively what, what are your people like? Let’s talk about your people. Like I’m very, very proud of that. I mean, brought that out. I, I, I’ve figured, you know, when I saw the smile, so let’s talk about the people a little bit.

I mentioned our customer service earlier. Uh, we have, uh, when by a customer service, I mean, you, you, the little text box you bring up the mm-hmm. That, that type customer service, we have an average response time of one minute and 18 seconds. Great. Uh, which, you know, most times you, you’ve, you do one of those, you’ll be like, okay, we’ll get back to you within 48 hours.

Ours is average response cycles less than a minute and a half, four years. Mm-hmm. It’s been that way. Average close time of 12 minutes. So I get, that’s the compliment I get the most often is how amazing your customer service. Easy button. Yeah. Well, and if somebody’s pissed the. They diffuse it. Mm-hmm.

Whatever, whatever it is. Like that’s something I’m very, very proud of. I think that that comes from me having done tech support, as weird as that sounds. Mm-hmm. I think that was where learning how to do that, but that, that’s one of the ways we’ve distinguished ourselves. Like get, get ’em in neutral. Yeah.

Leave them better than they arrived. Yeah. And then, uh, as far as the people, we have people in six. Our staff is entirely remote. I work by myself. Everybody works alone. Mm-hmm. Basically, uh, we have people in six of the seven continents. I don’t have anybody in Antarctica. It’s funny, every time I say that, people are like, well, I’ll move the Antarctica if you get me a drop.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was like, you don’t really know what Antarctica’s like you were you and you and the aliens and the pyramids. Good luck with that. Yeah. But we have somebody in every continent other than an an Antarctica. Uh, it’s a hundred percent remote. There’s one person that lives semi near me. She lives like half hour away.

That’s the closest everybody else is in other countries. I think it’s like. 12 or 13 countries, 15 time zones. Uh, and they’re just all wonderful people. Like I know all of them individually, like, and there’s gonna get to a point where I can’t, but I know all of them individually, I like know their kids names and their pets names and what’s going on in their lives and things like that.

In the eight years we’ve been in business, we’ve never fired anyone, not one person. Uh, and we’ve only ever had two people quit and one of them was for unrelated like yeah. Health reasons. Uh, so very, very proud of that. And running a remote team is no joke. Mm-hmm. It’s no oil. A lot of work. Right. Because it’s always business hours somewhere.

Mm-hmm. So one advantage to having a remote team is, or international team is that it’s always business hours somewhere. So there’s always somebody that’s awake. The downside to that is it’s always business somewhere. Yeah. Or somewhere. So you always have to be awake. I would imagine running a, a fully remote team like that too.

One of the difficulties is human beings have emotions. They have, you know, things and it’s not like when you know, you walk into a brick and mortar building, you can look at the expression on somebody’s face and you could say, Hey, how are you? And you could tell by the reaction whether or not you need to ask a follow up question.

Like, no, really? How are you? Right. Little bit more difficult. Remote. It is. With many of them I’ve gotten to where I can tell that just by the way they respond to, yeah. Not even, how’s it going? Just like. I don’t know it, you would read the text and you wouldn’t see it, but I I’ll see it. Yeah. Just ’cause of how I know them.

Uh, you know, and some of them I’ve known for eight, nine years now. Some of them have only been a few weeks, but, uh, you know, I know very, very happy with them, so that’s great. Hopefully they, you know, they’ll, they should watch this, so I hope they see that. Yeah, please watch it guys. See, come on, you’re in, you’re in every continent for gosh sake.

Gen we’re trying to go worldwide here. They generally do watch our stuff. Sometimes I tell them to because I want to click through it. Sure. Yeah. That, I mean, well, I tell ’em the same thing here. I’m not so sure that they’re listening quite as well. But, uh, hey, we have like old companies. Let’s, let’s pay attention here.

You know, you have to come up with like a, a meeting structure. Like, I meet with my partner who is the co-founder. I meet with him once a week. I mean, we talk every day. Mm-hmm. Like, I talk to him out in the lobby here. Yeah. Like, uh, we have like a, a Zoom meeting every day. We’ve met in person four times in eight years.

Oh wow. And. Like three of those were just because we, one of us happened to be where the other one was. Yeah. Of a vacation or a business event or something. So for business purposes, we met twice or three times. Three times. So, you know, there’s that, um, where was I going on that? Uh, but like we talked, uh, then I talk to our chief of operations.

I have a meeting with her once a week as well. And then we have a team wide meeting where we can’t really have a full team meeting. ’cause too many times. Time zones. Yeah. But as many of them as can make it once a month and, you know, a few other odd admins meetings there. But, uh, you really have to come up with a structure for that.

But then for the rest of it, it’s all in Slack. I consider Slack to be our office. Mm-hmm. So that’s cool. Um, where would we find you if you weren’t working? What are some of the hobbies? What, how do you decompress? Like what, what’s your thing you go to when you’re not working? Where you for, and I’ll just give you an example for me.

Like, I could have a, a, a, a absolutely terrible day at work. I know I’m gonna go home to a happy family. Right. But even then, I don’t wanna bring it with me. So I might need to go to the driving range and smack some golf balls and it just is like, therapy for me kind of gets me back on track. I tend to come home smiling.

It’s just a passion that I have. I have to go do it. Like I can’t miss it. What is that for you? I’m glad you asked that because like I, I gave you kind of like the whole history of there. What I left out was during those eight, 10 years, whatever the number is that I was building the business, I kind of let everything else go.

Like I didn’t really have, I mean, I have friends, but I wasn’t really associating with acquaintances. Yeah. Well, I mean, they were still friends, but I wasn’t associating with ’em anymore. Uh, you know, I was, I let my health go. I gained a lot of weight, you know, got outta shape unhealthy. I didn’t really have any, I would work and then go to bed, so, and I didn’t, and it worked, you know what I mean?

Yeah. Like, I’m glad I went through that. So, sacrifice you had to make, I guess. I mean, I probably didn’t, but I did. Yeah. Didn’t have to, but I did. Uh, and then around 2022, I remember things in ways of years. Uh, at some point I was like, I, I gotta fix this. ’cause the health problems started showing up and I had no hobbies.

So I, you know, I started fixing my health and I got, kind of got into like, health in general, like biohacking and sleep optimization and stuff like that for a while. Uh, and then I decided I needed to make some friends. So I started making friends. I started dating again, not to get like too personal, but I let that part of the life go for a while too.

Mm-hmm. Because, you know, you were dating your business. Yeah. I mean, nothing will fuck a bad, a good business up. Better, better than a bad relationship. Yeah, sure. I’ve seen that happen. Yeah. But, uh, I let that go for a while and I didn’t really have any hobbies. And then, uh, I. I, I got into, back into a few things, a few years, like when I was in my early twenties.

I’m gonna be 47 this year, but, uh, in my early twenties I did martial arts for a while. I did, uh, kung fu. Mm-hmm. And I got back into martial arts. I started taking boxing and Hai and uh, that helped me both get into shape, but also it helped me make some friends, and then it helped me just get out of the house.

It also had a weird effect on my schedule because it was at six o’clock, so I had like to get everything done. Had to stop right. Exactly. So that, that helped a lot. Uh, and then when I was 45, I actually competed in a kickboxing tournament. Nice. I wanted to prove to myself at that age that I could still do that.

Yeah. I lost, but you know, I, I got through the full thing and like, well you, you might’ve, you might’ve lost and didn’t get the hardware, but you won from the standpoint of you have that story forever. Yeah, exactly. I mean, my a my opponent was 25 years younger than me. Yeah. That makes a difference. I mean, I didn’t get knocked out.

Like, I, I didn’t get embarrassed, you know what I mean? I, I, you know, somebody’s gotta lose. So, but anyway, I did that. Um, and, uh, I, it’s fun story. If you’ve ever, I dunno if you did like any, I have any of my YouTube videos, but the background, I have a bunch of like bobblehead. Yeah. Yeah. I saw you’re a collector.

Yeah. Well that started on a whim. ’cause like one day I was in the mall and I was just, I was in a store. I think it was a, what’s the video game store? Uh. GameStop. Mm-hmm. Uh, and I picked up one that’s kind of neat. Let me grab, bought that one. Just kind of like, it’d be cool thing. And I went home and started like researching them and I was like, holy shit.

This is like a whole thing. It’s a thing. Yeah. With like thousands of variations. So every week I would just buy one or two and sometimes six or seven. Yeah. I just started putting ’em in the background because like I didn’t really have anywhere else to put them. And it’s just kind of a part of that. It makes for really cool podcast scenery.

It does. Yeah. And like people ask about it now. Yeah. Yeah. And like it helps my engagement there. It is important to have those aesthetics on a video content because while people are paying attention and hopefully they’re really engaging and taking notes on what you’re talking about and teaching or whatever.

Mm-hmm. It does help to have some optics besides you that kind of captivate people’s eyes. Yeah. And when people will like leave comments about it, which is good for your engagement. Yeah. But I also sometimes wear like a nose strip. Uh, I don’t have it on today. Yeah. Like I wear that and that gets a lot of comments.

Creates a commonality. Yeah. Like, hey, I wear that too. Or Hey, I’ve got that same, yeah. People accused me ripping off Alex or Mosey because he Okay. Wear those too. Or just wanting to breathe better. Yeah. That’s what I tell I it’s like, yeah, that, yeah, I did rip him off. I, we both love to breathe. Ah, we’re both odds of genetics.

Exactly. Yeah. I told you I got into biohacking. That was one of the things that I got from it and it’s helped a lot, but it’s also helped with YouTube engagement ’cause people will either like criticize me and like, I don’t give a shit. That’s a good important thing to bring up. By the way, we’ve talked about personal branding is if you do that you have to be prepared for people to hate you.

Yes. Because like. You could be the nicest person in the world and some people are still gonna hate you. Well, they hate themselves. That’s why they have to hate you. Sure. But some people can’t handle that. So if you’re somebody that can’t handle that, either get tougher or accept that personal branding isn’t for you.

So it’s Yeah. Don’t accept that personal branding isn’t for you. Get tougher. Yeah. I mean, that’s the real thing. It’s, I mean, he gave you two options because there really is only one option. Like, get tougher. Yeah. I mean, it’s like, look, the, the thing is if you go to a mall, there’s 150 people that are looking at you, turning their nose up at you.

Um, they just don’t have the guts to say that they don’t like your shirt or like your face. Mm-hmm. Or like the way that you carry yourself or whatever it is. They just don’t have the guts to say it, but they’re sure as hell thinking it. The difference is on YouTube or TikTok or Instagram or LinkedIn even.

Um, they feel like it’s okay to say that they don’t like your face. Yeah. Um, or the way that you speak or communicate or whatever it is because they’re behind a keyboard. Yeah. So don’t think that it’s just, you’re being trolled because you’re on social media, you’re being trolled every day. Everywhere you go.

Always. It just seems more, they just aren’t saying it because they don’t have a keyboard to hide behind. And you’re reaching way more people. Yeah. So you’re more likely going to reach, you’re gonna find the jerks. Yeah. Yeah. So, but, uh, I’ve gotten to where I get amused by it. Oh, it’s funny. I’ll even go back at them just to, oh God, I love it.

I get trolled on, on YouTube. I’ve, I’ve developed, I’ll have this post. It’s like totally inspirational. The guest says something brilliant about how they saved a baby’s life or whatever. And, and like, I’ll, I’ll look at like the likes on there. I’m like, why are there four dislikes on this? Like, who doesn’t like saving a baby?

Like, what is happening? People? So I, you just gotta know. And then I have one person that wrote a comment that was essentially like, um, this is a bald guy that is a know-it-all that is literally just talking about nothing for. Um, 59 seconds on this clip. I’ll save you time. Don’t look at the clip and also clearly don’t look at the full episode.

So of course I responded back like, Hey, why don’t you crawl back into the hole that you came out of? Like, do you have nothing better to do? Yeah. And then he responded back, like, of course he did. You can’t, you can’t take a little bit of a critique. You’re a creator. And I was like, that’s not a critique.

That’s you being an asshole. That’s different. Yeah. Like if, if you, if it’s a critique, let’s gimme some advice. What should be a better clip for you? Yeah. But it wasn’t, it was just you being an asshole. And then of course he disappears. Yeah. And you know what one that works really well is, thank you for being a fan.

Like Yeah. Yeah. That’s, you have like kill him with kindness. Well, and it’s not even like, it’s hard. You’re clearly being sarcastic. Yeah. But like if it’s true too. If they’re watching every video, even though they hate you, they’re still a fucking fan. Yes. So I don’t care. Another one, like, um, kind of crass, but like, uh, somebody once told me, just replied and said, you suck.

I was like, well, your mother taught me how. Oh, okay. Yeah. So that, I got that one from Kurt Engle, actually. He’s a professional wrestler, but, uh, yeah, I dunno. I got to where I enjoy it and I play with him a little bit, but it used to bother me. Yeah, of course. And, and look, the, the bigger you, the bigger your falling becomes, the more it it that’s gonna happen.

And that’s why it’s also so important that when you get positive feedback, don’t brush it off. Say thank you, engage. Mm-hmm. Make sure that you build community by, you know, accepting the compliments. I’ve always found that, you know, it’s hard to get compliments when people give them to you. Like accept them.

And by the way, like when you stiff arm somebody and you’re like, nah, you know, hey, I’m just a guy doing my thing. Like when you do that. You’re kind of, you’re minimizing that human, like, don’t do that. Like let them feel like, Hey, that was so appreciated because that, that gives them validation. They want the thank you.

Oh, absolutely. Well, and I think we’re taught too much to be humble about that. Like, yeah, people think they’re doing the right thing by like saying, no, really, but, you know, just say thank you even, you can even add that after. But like, thank them for their, I think everyone, in fact, a con, a common compliment I get is people will DM me to thank me for some piece of content.

I don’t even remember me and I, and I replied, Hey, thank you, you know, whatever. And they’re like, I can’t believe you actually replied. Yeah, they’re actually, they’re, they’re interestingly shocked. Yeah. I’ll get dms at, you know, 1245 at night and I, I don’t sleep well. Shocking. Um, and I’ll reply and they’re like, holy cow, I can’t believe you replied, replied like right now.

I’m like, why? Holy cow. I can’t believe that you sent the note first right now. So we’re both awake. Let’s talk. Right? Yeah. Um, yeah, I, I, I, I really, uh, I really appreciate where you’re coming from. Um, and you know, it’s great when you surround yourself with really, really great people. Mm-hmm. Uh, the visions sounds fantastic.

You’ve overcome adversity and, and some of these different things. So like, where do you, where do you get your purpose from? Like where, what’s, what’s kind of the fire lit under you? I know that you, you’re not married, no kids, right? We talked about that. Mm-hmm. A lot of people would lean into like, well, I do it for my wife, my kids, and this and that.

You did obviously have a great relationship with your mom. Mm-hmm. Like what’s the thing? There’s always a thing behind the thing that is inspiring somebody or giving somebody a sense of purpose. Like what’s the purpose for you? What are you doing it for above and beyond your employees and the money.

Well, if, if, the way I look at it is, if you don’t make an impact on the world, what was the point? Like, we’re all gonna be gone someday and most of us are gonna be forgotten. But it doesn’t, just because you’re forgotten doesn’t mean that what you did doesn’t matter. And I’m want to do, have as much of an impact as I can because otherwise, what’s the point?

Like, I don’t get the laptop lifestyle folks that do it just, and nothing against them. I, I do understand the appeal, but I don’t, that wouldn’t satisfy me to just do it. To have in as much pleasure and enjoyment and fun mm-hmm. Outta my life. I wanna do something that makes an impact on the world. Like, you know, there’s I in business is the way to do that.

And like, there’s only a handful of businesses that have done that. And I mean there’s, like I said, 300 million does, or 300 billion I think it was whatever the number was. It’s a lot. How many of them can you actually name, you know? Mm-hmm. I want, I want to be one of those that you can actually name because.

Not because I need the ego. Fuck. ’cause I got a pretty big ego as it is. Uh, I want to do that because those are the ones that have had the biggest impact in the world. I mentioned Steve Jobs earlier. He didn’t just wanna make really cool devices. He wanted to do that. He wanted to change the world. He, his exact quote was, I wanna put dent in the universe.

And, uh, that was really inspired. Like, he, like when I read that, it like articulated something that I kind of already thought. Mm-hmm. And I want to, I want to do something like we have this internal expression at legit, and I put it in some of my presentations sometime, but one of the is that, that hope is you.

Uh, and we think the way, what that means is that everybody we interact with, they don’t really need a website. They don’t need service. They just need some hope that, that what they’re doing will make things better for them. And I’ve, and it’s easy when you’re dealing with a lot of customers every day for it to be whatever situation comes up is just another one of those.

And the way that I, I’ve trained them to remember it is that you are, I. Giving that person that hope that they need. So that’s as far as how we want to affect people. We want to give them hope and that that hope is us or that hope is you when you’re, you know, grammatically using it that way. And that we want to affect every business in the world because that’s the way that we can have an impact and way I can have an impact.

So everything I do is in service of that. It’s a beautiful sentiment. Alright, let’s get a little bit of your wisdom and then we’re gonna wrap this bad boy up. Okay. How long do you think we’ve been podcasting for, by the way? Maybe 90 minutes. Wow. Pretty good. Hour and 42 minutes so far. Pretty good Guess, um, give your three.

There’s, there’s a lot of people I think that are listening that, that are any career right now and are thinking about. Making the jump. The name of the podcast is the Get Shit Done Experience, and we’re talking entrepreneurs, authors, athletes, people that are getting it done. Top one to 5%, right. That have all made sacrifices, made the big jump.

You know, I often talk about our CEO Tim, like the, the thing about Tim that resonates the most with me is that he’s just got guts. Mm-hmm. He just, you, you know, he believes in himself and he went and did it, and he just keeps building. And I, I, I really admire that and I really admire that about you and all of the guests that I’ve had on that are doing big things, well, they didn’t do that on accident as, as humble as they might wanna be.

Uh, and typically they have a formula. So I’m curious for you if, as you look back and you kind of had, had eight years to build this, and I’m sure you have your moments where you sit back and you go like, how the hell did I do this? Mm-hmm. Right. What, what would be three nuggets that you would give to, let’s say somebody who’s about to make that entrepreneurial journey, or somebody who just started the entrepreneurial journey, or somebody who’s, you know, starting to think about making the entrepreneurial journey.

What would be three nuggets you would give them of, of wisdom that you’ve learned? Uh, of best practice or, uh, process or way of thinking Mindset. A practical thing would be to keep your personal expenses as low as you possibly can for as long as you possibly can. Uh, that helped me tremendously in the beginning.

’cause I had a really like inexpensive place that I was living and all my stuff was paid off and it’s, uh, it allowed me to invest my personal, I didn’t really, I don’t really buy things other than Bunco pops. I don’t really buy things and having, and at least in the beginning, like having that flexibility helped a lot like it.

And then getting, and that kind of ties into the next thing is, the reason I don’t have a lot of things is because I don’t get any purpose from that or satisfaction from that. So you might get into a line, a question I get a lot is what should I, uh, what’s selling right now that I can get into? It’s like, don’t do it for that reason.

Like, you might get good at it, but you’re gonna hate it. Uh, you have to do something that you can work on for 18 hours and realize, not realize and never feel it. Yeah. Like so have a. That’s where happiness comes. Happiness isn’t a thing that you can achieve, but like satisfaction comes from doing things that.

Actually fulfill you. Now if they don’t have a financial component to it, like then you can’t do that as a business. So I’m not telling you to follow your passion ’cause that shit’s overplayed too. Your passion might be playing video games. Unless you’re gonna be a streamer, that’s not gonna be a business.

You better be really good at it. Right? So you, you, your passion has to be something that makes you money, but you also can’t do something me for money. That’s what having a job is. Mm-hmm. Uh, and no offense to my employees I tried to make. Yeah, sure. But, but yeah. You know, so have a purpose. Keep your personal expenses as low as possible and then know, uh, have a goal for your business in the beginning that informs every decision you make.

’cause otherwise, and I’ve said this several times in this podcast, but otherwise, you’re gonna be making the decision that makes you more money than last month. And that’s not only is that not sustainable, but there’s no great business that, uh, that’s ever worked that way. And then, okay. Elaborate on that.

No, when you say decision making, you’re saying you gotta play the long game. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I guess that’d be a, a bit more basic. So don’t make shortsighted decisions because it’s gonna impact you positively that month. Right. But it’s gonna hurt you for the next three years, like Right. Which also goes back Yeah.

You, you’d rather take the hit for the month ’cause it’s gonna help you for the next three years, which goes back into keeping your expenses low because, well, your personal and your business expenses low because you might be tempted to take on funding, like, uh, investors. Mm-hmm. If you do that, you’re gonna have to start making quarterly decisions, even if they don’t make sense.

Yeah. Just ’cause you gotta report. Yeah. So, and then, uh, the last one, where was what, one more I was gonna say, I forget, I dunno. The last, I guess the last would be to just, uh, like I said, have a purpose for what you’re working on and then just to, not to make decisions towards that. Because if you don’t, it’s just gonna be whatever.

Oh. That’s what it was gonna be. Is, is, is, uh, try not to try to get over the ego of you. Nobody can do this as well as I can. Uh, because a, every entrepreneur I see goes through that. Mm-hmm. Where, and you know, you are. The one side, you’re right. No one’s ever gonna care about your business as much as you do.

Mm-hmm. But you literally can’t do it yourself. Name one important business from a solopreneur ever. There isn’t one. No. So. You have to hire people. And even if there’s the one thing that there’s a cap to in this world is time. And the only way you can get more time is to get more people. Mm-hmm. So, ’cause they have time.

Right. So even if like one person does something 80% as well as you, or 75% as well as you, that still gives you a hundred percent of that time back. Yeah. Yeah. You even more, I took way too long to learn that lesson myself and uh, so you might have to go backwards by hiring people. You might have to take that hit and float.

That cost the cost, but they’re ultimately over a period of time, it’s gonna, it’s gonna pay dividends provided that they’re productive and they do their thing well. And so not, not just the cost, but like the, them not performing it as well as you can. Mm-hmm. Which by the way probably isn’t true. You’re probably not as good as you think you are.

Yeah. Whatever it is. But I’d rather have 10 people operating at 85% effectiveness. Right. Than having, you know, two people running at 110% ’cause they’re gonna burn out. Right. And then once they do that one or two things that you give them and that’s all they do, they’re gonna get better at it than you were anything.

Yeah. Yeah. Unless they’re just not a good hundred, they get mastery. Yeah. Specialist. Yeah. They’re gonna start, like, even now sometimes I, I find out stuff that’s going on in my own business. I had no idea. Mm-hmm. That they were doing it and they’re doing it. We so Well. Yeah. And like, that’s great. I don’t know even where to find, like sometimes I, I joke that I’ve become like.

The Colonel Sanders of our business because I’m just like the face on the sign. Yeah. That’s a beautiful thing. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe not that perfect. Turn you into a caricature. Yeah, yeah. You know, I mean, I still do, I still work, but mostly what I do now is make decisions and do this. Yeah. Like, is like drive the business.

You become the Yeah. You become the promoter for your own brand. Yeah. So I, I, I gave you like seven, but that’s, it’s great. Hey, seven is better than three Chicago Bears. Are you listening? Seven points is better than three points. Yeah. Let’s just let that soak in. Final question. Sure. Um, and I, and this is always important because, you know, again, um.

I truly do believe, and I’ve learned this, I didn’t know this for a long time. I thought motivation was far more important than discipline. I thought I could motivate myself into all types of things, and I thought I could pump myself up and I could pump other people up. And, you know, you hit a brick wall and you, you fail and you get dragged on the street and you get all bloodied up and you start to realize, whoa, wait a minute.

Discipline is probably a little bit better. So then I really got into this discipline thing and I, I really figured out that, man, when I’m disciplined, I’m at my best. And, and that’s so important, but we also need to be inspired. Mm-hmm. And inspiration, I think is, is, uh, a powerful thing. So leave our listeners with some inspiration, some words maybe that were advised to you, that, you know, center you, that you keep on the front of your mind or things that you’ve maybe told to an up and coming employee and it’s helped them to kind of get their mindset right and get to the next level or just, just anything that is, you know, a way of, of being, a way of living that, that has helped you to get more shit done.

Um, I guess just remember that you, that what you do matters, like no matter what your job is or who you do. Some reason you, uh, you, I talked about having an impact, like I. You know, not everybody has to have a global impact. You might have that one thing you said to that one person 10 years ago could have an impact.

So remember that you can have an impact on somebody, whether it’s yourself or someone else, and just do that as often as you can, like to, uh, do it purposely when you can, but realize that you’re doing it, whether you think you are or not. I’ve had the. The like incredible experience of having people come up to me and say that that video you made in 2017, like I did that in a, like I started my whole business from it and it was just some shit where one day I like decided to make a video and like, so you having a bigger impact than you?

I think you do. You matter more than you think you do And you can take that and put do it intentionally and have figure out how. Absolutely. Awesome. I love it. Ladies and gentlemen, that has been Chris m Walker. Thank you so much for joining us. We appreciate it. And I just wanna to remind you, sir, you got shit done.

Have a great day. Thank you. Cheers.

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