The Ultimate Persuasion Technique To Make More Sales | Ed Mylett

So, hey guys, I'm calling on all my friends here in the audience for a little bit of help. We're conducting an audience survey at gum.fm.slashmightlet. And we want to hear from you so we can make things here even a better experience for you and create content that you want. You know, we all know this, there's ads on our show, right? So we want to improve the experience, but in order to do that, we need to know a little bit more about you. So my friends in the audience, we want to improve that experience. So please help us. The survey is quick, easy, and it's a free way to support the show. If you'll take two minutes, you'll be helping us out so much by doing this. So go to gum.fm.slashmightlet to fill out our audience survey. That's g-u-m.f-m-slash-mightlet. So hey guys, I'm calling on all my friends here in the audience for a little bit of help. We're conducting an audience survey at gum.fm.slashmightlet. And we want to hear from you so we can make things here even a better experience for you and create content that you want. You know, we all know this, there's ads on our show, right? So we want to improve the experience, but in order to do that, we need to know a little bit more about you. So my friends in the audience, we want to improve that experience. So please help us. The survey is quick, easy, and it's a free way to support the show. If you'll take two minutes, you'll be helping us out so much by doing this. So go to gum.fm.slashmightlet to fill out our audience survey. That's gum.fm-slash-mightlet. This is the Edmillet Show. Hey everyone, welcome to my weekend special. I hope you enjoy the show. Be sure to follow the Edmillet Show on Apple and Spotify. Links are in the show notes. You'll never miss an episode that way. Here's our first guest. Welcome back to Max Out with Edmillet. So excited. I've got sitting next to me here today, the birthday boy. And this gentleman right here has become really, I was telling him off camera, this guy has become really a cultural icon in the fitness and apparel business. And so many of you that are seeing the shot right now already know who he is, but if you don't know who he is, I want to start off by introducing to you one of the real leaders on social media, real leaders in the fitness industry and the apparel industry. And really for young people out there too, somebody that gives hope and inspiration because of his background. So I'm so excited this guy's here today. We've been putting our cows together to do this finally. So Randall Pitch, welcome here brother. Thanks for having me. Good to have you. By the way, happy birthday. Cheers. We're drinking a little whiskey. Thank you. Yeah, it's my birthday. We're drinking a little whiskey. Hope you guys don't mind that. This is not our first drink, but we're still in a good state of mind to give you a good interview. So yeah, thank you for being here, man. Of course, of course. I appreciate it. So tell everybody a little bit about, you know, just your upbringing, kind of how you came up, your family life, you know, community, that kind of stuff. Just set the tone for you. Yeah, for sure. So yeah, like you said, I grew up on the east side of Long Beach where there was just a lot of gang activity, a lot of poverty there, a lot of section eight housing going on. And I was part of that, you know. Section eight's government housing, everybody. Right, there you go. My mom came over here as a refugee from the Khmer Rouge, the genocide she survived. So she came here with my dad and they divorced when I was three. And I don't, I'm not like a sad dude when it comes to divorce because I understand it because for those out there in the Cambodian culture, the marriage was arranged. It was an arranged marriage. It was arranged marriage. So I like, if my mom didn't like my dad, then it's so be it. But the way it is, my dad was always there and my mom was always there. It was just two separate things, you know. And by the way, just real quick, stay on that for a second. People don't, it's just historically, because I read about this before I knew you, but when he tells you the Cambodian genocide, you're talking about literally millions of people, right? More than the Jewish genocide. That's unreal. I mean, it's unimaginable that your mom fleed, your mom and dad, fleed just to get to this country. I just want to say one thing to you about that too. There's all this conversation in the world today about immigrants. And I was going to tell you something. I can't stand the demonization of immigrants because you and I both know some of the most hardworking, loyal, patriotic people in the world. Yes. People like your mom, right? Exactly. They're the hardest working people in the world. I just want to say that to set the tone, because I don't think you come to become what you've become without your mom. Exactly. Is that true? Yeah, no, she survived so I can do this. It's amazing. So I can get this freedom and live the life she never had, because you can see that and live through me. Did your mom, when you were, I bet you didn't, but I'm just curious, did your mother ever like talk to you about being better than her or having a better life as it ever was? This is like survival all the time. It was kind of a little bit of both. Really? But it was always do better, go to school, do better. They didn't really talk about the war. They didn't really talk about, no, and this goes for the whole Cambodian community that lives here in the States. They don't really like to talk about the war. I don't know what it is, and the younger generation can relate to me for sure, but it's now it's, they're opening up when we ask them these questions, where we're a little bit more growing up and really digging into our own history and trying to learn. Yeah. When we ask questions, then they open up. But besides that, I think they just want to sweep it and throw it on the rug and it's like, hey, that's the past. When we talk about it, you guys are free, live. Do you think it's, that's interesting. So if you ask, she'll tell you now, but when you were coming up and you're living in a really rough environment, she's not sewing into you all these stories from back home. No, never. I think it was maybe the parenting of what they thought was right or was good. Let's not scare the children of these past history or, you know. I don't even know about this, so I'm curious. So do you think that helped you assimilate into this community, into this culture more, was the Cambodian community still very isolated in its own community when you grew up? It was kind of isolated, but now it's out there more with the help of Angelina Jolie. Yeah. Actually, she helped bring the awareness of the culture out. Yes. So it's become more mainstream and stuff as far as the history and what happened in the country. Okay. But so you grew up with like literally gang activity around you outside the front door constantly. Gang activity, Mexican gangs, black gangs, Cambodian gangs, Asian gangs, everything. Were you in one or were you never participated? No, I never participated. It was, I had friends that I skated with that you either chose to go skateboarding or you go gang bang. So there's two cultures, skate culture and gang bang culture. Yeah, but see what people don't realize over there in Long Beach too is sometimes you don't choose to be in these gangs. You get jumped in from the streets and it's like, okay, now you're in. If you want out, then you let us know, you know, because I had close friends that are in gangs that told me about this. Okay. So I just jumped, luckily enough. I want to learn. I want everyone else to learn. You get jumped out too. Like if you say I want to get out, is there a way out? If you want to be out, do you get jumped out? For some gangs, I can speak on behalf of some of my friends that if you want out, then yeah, you can get jumped out. You get jumped out, literally just the shit beat out of you out. Yes, or you've done enough dirt, which they call it, and then they give you the freedom. Yeah, you're good. You've done enough for the gang and you're good. So how did you avoid it? I just stuck with skateboarding and just stayed away from the neighborhoods that I knew were heavily with gang activity. What did you speak growing up? What language did you speak? English. English always. Was that what you were speaking in your house or did you speak that outside your house? I spoke it everywhere. You did. In English, yeah. My mom spoke to me in Khmer and then I would just respond in English. You would respond in English. Yeah. I can understand it. No kidding. Okay, so you grew up in a really, really rough environment. And so were you always, this is so, you're talking about an icon here in the industry. You're talking about a man who's built, he's 30 years old today by the way, which I think is a significant birthday. At least for who it was for me. I'm not a young guy anymore. I'm a man now. You're a man before that and I know you've built this man business, but for me 30 was kind of a big birthday. Yeah, stepping stone. It was only 17 years ago for me. You and I are basically the same age. We're basically the same age. So you grow up like this, real rough environment. Were you always a little bit entrepreneurial? How do you start into, I mean we get to live fit, but before we get there, how do you start in, did you eventually make a t-shirt for something? How'd that start? So check this out. On the streets when we were skateboarding, a lot of the kids' parents were just, they had to go to work. During summer days we would just go out, get maybe five bucks from our parents here and there. And I remember literally trying to make money on the side. If I had two skateboard decks, I would literally, hey who wants to buy a skateboard, my old one for 10 bucks. We would hustle that. So you were already a hustler? Yeah, I didn't know that at the time. I would exchange things that I had extra for some money. I was like, yeah, I'm gonna make some extra cash. Here's some wheels, you want it for five bucks? Cool. Yeah, straight up. So you're already negotiating, you're already hustling a little bit. Really young. I was building that very young and I didn't know now that that's what it's turning me into. Yeah, so there's a little bit of that gene in you like somehow already. That's interesting. So how's the first, how do you end up making a shirt? How's that start? What started that? So the whole shirt thing, so I've been in the clothing industry before, the fitness industry far before. Clothing before fitness. I didn't know that. Yeah, a lot of people don't know that. In high school, I played in a hardcore band. I played drums in a band and in that period. What's a hardcore band? Explain that to everybody. A lot of screaming. Okay. You know about like a punk band or like my generation? Punk hardcore metal band. I don't know what kind of bands that can relate to like today, Tare maybe. There you go. Okay. So you were a drummer? Yeah, I was a drummer in a band and we already tied it up when you were younger. When I was 18. Yeah. You had your first tattoo at 18? First tattoo at 18. Is that because like mom wouldn't let you or like you just never thought about it? Yeah. Yeah. Mom's like, yeah, tattoo you out of the family. All right. All right. And then 18 and then fully blasted. Okay. Then you blew up. Yeah. Blasted. But yeah, so from being in a band, you know, you need merchandise and I was like the creative kid, you know, I was like, hey, let's get some fucking shirts that have our band name on it, you know? So I decided to take a graphic design class in high school. Here we go. This is my sophomore year. Here we go. And that's when I first started learning Adobe Photoshop. And in that class, they did one course on how to make a t-shirt from burning the emotion to making the screen literally from like silk screening. Okay. To applying, yeah, emotion to burning the screen in the red room to putting on the screen on the press and still screening and then drying it. Okay. The whole, the whole process. So you're like 15, 16? Yeah. I was like, I was doing that whole thing and to me, obviously I was learning it, but I was having fun at the same time. I was like, I just want to fucking dope design. Yeah. So I was just so concentrated on making the perfect design for my band. And then obviously the process came with it because you had to do it. And then I made it, went to the shows and started selling the merch. At the shows for your band. Exactly. That's how it starts. That's how we get money. That's how we get paid. You know? Okay. I believe this about you because I've, I've, I'm fascinated with this man just so you know, like I had a little bit of a man crush on him before I met him. And I haven't had that on my show. I've had all these athletes on here and, you know, well-known business guys. My first real man crush in business was you, which is a little bit creepy, but it's true. Right? Like, because he's this, he's very unique. Like he's this jacked up dude. He's built this great brand. Spilling whiskey all over himself. That means you've had too much whiskey. But I got him a little loose for you here, everybody. But no, but like, because I think you're really probably at heart. I think you're an artist. Mm-hmm. Like I think, you know, the fact that you were in a band, the fact that you created, you know, these shirts, I think you're a creative, brilliant artist. And the results of your brilliance is people love your art, right? They love your brand. They love the look of it, right? I think that's the first thing. So, okay, so you got the shirt, you got the shirt skill, the art of doing it. Now you made a little bit of money from it. Where do you end up going from there? So obviously the band look, the tattooed look, the selling t-shirts, my mom was like, man, what the fuck is this? What the fuck is this fool doing? What the fuck is this fool doing? So are you out of high school now and not in college? No, I'm in high school. You're still, so you're still back at that stuff, 15, 16 in the band? Yeah, and I'm like, dude, I'm going to be in a fucking band forever. I'm going to play, I'm going to fucking just do this shit, you know? And my mom was like, nah, I think you got to go to school. Okay, right, which is good mom advice. Exactly. Right. So then at the time, obviously I was in a band and I had friends that were, I had clothing brands as well that sponsored bands and whatnot. A lot of guys did that then, right? Yeah. They still do it, right? They give these little brands that kind of are connected to bands and different things like that. So then I had this buddy, Mark Atkins, he had this brand that literally sponsored a ton of bands at that time and blew up. Okay. And I've seen this blow up. I'm not going to say the name of the brand because he doesn't own it now and it's a bunch of legal shit that happened. Okay, leave it up to them. He got burned. But my buddy, Mark Atkins, the fucking smart dude, took this. Right, I know who Mark is. Yeah. Took this brand and we were like 16, 17 year old and I seen him take it from a small scale to now being distributed into Tillies, Zoomies, all over the place. And I was just like, fuck, this is crazy. I was telling my mom, I was like, hey, this is something I want to do. And this is before college. She's like, no, no, no, whatever. You'd be realistic. Yeah. And I was working for Mark too, helping him still train at the time. And then she's like, no, you got to go to school. So I was like, all right, Mark, you just handle this thing. And then he blew it up. I'm like, fuck. So I was experienced to that. And I was like, I'm gonna be my own friend below this fucking brand. So now you got an example. Exactly. This is what I want to do. But since my mom was like, all right, go to school, I decided to take the school route. I applied to Cal State Long Beach, got in and then that's when I started studying kinesiology. Kinesiology? Yeah, getting to fitness, trying to be a trainer because that was all I thought. But all that sort of this convergence, because this happens in everybody's life, it was like this convergence of circumstance that all end up favoring you. Right? So the fact that you had that example, the fact that you did the t-shirt thing, the fact that you're an artist, now you're learning about kinesiology and the body, all of that sort of, you don't know it, but it's building this combination, this recipe that ends up being live fit and some other brands. Right? Exactly, yeah. That's crazy to me. So you go to college, a lot of people can relate to this. Our family's encouraging us to do the traditional path, which more and more, by the way, in life is becoming less traditional. More and more people have awakened to the fact there's nothing wrong with going to college. Marciana and I debate all the time, shit, our kids are, my son's a 4-5 GPA, right? Like should he go to school? I'm kind of for him going. She's like he should become an entrepreneur out of the gate. But I think it's great that nowadays there's a debate now. Right. There was 10 years ago, or when I was a kid, 100 years ago, there was no debate. Like if you were smart, you went to college, you went out, you went 4-5 years, maybe you went 6 years, got a master's, you got a job and you're like in this system that produces average. Yeah, yeah. You just kind of end up in that system. So you're kind of trending there, but you got this artistic bug, the entrepreneurial bug, so you're at Long Beach State and now what? Now what takes place? So when I decided to obviously go to school and college, I wanted to move out. So I was like, all right, man, I got to get a job somewhere, you know. And I've done. Everybody relates to that. Yeah, I've done a construction. I've done the whole t-shirt, social screening thing. And then, you know what? Let me do something that's in the field that I'm studying in. So I was like, okay, let me apply to Bali's total fitness when it was around back then. To Bali. Yeah, yeah. So I got hired on as a personal trainer. Okay, do you get certified or no? Yeah, I got certified. I got my aphid, anasm, all that stuff. And at the time too, I don't know why I always leave this out. I was in search and rescue as well. So I was like fresh, I was going to be a firefighter. I did a lot of shit, man. Wow, no, well, okay. So I graduated rescue academy, had the CPR first aid, all that stuff, plus my certificates of training and stuff. So that's why they hired me right off the bat. Okay. Catched it out because I was tattooed. I had big old holes in my ears at the time. That's where these holes are from? Yeah, I was like, who the fuck is this kid? But I had all my credentials at the time to get hired on. Okay, yeah. So I got hired on. That was my college job throughout college. Okay. You know, because it was pretty flexible. I trained when I had clients, this and that. And then I built a pretty big client tell at Bali's before I went private because I took all my clients from there and then went private to the center. So let's talk about that a minute. I was interviewing Bader Oskuli on the other day. Right. And he was, he's a huge fan and friend of yours. And I know that feelings are mutual between the two of you. But he was telling me that when he was a trainer, that was a really important time in his life because the type of people you train typically have a couple bucks, right? And so these people sort of become kind of quasi mentors. So that now, because mentoring is also part of the recipe, right? So was that part of sort of the formula of creating you? Like you got the art background, the band background, you've done the t-shirt. By the way, when you're in the t-shirt thing, were you hustling like, were you one of these guys I would see sometimes once a while that you're selling t-shirts out of the back of your rig or like, or no. I was never force-feeding it. But whoever wanted to meet up, I'd go meet it. But I was never like, oh, this is my clothes. No. Okay. You weren't there. Okay. You weren't that pushy type. That's good to know. Okay. Because I think a lot of guys think, hey, to get, because I'm not either. I come from a family like the culture in my family is like sales guys are almost like piranhas. Like you don't want to be pushy. You don't ever want to make people uncomfortable. I still feel that way. So that's good for a lot of you to relate to that. Like neither one of us got pushy to push our success. Right. We got pulley, which meant what we had was so good people wanted it to come with us. Right. That's ultimately, you don't win by being pushy. You win by being pulley. Yep. It's a gravitational pull. Right. So that's why you want. So you're at Long Beach State. I want to stay in here. Yeah. You got this background. Now you're a trainer. You're kind of getting some mentoring. You're also probably making some money. Yeah. Right. And so what, what takes place from there? So this is crazy. Like, Ballet Tollo Fitness actually taught me a lot because it's strictly corporate. It's a machine too. It's fucking, dude. It taught me to be this, the sales savage, dude. Okay. Good. I remember my director, she laid out two pieces of paper. She told me, all right, tell me why this one's better than this one. I was like, fuck, I blanked out for like a cool 30 seconds, but then I gathered. I was like, you know what? All right, this paper is made up of this type of wood, ballettes, you don't want this one. You know, I don't know what I pulled off, but I pulled it off and sold her this fucking piece of paper. And she's like, all right, cool. Yes. And I do that with the training business because you are, your training is this value. And you, you know, if you believe this otherwise, then why are you even here? Wonderful. Okay. I want to jump in on this too. Cause I want to stay with you on this. Cause there's like, I think the guys like you have so many skills that make them successful. I want you to be aware of them. Another. So many of you have asked how to see me speak live. And for the first time ever, you can come see me speak live in person. All of my speeches have been private events, but now I'm teaming up with Life Surge speaking all over the country. Life Surge is a one day faith based event where you'll walk in hungry for success and you'll leave ready to build your resources to leave an impact on others. We're talking faith, fueled finance. Growing your resources, crushing obstacles. And then yeah, using it all for something way bigger than yourself. I'm joining Life Surge in a few cities this year and I'd love to see you there. I'll be sharing the stage with legends such as two time football champion Tim Tebow, star of duck dynasty, Willie Robertson and leadership hero of mine, John Maxwell, pastor and author Craig Groschell and worship with artists like Natalie Grant. Tickets are on sale at life surge.com. And just for my listeners, you can use the code ED30 for 30% off a ticket. There will be a link in the show notes. So click through and take some time to join us. Cities are being added all the time. So if you don't see one near you now, check back. I hope to see you there. So you know what everybody? I really appreciate the comments about, you know, I've gotten a lot leaner and built more muscle this year and it was really intentional. And I was thinking, how can I get ahead, you know, on my fitness? Because I already pretty fit and worked out and it was how I'm eating. And that's where Factor came in. Factor doesn't ask you to meal prep or follow recipes. It just removes the entire problem. Two minutes, real food, bam, done. And so once I started eating healthier and using Factor, not only did I get a lot leaner, but I built more muscle. And the truth is, guys, I had more energy. So one other thing I like is going to tell you, you can rotate the meals every single week. There's like a hundred different meals. High protein, calorie smart, Mediterranean. It's awesome. You should be using Factor just like I am. Head to factormeals.com slash my let 50 off and use code my let 50 off to get 50% off your first factor box plus free breakfast for a year. Offer only valid for new customers with code and qualifying auto renewing subscription purchase. Make healthier eating easy with Factor. Element at any business. So this man's in the apparel business, the fitness business. You have to be able to persuade people, right? Like that's another layer that I didn't grow up with. No one taught me how to communicate. No one ever taught me how to persuade. So there was a point in my career where I learned how to do those two papers. So that's a huge, don't you think that's a huge, it helps you persuade employees to join you, right? Distributors like pricing, everything. Persuasion is huge, right? So you learn that at that. That's interesting. You learn that at ballets. Dude, it was huge because at ballets was cut throat. Once you offer your probation period, if you don't make clients and you're out of here, they will, not only you're broke, they'll get rid of you. They'll get rid of you. You're done. And I ended up making, not even being a regular trainer, I was one of the elite master trainers breaking almost like 10K a month, four ballets at a time. As a young guy. As a young dude. There was only like five of them at each end. Do you keep any of the 10K? Yeah, probably like, I don't know, a small percentage of it. Yeah, right. Not a whole lot goes back to you. But you're paying your bills at least while you're in college doing that. Oh, I was living. You're living large, probably compared to your buddies. Exactly, yeah. Okay. So you're there, you're training, you're obviously getting a lot of business experience, communication experience. Right. Like here's the thing, everybody, especially if you're young, this is all part of the journey of winning. It's like, he wasn't a millionaire when he was 20 at Long Beach State, right? But he was, he was making deposits in himself, right? Like you're all these investments you were making in you through experience, through the grind, through just doing stuff. Like you probably, when you were skating, when you were playing in the band, I doubt you thought I'm going to be a personal trainer at ballets, right? No, never. Right, never, right? So that's crazy. Okay. So you're like, what's the difference from there? Like where do we go? So each, so the clients that I met, as I became more of like the master trainer, what they called it, I got, I didn't have to go out and prospect much. So they used to make me prospect, like go find your own clients. They never fucking gave it to you. Right. You had to go close the deal yourself, walk up to strangers. I did all that. In the gym or out of the gym? Both. Both. Okay. However you can get them in the office, you know, and sell them on it. So I did so good at that. I built such a great clientele. And now when the leads actually came in that weren't for me, that were high paying leads, like these professionals that were coming in that need help, I would get fed those leads and close them on the deal. You know? And in that process, these professionals, like me being a tattooed minority type of person, like, okay, how the fuck do I speak to these guys? How about scare your mom? How about a 45 year old white male banker guy or doctor, right? Because they come in and they have their offense up, you know, or the red wall. You got to bring that shit down and be able to relate to them and see what the problem is. Everyone's relating to this right now, right? Like, how would you do that? Was it asking them questions about them or how did you do it? Asking questions and just keep kind of relating why they're here and how I can help them and that I'm not this dude that's just, you know, here to sell you one shit. Like I can actually change your life. You know what I'm saying? So once I learned that and I'm talking to this, a surgeon to a lawyer, to like a college student, you know, so I was able to maneuver, communicate. That's massive, bro. And bring down these red wall barriers and connect with them on a personal level. And it was basically how you could help them, how you could connect with them. Yeah, exactly. This is interesting. I did all this reading about you. This is the part of the story I didn't know. And it helps me piece together your success. Yeah. Because I've always felt like, I don't care what the business is. I don't care if you're in the software business. You have to be able to persuade and communicate to people. This is, that's interesting to me. It's hard because I've done a lot of interviews here and there, but you know, you live life. There's 365 days a year. There's so much that goes on, even with just like eight hours of the day that you can't even explain for a full two hour interview. Yeah. I'm really glad because it like, it helps me piece together you because I just, I have this overriding belief like you have to learn how to connect with people. And I've met you. And I think one thing I will just tell you that I see about you too is like, I think you have a genuineness about you. Like you're instantly likable, man. Like you're super humble. Like you don't even know how successful you are. I appreciate that. And I love that about you, bro. Like I just, I hope I have that a little bit. Like I don't think you know how amazing what it is you've already accomplished. Because I think you're in the mid, I think in your mind, you're like still in the beginning, which is huge. I think I'm still in the beginning too, right? And I'm 17 years older than you. I still think I'm in the beginning anyway. So you're there, you're training, you've learned to communicate, you've learned to close. Right? Now you got some mentors. What we're getting close to live fit, but we're not there yet. Right? Okay. And also I assume you're probably still connected to the way you grew up a little bit too. Right? So you still got buddies of yours getting in some trouble. Some are successful. Some are probably getting even locked up once in a while. You probably even lose a friend here and there, right? That's killed. You're in this environment that's, most of us didn't grow up in it, but grew up close to it. You know, I know it's almost like you almost lived in a minor, minor war zone, a minor combat zone and you're still connected to that, right? Yeah. At that time. Yeah. So did you, were those like, were you pulled back into that all the time or were these new associations kind of sculpting you and shaping you at the same time as you still had your homies from where you grew up at the same time? At the time, like there's a stereotype where like the gang activities like heavy and they'll put you in like, no, once you get to like a certain level. You were way past that. Yeah. And the guys that are still doing it, they respect you as like more of a friend like, okay, what's going on now? Let's catch up and then after that. They're proud of you almost. Exactly. And then when you're done hanging out, then they'll go back to their thing, you do your thing, you know? It's kind of like we already lived our separate ways because when people do the dirt stuff, that's when we're young, young, you know? Yeah. And once you start making real money and making a living, everyone respects one another, you know? My other friends who are athletes who come from those environments too, tell me that they're becoming a transition where they're like really rooting for you and proud of you. You come from where they come from. There's some truth to that. Yeah. No, I mean, I see these guys, I brought one of my friends as like one of the OG gang bangers head like shock hauler and he came down to the warhouse and he was so proud. Yeah. He was genuinely proud. Yeah. Because he has a family of his own. He's like, dude, I'm fucking, you know? I think a lot of the things do from these communities because I think Long Beach is part of your story. I think it's always going to be. I think being Cambodian is part of your story. But I don't come from that kind of a community, but I have many friends who do, especially the athlete guys, especially by the way, some of them from Long Beach. Long Beach Poly is like one of the great football basketball schools in the country, right? And I think that sometimes a lot of the people that grew up in those communities, at least my sense is their actual family isn't intact all the time. And so there's almost a family relationship to the community. Like they're all rooting for you. That true? I know exactly what you're talking about. Yeah. No, I can relate. Yeah. I think there's a lot of people out there that are just like literally proud and rooting for you all the time. There's people you see every day that I used to skate with or just hang out with like on the streets. Like they almost become family just because our actual family is working or doing something to put food on the table, you know? And I think that's part of the success of your brand. I think that the great brands now, and we're going to get into that in a minute, they're not just communities or cultures. They're almost like a family of people that all sort of support the same culture, the same way of thinking, the same thought processes. I think that's what you have, brother. 100%. I do. I think it's almost like a family. I don't think it's a, I think brand is like minimizes what it is. Like the people I know that wear your stuff, like they're proud of it. Like a dude you grew up with. Like they, it's not like, hey, I, when I meet guys in the gym that wear your stuff, they're aware they're wearing it. Like once a lot of people walk out of the room like, hey, nice hat. I'm wearing some clover hat. I'm like, is that what I'm wearing? You know, it's nothing to me, right? But when guys wear your stuff, I'm like, hey, I'm about to interview that dude. They're like, oh bro, like they go right into it. They know they're wearing it. It's, it's like a family brand. It's like, and by the way, that's huge and busy. Okay. So let's get into it. Bally's, you end up eventually, how do you end up getting to where you have, you like start a store or something, don't you? Like, yeah. So, good. Um, after Bally's, uh, obviously I realized that I was making good money, but I'm like, dude, I can make it a little bit more if I left and, you know, went into private training. That's private personal training. Okay. Personal training. Yeah. So running my own business, training multiple clients at one time, running boot camps, maximizing my time. All right. You know? Okay. So I learned that actually looking up, uh, Baydross. Baydross the boot camp idea. Exactly. Okay. His business model and all that stuff. So this was before he even knew who the fuck I was, you know? Okay. So I, I took that model and literally fucking nailed it to the tee. I was in college making way more fucking money than, uh, anybody I knew around me and I was like, fuck, what am I doing? You know? Yeah. So, I mean, I just kind of was doing it for my parents at the time. Yep. Stay doing that. And then this random opportunity came up with my buddy, Bruce Soth. He owned this t-shirt store in Long Beach off of Malino Anaheim. Okay. Not, not a good area by the way. Yeah. Not a good area. It's fucked up over there and it's still fucked. Yep. Um, he still owns it. It's pretty good. Yep. Oh, he does pretty well, but it was like a shop that offered just like five or $10 like blank t-shirts or what you'd make like custom one off shirts, you know, that people go in and buy and it's still like dickies. So retail. Yeah. Um, and at the time he gave me this offer to like buy into it. I was like, all right, sure. So you're entrepreneurial then. Okay. So you buy into a t-shirt store in a pretty rough area where you grew up. Yeah. Cause I seen the people would just see playing on this fucking rough area. I've seen the money because and over there in the hood, what do people do every morning? This is a trip every morning. Uh, they would go in a regular customer's and buy a fucking brand new white t-shirt every morning. They don't wash it. So this is maybe something new you learn. You don't wash your, it's their pro five t-shirt. Okay. So just buy a new one every day and throw it out. Yeah. So you'd have like regular traffic like someone's going to a Starbucks to buy a cup of coffee. They're buying a white t-shirt from you. Yep. I never knew that. Yeah, it's crazy. Okay. It's the weirdest shit when I tell people, I'm like, yeah, no, that's why when you see like, you know, some, some like gay main views that wear white t-shirt, they'll still have the crease just from the packet. I was going to say, I was like, how is this guy such a beautiful shirt every freaking time? So that's why it's a brand new shirt. It's a brand new shirt. Exactly. We'll just open it. Okay. So it works. That's why like it's actually a pretty damn good location. I saw it all the time. I was like, cool. And you knew that because you grew up in it. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Yeah. I'm learning a lot here. Okay. So then with that, I got obtained the t-shirt store with my buddy Bruce, then I wanted to do this whole Long Beach brand as well in there. I was like, I think I can sell some cool fucking Long Beach logo stuff because Long Beach has a lot of pride. People within the city like to rock. Yep. You know, Long Beach. So I started to make the design and created this LB clothing brand and fucking it took off in the store. People would just come in inside the store. Inside the store. Yeah. And I obviously started marketing it on like Facebook and MySpace at the time. There was no Instagram. So there was, you were already dabbling in the social media deal, which is huge to your success now, which we'll get to. But so you're now you're, were your training clients wearing this stuff or this was like a local brand thing? Into what stuff? The, so the, the, the, in your store, the shirt you were selling in your store that you created, right? Was that, was that something you're, the people you trained or are like local dudes with some local dudes, yeah. Yeah. But then over time, when I was running my private training business, I had all this graphic design skills. I had all these other like video editing skills, photography skills. I had my training business as well. Okay. I was like, okay, I'm going to design some stuff for my clients. What can I, what's a catchy slogan? Okay. I was like, all right, lift it. You're kidding me. Yep. So I fucking. Are you serious? This is how I started. Lift it started for the people you were training? Yep. I had RP, RP fitness and then my slogan was lift it. So I just made this collection of like a T-shirt design and a black zip up hoodie. Yep. That we still sell today. Okay. That were the first, I guess, line that was offered to my clients first. So then they started wearing it and then I, at the time there was only what, Facebook? Yeah. So I was like, all right, this is fucking cool. Let me film this. Yeah. When we're doing like boot camp to group training, because everyone's having fun and everyone's wearing the same shirts, this and that. And not only did I post it, but because they were my clients that were part of the community or my training business, they wanted to post it too, because they were wearing the shirts. Like they wanted to show off to their friends, like, look what I'm a part of. So it just kind of went in viral in the local community. And then it just snowballed from there. Because then people were like, okay, I'm not training with you, but I want that shirt. How do I get it? You're kidding me. Yeah. So then I kind of just. What was this? What year are you talking about? Probably like 2011. Okay. So I'm going to tell you that everybody does as acceptable, which is film their brand, make it fun. You did before, most everybody was doing it. Way back. What makes you think that? How did you know to do that? I just thought the shit was cool. You thought it was cool? You kidding me? I was like, hey man, this shit's tight. I want to fucking let's film it, you know? You know that that's genius, right? Like that's, no, no, not I guess. I didn't know that. Yeah. I was always like a marketing person. Yeah, you are. Everything, everything. If you wanted to look at my brand or whatever I'm about, I wanted to make it look as cliche as it sound. I wanted to make it look perfect or make it look cool. You know, so how do I do that? I think I'm going to film this, you know, show my, show my, show my friends what I'm doing, you know, that I'm, you know, and it went a little bit viral through their posts and them wanting it, then people who don't train with you want a little piece. So you have that going on the sort of viral social media virtual world and you have this physical store that you're selling local stuff to as well, right? Dell PCs with Intel inside are built for the moments that matter for the moments you plan and the ones you don't built for the busy days that turn into all night study sessions, the moment you're working from a cafe and realize every outlet's taken, the times you're deep into your flow and the absolute last thing you need is an auto update, throwing off your momentum. That's why Dell builds tech that adapts to the way you actually work built with long lasting batteries. So you're not scrambling for the closest outlet and built in intelligence that makes updates around your schedule, not in the middle of it. They don't build tech for tech's sake. They build it for you. Find technology built for the way you work at Dell.com slash Dell PCs built for you. 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Now available in Canada too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash ed. Free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince dot com slash ed. Tell them real quick, because I didn't know this and you would get business spikes at the store through tragedy almost. And I want people to understand this because there's all these brands that are massive, or I don't know the right word for it, but I'll just call it urban driven or city driven or culturally driven brands, right? That a lot of people don't understand, whether that be even like music, like Jay-Z, or we were talking about Damon John earlier with Fubu, or what was Russell Simmons brand, baby fat, right? Or these other brands, like so you would have a spike in business in your store and in your shirt when what type of stuff would take place. When murders would happen. Yeah. When murders would happen. Like I said, there's heavy gang activities. So one of the things we did too were just one off custom shirts. And a lot of that was rest in peace or in loving memory. Because in gang culture, if someone dies, what happens usually? They retaliate or whatnot. They retaliate, but they also make some, they make, I didn't know this. There's like rest in peace shirts. Yeah, they'll make rest in peace shirts just for the lost ones, the loved ones. So you would hear like there's noise, like someone was killed, there's going to be retaliation, and you'd literally be thinking business is going to spike. Yeah. Me and my buddy Bruce were like, dude, we're going to be busy in the next one. We're going to be busy in the next couple of days, man, because this person got smoked, they came in, made a bunch of shirts, but we know this other person has a green light on them or like, fuck, all right, he's about to die. And then sure enough, it sucks, but he dies like a week later. And you guys, you know, in that cycle of bubble, dude. That's amazing to me. And so you put an unreal story, by the way. So I'm going to carry, I don't know this. So you have this store, you got your, so it's interesting. You got all these things going. You got your training. You got this culture going where it now live fits starting. You got the store. Guys are coming and buying their shirts every single day. Plus someone dies business spikes because you're making those shirts. Plus your normal brand that's local. Plus the other stuff you sell. Like you ever get, I don't know, I always think about this. I go into when I'm driving home from LA back here, right? Or when I was even a kid, I'd go out and play baseball at Long Beach or Long Beach State. I go to a game there or I'd go to a, or even Cal State LA, you know, you drive back from there, you go get gas at a gas station. You grew up in Diamond Bar where I go and say, Hey man, this is a rough gas station. This is a rough, I'm more careful, right? Like I go into where you grew up. And did you ever get robbed? Uh, yeah, actually when I was, they'll rob you. They don't care what the f**king age you're at. I was, I think 13, 14, it was on the left of the temple. It's funny you ask me. I was with probably 12, 12 of my friends just hanging out in front of my buddy's house. These two Asian guys are Cambodian as well. Cause there's, there's, there's two gangs in Long Beach that are two Cambodian gangs and they beef with each other too. Okay. Still to this day. Yeah. Still to this day. There was this, these two gang members, they walked by and they looked at me. They're a little older and I was like, I was kind of weird, you know, I f**ked through the look and they walked to the end of the block and then they decided to walk back. I was wearing this gold Buddha necklace. I didn't know at the time, you know, my mom gave it to me and then, Your mom gave it to you? Yeah. And then these two guys came up and then one of them, the second time they walked back, he took a knife I put on my neck, he snatched it and all my friends were just like, we kind of just knew we're like, f**k, we do, you know? I even call my friend that was in that gang too. I was like, Hey man, can you get my f**king like, let's back. My mom's going to f**k kill me. You know? She's going to beat my a**. Cause that's just what, if you get jacked, they're going to get mad at you. But then they're like, nah, dude, I can't. If they're just doing that, that's just part of the work. I was like, f**k. Did you ever get it back? No, never. Then it was funny cause when I went back home, I guess I never said anything to my mom. This is weird. I never f**king talked about this s**t. She never asked where the necklace was and it was f**king years later, I was like, hey mom, you remember what I thought? She's like, I knew you got robbed. She knew. I was like, f**k, are you serious? She knew. Yeah, cause she's, I was like, how, you know, she's like, she's just new. I guess I was too quiet or something, you know? Your mom, we're going to get into live fit now, but your mom's like a central piece of your life, huh? Yeah, no, for sure. You talk about your mom a lot. Why? Like what, why is that? Probably like the only person that, now that I realized I'm older, she gave me everything I wanted, even though we didn't have the f**king funds for it or the means for it. If I wanted new skate shoes, she would buy it. She'd find a way. When I was young, I didn't know what the f**king housing was. I didn't know what section eight, I didn't know what food stamps was. I knew you buy this f**king food and this green backs, you buy other s**t. That's what my mom said, you know? Yeah. So, but I didn't know. I thought I was f**king part of life, right? Everybody had that. Yeah, so. Everything I wanted, skate shoes, f**king wheels, whatever it was, I was like, mom, I'd have to f**king have it. I was that dickhead kid, you know? I was like, I f**king have that as a s**t. Right. You know, not f**king not cool, whatever. So was I. Yeah. So she'd f**king make it happen, you know? She found a way. You know, so now I realized, like f**k dude, I would go to beat my a** if I was looking. Yeah. You know? What's amazing that y'all don't know is that now that Live Fits built, one of the first things you do when you got money was you took care of your mom, retired your mom. Yeah, retired my mom, yeah. Now she doesn't have to work, nothing. That's my favorite part of your whole, all the wealth you're going to make, man, all the cars you already have, you're going to sell Live Fit for a couple hundred million someday or whatever you're going to do. My favorite thing about it is that the first thing you did when you made some money is you took care of your mom. Yeah, 100%. And that's, everyone watching this, like it's one of their dreams, like wouldn't you love to take care of your mom? All the stuff you went through being robbed as a kid, I'm pretty sure your store probably, I don't know, did your store ever get robbed or almost robbed? Try to get robbed, yeah. Try to get robbed. Yeah. One time we'll talk about what, on Andy's thing, man. What happened there? I don't know about that. Some guy tried to buy a t-shirt with the fake $5 bill that's Mexican, dude. Okay. And he was just from a gang that just didn't like Asian people. Okay. So I was like, fuck you. So he comes into your store with a fake $5 bill? Fake $5, tries to buy it. And I'm like, dude, I can't, I can't sell you this. He's like, why? Because I'm a donkey. I'm like, no dude, because this is a fucking fake $5 bill. I think he was all drugged up. He was like, dude, I'm going to come back and fucking kill all you guys, kill all the fucking nips. That's what they call us, nips. And then I was like, fuck, I knew he was serious. I'm like, all right, man, fuck this shit. Oh my gosh. So then my buddy, we had a shotgun. In the store. In the store, yeah. He had a shotgun and a Glock, but we fucking had, we loaded the shotgun, cocked it back and just had the safety on. That's how fucking scary the shit was. And my friend Bruce was like, if this fool comes back, just point that shit that way. You don't have to aim, just fucking point and shoot. It'll fucking blow the whole fucking window off. I was like, oh, fuck you. Were you scared? I was scared. I was fucking about to shit my pants, but I was ready. That's the thing. I was like, all right, this will come back. The whole day you're there. Every do the walk through the door. You literally have a gun right next to you. Under the keyboard. Just get this, everybody. We're going to segue now into where he is now, but just so you get this. And I'm not exaggerating when I say this. On some level, I am and I'm not. What's happened now is the modern day Nike. If the modern day Nike came from this, do you understand that? When you go Google him or you research him, it's the modern day Nike. It's like you're, and by the way, I think you're more viral and innovative and creative and have a more loyal following than them. So you're talking about somebody who grew up in a band skating. He drops out of Long Beach State just so you know. I mean, like pretty close to graduating. You probably could have graduated if you went like what, six more months or something probably. He leaves Long Beach State. He's in a store where he's getting robbed with fake $5 bills. His business would spike initially when people were killed, right? And he ends up building this modern day massive brand. So just think about what you're capable of when this man's done this. And there's this combination of unique things you've built. You've got this artistic, I think everyone who wins in business takes advantage of some birth blessing and then build skills after it. So like for you, my analysis is you were born with a birth blessing of artistry, of creativity, right? Like skating's an art to me. I skated too. So skating's an art. Playing in a band is an art. Creating these desires you've created is an art. I think at your heart you're an artist. But that's not enough. Then you learned how to close. Then you got some mentoring. Then you learned to be an entrepreneur, which you already had that kind of desire because you come from nothing. So you want to make money, right? Like scarcity, I want more of this. Exactly. World-class mom who sews belief into you and love all the time. Just loving a child like you were loved by your mom gives you confidence. Even as I say that, just so you know, bad-ass tattoo guy, your face just changed. When I talk about how much your mom loves you, right? That's the story of your life and you're engaged in this beautiful woman you're going to marry. The central figure of your life till this moment is your mom. She's the one. If I turn the pages of the book of your life is your mom, right? And so I love that, bro. Your mother went from like, I've read about literally no food, eating like anything she could find to eat, right? Is that not true? Yeah. Your mother would like, what would she do? Like to eat? I remember the story that I asked her. I remember her mom, my grandma, during when they were at what we call the labor camps. Yes. They only get fed one time or twice. They would try to get, they'd see a fucking lizard and she would snag it and fucking kill it and put it in their pocket and then later distribute it to the rest of the kids later just so they can eat. I heard that. Knowing though that if they did get caught execution right away, but it's like fucking eat or fucking, you know, survive every day. Isn't it amazing that your mother, bro, like, and her son becomes this. Yeah, it's wild. I just like, I, I hope people listen to her like, if this is possible, what's possible for me or my children, right? Like, or my future, like your past, your, your upbringing, your, the, the, the tragedies you got. They don't define you. Like look what this man's become. Very short intermission here, folks. I'm glad you're enjoying the show so far. Don't forget to follow the show on Apple and Spotify. Links are in the show notes. Now on to our next guest. Welcome back everybody. This person sitting across for me has been on the show before. You guys all want nuts when he was on, but I got to tell you, he's probably the person whose content I share the most on the planet because I think it's that good. I really, really like a lot of people in the business space. I admire and listen to very few. And he has risen up the list for me of the people that I admire and I listen to the most because his content is so good. His message is so good because it's based in actual results and actual experience. My guest today is Alex Hermosi. Welcome back brother. Thank you for having me and such a gracious introduction. I just to apologize ahead of time to the audience. There's no way I will live up to that, but I'll do my absolute hardest. I'll try my hardest. He will. Fifteen minutes in he will have exceeded it. By the way, he's got a new book out called 100 million dollar leads. How to get strangers to want to buy your stuff. And I think it's the book launch. I told you this off camera. I've heard the most about ever. He had a few people participate in it. How many did you have? Tell them. Yeah, we had 500,000 people who signed up for the event. We had just under 200,000 who clicked to join live. The moment we launched, it was wild. It was all city. And I said to him, I said, well, how did you do it? He go, actually I did the stuff in the book. Give us a couple specifics of what that means. I'm going to give a little bit more context and I'll give the better answer. So $100 million offers, which is my first book, was an offer about making a proposition to somebody that they would say yes to. So how to make offers so good, people feel stupid saying no. And the first question that you need to answer when you're an entrepreneur is, what do I sell? Right? And so you make an offer. And that's why that was the first book. And so the offer book itself was what I would consider a meta book. As in it both, the goal was that I demonstrate the concept while also with the book, while also teaching about it in the book. And so the book itself, I promoted for $1.99 and it came with a course that most people charge $5,000 for. And I gave that away for free and did no paid advertising whatsoever. And it continues to sell 25,000, 30,000 copies a month. This month obviously way more than that because the launch and whatnot. But it does more every month than it did the month before. And it's still top 100 two years later. Now the next book answers the next question. So once you have something to sell, then you're like, well, who do I sell it to? As you need leads. And so that was why the second book is $100 million leads. And so leads, a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but most people agree that they're the first thing that you need to have to get new customers. Hello. Right. And so the thing that creates a lead, and when I was trying to go through this book, I was like, what is a lead? And so I had a buddy of mine ask me that question and I stumbled for, I was like, a lead. And he was like, no, what's a lead? And so I was like, it's someone that you get name, phone number, email address. And he's like, okay, if someone follows you on Instagram and you can message them, are they a lead? I was like, well, yeah, I guess they would be a lead. He's like, okay, well, if I subscribed to YouTube, am I a lead then? I was like, no, I guess not. It wouldn't be because I can't contact you in any way. And so we started going through all these, if I knock on someone's door, are they a lead? And so we started going through it. And so we come up with a lead is a person you can contact. Now from there, you're like, well, there's a lot of people I can contact, which then gave me the conclusion that what people say they want is leads, but what they really want are engaged leads, which is a person you can contact, comma, who's shown interested in the stuff you sell. So you would call it qualified lead? That the next level. So yeah, if you're looking on the lead continue, you've got an unengaged lead, engaged lead, a qualified lead. And then yeah, and then you go into customer and went up. And so then the question is, how do you go from an unengaged lead to an engaged lead? And that one flip just from there to there is the entire book. After that point where someone raises their hand and says, I'm interested in your stuff, that is where the book ends. And so I wanted to show people how to get strangers to want to buy their stuff, not to buy it because that would be sales, but how to want to buy their stuff. And so in going through this, we made two four boxes and this took 100 iterations to get here. I was looking at it again last night. It's awesome. It was really hard. It's crazy as it sounds. I came into it with a lot of the preconceived. I was like, what about earned media? What about owned media? Like I had all these, and I had to deconstruct everything into simply you can talk to people one on one and you can talk to people one to many. And there are people who know who you are before you talk to them and there are people who don't. And those are the four variables. So if you're one to one to friendlies, that's a warm reach out. If you're one to one to strangers, it's a cold reach out. If you're one to many to friends, it's when you post content. It's your audience who knows you. And if you're going to one to many to people who don't know you, it's paid ads. Gosh, that's good. And so those are the only four ways that a person can let other people know about stuff. Anything at all. Like if a girl is like, I just slept with six guys, she's advertising what she did. She let people know about it. And so advertising is the process of making known. That's how we define it. And so then you're like, well, if those are the only four things that I can do to let other people know about stuff, are those the only four ways to advertise? And so the answer is kind of like yes and no, because the other four are what I call lead getters. And so lead getters are people who let other people know on your behalf. And so they are where you get the greatest amount of leverage in advertising. For example, if I were to say, okay, I'm going to hire a recruiter who brings me affiliates every month. And so I hire one person. So I do whatever amount of work, it takes me to hire one person. And then I go and I sip my ties on the beach, which we know that's not true, but just for the example. Now that person works every hour of every day bringing affiliates in. And then those affiliates, then either they do one of the core four, they reach out to their friends, they reach out to strangers, they post content or they make ads to their audience to tell them about my stuff. For money, free stuff or both. That's the incentive. And so that is an example of a lead getter and how one day's work might create zillions of dollars on the back end by just having leverage, getting more for what I put in. And so there are four. The first is customers. So you do the core four. Right, I was going to ask you. Yeah, you do the core four to get a customer. Now that customer, then do the core four again to get you other customers. Do you feel that there's a priority among others? In other words, when you were saying it, I'm like, customer might be the best one. Sure. The reason I would say customer is more important isn't as much about the customer, but about what would make a customer want to refer is typically an exceptional product. And so if you have a better product, like you can incentivize any affiliate if you put it in. Better product or better experience. Right, exactly. So I'll quickly go through the four lead getters and then I'll explain the whole cycle in total. So you have customers, you have affiliates, which I talked about just a second ago, which looks like a customer referral, but it's a little different because it's another business who refers their customers to you. You've got agencies who can do the core four on your behalf. They can run as they can post content. They can do outreach all for you because there are agencies who do all those things. And then you have employees. So like I didn't, I don't make my content. I have a team of people who make content for me. And so you can see how the first four things are the only things a human can do to let other people know about stuff to advertise. The other four are the people you get from advertising who can then do the advertising on your behalf. And so the long-winded answer for like, how did I get 500,000 people there? Is that I purposefully took the 24 months leading up to that because once offers launched, everything was about leads. So I knew that the audience didn't know that, but everything that I was doing was knowing that in 24 months I was going to have my next book come out. And so I wanted to use every tactic or method in the book to advertise, to advertise the book. So that's the whole meta concept. The first one was I had to make a meta offer. Like the book itself was an amazing offer, so good people were so stupid to say no. And then when $100 million leads, I wanted to get as many strangers to want to buy my stuff using warm outreach, cold outreach, posting content, running paid ads, getting customer referrals, affiliates, agencies, and employees. So the launch itself is validation of the book itself. Yes. Keep going. And so the thing that always grinds my gears, and I think what I've strived really hard to do with the content that I make, et cetera, is that I always want the proof to be undeniable. And so I started the presentation for the book launch with this little picture of a book that says how to market a book, and it has 14 reviews on Amazon. And whoever wrote this book, I hope I'm not just destroying you. That's not my goal. I blacked out the name. I don't know what it is. But I don't need to read the book, because I already have evidence that the person doesn't know how to market a book, because if they knew how to market a book, they wouldn't have 14 reviews. So I have real-world evidence that the contents of the book are irrelevant. And so I wanted to do the exact opposite of that, which is if you're going to have a book about advertising, it should be advertised better than anything. And so that was exactly what I wanted to do, was just lean really hard on that and purposefully use only the things that I have in the book, which was actually kind of fun for me. So when we scripted out the ads, I have an ad creation framework that I just used the framework that I introduced in the book only. And with the affiliates, I had the structure that I set up in the book I used only. Like I call it whisper tea shot, which is kind of like the method that you do to launch anything, or at least that I used to launch anything. You know, like we used agencies when we didn't have to, because I wanted to have an agency run it so I could talk about that. And then obviously the team did all the content. And so we used all eight methods to promote the book, and then that is what resulted it. We had 137,000 people who came from paid ads. We had 104,000 people who came from affiliates. We had 27,000 affiliates sign up to promote the book launch. We had just under, just over 200,000 people who came from content. And then we had, what am I missing? And then referrals, the rest were referrals. Do you, by the way, everyone hearing this right now, it's amazing to me, obviously the detail of the book and all of that is one thing. The other thing is that how many people, all the concepts you just described to them, even if they were at the book launch, is still foreign to them, meaning they still look at business almost like a linear transaction. In other words, this is a simple analogy. Look, here's how I got wealthy. I don't play checkers in business. I'm playing chess. I've got multiple moves that I'm already making in front of the other one that set up something else. Most people are like, I just got to get this client. And then once I get that, I'll breathe out loud. And then I'm going to go through this arduous, grinding, debilitating, horrific, self-loathing process to get one more, right? The power of one more. That's what it in my let says. And do you agree with that though? Does it still blow your mind how many people still don't get progressive marketing that stacks on top of one another? Funnel is a terrible word, but there's multiple funnels happening here, meaning you've got the affiliate funnel. You've got the paid ad funnel if you choose to do it that way. You've got your content or client referral funnel. But most people in their businesses, they're still, what you just did is so brilliant, it's like washing over them still, even of the half a million people that were there. You and I know this. They're picturing how business works fundamentally incorrectly. Do you agree with that? I think so. And I think part of it is, so I would say it's more like, at least from my perspective, like an incomplete picture. So you can only see as far as what's in front of you. And so if you are barely making rent, and you're barely making payroll, it's really difficult to think about brand. And so it doesn't make it less important though, but it's just really hard. And so, at least the prescription that I have in the book for advertising is pick one method. You can pick warm reach outs, you can pick cold reach outs, you can pick making content, you can pick running paid ads. And those are all the things that you can do. And I start there because most people reading anything in business are usually the ones doing it, for the most part. And so we start with the core four that a person can do. But of course, all four work better together. Yes. Now you can just do cold calls, and you can build a business. You can just run paid ads. You can build a business. But if you do cold calls, run ads, and have content that people consume when they click your ad, they consume content, and then they complete the transaction, or you do a cold call, they take the set call, and between the set and the close, they go to your profile, they read some stuff, they watch a video, and they're like, oh, this guy's legit. Now if you didn't have that, the likelihood that you closed them would be way lower. But you would attribute the failed close to bad cold calling. But you could have given the assist with brand, with content. Let me ask you a hard question. I bet no one's asked this. And if they have, cool. But I was thinking at your work, like I was going through all of it last night again, and I was thinking, OK, I want to ask them the tough stuff. Like, the stuff no one's going to ask them in an interview. I want two entrepreneurs pushing one another to figure this out, even another, OK? So what if the sales cycle of your product is different? Does that dictate which way you should go? So let me give you an example. I'm marketing a book that's a tangible product that can be acquired instantaneously. Let's switch it. Let's make it a hard one. I'm in the mortgage business. I'm in the insurance business. This sales cycle is a little bit different. It's not necessarily A to B, bam, we've got a client. Does that change your methodology? And let's walk through a real world one. I'm a realtor. What I think is maybe the hardest one to make the application fit on some cycles. Do you pick A lane, all of the lanes? And does that matter that the product isn't a consumable can of Coca-Cola, or a bottle of water, but it's a transaction experience that you're going to have to go through in the sales cycle? I don't think it would matter at all. So let's fill in the boxes, if we will. So if you're a realtor, warm outreach is going to be you reaching out to your friends and family saying, do you know anybody who's interested in buying a house? Now, ideally, you probably not start with that, because that's what every realtor says. So it might be something like, hey, what's your dream home? Or something like that. And then you can start talking about something more interesting. Believe me, I'm not in the real estate space. So hopefully there'd be a better hook. But that would be the idea. Cold reach outs is you're just dialing numbers that are close to your cold emailing, or that is cold reach out. If you're making content, you're talking about the houses that you're selling, and many realtors do that. And then you have paid ads, which also plenty of realtors either generate buyer or seller leads that they call, and then they can help them sell their house. So either they list houses, and they show these six or seven carousels of cool houses, and they get buyers. Or they talk about recent sales, and then use them as case studies for like, here's the 17 steps in the process we took. This house from the owner thought they could sell for $500. I sold it for $575. And this was the 60-day process we ran through. If that sounds interesting, I can walk you through what I would do for your house, whatever. So that would be the core four. But a good realtor should also have friends who are insular to the industry. So it might be lawn care people. It might be, I know there's regulations around loans and kickbacks and things like that. But still, cleaners, anybody who does home services, you can still get referrals from them, which would be an affiliate. Now, customer referrals is you sell the house and you ask them for friends. Or before you sell the house, you ask them for friends. Or sometimes they just do it on their own because they actually like you and you did a good job. From an agency perspective, you could hire agencies to do any of those things. And then if you have more, if you're a bigger realtor and you have a team of people, then you can use your employees to do any of those things on your behalf. And so the core four and the four lead getters work independent of whatever business you have, because they are simply the only ways that one human can tell other human about stuff. It's a fact. So let me give you an example. Several homes listed right now, just different things I'm doing. I'm just thinking through what you just said. One of the homes I've listed, they literally knocked on my door as a cold call. And the fact that they did that, they make a lot of money too. I was like, this is my lady. So that's one of them. The other one I have, an interior designer, referred me the realtor that is now listing my house. Isn't that interesting? And the third one just literally had a digital footprint that I saw their digital footprint, went to their brand, was validated by other significant properties they had sold, and they're listing that property. So what he just said, I just gave you in my own life validation of all three of those methods right there off the top that I'm currently using, currently in the MLS with three people in that industry, exactly the way that he just described. But I wanted to push you to describe it first. That's the theory. Here's why I think you're this way too. There's validation, and then I want to push the theory to the extreme most difficult measure to see whether it passes the taken on water test. And that's what it does for me. Number one thing I want to ask you. As a entrepreneur, they're listening to this, and they're not getting enough leads in general. And they're literally thinking that what I'm going to do is I'm going to continue to do just posting stuff on my Instagram over and over again, and people are going to magically appear. If there's one step now I should take to change my tactic, first thing I should do, aside from get the book, get the book, would be what? So if I needed to make money tomorrow, and I was that guy, it's the first of the core four in the book, which is warm outreach. And so what that means is I go through my email, and I look at every single contact that I already have already in my email list. I open up my iPhone or my Android, and I go down my contact list, and I download that and I export it. And then I look at every one of my social media profiles. I've got 700 followers on Instagram. I've got 400 friends on Facebook, and I list out all the people into one Mondo Excel sheet. That is my first leads list. And I reach out to them, and I open with something that has nothing to do with my profession, which usually has something to do with their life. And so I take the 30 seconds before I message everyone, because you only have a fixed amount of people, and I would say, what's new in Sarah's life? Sarah just had a kid, Sarah just moved, Sarah just had a baby, Sarah just competed in Tough Mudder, whatever. And then that would be my opener. And then it's house things. And then once you have house things, then you transition, you can move the conversation into whatever direction you want. If I'm selling fitness, I would say, oh, well, how do you have time to cook food and get in shape? If it was, I was career coaching, I'd be like, how are you making time for work and your career goals? If I was talking about, if I was selling therapy, I would say, how's your mental state with crushing all these goals, but are you taking time for yourself? I could sell anything from once I have their attention, and we use something that I call the ACA framework, which we learn from the gym world, but it works with anything. It's really just how to talk to a human being, but is acknowledge whatever they said, compliment them on a legitimate compliment, and then ask the next question. And so a lot of people just don't know how to have a conversation. And so whenever someone says, I did the Tough Mudder, I would say, it's so cool that you did the Tough Mudder, compliment, which would then say something like, that's so tough of you. It's so cool that you take that time to push yourself. You must be that type of person. I would label them with something that I want to use later in the sale. And then the ask is, let me move the conversation forward. And so I then have my big list of every single contact that I have, and I start with the open hook that's personalized to them, and then I move them through ACA, and then I set them up for a 10-minute qualification call of some sort to just make sure that they like whatever it is, and then I would set up for a real conversation. And if you're curious, what does that 10-minute call look like? So I use something called the Closer Framework. It's not that this is the perfect way to sell. It's just a simple acronym that I used to organize sales scripts. And so C is clarify why they're there, because they got on the phone for a reason, or they decided to respond back to you for a reason. And so it's the first obstacle that comes up in any sale, is someone says, I just wanted more information. Well, no, they didn't. They got there because they have a problem. Like you're not just hopping on phone calls for information all day. Of course you're not. Right. Like you can make that joke if you want to. Really good. Right. Well, because then you just clarify, like what problem do you want to solve? Like six months from now, what do you want to have happen? And then the person's like, well, I can't fit in my jeans anymore. You're like, right, boom. I've clarified where they're there. Then you restate it with L, label them with a problem. So to be clear, you're not the weight you want to be. You're currently how much? 200 pounds? What would you like to be? My high school weight. What's that? 130. Got it. Gap. Okay, cool. So then we go CL. Now we go to O. So this is the Closer Framework. O is overview their past experiences. This is what I call the pain cycle. So you say, what have you tried so far? How did that work for you? What did you like? What did you not like? Whenever they say the things that they like, you mental note of that so that when you present your solution, you're going to talk about and tie the things that they liked about it. It's part of their buying map. And then the pain part is where they're like, this was terrible. It was too hard to follow. They didn't pay attention to me. No one followed up, blah, blah, blah. And so then it's like, well, what else have you tried? And so we just keep doing until we've exhausted all the pain. And whenever you bring up past experiences, it always aggravates and increases in importance. Like in the political world, whatever the new cycle is on, people will say is the most important issue of the election. And it's really just whatever the media chooses to, whatever piano key they want to play on everyone's emotions that month. But it works the same way on a micro level on a sale. So whatever you're talking about in the pain cycle is going to be the thing that they now think is more important. Even my health is more important. Maybe my cleanliness in my house is more important. Maybe I do need insurance, like whatever it is, right? And so in a set call, we stop there. So you basically go clarify, label, overview the past experiences. You're in the middle of pain and you're like, I think I can totally help you. I don't have time right now. Let's put a much longer, because this is like a cold, like basically it's a set call. Now if someone has, if you're selling a smaller ticket thing, then you can go cradle to grave, right? You can go to clay to close if you want to. But if you're selling an insurance product, you're trying to buy, you know, get them to do a house or do a longer sale, then cool. Then let me put some stuff together for you so I can give you a much more informed answer. But I think we can really help you. Can I ask you a question before you do that? Do you get any commitment from them? Like if I can end up helping you or you open to me, solving the solution for you, or do you not get any close at that point? Yeah, we call it the integrity tie down. So yeah, we have this big checklist that we call the lead nurture checklist, but it's like 17 things that we do. Whatever we take on a portfolio company, we always look at their show rates on appointments and we can usually take all show rates, even in the coldest prospects to 85%. But it's like everyone's like, what's the one, there isn't one thing. You have to do like 17 things that each bump you by 5% to 7%. But I like it. So you're going to end the conversation there with some probably minor commitment close that if you can solve the problem, they're going to move forward when you get back together. 100%. And so then when you go to the second call, we still go through CLO again and you'll be like, again? You're like, sure, well. And you just dive a little bit deeper into all of them. And then you go SER. So S is sell the vacation. And I use this acronym, this moniker, because I say you want to sell the vacation out the plane flight. And so a lot of people, when they want to sell stuff, they talk about the widgets, right? They talk about TSA. They talk about checking their bag and taking their shoes off and who they're going to sit next to on the plane and the seat and how long the flight's going to be and the modules and the services and whatever. But people just want Maui. Yes. And so you should be describing the beach and the ocean and what they're going to experience the moment they get into the hotel room, right? And they can open up the curtains and they look out the window. Like that's what we should be describing, not how they're going to get there. So you sell the vacation and then ER is explaining their concerns. So once you sell the vacation, that's when you make the ask. And then ENR is, OK, if they don't say yes immediately, totally reasonable. Most people don't. Expect no. Yep. Train for no, because that's where you make the money. And then we explain what their concerns. And so, you know, for us, I train on three major obstacles, which is they correspond to the distortions of reality from Dr. Albert Ellis. And so you've got people who are upset at the universe. So circumstances, that's on the outermost layer. And then the next level underneath, and this is like an onion. So if someone says no and they say time, money, this isn't the perfect fit for me. All of those are circumstantial. And that's the easiest thing to say. And that's the first thing people say when they say no. The second level underneath that is other people. So first people are upset and distorted about the universe. Everything's unfair. Nothing goes my way. The next level is because of insert person, blame finger goes out. My kids, my husband, my coworkers, my mom, whatever it is won't let me do this thing. And so they put all the power in the other person. And so we have to break that apart and get somebody who's in power who can actually make a decision. And usually, I am a big believer in sales being an actual empowerment conversation. Because if you're talking to an empowered decision maker who's informed, that's the only person you want to talk to. And I believe a well-structured sales conversation can increase the number of people who are that person. And so the final layer, the deepest one, is themselves. And so they have their own fears that they have to overcome and doubts about what's going to happen. And so we have to work through those layers until we eventually have a person who has now made a decision. And so when we can do that, I'm a big believer in trying to get yes and no, not to be hard closing. But just so that if someone doesn't give a decision, then we want to walk them through how they make decisions so that they can make a decision about your product. And so as we're going through it, so that was basically just the explaining way concerns. And then finally, R is that the person says yes, and you reinforce the decision. And so a certain percentage of sales, especially in high volume transactional sales organizations, people back out, they get cold feet, et cetera. And so what we try and do is the moment someone closes, we want the next 24 hours to be unbelievably choreographed. And so like, we're talking immediate. So the moment they sign, the moment the credit card goes through, they get a text from the onboarding person, or we do a warm handoff like, hey, this is Shirley, Shirley's going to be taken from here, like I said earlier. And so what we want to always do is set expectations, meet expectations, set expectations, meet expectations. And I have changed my tune about this. I used to always say over deliver. But I've come to the point now where I genuinely believe that if you just keep your word, they will trust you more. And ideally, and this is a little hack for everyone, if you're any type of services business, let's say you're an agency that does SEO, whatever, and it takes you 14 days to on-ramp somebody, rather than saying we're going to touch in every week, which would be fine. And that's what most people do. In that week, you probably do like 25 things, but you're going to have one meeting. If you want to be really clever, every day, send an email, it says, hey, no need for reply, just want to let you know we did these three things. We'll recap at the end of the week, but I just want to let you know where we're at. If you send progress supports every day, what happens is you create multiple reinforcement cycles. And so you're setting and completing, setting and completing. And so at day seven, when normally your competitor has only talked to them, this is the first time they talk to them since the sale, you had a warm handoff and they've received communication from you every single day. So this is like the eighth touch point for them. And now their trust in you is so much higher, which then translates to way lower backups, way higher ascensions into whatever your next revenue thing is, or the next product, or expansion revenue, and more referrals and testimonials. And so we try and choreograph that process, and that's the R. And so close your framework, clarify whether they're labeled in with a problem that you can solve, overview their past experiences, the pain cycle, sell the vacation, not the plane flight, explain where their concerns, and then reinforce the decision. Okay, a lot to unpack there. Yes. Okay, so hang on. This is one of those notes, a segment on the show. We rewind it and go listen to it again. Go rewind seven minutes back or whatever that was and listen to it again because there's genius in there. I just want to unpack a couple of things. Most of you make the mistake in whatever it is that you're doing, even doing it with your kids. You are selling the plane flight. You're selling the process. You're selling the steps as opposed to the beach. That's a biggie. Number two, this notion of the 24 hours post, I cannot get over how many people think the sale just got closed. I'm done. I cannot get over it. Number one, you're probably going to lose the sale. Number two, you're definitely diminishing the amount of leads you're going to generate from it. I just did a very significant transaction with somebody. I had a very laid out process in my company. It's a very major exit type decision for somebody. I told my team, the second we hang up this phone, he is going to begin to doubt this decision. If he's an airplane, he's freaking losing altitude. We need to be doing X, Y and Z, but it's already a predetermined process. I was just taking them back through reminding them why. Some of the businesses you have, it is just a 24 hour process. Some of you, to your other point, it's a week or eight or 10 days and whatever it might be. Sure enough, what was supposed to happen the next morning, didn't. By midday we were behind. He messages us with a question, which we replied to. Then he messaged with another one. When the second question came in, I messaged the entire team, this deal's over. We're losing this deal. No, no, no, we can get it back. We've lost the deal. He has switched, he's got downward momentum and it's our fault. Sure enough, massive, like close to nine figure mistake that was a process that was involved. Some of you are making a $800 mistake when this happens. Let me ask you a hard question because this is something I've done in my career. It's not process driven, but it's important. You went through this process. Sometimes I think that somewhere in that flow, tell me if intuition works or you just stick to the process. Somewhere in that flow before you get the close. I've had the intuition, this person's ready right now. I can go to this step. That's not necessarily something that's able to teach on scale. Do you know what I'm saying? But I've also watched a lot of people go, you have them here and now you're beginning to layer objections in it and it's taking longer than their tolerance level is. I see a lot of people, especially the longer they're in sales, they unsell them. They give them more. Let me tell you one more thing. One other thing you should know. One other thing. By the way, my checklist says step four is I then do this. Do you, because scaling this isn't as easy as, but I also know the real world. Should someone still have sensory acuity when they're in the process and go, we're ready now? The way that we train sales is that one, we start, you might love this. So we try to think back to front, which is if someone, a lot of people train rapport building first, they train the script top to bottom. But if someone knows how to do the first half of the script and they don't know the second half of the script, the likelihood that they can close is zero. Yes. If you train people from the back of the script to the front of the script, if someone doesn't have rapport and they don't know the opening questions, but they know how to close, the likelihood they could close is greater than zero. 100%. 100%. And so for us, my belief from a selling perspective is that if you follow the closer, right, clarify whether they're there, all we're doing is asking questions. Telling them is just asking for agreement on one statement that they have the problem. Overviewing past experience is just questions. We haven't said anything else. We're just asking questions. And then the only time you actually make a statement is when you sell the vacation. And then after that, you ask. And so for us, the E only comes out after they've said no. And so we explain it through obstacles and objections. And so objections, as I see them come up after the ask, obstacles come up before the ask. And so if someone says, I'm just here for more information, that's an obstacle. So we handle that up front. If, you know, like up front again, it's like, is there any other decision makers that need to be on the call? And we asked that in the nurture process before we're on the call. And we'll reaffirm that at the beginning, because if they say no, or yes, I do need someone then like, cool, let's just reschedule. There's no point in going through this. Objections happen, which is universe like time, money, fit. I need the other decision maker. Or I don't know how to make a decision, which is the personal thing, the doubt part. And so then we walk them through making the decision making process. But each one of those, we always loop back. So they give us the thing, we overcome it, and we say, great. So now you're ready or make sense. Fair enough. Let's ready to move forward. Do you have your idea on you? Whatever the closing question is. And so that way, as soon as someone says yes, that is when we stop selling. So that's the big, to your point of the unselling is because people then get like really excited. It's like, dude, take credit card. Like as soon as they say yes, great. What card do you want to use? That was a great conversation. If you want to hear the full interview, be sure to follow the Edmile Let show on Apple and Spotify. Links are in the show notes. Here's an excerpt I did with our next guest. All right. Welcome back to the show, everybody. So I'm so excited about today because you're going to learn from somebody who is currently in the hunt doing something great in business and their life. And you know, I've been asked a lot lately, you know, why is it that I don't always just have celebrities on the show because we've had lots of celebrities on in the past. And one of the reasons that's just for other shows, to be honest with you, I want to put out podcasts every week that can impact and change your life. And oftentimes I feel like when I have someone super well known, it's just sort of platitudes and general statements. That's not always. You can look at Matthew McConaughey's episode we did and others. They're just incredible. But I want people that can change your life that are doing it right now and this man fits the bill big time. So my guest today is Ryan Bartlett. He's the CEO and founder of True Classic. It's a men's apparel line. Listen to this guys. He scaled his company in three years, over $150 million in revenue and is in the hunt of building a billion dollar brand and a billion dollar company. He does it every day, including today. And so I want you to be able to have me pick his brain for you about business and life, balance, all these other things that he's clearly mastering right now in his life. So Ryan, welcome to the show, brother. Thank you so much for having me. Customer service is like nineties. What you're saying today is about and you call it the customer experience, right? What is the customer experience and why does that matter so much in today's world? It's something I'm obsessed with and probably a little too obsessed with. But I will tell you that when I started this thing, I was definitely on the same page with my co-founder Nick that we were going to be the Ritz Carlton and we were going to create such unbelievable moments for people that they were going to tell those stories forever. And so like we would be talking to a lady, we would hear a baby in the background and we would send them some sort of baby gift along with their refund. And so there's just like, there's so many nuanced moments that I can think about. I've sent a guy a Tom Brady jersey because I found out he lived out there and he was a huge Tom Brady fan and he was having a bad experience with us. So like those are the kind of things where if you go above and beyond for people, they're just always going to remember you, right? They may not even end up buying your product, but someday they'll tell a story when they see that advertisement and they'll tell somebody in the room, that guy sent me something one time and he just really made my day. And I think a lot of that is lost today. I think people are trying to really automate customer service as good as they can with AI and they're trying to create all these chatbots. And I just think having a human be able to make an impact on your life in a moment where you're frustrated and you really need someone to show up. That is really the time to do that. And I think people ultimately just don't want to deal with customer service. I see it as an unbelievable opportunity to show up in that moment when they need you most and over index for them so that they can just become a fan for life of the brand and really say, you know what, this is definitely lost in this era. And this one company did show up for me that one time so that when they consider us in the future, that's just something that's ingrained in their memory about us. And that's the feeling I want them to take away, which is just like I said, look good, feel good. It's feel good on the ads. It's feel good on the product. It's feel good in customer service. You name it. There is a feel good component to every part of this business. And that's why it operates at a 10 in every facet and how you're able to grow so fast like we have. Funny, this is so good. My kids are going to watch this today for a business course. I'm telling you, you guys, I think, Ryan, the reason that customer experience isn't something most ask yourself if you're listening, by the way, one to 10, how is your customer experience based on what he just described? Because I think it's a separator because you really almost can't teach it. Like you can go to any business course, you go to any seminar, but you actually have to think through customer experience. It has to be part of your culture. Like you have to bleed it and it is the separator. The other cool thing about it is nowadays it's the advantage to the small business over the big business because you're more nimble. You can have more listening skills. You can move faster. You can create culture easier. Small businesses have huge advantages if they take advantage of them over big ones. Now, one of the advantages they don't have, though, and this is what I want to ask you because you've done this, you've scaled really big really quickly. I mean, that's electric like meteoric growth that you've had. What's been the hardest part of scaling so big, so quick? And can you scale too big and too quick and harm your company when you do it? Absolutely. So we're up to about 600 million now. We did 200 million last year. We're in year five. We just got valued at 950 million. So to get to a billion in five years in terms of just enterprise value is pretty mind blowing and it still feels pretty surreal, to be honest with you. Okay. So I completely undersold you at 150. We're at nine times that. Thank you for fixing it. By the way, it's more impressive. Keep going. Yeah. So absolutely you can. I mean, there's this could be just an hour in itself. I mean, we've made every mistake under the sun. I would say that we always have to burn every department all the way down before we figured out how to rebuild it back up. So I would say most of the challenges we've had in the early days were over betting on inventory, which is like the classic mistake of every e-commerce company where they just over bed and now they have all these receipts coming in that they can't fulfill because the sales aren't there. And so like in year two, I made a $40 million inventory bet because I just, I was like, Hey, we're going to the moon guys and we're, and we're just going to keep going. So that was right after we had hit a hundred million in year two. So we did 15 million the first year and 90 the second year. So right after the second year, I was feeling really confident and I was like, look guys, and I'm sitting around the table with our executives and I'm just like, let's just make a bet. What do you guys think? And this is the, so after music, by the way, just going back, I, after I kind of gave up on music, I got into poker and that took over my life for a good amount of years and I became a, I guess what you would call a pro is really just not having a job and trying to gamble. But that really built my risk tolerance and it showed me that what, what it feels like to lose and just getting numb to that losing feeling, which in hindsight was a huge advantage in entrepreneurship. Cause as you know, you have to go from kind of failure to failure without, with no loss of enthusiasm, which is one of my favorite quotes. I think that really sums up entrepreneurship. So what I did was after, you know, doing poker for a while and also failing at that, it definitely built up my risk tolerance. And one of my other co-founders, it was also a poker pro at one point, which does not help us by the way in business. It just, it really, you know, we had no fear for better or worse, we had no fear. But ultimately, even though we made that $40 million bet, I think what we were telling ourselves was even if this doesn't go well, like let's just play out the worst case scenario, even if it doesn't go well, what's going to happen? We're going to have to go back and renegotiate with our manufacturers. Right. Like we're going to have to hold some safety stock, we're going to have to pay some interest, whatever it is, we just believed in our ability to negotiate with these people and level with them on a really human, human to human basis and say, look, you see us going to the moon. Do you want the business or not? I know we overbought this time, but stick with us and you'll be our preferred vendors in the future. So that was kind of our pitch to them. And it worked out all the people that stuck with us in those early years when we overbent and couldn't pay our bills on time, ended up eating it for a short term for the greater good later, because they just knew that we were going to figure out a way. Plus it was like inventory that it wasn't like I was, you know, holding yellows and oranges. This was like sellable inventory. So they all like could see that. They're like, OK, this is core product. They're going to get through it. But I would say that is a very easy way to sink the business. And that has been the hardest part. It's called demand planning in our business. And we still don't even have it perfect. And we're in year five. It's still a nightmare. We run out of stuff all the time. And then I would say outside of that now in year five, what I'm dealing with in terms of, you know, what are the biggest problems I have? It always goes back to people, you know, and I love people to a fault. And I'm overly empathetic, which is why I win in business, because it really works for the customer. But where it doesn't really work in business is employees. And I have had to learn to put the business first in a lot of situations. And when you move as fast as we do and you're a startup and you're scaling fast, one of the problems with people is that when you hire a person for a role, they quickly the business outgrows them very quickly. And when we were at 100 million, that CFO is a different level than 500 million. Right. And now we're looking back and we're going, well, where do we put this guy? Like we we there's no other spot for him to go. And a lot of times we will find a spot. Like if it's wrong person, wrong seat here today, we will try to shuffle them around and make it work ultimately, because if they're here, they're here for the right reasons, which is they have the right DNA, they're gritty. They hold all our core values. But, you know, we really try to now look and say, you know, I got a guy who works for Kitch, maybe you can go over there. Let me just ask him if he's looking for a CFO. CFO because he's doing, you know, X amount of revenue and you're perfect for that bracket. And so it's really tough though, because you have to have insanely hard conversations with people and people are going through their own stuff too. You know what I mean? Like a lot of times it's not even about work. I mean, ultimately the someone that doesn't work out here, it's for one of two reasons I always tell our employees, because a lot of employees will come to me and they'll go, why didn't it work out with so and so? And I'll have to have these hard conversations. But what I always say is like, it's two things. It's either wrong person, wrong seat, and they're just really not qualified for that job because the business needs them to really move at an absolute 10 to make it work. We don't have the luxury of having 20 people for one job and they can just kind of chill and let things go. Like this isn't that environment. Like if you're here at True Classic, you are building legacy, you're working with an insane startup and you better be providing real value for the business. So if you can't live in that world, we're just not a good fit. But people know that by now. They've seen enough podcasts or they've listened to us and they know how we roll. So it's not a big surprise anymore, but it's been really tough to watch all the OGs of True Classic kind of make their way out of the business because you start with one group and you end with a completely different one. And but it's for the better. I mean, I look back now and all these people are thriving in different departments. So when I let people go or I have to let people go for the sake of the business, I always tell them, look, I'm going to help you. I'm going to be an amazing referral. This is not this doesn't have to be a negative. You know, there's always severance, obviously, like you can help people land softly. Yeah, it's not just like, let me cut the cord and never see you again. It's like, no, I'm going to see you again. And I can promise you when you go start interviewing, they're all going to be pinging me about you and saying, hey, how did this person work out? And I'm going to give a great review because I just know that you're a great person, you work hard, you're gritty and you provide value. So I'm going to show up for you there. But that's those two things take up all the, you know, what's the hardest part of the business in my brain? It's just it's those two components are always the toughest. Before we start the interview with my next guest, just want to remind you all that you can subscribe to the show on YouTube or follow the show on Apple or Spotify. We have all the links in our show notes. You'll never miss an episode that way. Now on with the show. All right, welcome back to the show, everybody. I have been looking forward to this interview for a few weeks. Mutual friends of ours that turned me on to Alex said, you need to get with this young man and get him on your show. And then when I dove into his content and his work, I was blown away. He is brilliant. I don't say that very often when I introduce people. I think he's probably got one of the highest IQs of anybody I've ever had on the show and his content as it relates to personal success and particularly entrepreneurship is very unique, very special, very detailed. And I wish we had three hours today like other podcasts have because we could, we could use that entire three hours and still have a bunch of time and stuff left over. So he is the host of the game with Alex Hermosi on all these different platforms. He's a serial entrepreneur. By the way, he's built brick and mortar businesses, virtual businesses. He's written incredible books. He's got another one coming out. So Alex Hermosi, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for the introduction. I will do my very best to live up to it. Better live up to it. One of the things you've been pretty good at doing though is using leverage and leverage to most people who typically means borrowing money from other people. But you define leverage freaking brilliantly. So talk a little bit about what real leverage is and the way you define it. So leverage is the difference between the inputs and outputs in a system. It's the discrepancy between what you put in and what you get out. So if I have a lot of leverage, then it means if I put a little bit in, I get a lot out. Five low leverage, I have to put a lot in to get a little bit out. If I'm working at a Froyo shop, I have to put a lot of time in to get a very little amount of money. So I have very low leverage. If I do put a deal together, right, and I make a couple phone calls and then that deal yields me $10 million from connecting parties and then maybe underwriting something, all of a sudden that's a lot of leverage. So I put a very little bit of time in. I get a lot of money. And so the idea of using more leverage is looking at what my inputs and my outputs are and figuring out how I can create bigger and bigger discrepancies between those. Are there different types of leverage other than just money? Yes. Which are? So anything that increases your output without per unit of effort is leverage. And so that can happen in the physical space. So like a literal lever is increases your leverage. If I take this, we take this podcast and you put it on YouTube, that was leverage because we put the same input in, but then we get more output. If I have a cold calling system and I'm able to now dial 10 phone numbers per minute because I have a dialer that's doing outbound, I have more leverage per unit time. If I take a form of media and then I transcribe it and then I also make an audio version that is leverage. So all of those are different versions of just getting more out for what you put in. Hard question. So I let's let's dig deep. I'm an entrepreneur and I'm listening to this. Doesn't matter. I can even be self-employed. I sell life insurance. I'm a mortgage broker. I'm in real estate. I've got a cannabis business. I got six people working for me. And I now kind of get from listening to this dude and listening to Ed regularly, like this idea of leverage is what successful and wealthy people do. Right. They do it better than other people. This is a really big deal. Everybody listening to this right now, they do this better than you. They understand the concept of this better than you. And to the extent that you can understand it and most importantly, apply it. Is where you make a shift. So it's a hard question because you've answered it, but I want to push you harder on this. If I have any type of business right now and I've evaluated the concept that you've described here, how do I apply it? What do I look at in terms of buttons I could push to get more leverage? Yeah. So, Neval Robocont does a really good job of defining his four types of leverage. Now, within those, I described a lot of different leverage around one, which is media, right? But you have leverage on labor, which is you buy other people's time. So that is a first version of leverage. So is there something that I'm currently doing that I can pay someone else to do to gain time back and then use the excess time I have to make up the difference? So if I can pay someone $10 an hour and I know that I can make $50 an hour on the phone selling, then I can pay somebody to do any of my tasks for $10 and then I make up the time selling. Stay on that. Brilliant. We're going to go to the other three. I just stay on that. This is something I struggled with young. I don't know if you did. When I was young, I didn't have a lot of capital. I used to think, no, I'll just, I will do these things because I can't afford the expenditure right now. Yeah. Were you ever that way when you were young in business? Totally. I just held on because I'm like, I had the scarcity idea that this may be the $2,000 a month that keeps me in business. Yet it was the very thing that kept me in the small business I had. I think there, I mean, you got to work double time. I have, there's no real sexy answer that I have for that, which is just like, you have to work the normal amount you would to make your money. And then you have to make enough, then you work again to make someone else's money. And that's in the beginning. So it's like, I'm making my job and I'm making someone else's job so that I can buy that time that I used to work to pay someone else to then make more money in that period of time. Really good. And the big thing that I think a lot of guys, because I, on the flip side of the entrepreneur space, the influencer or whatever space, people are always talking about buying your time back, but that they don't talk about what you do with the time you bought back. So if you just buy your time back and don't do anything, you're going to make less money. I just want to be clear. But because I had an entrepreneur who was talking, he was like, I bought all my time back. He's like, but I'm really not making it. I was like, you're not doing anything. Like you still need to work. You just got to now work on higher leverage opportunities, more dollars per time. So in that, that input is my time. My output is my money. So it's a higher leverage thing at my time. What are the other three? So you got labor, which is the, which is the most operationally complex and heavy of the, of the types of leverage. The next one is capital. If you can raise money, leverage other people, that's the one that, you know, the mortgage brokers that are, they're more familiar with real estate guys. Because if I don't have to put any money up and I can buy something and then I can sell it for more money, then I get to make the, the difference between those two things. And I used it on some, on basically someone else took the time to earn the money. And then they just gave me that time. If you think of money as a, as a tradable unit of time that I got to borrow and then make the difference on something. The third one, and I think three and four kind of go hand in hand, but it's, you've got software, sure. Code and then media. So code is just, you know, you write code and it, it takes you one time investment to get the thing to do something. And then every additional time. So the input was the time I took to build once. And then every additional person who uses the software and gets a benefit from it, I get almost no incremental cost. And so that's leverage. And then with the, the media side, we, you know, said it earlier, if it takes the amount of time for us to make this one podcast, if one person listens to this or a million people listen to this, it's the same amount of effort. Yeah. I told you guys when I introduced some of this, this'll be stuff you've not heard before. So, and it is, there's another type of leverage. And I really related to this. I'm, I'm 20 years further down the road than you on some of these things, but I very much relate to some of the things you talk about. Obviously you have this relationship with your dad. Maybe we'll go there, but that you were, you know, just trying to prove him wrong all the time, but you said something in one of your quotes, you said, I found out later that I was constantly trying to prove a fictitious person wrong. Meaning the type of leverage that I got on myself when I was young, I'm going to prove them wrong. I'm going to prove them wrong. I'm going to prove them wrong. And it was like this. I mean, I think the best way to describe me as an early entrepreneur was a little bit angry and I leveraged intensity. Yeah. I leveraged anger. I actually leveraged fear of losing to this fictitious person of them being right. And by the way, some of that probably served me really, really well, but I don't know that it was healthy longterm. So what about that getting leverage on yourself idea? Would you recommend someone operate out of that space and talk about your own journey on it? I would recommend you use the resources you have to create the life you want. And so if the cards that you have dealt right now are anger and fear and disappointment, then you can either. Wallow in those, or you can turn something good out of it. And so, I mean, I love the saying you can either let life beat the strength out of you, or you can let it beat it into you. And I think that you can use that. You could put pain, you could put disappointment, you could put fear, you could put whatever that, that life, you know, thing is. And so it's just a decision of whether these circumstances are going to serve me or I'm going to serve them. And so I think that whatever your raw materials are, a lot of people lament what cards they're dealt, but you don't have control over those cards. You only have control of how you play the hand. And so I think everyone just needs to move past that and, you know, stop the pissing contest on who had a sadder upbringing. Yeah, I also think though that you have to be, if you're making progress, you know, one of the things that's made Jordan great or Brady great is changing the leverage they get on themselves. So it's not that Tom Brady still isn't playing football to prove the fact that he was a six round draft pick, right? But this notion that that's what he gets up every single day with that's the chip on his shoulder anymore is not true. He's now playing for greatness. He's playing because it's his standard. Yeah, praying to so. And I find with a lot of entrepreneurs, they don't ever change the leverage. And so when they get to where they have proved that fictitious person wrong, or they have gotten to where they are no longer starving, they don't have any mechanism to drive themselves any further. You know what I'm saying? Like I think a lot of people are just oblivious to the fact that you've lost leverage. I'm not motivated anymore. I'm not inspired. It's because the old lever you pulled that worked at one stage, you need to now find Jordan used to say, listen, I play every day, but Jordan didn't take a bunch of games off. He'd say, because there's a kid in the stands who it's the one time he's ever going to see me play as that night in Sacramento. And even though it's the Kings, I'm going to play all out because that kid's going to tell stories about seeing me play. That's different than his motivation, his rookie year to prove he belonged in the league, right? Entrepreneurs don't find that new lever. You obviously have. I, so I've made some content on that specifically that Michael Jordan said. So I super resonate on that. Like that was my biggest of the whole series that I watched. That was like the point where I like had to pause and like chew on it. But it really made me appreciate like every, every podcast, every, every opportunity that we have to share something to really try and bring it rather than call it in. You know what I mean? Um, but yeah, for me, my, my leverage has changed. I think I was really angry, um, younger and very more fearful than angry. Me too. Um, just really just the idea of the disappointment and him being right was just like unbearable. Him being dead. Yeah. Yeah. Isn't it? Do you think I think that, um, anger is typically the manifestation of fear. And so I, when I say anger, I wasn't throwing chairs all the time or anything like that, but there was this almost like game day intensity type anger every day to the way I approached my life and my business. That was a great conversation. Be sure to follow the Ed Milech show on Apple and Spotify. Links are in the show notes. You'll never miss an episode that way. Welcome to the Ed Milech show fired up today. I've got one of the great young entrepreneurs in the United States here with me that I've been following on social media for a long time. We've got a bunch of mutual friends. And so I'm honored to have the great Brad Lee here today. Brad, thanks for being here. Really. And I'm honored. I'm honored. Oh, it's great to have you. We've been having great conversations off camera, very interesting conversations. And I'm hoping that transfers to on camera now too. So many of you probably follow Brad on Instagram or on Twitter through social media and you've seen the unbelievable post that he makes. I think he's one of the most creative and innovative, unique people on social media. I've told you that. That's interesting. I want to drill into that. Okay, we will. I'll tell you why it's unique too. But so I encourage you begin to follow him too as well if you're not. But what I want to do today is get to know you better. And then there's all these young entrepreneurs out there, salespeople. I consider Brad to be an expert with how to teach people how to become more productive entrepreneurs and especially great at teaching people how to sell and close and persuade people too. And so I want to pick your brain on some of that stuff today. Brad's built an amazing company. We're actually at his headquarters today called Lightspeed VT. It's an unbelievable virtual technology that he's got that you see a lot of people on his platform often that you would know very well in personal development. But I want to go back prior to that. Okay. So how does Brad Lee become Brad Lee? So you grew up where you grew up in the Pacific Northwest. Yep. Did you grow up in a super successful family, like entrepreneurs around you, wealth around you? How'd you grow up? No, no. Originally we were kind of, I wouldn't say poor, but low middle class at best. We lived in a little tiny house on a hill surrounded by bigger houses. It was it was kind of unique because, you know, there's a lot of stories from that, that I've learned back in those days that I can now see the lesson where there, I didn't really realize. But no, we grew up a lower middle class. You did. Mom and dad married and you didn't say those? My dad and mom were divorced and then my dad remarried. So I had my stepmom at that time. Okay. So you live with your dad and your stepmom? Yeah. Well, originally we all went to an orphanage and then my grandmother, bless her heart, told my dad to get off his ass and come get us because we were basically about to get shipped off to different families. You're kidding me. No, when my mom and dad divorced, my dad said, screw you. And my mom said, well, here take the kids. She kept the baby. So me and my brothers and sister went to an orphanage and was about to get shipped off and then my grandmother told my dad, you better go get them. So fortunately he came and got us. Well, what? How? I was, I was two. You're two. So you don't really remember this happening necessarily. My brothers and sisters do, but I was two. My brother was probably seven. Wow. And then in between. Have you covered that before? No, but you want something new, don't you? I do. I want stuff new. I always make them cry, crying a little bit. So what am I going to do? Come on. Come on. So that's interesting. So you're this little guy, you're growing up, you live with your dad, mom's sort of in a different place. Were you always, were you an athlete? Like, were you a competitive part? Like, did you have this background of winning and competition your whole life or? Well, well, actually, yeah. I didn't know it at the time, but I excelled at sports. Like, for example, I joined a swim team and I first year joined a team called the guppies. We had to, yeah, to start there. And my, the only sporting event my dad ever came to watch was my first swim meet with the guppies. And I beat the other swimmers so badly, they disqualified me. Really? They said he, he shouldn't be in this league. And my dad basically told them, ah, you know, you guys are stupid. He left and he never went to another sporting event of mine, but I excelled at swimming at first. And then cross country did that for a minute and, you know, kind of beat the competitors without even really trying. So you're a natural athlete. I ran a 440 in junior high. 440? 440 in junior high. I mean, like people say bullshit or bull crap. That's okay. And it's true. It's the dead ball's truth. But I didn't have a lot of parental guidance when it came to, you know, sticking to something. So ultimately I ended up, you know, quitting over something stupid and no one made me go back. So I didn't, I didn't finish with sports. Okay. A lot of people relate to that though. A lot of people had some potential when they were young. They didn't have a lot of supervision. They end up, you know, kind of flaming out on their first dream. So you had all these gifts that you end up not using. So after high school, you had a college or you didn't? Dropped out of high school. You dropped out of high school. Yeah, beginning 11th grade. So you're a high school dropout who's built this massive company. Yeah, baseball. Yeah. Either home runs or strikeouts. There was no in between. There's no in between with you. No base hits. So you're a high school dropout and then you end up becoming this. How's that happened? So I know this, just to speed something up here, you end up getting into the sales business eventually. Yeah. Right. And so how long were you in sales? What type of sales were you in? And is that when you first started to get your taste at, hey, I can control my time. I can make some money. How old were you? Like, when did all that start? It's 17. You know, I couldn't decide between movie star and, and a job. Everyone was telling me, you know, get a real job. Yeah. weren't you an actor though? You were also actor. Yeah, I technically still am. I'm just unemployed. Okay. So if you guys are looking for one, you know, I'm a thespian, trained thespian, by the way. But at around 17, early 17 years old, I went and got a job with a forest service company. And I thought I was going to be fighting forest fires. Sounded cool. Yeah. Went around bragging like I'm cool, paid like $22 an hour. First day on the job realized I wasn't a forest fire fighter. I was the dude that had a 10 pound bag of water put on my back and I went and squirted water on stumps that were smoldering so they didn't reignite a fire. They called it a piss bag, got poison oak and went and basically said, Hey, I got poison oak, I'm not gonna be able to come in tomorrow. And they're, they laughed and said, Yeah, you'll be in tomorrow at four a.m. That's part of the job. And you know, everyone had poison oak supposedly. So that's ultimately when I said, Dude, this manual labor ship, I'm not into it. Yeah. So I opened the newspaper to get another job and there was an ad for selling cars. Okay. So I went and applied for selling cars at 17 and basically lied to get the job because you had to be 17 years old. Yeah. And you had to be 18. So I got the job at 17 lying, which again, you'll learn people say you can't change. I think you can, by the way. Anyway, BS my way into the job. Okay. Went around bragging to everybody. I was 17. So, so the other salesmen were haters because I was kicking everyone's ass and they told management. And so management brought me in and said, Howl to you. And I said, And he said, Don't lie to me. I said, I'm 17. He said, Well, you lied and said you're 18. I said, Yeah, he said, How many cars you got out? I said, like 26. And at this time, closest person might have had 10. And he said, When do you turn 18? I said, like another two months. He said, Can you keep your mouth shut that? Of course, I don't want to lose the golden goose. Yeah. So I, so I, so I started Excel. You know, they gave me a car to drive. You got to wear a suit. I was, I was home. No poison oak, no hard work, a pen, you know, and the way I looked at it, this individual paid for all the cars, paid for the building, paid for the advertising, gave me a pen and let me have my own little business without investing a dime. That's the way I looked at it. And so I was aggressive and started selling. Talk about for a second, because I don't think most salespeople think that way, especially if they're not in something where they do have some ownership of it. But you treated selling. This is important, by the way, because I did too young. I started out just in the selling business too. And so, but you treated selling like it was your own business. Well, it is. Elaborate. What do you mean? When you're on commission, you know, you don't have a limit. So if you're going to give me cars, let's use cars or art, because I've sold art, cars, RVs, ridiculous vacuums, really, candy bars. Yeah, I've sold everything. Matter of fact, six years old, there's a story about selling candy bars that is pretty funny, but give me it. I want to hear it. Well, I was six years old and they gave out the boxes of candy, world's finest chocolates. Yeah. You remember those? Yes. They were delicious. They were. Yeah. I mean, still to this day, I think they're probably the best actual chocolate with almonds you can find. So I went out and I started selling candy bars and all the other kids that couldn't sell their candy bars, normally they would ship them back to the company and that was it. Well, they just gave me all of the candy bars everyone else couldn't sell. And I literally sold every candy bar that the school received. And how knocking doors. Yeah, I went on knocked on doors. They'd open the door and I'd have it behind my back. And when they answer the door, I would say, do you have the phone number to a good roof repairman? And they'd always be like, no, it's six years old. You say six years. And I developed it all by myself. I don't know how, but I said, do you have the phone number to a good roof repairman? They said, no, why? And I say, because when you taste one of these, you're going to go through the roof. And people were just six year old little face saying that. I don't know. I can't say no. And people were just buying boxes at a time. And I'll take 20 of them. So I learned selling then. Okay. I'm going to tell you point this out what you just did. I told Brad before we went on the camera because you just did it again, that he has an interesting way of communicating. Remember when I told you this earlier? Yeah. You just did it again. You started it at six years old. And this is why I want you to follow him because a lot of people speak the same way. They'll say, here's what I'm going to tell you. Then they tell you Brad's communication style is it ends up a punchline. So you don't know where you're going and then boom, you land somewhere. Whether that's a joke or a sales pitch or a close or a statement, you watch when you watch him and you just so you know, you did it at six years old. You start with the candy bar behind your back, right? Yeah. Do you need a roof? You know, and boom, then you come back at him. So you always take him down an interesting road when you communicate. It's very unique to this dude with the way that you talk. It is. And it's why I think your social media stuff is interesting because it's not like, let me tell you what you need to think. And then you say it, you start out somewhere and I don't know where we're going. And then boom, there's a punchline and we land somewhere. And when I say punchline, it may not mean something funny. It just may mean you take me where you're going to take me. It's almost like going around the corner and I find the prize. Yeah. And that's what you were doing when you closed then too. So that's awesome, by the way. You started that at six. Started at six, you know. So let me ask you a question. You're this good closer at six. You become a great car salesman, young. You've gone on to sell other things and been successful. Then you built this huge training thing that we're going to talk about in a minute. But I'm a salesperson, which by the way, the first thing is the first step of that is admitting it, right, that I actually close. I actually sell, right? Give me a couple of things that someone out here just got into sales or is in it and struggling, right? Like what's a couple of real keys of being great at closing? One, you've said you own it like your own business because not everybody does think that way. But give me a couple of things. What makes a good closer, a good salesperson, a good persuader? The ability to listen, first of all, because a lot of salespeople really don't listen. And they're not even prepared to ask good questions in order to get good answers. So I'll give you an example. When I used to train people, I would carry around a quarter, a dime and a nickel. So they can put this on the screen if you're editing this, but pretend this is a quarter. Okay. And this is a dime and this is a nickel. Now I'm going to ask you a question. I want you to listen. Okay. Bob's mom has three kids. The first one is Nicholas. The second one is Demetrius. What's the third one's name? I don't know. What is it? Okay. Well, I'm going to have you listen again. Okay. Do it again. Bob's mom has three kids. The first one is Nicholas. Second one is Demetrius. What's the third one's name? I don't know. See, that's because you're not really actively listening. Okay. Now actively listen to me. Okay. Bob's mom has three kids. The first one is Nicholas. The second one is Demetrius. What's the third one's name? You got me. I don't know. Listen closely. Stop it. Give me an answer. Bob's mom. Bob's mom. It's Bob. There you go. It takes me a while. So you notice that doesn't take you a while. You're not listening actively. I'm struggling with my IQ issues, but I got it eventually. I guarantee it's not that. It's been people do it. And people do it all the time. They're not listening actively because we're having a conversation and you're you're not trying to sell me anything. Right. But when someone says what makes the best salesperson? Ultimately, where all of you just watching that go, what the hell is wrong with me or were any of you with me on that? Like, it's at least five percent of you with me that you did not know Bob's damn name. I'd say 90 percent. Because what is the trick is there's a damn N, a D and a Q. So you're throwing me off with the Q. Yeah. Well, that's why I'd have a dime, a quarter and a nickel. Yeah. So people just are trying to because they're not listening. So if you're if you're if you want to be great in sales, first of all, you need to learn to listen closely and actively. And then secondly, learn to ask the right questions. Wow, that is that is such an awesome illustration right there. My whole audience now just unfollowed me because they know how low my IQ. Well, watch this. Well, you can edit it, but trust me. It was awesome. I'm 95 percent of the people I do that with. Never get Bob. Sometimes they'll get it on the third one. Occasionally on the second one. Hardly ever. They're listening. No, I'm leaving that in there. That's too damn good. However, knowing the right questions to ask, you know, when people start selling things like if I say, you know, go ahead and sell me that, you know, people will start saying, oh, it's quality leather and it's going to last a long time. And that's not really selling. That's telling. Selling. I have to know what it is about you that values that. And I do that through questions. So if I were going to sell you that, I wouldn't just start selling it. Like most people, that's what they'll do. Like next time you talk to a salesperson that says their top salesman and say, okay, well, sell me that chair. And they'll say, oh, this chair is constructed this way and it's the greatest fabric and it's going to last the best. And they're not asking you, you know, who's the chair for? You know, are you replacing a chair? You know, what do you like about the chair? You're replacing what didn't you like about the chair you're replacing? So by the time I explain that chair, I can provide value and explain to you why it's valuable. Now, let's say, for example, you tell me that chair is so quality and it's going to last forever. And I find out you're getting a divorce and you have to provide your ex-wife. A replacement chair. Yeah. I just unsold you the chair, not even knowing it. Why? Cause I didn't ask you some questions and listen to the answer. Well, that's the big thing. Cardone said this to me. Grant Cardone. And I were talking about this very topic off camera also. And he said, because it's what you just did with me. It's not just asking the question. It's getting the answer. So a lot of people ask questions, but they never get the answer. You forced me through finally to get me to get the answer. Right. And that's what a good closer gets also. They don't just ask the question. They actually get the answer. I think some people think, all I got to do is ask a bunch of questions. Well, no, you have to get the answer and get them actively listening. That's why that is really powerful. And I want to absolutely leave that in there. So very, very good. You want to be good in sales, listen and ask good questions. Okay. So that's huge, by the way. So you want to start a business. You might think you need a team of people and fancy text kills, but you don't. 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