Dennis Yu & Sal Steffano Talk Building and Scaling Digital Marketing Agencies

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen. Today on the coach you show, we have an absolute legend in digital marketing. South Stefano, is one of the few people that has scaled his agency to the point that he doesn't have to be involved. And he's been so good at it. He started a cryo agency, a solar agency before you were doing this, like, pole, g I GIS mapping stuff. So Lots of different agencies lots of different areas, and stick with us today, and you're gonna learn how Sal was able to do things to where he was able to get out the operations in the day to day, how he grew his team with a ton of virtual assistants. So he and I both really like our VA in the Philippines. We're American. Just like everybody else, but you're gonna learn the real deal on how to scale an agency. There's a lot of people out there talking about to build an agency. They're trying to sell you courses on agencies and whatnot. Sal doesn't sell any courses. Who courses for sale? Sorry. He's here to help you today. So Salle, so glad to have you here in the studio today. Great to be here, Dennis. Thanks for coming by in Vegas. We have all sorts of things that happen. So Sal's been through a lot. You can see that he's a kind soul, but his dad died at an early age And he had he had to struggle. So tell us about that, and how did that affect your view on business? Yeah. So when I was I was, like, about fifteen years old or so, maybe sixteen. Just driving along one day, and we're in Buddy's car. And we're sounding like this residential street. Alright? Nothing crazy. And somebody just we're going this way, somebody's coming this way, they go to turn, you know, hit us on the side of the car. And basically, you know, my dad said, hit the windshield, you know. Yeah. And Fortunately, didn't have a seat belt on either. Mhmm. And so, you know, I remember we got hit and I remember, like, kinda like, I don't know, like, this ain't passing out, but I hit my head against the back, you know, passenger side back seat. Mhmm. And so I remember just waking up, kinda dazed and confused, you know, didn't know what was going on, found a later had a concussion. And I saw my dad and to see just kinda like limped over, I thought he was dead at the time. Thankfully, at that time he wasn't, but he had unfortunately broke his neck. Oh. And then find out a few years later, he actually damaged his frontal lobe. So once Pete somebody has that damage Oh, he broke his neck. Okay. I misread Yeah. So but, you know, it he might as well have almost died that day because it completely destroyed his quality of life, you know, everything with our family. Yeah. We went from basically living in the beach to living in the hood overnight. Yeah. You know, less school, work two, three jobs, you know, and That's kind of how, like, I got into digital marketing because, you know, working these job serving tables and all that just You're scrappy. Yeah. Do we had, you know? Would learn how to, like, fix computers and phones and, you know, I remember, like, the Loca repairs and the old, you know, Samsung galaxies, doing all that stuff. And, you know, just don't you couldn't make some money. And I remember looking at the Internet, I'm just like, man, like, if I could just make money from this Internet, from home. This was before there was any real courses. Yeah. This was before, like, Ryan Fort Tay Lopez and all that. Right. Before RideICE and his potato k and n and, you know, tell everybody about lead magnets. And this is way before this was like back in the days where people with SEO would have like a blue background and put blue tags and like, you you get ranked for that kind of matter. Really the real span days. Right? Yeah. And so, I remember, like, I made my after about two years, took me two years to make my first dollar, but every time I got home, you know, it not work like doubles, twelve, fourteen hours, but I would spend two, three, four, five hours just researching online, like, you know, stuff like the warrior forum and Black Hat World Digital Point. Yeah. Digital Point. Yeah. You know, do those four days. Right? Yeah. And so I started doing some affiliate networking. Eventually, after two years -- Uh-huh. -- finally made my first check -- Uh-huh. -- it was like forty something bucks, you know, affiliate commission. Most people make nothing. Right. But it was like, you know what? Like, that moment, I got that check-in that mail. I was like, I did it. I wasn't proud of everything I had to do to get that far, you know, but You know, I made it happen. It was real. Yeah. I was like, okay, this is not just some BS because, you know, that time everybody's like, oh, go get a real job, you know, like, this is you're crazy. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. You guys remember how you felt when you made your first dollar? That's experience. Right? So this is this is what I tell my clients now. Okay? Because I work with people outside my agency consulting that, you know, one on one. And what I tell people is, don't work with me because I'm some kind of genius, I'm not. You know, I'm stubborn as a mule. I'm hardheaded. But for about ten years, Dennis. Yeah. I didn't make, like, really any money. I made money enough to, like, barely survive, right, take care of my family? Yeah. But it was once I you know, started documenting all the things that went wrong here. And I turned them into systems and processes. And that's when I realized like, that's the key. It is. And so crazy enough. Yeah. If you wanna have like the best system in the processes, you should hire somebody who's completely unqualified to do the job, somebody who's kind of an idiot, to be honest, because lazy people like that. Right? They do everything wrong. Yeah. Right? If you can build your system so tight -- Yeah. -- and so accurate and detailed, that anybody can do it even that guy. Right? Yeah. Now you have an awesome system. Yeah. And now you can go hire the right person and put them through and your job's gonna be a breeze. But too many times, we try to hire people and expect them to solve our problems, which you can, you know, if you're hiring like a c level exec or you're partnering with certain company and their strategic partnerships and things. But your typical employee is not gonna have that level of accountability and know how. At the end of the day, most of them, you know, they wanna come to work. Put their hours in -- Yeah. -- make their paycheck and you live their life. They're not workers. The workers instead of the architects, the employees versus the entrepreneurs. Yeah. And you need them, you know. And so anyways, I mean, we talk about that all day. Yeah. I've done some snooping on Sal. Oh. And this man here understands SOPs. So we can talk about strategy and, you know, having the right mindset and working hard and, you know, working ten years before you start to make some real dollars, last two years, how he built a seven figure agency with COVID for Adam's nothing. But the real thing that I want you to see is that the when you see someone like Sal who has put together processes that are detailed on how they have these five minute follow ups, Right? Tons of people and tons of processes and software. His processes on how he hires and trains VA's where it's it's a gauntlet of many, many different steps That's the ongoing advantage. It's not that he's working super hard. In fact, this guy his calendar is mostly clear And he he could just take four or five days off if he wants just to do nothing. Right? If you wanted to. Mostly how my calendar is, you know, until I get excited about something. And then I just put all kinds of stuff on my calendar. But like that's that's the beautiful part. Right? That of like being an entrepreneur. Yeah. And don't get me wrong. Like there's I wouldn't I wouldn't put this on my worst enemy to become an entrepreneur if they're not the right person. Right. Because it would drive you absolutely insane. And if you are the right person, it still will, but you can deal with it a lot better. But you know, at the end of the day, shoot, I forgot where was it going with that. What do you say? Well, you're putting all these SOPs in place and it takes years to get to that point before you can live that laptop lifestyle because Sal can do what he wants to do now because he put in that time to delegate all this stuff out. If he had to respond to every single inquiry, if he had to talk to every single client, every kind of random, just heartbreaking thing that happens in an agency. Right? An agency will just suck soul out of you because of clients and problems and all sorts of little things that just support, training, refunds. Check the words on my own. It can there's a lot of freedom to it. Right? But it can be the complete opposite. Yeah. You know, again, put you in chains -- Yeah. -- very easily. And I think that's one of the hardest things like, everybody talks about scaling up. But people, like, they don't understand what that really means. Yeah. Like, the heartache, the pain you gotta go through, because it's not just about you know, getting your business to make more money, or creating systems and processes, or hiding the right people, that's all part of it. But this is like real inner character work because when you're like looks like a video game. When you level up -- Yeah. -- like you go from level five to level six and going from level six to level seven is a lot harder. From five to six, you know, and so forth. Right? Yeah. And so the higher up you get, you know, and take that however you want in life, in general, business. Mhmm. The more that's required a change out of you, you know, in order to be the person who can manage that kind of responsibility So I can't believe it's like Spider Man. Right? You can stay with great power comes great responsibility. And that's what running a business is. Now you're not just in charge of like yourself and your own wheel of being, there's all these other people. Right? And how do you cope with all those emotions and feelings? Mhmm. Well, the thing is is in order to scale and get past like, you know, a lot of agencies are at that churn and burn, right, where they keep clients like thirty to ninety days -- Yeah. -- if that. Yeah. And a lot of it's because we're too close to the people we're working with. Yeah. And so if you're scaling your business, right? You said your average was fourteen months? So It's about it's about three years right now. It's around a nine nine point to seven percent -- That's great. -- month over month retention rate. So that's month over month. Yeah. It's not year to year. But Right. You know, so, like, it's it's up there and that's because our So, with SM one hundred and eighty, you know, it came in about, I don't know, about fourteen months ago. It was, you know, started by introducing my current business partner with there. But, you know, we had started we met at It was one of Rob Bailey's events -- Okay. -- because we're both, like, in his program, agency, Alcony. Mhmm. And we had met over there, you know, Sean Clark with high level was there and everything. And both our short man guy, you know, ends up, you know, saying something to me. I said something that he thought it was a joke, and I wasn't, but we both started laughing. He ended up buying me pizza, you know, a little bromance. And, you know, he asked me for some help with his sales. I told him, you know, well, normally, like what I charge like, you know, be way out of his, you know, ballpark. Right? So, you know, I give him, you know, hook up. Because I like the guy and he bought me pizza. Right? That's one way, you know, if you went out for me to buy me pizza and I'll probably do all kinds of free shit for you. But so anyways, you know, to make a long story short, about six months, you know, I'm helping him out and eventually we just end up becoming business partners, you know, COVID hit all that stuff. I started taking over more of a gym that I just acquired. And I didn't really wanna focus so much on the digital works. It's like another physical brick and mortar place to take care of. Right. And so he helped me with some clients and things. And we decided, you know, after that, just become business partners. And so in about fourteen months, just installing some of the things I've learned over the years like, you know, traction in the US. Okay. We have great systems. The best. Like, that's I took about four year break from business all the time in my life, and that book is what actually made me wanna start another business. In faction. Yeah. Absolutely. That's a tough one, though. It's It's a lot to implement. Man, it it is. It's a lot of paperwork and tracking. It was, man. It was tough. But to me, it's the best thing I ever did now. Every business I run now runs it. I've learned how to do it with very small companies. It isn't meant for companies once they hit like two to five million a year. Yeah. You know, not under. Now you're twenty something people, right? What's up? Your twenty something people? So That's what you're saying. Well, I I was at twenty something. That social marketing one eighty. But made some improvements to our systems and processes and our efficiencies and our software. Right? And so we were able to cut that in about half and then I moved half of those people over to new solar agency that I started. Okay. Two for one. So exactly. And so so long story short, you know, kept making a better product, better service. And right now, like we've made it so good over last year, like we're able to grow ten x without actually doing very much outreach to get clients, because truth is, we got a lot of referrals because we were actually getting results. And that's a key. A lot of people skip over that. They they say, you just sell sell sell, which don't get me wrong when you first started, you got no money, you gotta bring money in. You know, you should spending all your time money on your product. I mean, you shouldn't. You know, you need to make money. Yeah. But there comes certain time where you're making enough money, support the business, Right? Especially if you're doing things smart, like, you know, outsourcing overseas properly. Yeah. Right? And when when you end up you know, going through all that. Right? You get to a point where all you need to do, man, is then worry about your retention. Mhmm. Because without the retention, you get stuck in that -- Channel TV. Yeah. -- and really, you're just a snake oil salesman at that point. Right? Yeah. And so once again, you know, you gotta have something decent, you gotta have your MVP, my men way viable product. Mhmm. But if you focus on making your products so good, that people can't resist it. Well, then you combine that. Yeah. But then, so we, literally, TedX that company went from doing seven thousand a month at agency when I first got there. So now I was doing about sixty thousand a month recurring revenue. How much of that is margin? So before owners pay, but after taxes and operating expenses and everything we run profit first, as well, which is amazing system if you don't have it. We take between owner's pay and profit, we take about forty five percent. Wow. It's half. That's good. That's great. And we could take more. Yeah. But, you know, you don't wanna get too greedy. You know, like that there, that's probably about, you know, I should probably be coming down a little bit on it here moving forward. You know, now. But so we we went from that and, you know, this year. So we haven't even focused on sales and marketing. And that's a crazy thing. My background is in sales and marketing. It's not an operation. That was one of my biggest weaknesses in building teams and stuff, but I've really been focusing on the last couple years. You don't need to do marketing because you're growing by with word-of-mouth. That's what I'm saying. And you have retention, so you're not having to replace clients, you're losing. And you know what one thing that we do? Mhmm. So we go to events, trade shows. Because you can go to places like that. You have the perfect target market, because who spends money and flies all over the country and pays hundreds and thousands of dollars to go to spaces. It's people looking for solutions to their problems. Mhmm. I know that because when I go to trade show, right? And I'm not an exhibitor. I'm going there to get solutions to my problems. Like, I have money in hand. I'm desperate to give people money. I love throwing money at people to solve my problems. Yeah. You know? And so when you go to when you do something like that, right, you can get enough clients for the entire year. At that event and just do sales once. Yeah. Like there's so many things outside of just the digital marketing realm. And like, that's one thing that I've really learned a lot. And Mike McCalovich has a great book. You just put a pocket first. Yep. And another book. Yeah. He's like, I think seven now. Okay. But, yeah, someone called get different. It's marketing book. Can you guess what it's about? It's about just being different than everybody else. That if you just stand out, now don't be freaky in a weird way stand out, right, to scare people off. Yeah. But stand out in a way that's, you know, attracts people. Well, you've already you know, you've done the first thing. You like, ate a formula. Right? Yeah. You got that intention first. Yeah. And so many people, we skip all these steps, And that's why systems and processes, all the things are so important and know in your numbers -- Yeah. -- because then you know, where to at where your funnels broke in, where your sales process is. And you have one product and you serve one industry. So how important is it to focus on one industry for your see. Oh, man. So it's the difference between being successful or not, you know, for ninety nine percent of the people out there. What do you say to agencies that focus just on one area? They serve just Vista, California, just Portland, Oregon, and they try to handle all the different kinds of local businesses in that city. So, I mean, there's two there's two thoughts on that. Right? So, number one, that's better than what some people do. Which is right, especially in, you know, the Internet marketing world. Yeah. You know, people who go to website, you know, so websites, I sell Facebook ads, I sell SEO, I sell automation. Right? Yeah. And then they try to sell it to every industry, like, that's the absolute worst you can do. Right? Those companies that are doing well in spite of that, those ones I love working with because it's so easy in and just make up a little changes -- Yeah. -- and boom, you know, they're good. But so I think so that's better than that as a step above. Right? Mhmm. But the thing is, you wanna get very very specific. Mhmm. Right? You know, some people might call it the three p's. Right? You know, so I have one problem -- Mhmm. -- for one person, and, you know, through one product. Yeah. Right? And when you do those things and the more specific that you can get, I don't care how big the market is. I don't care if there's only fifty people in the market that meet that criteria. Yeah. Right? Because when you first start, well, you want as specific as a message as possible and to keep your business as simple as possible. Right? In fact, the solar agency that started, it does literally one fifth of what social marketing one eighty does. All as we do, crazy enough is we just have people in the Philippines, cold calling all day -- Mhmm. -- and when they get somebody on the line, They do some brief qualification. Mhmm. And then we live transfer. We don't even book the appointment. Crazy enough. We just live transfer it to solar companies that already have their own call centers and sales teams and stuff. So we just do the one thing. You're the Chick fillet with the chicken sandwich. That's it. And you're real good at it. And guess what? That company -- Mhmm. -- is make that company this quarter will make more money than the agency that's been in business for four years. Because it does just one thing because it does just one thing. It's super simple. Now, as you expand and grow, right? In order to keep gaining market share, you have to keep innovating. But too many people are worried about innovation and scale before they've even have a working product that the market loves. Yeah. Doing fifty things okay instead of one thing really well. Yeah. That's it. And I know that's like so easy to say. It's easy for me to say, and I I still struggle with that almost every day. I do too. Shiny object syndrome. Shiny object syndrome, man. I'm telling you, it's everywhere. Yeah. And like what happened, like, even in social marketing one eighty. Right? The reason why we're not at, like, hundred and fifty, two hundred ran is because right now I keep making the focus on the product. And like this last quarter invested fifty thousand dollars into our infrastructure. Yeah. But that also cut over expenses in half, though. So Yeah. But so now I'm at a point where now it's like, okay, we're focusing on all sales. I'm marking this year. And so our minimum target -- Mhmm. -- this year is five hundred k a month in that company. You know, and that's reoccurring revenue -- Right. -- once again. You know, at minimal, the ninety eight some retention rate because that's our metric and we're way above that right now. But, of course, over time that -- Yeah. -- can go down, you know, as you scale. Right. But you know, my real goal though, and I don't tell those employees, I think I'm crazy and they'll hate their life. Okay. You know, there's things I do behind the scenes as the visionary. You know, do you know what my colleague you go and you sprinkle your magic or Yeah. You know? He's a visionary and that means he's got an integrator. Absolutely. You have to. That's that's literally what changed my life. Before an integrator, you get no traction. How part of it is to have a cofounder versus trying to be a solo founder doing it all by yourself with a bunch of freelancers and whatnot. Oh, man. So because most of you guys are probably visionaries, but you're but you're involved in the details operationally, and that's what's getting in trouble. It it it it's so hard to be a visionary without having capital and resources and not even that, just a know how in order to hire that integrator. Right? Because in order to do that, number one, you have to get to a certain point in your business or maybe if you're born with a silver spoon in your mouth, I don't know. I I wasn't. So but if you have something like that, then you just you know pay somebody to start with. Right? Yeah. So why a lot of big companies, you know, there's a lot of like nepotism and people getting jobs they shouldn't. And they still do okay because so much money that they can blow. Whereas when you're small. Well, already, yeah, they got momentum. I mean, dude, every business I've started up until the most recent one in the solar agency. I started with than a hundred bucks or no or no money on my own. Yeah. Every single time. And, so you have to get to a certain point, right, where you can figure out a way to bring on that integrator. Yeah. And in order to do that, you gotta do one of two things. You either have to have the right kind of money and, you know, know how to hire the right person, or you need to know how to sell people on your vision and on your dream and what you're building in order so that they will They're in a partner at that point. Exactly. And so Yeah. But I think when I first started business, You know, I I used to do all on my own. I didn't have business partners. Right. You know, I was always afraid of being screwed over. Right? Which it happens. Yeah. My first business that I actually that that I would call successful went from zero to three hundred fifty k a month in about twelve months, I was the first, like, real business I built. But unfortunately, I made -- So climbing the poles? -- I was climbing the poles. Yeah. Cellphone tower were like, I Man, I'll never do that again, but, you know, being negative twenty degree weather, climate three, four hundred feet up in the air, on these cell phone towers? So you you as a big guy were climbing up As a big guy, I weighed more back then than I do now. That's scary. Like, it was Four hundred feet up. I can't imagine what that looks like. When it's minus twenty and you're trying to hold on to these steel towers. Wow. We literally had, like, knock ice off the rungs and stuff as you're climbing. So Like, and then you're climbing and you have, like, your your visor on. Right? And it you're you're having, like, you know, your hot breath. Mhmm. Fog them up. And you climb in, like, you you can't see stuff and like, dude, it's the scariest thing I've ever been through in my entire life. When I was That wasn't in Chandler. No, that was in Minnesota. Minnesota. Minnesota. You know, for sure you betcha. You know you know. Yeah. You bet your boots. So I'm up there, right? Uh-huh. And I'm just in my head, I'm like, what did I do wrong in my life to be here? And at that point, I told myself, there's nothing in the world I can't do if I can do this. And the crazy part was, is the only reason why I was doing that. Is because I thought to be a leader -- Mhmm. -- I had to be the guy out there showing everybody that I could do it. Even though I've physically like, dude, I shouldn't have my health wasn't in the right place to do that. Right. Kidding me. I probably could've had a hard time to die up there, you know. Super dangerous. Like, super dangerous. Right? It's the most dangerous job in the world, dude. Yeah. We were doing but it's so small, it's not it's, you know, it doesn't have its own classification. Yeah. So I'm up there, you know, thinking what I do wrong in my life, and I have to tell myself, in order to get up that tower. I have to tell myself, this is awesome. Man, I love this view. This is beautiful. All these I had to lie to myself. Literally. Yeah. I had to lie to myself. I had to trick myself into believing that I could do this. And at that time, I had a time where I actually slipped right on the ice. And like kinda like fell off and then caught with my other arm. Right? And put and I've had surgery on this shoulder before and this one for that matter. But and I end up jacking it up. And So it's either that or fall. Right? Is that or that or fall? And so I get to the top of the tower, but I wasn't in pain climbing because, you know, I'm literally in fight or flight, my life. Yeah. Yeah. You didn't feel till later. Yeah. I guess the top dude, no lie. I'm busting out crying for, like, half an hour or forty five minutes because I'm in so much pain. Then you have to get back down. Then I had to get back down. And then I did that three more times that month because I had to, you know, get something done. I had investor first time in life I ever got investor money. That's a crazy story how that happened. Yeah. But the point I'm getting back to here is went through all that, and you you know what happened? After the company finally started making some real money and got things, you know, figured out and we were, you know, positive. What happened? Dude, I got kicked out of my own company. Ugh. At once when I started at eighty five percent, I gave up shares though. To get investor money. Yeah. And then got kicked out. Then they played the game to get you out. Yeah. Exactly. So I know what that's like. Go to business for somebody else. And I won't mention names details, but they really do get stabbed in the back. That's the risk of partners. And here's the crazy part. Some of the partners or family of mine. That hurts even more. So built six million dollar a year business, Lost all, but you know what though? I wasn't mad at it because I hated my life so much and what I gotten into, that Oh, I wanted to go. And you could do it again. You knew that. Yeah. And since you've done it many times. Well, you know, the crazy part is I got offered to buy back the company last year, for pennies on the dollar. Because they mismanaged it? Yeah. And at that time, I went from about six down to, like, two and a half million, I believe. Yeah. You know, it could be wrong about things. But as of summer, I think it was around two point five. Right. It went down to. You know how much they offered for me to buy it back? Three hundred? Not even. Hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Oh, wow. That's how much they wanted to get out business. Everything that I told them that happened did they don't want to listen to. So then what happened? Oh, I don't I don't know. I don't really talk to them anymore. You didn't wanna bite them? Yeah. I just told them not. You know, don't wanna bite back. Thought about it and I'm worth the money. Thought about it, but I was just like, dude, like and like this crazy part of it was like, that was the whole plan all along. You know, we do like a Steve Jobs, go back by the company. Yeah. You know? But I didn't want it because I was so much happier with my life And that's when I'm like going back into like digital marketing and agency and everything, like, it's just such Oh, man, like, we don't know how good we have it. Yeah. You know, we wanna complain that, oh, you know, somebody didn't respond to my message or, you know, it didn't hit my sales number. Like, I think like you have full control of everything that happens in your business, stop complaining. Yeah. This digital business versus climbing cell phone towers at minus twenty, this is incredible. I mean, and and I'm I'm nobody special, but like, that's the thing like, you know, growing up, I just been told, you know, hey, like, you have a lot of heart. Right? Yeah. Like, even like when I played sports when I was younger, I was always the top. But I wasn't the strongest. I wasn't the fastest. I wasn't the smartest. But I gave I gave a shit about what I did. Yeah. I put My best is everything I do. You know, I'm doing wrong. There's some days that bad days. Right? Where every damn flaw is executing. Yeah. But the whole experience that taught me I don't have to be the one they're executing. Start using my brain and use my strings, and it wasn't really until I started reading more of, like, Jay Abraham. Yeah. She's awesome. Yeah. He kinda really showed me, like, because growing up, I was, like, kind of the broker, the middle man anyways all the time. You know? And I enjoy that. I enjoy talking to people, helping people, consulting with them -- Yeah. -- giving them real advice, you know. Like, that's like, hey, that's one of the beautiful things about consulting because you see from the outside end, so by situation, and a lot of times, like, it's the smallest, dumbest, easiest fix they don't see him. Alright. Like, well, there's this truck driving recruiting company I work with. Right? And I'm not gonna give their name because they don't wanna know -- Right. What I did for them, you know, publicly because it works so good, they want their competition to know. Of course. So they they're doing about five, six hundred thousand a month. Okay? And this guy I've worked with him, you know, over the course of a few years, you know, doing some different websites and things like that. Build some custom solutions. Right. So we got a good relationship, and he calls me up. You know, the blue's probably been like almost about a year and a half since I talked to him last. Right? And he calls me or sorry. He sends me a message on LinkedIn, and then we talk. Right? And he's wanting to build some like crazy website. I'm like, why you wanted to do that? Well, you know, I wanna, you know, get more of a brand out there and get more leads and all this. I asked him, okay, well, how are your Facebook ads going? Because I know you do that pretty well. Right. You spend like thirty grand a month on those. You know, he's got about thirty recruiters in the states. Right. I'm like, okay. Well, why not just spend more on ads, dude? Just one thing. And then why not instead of your current strategy, start using your actual brand into retargeting ads. Are you doing that? No. Yeah. Instead of a new website. Right. Yeah. And that's just like Real quick, they hit him. It was like, dude, like that's why didn't I think of that? Right? This game is not an idiot. You know? It's sort of a really successful company. Yeah. And so the next thing I talked to him about and I'm like, okay, we got thirty recruiters, you know, are they getting to all your leads? Within five minutes. Because, you know, study He's a five minute guy. Yeah. Hey, you know, MIT did the study, you know. Yeah. But, you know, five minutes. That's that's if you're generating leads I don't care what industry you're in. If you're not getting to within five minutes, I'm not talking to this automated text. Right. I'm talking like, I'm gonna go and call them. Yeah. Because you just what, yeah, there's a lot of people who don't wanna on the phone. But guess what, when you're excited about something, when you just fill up that submission form and somebody calls you right away, that's first five minutes. Guys, you you guys gotta hear what Sal is saying. You gotta get to those leads especially for your clients, they're not gonna answer the phone in the first five minutes. So there's there's automate, you know, Alex Hommosse's got this Allen system first. In the first five days if they do. Yeah. And then you've lost them. Like you have you have like a fifty times higher chance of closing them if you get them within five minutes than a day later. Well, think about it. You know, they say our attention spans now are less than goldfish now. Because like a goldfish is like nine seconds, but ours is like eight seconds that we would yeah. Whatever the numbers but, yeah, they say it's less than, you know, and it's whatever, but still it's just still interesting. Right? Like we and the guys like us, right? You know, we were around before the Internet and all this and to see the transition in, It's crazy. It's all in our o g's. Yeah. You're right? Been around for a minute here. Anybody starts talking about warrior form. Wanted to take him out back now, just kidding. I was the first person on the Warrior Form podcast. Really, really? Uh-huh. Wow. You look all the way back. Man, it to the grandkids one day. Yeah. Just kidding. That was before Google and Yahoo and these other things more your form. Absolutely. So Rapping come around full circle here. Right? Yeah. When you are building your business, okay? The more time and attention you have to spend your your time on things. And the more feelings you have attached to things, the less successful you're gonna be. Because when you have those two, three clients, right, you bring on two, three clients. Right. And then you start doing work for them and you're trying to get files back forth because you don't have an onboarding system. Right? And it takes three weeks to get started and then by time you actually get started, what happens is, well, they don't wanna do it anymore because now it's taking so long, right? They're not interested. Not like that, but you can't go and get more clients because you're if you're having a hard time servicing your current clients -- Yeah. -- and they're not getting the best results, you're not gonna feel good about going out there and selling more. Yeah. Exactly. Right? And if you have employees and you're spending all your time micromanaging them, making sure that they're doing every little detail Right? Yeah. Well, it's the same thing. Yeah. You're not gonna be able to grow on scale because in your mind, your company sucks, your product sucks, everything sucks. And the lab will show through too when you talk to prospects. Yeah. Absolutely. Now, when you're able to distance yourself from that, right, which really in that visionary role you need to be, because otherwise, you're gonna get too emotionally attached to everything going on. And if like a system or process isn't being followed a hundred percent -- Yeah. -- you know, because you've spent a lot time -- Yeah. -- and learning and making sure that that's supposed to be done a certain way, but guess what? You're putting nobody that you hire is ever gonna do everything a hundred percent the way that you want. That's right. And that's gonna drive it's gonna drive you crazy. And that's why metrics and having like a scorecard is so important because if I hire somebody, And tell them your only job other than, you know, being the right culture fit, you know, having the right people, right, in the right seats. Is making sure that this number is hit on a weekly basis or daily basis, whatever the basis is. And as long as they're doing that, leave them alone. Leave them alone. Yeah. Then you have to micromanage. Alright. That's the hard part, though, is after you've done that to actually step back. It's very hard, especially the more you go up from some of the beginner rules in a company -- Yeah. -- to when it starts to scan the leadership rules, let somebody come in and lead your team? When you've been the guy, dude, dude, that's So how do you find an operator to to trust someone to be able to run your agency or run your company and and know that they're gonna mess things up. And at what point do you say, okay, it's not working out versus you just let them continue? Because a lot of people say, oh, yeah, I can operate the company. I could be a manager because they need a job, but they're not qualified. Yeah. Ninety nine percent of them. So number one, you can hire agency rocket fuel. Guys are pretty awesome. Yeah. But on the series though, so they've helped us. Right? You know, they've done some placement for me for social marketing one eighty. Great guys. But Realistically, before you hire that person, okay? Number one, you have to understand who you are as a visionary. What your strengths are, what your weaknesses are because every visionary integrator aren't the same. Yeah. There's some visionaries who are involved in some day to day things because that's what they enjoy. Maybe not all of it. Right? Mhmm. There's some visionaries who, typically, the visionary's the good guy, you know, going to meetings, you know, he's giving state of the union. He's motivating people because SEO or visionary. Yeah. Your number one job is to sell your employees you know, people potential recruits. Yeah. And your market and clients, right -- Yeah. -- on the vision of your company. Yeah. That's your job. That that's the number one thing, because you have to You can't build a business by yourself. You have to have the right team of people. Right? And so that's really like One thing Gina Wegman calls it, you know, it's like I think believe the cultures are. Mhmm. Right? And so your thing is make sure you have right people in the boat. If you If that's the only thing that you do, right? Well, then you set up for success. But in order to know that you have the right people in the right seats. You have to understand who you are, how your company operates, and what strengths you need that purse, because they're not gonna be able to do everything. Yeah. That's tough. Right. Then but they need to be, like, that you're better half, almost like it's like getting married to somebody. Yeah. Quite witness Right. It is the business marriage. And that can either be heaven or hell, you know, like it can be the best that happens to you or it can be the worst. And here's the crazy part they don't talk about. Sometimes you can outgrow an integrator. And sometimes, there's because here's the thing, not everybody is like a super hardcore you know, a million ideas per minute, visionary. That's how I am. Yeah. Very very high in the visionary scale. But not every company is like that. Companies don't need a visionary and they're better off without it. Yeah. You know, depending on how fast they wanna grow and scale. Yeah. Whereas you have this guy like me, that's what I do. I take businesses, and I only work with companies, whether I'm a business partner, whether it's a client. If I can't ten x their sales -- Yeah. -- and -- It's not interesting for me. -- in their income and profit in the next twelve to eighteen months. Like, yeah, I'm not taking that on because that's kind of like what I've gotten into is literally ten x ing businesses. You know, and it's And so, go back to the truck driver crew to companies. Right? So, all's I do with this guy, is is I helped him hire people overseas in the Philippines, to get to all those leads and then set appointments with the recruiters. So about three months go by after I built this system for the guy. Right? Had a rating, like, literally, like, two weeks of everything to go. I don't hear nothing. Like, man, like, you know, they're not getting back to my emails. Mhmm. Not getting back to my message on LinkedIn. Hit me up out of the blue. And he's like, dude, I haven't gotten back to you because we've been so busy. Because right now, you know, obviously there's a lot of truck driving, you know, recruiting going on -- Yeah. -- with everything going on. Right? Yeah. Yeah. So there's like huge market there. Yeah. Yeah. But the system works so well. He was adding anywhere from like fifty to a hundred grand a week in new sales. Wow. Just by hiring, like, three people overseas, right, a thousand. And it pays them better than most. Right? Like, I do too. Pay like thousand bucks a month. Right? Plus commissions and stuff. Mhmm. And he was like, in fact, these guys are so good with the system -- Mhmm. -- that you built for me that I think that they can replace the drops of my recruiters here in the US. But that he wasn't expecting that. That's amazing. Now, how did you charge when you had a client like that? Like a fee or a rev share or some kind of equity thing? So I'm working out a bigger deal. With that specific client, more of a licensing deal taking because what happens is, he works with, like, the top people in the industries, you know, some big companies. I'll just say that much. Yeah. And a big corporation. Yeah. And he says no to, like, it's, like, I think, like, seventy, eighty percent of the business because they're not qualified. Right. I'm like, dude, why don't we license Your system once again, someone learned from Jay. Yeah. Why don't you license this out to other companies? Yeah. So so what I did is, normally, I do, like, rev share and stuff. Mhmm. And I actually way undercharged the guy just to be real with you. I charged Why have you known him for years? Yeah. I I charged him like fifteen thousand dollars. Uh-huh. You know, for the entire system, my team built it, you know, get to trade deal, look at they are all he got. Oh, it is. But then, you know, you have some people. Right? Now if I'm running an agency and I'm making five grand a month, Well, that's no longer a great deal anymore. The agency because they don't have And it's not It's it's because they don't have the resources and the bandwidth where it makes sense yet. Yeah. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. And so they'd be better off, you know, maybe going out figuring out how to do it themselves a little bit and, you know, get in the course or something like that. Right? Or watching a webinar. I'm sure you got plenty of those, you know. Something like this. Yeah. If you can't get sal with you helping, you can get eighty percent of it with twenty percent of the effort. Yeah. But, yeah, you don't have to make it complicated. It's really simple. Just like any marketing. Right? Any sales. I don't know why, like, we we especially in the marketing world, we think about this, with our funnels, our landing pages, but when it comes to hiring people, we don't treat it the same way. That way trying to sell something, we're like, oh, we're hiring and we're big macho bot. No, like, dude, you're hiring people who have a choice where they wanna work, gotta sell and convince those people why they should work for you. Yeah. You know, especially if you can't pay them as much as other people, then you gotta really have a good vision, you know. But thing is if you wanna don't have to overcome it. You keep it really simple. You you go find, you know, where the fish are at. Right? If you're going fishing, you gotta have the right kind of bait, the right kind of line or pull. Right? And you gotta be at the right lake. Yeah. Otherwise, if you don't have all that stuff, you know, or if you only have some of it, it's gonna be tougher, right? And So long story short, go where those, you know, people are that you wanna hire. And then make sure that your message, your job description, and all that stuff matches what the roll actually is. Okay. Then from there, you know, put it out there. Right? So one thing that we had done is we scrape Well, not scrape, but just, you know, like our team they go into Facebook, right, all the different groups and stuff. One thing when we hire people, dude, we don't just post in one place. Like, we post on over two hundred play Facebook groups. We post on online jobs dot p h. Yeah. Linked in. ZipRecruiter. We run Facebook ads, you know, with video, like, we do all that because I'm looking for the needle in the haystack to hire. Yeah. Yeah. Because hiring people is and it's very hard to calculate the cost, but having a bad hire or in That's the most expensive thing, a bad year. There's nothing more expensive than that. Yeah. Now, you could literally lose your entire company off one wrong person. That's how I lost that one business. Yeah. One person is one person is the wrong person. It's not that they're a bad person necessarily. Yeah. It's cancer, and that cancer grows. You know? It's like if you have a sales guy, for example, is responsible for ninety percent of your sales. Mhmm. Alright? But it's a jerk to deal with. Nobody likes them. Yeah. Well, he's gonna push away all the good people that you want in your business. Right? You know, they have the right culture fit. Yeah. And then they're just gonna leave more likely to the highest bidder one day. Right? It happens all the time. Yeah. And then you just lost, you know, everything in your business because, you know, you made a bad decision. You didn't hire that or you didn't fire that quickly. Once you realize they're a bad fit, and you just took their you didn't have the right people in the right seats. You gotta have the culture fit. Right? And you gotta make sure that they can actually do their job. If you don't have both of those -- Yeah. -- they're not gonna be successful. And that's why most people have a hard time hiring because it's just like a funnel, like a funnel. Yeah. You know, if you're if you don't have good accent, go into your landing page. And from your landing page to your follow-up, not all matching. And something's broke there. Right? Things like Golden string theory. Yeah. You know, if anything breaks, well, then you don't get a result. Yeah. It's a weakest link probably not call that multiply by zero. Give a hundred times a hundred times a hundred, but somewhere if there's a multiply by zero, the whole thing goes to zero. And that's why people say stuff like advertising doesn't work. Marketing does because they don't understand like there's a lot of pieces. You're not just gonna hire some marketing company that's gonna solve all your problems. And literally, there's companies where I've been told This been several times over the course of my career. Yeah. Like, okay, like, you need to stop setting so many people in here because we're too busy. I can't and like genuinely mad. Yeah. And it's like, Come on, man, all that talk? Guys. Yeah. Right? You can't you know, it's like, go hire somebody. Right? Go do Yeah. Too too many people are afraid. Yeah. Well? Hiring an ad company to solve your strategy is like asking a dancer to help you with your plumbing. Alright. And I'm not saying there's not like situations where, you know, where it's why does it do that? When you have your strategy down -- Mhmm. -- and you know what's working stuff, you just need people to manage things. Sometimes that could be solution, you know, but you have once again, it has to be part of your overarching strategy. Yeah. But any business, I don't care who you are, whatever industry you need to own your marketing and your overarching strategy. Did you hear that? You've got to own your marketing. So whether you're a small business, or an agency. You've got to own your strategy. You've got to own what you stand for. You can't outsource that part. Exactly. You know, you can outsource people to ful on your strategy. Right? You know, just like a general at war does, you know, read art of war. There's all kinds of good stuff in there about business. Right? One of the best business books written, but So, anyways, so you're, you know, you're here right. You've got the message down. You know, we understand, you know, the core values, you know, we're talking about those things and our job description application. Before you even, like, deal with these people in the interview, you need to test them. Yeah. You know, weed them out without manual labor. Exactly. What we do, we have on our application, we have reading and writing comprehension skills test -- Mhmm. -- just like the stuff you did in high school. Fact, most people before you go straight to an interview because these guys wanna go straight to an interview. You can't tell from a single interview -- Mhmm. -- or a resume. And it's a waste of your time. You know, like, you you would never get anything. And they didn't put in the effort. Exactly. Right? So they're already dequeued for that. Exactly. And so you have this. Right? So you have your reading, you know, comprehensive goes, that's which most people I know that live here in America can't pass it ours. I would love to see it if you could share that with -- Yeah. Absolutely. -- about Farvie Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. I'll definitely share that with you. And so we have that and then one thing's too, we do at the beginning of the application on the job description at the very bottom it says, hey, when asked your age, I think put in like forty two or thirty two or something like that. Right? Just to see if they're paying details. Because details matter. I I don't care what position you're hiring for for me. Critical. You people gotta pay attention. Mhmm. You gotta give a shit about what you're doing. I think the thing, one of the problems just in society today, people just don't care anymore. Like there's no like passion for the thing that it just oh, I'm coming here. I gotta make money. I gotta do a job which, you know, we do gotta make money. Yeah. Gotta have somewhere to work and stuff. But Why not like do something you actually care about? Yeah. Because you're number one, like, it's not even just about the money. Right? Because, you know, dude, money that just that's a, you know, byproduct, Yeah. You know, of helping people. Right? And, you know, doing good things in the world. But it's having that passion and actually caring about something so much to where don't just do the minimum. You go above and beyond what people expect you to do, whether you're an employee, whether you're But how do you find that? Right? Everyone wants that star employee. Who really cares? Well, and that's why your whole system has to be designed not to necessarily just attract the right person but to weed out and polarize -- Yeah. Yeah. -- everybody else. You know? Like, if you're not polarizing people, like people when they read your stuff, they should either be, you know, in the perfect world, right? They either absolutely love it and they're, you know, raving about it and they're like, oh my god, I just saw even if they're not the one gonna get the job -- Yeah. -- man, this company is awesome. And, you know, here I have this friend, you know, and they send the link to a friend. Right? And give them a referral because whatever something you did was so cool or the video or you know, use some of your benefits, whatever maybe. And on the other side though, if some if somebody sees them like, man, I can't stand what this company stands for. Right? That's good. Because now Why not early? Yeah. Well, because that they're gonna disqualify themselves, and then they're gonna tell other people the negative side, right, which is gonna keep those people when the people who are into that, they're gonna see that as positive. Yeah. Does that make sense? Yeah. So have you ever been like hanging out with a friend? And, I don't know, you're out and you hear somebody talking about, like, I don't know, like, Ryan or Grant or, you know, because a lot of people, like, They'll talk about the, you know, you know, Gurus' rights. Yeah. Yeah. And they have so much shit they're talking about them. But then like when I hear that stuff like, well, that's the reason why I actually respect that guy. That's why like I respect Grant Cardone is because of what you said. Yeah. And everybody's different. There's nothing wrong with that. But too many of us were afraid, you know, with cancel culture and social media, and dude, I'm one of those guys too. Like, for a long time, I wasn't out here doing these videos. Yeah. You know, I just started really doing these these last year. Yeah. And for me, like, I had to get to a place where I just didn't care anymore because what I believe in, in my mission, and goals in life, and purpose, it's way beyond that somebody can deter me from from just say something about negative about It's not about you anyway. Yeah. Exactly. As you turned the camera on earlier, Right? Imagine you've got on podcasts earlier. You know, exactly. A lot of people wait until their mega successful to then be on podcasts. Yep. But people you probably already have some stuff that you could share. You could probably write a book based on what you know. You'd be surprised how much is in here when you actually sit down and write it out. That's crazy. Like all of us are experts in something. Yeah. We don't even realize it because we see what so and so is doing on Facebook. Or Instagram. Right? I wouldn't believe any of that stuff on social media. Yeah. Well, number one. Right? And even if it is true, people are at different levels. And people get there at different ages and different times and different ages. And how long have you been in the game? Oh, man. So I go business entrepreneurship. So I built my first website for my dad's company when I was like fourteen years old. You know, he he paid me like he paid company like thousands of dollars. It was terrible. He's like, I bet my son can do it better if I give him a hundred bucks. And I did. See, there you go. Yeah. I bet it was this was Remember homestead? The website builder? Yeah. Yeah. They got sold to web dot com or something. What I swerved to web dot com crazy enough. But Yeah. So Great company, by the way. Yeah. So I built a fencing calculator. He had a fencing company. Okay. So, basically, I I created, like, every page and, like, multiples of five by the footage and where there's, like, wooden or PVC or chain link defense. Uh-huh. So I built, like, hundreds of, if not, thousand plus pages like, static. I don't just but, dude, I knew nothing about coding back then either. Yeah. You know, this is like, crappy what you see is what you get. You know? Terrible back then. Yeah. So the point is, you know, figure that out. And that was, like, kinda my start into it, but it my first business where, like, I started, you know, making money. Yeah. Even past the affiliate thing was about twenty years old. So about almost fifteen years ago now. Fifteen years guys -- Mhmm. -- long time ago. Yeah. And at that time, you know, I made my first start like actually like really making money. It was in the BST threads. Wicked fire specifically dot com. Yeah. Yeah. So buy sell trade, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I just post in there my title was three free review copies. Guys, I noticed other people that were like blowing up on them, they gave review copies to start. Okay. Alright? And I didn't really have like best graphic design. Let's go buy a new basic photoshop. Had a cool version, you know. You know, I'll definitely pay for everything now because I had a respect. But, you know, I had nothing man, we do get by. Yeah. So what ends up happening is you know, I get my first three review cup of data, and I I knock out each person's graphic design project within twenty four hours, if not, like, an hour or two. Yeah. I was selling, I think, logos for, like, fifteen, twenty bucks, banners -- Way before fibers. -- websites, you know, for like a hundred bucks, you know. Yeah. Like, hand coated. I didn't even know I was doing. I was just googling me and stuff trying to, you know, do this. It was a nightmare, but I got to a point within about a month, just from that one thread alone. On wicked fire. Mhmm. I was making about five hundred bucks a day. Wicked fire. Wacky fire dot com. Yeah, man. I remember that. So, again, you know, going down memory lane but Yeah. You know, I started there and then I started like, you know, putting BSTs in the other, you know, threads, and d p, and warrior forum. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. A black hat world. Right? I remember XRimer and SCmuk and all that. Yeah. And I've been flamed on all those forms. And I tell you what, this so use an x rumor. Uh-huh. You know, somebody did to me once? So I hired this guy to do SEO. Okay? About five months ago by, he did absolutely nothing. Right? And I knew. I called him out on it. You didn't get back to me, then I saw he like scam some other guys in Black hat world. So I did charge back on the guy. Mhmm. You know what the guy does to me? Goes a rip off report. No. Of course, a bunch, you know. Yeah. It's like explaining your name. Right? So, yeah, if you go, it's like, I don't know, the fifth page of Google. I don't even know if they have pages. It's score more now. Yeah. Yeah. You'll probably find it somewhere on there. Right? You know, I don't hide anything. That's the worst thing that you'll ever find about me. I've been doing this for fifteen years and you know -- Yeah. -- if you're in the online world, your room people have to retribution can happen pretty quickly. Right? Yeah. So long story short, you know, going through that. And that's when I first started getting into like hiring people on overseas, and I was hiring people from India, from Pakistan, wasn't the Philippines yet. It's probably my mistake. I didn't hire from there to start. Yeah. Most of the Indian Pakistan Philadelphia. It's cheap. Right. I remember I had these guys out of Kuwait, Croatia. Yeah. I pay them like a hundred bucks. They would take my PSDs that I would design in Photoshop and term into WordPress sites. Right? So I got to a point where I went from something like hundred dollar websites within about a year to where else I'm landing pages, and where I was basically, I didn't know I was even called it back then. I was doing conversion optimization. Uh-huh. Because I was taking people's landing pages they already had made -- Uh-huh. -- and just making better ones. Yeah. You know, just and the crazy part is, I knew nothing about marketing then. How I learned marketing was actually doing graphic design projects and web design projects for other marketers. So, like, I was getting paid basically, like, Filipino, Indian, and taxing prices in the beginning when I was, you know, started. But like, that's where we gotta start, and that's why when I see people like being told, you know, by these gurus, you know, go out and so people on a five, ten, twenty thousand dollar project when they've never even done it before. Like, I get where they're coming from because you know, you don't -- Yeah. -- need to be good at something to actually sell it, but -- Right. -- there's a line between don't ripen people off, You know what I'm saying? That's huge. And just being a middle name. Let's sell stain. Absolutely. Too many times, people -- Yeah. -- they don't test the service providers even if you're white labeling. Right? Because they hear good things and maybe they can maybe get lucky and get to you you can white label, which I'm not saying that's a bad thing to do, but you need to do a lot of research, you need to test them out, check the customer service. Yeah. Because otherwise, if you partner with the wrong person, you know, you just screw over somebody, took their money. Yeah. More unlikely, don't have enough money to pay them back. You probably spent it, unrent, you know, going out, whatever. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Terrible. Exactly. And But, you know, I think like too many people are afraid just like get their hands dirty and do work for free. Like, there's something degrading about that and it's like, dude, like, you don't deserve to get paid until you know what you're doing. Yeah. And once you know how to do it, these clients are gonna keep paying you month after month after month. So I'm willing to give away the first months of of service if I have to learn how to do something because I know that client will continue to pay. That's the key. When when you understand -- You're good at it. -- long term when you time when you understand average lifetime value and maximum lifetime value. Then reputation and your referrals and everything else from that. Yeah. Absolutely. And just, you know, there's just like this whole culture. It wants like the quick buck. Right? You know, who wants that get rich quick? Yeah. And the thing is, any of those people who the very few who do in our world that do have initial bout of success, if you if you follow them for long enough, most of the time, they kinda lose it all because -- Yeah. -- they did It's kinda like winning the lottery. Right? Yeah. If you didn't rightfully earn that money, and have to go through the pain and understand the whys and the hows, you're not gonna be able to maintain it. I'm not saying there might not that unicorn out there that blows up and then is able hire a bunch of high, you know, a bunch of high up executives and stuff. That does happen. Right? But most of it, like, I'm not gonna bet on that. Yeah. These folks, they come and go. Absolutely. You guys see it all the time. Yeah. And it's not that they're bad people. They just I mean, like I said, it's like win the lottery. You know, if I was kid, if I was twenty years old, and I was making the kind of money I do now, I'd probably be dead, man, due to old bad habits and, you know, drinking too much back then, and dealing with depression, and there's, you know, let's all decide that people don't talk about. They don't talk about like that side that like that gut wrenching, heart broken. It's tough. Yeah. You never see that on Instagram, do you? You don't, man. And that's that's that's the side where Honestly, most of your time as an entrepreneur is gonna be on that side -- Yeah. -- until you you know, get past that, pay those certain levels. Yeah. And even then, it can all come crashing down. All it takes is no mistake. Yeah. And if you're a visionary like me, then one of our biggest enemies is boredom. So we're talking about how there's a lot of people that fall for the gurus with Get Rich Quick, and these people fizzle and burning down because they haven't gained the competence. They haven't built the reputation. They haven't built a machine of repeatable SOP kind of processes. That Sal knows how to do. What advice, Sal, do you have for a lot of our young adults out there that wanna start an agency? They wanna do social media. They wanna be an influencer. They wanna do stuff on TikTok. They know there's a lot of dentists and doctors and lawyers and real estate agents that need help. Okay. So, man, a lot of things come to mind here. So, I'm gonna start with core fundamentals basics. The first thing you need to ask yourself, is, do you have what it takes to be an entrepreneur? And when I say entrepreneur, there's a difference in my humble opinion -- Mhmm. -- from being an entrepreneur and being a business owner slash operator. Mhmm. Right? Anybody can run a business that provides a job for them. Right? Like, or almost anybody. But it's a whole another thing when you're responsible for going to business with people and building out complex operations and systems, people's livelihood is based on your ability to run an organization and to be the captain of that ship. Right? But up to the early twenties, they don't even know because they have no experience to base it on. Exactly. They don't know. So there's this great book, one of my favorite authors, Juno Wickman, which I, you know, wasn't out when I was that age, but I wish it was, it's called entrepreneurial leap. And so it goes over different characteristics that are needed to really become like an entrepreneur, right? And so, what it does is help you determine what you really want. Because some of us you know, we just really want like just like, you know, quote unquote a job -- Yeah. -- where something that makes us money. Nothing wrong to have a job. Yeah. Nothing wrong with it. And that you can, you know, have the Tim Ferriss, you know, or a work week. Like, you can build that. Yeah. Honestly, if you put in the right work and you're simplified and you're focused in what you do, you can build that in twelve to twenty four months. Yeah. You know, if, you know, you really put your time and effort and purpose and focus towards that. Right? And you can have the travel, the backpack lifestyle, which which is cool, but I always thought I wanted to do that, you know, for the longest time that's why I got into it. But but You know, like, it's I don't know, it's kind of annoying, you know, driving around all the time, you know, taking it to do whatever you want, eat all the restaurants you want. Right. And all the fun thing is telling knowing that. I know. I know. It's like this. But, you know, it's I don't know, it's It's a blessing to be able to do it, but at the same time, there's a lot of drawbacks to that. You know, you're not really, you know, home often, you're not, like, in your own bed. Each travel a ton. Well, this last year, since COVID, man, I've been traveling all over. You know, that's like one thing after I got rid of, you know, sold my shares back for telecom company, the tower company. Yeah. You know, it's one of them. So what drives you're traveling? My girl lives to travel. What drives all this? Right? So for me, I guess, you know, just growing up, you know, being dirt poor, not having nothing, being at a point in my life now where I'm not tied down to you know, I don't own my own houses and stuff. I've done some flips and stuff, but I don't live in the own house Yeah. My own house is kinda like, you know, Grand Cardone talks about. Right? Going from him. Yeah. I can be anywhere I want, right, with the type of work that we do. It's all virtual, all businesses I run. Yeah. So Sal and I are both VA's. Because we're working virtually. Exactly. You know, we're all VA's here. And so, you know, it's good having that freedom and luxury, but sometimes you just you know, it's good to be home and, you know, not on a laptop working and have like, you know, your full desktop, you know, PC with all of your monitors and, you know, we're excited about projects. But, oh, that's like something I personally struggle with because what I tend to do is I end up working my butt off for like three to six months, nine months, sometimes a full year. On these bursts. Yep. And it's just like, go, go, go, go, go. And then, you know, end up burning myself out. Right? Brito's real. I don't care how much you love what you do, how passionate you are. You know, there's some people I respect and appreciate that talking to the subject, but I don't agree with. I believe burnout can happen to anybody. Yeah. You know, because even if you love what you're doing, you can work yourself to excess. You know, just like anything? Just like anything. And so, you know, then what happens is I end up taking a few months off, not wanting to do nothing. But over time I've got a little bit better about it. So now I'm at a point where what we're doing is so this year coming up, but we're moving starting a physical brick and mortar location in Austin, Texas -- Wow. -- which completely like against how I would normally run business, but thing is I have a holding company -- Okay. -- that run, you know, that's has my shares and all the other companies I run. And wanna put a leadership team in place because there is a certain important aspect, and it's a lot different running a business and having people a room with each other -- Right. -- and being around. Like, there's Like, I'm not saying you have to be there every day, but, you know, having that two, three times a week There's just something that you don't Something about that. Yeah. You just you don't get Zoom done, dude. Right. You don't get the same collaboration, the teamwork, all that stuff. Even there are people in the Philippines, like, every quarter, you know, we we give them money -- Yeah. -- to where they can all go and hang out for a night. That's a great idea. Yeah. And you have to have great communication, you know, these various companies. So a long story short, I don't have like my own like little thing take there and build like a video studio to come and do videos when we need to, right, and bring actors in locally. It's just more of like a convenience thing. It's kinda like my version of, you know, some people, you know, they start making money and then they go out and like buy a restaurant because they want a place to chill. So that's kinda like in my version of having my own restaurant or something. It's having like a brick and mortar, cool place to hang out. Oh. You know? And, you know, have like going What can I come visit? Yeah. Well, the plan is to, like, you know, go out and get some warehouse space, right? Because, you know, it's cheap, right, and especially taxes. Awesome. There's a lot more expensive now. Yeah. Well, compared to a lot of places, you know, Minnesota. When I was at Minnesota? Yeah. A place that's so expensive to live. It's ridiculous. Oh, wow. It's one of the most expensive Minneapolis, one of the most expensive in the country. But, so, anyways, yeah, so playing this build out like just like crazy big, you know, green screen room. Right? Love green screens, man. There's so much you can do. But, you know, that and have all the right equipment, have people in a place. So in that way, you know, it's almost like I got my think tank or, you know, leadership team there. And I can go off investing in more businesses, speaking at more events, and really, you know, fully go into the visionary role because even for me, it's taking me this long -- That makes sense. -- to actually fully be in the visionary spot. Right? Until this last year, I never had an organization where my only job was to be the visionary. And so You know, digital marketers in Austin have you spoke for the certified partner program? I haven't. I've been through digital markers courses twice though when they first came out like five years ago. Yeah. Other certifications. You see my stuff in there? Oh yeah. I mean, three by three and everything. In fact, when I was running a so it was called Fighter Flight Academy. Alright? So when we're talking about COVID earlier and making courses and all that, Well, you know, during the middle of COVID did my first Kickstarter campaign. It was absolute nightmare. Yeah. We hit our twenty five thousand dollar goal. Okay. Right? But we put together, like, Really, the world's it's not the first parkour class, but it was like the, like, as far as video production wise, it was like, you know, freaking Wow. Sanely good. Yeah. Yeah. So we had her like, you know, had her own full time video editor -- Uh-huh. -- working inside of a gym. That's how much video we did, how much contact. And so, we did this campaign, right? And in order to launch the Kickstarter, we launched the world's largest online parkour contest where people would submit their videos, doing their different stunts and tricks, and the community would vote. Right? It was a whole crazy, you know, thing you can look it up sometime on their Instagram or Facebook. But we did that, you know, number one, to kinda give back because a lot of these guys in parkour, they're like really solid athletes, and they get no attention, no credit. Some of them, you know, getting to movies and stuff like that. But it's really I think it's the up and coming industry and that's why I love it so much what we did there. But so we started and it was like the world's largest, not the world's largest but world's biggest prize contest in Park wherever, including bigger than the Red Bull events at the time. How much was it? Ten thousand dollars first prize. Okay. There's no second, no third place. You know, But ten grand -- Okay. -- first place, you know. So it kinda put them back on the map, you know, we did a lot of stuff over there. But the thing was like, it was like, One of the coolest things ever, you know, it was fun. And that's why I really got into, you know, really saw the power. You know, a video. And it ended up like, you know, going like Harman taking like the Harman brothers, you know, go through their courses. Yeah. Yeah. You created one of those style videos, dude. That was the gold. Yeah. Oh, man. It was so fun. It was one of the funnest times I ever had. I was like, probably the company that I honestly had the most fun at. Because this is cool stuff. Yeah. Well, and getting to that, we got some of the top parkour athletes in the world. Right? And got them to do online courses for the Kickstarter. Mhmm. Right. Which I didn't know what I was doing then. Like it's called licensing. Right? Yeah. But we did interviews with them and stuff and and the point I'm trying to make is we did all these interviews with them and I was following your three by three strategy in order to run the ads and everything. Right? Okay. Now Here here's the honest truth though. I failed with it. Uh-oh. You know why? Why? I made it too complicated. So I've never done a three by three. Okay. Right? And then I had and so never done it before. But here I had like, I think there's like ten athletes that we did like these interviews with. Right? And we're doing like the know, the how, and the why Why on? Why yep. And so we're putting all that together, and we got all that edited. But then I realized, Well, man, that's gonna be super complicated doing this for all these ten people and have access to their account and figure this part. And there's things I just didn't know. Because when I read the strategy, there was a lot of things I assumed that I understood how to do and I didn't have your course or nothing, and I was running out of deadline. So I just end up cutting the whole thing, didn't even get to run it. Can't tell you how many projects have been like that in the past? Can we not revive it? We still build the personal brand to these parkour, I think. I mean, maybe, I sold my sold my shares, though. So I'm no longer involved, but Well, it's a shame. You know? You know the little secret about the three by three that people don't know. What's that? So when we asked people to make a bunch of one minute videos, Three y, three how, and three what, so you have top middle bottom of the funnel, three videos for each. They don't need to actually make that many videos. We want people to make a bunch of one minute videos because when we start running dollar a day against it, it increases our probability of finding a win. Because we typically find that most people, they'll just make one video. They'll just make one ad, and the odds of that ad working are really low. So this is it's just a three by three and dollar day strategy. It's just a testing strategy just to get people out there. One of my favorite things to do, when I was coaching athletes in high school on cross country. Like, I'm I'm big now. Like, you know, I'm big now. Is they wanted to run the first marathon. And I would tell them something like, if you can just run three miles today, three miles tomorrow, and then ten miles on the weekend, then you'll have like, I made it some magic formula. I would make something up, then you're gonna be able to run that marathon that's in two months from now. And so they would do that and really all I was trying to do was get them to go out and run three days in a row. That was it. So this whole three by three thing is I'm just trying to get people to get into the habit of learning how to make video. Because if if they've not made one minute video, if they've not learned how to run dollar a day, they're just gonna suck. And so we have to make a number of videos to get practice until we're good. It's one of those things. Right? How many times do people think they're gonna go to the gym and work out really hard for two hours, and they're gonna have six pack abs after that one workout. Too much, too often. So it doesn't have to be three by three. That was just something to get people going. Well, and speaking of that, you know, when it comes to the diet and working out. That's one of the When I first got into this and I was working with all the marketers and all the websites that I was talking about earlier on the forums, That's like one of the things I got a lot of business was was from, like, supplements and stuff. Right? And so, When I first started doing, I didn't really know what I was doing, you know, what they were doing. Well, it comes to find out, a lot of these guys were doing the little rebuilds. Right? So, you know, they're telling people, hey, get your Asahi berry. Right? Remember how big that was? And I can't tell you how many landing pages I did for that. My buddy Largo is the largest seller a site there ever. And shoot. I might have even dissimilar from and never even, you know, noom or whatever because I didn't I didn't know, like, how big some of the people I was working with back. Yeah. He did a hundred million. He he did the Oprah. At. And I wouldn't be completely surprised if I end up doing some of that, like, you know, some of their work because I was doing it for everybody now. Yeah. Yeah. And so You know, I've come to find out, well, these guys are telling people, hey, you know, you get this many free. Right? Mhmm. And then on some of the websites that have fine very fine print. Right? Technically legal. But Yeah. It was, like, three hundred dollars that get charged after, like, fourteen days or something. And even worse, some people were doing that and they had no fine print. Right. They were just doing them to make it impossible to cancel. Right. It got so bad. I believe it was the FTC. They eventually cracked down on all that you can't do it anymore. Yeah. You know, stuff. Yeah. It's like So, I mean, man, they just been because that when we were getting started, but there wasn't much out their actual rules. I remember looking it up. Like, FTC and all that, like, what you could and couldn't advertise. Yeah. That's two thousand nine, that stuff all really changed. Exactly. And now, like, the whole reviews and stuff, it's like, with the reviews, what is it? Fashionova. Right? They just got sued. I think it was like eighteen or twenty million. I could be wrong in the numbers. Terrible numbers. But because of, like, gating reviews. Yeah. That is illegal. Yeah. It was crazy. Right? Something like Any local business, if you're gaining reviews or you're using software, where they where it tries to funnel the good and bad reviews, one direction or another, that's not legal according to the Federal Trade Commission. Yeah. It's crazy, but like, well, I didn't know that. Not until I saw that article. Yeah. You know? Thankfully, though, a lot of times, like, the bigger companies they get the attention and the small guys, they don't. You know? So you start blowing up, you know, like Frank Kerin, I know you got into a lot of stuff at one point, but that's it's kind of a rite of passage. Nobody talks about that either. Yeah. Right? I've had people who try to sue my businesses before in the past, not the recent ones. Yeah. But and you know what the attorney says? What? So You're doing well, no. He's like, well You're successful. Yeah. You're not successful, though. Until you get sued. Take get sued. Yeah. You know who wins every lawsuit? Who's that? The attorney. They're the ones that make the money. Oh, for sure. That's just what's gonna happen like because they're many laws and regulations. Looks like somebody's not even trying to do anything wrong. Yeah. It's just there's just so much out there. And then there's the interpretations of it and because out of the foundations. Oh, you write twelve laws every day. Yeah. Every day. Yeah. We all do. Yeah. It's like like taxes. Right? Everybody does. Yeah. Because it's So complicated. There's no way you can keep on top of it. There's no way. It's, you know, so just, I don't know, you know, it's just gonna happen. Just realize, you know, you're gonna get If you get big enough, you're gonna get sued one day. That's the mark of success. So Being sued. I've been sued plenty of times too. It happens. Right? You know, you try to do the right things, but hey, Yeah. So, Sal, what was it that inspired you to wanna be on the podcast and then come out to Vegas? Oh, man. Well, Just to be hundred percent here, man, you've been popping up all over the place the last couple of years, you know, I've learned some things from you. I wanted to meet you. And you know, it just was my part of my goal, you know, is to get into more podcasts, right? And to network with people and The more I do things like this, the more my network expands, right? And it's so important people like you know, like, I used to never care about networking and all that stuff. You know, I was like in B and I and all that. Yeah. Yeah. But it's just you realize the older you get and the wiser you are. It's all about spraying yourself the right people. And it's not even about how much money can I make today off of trying to sell a guy something? Right? What can I learn from this guy? And who can they introduce me to? And most importantly, what can I do for him to help him out first? You know, it's like if you help out people first without expecting anything in return -- That's the key. -- that's the key. That's the whole key to life. I wish I knew that twenty years ago. Right? Like, stop making goals about money. Mhmm. Like, dude, money's great. Right? You know, like, you need to have it. But as soon as your focus is money, don't get me wrong if you're, you know, starving in the street like, hey, like, you need to do what you need to do, right? But it's like, an undercover billionaire, you know, Grand Cardone says. Yeah. You know, it's all about contacts and contracts. You know, the cash doesn't matter. Like, a lot of people don't know this, but dude, money is an illusion. It's not real. Yeah. It doesn't mean anything except for the value that people put on it. It's a fiat currency. Exactly. You know, it's like, the Fed's life for every dollar they print, and it's called microfactioning. Right? They can go out and take Nine four dollars. Right? That's right. Exactly. And so and then that then that money, right? So that one dollar that goes out, they can go get ten more for that. And then that ten that goes out, all that interest needs to be paid back. So there will forever be debt. Mhmm. And the whole monetary without going super deep into, you know, ten hack conspiracy theories here. At the end of the day, it's an illusion to keep us mentally and emotionally enslaved to this system, because that's So that's what people want. They think about how many wars are fought over money. Mhmm. Like how much problems there are, right? Like people's divorce, relations, all those things, mostly money is the root cause. You know, fighting about money. Same thing in business. Right? And, probably, like, working with people when you make money, your focus, and that's just one of the easiest ways to have the most toxic business and just life in general. But when your purpose is about helping people, you'll make the money without thinking about it. It's like, with social marketing one hundred and eighty, you know, literally ten x you know, their monthly reoccurring revenue and had an have an insane retention rate at over ninety nine percent, and it's because it was never about the money, It was about loving our clients and loving our employees. It's all about people, and that's what being an entrepreneur is about. It's about building something that's gonna help a lot of people. Mhmm. And that's why there's a big difference. That's where the money comes when you create so much value. Yeah. And that's the difference between entrepreneur -- Mhmm. -- and being an owner operative. Mhmm. And on our operator, you're an employee in your own company. When you are building a business, an entrepreneur, you're leading people, and you're a leader, you're an investor in your business. You're no longer in the day to day, you're in the overarching strategy. Yeah. And your whole purpose is to make sure you're surrounded by the right people. And if you do that, you'll be successful. That's in a clever op. I mean, it's Boom, right there. Simple. Right? But So simple things that are the moat that we Man, we tend to make overcomplicate them, you know, but if you just And you can't just say it like, oh, I'm helping people. Everybody does. A lot of their people say that. But as soon as there's a problem and let's say you have a client, and you did everything right, you upheld your contract, and that person wants their money back, because they're mad about whatever. Right? Do you deserve to keep the money that you made because you did what you were contractually obligated to? Absolutely. But what's gonna happen when that guy is pissed off, talking shit, and It's gonna cost you ten times that, and headache and mutation and everything. Might be even way more than that. You can lose a bigger deal of your life. Yeah. Because, you know, it's like movie casino. You watch movie casino? So, you know, he's, like, the guy who's in charge of the Gaming Commission or, you know, whatever. Right? His nephew, right? We're to the casino and Robert Nero, you know, fired the guy. And he's like, why'd you fire him? Well, because either he, you know, was an idiot or he stealing from me. Either way, he can't work here. Right? Right. That guy wasn't really costing him much. You know what I'm saying? So that one mistake pissing off the wrong guy, end up costing him well, that's what cost Vegas, you know, with the mafia of the Vegas according to the movie. Right? They lost the entire you know, City. Yeah. And the gaming commissions came in, and they got all the mob guys out. Right? You know, stuff, well, it doesn't exist anymore, I guess, supposedly. But the point I'm trying to make is, you know, When you're working with people, all it takes is that one person, and you never know what kind of far reaching effect that can Not that, but it just feels good -- Yeah. -- to just go above and beyond everything. Because then, what can you say about me then? I gave you a free service. You made money off me, and I gave you your money back. Yeah. It's the right way to do it. That's an abundance mentality. Taking care of your customers. Absolutely. And, there's times I haven't been perfect about that in the past, you know, especially when I was struggling. Yeah. But for me now, like, absolutely every time. Heck, if I have a, you know, someone learned from Mike Arcy -- Mhmm. -- it's crazy. This stuff Mike Arcy's awesome. So he's the man. Check out the bits we have with Mike Arcy. So We've learned a lot. You know, me and my business partner from Mike Arcee. Yeah. And some of the stuff that I learned from the gym world, right? You know, stuff like charging first month and last month for example. Okay. So, you know, you go to the gym, they have that, the sign up fees. Well, because what I brought over into the agency. Same thing. Same thing, man. So we charged first and last month. You know what that does for me? Creases cash flow. Well, crease of the cash flow. Right? Because we I know I have a long retention, so I'm not, you know, worried necessarily like, you know, about how long I can I can lose ten thousand dollars on acquiring client? And still be at one seventh of how much money their lifetime value is. Right? So we're close to a hundred thousand dollars lifetime values, more than that if you include referrals. Right. But so anyways, so we charge anywhere from thousand, two thousand bucks a month. Right? We live in or we live. Working in industry, cryotherapy. They can only afford so much, man. Right. As much I'd love to charge five ten grand, like, Right. Unless they got multiple locations, which we do work with multiple location owners. But, you know, the whole thing with it is if you Sure. Sorry, man, my ADs going wire here. What what was I saying in just a second ago? Well, the retention, right, you can afford to lose in the beginning because Yes. You have LTV. So what I did when I had my gym, right? Was rear charging, closed like two hundred bucks a month. Uh-huh. We had the first month and last month. Well, guess what I did with the last month payment. I give that to my sales guys. So I pay to my sales guys. Okay. And so what I do in the agency is my customer acquisition cost, well, that's equal to the last month payment. Because it's not first and second month, Right. It's first and last month. Right. Meaning, that last month doesn't happen until they say, hey, you know, I wanna be, you know, you know, I'm done. Right? And then it's like, okay. Cool. You have another thirty days. Right. Or I love this one. I want to pause. Uh-huh. Right? You know, because of people like, oh, December comes, they wanna pause when really do they should be spending the most money December because nobody else is and then when January and February hit like they're making a lot of monies. Yeah. So long story short, you take that payment and you apply that to your customer acquisition cost. So between your leads, your sales. Right? And now you're getting free client acquisition. Free customers. Yeah. You can scale up as much as you want. You know, and I was from Mozy kind of talks about too. I was gonna mention that. It's like, hey, if you only have a you don't need any money for camouflage because you take all the money that you make on that first sale, you put it into it and you just You know, I mean, it's compounding. Yeah. Exactly. You know, it's compounding cash. It's the best way to do it. A lot of people though, we get our money And then this is where a lot of us are in a tough spot. Right? Because this is the hardest spot, and I was there for a long time. You don't make enough money initially. Do that because you can barely you're behind on your rent. You're behind on your bills. Yeah. That's why it's tough. Yeah. So what's your message, Sal? You have for people maybe that are in that spot. They started their agency. They've bought a few courses or programs. Things maybe didn't work out. They still wanna do an agency, but they're thinking throwing in the towel, but they're just on the verge of maybe getting that big client. Things are tough. So a couple of different ways to go about this. You know, I used to always think that to be an entrepreneur, to be a business owner, all that stuff. I used to think that, to be an entrepreneur, you had to own your own business, right? But trying to learn a skill, learn a market, and make money from it, and pay your bills while not having any other income is almost a death wish. Like, you're gonna get So it's gonna eat you up and tear you up. Yeah. You know, for a long time, you know, those who end up surviving through that. So, one thing I've really learned lately, and if I could go back and do things differently, you know what I would do? Tell me, I'd go to work, I'd find the company that I love, and believe in their mission, and I would work my way up in that company and have and get paid to learn from that company. Yeah. An apprenticeship model. Exactly. Even if they take all the risk, Exactly. Even if I had to start out working for free for that company as intern or something. Right? And I know that's so As fast as a way to learn, and you're surrounding yourself with that are mentors that are committed to seeing you succeed? It's like instead of going to college. Right? Go spend two, three, four years. Heck, even a year for a company who already knows what they're doing -- Yeah. -- has got things figured out. Yeah. Because not in that, but you can take these skills. Right? Like like right now it does, I would make more money personally, in my pocket today, working for another company right now. Because there's companies that I can make Just doing sales alone. If that's all I cared about, you know, if I wanna do sales every day, there's come to work for, you know, getting paid twenty, fifty thousand dollars commission, selling daily, making that kind of money. It's crazy. But that's not my purpose just to make money. Yeah. Like, if your whole thing is just to make money, there's way easier ways. Yeah. Getting the sales, find the height, find the right vehicle, the right company, you know, in a product that you believe in, preferably that you actually use yourself -- Mhmm. -- or, you know, would use. Right? You know, it's like, you know, keep talking about Grant O'man, but he's had such a big impact, you know, on me and my sales career. Right? Yeah. It's like, you know, if I work at a Ford dealership, you know, and I'm selling cars, and I'm driving a Toyota. What kind of message is that saying? Yeah. Incongruent. You know? So that's my first thing I would say is, like, if you're kinda just started and you're younger, take a year, two years, three years, four years, You know, instead of going to college whatever, you know, not saying that college is necessarily bad, you know, as a high school dropout, and a college dropout, I tried it, but I dropped out of high school too. You know, that's like it's everybody's life is different. And I'm saying that's not the best choice, but I don't know. That's a whole another debate. Right? But the thing is, you know, that's that's a way to go about it, there's nothing wrong with that, and you're gonna learn, you're gonna get paid to learn. And, you know, then you can go start your own business, right, if that's what you wanna do. The other thing is if you're just like nope, there's no way I'm doing that, if you're stubborn, you're bullheaded like me. Yeah. Well, wanna watch my language here, but just stop making excuses, stop blaming everybody because you are. Yeah. If you're not where you wanna be in life, It's because it's your own fault. You know, it's like, you know you know what? I had to listen to every day for almost a year just to get myself out of bed and to deal with the depression I was going through. I had to listen to it was when Rocky was talking to a son. Right? And, you know, he's telling him, you know, life's gonna come, it's not fair, it's gonna knock you down, but I'm just gonna make you stay there, you know, if you let it, you gotta get up, you gotta keep moving forward. Right? I used to listen to that like at least once twice three, sometimes ten times a day -- Yeah. -- just to motivate me enough, right, to keep getting up And that's the key to success in anything in life is whatever you think is gonna take successful, and that's why I love the ten x rule. Not necessarily about the money, but it's gonna take you ten times effort that you think is gonna happen. It's gonna take you ten times the heartache. It's gonna take you ten times more money. Right? The problem is though, we like read these stories and these testimonials, and see what Alright. Because you might some people might see some of my testimonials for different service providers and vendors, you know, that I've worked with. And they, oh, man, that guy went from this to this, you know, that could Well, but here's thing you don't know. I also spent twelve, thirteen, fourteen years You wanna do all this other stuff. Right? And this guy, you know, they just gave me one piece of leverage, which -- Mhmm. -- can be huge. Sometimes that's all you need. Right? But the point is is like, you know, you gotta believe in what you're doing so much that it pulls you. Because if not, if you're just pushing yourself all the time, willpower, dude, it's only gonna go so far. That's not enough. Yeah. It's not enough. And so, and that's why being passionate really really matters. You know, you don't have to Here's the thing too, people think that being passionate has to be you work in industry, something that you absolutely love. That's great, but that's usually likely, like a lot of times what you're good at is sometimes not always like things that you like. But for example, like running an agency. Yeah. It's not my dream to run a marketing agency. But it is a cash cow, right? Our, dude, your profit margins can be insane if you allowed them to be and you plan for them, right? And your strategy is good. But what I am passionate about though is helping people, is helping small businesses, right, is changing lives, Because I personally believe, and the reason why I work with, you know, for example, an SM one hundred and eighty is crowd therapy because I believe in what they're doing. Yeah. I believe it's better it betters mankind. So I won't work with, you know, like for example, like, you know, alcohol and tobacco companies and pharma and that stuff. It's not that I'm judging anybody because it's not like I've never drank before. Right? But I don't believe it's cryotherapy. You you have a a clinic in Chandler? We do. I wanna stop by and say hi. Absolutely. Yeah. There's plenty here. But, yeah, we'll have to, you know, go do it sometime. But the point I'm trying to get is all the industries I work in, they're all doing something better for people. Right? And when you're able to better that local business, you better the community, you provide jobs, opportunities, and all these things indirectly. Yeah. So once again, I'm not passionate about, oh, we get to run Facebook ads and, you know, follow-up with all leads, with our callers, and do sales training. That's just stuff that we need to do in order to get the result and the impact. Yeah. Right. And when you are able to go from, you know, hey, I'm just trying to make money to survive, but there's nothing that you gotta, right, you know, Maslow's hierarchy of needs. You gotta take care of yourself before it can help other people. But once you get to a certain level of success, you'll realize, like, it's not really what it felt like. And I think they say, like, what? If you make over seventy five thousand dollars a year, your quality of life doesn't really Eighty is the top. Yeah. Exactly. So you know, and it's true. Right? Because once you you can kind of do whatever you want for the most part, maybe not now with inflation, it's probably like a hundred grand, but but, you know, the the point is is You get to a point where it has to be about something bigger than yourself and you have to have that mission. And if you look at all the grades no matter I don't care what kind of business, whether they're an athlete. Yeah. Right? Whether they're a farmer like philosopher. They believed in so much something bigger than themselves. A lot of times, those people are willing to die and give up everything for what they believe in. Yeah. And if you don't have that kind of conviction in your beliefs, then you need to do some soul searching. Yeah. Because the other people who do are gonna beat you. Yep. I mean, look look, no one's got him not like a big fanboy of him, but, like, just as a person, right? Look at you on Musk. Yeah. Like, he's committed. Hey, guys. From dying on Mars. Right. For well, from act you know, sir, but he he didn't start there though. Right? Start with Xcom, which became PayPal. Which is like huge for e commerce and -- Yeah. Yeah. -- all of us have like a lot of things there. Right? It wasn't for certain things, right? Like that, like, dude, like, it would've taken so much longer for their net to blow up. Right? Yeah. So there's that, you know, Tesla, right SpaceX, and the boring company, guy works like, what do you say, like, hundred hours a week? And don't get me wrong. I've been there. I don't work a hundred hours every weekend, dude, dude, it's but I've believe in something so much that I've done that. There's times I hadn't slept for three days because we had to get stuff done. Yeah. It was a middle of COVID. Right? Yeah. Could've lost everything. You know, but at the gym, we ended up maintaining, keeping like seventy five percent of all of our clients that even though they couldn't come to the gym, like That's crazy. Alright. Wow. Because we just we're human, we send them investors, we connected like, hey, you know, if you guys need to, you know, pause, cancel whatever, completely understand, but if everybody does that, can go out of business and say, you're not gonna have a gentle return, but if you're able to help us, we're gonna give you, you know, the free months, whatever, we're gonna give you you know, making like cool t shirts, you know, and some stuff like that, pass for their friends. Yeah. And we're able to bring that community together. That's what happens when you have a business with people who love your company and the people that are in it. You know, like, everybody works together. Right. Yeah. And if it wasn't for that, that business would've went out of business. You know? So once again, you're not gonna do those things though if you don't care about them. So you must do, yeah, like just like everybody else other high level entrepreneurs do, he's nuts to everybody because he is. We're all nuts. We're crazy. Right? You gotta be to do this stuff. That's what I do, like three in the morning, four in the morning, four in the morning, what was it? Like, calls it he has, like, meetings with his employees and stuff sometimes. Yeah. But that's the kind of passion he has. You know, and if you're gonna go to Mars, well, you gotta you gotta have a lot more than just some rock if you would get there, you know. You gotta be insane. But, you know, it's like Steve Jobs talks about, right? You know, think differently and the world's full of dreamers than saying the freaks, the weirdos, right, I forget the speech, but It's true though, you know, if you wanna have an impact in the world, you know, people are gonna think you're nuts. People are gonna think you're crazy. And, you know, there's nobody that does great things. That's not, you know, that doesn't polarize the world. And you gotta be okay with that. And you gotta realize that all these people hating on you, right? You gotta learn to love them, you know? It's just gonna be all in your rear rearview mirror So, the fact you have haters or even people that sue you, probably doing the right thing. Absolutely. Well, Sal, it is so awesome having you here in the studio. I've learned so much and everyone out here are gonna learn little tidbits here. I'd love to hear what you guys think. What questions do you have for Sal? What was something that maybe was an aha moment? Maybe something that you're struggling with or something that you have struggled with We'd love to hear what do you guys think about this. And thank you so much, Sal, for sharing your wisdom. There's a lot of people out there that wanna pretend and they they show this fake sort of lifestyle, but South Stefano is the real deal, and you should always surround yourself. It's all about people. Always surround yourself. With people who have done the thing that you want. So if you wanna be a successful agency owner and get to the point where you are not stuck in the crap of the day to day operations, look at the systems and processes and things that Sal has put in his life and see which of those items you can knock off in your journey to be able to have the the kind of real freedom of your time and money and doing things that you really like to do. Any parting words of wisdom? Go out there, get shit done, and screw what people have to say because, you know, people are gonna be saying shit all the time, you know. I know that's not fancy, that's not elegant, but that that's the truth. GSD. Right? You just got a GSD, man, and you just gotta keep blowing past, you know, all the obstacles because there's it's never gonna stop. The more money you make, the more problems you have, the bigger your business gets, the exponentially get bigger, and that's why you need to have the right people in your business. And If you don't do nothing else -- Mhmm. -- there's one thing I recommend that every single business owner does. K. And that's read, pick up the book, traction, by Gina Wickman. Yeah. Absolutely. Because even if you're not gonna incorporate all of it, like, they're just you know, most people have read the e myth. Right? Yeah. This book is like, the practical version of how to actually implement -- I tell you systematize your business. Absolutely. So big fanboy of them, like, they don't I don't get any money from it or nothing like that, but it changed my life. It's what when I took about four year hiatus from business -- Yeah. -- and just did sales, It's what motivated me and encouraged me to get back into business, because it showed me, you know, that I was a visionary, and I was missing the integrator side of the business. And, you know, it really, really, like, got me into thinking about systems and processes. So amen. That's a number one most important business book that if I you know, if you don't read nothing else, read that book. Boom. So, Sal, how do people find you? So, yeah, you can find me on Facebook, guys, look me up on LinkedIn. I have Instagram. I don't really use it too much. Probably looks kinda dead, but But yeah, just look me up on social. You can Google, you know, find more information about me. And yeah, just reach out to me. You can also email me at sal at social marketing one eighty dot com. And, you know, I'd be more than happy to chat with you and, you know, there's not a lot of you guys that are struggling out there and it's like, you know, I don't have time to talk to like thousand people a week, But, you know, when somebody is hurting and they come to me genuinely and need some help, a lot of times, man, dude, Somebody just honest with me and tells me that they're struggling, dude, I I don't even I don't even charge you for advice. Yeah. But so I'm not charging you and I'm helping you out. Better take the advice and do it. Otherwise, I'm not gonna have no more to give you. Yeah. It's trouble free advice. Absolutely, you know. Exactly. And that's the thing, you know, if you do stuff for free. That's why for you've gotta charge people for stuff, right? And so the end day, you know, I do what I do to help people out. And the best situations for me people to work with, if somebody has like a business that you're already doing well, but you wanna do great. Yeah. And you want you know, you believe that there's some things that can be done better, or you just maybe don't even know what that thing is because you're so involved. You know, one of my best skills is I'm able to look at somebody's business that bird's eye view outside perspective, let you know exactly what you need to fix, And typically what I do is, you know, you know, it had a complete risk reversal to it where, hey, I don't get paid, until I solve that problem for you. So when I'm working with the right people that I actually enjoy working with and I wanna help them, you know, I know that I actually get people results, so I don't need to get paid on the front end. That being said, you know, I do get paid out more in the back end -- Yeah. -- those deals, but that's because You're not clearly risk. Yeah. I'm taking all the risk if it doesn't if it's not successful, whatever we're doing. Yeah. I'm not getting paid and I will amount the money that I've invested in. Labor.