5 Business Ideas To Start Today With $0 ft. Shark Tank's Sabri Suby

so what i would do is i was in this niche is i would say hey just tell me the date that we can hold the funeral for the money that's being murdered from you doing this so instead what i'm gonna do for you is i feel like got rude to where to know why i could be what i want to from at all in it like a day's off on a road less trial today i'm talking to sa sue he is kinda like the australian gary he's got a marketing agency he's on shark tank australia hey he's is a fun guy i wanted to brainstorm with him businesses that he would start today so next eighteen months where's is the opportunity that he sees if you're starting from scratch you got no resources maybe no experience or capital to start with how would he still make it because this is a guy who took his laptop and basically built one of australia's biggest growth agencies and i wanted to hear what he would do today so with brainstorm ideas and then at the end we talked about some of his sales philosophies because he's a very good sales guy and also some of his life philosophy so how how he lives his life a little bit differently than most so enjoy this episode with sa sue what are some ideas or business ideas that you are excited about right now so trends that you're seeing opportunities you see if you weren't doing what you're doing right now what things would you be interested in what businesses would you go create so i've got a few and i'll start from like i'll lead up to the best one when i think the best opportunities are right so i would say the the the first thing that would be a very very compelling offer is when you're running a business and you start with one traffic channel right and you kinda start with one traffic channel you make an offer you get something working it might be google ads it might be twitter ads it might be you know tiktok it doesn't matter what it is you run with one channel you see some success and then you know you got sales coming in customers are coming in and like a lot of businesses there's always so much more opportunities that are flying by you and it seems like the bigger that you get and the more success that you have the more ill that these opportunities are and the challenge is that focus is the main thing when what i have found and running businesses because i had shiny object syndrome really really badly in the beginning of my korea and that's where i had these ups and downs and i made money and then i lost all my money and then i had to do everything again and it was all because i lacked focus and i was just looking for the next new sexy sales channel the next new business model and so that's something that i see for a lot of businesses and they know that they need to focus on one thing so they focus on one traffic channel but as a result of that they also then say no to a lot of opportunities so i think that a very good opportunity right now is to reach out to businesses that running ads on a platform whether it be google and say hey you got your funnel here it's all dialed in it's obviously working but notice that you're not running any facebook ads right and that's always always because they need a team they need expertise they need to do something or they tried it and it didn't work because they tried to use the same funnel they were using on google ads on facebook from hot traffic to cold traffic and it didn't work and you just say look i'm gonna do everything for you don't pay me a cent i'm gonna build the funnel i'm gonna run the ads i'm gonna show you that this works and i just want a percentage of the sales right from this traffic channel there's no there's no risk and it's only gonna result in something it's actually proven and i think there's so many platforms that you can do that with there's a lot of people that are like really all in on facebook ads right now right and meta adds and they're kinda waiting to see what happens with tiktok and the ban and they're not really running that yet where you could come to those people and be like awesome what we're gonna do is we are going to run tiktok as a platform for you right we're gonna build the funnel because what a lot of people don't understand is there's different compliance for tiktok and facebook so we're gonna build all of that for you we're gonna run the ads we're gonna do everything you're not doing it right now and we just want ten percent overwrite and we'll do everything nice and so what do you think of what do you call that that pitch where it's not like it's like a reverse cell basically or you're it's a killer offer where you're offering them something that they'd be they'd be a fool to say no right it's a no brainer do you have a a phrase for that because i know you're good with coin yeah i i i told father offer right so it's like making making like you know your prospects and offer that they simply can't refuse and when i think back now to like all of the roles that i had that you know the companies were crushing it they were growing very very quickly they were all had a very very strong offer like that was the one thing that was the throughput to all of that we had the same thing happened in e commerce a lot of stores are on shopify that are not on amazon and what you can do is you can go to every shopify store that's not on amazon and a very simple pitch a very kind of rinse and repeat pitch you basically would search for a shopify store above x in traffic which you can go use similar web or whatever to to the chrome extension we'll just tell you that and you say great you reach out to them cold we can always get the the business owner's email and you'd say hey notice you're not on amazon right now probably because it's a big lift it's kind of operationally intensive you don't know where to to do blah blah blah but i did a little research and three of your competitors are on amazon there's another tool that will tell you how much somebody's selling so you say your competitors are doing million dollars a month on amazon right now and actually there's low competitiveness for this keyword i think there's i think you're leaving x dollars on the table it'll take some time to ramp up but i can do that for you leave the items in your warehouse you don't even need to to ship it to amazon yet we could start simple and then we can get more complicated once it starts to show results and you could pick up you know five k a month ten k a month clients and you know ten five k month clients is fifty thousand a month that really one person who understands amazon fba could do and to understand amazon fba is like you're four months away from being good enough to operate this for one store and then you do it for two stores by the time you do it for two stores you could do you you'll be able to do it for ten you'll just have to hire a couple people and so i think that that's another example of people just find find a group find a class of business that are not on a channel and make them a custom killer offer or as you call a god godfather offer to to do business with you exactly yeah i think that that's is that is something that is not not a lot of people are talking about and it is a very nice shoe you're already being able to identify a a group of people that would be a perfect candidate for what it is that you've got that have money right but they don't have time and they don't have the expertise in that channel and just bring that to them making it a very say here is people try to do this for podcast so like hey you should be posting clips or you should do this i'll do it for you and then what they forget is that most podcast don't have any money or they don't have an enough they don't make enough money on a podcast to be able to do this and so you wanna go fish in a pond where something like e commerce works because if e commerce store is still in business three years later it's making money and and for them it's very easy to say why they should do this new channel because it will also generate money right away you can make a strong case for why amazon is worth it because it'll generate revenue from day one whereas posting your podcast clips on tiktok is kinda silly because you're not necessarily gonna get money or even podcast subscribers from it yeah it's harder to justify the sale right like either you're giving someone an roi it's a much easier sell than just like here's another expense just to get cliffs chopped up for you and you already don't have no money alright what's idea too so i idea number two is i think this was probably be the place that i start i would start and i didn't have any skills and so one thing that's present right now is that cpm on facebook are through the roof and there's only pretty much one certainty other than death and taxes and that is that the cost to advertise next year is gonna be more expensive than this year and it's gonna keep going up and it's gonna keep going up and so what's happening right now is a lot of these saas businesses that have these hacks that are very high they're really feeling the pinch and their payback periods gone from six months to twelve months to eighteen months right i think i read a report the other day about salesforce and their payback period is something crazy now like twenty four months or something or even longer than that yes two or three years i think it went two three years right and so that is going to continue people are gonna continue to fill that pinch so i think that you know as long as that continues to happen there is gonna be an arbitrage with people that can actually deliver people customers with a lol attack and so a great way to to do that is that a lot of these businesses whether it's hubspot or go high level click funnels high all these guys they offer insane affiliate commissions right i believe hubspot affiliate commission is forty percent which is just astronomical economically high so what i would do is well that in dollar terms roughly what do you think that it what do you think that means to deliver a customer so this is the hubspot affiliate is basically the either the bottom tier of it it says is thirty percent recurring up to one year and so i don't know what the the average price point is for for this but what do you see on the pricing page okay marketing hub is eight hundred dollars a month marketing enterprise up is thirty hundred dollars a month so let's just pick the eight hundred right and then we're saying that they pay you over over the year you get thirty percent of that so that's three grand right it's basically what you're gonna make for not doing a lot per customer per customer without having to operate and maintain that customer you've you've offload floated the rest of that to the to the actual company themselves yeah and and there's some that are even more lucrative than that right five see if you look at h they said that they pay a minimum of one thousand and up to fifteen thousand dollars for a customer and there's there's there's countless of these guys so what i would do if i was in this niche is i would pick one niche let's just say it's chiropractors and i would build out a full funnel that i know converts for that niche with an offer the opt in the email flows and everything i would then build a list of people in that it for all chiropractors in whatever the geography that you wanna service you can do this on work you can do this with built with you can it with a whole bunch of them and then i would run a campaign or a outreach to these people or i would cold call these people and i would say hey i can see that you're running ads right now but you're sending them to your home homepage right just tell me the date that we can hold the funeral for the money that's being murdered from you doing this so instead what i'm gonna do for you is i've already built you a funnel and here it is right you get the email flows you get the landing page the offer everything like that the text messages you don't need to pay me nothing for it i usually charge five thousand dollars all that i ask is that you sign up through this commission through this affiliate link in order to sign up and get this funnel through hubspot for free right of course i have to pay there and then i get my kickback and that is something where a lot of agencies that service chiropractors or dog washes or doesn't matter the niche these people are actually charging for that so if you're how you would to go out there i'd actually just offer people or the same thing with high right it's like their guarantees like they're guaranteed to give you an uplift of fifteen to twenty percent in revenue from that build would a list on built with of all shopify stores cross reference the ones that are running facebook ads that have the facebook ads pixel on there and i will guarantee to increase the revenue track from your ads by twenty percent interesting okay so i thought you i didn't understand the the genius of your idea here what you were saying i thought you were just saying hey hubspot pays at affiliate commission become a hubspot affiliate run traffic to get people to sign up for hubspot but no you had a two step system you were saying find a bunch of people that so if they were sophisticated in their funnel would have enough leads where they would need to use hubspot so you're like let me just do get create a free turnkey funnel for chiropractors then go to the chiropractor and have them just give that to them and they're like wow thanks really what's the catch and you're like oh the only catch is that these leads need to live somewhere they should live in hubspot use my affiliate link when you sign up when you go ahead and and make that official there and so that is how you would you would generate a higher volume of customers for these saas products by giving away the thing to the to the end user who needs to use it correct okay smart alright cool i like it give give me another one give me a different one is there one that you have that's not as internet marketing well i i i i do i there they are pretty much all kind of in that internet marketing niche what another one that i think i'll hit you with two more so the next one that i would do is there are four hundred million small businesses in the world right there's sixty million in america there's five million in the uk there's two million in australia and as everyone moves online and there's people all over at all different time zones that wanna get in contact with these business a lot of these businesses a google my business listing right google page with their reviews and all of those kind of things and the thing that very very few of these people offer is live chat so i would offer live chat as a service and either it was just me and i was trying to start a side hustle you know what i mean i could do it after hours whereas where a lot of people don't have the manpower to offer support after hours or to be able to field inquiries and again it would be free i would say hey i'm gonna do this for you no charge so i don't need to try and convince these people to do it right a compelling offer is infinitely more powerful than a convincing argument so i do not wanna get into a convincing argument over the phone that they should do this and they should pay me money to do this i would say cool i know that this can increase your sales by ten percent because i can look at your google my business listing and say that you gain so much traffic after hours that you guys aren't open we're no get in contact with you i'm gonna field those leads i'm gonna nurture those leads i'm gonna then send them to your sales team or even close some of them for you through chat and i wanna a twenty percent commission as a result of that i would start it as myself until i got to going and then i'd hire some people in the philippines or wherever it might be to actually service that and i think that that is something that for people that are running ads or that already rank on google is just a nice little shoe horn it just it just fits okay i like it what what would you target so when you're let's say you were at the beginning and you're trying to build up are you trying to make these into twenty million dollar companies are you trying to get to a thousand dollars month you're trying to replace a job what's your mindset if you were starting from the beginning here and you're thinking about one of these kind hustle ideas where you're gonna be doing the internet market for somebody what would be your goal or your approach to that to get to that first milestone how do you think about that i can tell you how i thought about it and i at the beginning it was like just operation don't be broke right like you are broke right now and you not you need not to be broke so it wasn't like i had this big like a elaborate vision of having these all these team members and multiple offices and a book all that no none of that it was just like you need to not be broke right so what i look for is people like what i call customers that have a bleeding neck right the the neck is bleeding and they need an immediate solution to solve that problem and so i like to try to get as close to like the revenue producing activities for business as possible because that's the oxygen right that's the blood of a business and i think that the way that i would think about it straight away is first replacing my income either was just started as a side hustle and everyone kinda has this magical number of like ten k per month that they wanna get to per month and i think that going through this route is a way to very very clearly get there but the other lens that i like to look at it for is like what other skills that i am going to need to possess in order to make this business get to ten thousand dollars per month and what are the half life of those skills right am i gonna be learning just facebook ads that what i know right now with facebook ads is gonna be infinitely different in the next three years and so the half life of those skills is probably thirty six months and then i've lost those skills and then they don't compound for me so then i would be looking at it is like what are the skills that i'm going to acquire that this might be a little dirty down side hustle at ten k per month but i can then use those skills and build something that is really big further down the line and it's gonna serve me which will bring me to the to the last thing right which i think that this is the best business opportunity right now for people that wanna get started by none so the the idea that i wanna speak to you about is something that you need no money to begin with right you don't need to show your face you don't even need to use your voice there's nothing about it at all that you need and it is a market that is completely exploding and it is a way that you can earn at a bare minimum ten thousand dollars per month and there's proof of people making a hundred two hundred grand a month of this do i have your interest you you have my interest you have my attention so we all know the tiktok shop is exploding right now right and what we're also seeing right now is that obviously the whole war between these platforms is now youtube shopping is about to have a second crack at it and they've just launched their thing and so what tiktok shop is is anybody that doesn't know it tiktok shop launch their platform which allows brands to sign up to be to offer affiliates and to have people sell their product with a product tag on it and then they get a percentage of whatever sales that they drive forward towards that business and this thing is exploding like social commerce under that umbrella is completely exploding and we're kind of in a war right now for like gen z's and these younger generations like everyone wants to get in on these guys because they know right they don't focus on them now they're gonna be dinosaurs in the next five years so what you wanna do is you can use a website like ka data or there's another one called fast moss and you can go through and you can find the best selling products on tiktok show and then they will tell you not only they'll show you exactly the revenue that these products are doing they'll show you the the tiktok videos and the reels that people are using to actually sell these things now you might be thinking right now i can hear them i can hear the objections coming out of the back of the crowd i don't wanna show myself i'm not a content creator well this is where the magic happens right you don't need to do none of that so what you can do is a lot of the people that are selling the most through these platforms is they're using eleven labs right cool twenty bucks a month we're good to go on that bad boy and you can start to look at the scripts on something like call data and have a look at what are they writing in them get them transcribe transcribed figure out what's making the ones sell the most what's why making can it get the most views reverse engineer that then you can plug that into something like eleven labs it will give you the voice over for it and then you can use mid journey or whatever free ai generation tool to create the images for that and then throw all of that into cap cut and a away you go and the boys are cooking right the boys of girls and cooking if you do that and you might be thinking that sounds okay like there are people printing with this there are kids out there that used to work in chipotle that are earning fifty grand a month doing this and it's not by doing a thousand of them right it's about doing one a day right what's an example how did you how did you stumble across these kids give me a story about somebody you met that's doing this yeah well i saw i like i've kept on seeing all these crazy ads for like this stuff and it was like cold shi legit resin and i was like what the hell is shi legit resin and i was like this black tire and it was like an ad that came up and it was like what would happen to you this is what would happen into you if you ate shi every day for fourteen but what is shi legit risen i've never even heard of legit is like a it's like a black tie that they get in the himalayas in india and it has like all of like the essential minerals and drink you put it on your teeth what he what do what do you do wild black syrup and they sell it in this two tiny little like jars that look like a lip balm jar and it comes with a golden and spoon and for anyone that runs ads know that that is immediately killer right yeah then it's a little patent interrupt with black tie it looks really weird on the on on the feed and so i started to see these things every and they'll all ai voices and they were making the most outrageous claims that i've ever seen that it doubles your testosterone it increases your pencil size as they call it and about always these wild things right and all these like weird people getting jacked with this black tower all over them and i started to to look then once i clicked on one the algorithm knows and i start seeing these things everywhere and i was like i need to go down this rabbit hole i i need to i am a man of the internet and this is my judy so i will go down and i will start investigate this thing and so i found this company called better alt himalayan shi resin that all of these tiktok affiliates were pushing and then i found ka data and i plugged them into that and i saw that they were selling ninety one thousand units right over like a ninety day period it was like a thousand units a day of this shi resin and i was like that is insane and then i went further down the rabbit hole and these guys had done just shy of nine million dollars in shi resin in ninety days in ninety days through tiktok shop a hundred thousand dollars a day on tiktok shop yeah and that was the tip of the iceberg because then i went over to their funnel and started to have a little look and started to see what i could find and there was like thousands and thousands of reviews and then if you go to their website that they they say that they sold nine point five million servings right and it it was it's crazy like it was more it was like a two hundred million dollars worth of shi if you looked at it calculated that based on their lowest average order value yeah the okay so they're crushing it what's the other one they're like guru nana or whatever that is the is it teeth whitening or whatever you listen is guru under oil pulling kit everywhere these guys are all over tiktok like they do lives the their funnel is is very crazy all news behind this is it's just like two twenty six year olds or like who who is how did they do this because it sounds like some ancient indian herbal recipe or something like that which is exactly how it's meant to sound right black but it's crushing on tiktok shops so i assume it's like a guy with the you know zero high fade on a you know harry exactly who who is behind this do you know the story do you know who these guys are i don't know the the the founders behind these things but basically i guess like one thing that they all have in common is story based copy right it's all like it's all about the story about the thing that they've got and they'll focus on a ancient oil pulling the egyptians used to do it and they had the there's still people that are mum that under the pyramids that have perfect teeth because they've been doing this oil pulling and then they they hook you in like that and yeah grew guru nand same thing here like hundred thousand units a week through take talk show well i'm looking up the founder right now i mean it looks like what you would expect and i mean i either this is a complete this is a fake ai generated guy or he's got a nephew right he's got like he's got like an nephew with the fade who is doing this because it is un remarkable how much they've done what give me a sense of the numbers how big is this thing i thought this was the number one selling product on tiktok shops for a while yeah it was they're they're doing like i think i did had done like one point two million in sales for the app a hundred thousand units a week they've got forty thousand reviews and there's like thirty thousand videos tagged with guru under on tiktok and again this is only seeing the numbers directly through a tiktok shop using these websites so you can find them but the crazy thing is all of these products it they've got way more reviews on amazon because the thing that they're doing so smart is that like you've got a lot of people that are promoting the product on something like tiktok right and they're getting a lot of attention and eyeballs on it but then the people arrive at something that is much more trusted like amazon and then they get that little bump in conversion rate there's trust already they're sold from a video and then they get all of these secondary sales so the opportunity here is twofold right because you're can attack it where you can go and say hey like you're just gonna start an as an affiliate right and that's just like the skills that you will learn is like copywriting how to grab people's attention right how to you will understand the social currency of these platforms what goes viral and you can take those skills to any business and just explode their sales right and what you can do is for instance you could start off like that and you could get some traction and then you could go to a business and you could say hey you're gonna pay me twenty grand a month and what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna build out tiktok shop as a platform for i'm gonna do all the creative for you i'm gonna run that i'm gonna crank the revenue from it it's a twenty thousand dollar per month retainer plus five percent of sales you don't do nothing but i'm gonna do you one better than that because i know that you guys are running a lot of facebook ads and anybody that runs a lot of facebook ads knows that the number one bottleneck is creative so i'm gonna that i'm gonna run all of these tiktok i'm gonna make and go viral and then i'm gonna give them to you to run on facebook that you can scale up on paid ads even more hundred percent this is a great idea the the beauty of what you just said is you're gonna learn these more timeless skills copywriting understanding consumer psychology video editing video storytelling knowing how to utilize social social media to go viral all of these things which are horizontal skills that could be used on it in any business but you're gonna get paid to do it you're getting paid to go to school to build the most valuable skills that exist for marketers if going forward by by doing this as a either affiliate or as a retainer you know consultant for some of these brands and that's the reason why i think it's the best is because the skills that you're getting and getting paid to get are gonna serve you for the rest of your life like these are not skills these are not shiny objects that are gonna go away like we are gonna be communicating in twenty to thirty years from now right and it's gonna even be a more hyper fragmented there's gonna be even a greater war for attention and if you get the reps in now if you're uploading at tiktok a day right just imagine the skills and the understanding that you have on human psychology in a year in two years time and what that will allow you to do if you go into a more legitimate business and you know this and you know all of those skills what you'll be able to bring to those businesses i mean i think this is great advice for people early in their careers people whose main attribute and asset is hustle and willingness to learn things and figure them out if that's all you have going for you then this is the perfect type of thing for you especially if you don't have you know coding skills right if you can't build in other ways then you know which is me i was that right i was twenty one years old i didn't have coding skills i didn't have any assets i didn't know one you know if i was a great investor cool i don't have any money to invest nor do i have any track record to be able to go raise money to invest so i can't do that career yet k i didn't have any skills to to build software if i could have built software i would have built software but i would have had to have learned that first in order in order to even build a a product in that category whereas this is something that the bar to enter is so low that it's applicable advice to to anybody who's at the beginning i was just say that so i don't necessarily think it's the best but i do think it's the best for a certain group of people who are in a certain context where they only have certain attributes and they have certain things that they're they're lacking at that time correct you just don't need like anything to get started other than time and that's when you're broke that's all you have is time and the reality of it is that most of these people are already spending four and a half hours a day on their phone so in that that's where i i believe that it's yeah it's it's a very ripe opportunity you have a few phrases that i like i want you to tell me about them one is killed a little bitch inside what is this it sounds like a david go phrase yeah i just i think that there is a duality of man that is present and whenever like you know you trying to do something that is hard there's the little bitch that comes out and starts to whisper in your ear like hey it's cold outside sa like you've been working out all week man just it's okay just roll over and go back to sleep or hey you've already had really great conversations this week you send out some very promising proposals you don't need to make another twenty cold calls right just knock off for the day and go hang out and there's always that that little bitch that comes out and typically the harder the things that you do the more loud it gets and it is the best salesperson that exists because it knows all of your little weaknesses it knows all of your little vice and it knows exactly how to hit those pain points and it's i have found that the heart of things that i do the more it's my ability to silence that person and to do things despite them and i have like an interesting relationship with that little voice that lives in my head because it rear it's ugly head and tries to say that stuff to me then i just put it through pain so it's like you need to skip the gym like you go a little bit of a tweak in your muscle like don't go it's like just for recommending that like we're gonna finish the workout with fifteen minutes it's a hill sprints like you shouldn't come out here today you wanna send it into isolation exactly i i wanna let it know what what what what will be accepted in this only do you ignore it you penalize it for being there so that it doesn't rear rotate again i do because i think that like the biggest lie that people tell themselves is like the lie every day like the people that say i need to work out or i need to do this or i need to do that and then they start their day by like lying to themselves and not accepting that like for me it's just like binary it's like he's i know that i'm not gonna do something then i'm just not gonna say to myself that i'm gonna do it because i don't wanna teach myself that i make promises to myself that i don't keep like that's a really bad thing so if i feel like i don't wanna go to the gym the next day or there there's gonna be a reason why i can't go i'll will just say it now i'm not gonna start i'm gonna go and then lie to myself what do you do when you get caught in that situation where you thought you were you said you were gonna do something you so you let's say you i have to take catch it ahead of time yeah what is what is the tax that you pay that the tax is always more volume so it's always more of the thing that i said i was gonna do that i didn't do it not only do i do it i now have to do more i do i have it comes it comes to collect what are some of the other big ideas that you that serve you well either life philosophy maybe a lifestyle technique you have maybe it's a belief you have that you think most people don't live by that that you do that have that has served you well so i think what i'm asking is what's some wisdom you can drop on me but the wisdom is in the form of something you actually take action on i think that the you know when i started my career i thought that i needed to look and act a certain way and you know i was you know watching business shows i had read business books and i was like okay i need to be like this serious dude like i need to wear a blazer and i need to show up like a businessman and as a result of that i had to act a certain way and that certain way wasn't really a way that was indicative of having a lot of fun and over the years it's like the world just like tries to beat you down to being like vanilla right and to fitting in and like not being that like dark rich chocolate or that person with a bit of show or a bit of flair and a bit of fun to it like people think this is business so i need a act a certain way and i i definitely fell into that and so one of the philosophies that i try to embrace is just to have more fun and do everything that i do is just to have more fun in my life and in my business because at the end of the day like the revenue the sales numbers the profits and all of that kind of stuff like the years roll by and unless you're having a lot of fun doing what it is that you're doing like nothing else matters so and it was actually like it was only after i started if i'm focusing on having more fun did i start making a lot more money and so like an example so what would you do that was more fun and how did that what what what was a turn of events that led to more money or were they not connected no they were definitely connected so obviously like some some of the things that like i would say that our fun is that like a specific example is about a year and a half ago i put together an ad campaign and usually when i put together an ad campaign i'll be like okay how do i make this convert the best right that is the goal it's like how how do i just make it convert and to cold traffic because that's the game and then i was like let me just think about like what would be the the funniest to add like what would be what would i need to do to have the most fun and i i started from that place of just having it's a wild fun ad that regardless of the your business or not it would be entertaining in fun and we did all types of outrageous things one of them was like having me dressed as a priest and we had lord z and lord a elon in the background and we were having a funeral in a church for the money that is being murdered in most people's ads campaign right and that was a whole lot of fun making that ad and everything that we did in that in that whole script was a lot of fun it was funny and that one campaign tripled our sales and so that that is a very transactional example but it's more so about like what is it that would be fun so i try to do something that is like you know really big and have a big swing something that's really risky every year because i know me and i know the urge that i have as an entrepreneur took like always keep engaged and to have to scratch that itch and the big sin that i made early on in my career is i looked at scratching that itch through other business opportunities at other like things when what i do now is i'm present that that is the law of gravity i'm always gonna wanna do new and novel things but i have a new and novel thing that i do that is attached to the main thing right so it might be a new campaign or a new channel or a new offer that i'm gonna run and that will scratch that itch and i think that like getting wrapped up in working people as they get older in their life they start to take things a lot more seriously and they forget that like hero we're just all here having fun at the end of the day right like yeah what's the point you're not having fun so i like to talk to strangers lots of strangers you were told from a very early age not to talk to strangers strangers have got everything that it is that you want my wife was once a stranger right like my customers my business partners my best friends all of these guys were strangers to me and so i think that is something that is underutilized having parties and and entertaining people it's so easy to get caught up in organizing your business life and the meetings and the events that people don't take that same vi and discipline with planning fun and making like events fun and when you do that and you have fun and you've got all of these things that you do in your downtime it just makes you like bring so much more zest in life to your everyday business because it's not like this just never ending constant grinds stone yeah there was a great google principle i think called twenty percent time that they had for a for a period which was they acknowledge that the most talented people the best programmers that they wanted to hire they would never be able to just chain them to the desk and say optimize these google ads for the rest of your life and that they needed the twenty percent time to just say go work on whatever you want and you're either you're gonna do it anyways you're either just gonna do it when you go home and that's gonna become a side hustle it's gonna become a new company it's gonna become a reason to leave it's gonna become so much more fun that you're you're just kinda disconnected from your job because the fun is what you're having outside of the outside of the job so instead they said explicitly use twenty percent of your work time to do something completely different than what you wouldn't do in your normal day to day and out of that came some really great ideas i know with facebook out of their hack which were their their version of like yeah let's just build some shit forget the process forget the product forget the road map forget everything let's just build some shit tonight have beer pizza and i think like the like button came out of that the most push button in the history of the universe came out of came out of somebody to hack saying hey what if we added that to our product and so i think that there's great examples of this in business as well we used to have a do cool shit budget which was we would take twenty percent of our time but we'd also take i think it was a ten percent of our money we said ten percent of the marketing budget has to be a no roi play meaning we think it's awesome but it's not measurable it's not clear it's not proven that this would work and it was only out of that extra ten percent that we would do things that were the kind of big swings out of the box ideas that might result in a big winner or it might result in we just tried something we learned so fun we have a good story to tell we moved back on and we we had a creative release that we now use to do something else tim ferris was on the podcast and he said this well he goes i've learned that just because i charge my batteries doing something silly doesn't mean i have to use them doing something silly so for example he will do something that's not quote unquote productive because it charges his batteries and he's like now i have batteries used to go do more productive stuff if i wanted to if i only ever do the super productive stuff but it's just draining my batteries that's not better that's not that's not the way and i think that that is even a more powerful example right because like looking at like google's like you know their twenty percent time and all that's still tied to work right but it's more so it's like as we get older like most people think that getting old means getting boring like just think about it they think about most people as they get older on they have the kids and they all of these things happen then it's like they just feel like that that is almost like a whole pass to being boring and just like fitting in and doing stuff so like there there's this annual server that they do every year that is the happiness index right that measures people based on their happiness and if you ask most people like are you happy or like you know did you had to rate yourself on a scale of one to ten how happy would you be most people say seven yeah seven right obviously yeah but i don't like to live at sevens right like i i i i i wanna be very happy and i want my life to be very very full and i just think that this far too often we take things far too seriously they do not need to be seriously aren't taken seriously and we just we feel like that because naturally we're getting older or getting more cynical and it comes back to you need to do silly things that do charge you and that you do get energy for because you wanna have like those sprints it's not about sitting down and working sixteen hours a day just grinding on something because you've got the hours to do it it's about doing your most meaningful work and i find that i do my most meaningful work when i focus on having more fun with everything that i'm doing because it's like if you're gonna compete with somebody it's like the naval quote right you wanna do things that feel like play to you and that look like work to others right so if you can inherently have more fun doing those things you're gonna do them for longer you're gonna get better and you're gonna see better results can i read you a quote about this exact topic an hour before this podcast i was supposed to be prepared for the pod but i was deep in a rabbit hole on sylvester stall of all people i was studying the the the story of rocky and some s and he said this quote he goes i think that life belongs to people who can make a sick joke out of it all and he said if you take life too seriously i don't know either you you either think one of two things either you think that life is a comedy or you'll feel that life is a tragedy and i just love that and and you know it reminds me of i was at tony robbins event once and there's seven thousand people from fifty six countries and there we're all totally different ages groups of people different you know backgrounds different economics different everything and he says something he goes show me what a depressed person looks like how does a depressed person stand it said don't say a word just how do they stand and everybody instinctively does the same we you know you sort of shoulders down he said how do they breathe it's like shallow it's not deep breaths he said how does how does their face look and you could see everybody regardless of background new we all knew the protocol and he says that he goes you guys have practiced this right you know what stress looks like you know what depressed looks like because it is we all know instinctively what that looks like you said something earlier which is that we all believe that as you get older you get boring nobody says that out loud but i think it's an implicit belief that's baked into all of us just like knowing that well if i wanna be in a low energy depressed state i should hunch over breathe kinda shallow shuffle my feet and talk talk a low voice that is gonna manifest that in the same way i think that most people truly do believe and accept that as i get older life becomes more boring and that's crazy we gotta like uproot that and eradicate that as a as a default way of of of accepting how things are gonna go because it's these beliefs that are so ingrained in you that you don't even really acknowledge those are the ones that kinda drive your life correct and it's all driven by the activities that you do if you think about like why are you like more energized and excited for life you know when you're maybe in your twenties as opposed to being later in life right just as an example and a lot of the times it's because people stop doing new things and it's like they they just repeat the same thing every day so right instead it's like that the manga quote of like you know show me where i'm gonna die so i never go visit there it's the same thing same activities you wanna look at like well why are you like why do you have a little bit more pep in your step when you're younger you're always doing new things you're taking big swings like there's all and there's always a gain you know to quote the little bitch in the back of your mind they're saying but yeah i have kids now i have responsibilities i have certain things that i need to do whoever said that means that you can't do also new things or that you can't also have fun while doing those things and it says little exercises that you can put in in your daily life that you you make the ordinary extraordinary this is a little small talk pro tip one of the most common questions people ask is like so what's new that's what we ask people when we see them what's new and if you are on the receiving end of the what's new question it's like oh got what's new like and it's sad it's like nothing's really new but for most of us nothing is just new between the last time we saw you in now right like we're still working that same job we don't change jobs every week still got the same kids they're still around still got the same most of the things we do are the same and so asking what's new is a terrible question to ask and it puts the other person in a sort of you sort of pin them into a sort of sad realization about their life in a in the moment a different small talk question that i think is it generates much more interesting responses is what's something you're excited about coming up so i'll ask you with this all time i'd be like i'll say i'll even say what's new so that the question doesn't sound different i'm like what's new what's something that you're looking forward to right now what are you excited about what's coming up for you and then they'll tell me like i'm really looking forward to this thing that i'm gonna go do this show i'm going to this thing i'm gonna go see and then they light up because people light up when you ask them what they're looking forward to because we need things that we're excited about and we're looking forward to to your point we should be you building the muscle of having more fun of building planning things that we're excited about that are going to be fun yeah you got to engineer them you can't just wait for them to happen by chance and the best way that i have found to do that is just to sit down at the start of the year with your partner whoever it might be and like not as as everybody plans out their work here right they're like these are the projects that i wanna do on it in q then we've got this it's like do that about your own life right we're gonna go on a holiday here i wanna try this here i wanna do some crazy here right what are some examples you've done yeah so some of the stuff that that i like to do is i like to look at like all the different areas like of my life my relationships wealth all of those kind of things and you start to have these pillars so the pillars might be like for me i like to go away every ninety days i've got three daughters my wife i work very very hard and i like to i love to travel i like to go through i do a cooking classes experience new cultures and i don't wait for when i need a holiday i just plan them in advance because i know that you know a ten day holiday is gonna give me that thing is gonna give them that juice and i come back and get way more done in that next quarter so like we like to plan the year in terms of like all the holidays that we're gonna take and then a little hack that i i like to do with you've got kids and you go travelling is whenever we go to a new city you know every year we go to multiple new countries try to go to multiple new countries a year and whenever the cities or the countries that we're gonna be visiting i go to chat gp and i ask it to write me a children's story book about that and i read that to my daughter's leading up to going to the countries and it's incredible like you can say no make it like i had three characters and these are the characters names and they're all my daughter's names and then like it uses all the things about that culture into it and it just makes everyone board in and so much more excited yeah because the anticipation is always more fun than the than the actual event than itself so that makes sense to actually invest in the anticipation part of it indeed and you have a pretty interesting set of interest that align with what i'm interested in you like i asked you texted you i said hey what should we talk about on pod and you said to me four words of which i'm actually interested all of them one of the first one you said was show ship talk to me about show ship why is this on your on your mind yeah i think that like you know entertainment is like the currency that buys the attention of your prospects and of your marketplace and show ship for me is like you know it there's it's a lot of things like it's storytelling it's being able to have like stage presence and energy with the way that you show up and it's also visual storytelling telling and being able to surprise and bring drama and excitement to to whatever it is that you do and i think that in regardless of the business that you choose to build you very quickly once you get to a certain height you realize that you're in the people business right you're in the in in the the business of leading people and communicating to those people regardless of what the product or the industry that you're in and it just becomes infinitely more important with your ability to be a show and to bring like a bit of p you know a bit of that source to things that seem ordinary right and it couldn't say monday mundane and boring whether it's a a job advert advocate that you're riding or an interview you that you're conducting or a team meeting that you're running in all at hands on deck and it's just one of those lost art forms where people just like most of our communication is done through text and email so i think that people just naturally just get to a plateau where they don't really emphasize it anymore and i think that with everything that's happening with content creation and and and stuff like that and the importance that people are placing on building an audience there's like you know a renaissance of of like show ship that is having to come back i like that you said show is the currency that buys the attention of your prospects that's killer you it seems like it's kinda polarizing right the people who are out there creating content on tiktok and and and youtube they probably know more than anyone how important show ship is and they're benefiting from from doing it and then there's a whole bunch of people who are opted out of that that sounds complicated hard i don't know how to do that and they're living in emails text messages maybe where most boat business owners live and i think i'd buy what you're saying which is that when you're communicating through let's say just emails or or you're running ads you tend to kind of conform or subdue yourself into a very transactional just dry informational way of communicating and that that actually does you disservice is most of the new business you get through content you're making on your youtube channel no i we we run a lot of ads so we we get that as well i look at it as like the whole ecosystem and the the youtube content is a way to also get more reps in right i understood that like it i wanna become a better storyteller if i want my hooks to get more dialed in if i want the whole thing of retaining people's attention learning all these storytelling techniques foreshadowing and all of this kind stuff that you know i kind of really came up through the whole privilege of direct response and learning my way through that and understanding that like the the landscape is changing and like you really need to become even better at storytelling and all of those reps that i get in on youtube i can then translate them to all the ads that i do the emails the video sales letters and whatever it else that i'm gonna do even presenting and just being a show it allows me that instead of getting feedback of maybe doing a launch or a campaign every quarter like i'm uploading a youtube video every week right so it just it's about practice let's say if i'm good what's something you've learned in the gap between good and great on storytelling or show ship through content yeah i wouldn't say like i i i i wouldn't put a crown on myself and say that i'm great yet i think i still got i've got ways to go but i think that fundamentally it's understanding the the principles of like how do you first hook somebody's attention and then retain it and then be able to make an ass and i think that the the place that a lot of people start is really focusing on how to make and ask they they think about how to write the most you know influential copy the most persuasive copy to have a a a huge amount of emphasis on the offer and they ask that you're making to your audience and i think that the number one thing if you wanna improve the conversion rate of anything on any vehicle the thing that you need to focus on is improving the consumption first and so you know i think that you'd wanna place a disproportionate amount of your effort on first getting that consumption and the way that you do that is by understanding the hook and understanding the lead right so how how do i have either something that's gonna be a patent interrupt or a patent match to my market and then how do i slowly just fore shadow how do i build stakes how do i have where i i i i'm basically delaying a payoff at that and have multiple storylines lines in it because if you can do that and if you can earn that viewer even if like yes you wanna have a very strong offer but it doesn't matter how strong the offer is if you don't get people to that pop of your whole pitch anyway right and you have a you have an interesting method here that you i i just was reading one of your titles that i really like the title of one of your most popular videos is sell like crazy stop praying to the internet gods what's the premise of that video is that like a lot of people sit around and hope and pray to z about that they're gonna get cheaper cpm right or are everything would just get easier with my add account is like the the algorithm wouldn't be so wild and so volatile or people you know basically beg people for referrals and they sit around and operate their business by whatever fate falls in their lap but most businesses don't have a repeatable predictable way to actually put a dollar into machine and turn it into three or five or ten dollars back and with all the businesses that i've seen with the thousands of clients that i've worked with all the businesses that i've actually been an employee of you know that's the one thing that those people all have is a repeatable process to go out there and get clients because if you do not have that you have an expensive hobby that just is worse than a job because you you don't get vacations you got all the stress you got to everything that else that you need to deal with and you end up working double the amount of hours and you would in an normal job right right what are some examples of these repeatable systems which might be just a sales funnel a great sales funnel that you've seen right now that you could you know teach me about or tell me about yeah i think that like if you if you look at it on like a lead legion perspective you know a a basic funnel is having somebody having a piece of information or a video or a free report or something that you can get your target market to raise their hand in a sea of people and say hey i would be interested in learning more about that and that's the first like cardinal sin that most businesses make is that they go out to their market and they conduct it like that they're in the dark ages they lay out their ware like they're in the market place they can say these are all the products and services that i've got there's a little bit of h back and forth on the prices and then the deal is done right they just like get a quote buy bye buy where you will get ten times the amount of people if you go out to your marketplace with something of value to try and educate people and basically lead with your best foot forward and use a piece of content that you know that it's gonna be baked to get that person to raise their hand in a sea of people right and it can be a free report about anything and then once you get them to raise their hand on a very small ask that is not confronting it's not intimidating then a you have them arrive on a page where then you make your offer right where then it's a two a basic two step funnel so instead of saying get in contact with our sales team or get a quote you say here's a free piece of information they download that then you arrive them on a page that makes them a godfather offer to get on the telephone and you just get ten times the volume of people that will come into communication with what it is that you do if you do that so what's an example of a specific example of someone doing this so in terms of like we do that a lot all of our clients do that but there is like in say for instance you're a digital agency and you wanna sell your digital agency services instead of being like hey we can help you grow your business with digital marketing you're like here is a free report of the twenty two things that you need to know when running facebook ads right right and then that's only gonna pull people in that are interested in running facebook ads and a percentage of those people are gonna be interested in having someone run their facebook ads for them that's it on the lead gen side right then if you've got like the e commerce side of things again it's a bit about being able to first go out there and get people's attention through through content and then the brands that are crushing it the most is they're not like here is our goo in a bottle here is our protein shake right all these people now if you look at the landscape with tiktok and everything is going on they hit you with a piece of content that just looks it just slides under the radar it's completely organic it doesn't look like a sales message and then you're watching it because it's very interested and the algorithm does all the optimizing for you and then you get to the end of it and then they make the ask right right so if they're selling like a testosterone boosting supplement they're not like here's this testosterone boosting supplement buy yeah they're like did you know the testosterone in males has dropped by seventy percent over the last ten years and it's was like that will get someone's is to kinda hook up and go okay what is that and do you know the post a a clip of jill rogan talking about testosterone it just looks like it's if someone sharing a clip of gel rogan and then it starts to go to weave you into an actual a product fits leader exactly like i saw a brilliant one the other day like i'm in the process right now building a house and it was a a real on tiktok and the guys like these are the best twenty things that you definitely wanna be building inside your house that nobody he tells you about he's like you want a whole house water filter you want this dehumidifier for your whole property right you want these essential oils that diffuse and go through your ac you want heated tiles and i'm like dude like this is fire and then at the end of it and he's like and all these things are expensive and so if you want you you must be thinking like how how much is this gonna cost me well i've just put together a course that shows you how to buy and flip home so you have the money to buy all this stuff putting i was like dude oh you got me full line and sink up yeah that's absolute j flip at the end there exactly and forget about having a home you can't afford it but the way you can't afford it is if you like my course let's start learning how to make money online that's amazing you did it you did this with your book right i remember going down the funnel once of your free book and i was like this is very very smart he's got a free book funnel tell me about this sell like crazy book funnel how many people have have bought have gotten a book from you front through this i would guess it's a pretty ridiculous number yeah we've sold a million copies now but are you selling them or are they free i thought they're free yeah like it's free plus shipping right so like between we are on amazon and and whatnot as well but yeah overall it's we we've sold a million copies through both the amazon and the funnel and when i saw this i was like this is genius because books are not good money makers anyways so instead of trying to make a profit charging nine books for a book you're like let me give away a free book on teaching you how to sell and then you would create what i call the yes yes yes no funnel the yes yes yes no funnel is you hear somebody telling you how to do something how to get better something they're not selling you anything and you say yes yes yes that all makes sense and that's true that's a great example that's a great point yes yes yes and at the end you just say no i don't have the energy to do that and at the end what you're hoping for the ideal prospect for a lot of these businesses is somebody who is now convinced that you know your shit but they're also convinced that they don't have the time the energy or the skill to go do it themselves and you could say if you don't want i'm giving you the playbook but if you don't wanna do this as yourself or you don't have the time to do this yourself luckily we're here we do this for you you have a marketing agency for example so you could teach people you could give away how to do marketing and people would do css and at the end they would say no but i'd rather you do it for me you've all you've done is convinced me that you are an expert at this and i want to now enlist you to do it yeah and i think there's a caveat to it though right and so like what a lot of people do when it comes to book funnels or any of these kind of things is they effectively make the book like a thinly veil sales pitch to do exactly just that and one of the things that like you know i think i started it in the different way like i started in a position where it's like we were getting so much inbound to what we were doing and you know we're a premium agency there's a lot of businesses that couldn't not afford to work with us and they would always ask is like who who else would you recommend like right who's the no frills version of what it is that you guys do and in the beginning i was like okay let me try to find some people that kinda know what they're doing and send them their way and they would always come back to bite me in the ass and they're like hey you recommended this person and they just murdered my money right so and so i just decided then i was gonna write like a playbook to help those people to get them to a point where they may not be ready right now but let me give them this stuff for free let me literally know holds barred give them exactly the playbook and not hold anything back and then maybe in the future they might come back as a client and if not that's completely fine so there's a lot of people that just they go the opposite route and they go let me build the the yes yes note funnel and let me just make basically the book a sales letter for my core offer and so i was very conscious of not making that the the the situation because i wanted to be something like books is interesting books is not like a youtube video of real right like that book is gonna be around in some capacity hopefully long after i am gone so you really need to pour a lot of time and energy to make it the best that you possibly can and so yeah like i think that that's the distinction to make is that it's not a bait switch of like yeah you buy the book and it's just like you i'm gonna hold back all the seekers use you the the secret eleven herbs and spices baby you're not gonna know them right right and you you need to literally lead with your best foot forward and do give them everything and then if they arrive at that decision they don't feel like okay he's giving me everything but the sacred little part that turns the machine on yeah i think that's a very good point awesome well dude thanks for coming on man i knew i would learn some stuff up marketing but i also got some good life tips and life wisdom out of this which is always always a good thing for me so i appreciate you coming out your people find you or get more about you it's been a pleasure thanks for having me on you can check me at sa so pretty much on all platforms and if you liked this you can go to youtube and check me out awesome thanks man have always i feel like i could rude where i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a days off on a road travel never looking back