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- [00:00]
Roland Frazier
Digital Marketer is a company that basically you created with Ryan and Perry. I came and horned my way in a little bit later in the game and I'd love to talk a little bit about what was Digital Marketer. I know it kind of had, I don't want to say lost its way, but it was really having a hard time finding an offer that worked. And you know, it was, it was when digital marketing was kind of new, when it first came around. I'm going to let you tell the story, but, but I want to talk a little bit about that evolution and what changes you've seen and then how the AI is coming to have a role and, and you know, turn, kind of turn the ship around a little bit. Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of Business Lunch. And as you can see, Ryan has had face transplant surgery, if you're watching this, and changed his name to Richard Lindner, a more handsome version if I might add, you know. But anyway, Richard Lindner is joining me today. I am your host, Roland Frazier, and Richard is the business partner with us on several of our ventures, as well as the president of Digital Marketer and Skill Scalable. And Richard, it's wonderful to have you here today, man.
- [01:26]
Richard Lindner
I'm excited to be here. It's. Well, frankly, I can no longer be offended for the lack of an invite, so I lose a little, little bit of, a little bit of a one up on you, so.
- [01:36]
Roland Frazier
Oh, I, I, there's, I, I have a list that GP Chat, GPT generated of ways to be offended, so I'll share that with you.
- [01:43]
Richard Lindner
Yeah, that'd be great.
- [01:44]
Roland Frazier
I call it the Umbrage list.
- [01:46]
Richard Lindner
It's perfect.
- [01:48]
Roland Frazier
So I, you know, it's really cool. I'm really excited actually to have you here and wanted to chat with you a little bit. Ryan, Dice and I were chatting offline about what's going on at Scalable and Digital Marketer and he mentioned that you have gotten deep into the world of AI and are building things and doing all kinds of fun things. And I thought it might be fun for us to chat about it just so everybody that's listening or watching can kind of see what, what are we actually doing with it, because it's nice to talk about it, but then to see how it's actually being deployed and being used and what results you're having is, is another thing is, does that sound like something that'd be kind of fun to chat about?
- [02:31]
Richard Lindner
That sounds great. Obviously it's, it's kind of what I've spent my, well, last Six months, really diving deep into and kind of a couple of different areas.
- [02:40]
Roland Frazier
So, so I know that. Let's start with Digital Marketer. So Digital Marketer is a company that basically you created with Ryan and Perry. I came and horned my way in a little bit later in the game and I'd love to talk a little bit about what was Digital Marketer. I know it kind of had, I don't want to say lost its way, but it was really having a hard time finding an offer that worked. And it was when digital marketing was kind of new, when it first came around. I'm going to let you tell the story, but I want to talk a little bit about that evolution and what changes you've seen and then how the AI is coming to have a role and turn the ship around a little bit.
- [03:34]
Richard Lindner
Yeah, I think you're pretty dead on. Maybe not lost its way, but maybe lost its purpose. When Digital Marketer was formed, the job or the role of Digital Marketer was simple, right? One, I guess maybe it was twofold. One. At the time that we created Digital Marketer, the goal was to professionalize what most people were referring to as Internet marketing at the time, right? There was this, this, this kind of upand coming group of, of marketers that referred to themselves as Internet marketers, which good job, we use the Internet pretty much every day. So they've done it, they did a fantastic job we mass adoption to the Internet. But we really looked at that and said what we're talking about here is, is leveraging the Internet to market all types of goods and services. So we need to, we need to kind of up level this, this future career, right? So Digital Marketer was a professionalization of, of that, that industry as we saw it now. Our purpose or kind of our reason to exist was we used all of our portfolio holdings to just figure stuff out, right? What's working in all of the different platforms to drive leads, to convert sales in any different type of business on the Internet, right. And then we would kind of templatize those things and open source them and, and sell them to other business owners and professional marketers and, and that was Digital Marketers kind of whole purpose for existing. And the reason that it worked is because when, when digital marketing was new, everything changed. Everything changed daily, weekly, monthly. There were new platforms that existed, the platforms that were there were rolling out new features and the features that were there were changing or being taken away. So everyone was always wondering like what should I do, what should I use, what platform should I use, how Should I use it or Facebook changed something, what do I do? So digital marketers main purpose in the marketplace, how we served marketers and entrepreneurs and founders was we figured out just that, what you should do, how you should leverage these different platforms, what types of campaigns you should use, how you should use them to drive leads and convert sales. And then we just told people. So we cut through the noise and eliminated confusion. That was digital marketers purpose. We over the years kind of, whether it was intentional or unintentional, swam a little upmarket. We went more in the alternative education space and we rolled out certifications. And certifications were huge for service based businesses, mainly coaches, consultants and agencies. So a digital marketer certification was great for them because it was credibility to their clients. Well, we pivoted a little too hard and went all in on kind of becoming university almost. Right. And really went into serving and serving an education, alternative education space. I think what people after Covid really got tired of a bit of the distance based learning. We went all in on second career in Covid and digital marketer. While it benefited mightily during COVID of some of these things getting incredibly popular, when we came out of that, digital marketer did not benefit from that. It kind of went the other way. So from about that point on, Digital marketer definitely lost its way and really had lost its purpose because really nothing was changing all that much. I mean, meta was meta and Google was Google and they weren't rolling out a lot of features. They took a bunch of stuff away and you just market. Right.
- [07:41]
Roland Frazier
Did something also happen though that caused the certifications to be less desirable or did you just cap out on it or what do you think?
- [07:53]
Richard Lindner
You know, I think as, I think people stopped caring about the certifications as much really. And one, people stopped caring about the certifications from an internal employee level. So in order to, you know, get a raise, get a promotion, caring about that. Two, what we saw was these platforms, when they stopped making as many changes, they went in and created their own certifications and they were free.
- [08:23]
Roland Frazier
Okay.
- [08:24]
Richard Lindner
And if you didn't care about the certification for the credibility and what you really wanted was the knowledge, well, why not go straight to the source? That's what we would do.
- [08:32]
Roland Frazier
Makes sense.
- [08:33]
Richard Lindner
So, you know, smart people did smart things. Who could blame, right?
- [08:37]
Roland Frazier
So and then you tried a bunch of different things to kind of get to the next level. How did you go about? Because, because. And here's what everybody, you know out there that's listening or watching, I want you to think about this because business is always changing and evolving. And if you stick with what you've got, you know, what you started with, you could very well ride down to, to bankruptcy or, you know, not being in business anymore. But it's difficult. While it is difficult to change, it's often hard to figure out how should we change, what should we even try to change? And so you've heard Richard say we started basically with the market, which I would argue was online entrepreneurs, people that were solopreneurs and entrepreneurs that wanted to figure out, how do I market and sell stuff online? We hit that market pretty well, then pivoted to let's go up to people that have a little bit more money to spend and get a recurring revenue model and offer these certifications. And now that's been kind of replaced by something else. This can happen to you if your product, you're in the middle and your source. Like I used to sell diamonds and the people that had the diamonds in Israel never came to the United States. They sold to wholesalers like us, who would then bring the diamonds to the United States and sell them. And then when things got tight, they started coming here themselves and they cut out the wholesalers. And so like that. This is wherever you are in your business, it's either a risk or it's already happening or happened to you and you've got to figure out where do you go? So this, to me, that Richard's about to get into, I think is one of the most insight, you know, one of the things that will give you the biggest insights from today's episode. So now this isn't working. We've been usurped by these rude people who are teaching their own people how to use their own stuff.
- [10:30]
Richard Lindner
Right.
- [10:30]
Roland Frazier
And not charging for it.
- [10:32]
Richard Lindner
How dare they cut us out. Yeah.
- [10:34]
Roland Frazier
So what do we do besides not.
- [10:36]
Richard Lindner
So we went all in on certifications and we're going to be a basically a university, an unaccredited university. So we're going to take on the big boys. Well, we have no competitive advantage and people started giving it away for free directed source. So that didn't work. Come back to the drawing board and say, well, what are we going to do? Well, let's go all in and focus on agencies. So instead of going to the entrepreneur, instead of going to the professional marketer, let's go and let's only support agencies. So digital marketer decides, we're going to go in, we're going to just acquire agencies, we're going to enable agencies and really train them. Because if we can impact one agency, then they can impact dozens, if not hundreds of clients and really we can have a much bigger impact. Great. Very well could have been true. The problem was math, right? The math didn't work. We couldn't figure out how to make that a true channel. Right. We're not digital marketers, not a software company. And really when you have a VAR network, a value added reseller network, then it becomes a channel and that channel just plugs into a revenue model that you already have.
- [11:45]
Roland Frazier
We did try though. You, you and Ryan.
- [11:48]
Richard Lindner
We tried.
- [11:48]
Roland Frazier
You did the whole, you know, Dan Martel thing and talked to all the SaaS people. We spent millions, literally millions, more than one, millions of dollars developing something that didn't work.
- [12:02]
Richard Lindner
A couple of them, yeah. Developed a couple pieces of software, really tried to, to create our own internal software that we could leverage so that we could put digital marketers trainings within there and enable agencies to become their own training portal so that they could not only go out and serve their clients, but they could become kind of that one stop shop for training internal team members and for actually doing the services. So went all in there, failed to really create a software. Right. We realized that again, while we don't have a competitive advantage and we're, we are absolutely not. We're not a university. Right. That's not us. We don't have a competitive advantage there. We're also not a software company and.
- [12:47]
Roland Frazier
Dive into that because. Because really where, where you're heading now is more software sassy. Even though it's a different thing because it's a different world for building.
- [12:57]
Richard Lindner
But yes.
- [12:59]
Roland Frazier
What, what was the biggest challenge? Was it we just like we weren't a software company. I don't think it was that we didn't know how to code because we acquired and hired coders and things like that. Was it that we just didn't know how to build a thing or we built the wrong thing or what would you say as far as lessons learned there?
- [13:18]
Richard Lindner
I don't think we, I think we built what we thought someone wanted instead of really going out and figuring out what the marketplace wanted and then building that. That was number one. Number two, I think we, we fell prey to the same like cliche trap feature creep kicked in and we just kept adding more and more to a product that frankly we were unsure if anyone wanted. So we just took longer to take it to market and spent more and more dollars. And three, I think as, as partners. Right. You, Ryan and I, what we didn't do was sit down and decide how much money we were going to invest in this project and fund it. We just kind of said, sure, we have kind of the rich grandpa account, right, or the rich uncle account. It just was funded from our other ventures and there was no start or stop. It just kind of kept going until one day we hit a monthly burn number that was impossible to ignore and we pulled the plug.
- [14:29]
Roland Frazier
I think also we had poor financial insight because we were told that the burn was anywhere between x and 10x. And then we would say, it looks like it's 10x. And finance would come back and say, no, no, it's only X. And so we didn't really have a good enough internal financial reporting or accountability system to be able to identify for sure what was being spent. Because I know you and I would have a conversation and then Ryan would be like, no, no, it's not that, it's this. And then we're like, well, that's acceptable, but this is not. But the dollars seem to be this. And so that went on for six to 12 months, right?
- [15:12]
Richard Lindner
About a year. Yeah, about a year. Well, and, and, and here's why. Because it was both right and wrong. We, again, lesson learned. We wanted it so badly and frankly, we were unwilling to pay what it cost. So we split the focus of the developers. We said, well, we can afford them if they also do this, right? So technically it costs X, but technically it cost half of X because we were having a coder. Instead of focusing on one project, we had them do something for a profitable company as well. So that's the way we justified it. And kind of. That's a double miss, right? It was a double miss because it created an unnecessary dependency on a profitable company. And it took someone that should have been focused on creating one product to go to market and split their focus. So yeah, all in all, we just, if there was a mistake to be made, I think we found it. I think we found it and made it at least twice.
- [16:17]
Roland Frazier
So we then, we then chalked it up and said, we're not.
- [16:20]
Richard Lindner
That.
- [16:21]
Roland Frazier
We're not going to do that anymore.
- [16:22]
Richard Lindner
We're not going to do that.
- [16:23]
Roland Frazier
Now what. And what was the conversation to get to the next place?
- [16:27]
Richard Lindner
The conversation was we need to go all in and we need to support professional marketers. Because I'll tell you, this is something I truly believe. When you're trying to define or redefine your company, if you're, if something's not going right and you're trying to reposition, you don't define your company by the product you sell or the business model. You define your company by the person you serve. Right. So at first we said, well, we, we're going to serve, you know, someone who's looking for like a second career, right. They're looking to get certified. They're looking for either status, elevation or second career. Really, we're serving this person. No, that's not it. We're serving and agency owners. No, that's not it. So the third attempt was we are serving professional marketers and really employees.
- [17:17]
Roland Frazier
Okay.
- [17:17]
Richard Lindner
And again, it worked. But it didn't. Right. We went out and we were able to acquire employees, professional marketers, marketers at companies large and small. They liked what we were selling them. The problem was the ltv. The problem was not lifetime value and immediate value was low. And when we went back in and looked our product line, the, the, the ascension ladder, the things that really were profitable on the back end were misaligned with the client that we were now acquiring. They didn't have the purchasing power to make the decision that we were asking them to make. At that time, we were selling a mastermind. So we're selling products to employees and then saying, would you like to join a mastermind? That's five figure mastermind, which you're gonna.
- [18:10]
Roland Frazier
Get approved by somebody else. They don't get to make the decision.
- [18:13]
Richard Lindner
And a lot of them were scared to ask.
- [18:15]
Roland Frazier
Yeah.
- [18:16]
Richard Lindner
Because there's a cost to even asking for that. So while it worked, it didn't. We could, we had the decision to make, do we. Do we abandon this avatar? Do we abandon this person? Or do we completely abandon our product line and build a product line for this person? At the time it was, I can't think of anything that we could sell that would make the unit economics work to acquire this person. And I'm really not excited about going in and redefining a product line and service offering. So let's abandon the person. So now we've kind of gone through three or four different versions of who do we sell to. Finally we kind of came back around and said, you know, what we really sell to is the performance marketer. Right. We're selling to the kind of performance based marketer. We're selling to someone that maybe they're the entrepreneur, maybe they're the founder, maybe they're, maybe they're a growth marketer, maybe they're an agency owner at the end of the day.
- [19:18]
Roland Frazier
Let me pause just to be sure that I don't miss on another thing that I'd like to hit. On is this before we get to trying licensing sba, that kind of stuff or this after that.
- [19:32]
Richard Lindner
So the licensing sba, that was when we got with or when we focused on agencies.
- [19:39]
Roland Frazier
Okay.
- [19:40]
Richard Lindner
So the licensing went with the portal and the software.
- [19:44]
Roland Frazier
Okay.
- [19:44]
Richard Lindner
Right. We did come back around and try that again without the, without the SaaS aspect of it. And but that was, that was next. So we took another bite at that one after this.
- [19:58]
Roland Frazier
Okay.
- [19:59]
Richard Lindner
So we came back and said let's focus on performance marketers. Kind of really it was another way to say let's go all the way back to the beginning and just do what we used to do. What if we just hit kind of control Z about 10 times and just did what digital marketer used to do.
- [20:17]
Roland Frazier
Okay. But it, it's still a different level of marketer.
- [20:20]
Richard Lindner
Right.
- [20:21]
Roland Frazier
Because I feel like that the, the first time around it was more biz op focused and like it was how to make money playing around your phone with social media something or other.
- [20:31]
Richard Lindner
And then at the very, very beginning.
- [20:33]
Roland Frazier
Yeah.
- [20:33]
Richard Lindner
Yes. It pivoted quickly when we from any opportunity based into tactical because we made the intentional decision that we want to only focus on people that have something to sell.
- [20:47]
Roland Frazier
Right.
- [20:48]
Richard Lindner
So we, but we kind of went back and said let's really focus on people that can benefit from increasing the revenue. So they, maybe they're an employee, maybe they're an agency, maybe they're the owner, maybe they're in every box we've already attempted to check. The unifying factor in this avatar is that if revenues, if the company revenue goes up, their compensation, their take home goes up as well. And what we found there was it's just too generic, it's just too broad that too many people. So maybe it works. But we couldn't call out any one person. So we went back to the agency, removed the, removed the, the, the SAS aspect of it and focused on licensing. And without the, without the SAS aspect, that's when again, just there wasn't a way to track the licensing and really get it to where without having a. Almost installing a police force, a legal arm to the business to enforce and make sure that are these licensed partners, if they deliver this, are they paying a licensing fee? Are they. It. It likely could have worked.
- [22:03]
Roland Frazier
I think it's tough because. And you and you tell me if I'm, if I'm right. But it feels like that model was tough because it was, hey, we've got a whole bunch of intellectual property that we've got which is easily copied and impossible to measure because it's not using something that has like credits or units or draws data or that we can monitor. So we're going to give it all to you and expect you to pay for it a few different ways. One I think way we tried was every time you use it, you pay us a little something. The other was you have it for this period of time and then you have everything for this period of time and you pay a fee for that. And then every year that renews. But in both cases it's just impossible. I think just human nature wise, it's impossible to get most people to do that because they're like, but I've already got it right. Would you say that was the challenge or was it something else?
- [22:59]
Richard Lindner
Well, yeah, the business model is scout's honor. Right? The business model is. It's tough to scale. And I think that business model puts you in a bit of conflict with your ideal client because they're going to make nuanced changes and they're going to feel some level of ownership to that ip whether they should or not. Over time it becomes blurred lines. Yeah, we all do it like how much do we teach and we don't know the origin of that in our minds. I created this new concept. Well, I probably read it in a book 10 years ago.
- [23:34]
Roland Frazier
Right.
- [23:34]
Richard Lindner
And now I'm in my mind. I think it's mine. What's not. So I think that model is so conflict heavy with you and your, your ideal client that you just have to decide where the line is and how much you're going to give. And I just don't want to be in that business. I don't want to be in a business of, of that level of you got me or I'm not going to let you get me that much. It just wasn't profitable enough and it didn't. I don't think it scaled large enough to deal with what it was going to require. So abandoning that because you're still, you're.
- [24:14]
Roland Frazier
Still going after more than anything agencies I think at that point, right. They have to be reselling.
- [24:20]
Richard Lindner
Right. Really more almost coaches and consultants at that point. So maybe some agencies. But when you go into licensed IP model, you're going to people that don't necessarily, that have the ability to get clients but don't have a proven delivery mechanism that don't run them through the same system. And maybe you can help them get clients a little bit better, maybe you can help them send clients to a higher package that you can package up for them. But really what you're going to give them is a consistent delivery mechanism, a consistent outcome, and almost a productized service with your ip. So less agencies, more coaches and consultants. And then what you've got to also figure out is you're putting your logo on every one of these people and they're walking into a business and they are doing work on your behalf.
- [25:13]
Roland Frazier
Yeah.
- [25:14]
Richard Lindner
Whether that work is fantastic or whether that work is terrible, yes, it's going to reflect on that person, but it's also going to impact you. And you have little control and no visibility into who they're even working with. No, we're out of that.
- [25:32]
Roland Frazier
So. And then from there we go to where we are now, or is there another jump in between?
- [25:37]
Richard Lindner
Well, from there we went back and we said we, we really do just need to focus on what everyone needs, like a digital marketer. Let's get back to what everyone needs. Everyone needs more leads, everyone needs more buyers. Let's get back to community. Let's really give people a place. Go all in on community and then go all in on, on kind of these two accelerators. Like, let's give them an accelerated training on how to get more leads. Leads on demand. Let's give them an accelerated training on how to get more buyers. Buyers from scratch. And it worked, right? It worked. And then we gave them a place where they could go and get group access to daily calls with, with our experts, with our coaches. So anything and everything you could want. If you need help with, you know, copywriting or sales funnels or paid media, you can come on a call every single day, five days a week and get help. So that really, really worked. And it's looking good. We're like, we nailed it, we got it. Then AI, right? Then AI went from AI is a thing to oh, oh, AI is a thing. Right. Everyone is using AI and disruption, right? Disruption. When you think about even the greatest training in the world, you're still going to have to fill in the gaps, right? If I'm giving you a training, you're still going to have to fill in the gaps on your company, your business, yourself. Well, if I ask AI, it's just going to tell me what to do. Now there's some, there's some gaps or flaws in that logic, but at a basic level, why would I go through and watch a training or go through a cohort based training that I still have to figure out from conceptual to practical application on my business?
- [27:34]
Roland Frazier
And I want to, I want to split because I want to do two, two podcasts during our time I want to split this because we talked a lot about like the business model and I want to get to takeaways before we get into the actual AI. And then let's, let's do the AI in the second one. So now this model is what, just, just kind of break down the model without. We don't, we don't care about the AI.
- [27:56]
Richard Lindner
This model is moving from, moving from more, moving from merely training and community to training and services or, or community and services. And really where I think we are, we are headed it. Where we are headed, where Digital Marketer is headed. I'm going to bring up AI, but I'm not going to get into it. Yeah, I think AI has given Digital Marketer a purpose, a reason to be relevant again. Which is, which is AI is changing at the rate at which the Internet changes.
- [28:33]
Roland Frazier
So we're back to originally, Facebook is new, Instagram is new, et cetera, et cetera. And we're here, hey, ChatGPT is new and Version X is new and Google Flash is new and Fire Studio is new. So there's all this newness. So there is a demand again for understanding and monetizing the newness in the context of their jobs. Right.
- [28:54]
Richard Lindner
Well, and there's a million different AI tools that are launching outside of the, you know, the big. Which one do I use? How do I use it? When what should be a GPT? What should be an agent? Should I have a team? Should I have. What team should I have? So everything is the wild, wild west and for us that's when we excel.
- [29:14]
Roland Frazier
We're really providing now. So before it was training, but training is yesterday's news, I think. What, what are we doing?
- [29:23]
Richard Lindner
So what are we for us digital marketers, where AI meets real world marketing for business. Right. What we want to do is we want to help small business grow by giving entrepreneurs AI powered marketing systems that drive, drive sales, build brands and scale businesses without losing that human touch.
- [29:42]
Roland Frazier
And you're finding, you're finding that to resonate now with the marketing of Digital Marketer. Correct?
- [29:48]
Richard Lindner
Yeah. Here's the big pivot, here's the big shift. We don't train humans anymore. We train AI to work for humans.
- [30:00]
Roland Frazier
Okay, Right.
- [30:01]
Richard Lindner
If you go back to just thinking of the whole training business as, you know, just as a whole, someone buys a training, the first thing they have to do is log in. So let's now take off 50% of the buyers. Now they have to complete the course. So we'll now take off another. I don't know of the 50 left. We'll take off another 80%.
- [30:20]
Roland Frazier
Yeah.
- [30:21]
Richard Lindner
Then they have to, let's assume of those people 100% of them comprehend it. But then they have to retain it.
- [30:29]
Roland Frazier
Yeah.
- [30:29]
Richard Lindner
Then they have to apply it. We have now gone. I mean we're talking the 2% of the 2% of the purchasers ever have any real impact from a, from a course that they bought. If we can train an AI, whether it's an agent or whether it's a GPT to do the work for that person we now get all the way through to. All you have to do is use it. No one actually cares. No one actually cares about the theory if we can train it. We're really good at creating marketing systems and frameworks and figuring out what works and updating it when it changes. We just now get to train an AI and we get to give people access to those AIs to deploy in their business. The impact amplifies.
- [31:13]
Roland Frazier
So let's wrap it with what are the takeaways from this journey of the initial. Through all of the things that we tried that. And I don't want to say they didn't work by the way. I think it's more of an evolution than it didn't work. It's like we, we tried stuff and it's been profitable and successful all along the way. It just, we haven't found what we would call, you know, true product market fit at scale. And we think maybe we have now. We'll see. Hopefully we have. But what are the takeaways that anybody that is kind of experiencing the, anywhere along the journey that you've seen Digital Marketer take that could help them get to the end faster.
- [31:57]
Richard Lindner
I think first figure out the value your company adds. Right. We had to, had we cut through and said Digital Marketer really was able to simplify a very complex, ever changing environment. And that at the core was what we did. How do we do that again? We would have approached this much differently. 2. I think the thing that we did right, the thing that we did very well was we always looked at who are we serving. And to your point, it almost every one of those worked. They just weren't scalable. They weren't they, they didn't excite us. We didn't, we didn't have such a competitive advantage that we thought it was worthy going all in on. So it worked to some degree. Just not to a degree that we were happy with.
- [32:48]
Roland Frazier
Yeah.
- [32:48]
Richard Lindner
But we always led with who are we going? Who are we targeting? Who are we serving? Right. And I'll tell you, we did it very quickly. Each one of these tests were a complete rollout in a quarter or less. Yeah. So go all in. Right. We tested almost. We almost reinvented ourselves three times in three quarters.
- [33:09]
Roland Frazier
Yeah.
- [33:10]
Richard Lindner
And knew whether or not it worked. So know the ultimate value you provide, know who you're serving and. And target them, and then move very, very quickly, not only in attempting to fail, but when you have success. Right. The second that we succeeded, we're moving quickly and amplifying this model.
- [33:31]
Roland Frazier
And then let me throw some things out that I think might be takeaways and you can plus them or say, I don't know that. So the first would be with respect to your business model. So I'd say cash flow would be one of the big things. When we moved to certifications versus selling courses, we moved from, I believe, like a 500 to $2,000 sale to a monthly sale at 99 or 199 or something a month and found that we weren't prepared financially to. While we were selling better than we had ever sold before. We didn't sell at a multiple that would cause the cash flow to equal the higher end sale that we were making before. And that created a financial challenge, right?
- [34:19]
Richard Lindner
It absolutely did.
- [34:19]
Roland Frazier
Okay. Model your change. Right?
- [34:23]
Richard Lindner
Yes. Model it not only from a business model, but from cash flow. Revrec. How does that impact where you're at now?
- [34:31]
Roland Frazier
Okay. And then even if you're selling, another would be even if you're selling something that people want and will pay for, if it is a single use or they have it and can continue to have the value without having to pay more, that there's no monitoring, no consumption refill kind of thing, no need to use resources, software access that you've got, then it's likely to fail just because of the human nature. And let's be as generous as we can to human nature, the human nature of feeling that at some point I did this and it's as much mine as it is yours, and therefore I shouldn't have to continue to pay you for it, Right?
- [35:08]
Richard Lindner
Absolutely.
- [35:09]
Roland Frazier
Okay. And are there any other of those things like that that you would say we learned or does that. Is it kind of those main couple.
- [35:19]
Richard Lindner
I think those were big. I think the. I think you need to sit with. I think you need to sit with nostalgia a bit. Right. Identify your. Your bias. Identify nostalgia and just do business with it. Right. Like figure out what is that where.
- [35:41]
Roland Frazier
I'm sorry, sit with nostalgia. What does that mean? Look at.
- [35:44]
Richard Lindner
So when you're looking at your business. A lot of us, A lot of us have an emotional tie to that. A lot of us remember a time when we had a breakthrough in the business and, and we're now going to move away from that model. Right. It's a bit of a breakup. It's the end of an era, and some people have a more difficult time leaving that era than others. Right. Some people will stick with something whether or not they realize it because of, of how good it was when it happened.
- [36:15]
Roland Frazier
Okay. And just be, be ready to let go and embrace the future while appreciating the past for what it was.
- [36:24]
Richard Lindner
Just because something else is going to be good in the future, it doesn't mean that the past was bad. But you've got to at least acknowledge your own bias or your own nostalgic tie before you can truly go on or you're going to sabotage the business models and the change because you're holding on to the past.
- [36:39]
Roland Frazier
Okay.
- [36:40]
Richard Lindner
And I could see that in different members of the team when we're talking about change. They were completely unwilling to leave, not because they didn't know we did. We needed to change and not because they didn't think that where we were going was right. They just had such a emotional tie to the past.
- [36:56]
Roland Frazier
That's reasonable. Okay. And then the thing that we learned from software, which would be have a clear budget for whatever you're doing and a timeline for how long you have to hit the milestones that are going to get you to the end result. And if you don't hit them, understand the concept of sunk cost, which is just because we've spent a million dollars on it so far, doesn't have anything to do with. Should we spend another hundred thousand. Right.
- [37:24]
Richard Lindner
Well, yeah, the. You don't have to earn it back the same way you lost it.
- [37:28]
Roland Frazier
Right, Right.
- [37:28]
Richard Lindner
And, and I think the other thing, if you're unwilling or unable to pay what it costs, then you probably can't do it.
- [37:37]
Roland Frazier
Okay.
- [37:38]
Richard Lindner
Or like Jay Z said, if. If you can't buy it twice, you can't afford it.
- [37:41]
Roland Frazier
Don't do it on the cheap.
- [37:42]
Richard Lindner
What we, we splintered focus because we were trying to justify having expensive employees, which. Yeah. So know what it costs. Be willing and able to pay the cost. Set milestones and, and set a threshold for how much you're going to invest and, and be willing to, to, to cut bait and say that's it, because we made that money back in other ways. It would have been great if we didn't lose as much. But we would have been fine if we were looking back at it now. If we said, yeah, we decided we were going to invest a million bucks, we invested a million bucks. When it hit a million bucks in one penny, we cut bait because it wasn't working. We moved on. The next year we made an extra million someplace else. Life was good, but it just kept ballooning.
- [38:29]
Roland Frazier
So, yeah, I like that. I think those are some pretty daggone good takeaways. Anything else that you would add from the conversation which I wanted to talk about AI, but it kind of. I love the path that we went down and, and so anything else, like kind of closing remarks for people to take away besides the takeaways or think you think we got?
- [38:49]
Richard Lindner
I feel like we did pretty good takeaways. I really do.
- [38:51]
Roland Frazier
Okay, awesome. Well, thank you for being here today. We're going to do AI next time. So you'll see in the show notes that this kind of started off this way, but. But took a turn that I think can be very helpful to you because you're probably all in some phase of reinventing yourself. And if you're not, remember that chances are very good that what you are doing now, everything that's making you money and successful in your business right now, five years from now will not work. So you've got to constantly be on the awareness level of that everything is evolving and where is it going next and how do you enhance what you've got? We're enhancing primarily with a new business model and AI that Richard and I will talk about in the next podcast. Thank you guys for being here today, Richard. Thank you. And if you guys enjoyed this, please feel free to share it with a friend. Give us a review. If you didn't, then please don't do anything. We look forward to hearing from you on social and we'll talk to you guys soon. Hey, Roland Frazier here. If you're looking for a way to grow your business exponentially to get more customers and ultimately increase your wealth, there's no faster way to do it than to acquire other businesses that already have the customers, products, services, teams and media that you want. If you want to double your sales, just acquire a company that has the same sales as yours. It sounds simple, but far too many people end up starting new businesses that that fail and forget that they could skip all the hard stuff and just acquire one that already exists. There's a reason why private equity firms, family offices, big companies like Apple, Google, and some of the smartest entrepreneurs on the planet do not start new businesses from scratch. They acquire already successful businesses and when they do it, they instantly increase their sales, their profits. If they want market share, they increase that. They can get new products and services to offer, all instantly. Hey look, 90% of new businesses fail. 90%. Why not acquire an already successful business and increase your chances of success by 900%? What most people don't realize is you can acquire highly profitable businesses with no money out of your own pocket in pretty much any country in the world, regardless of your credit, and without having to go find a bunch of investors or needing any experience. Look, I've been acquiring businesses for over 30 years now, and I cover the whole process in my EPIC Investing Strategy training and I want to give it to you 100% free. Just visit businesslunchpodcast.com epic to get your free access to my EPIC Investing training right now. While it's available.