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Unemployable with Jeff Dudan
The Future of Marketing is THIS | AI Tech Founder Joe Stolte Breaks It Down #181
01:17:45
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- [00:00]
A
Welcome everybody. I'm Jeff Duden and we are on the home front. If you grew up in a rural farm town, hustled his way through side hustles and at 17, became a professional breakdancer in the notorious Break Dancing Crew and Massive monkey in Seattle and went on to be a five time tech founder with three successful exits including lottery.com which went public for $526 million. If you are the author of Tracksonology and founder of the automated email Daily AI, your name can only be Joe Stulte. Welcome, Joe.
- [00:36]
B
Good to be here. Thanks for having me, man.
- [00:41]
A
Yeah. Did you really do all that?
- [00:43]
B
I really did all that. Like, sometimes people will hear my bio and they get on a zoom call with me, like, how are you so young? I'm like, well, I'm secretly not that young.
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A
Yeah, it's. It bone tallow, right? Beef tallow.
- [00:54]
B
That's what I've heard. You know, when I was getting, I was going to get into it, and then our mutual friend Dr. Daniel Pompa did a whole thing on beef tallow being not good for you, and I was like, you know what? I'm just gonna stick with my diet.
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A
I just. It. For me, it was the flies.
- [01:08]
B
Yeah.
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A
Just stuck to my face all the time. It was horrible. All right.
- [01:13]
B
Can't do it.
- [01:13]
A
All right, Joe, your entire career has been on the bleeding edge of emerging trends, whether that be music, hip hop, or technology. How do you see the trends and how do you choose what you do?
- [01:25]
B
Yeah, I think one of my zones of genius has always been to simplify and amplify. You know, like I, I just consume information and ideas in a way that allows me to really simplify them and distill them. It's been like that since I was a kid. You know, I don't know if it's because I'm an entrepreneur and I see opportunities, but the other thing is just amplifying. Like, how do you take ideas, simplify them down, and then put them out into a world in a way that resonates more broadly with more human beings? And so I think that has something to do with how I'm able to see trends. Also, one of the things that I trained early in my career, like before I was an entrepreneur, I went from being a professional dancer to working in management consulting and I spent two years at Microsoft. And, you know, that experience was interesting because I was not put on this world to do that, but it taught me how to think. It taught me all these really interesting ways of thinking and Looking at data and finding patterns and identifying what looks obvious once you get close to the right information, but can be blind to, like everyone else is blind to it. And I think a combination of those two things is probably how I personally do it nowadays. It's like once you've been around the block enough times and you're up the experience curve, like life has all these interesting and ironic patterns and it just, they seem to repeat themselves because it seems like we as a species tend to repeat ourselves. And so, you know, I'm in my early 40s and I pay attention to stuff and it just starts to feel like things are quite circular in many parts of life, whether that's culture or technology or human behavior. You know, we just have these ways about us, and that tends to be what drives our reality.
- [02:59]
A
It's rarely the first startup that make people wealthy and successful. It's usually breaking a few things and then like you said, you know, developing some patterns of operating and then applying them to a new market or a bigger opportunity or doing the same thing over again. One of the things about building into emerging markets is that it's not a red ocean. And so many people try to launch just another one of those businesses. And if the market's not growing, then you've got to take market share from other people or other companies. And it's going to be expensive because they're already entrenched. Like for us with our franchise platform. And we've got two first to markets. We've got a fast follower in the space. And those brands, they, they basically grow on a post. Hard to find. But when you do technology like you, like you've done, there's always the next big thing. I'd love to hear just a little bit about the, you know, how you got into breakdancing, how you started performing and what that life was like.
- [04:00]
B
Yeah, you know, I've had this. The same thing that got me into breaking is the same thing that got me into entrepreneurship. You know, when I was a young kid, I, from as young as I can remember, I grew up in a farm town of less than a thousand people. And we didn't have, we didn't. We have a lot of money, right? And we didn't. I didn't know anybody that had any money. And I like to jokingly say I didn't know anybody who knew anybody that had any money. And our town was, was like small. Like when we got a traffic light, it was a huge deal. And when we got a McDonald's, it was like people Fell out of their chairs. You know, it was like a whole new thing to them. And so I always had this deep, deep desire to go and do something bigger than my farm town. You know, it feels like a. Almost like a cliche movie. But I also had a lot of faith that I could make that happen. And so that started off with doing, you know, entrepreneurial ventures when I was a kid. And then when I found breaking, a lot of my friends were getting in trouble, right? So my. In my farm town, it was a small farm town full of migrant workers, which meant that, you know, they bust up Mexicans from the border and they pick strawberries and other berries, just depending what the season was. You know, I grew up in Oregon, and there's various parts of the year, there's different, you know, crops you can pick for money. And so what happened is, because a lot of the families that were in, like, East LA or in places like Fresno or Sacramento, your kid would get in trouble or get in a gang, and to save them, you would send them with uncle whomever to come work in this small migrant farm town. Well, what happened is they ended up bringing their. Their stuff with them. So my town became this great place to get a drug habit and to get in a fight. And so I had a lot of motivation to get out of there. And by the time I was in middle school, a lot of my friends had gone to jail, you know, from. From fighting or doing drugs or selling drugs. And so it is interesting because that part of my life, when I reflect back on it, very few people actually know that I lived through that. It was just normal to me. It wasn't like, oh, that was bad and someone should give me a cookie because I had a bad time. I just. I just normalized that and I wanted something better and, like, more aligned with the way that I thought the world should be at the time. You know, my parents didn't do a very good job of controlling me. They just gave me a really long leash. I was kind of a quintessential latchkey kid. And one of the things that my mom asked me to do to keep me normal and grounded, she asked me to go to church. And so I think it was a combination of, like, going to church and, like, having my dad retire from the military and actually come home to give me guidance where I was like, huh, I could probably do something for my life and I could probably help people inside of that. And then breaking became this beautiful vehicle for me to do that. You know, I loved hip hop culture. I Grew up with. My oldest brother, was 13 years older than me, and he just loved heavy metal. But when I got a chance to finally choose music in the late 80s and early 90s, I fell in love with hip hop, you know, and it was just. Just stole my heart and my soul. And so when I started getting into breaking, I had changed going from middle school to high school, and I saw some kids doing it again. I'd seen it, it'd been around me, and I just decided to try it. And I was so competitive with myself. I really don't like losing. Right. So I was very bad at it. Is the short answer like, I was terrible and I just so competitive that I was like, I can't be this terrible at something. And it just consumed me, you know, My freshman year, I got very good grades. Got like a 3.9 GPA, almost perfect. But my sophomore and junior year, I basically skipped school every single day so I could train like an athlete to become a dancer. You know, I was training five, six, seven hours a day, skipping class. I'd only go to class if it was, like, an interesting topic. I had a friend in that class, or there was a cute girl, basically. Otherwise, I'd show up at school and sneak off of campus and just practice at my friend's apartment complex every day. And I graduated when I was 17. And a friend of mine in Seattle who I'd been visiting frequently was like, hey, we're going to get some guys together. Would you like to move out and. And join us? I was like, yep. And I literally packed my bags and left that day, went to Seattle. And I got into this, fortunately, was left to get into this breaking crew, which is what we call our groups, breaking crews called the Massive Monkeys. And we were. It was very special moment, you know, when we went on to win our very first world title in 2004. And the mayor of Seattle gave us our own day. Massive Monkey day of Seattle, April 26th. I went on to produce, you know, hundreds of breaking events. I helped run and fund one of the largest breaking tours in the world. And then years later, I was part of a small group that went and introduced breaking to the International Olympic Committee, helped get breaking into the youth Olympics and eventually into the adult Olympics last summer, which was kind of like my exclamation point, like at my early 40s. That's finally the point where I was like, okay, breaking chapter closed in my life. It doesn't get any better than that. And anyway, it was a wild ride. But the thing I want to Point out is that breaking taught me something very important that every entrepreneur, every business owner should be, every parent should be listening to. It taught me mastery, okay? I went in and I learned mastery. And it was through mastery that I was able to find the patterns that would allow me to jump into business with the same intensity, right? So in breaking, there's some things that I learned, some, some pillars, some things that you master in order to, you know, to just stay, to stay great in that culture. And one of them was always be a student. So I always approach anything, even. It doesn't matter who I meet or how successful I am or what scenario I'm in. I'm always showing up as a student seeking to understand before being understood so that I can learn. And that keeps me humble and it keeps me growing. The next one was to study the history, right? So in hip hop culture and in breaking, we study the history. I went to New York City and slept on the, you know, the floor of these roach infested apartments in Harlem and in the South Bronx so I could learn from the people that started this dance in this culture. And I was fortunate enough that I was able to do that. So I went and studied the history. And then along there's another one, that's the third one, which is to run the tape back. You know, when I was learning breaking moves, there's this move where you spin around on your back called the windmill. And I would record myself trying it five times, pause it, the old VHS tape, rewind it, watch it, go again, go again. Just fix one thing, try again, fix one thing until I've figured out how to do this move. And that's how I learned all this stuff. So I brought that into business when I was in consulting or in corporate or as an entrepreneur. I show up as a student, right? I study the history and I play the tape back. And as long as you follow those three rules and you keep your feet moving, you can't lose in this game, right? You just keep going and you'll get better and you'll get smarter and sharper. But diving in and learning how to mastering something and understanding the meta skill of mastery, you'll be unstoppable if you can get your head wrapped around that one.
- [10:32]
A
I think it was Paul Mitchell that said, if you haven't won yet, then it's just not the end or something in that nature, right? So, you know, if you're committed to continuous improvement, you're committed never to quit, you will eventually succeed. You might pivot, you might adjust 5%, whatever it is. But by running the tape back, you're going to see it. Quick question, in terms of decades, how far did Australia set back breakdancing?
- [10:55]
B
Well, you know what they say, all press is good press, right?
- [10:57]
A
I don't know, man. Yeah, I'm not so sure.
- [11:00]
B
Well, I think that the game that a lot of people don't understand, that business is really these days about capturing, keeping and converting the attention of your ideal market.
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A
Right.
- [11:10]
B
And, and, and unfortunately, if you're mispositioned, that can leave a residue that lasts for a long time. But let's be honest, you couldn't misposition breaking worse than the way it was mispositioned in the 80s. People still think it's like, oh, you like? I go. People tell me, when I tell people that I used to break or used to be a professional B boy, they'll say, oh, did you spin on your head on cardboard? And I was like, no. I performed in front of 30,000 people at the Pepsi center for the NBA All Star Game in Denver in 2005. And I shook the hands of the, you know, the Prime Minister of Norway after performing for his cabinet ministers. Like, there's no cardboard involved. So, you know. Yes, the Australia thing was. It was interesting. And it's just a byproduct of the way that the Olympics are structured. You know, they require that you source people from various parts of the world. And it just so happens to be at this point in history, this wasn't always the case at this point in history in that part of the world, Australia, New Zealand, there just wasn't Olympic level talent there. Right. And so, you know, we were required effectively to source from that part of the world. And, you know, but if you watch the rest of the females, including Ami, the young lady who won from Japan, I mean, there's no incredible, no mistaking the skill associated with that sport. So.
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A
Yeah. And do you have one or two children, Joe?
- [12:26]
B
I have two. And at the time of this recording, I have one on the way that's imminently coming.
- [12:32]
A
All right, well, three is a good number. That's what I have. And one of the things that I know your kids are young. Mine are all. My last one just turned 21. So no more, no more mean agers. They're all out, they're doing their thing. And of course, I have an entrepreneurial bent and I always. And they all do have a bit of an entrepreneurial bent. Oh, my daughter, she's in law school, so, you know, she can just go do her thing and Be fine with that. But I always tell them that take time when you're young to have as many adventures as you possibly can because you're, you're living without a net. You're not responsible for anybody but yourself. You have the opportunity to put yourself in places where you might, you know, you might not be as, as available or as flexible to be able to do later in life. What did you learn by going to Microsoft? And when you went to Microsoft, did you know that you were a short timer there?
- [13:27]
B
I didn't know. Before I answer that question, I'll just say my grandfather told my mother. Something that always stuck with me is he's like, when you've gone everywhere and done everything twice, then get married and have kids. And I think there's a lot of wisdom in that. So when I went to Microsoft, I was actually a little bit reluctant to go there because I was always like an Apple fanboy and it was like a student of innovation. You know, the one thing I got out of college that was extraordinarily useful is I studied under a man who created a program at Carnegie Mellon. I didn't go there, but he left and went to my state school and we were studying what was called technology innovation management. It's literally like, how do you identify trends and patterns that are happening innovation in the marketplace and monetize them? And so my perception at the time, because Microsoft was under the Ballmer era, was that Microsoft was way behind and didn't have a clue. And it was mostly in an extractive phase of their business because they had such a strong sales and marketing arm and they had such a weak product development arm that's mostly copying other people and iterating in small increments. So what happened is a former client of mine basically said, hey, if you join Microsoft, I know because I also started a charity that was helping, you know, hundreds of kids learn leadership and dancing in the city of Seattle. He's like, we have a great matching program that could match contributions to your charity. And so you could basically just donate your signing bonus and we'll match it. I was like, amazing. So that's kind of what got me in. But what surprised me is I got into a group called qbe, which I don't think exists anymore. And it was basically like the Lean Six Sigma arm of the business, which was going around and teaching Lean Six Sigma to the rest of the company. And I had a Lean Six Sigma certification from my consulting days, but it wasn't like my thing. But I got into this really narrow groove which was helping emerging market subsidiaries double growth or beat GDP growth. So it wasn't just about being efficient and using, you know, statistics to drive operational efficiency. It was about let's grow, how do we grow? So I got to go travel to China and Brazil and Mexico and help the country manager, basically the GM of that country, like CEO of Microsoft in that country, and work with him and his entire leadership team and the whole organization to say, okay, how do we double revenue for Microsoft? Mexico for example. Right. And I was a young kid working with people twice my age, but I was so full of energy and that's when I knew I was an entrepreneur. Because I was like, I don't want to, I don't want to do any of the lean Six Sigma stuff. I want to talk about sales and marketing and growth and opportunity and, and that, that experience helped me do a couple of things. Number one, what surprised me is I talked to a lot of entrepreneurs today that either are customers of ours or work with me in my AI mastermind. And I noticed there's a lot of like anxiety they have around like sales and marketing and then like numbers, like big numbers, like, oh, like a, like a seven figure business is a huge deal statistically and it's sort of this like place in a lot of people's minds like, oh, if I could just get to seven figures. Whereas when I came from consulting, you know, I was used to looking at spreadsheets where the zeros were truncated because we were talking about hundreds of millions and billions. And so to me, the, the, I grew a callus to big numbers. They did like they, they became the norm for me. So getting to startup land and thinking about growth, you know, getting to 10 or 20 or $100 million still felt like, oh, I got a long way to go. I didn't feel like I'd arrived. And so I had this nagging sense of we got to keep going. And that was a huge blessing. Other than that, a lot of corporate America is in lots change. I haven't been in corporate America a long time, but my experience of it was like, it's a lot of stakeholder management and change management and holding a human's hand through a change, you know, and getting them to accept the best possible solution. And often the best solution is not the solution that gets through. It's the best solution that people will accept. That was a hard thing for me to understand going in where I was like, no, no, no, like this is the best path forward. But if you can't Bring your people down that path as a leader, then that solution is dead on arrival. That's somewhat the echo of that is somewhat true in a smaller organization, but not nearly as much. And so yeah, I just learned that bigger business is fundamentally playing a different game. When they say it's all about the people, they're not joking. It really is all about your leadership and your culture and your ability to affect change. You know, when you've got over 100,000 employees, it's, you know, that's like a city, you know, that's a pretty, pretty big responsibility and it's a different set of skills that come along with that.
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A
Yeah. Leaving Microsoft, what was the next venture? Was it lottery.com?
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B
No, actually. So I got married, my father passed away from cancer and I left my crew and my Microsoft everything all within a six month time period. And I went from making several hundred thousand dollars a year to, you know, I moved in with my wife and six other people in a, in a live work loft on Electric Avenue behind Abbot Kenny and Venice beach. We had two bathrooms and one shower and I think I was making 50k a year and I was having the time of my life. You know. We started a new business called Rally Song and the mission was how do we raise $100 million for charity? Building the world's largest charitable playlist. And so we basically built like a Kickstarter that if you donated to a particular cause, it would unlock exclusive music from a big artist. And every dollar you donated was like a name in the hack. And we picked one lucky winner to go have an experience with the band member or whatever afterwards. And so great business. Learned a ton. It was a huge gear shift to go from corporate America to startup land, especially around like speed, you know, in a startup, speed of implementation is, is everything, you know, you have to go, it's, it's as important to learn as it is to earn, you know, and make fewer mistakes, make better mistakes. So yeah, that was a huge, huge thing for me. I raised money from a bunch of people that I knew and some funds and you know, business ultimately didn't work. We got left on the altar at our Series A, which was very disappointing and, but I learned a lot that that experience is what led me to lottery. But that experience was a huge transition period for me. You know, I was, I was listening to a bunch of personal development stuff. I was doing transcendental meditation on the beach in Venice and going to Gold's Gy every day. I was just trying to recreate myself after the Passing of my father and becoming married and making this transition into a startup founder. And one of the things from one of my mentors I learned is he said to me, you know, basically the reason why you can't like if you. He asked me basically, like, we wouldn't ask me, ask somebody else. He said, well, what do you want? And the person said that that's what they want. And he's like, great, well, in order to get that, here's what you have to do. And he laid out all these things and the other person was like, well, I can't do that because that's not me. And he's like, exactly. You have to become. Not you, right? You don't discard the person that you were. You put like a new Russian doll and you bring that old person with you, but you have to become somebody new. Like, I was not good enough to do startup stuff. I had to become somebody new. And it wasn't a self worth thing. I just lacked the skill, you know, I just was not skilled in those things emotionally or intellectually. And so I just spent a year or two rebuilding myself and learning how to fail, quite frankly, gracefully, which was a tremendous. I learned probably more from that than I have from any positive exit as a business owner.
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A
When's the last time you had to remake yourself?
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B
Oh, good question. After lottery, actually, I left lottery before they went public and I just started over. I was about. A few months before I was about to have my first son, my son journey this back in 2018 and I decided to just make a really clean break and I just hit the reset button fully and I just wanted to become a different person. Not necessarily on the business side, but, but in the personal side. I, I wanted to become a father. And I had this experience where becoming a father allowed me to understand what it was like to be a man for the first time. And I don't mean to demean men who believe that they're men and aren't yet fathers. It was just that my lived experience of that was that it was like, oh, interesting. There's a whole other level to being a man. When my lived experience of it anyway, there's a whole nother level of being a man when you have a child, you know, you get protect your provider mode. You learn how to, you know, wrestle with the malware that was installed by your parents and choosing if you're actually going to be like them or be your own person. And it's this whole thing. So I had a huge reboot there because I Said, look, I love my parents and I want to show up more powerfully than they did.
- [21:55]
A
As a parent, you think our kids will, will believe that they have to overcome all of our shortcomings as much as we believe we had to overcome our parents?
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B
Yeah. I don't know. I, I, I, I hope not. But, you know, maybe that's just the way it is with, with our species, you know?
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A
I think so.
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B
Yeah.
- [22:10]
A
Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, I mean, I know you remade yourself into a father, but you become a father that first moment.
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B
Yeah.
- [22:18]
A
Yeah. Everything changes permanently. It's a different perspective.
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B
Yeah. I call it a, a positive forced transformation. There's no way back. You got to just go forward. And it's beautiful.
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A
Yeah. Well, let's talk a little bit about Daily AI. Daily AI, in my experience, is a high tech, high quality product for businesses who already are successful, who already have a client base, who are being successful, but want more, maybe out of their lists or more out of a new list. And your product has an exceptionally high open rate and high conversion rate. And then if you read your book Tractionology, which I happen to have right here and I read yesterday.
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B
Wow.
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A
Which is great, by the way. And it, and it's great because it gives you just enough to let me know that you know exactly what you're doing, but not enough where I don't have to call you. So it's the perfect. Which, by the way, that's conversion. And what the book told me is that you know exactly what you're doing, you're an expert at it, you've done it throughout your career. But tell us a little bit about Daily AI and what was the mission and where is it at?
- [23:30]
B
Yeah. So the history of Daily AI really starts from the last company that I sold. I was the chief revenue officer with my friend Travis Steffen, who is CEO of a company called GrowFlow. And we took that company from 900K to about 8 million in sales in just under three years. And I learned a ton because in that business we were doing compliance software for the legal cannabis industry. And what's interesting about that is you can't really buy ads because even though you don't touch the plant, it's against terms and service. And there's, there wasn't a lot of hope on social media because the algorithms don't love propagating that kind of content either. So I just went back to the old school and we started doing direct mail. We sent like gag gifts and sushi socks and just tried to get people on the phones. And we built an amazing inbound sales team. Right. So I would send. It's the Pandemic. I find your home address and send you a gift that's like, hey, Jeff, I know you're not able to go out and get real sushi, but I thought I'd send you these sushi socks. By the way, here's an offer you can't refuse. I would like to buy you lunch. I'd like to buy you real sushi. I'll Uber eats sushi to your, to your place and we'll have a phone call. And all I want to do is help you grow your business during the pandemic. And I have nothing to sell. You just give us a call. Click here to book your call or go to this place to book your call. That was it. And then we would just keep sending funny gifts and funny letters. And like, a lot of people found that amusing and they were bored, they had a lot of time. So we, we converted that attention into calls and that's how we're able to grow that business. But we did a lot of it also over email. That's the bridge is email became this thing where I started to realize it's this, it's the first killer app. It has more daily active users than any single social media platform on the planet. And every business owner uses email. I don't care if you're a Gen Z or, OR A. Your 70 year old business owner or whatever, right? You. You use email. It's just the way that we conduct business. And so I said, huh, well, everybody's zigging towards social. What if we could apply those, top those concepts towards email?
- [25:27]
A
Yeah, Lumpy mail and email Lumpy, you know, I call it when you send people things in an envelope that they're like, what's in here? I call that Lumpy mail.
- [25:34]
B
Yeah, Exactly. You know, dream 100 lumpy mail campaign. That's what we did. If you're looking for all the market marketing jargon around it.
- [25:41]
A
Yeah, Lumpy mail and then, and then email. Interesting. All right.
- [25:45]
B
Yeah. So that business went really well. So when I, when we were selling that business, I got in touch with my current business partners, Evan Pagan and Peter Diamandez, and they. Peter, you know, is a obviously a brilliant human being and a multiple New York Times bestselling author and has access to a lot of people because of who he is and what he does. And so he already had access to the OpenAI API with a team working on stuff. And so when I met them, you know, they had already had a working prototype of what they were trying to accomplish. And I thought, man, like I've been selling compliance software for the last three years, I could probably sell this. But we spent, you know, seven or eight months trying to figure out where the puck was going before we launched anything. And one of our big predictions was that marketing is going to go from one to many to one to one with AI as generative AI grows up and becomes what's called multimodal. And the trends are basically, the cost of compute is going down faster than Moore's law. So we said, if we looked at those trends, what would be a useful tool? And I said, huh, what if we built machine learning inside of email? And so that's how Daily AI was born. We launched in 2023 and it was great. What we do is we help small businesses and thought leaders that don't have team or time launch AI automated email newsletters that, that take less than 5 minutes of your time to review and get a 40% or greater open rate. 81% of our customers have a 40% or greater open rate. Many of them have 70s and 80% depending on your market. And we were able to do that through this thing that we've built called the Perspective engine. It goes out, it scrapes all this content in the world. It could be literally anything, scientific journals, blog posts, podcasts, YouTube videos, and it will filter out negative news, it filters out clickbait, it filters out any of your competitors, basically anything that you don't want in the newsletter. And it will bring in your content if you have it. It packages it up in like a three or four thumb scroll. Type summary as a newsletter and then it'll send it out to your list every day if you want it to, five days a week, 20 times a month. You can even go seven days a week if you want. And here's where the magic sauce comes in, Jeff. It's gets smarter. So the more that people click and open, the more our machine learning knows when to send it, what to put the subject line in, what content to put in there. And the last thing I'll say is, because we knew that marketing was going from one to many to one to one at the click of a button, you can send every individual subscriber their own version of the newsletter. It doesn't have to be a one to many thing. And that's what makes us superbly unique, is we built that from the ground up because that's the future that we saw coming two or three years ago.
- [28:26]
A
You talk in your book about going narrow this product. As I think about implementation, we have a project, an education business that we're in the process of launching. I'm thinking about all the email lists that I could get that would be referral targets or direct targets for this education business. But it would be a narrow, I mean, it would be a narrow list. I mean it might be. I could see maybe 10,000 emails on this would represent the whole universe of potential referral partners and customers. Is that a big enough list? Is that, is that narrow? What do you see that's typical when people are building either an education business or sales business? Your, your book and your methods are specifically on service businesses. Correct. And you. So first define what a service business. How do you define service business?
- [29:19]
B
Yeah, I will. And by the way, daily AI works with everybody. It's not just service business. Okay. My book material was on that.
- [29:25]
A
Got it.
- [29:26]
B
The way I think about service businesses is I call them bridge builders. Like they're in the business of helping people get from where they are to where they want to be. Right. The CPA helps you get from frustrated and making mistakes and dealing with tedious things to carefully pain free, jail free tax filings. Right. They're a bridge in that regards. A, you know, a lawyer is similar. A consultant is going to help you go from, you know, I don't know, a million to 10 million in revenue. A training facility is going to help you go from no capability to having this capability. A coach, very similar. So most, when you look at small business in the western world, especially in the United States, 70, greater than 70% of those businesses are service based businesses. They are white collar, they don't move physical products. They're selling information or capability or a service where they're helping you actually get something accomplished. Right. They're doing something for you or on your behalf. And so that's what I could consider a service based business. It could be an agency, a consultant, a coaching practice, a mastermind podcast where you're selling sponsorships. Like those are all service based business. It's not, you know, selling stuff that's physical products. And it's not, it's not necessarily SaaS, although SaaS is just software automated services. But it's that it's those kinds of businesses.
- [30:45]
A
Got it. And then the daily AI product can be for anybody, anybody who wants to build a personal brand, anybody that wants to expand or deepen their customer set in any business.
- [30:56]
B
That's right. So we work with about 20% of our customers are Big name thought leaders, everybody from former presidential candidate Robert Kennedy Jr. Chris Voss, Tony Robbins, we've built the newsletters for, you know, Dan Sullivan, Dan Martell, Joe Polish, and on and on and on. Right. So if you've got a thought leader kind of business, we are by far unequivocally the best product to reinforce your authority over email. That, that was like our first use case because my business partner Peter is leader. So we're very good at that. We also have about 192 other businesses that are not personality brands and they're not thought leader businesses. They are the cpa, the lawyer, the consultant, the advisor, they are the plastic surgeon, they are the real estate agent, they are the roofing company. They are, you know, the high margin local business. If you have people on your list and you're not engaging them every single day and you would like to do that in less than five minutes a week in a way that grabs their attention every week and gives you authority, then we're a great solution. See most small businesses don't have team or time to do that. They figured out how to get leads usually from referrals and they figured out how to convert everything in the middle. There's the whole nurture sequence is not being done and it's or it's not being done effectively. And so we're able to help you be consistency. And the reason why this matters is because you know, consistency creates trust and trust creates transactions. Where there's no trust, there's no transaction. So if you only show up on your email list like once in a blue moon, there's a subconscious signal that you can't be trusted. I don't know when you're going to show up. Same thing's true if all you do is put me on some, I don't know, like a soap opera sequence of emails where it's just endless, worthless, non value add emails that are secretly trying to get me to buy something. Now I don't want to knock that, there's nothing wrong with that, but that's all you're doing. You're consistently showing up and saying I want something from you. How much better would it be if you said, well what's in it for them? What would they be interested in? How can I stand on the shoulder of giants by giving my audience more of what they want and then ask them for the sale? I like to say that there's three forms of truth in marketing, right? There's what the business owner thinks the market wants, there's what the market says that they want and then there's what the market actually clicks on. We want to know all three. We just want to over index on the third because mathematically that's what drives sales and that's what's going to grow your business and build trust.
- [33:17]
A
Yeah, that is so well said. So there was a recent conference with Google and a bunch of other industry software providers, technology people, service businesses, franchisors and there was a lot of discussion around the cost of Google and Google had people there, they were fielding questions directly about cost per lead, why it's growing up. They're talking about their new product products and the new things that the new things that we as people that, that rely upon Google need to do to bend to their will and for them to serve up our information. And now you know, I was at another conference recently where they said, well chat is going to be bigger in search by the end of 26 than Google is in terms of number of searches on chat. I've started using Grok and I find GROK to be a great tool to be able to just ask a very open ended question and it gives me a very reasonable and thoughtful and researched answer. What are the trends that you see in marketing? And this going back to traditional, which I would say is email. I also saw that you had some stuff about direct mail. Like what do you see in terms of if I'm not just wanting to get on the merry go round of just constantly paying companies, more like what are, what are, what are some things that you see that people need to think about going forward?
- [34:47]
B
Yeah, I think one of the things that's important to understand is the future of marketing is going to be around personalization. It doesn't matter how you're reaching them. It's going to be about the right message over the right channel to the right person at the right time with the right offer. 40% of the content that a small business puts into the marketplace actually puts pushes a prospect away from the sale because it feels intrusive. They're not ready yet. Right. Only 90, like of the whole 100% of buyers in your market, 3 to 5% are ready to buy now. And that's either because they're what's called a low information buyer, which means they buy on emotion, or it's because they just don't need as much information. 97% of people actually need more information before they make a purchase. Now as salespeople were taught to think that they're like tire kickers and they're not serious. No. They just need more freaking information to make a decision. That's what humans do. And so the big opportunities right now for marketing are to give content that actually gives them more information to help them. Right. And like if you think about it, the big opportunity. There's two big opportunities in marketing right now. Number one is making content time on brand. How much time can you get someone to consume your content like stuff like this, like podcasts, social media, emails, phone calls, webinars, live events, doing partnerships, those kinds of things where you're getting someone to spend more time with you? It's worth looking up 7, 7114 rule. Google came out with this rule, apparently did a study some time ago that said that on average to take somebody from a cold prospect to a paying customer, they need to be exposed to your brand for seven hours with 11 touch points across four channels. So brand time on brand time on your content is what builds the trust that gets people to actually buy. That's why we do what we do we do at Daily AI is we want you to have those 11 touch points every day or every week. You're getting value. Then if you have a podcast or YouTube or you're guest frequently guesting on other people's channels, that's what allows people to spend time with you that seven hours so that they'll actually buy from you. So the trends that I'm seeing that are working right now are people that are spending time to develop what I call brand, not necessarily logo and identity and colors and consistency, although that's important too. I'm talking about time on brand time on you or your business providing value in the marketplace. That's what's driving trust. That's why so many people are working through you know what will be now call key opinion leaders or influencers to drive sales is because they have the Trust they have seven 11, four. They've already gone up the trust curve with everybody. And so I would just encourage at this point in the game, it's no longer nice to have to have some kind of a media arm in the business. You should be thinking about your brand as media. At least today, in 2025, that's one big trend. The next big trend that I would say it's important to pay attention to is you're not going to have to do creative, you're not going to have to do copy, you're not even going to. All you need to do is have a really good offer and then AI, AKA the ad platforms, you'll just be able to upload your offer, tell them what kind of money you want back and it will find your ideal buyer. It will make your creative, it will make everything for you. And, and it will distribute it across their network and send them back. Now, if your offer is extraordinary, it will convert at a profit and if it's not, then it won't. Okay. And I know this isn't a marketing question, but the game that everyone's going to have to start playing is what I call results as a service. Meaning you're all the best. Offers mean I don't get paid until you get the result.
- [38:14]
A
Got it.
- [38:15]
B
So all offers are going to move closer and closer and closer to results as a service over time. And so what you're going to start to see is, is that it's not the strength of your marketing, but the quality of your offer. That's the first door that will become the new marketing is a killer offer where all of the risk is taken off the buyer. The second place to win that, where marketers will win is even if you don't acquire customers at a profit, if you have ltv lifetime value, that's, that's most, that's long enough, that's where you will make all your money. So even if you break even on the front.
- [38:46]
A
Yeah.
- [38:47]
B
You make all of your money by keeping customers longer and getting them to buy more stuff and to do it more often. That is going to be the new game of business. So everything will shift to the integrity of your service or your business. And if that's not valuable, you are going to get left very quickly because the war for your prospect's attention is never ending and relentless. And somebody out there will figure out how to do it and do it better and do it with results as a service where they only, you only get, you get the result as the customer and you only have to pay after you get the result.
- [39:15]
A
That's, that's brilliant. That's absolutely brilliant. And it's a mind shift and it forces you to think about really providing real value. I mean if you're, if, if you're burdening the cost of and you're only going to get paid if it works. I mean, think about how much sharper people are going to be, how much less puffery that there's going to be, how much bad selling, how many bad products out there.
- [39:41]
B
Yeah. Well, right now the big advantage is like have your offer be results as a service or as close to you as it as you can. I'll give you an example. Like how could you do results as a service. If you're a roofing business, right? Well, you could, it's got to build the roof. There's upfront costs. It's hard, right? You could say I, if we don't finish on time, then I'll give you 20% of the profit because that's my profit right now. That's shifting the risk, whatever the equivalent of that is in your industry. That's where I think people need to be focused. But the second thing is buy advertising, go on YouTube and go on meta and buy ads. It's so easy now. There's no excuses. Zuckerberg just came out with an update in their earnings report five or six days ago that basically said what I'm saying, what I've been saying for two years, which is just give us your offer and what you want to sell and we'll basically do the rest for you. We'll go find your customers, give us your offer, give, tell us how much you want to spend and we'll go do it for you. And surprise, they're doing that. And how do I know they were going to do that? Because they're all taking their cues from TikTok. That's what TikTok has been doing. So if you want to see the bellwether of where all this is going, pay attention to what TikTok is doing with TikTok Shop. Pay attention to what TikTok is doing with AI user generated content. That's the future of marketing. But the big opportunity right now is have a great offer and put that offer on these ad platforms. That's the best AI in the world to get propagation. And then lastly have beautiful follow up something like a newsletter, right? Like our AI newsletter so you can stay in touch with people after you get their attention with your ad. That actually brings the cost of your ads down and allows you to convert more people over time.
- [41:14]
A
Talk to me about the impact of referrals on a business.
- [41:18]
B
Ooh, yeah. Well, I think that my whole thought process around referrals comes from basically Silicon Valley. We talked about innovation earlier and one of the things I like doing is taking ideas from one industry and bringing them to another. So I grew up listening to guys like Jay Abraham teach me about what I would later be learn as direct response marketing. So I took all of those ideas to Silicon Valley in these companies that I was working at or founding or running. And I realized that it was like in that world, nobody wants to talk to humans and sell. At least that was the case back in the Day, they just want to build the product with the product, sell itself. And I was like, cool, let's do both. And we made a lot of money doing that. Well, now I'm doing the inverse where I'm helping service based businesses that are trying to apply direct response say, huh, what if we, what if instead of thinking about the only way we can get customers is to buy them or to buy traffic, what if we actually just changed our paradigm? Like in Silicon Valley, it's heretical to get one user and not turn them into 10.
- [42:13]
A
Right, right.
- [42:13]
B
So, so it's. But when I meet service based business owners, they don't go, huh, I should turn one client into 10. That's just not a standard that exists. But I was like, no, no, no, like we have to do that. Let's figure out how to do that. And so asking for referrals is the first door that you walk through inside of that world, inside of that new paradigm is you say, hey, if I'm doing good work and I know I do good work and I drive real results, then I should be asking for referrals. And there's three specific places to ask for referrals. One of them is counter. The first one, ask at the point of sale. Why Most people will say, oh, I haven't done anything for them, I haven't delivered any results. Yeah, but sometimes if you're priced appropriately, the fact that they bought from you, if they did it cleanly and you didn't twist their arm, they're, they're excited. They're on the golf course telling their friends, I got this new thing and it's the new AI newsletter. It's amazing, like, great. So ask them at the point of.
- [43:03]
A
Purchase, they're not mad and they're not mad. They're not disappointed yet. No.
- [43:07]
B
And if you do a good job, then they won't be disappointed because from the minute they buy, there should be a script down to the letter of how you get to what I call first value or the aha moment. Right. For in tech, this is famous. Like Facebook got its first billion users by focusing on seven friends in 10 days. That's basically what the their main metric that they cared about. If I did get, you had seven friends in 10 days and knew you're going to be on the platform forever and be highly engaged, so they optimized for that. Well, what is that for your service based business?
- [43:34]
A
Business?
- [43:34]
B
It's like, if I do high ticket selling, can I get you a lead and a sale within seven days of signing? Up that'll keep you around, whatever that big aha moment where it's like, oh my gosh, I'm so glad I bought that thing from Jeff. Now all of a sudden you ask for a referral right there and now I'm getting another referral. And then it from there, it's either the end of the engagement or the midpoint of an engagement. Or if they're just on a recurring thing for you, you want to go every quarter or every six months. That's the game. Why is that important? Because if I'm going to buy traffic and I get you to come in, there's this idea, this metric that I have called lifetime worth. It's not just lifetime value. How much do you stick around and buy from me? It's how many people did you refer that converted and stuck around and bought from me? Because if I can get that number up and my cost to acquire a customer, I can spend more money to acquire more customers. So I can give my revenue from my service. I get my revenue from the referrals, which is just gravy. And I reinvest that into traffic and then I reinvest that into my people to make my offer better. Now we're playing three dimensional chess. Now we're playing a game that'll take you from low seven figures, you know, up to the next stopping point, which is usually like 25 million pretty quickly. But you got to think about it the right way. You got to be a student and look at, well, how do other companies do this that are out of my lane and what can I take and apply? So that, that is how I think about referrals. It sits inside of a, an ecosystem of growth and it's table stakes if you, if you're great at what you do. I learned this from Jay Abraham. He said you have a moral obligation to get in front of people and tell them what you do because they'll probably go buy from some yahoo who's just trying to jerk them around. So just go. Be, be assertive. I mean, I'm not aggressive, but be assertive in asking. And you know, you miss 100% of the shots you don't take, so why not?
- [45:14]
A
Are you still running Traction? Tractionology group?
- [45:18]
B
I am. There's not much to run. I had, I had a handful of private clients that, that I was coaching one on one, and I just don't take any more clients. We have like eight a year and I had many more. But what happened is I'll just coach them as long as they want to pay me. It's, it's a low time drag thing for me. Yeah, but a lot of them are having exits. I have a client right now who's going through a multi eight figure exit. Another one last year, end of last year did a multi nine figure exit. You know, these are people that are, that were starting off, let's say 4 or 5 million a year. And I just stayed with them until the whole ride was done. And you know, we, we stay till the end. So that's been super fun. Tractionology Group has really morphed into something that we call Prime, Prime Live and Prime Collective. It's a, it's a group of experienced entrepreneurs that I've brought together to basically learn AI, like advanced AI. How do you go from feeling left behind to being ahead of the curve when it comes to using AI to materially grow your business? And it's been this really beautiful journey because I just had friends asking me, hey, can you teach me? Can you teach me? Can you teach me? So that turned into a mastermind and it's just organically grown. We're capping it at 50 members, it's almost full and it's been a really fun ride. We have a unique methodology where we say, hey, instead of just taking any random AI tool that you can get off the street and making it about tools which can feel overwhelming and under leveraged, it's, let's learn about AI through practical hands on use in workshops where you build real stuff for your business. And then when you're in the mastermind, how do we actually find your biggest constraint? Because everything else is kind of a distraction. Right. And so that might be for Most businesses under $3 million in revenue a year. Their biggest constraint is they're still in obscurity. They just don't have enough leads. People don't know about them. Okay, great. Let's use AI to generate more leads. That's the appropriate tool. But if you have enough leads but you're not closing them, cool, then let's use AI for that. Let's not be distracted. If leads and sales aren't a problem, then let's use AI to make the product better, improve the onboarding, get to the aha moment. So all the stuff I teach in my book, we just now basically find the constraint and use AI to remove it to move people forward. And it's been, it's one of the funnest things I've been doing. Like, like daily AI is incredible and it's helping like thousands of people Millions of subscribers every month. But prime has just been such a joy because, you know, there's such demand for this and there's so few people that have actually done it versus saying they're doing it. And they, you get behind the scenes and they really don't know what they're doing that it's been fun, man. Anytime I'm in a market where there's crazy demand and not enough supply, like the supply demand curve is undefeated. It's, you know, it's a great place to be from a marketing and sales perspective.
- [47:54]
A
You're getting ready to have your third child. You've had a, you, you've had a great career and a great entrepreneurial story. How do you think about educating and exposing your kids to, to the types of things that you think are most important?
- [48:11]
B
Yeah, that's a really good question. I think that starts with, well, what do you think are the most important things to teach your kids? Right. And I don't know that enough people are sitting back to ask that question, unfortunately. And this is not in judgment, I don't want to make anybody wrong for how they parent because it's a combat sport, full combat sport, and we do the best with what we have.
- [48:33]
A
Yeah, they're all. You're going to have three little variables there.
- [48:36]
B
Yeah, well, inside of that, what I observe is a lot of people are just outsourcing parenting to schools, to nannies, to after school programs so they can work. And you know, economically that may be the right decision for you. That's your decision to make. I, I don't believe in school. I don't believe in curriculum. I don't believe in grades. I don't believe in a human that has all the answers that, you know, profitizes in front of people. I believe in curiosity, safety and desire. Anywhere where you have those three things. Learning is a natural byproduct for any human, whether they're, you know, six months old or 60 years old. And I've figured that out from my own self study and probably putting 10,000 of hours into like, how do you, how do we learn as a species? Right. Because I've always known that I didn't want to put my kids in school. I call school mind prison, you know, and again, if you put your kids in regular school, I don't want to make you wrong. It's not about guilting and shaming you. I'm just talking about what my preferences are. My preferences are to create as much agency and sovereignty in my kids as I possibly can and as much resourcefulness as I possibly can. If they want to go to school, if my kids wake up and want to go to school, we homeschool, by the way, and they're like, hey, I'd like to go to school. That'd be fantastic. You know, if that's your. If you've researched that and that's what you want to do, I would support that and I would encourage that, and I'll be a resource for you to make that happen. And, you know, to start, I don't. I just don't feel like we need to put them there. But going back to your question, I think there's three things that I've thought about this a lot. There's three things I'd love to impart on my kids. I break it down to character and competency. Right? Character. They're just going to model what me and my wife do. So that's me getting up and honoring my own commitments, having my own personal values that I abide by, taking care of my body, just. Just showing up is like the best version of me, because that's what they're going to model, and I'm a flawed, far from perfect person, and they'll probably get some of that too. But if I can be the best version of myself, they're just going to model that. So that's where they'll get their character from. Now, competency. There's three things in competency that I think I really would love my kids to get. The first one is I'd love for them to understand faith. Okay, not necessarily faith from a religious perspective or a spiritual perspective, although that's amazing. And I'm not here to make that wrong. I mean, faith, like the ability to see a potential future reality that doesn't exist and have the full faith that you can go make that happen, that you can think, act, speak, collaborate, and create value enough for that to exist. It doesn't have to be entrepreneurial, but it does have to be creating new realities that don't exist yet. The second one is money. How to make it, how to save it, how to invest it, how to multiply it, how to give it away. And the third one is sales. How to ethically extract money from other people's bank accounts in exchange for the highest forms of value. I think if, if, if they learn those three things, then I will. They will be prepared for anything in the world. And. And I feel pretty good about that. There may be some future utopia where money is not the same thing that it is right now. I don't think that's going to happen in their lifetimes. And so that's why I think those things are important. And of course I have a lot to say about character. Like, I want them to be good people. I want them to have high integrity. I want them to be in service, I want them to lead, I want them to lead themselves. But ultimately, you know, they're going to make that decision for themselves. That's not my path to walk. I just get to shape it for them. But as far as competency, those are the three buckets that I'm pretty focused on, making sure they understand before they leave the nest.
- [52:02]
A
What's the role of courage in living a great life? And how do you demonstrate that to your kids?
- [52:07]
B
You know, it's funny, since my son was young, one of the things I learned in neuro linguistic programming is that if you want to be the leader, like, leaders go first. So he was like 2, he just learned how to talk. And I would say, what do leaders do? And I would tell him to say, go first.
- [52:21]
A
Oh, he's programmed. You've already won.
- [52:25]
B
Later I would add to it, I would say, well, I would say, hey, when you're scared, I want you to be brave and take action. Being brave means taking action even when you're scared. I'm trying to describe courage. And I said, action. Well thought action in the face of fear will destroy fear because most fear isn't real. And he doesn't understand that. But I'll just say I made him memorize, you know, be brave, take action. And then the next thing I said to him is, you know, like, leaders are readers. Leaders help other people. And then the new one is leaders are listeners. So when I drop him off, he goes, it's we homeschool. But he goes to this thing in Austin part time called Acton Academy. It's mostly for the social interaction and learning how to actually lead other people. And every day I ask him, what does a leader do? He'll say, go first, be brave, take action. Leaders are readers. You know, leaders help other people. And now I taught him this this morning, which was, you know, leaders are listeners. You want to understand before being understood. So we're going to, we're going to drill that one. And I'm going to look for places in his life where I can say, you know, oh, I'll ask him a question or point those things out. So I'm trying to like daisy chain these things together. So even if he doesn't fully understand them, they're in there. And then I can look for teachable moments as a father for him and the rest of my kids to make that real for him.
- [53:39]
A
Yeah, firstborns get the best stuff.
- [53:44]
B
Yeah, they do.
- [53:46]
A
The other two will so resent it. But you know, there's a real thing to the birth order thing, man. It's. You think, you think you can out smart it, but like there, you know, it just is what it is. I mean, I've got a middle child. I am a middle child. And then I've got a, I've got a third, you know, a third one. And it's, it is just textbook as the way that they feel about their place in the world based on how they're born. But, but I think down to, down to a human in our household, I mean, we already had, we always had a set of family values. We did exactly those same things. I coached over 30 seasons. My kids, sports leaders bring energy. You know, I mean, we had all of those little things that, that, that just become sound bites. You know, my, my, my oldest, you know, one of the things that I've always said is if you absolutely know the right thing to do, do that. Right? So he was asked on a podcast, you know, if you had, you know, one principle to live by, what would be? And that's what he said. You know, so the things that you, that you constantly expose them to when they're 5, 6, 7, 10, 12, and then you live that through the interactions that you have with them, whether that's in athletics or in music or whatever, or break whatever it is they choose to do. And whatever your engagement is with that, that gives you the real world context to be able to show them how to apply the principles that you think are most important. And man, that is the most important thing because at the end of the day, you really don't want to teach them what to think. You just want to teach them how to think. You want to teach them how to, how to interact. You want to teach them how to navigate. And I've always said, you know, if I can have capable, you know, capable, competent, contributing, independent children, then that's it. And then whatever they make of the world and whatever the world makes of them, that's between them.
- [55:37]
B
Yeah, 100%. I love that. You know, the 11 things I learned from the Bible is it says if you raise a child in the way, they will not depart from it. Now clearly are talking about the way, you know, the religion, and I think that's true regardless whether it's Sports Book of Joe Yeah, exactly. Right. So I think that's. There's a. That's. That's what I've thought to myself, is like, how can I. Whatever I raise my children in, that'll be the operating system. That'll be, you know, hard to therapy out of them later, so I better do a good job or at least not do a terrible job. Um, I think you're right on the birth order thing. You know, like, I was the last child, and I. I, you know, I had a long leash, and for better or for worse, it worked out for me. So.
- [56:22]
A
Yeah, I mean, your. Your older siblings got the present in the box. You got the box, and then you just made it flat, and then you danced on it.
- [56:29]
B
That's right. Question. How old are your kids?
- [56:32]
A
27, 24 and 21.
- [56:34]
B
Okay, so you did mention that. I just wanted to remind myself. So do you think that they materially embraced the call to leadership or these things that you embedded in them?
- [56:45]
A
100%. Oh, man. Clear. So it's so clear. In their own way, they all stepped up to the challenge. They aspire for leadership. And part of it is too, one of the, I mean, Tony Robbins things. Significance. I mean, in their own ways, they seek significance and they. They try to, you know, so my daughter goes to law school, right? She. She went to Clemson undergrad. She decided to go to law school. She studied only two months for the lsat, got a great score, and then she kind of nudged her way into NYU and kind of at the bottom of the. Of the list, but she had a bunch of. She was a 4.0 at Clemson and. And all of that. And I said. I said, man, you know, do you really want to go to nyu? Because that's expensive. I mean, the living is almost as much as tuition in New York. And I said, you could go to Chapel Hill or somewhere like that for free. And here you go, Joe, right back at me. Didn't you always tell us to compete at the highest level that we qualify for? And I'm like, shut up, girl. Just like, okay, well, I guess, you know, I guess NYU it is. And she's. She's thrived inside of it, and she's getting ready to her second summer with knee, which is like an $8 billion. It's the largest law firm, I think, in the world, amazing New York office. And. And, you know, she's just a little, you know, five foot two, you know, thing walking, but, like, doing her thing, like, doesn't want any help, doesn't want, you know, it doesn't want me to make a call for. If I have to make a call or something like that, you know, or, you know, to try to help her. She wants to do it all on her own. And like, that's what you want. You, you're like, no, I got this. You know, I can figure it out, I can do it. And. And then. My son's an engineering student. He's very entrepreneurial. My youngest built a couple, built a pressure washing business called Two Bros and a Hose. Had a, had a 3D printing business where he had 3D printers all over the house, doing aftermarket parts for RC cars that just came out and selling them on Etsy. So he knows how to sell, he knows how to do that. I mean, he set up all the marketing and stuff. And, you know, he's an engineering type, right? Very, very kinesthetic. And the kinesthetic people, kinesthetic learners tend to have. Right back to where we started. They tend to have mastery in things. They might be slower learners, but there are artists, there are musicians. They tend to like. His focus on a problem is, I mean, it is debilitating to me to try to continue to stay engaged because he will just keep working the problem over and over and talking about it. And it's just so interesting how to make this machine. And all of the businesses that he built had some machine build to it. So he wanted to, he wanted to figure out how the pumps worked and how to put the skid in the truck and how to do this or, or how to, how to CAD design a light, you know, how to make a light kit work on an RC car and then how to CAD design it and, and all of that kind of stuff. So it's in the tinkering for him. And then my oldest, I mean, we're the fastest growing or one of the fastest growing franchise platforms in North America. We've awarded 220 new owners and 700 territories and 24 months. And I basically took him in a room and I said, we're not doing well in franchise development. After he did all of our. He's an econ and finance guy. And you know, three years ago I showed him the funnels and the business on two huge 16ft of whiteboards. And he went to work and he built the Cadillac of Franchise Development, CRM and HubSpot. And you know, went and did it and did all the marketing and, and drove, you know, $25 million worth of sales in 24 months. And so it's. Yeah, man. And, you know, I'm not here to. You asked. I don't, you know, I'm not here to brag about my kids. But I think, I think the point is, is that, and honestly, if you would look at it, I mean, they, somebody says, what's your parenting style? And I'm like in some intentional level of neglect, you know, but you know, with, with, with these guardrails that say never lie to them. I mean, if I ran over the dog or the cat, like I ran over, I ran it over. It didn't run away. So, you know, you just don't. Because once they know you will lie to them, they, you lose it. The you, you know. Oh, that's just what my parents are going to tell me. But I know it's not true. Like, you have to be just brutally, painfully disciplined honest with them. You can't rescue them from the world because then they're going to expect you to do that and don't do their thinking for them and let them suffer. I mean, the world, everything that we do as a species is meant to make our life easier. From air conditioning to technology, the drive throughs. We don't even have to get our fat asses out of the car. Joe. To get driving. Yeah. Or drive. Yeah. Now we just press the button and say, take me to McDonald's and take me to one where the ice cream machine's not broken. So I mean, it's just like, it's, it's, we are a comfort seeking society. But like, comfort's not where anything great happens. So.
- [61:52]
B
Interesting. I asked Jordan Peterson last year. I basically said the same thing. Look, it seems like more and more of us in the world are optimizing for comfort and ease and everything's getting easier for a father of two expecting a third. What would your advice be for raising resilient children? And he said, rough and tumble play. Because play is the vehicle where we all come and engage collaboratively and cooperatively. And rough play allows them to experience danger in a safe way where they can find their edge, but then also find their way back. I'm obviously paraphrasing. This man is a genius. And I'm only attempting to repeat what he said. That's what I understood. And so I think that's super true. And it's funny because, like, right after he answered, Bobby Kennedy jumped in and was like, well, I'd love to put some input on here. You know, he has a ton of kids. I don't know how many kids he has, but he's a Kennedy. And they, they come Batteries included. With a lot of kids, right? And I think it's like seven or something crazy.
- [62:46]
A
Well, he, he might be the best looking human man I've, I've seen in person. I was at that meeting, right? And it's. Yeah, yeah, he's, he's disarming, like. Yes, he's disarming in person. It's. It's weird.
- [62:58]
B
Politician, you know.
- [62:59]
A
Yeah, I mean, yeah, well, he's a Kennedy.
- [63:01]
B
I mean, yeah, well, he, he said, you know, spend, basically spend time with each kid. I don't know if you remember his answer. I was, I asked the first question. He said, spend time with each kid. And he said, talk, talk about one of his sons who is a little wild and maybe wild enough to have found himself in jail, but he found his way to hockey, and Bobby drove him to every hockey practice and every hockey game that year. And those conversations on the way to the games and on the way to the practice are like years later that son reflected back to him that that was the difference that made the, the difference. And so though I took those things to heart and we implemented a dating, like a, like a date night for each kid, basically, so that they all get individual parent time anyway. I think this is super relevant to entrepreneurs in the way that if you want to play this game for a long time, you're going to have to learn how to play it at different levels, especially as a parent, because if it's not sustained, then you won't sustain and none of the things we've talked about will work. Right. It's like if your wife is mad at you and doesn't like, resents you, do you think you're going to be a better or a worse entrepreneur? If your kids, kids don't respect you and you don't have a good relationship with them or they have a drug habit, are you going to be a better or a worse entrepreneur? You know, so it's like it's some way if you want it. My experience of entrepreneurship is if you want to get better and better and better at it, where better looks like you continue to grow and continue to grow your people with an obvious scoreboard which looks like profit, then you have to learn how to continue to be better at the game. Because it's not the same as it was when I didn't have kids. And every year it's not the same. And every new kid, it's not the same. It's kind of like tying one foot to one hand behind your back and hopping with one leg while Everybody just gets to walk around or jog, but you have to learn how to compete in different ways or learn how to adapt in different ways. And so I think this is like one of the most interesting conversations for entrepreneurs, whether they have kids or don't. Because I feel like if you don't take care of all of your family stuff, then it's gonna be really difficult for you to perform at a high level for a long period of time. And when you, I feel like when you get out of the game, you lose your purpose. You lose your purpose, you're done, you're just counting days until you're dead.
- [64:58]
A
Yeah, because I think not just money, it can't just be, can't just be money. The people would ask me. So I coached over 30 seasons of my kids sports when I decided to franchise the business and I got it, we had a, we were working all over the world almost, I mean like the Caribbean, Hawaii and everything, doing direct business. I was on the road all the time. I was chasing disasters. We were disaster restoration business, we were government contractor, you know, doing jobs on Puerto Rico, long term jobs. And so I mean I was just everywhere, right. And I had an inflection point which by the way have like three things. They have people you care about, are you responsible for an adventure, an opportunity at hand, and a risk of loss. Like those are the three characteristics of a, of an inflection point. And I decided to sell all of my company stores in the middle of the night, driving through Atlanta under a franchise model and commit to that. And it was, it was largely a lifestyle decision. I think it was the best decision I ever made. But it was, it was really based on the fact that I was becoming an absentee father. And I just didn't want that. But coaching this kid's sports. So think about it. I'm. We build franchise companies so we take somebody out of corporate America, we award them a business opportunity in one of our franchise brands and then for the first 90 days it's coaching them to enter the market, have conversations, build a team, do all that or I'm walking out in this. I have a five acre property here, 22,000 square foot building. I painted a football field in our side yard almost full size. And that's where we practice. I walk out of my building doing the franchise thing and Now I'm coaching 18, 10, 11 and 12 year olds to do exactly the same thing. I mean the method of building a football team over four months and getting these people to play fast, play for one another Care about one another, understand that there's only one ball make. You can't recontract when you step across the line. You know, like all of these things that first time entrepreneurs want to do, it was the exact, you know, so I'm a better entrepreneur for the reps that I got in coaching all of my kids sports. And it was full integration inside of that. And I think it, I think it was an important part of me understanding how to keep the message simple, how to make the systems simple, how to make sure that you're over communicating and you know, all of the things that, you know, when we get really good at something we tend to go fast and you know, you got to remember like you got to slow down and you got to get it to where people. Can I step back to something real quick because I have two questions for you to get you out of here and but I want to go back this concept and this was a question I was thinking about of agency. Okay. We have all this evolving AI and the pattern that I have observed that happened very slowly over my career is that there would be a new emerging technology process system, a new workflow, insurance companies going through third party intermediaries versus managing the claims themselves. You know, it kind of changed the industry. So you would, or we, we would, whoever you are, you would have to learn a new set of rules, a new set of systems, a new set of technologies and everybody would now be operating in kind of a new way. And that's the new normal. AI is evolving so fast that people are trying to adopt tools. Whether it's simple things like chat or Grok or it's lead conversion tools or it's you know, things that you put over your call center to, you know, to, to listen to everything and to give you better insights. Like there's just all these tools everywhere. But agent, agentic AI is coming. So there will be AIs that sit on top of all these AIs that you just need to speak to. And so the question is, is why do I need to learn all the underlying technologies anyway?
- [68:52]
B
Yeah, I think I'll say a couple things about where I see this going and then I'll answer your question. Today we started off with mostly dumb chatbots. In some cases they couldn't even access the Internet. They were pre trained on a model and they were quite smart but they had many flaws and limitations. Then they got connected to the Internet and then when ChatGPT came out with Model 01, we got kind of the first, what we call Reasoning models which were able to reason through things. Reasoning is a super important component in the evolution of agentic AI, because if it's going to be truly autonomous, it's going to need to learn how to reason through things on its own. And the best way for it to learn how to reason through things is pre training and something called inference training where it reasons with us effectively, for lack of a better definition. And so we're kind of in this place now where we're really getting to the meat and potatoes around reasoning. So we're starting to see some agents that are a little bit agentic. Now. There's a huge difference between agents and automations or workflows, right? Workflows and automations are great and they're smarter and they use generative AI, but they're not quite agents where they're reasoning on their own and doing their own thing. But those are coming and they're coming very quickly. Now the reason why you would want to switch it would, it would be akin to asking me, you know, imagine it's the early 1900s and you're like, joe, why should I switch to, you know, electricity, right? And giving me any other justification after that, why would I just wait? It seems like electricity is going to get more robust. I might as well just wait until they have streetlights and it's in every store and all that. It's not exactly the same analogy, but it's a useful one because there's so much short term utility and electricity and there's so much short term utility in using AI, even if it's just a chatbot or you're using generative AI, you know, which is text, image or video, to enhance a part of your workflow that you can't or won't do, right? That's an important part. Like I teach people that AI is best used in places where you can't or won't do it. Break it into small tasks. I can't write code and I won't do my own taxes or I won't do my own tax categorization. But AI is great at both those things, right? So where is that true in your life? We may not get to proper agentic AI for, I don't know, at best another six months and maybe a little bit like a year, I don't know, 18 months. In the short term. There is in tremendous, a tsunami of opportunity right now to be learning how to use AI and to be using AI in your business, right? So there's $11 trillion that are being transferred from boomers to millennials and Gen Z. Right. A trillion is a big number. Go look up the difference between a million, a billion in a trillion seconds to get a sense of how big a trillion is. Okay, it's 30 over 31,000 years, but just Google that. It's. It's. Or chat GPT. It's. It's a. It's. It's astonishing. So all this money is changing hands and it's happening right now. AI is going. It's. It's forecasted to increase GDP by upwards of 8%. Okay, the industrial revolution was 4%. And the big tech boom from the late 90s till the 2010s, that was 4.4%. 8%. That's a double double. Okay, so that. And that's not going to happen all at once. It's happening now, right now, as we speak. You've got a bunch of money being transferred. You've got insane levels of capability that weren't PhD level reasoning, that's obedient and intern, like at your disposal for like 30 bucks a month. So, so that's the reason why. Because if you're a capitalist and you like to ethically exchange the highest forms of value for money and value, enterprise value, now is the time, right? Yesterday would have been good, but today is the next best time to start learning AI. And I don't care if you are like older or like really experienced in your domain and you feel like, oh, like AI, like I'm too far behind. There's two schools of thought. I'm too far behind, or I know too much, that stuff doesn't work. But the ironic thing is, if you're way up the experience curve in your domain, whether that's franchising or real estate or coaching or leadership or accounting or whatever, all the mental models that you bring to talk to your chatbot automatically make you smarter because you can ask better questions. Here's what most people don't understand is in. In the, in the age where you have infinite answers, easy, cheap answers, which is the age that we're in infinite supply, the demand for good questions goes through the roof. And it's us that are up the experience curve to ask the best questions. You ask the best questions, you get the best utility out of these tools. So if you're feeling like you're left behind in this AI thing, we're like in the bottom of the second inning. Like it's early days and there's literally a sideways eight unlimited opportunity right now. I couldn't be more of A preacher for this stuff. So that's why you should use it. You should use it because you can help people faster. You can empower your teams to do more work in their zone of genius and get more output for less effort. And you can make more margin, which means more money, which means more value to reinvest yourself in the world and your business and your community or whatever the case is. Like that's why right now when the agents come, it's not that it's going to be too late, it's just that like you're going to already have needed the AI muscle in the first place. So why not install it now, extract the value and then when the agents come it just makes it easier. You already have the railroad tracks built. We're just going to swap the cars out with you using the chat to having an agent use the chat and get you a better outcome faster.
- [74:12]
A
Beautifully said. All right, I've got a curveball and a fastball.
- [74:17]
B
All right, let's do it.
- [74:18]
A
Curveball. Gun to your head, something you care deeply about at risk. You have to start a new business in the next 30 days and it has to be something that you are not currently in or doing at all. What would it be?
- [74:31]
B
I don't know about the doing it all thing. Gun to the head, what would I start over the next 24 months? There's supposed to be $157 billion industry for AI enabled services. So I would take whatever service is already working, red ocean or blue ocean, and I would come in from the ground up, guns blazing, so to speak. Since we're talking about gun to the head here, AI enabled from the ground up, that means every team member, every workflow, every automation. So we're getting 3 to 5x the output per normal human and what that means is better margin. So I can go into a bloody red ocean with low margin, a commodity based business and I can reign supreme because I'm faster, I'm better and I'm going good. And now if you said if you didn't put the caveat of like aren't currently doing now I am not doing AI implementation services but I think there's two huge opportunities that that are my shiny objects that I have to ignore every day. One is helping people install AI automations into their business right now and the other one is starting the world's premier AI training organization. Because that's a hundred million dollar business in a couple years beyond the shadow of a doubt. If you're world class and know what you're Doing those two things are huge opportunities that aren't my opportunities to have right now. But that's. That's what I would do, literally, if I didn't have daily and didn't have prime and didn't have a third kid coming in three weeks.
- [75:42]
A
Weeks. Yeah, I. I get the sense that you've. You've got your priorities well in line and under control.
- [75:51]
B
I'm trying. You know, one of the. One of the things that helps me is I actually. And I. I'll give this away for free. If you go to DM Joe, as in direct message DM Joe.com and you just message me the word time, that'll take you to my Instagram inbox. I have an automation in there. Just send me the word time and I will send you the prompt that I use and that I teach for how to organize my time each week. It's an AI audit of my time. I use it in chat GPT and it starts to know my patterns and it keeps me honest so that I can keep my priorities straight, I can keep my calendar straight, I can keep the shiny objects at bay. And I think, like, when you take a highly capable entrepreneur who's probably more inclined to have ADD and probably more inclined to chase shiny objects, and they run this prompt on Sunday morning or on Monday morning of every week, magical things will happen to your business. So go to dmjo.com and just send me the word time and you'll get a response and I'll get you this prompt for free.
- [76:44]
A
Awesome. Great, great value. Great giveaway. All right, here's one right down the middle. You had one sentence to make an impact in somebody's life. What would it be?
- [76:55]
B
Oh, that's so good. One sentence. Can it be a run on sentence?
- [77:00]
A
Yeah, I can. As long as you want. Because usually you get a couple of words, then a long paragraph explanation or two.
- [77:07]
B
Yeah, let me see. It would be give more than you take, make it better than you found it, and have grace for everybody's perspective because we're all on our own individual journey together.
- [77:27]
A
I don't think you need to add anything to that. That's perfectly said.
- [77:32]
B
Thank you. Great.
- [77:33]
A
All right, Joe, it's been great, man.
- [77:35]
B
My pleasure. Thanks for having me, Jeff.
- [77:37]
A
All right. I'm Jeff Duden. We've been here with Joel Stulte and we have been on the home front. Thanks for listening.