How To Spend $1 Million Dollars A Year On Marketing (Feat. Rick Wallace)

Summary

The WarPlan Podcast – Episode Summary

Episode: How To Spend $1 Million Dollars A Year On Marketing (Feat. Rick Wallace)

Host: Joshua Latimer
Guest: Rick Wallace
Date: February 12, 2026

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Overview

This episode is a no-holds-barred masterclass in entrepreneurial mindset, high-velocity marketing, and leadership, featuring Rick Wallace, founder of a multi-location lawn care and fertilization company. Rick and host Joshua Latimer share unconventional yet battle-tested perspectives on scaling a business, reframing personal identity, and using massive action and volume to dominate markets. If you want to break mental limits, understand the “real game” of money and marketing, and learn how to build a business that prints fortune (and helicopters), this is the episode for you.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Rick's Backstory: From "Lawn Boy" to Multi-Millionaire Entrepreneur

• Started at 12: Rick began cutting grass at 12 after his father lost his job, vowing to control his own destiny.
• Six-figure Teen: By 16, Rick was running a $100k/year business. (05:00)
• Disdain for Academia: Rick’s early experience with dismissive teachers and useless business classes gave him a “chip on his shoulder” and contempt for academic authority vs. real-world entrepreneurship.
• First Acquisition: Story of buying a fertilization company at a Waffle House with a “write your offer on a napkin” method—began his shift into recurring revenue fertilization rather than low-value landscaping. (06:45)
• Growth Through Grit: Struggled entering new markets, nearly failed in Florida, but persistence and learning from a successful operator (now his #2) led to explosive growth, now at three locations and nearly 10,000 clients. (10:10)

“I just remember one teacher looking at my truck and I thought, ‘I make more money than you do, what are you making fun of me for?’” – Rick (05:00)

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2. The “Mental War” of Entrepreneurship and Identity Expansion

• Mindset Over Everything: Both Rick and Joshua discuss how business is won first in the mind—more than tactics, it's about personal identity and decision velocity. (13:28)
• Decision Velocity: The speed between thinking and doing is the #1 differentiator—move faster, make more decisions, gather data and adjust. (14:19–15:53)
• Compound Effect: Rapid, repeated action builds a larger “decision data set,” leading to mastery and outsized results. Even “failure” is just fast iteration.
• Power Defined: The “latency” between intent and manifestation (aka how fast you can make things real) is the true definition of power. (16:07–17:50)

“If you can collapse the space between thinking and doing, you can outpace everyone. That’s decision velocity.” – Rick (14:19)
“The game of money starts in your mind.” – Joshua (00:13)

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3. Volume: The Real Secret Behind Breakout Growth

• Small Thinkers Underestimate Volume: Most businesses think they’re doing ‘enough’ (e.g., 300 flyers is a lot), but real scale comes from 30,000 flyers; 5,000 door knocks, not 100. (21:29)
• Hiring With Volume: It takes 20 interviews, not 3, to find a superstar hire; hundreds of pre-interviews is normal for Rick.
• Marketing as Massive Action: Rick ran 3,000 Facebook ads in a year—insane iteration leads to a data advantage and market dominance. (25:35)

“I tell people, ‘Do some flyers.’ They come back, ‘I did 300, it didn’t work.’ That’s not volume. It’s 30,000. It’s not 100 door knocks, it’s 5,000. There’s a misunderstanding of the effort required to build momentum.” – Joshua (20:00)
“We ran 3,000 Facebook ads last year. You collapse time by doing volume.” – Rick (25:35)

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4. Identity, Permission, and Leaning Into Your True Nature

• “Be the Ferrari, Not the Minivan”: Some people are built for intensity and speed; suppressing your high-voltage energy for societal approval is a path to misery (31:00–35:00).
• You’re Not Broken: Many “evolutionary hunters”—entrepreneurs—feel out of place because the world is designed for the status-quo “crop duster,” not the “fighter jet.” Embrace your identity, stop apologizing, and use your nature as a weapon.
• Identity as Constraint: Quoting Tony Robbins, Rick highlights that if you see yourself as a $1 million guy, you’ll subconsciously cap yourself there. Identify as big as you want to go. (36:11–37:49)

“Some of us are Ferraris… It’s hard for us to slow down. If you can tap into your hyperfocus, you can work four times harder than the average person.” – Rick (30:38)
“The constraint is your personal belief in yourself.” – Rick (37:49)
“You’re not broken. You don’t need to be fixed… You always were this leader, now you’re just letting yourself out.” – Joshua (95:03)

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5. Marketing Masterclass: Volume, Iteration, and Edginess

• Master One Channel First: The common advice to “diversify marketing” is a trap—dominate a single acquisition channel, iterate till mastered, then expand. (55:53)
• Testing Edge-Cutting Creative: Willingness to be vulnerable, be polarizing, and even offend. Ugly ads often outperform beautiful ones. “The best marketing doesn’t look like marketing.” (58:19)
• Monitor Data: If you’re not tracking every variable (cost per acquisition, conversions, etc.), you can’t find your actual “silver bullet.”
• Pattern Interrupt & Labels: Use messaging that stands out. Rick swears in ads, mocks “private equity” as “Gucci guys,” and creates strong pattern-interrupts. (65:49–71:47)
• Polarization is Key: If your marketing doesn’t attract complaints or pushback, it isn’t strong enough to attract fiercely loyal buyers either. (71:47–72:12)

“The only problem with your piece is it looks like marketing. The best marketing doesn’t look like marketing.” – (58:32)
“If you’re not willing to break through the clutter, you’re gonna be the clutter.” – Rick (68:53)
“Dan Kennedy says: if you haven’t offended someone by noon, you’re not marketing hard enough.” – Joshua (72:03)

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6. Unit Economics & “Frap” – Enabling Unlimited Marketing

• Unit Economics Is Your Moat: Most small businesses have bad economics: low price + low margin can't withstand marketing spend.
• Raise Prices, Increase Frequency: Rick raised per-service and annual customer prices repeatedly (from $70 to $100/apps, 6 to 9 apps/year), drastically increasing margin and making $1M+ marketing budgets viable. Every increase—when done right—resulted in no drop in conversions. (78:31–82:31)
• Two-Way Decisions: Try new pricing with new customers (low risk), test data, then scale once confident (Jeff Bezos’ “two-way door” strategy).
• Anchor Pricing: Lead with a high price, then delight with discounts or special offers.

“On pricing, the lever is enormous. Every time I raised prices, I never lost more than 5% of customers even going up 20%.” – Rick (81:19)
“If you present it right, and you’re always on sale, even your sale is still higher than your old price.” – Joshua (82:31)

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7. Leadership Through Identity Shift & Pouring Into Others

• Engineer Others’ Transformations: Rick tells stories of empowering his team—teaching them “who they are,” funding pilot licenses for fleet managers, and watching their identities shift toward leadership and mastery.
• Culture of Rapid Action: “In our company, if we say we’re going to do something, it’s done within 24 hours. Implementation is non-negotiable.” (17:50)
• Pouring Into Others Multiplies Impact: As Rick mentors, he sees joy in others’ wins, not just his own—rewards beyond money.

“If you want to set your team on fire, pour into them and tell them who they are.” – Rick (36:11)

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8. The True Regret: Not Being Yourself

• Five Regrets of the Dying: The top regret people have in life is not being true to themselves, not living life on their own terms due to fear or social conditioning. (97:21)
• Permission to Be: Rick closes with a call to entrepreneurial listeners to stop apologizing for who they are, whether that’s being “workaholic,” “hyperactive,” or “obsessive.” Wealth can be a trap too; fulfillment comes from authentically leaning into your makeup.

“The closer you get to being your true self, the more you will enjoy life—and I think the money will come.” – Rick (99:01)

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Memorable Quotes & Moments (with Timestamps)

• “You can't get worse by making more decisions; you can only get better.” – Joshua (16:08)
• “Entrepreneurs are evolutionary hunters… You have to know what’s on the other side of the mountain.” – Joshua (32:53)
• “Marketing is everything. Everything is marketing.” – Joshua (25:08)
• “If you’re testing two things, you learn one of two things. If you test 10, you learn more. You have to pair data with iteration.” – Rick (60:02)
• “If your marketing isn’t getting pushback, it isn’t strong enough.” – Rick (71:49)
• “The difference between a goal and a dream is the plan and the action.” – Joshua (49:29)
• “You don’t have to become something—you have to let out what you always were.” – Joshua (95:03)
• “You’re not broken. You don’t need to be fixed.” – Joshua (100:04)

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Important Timestamps

| Time | Segment / Topic | |--------|-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 03:55 | Rick’s backstory: childhood business, rejecting academia, first acquisitions | | 10:10 | Struggling and doubling in new markets; learning from great operators | | 14:19 | Decision velocity explained; thinkers + doers; moving fast | | 21:29 | The power of volume in hiring, marketing, and growth | | 25:35 | Running thousands of Facebook ads; 10X failures to 10X growth | | 31:00 | Embracing your true entrepreneurial identity (“Ferraris vs. Minivans”) | | 36:11 | Identity as the core constraint for business growth | | 55:53 | Why you shouldn’t diversify marketing channels until mastery | | 58:32 | Ugly, pattern-breaking, authentic marketing principle explained | | 65:49 | Using labels and pattern interrupts in messaging; being polarizing | | 78:31 | Frap & unit economics: the foundation of affordably scaling marketing spend | | 81:19 | Pricing levers—safe ways to raise price without losing customers | | 89:09 | Transforming your team by helping them shift their identity | | 97:21 | The #1 regret of the dying: not living as your true self |

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Tone & Language

• Authentic, Candid, Raw: Both Joshua and Rick speak with little filter, sharing personal stories and hard-earned wisdom.
• Motivational, Sometimes Contrarian: Willing to challenge common advice and social norms; urging listeners to “think bigger, move faster, do more.”
• Philosophical, Pragmatic, Tactical: Blends high-concept abstract discussions with down-to-earth implementation steps.
• Edgy, Direct Language: Occasional swearing (listeners cautioned), especially from Rick, but always directed at making a point.

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Final Takeaways

• Success is a mental war before it’s a business one.
• Identity is both the fuel and the limit of achievement.
• Volume and velocity of action trump nearly all else; marketing is a game of running the fastest and hardest in a direction that works.
• Everything is marketing, and most effective marketing is bold, polarizing, and not afraid to “be ugly.”
• Your business can afford massive marketing—if you master unit economics.
• Most important: become more of who you truly are, not less.

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For more gems from Joshua and Rick on building, scaling, and weaponizing your brain for business domination, check out warplan.com.

Transcript

[A]

Wake up.

[B]

Your competition is asleep. It's you against the world. And if you want to win, we need to get a few things straight. Your business is a mental war. Your success is a mental war. And making money is a game. And the game of money starts in your mind. This podcast exists to help you weaponize your brain through advanced marketing mindset and money concepts. To have what others don't, you need to know what others won't. Your future fortune awaits. Welcome to the War Plan Podcast. Hey, what's up, my friend? Welcome to the War Plan Podcast. So I gotta give a disclaimer up front. There is gold in this episode. It's a very strange, unique, amazing episode. We talk about abstract ideas, and here's the story, and here's the disclaimer. Okay, I got a chance to go meet up with Rick Wallace in Florida. He has a fertilization company across two states, three locations. His story is really powerful and he's really a philosopher. The disclaimer part is that Rick loves to swear like a sailor. I mean, it's just part of his nature and who he is. I love Rick. We've become very close friends. He was actually my very first hundred thousand dollar private consulting client. And you know, we worked together for a year, then he paid again and we worked together a year. And he's just done incredible things and his story is amazing. And if you want to grow your business, you know, see through the language stuff and get to the heart of it. The way he looks at marketing, the way he thinks about success, it's really interesting. And not to mention the fact that I got to fly in Rick's helicopter on this trip that he bought because of how successful Frapp has been for his business. Now he's a major implementer. He moves quick and he gets big, huge results. So if you want to buy a helicopter, this episode will teach you how to buy a helicopter. But there's probably going to be like 247beeps that my oldest son, Maverick will edit because he's our in house podcast editor. So get to work, Maverick. And for everybody that has little ears, maybe you want to listen to this one on your own. But there's a lot of gold and business wisdom. I hope you enjoy it. Take care. God bless. Hey, my friend, welcome back to the War Plan Podcast. It might sound a little echoey. I am in a private, secret place. I'm in Florida, in the Jacksonville area. And I have a special treat for you. I'm joined by a maniac, an entrepreneurial legend that no one knows about. But I know about him. We've become very close over the last three years. I've watched him double his business to eight figure level. But the ironic thing is he didn't even start yet. And we're going to talk about all kinds of crazy stuff because a kid from Georgia that people look down on called him the yard boy, the lawn boy. He's the lawn man now. You know, can you imagine building something where you make millions of dollars in personal income? Is that possible? Who do you have to think that you are to even be able to do that? So, Rick Wallace, how you doing, my friend?

[A]

I'm doing good.

[B]

So I don't have a specific direction to take this, but we were just talking before recording about identity and about volume and about the differ high achievers and everybody else and Maybe there's like 100 differences but if you distill it down, maybe let's start with the volume, give a little bit of your backstory first and then want to break people's brain with the amount of stuff you do to get the result that you get. Just so we can reframe some of the small businesses to doing more. You know, Hormozi always says, you know, more better, new. Like take the thing that works and do 100 times more of that thing, then do it even better. More nuance, more depth, more ninja. Yeah, then do a new thing.

[A]

But tell us about works almost every time.

[B]

60% of the time it works every time. Tell us about yourself and we'll get into it.

[A]

Well, you know, I started cutting grass when I was 12 and took it pretty seriously. My dad lost his job and I guess there's like, you know, he worked for someone and he was a treasurer and then that position sort of got eliminated when they went CEO, cfo. Kind of changed the structure and you know, it kind of, it changed me when I was 12 because I was like, I never want to. I want to control my destiny. My mom heard me like walk out of the. Our rental house. We didn't even own a house back then when I was 12. And. And she was like, where are you going? At 6am she heard the screen door shut. And I'm like, I'm going, I'm going to work. I'm going to make this happen, you know. And so that's how it started. And when I was 16, I was doing about 100 grand in revenue, taking my. I was the big dork that took the, the mower to the.

[B]

You were doing six figures at 16 yeah, I didn't know that.

[A]

Yeah, I was going to. Going to high school, working after school. All the other kids were playing sports. I was the dork with the truck and trailer.

[B]

You were like the rich dork in high school.

[A]

They didn't really.

[B]

High school.

[A]

I think they picked up on it. It was a. It was a private school that I was. You know, I didn't. My parents didn't buy me anything. I had to start, which was a great lesson, you know, And I remember one teacher, one time kind of making fun of me, looking out the window, looking at my truck, and I was just thinking, I make more money than you do. What are you making fun of me for? You know, and ever since then, I've had sort of a disrespect for a lack of respect for academia. And it got even worse when I went to. My dad wanted me to go to college, so I went to this community college, and I remember one of the professors standing up in class telling us, we're all idiots. And, you know, I just decided I didn't want to take life advice from a tenured professor. So I quit. And, you know, I got. Grew my landscape company to 3 million. And then, you know, I would wake up in the morning and I'd be like, man, I'm building something that's. That's worthless. Like, residential lawn maintenance, landscaping is just not. It's not worth anything. And I just felt terrible working as hard as I did for something that just was worthless. And this is probably when I was 35 or so. And so I bought a little lawn care business. Old man. I had to beg him to sell it to me because he was like, I'm not selling this to you, Rick. I'm gonna somebody's eyes out when I sell something. I'm like, well, let's just talk about it. Let's just talk about it. So we met at the Waffle House, and one day, finally, he's like, let's just meet at the Walf House. We'll talk about it. And he had two pens, and he grabbed a couple napkins, and he said, all right, you write your price on your napkin. I'll write my price on my napkin and turn it over and let's swap.

[B]

Classic.

[A]

So it. But he was kind of an ornery old bastard, so I didn't want to. Like, I didn't want to insult him. And so I had to. I gave him my best numbers, 193 accounts. You know, he wrote 80,000 on his napkin, I wrote 60 on mine. We swapped them and. And I saw his face kind of, you know, kind of give this kind of surprise look, like, well, that's reasonable. So it's like, meet in the middle at 70. And that's how Liquid Lawn started. And it was actually named Liquid Lawn back then.

[B]

And just to clarify, when you say lawn care business, you're not talking about mowing, you're talking about fertilizing.

[A]

Yeah, Spraying, spraying, reoccurring, revenue, fertilizer, weed control, fertilizer.

[B]

Low ticket, though, which is a totally different model than $20,000 landscape hardscape project.

[A]

Yeah. So when I. When I bought his business, like, you know how people just give you access to their software? Well, he, like, walked into the office with his desktop, and he's like, here's my client list. It's in here.

[B]

You brought the whole computer.

[A]

We're going through some of his clients, and I'm like, what about this Dorothy Smith? And he's like, oh, she's dead. She's dead. She's. Take her off. And. But he sold it to me. And it was. We started with 193 clients in Macon, Georgia. And, you know, at the peak of the season, we'll kind of touch on about 6,000. Now, it took about. We doubled every year for several years. And. And then we. We decided we wanted to go to Florida. So I. I found a. I really just wanted to get the license, and then I would start something. But then I met somebody with those willing to sell me the license. But then he just. I just really liked the guy. His business was only 56,000 bucks, and rental license for a year is going to be like 39,000 bucks. And. And just walked away from our meeting just being like, I really like this guy. And so my wife and me were at dinner one night. She said, why don't we just buy the business in Daytona? And I'm like, well, I'm not really crazy about Daytona. Like, it's. It's an older area. It's not growing super fast, you know, but the operator was part of the. Part of the equation. So I bought that business. And for three years, we just. Gosh, it was hard. Like, the things that worked in Georgia did not work in Florida, and so we had to dig deep. It was like one of the. It was. I don't know. It was a really hard period for me. But Josh, the guy that I bought, was just great. He. I just. When I go to his shop, everything would be clean. The trucks would be clean and be organized. Like, it was pretty he had a gift for, like, systemization and organization. Now, looking back, I can see that more clearly. But. But after three years, something we were doubling. You know, we would go from like 100 clients to 200 to 200 to 400, 400, 800. But when you're used to putting on like a thousand, two thousand clients a year, you know, that's like, it's really difficult mentally. But we learned a lot of lessons that made us dig, like, really deep. And. But by year three, then we started doubling like a thousand to 2,000 to 4,000. So now we're at. At the beginning of this year, when we ended 25, we'll be at like 4,700 clients there and about. So it's right at 9,500 clients total. We're getting close to that 10,000 mark.

[B]

That's insane.

[A]

Josh ended up being our second in command. You know, he's. He's running operations for all of our branches now. We ended up. The cool thing about Daytona was, like, I didn't realize that I was getting, you know, an integrator, you know, right hand man that really knew operations and built like, I've done so many personality tests on him because I'm like, how do we get more of you?

[B]

And I need a clone.

[A]

Yeah. And we've. We've figured out some things. And so. But then we. Last year, we. We've always been targeting St. John's like, Jacksonville area. We just drive an hour. But we finally found an office. And, you know, I mean, we have six. We started our. We started our office with, like, seven trucks, you know, so it was. It was. Now we have three locations. And. And in Florida, we've been growing at 100% a year, which is, you know, figuring out how to get clients and then figuring out all the systems and, you know, just building trucks has been getting enough trucks in time with, I don't know, it's a challenge, but it's a lot of fun.

[B]

One of the reasons I want to interview you, Rick, is, and I say this completely authentically, you're one of the most interesting people I've ever met. And then because we've talked so much the last few years, I've just seen, like, this radical transformation. But to help the people listening to this show, I want to dig deep on a couple of things, because when people listen to a podcast. Yeah, you know, we did this, we expanded, we got this. People don't understand what's required to get a huge result. I mean, just for clarification, Rick's companies, by the way, Like I said, he's just getting started. This is like pre game, okay? He's got a very, very big vision, a plan and the team to do it. It's going to happen, it's happening fast. But they don't understand the volume, the mindset, the marketing, the identity, all this stuff required. They just don't. They have a misunderstanding. It's not their fault. I mean, we're going to just talk about that. But I want to go back to the academic thing for a second. I have a chip on my shoulder for academics too. This started before I started a business. I worked in the mortgage business and because I grew up poor, I just thought I was dumb. And rich people must be smart. Until I met this college professor I was doing a home loan for. And after an hour talking to this guy, I literally realized this guy was really dumb. He was a dumb person. I'm not even being disrespectful. I'm not insulting him, I'm describing him. Okay, he was a dumb person. And I had this cognitive dissonance, like, wait a sec. But that's impossible. He's a college professor and it was some big school in New York. I can't remember what it was, but the guy couldn't balance his checkbook. He didn't know anything. His whole life was chaos. He was in debt like he was dumb. Nothing was impressive about what he said. And that's when I first realized, like, wait a second, like degrees and pieces of paper studying theory. Maybe it doesn't mean as much as I thought that it did. And I also noticed throughout my entrepreneur career that academics despise entrepreneurs oftentimes. Have you let go of that chip on your shoulder? Is that part of the reason that drove you and that like, is it a negative thing to be driven by like a chip on your shoulder in the first place? And I don't know, what are your thoughts on that topic?

[A]

I mean, I still have a chip on my shoulder because I hate private equity and you know, like that pot that, that clip I sent you the other day. Thinker. Doer.

[B]

Yeah. You know, yeah.

[A]

You know, a lot of times the most successful people are thinkers and doers and you can't be, you really need to be both to be really successful. Think deeply through things, but then don't get stuck on the thinking and just doing. And you know, we talk about decision velocity a lot. That was a term you kind of mentioned to me. And you know, I truly believe that I teach that to my team. Like, one of my friends sent me this awesome little snippet from a book and it was talking about reducing, like, reducing the amount of time between thinking and doing, like the space between thinking and doing. Like, if you collapse that, we would.

[B]

Need to call that something. It's almost like a KPI for your brain that time.

[A]

So powerful. Because people, I mean, you told me one time, like, you know, some of the higher, like when you were at a, at a, at a funnel hacking thing or at Russell Brunson Group, you're talking about like the people, as soon as they got the idea, they were running off out of the room, doing it.

[B]

Literally.

[A]

Yeah. And I think if that is. Nobody talks about that. No. You know, everybody's scared of failure. And I get it. I mean, failure is painful for me. I mean, it teaches me lessons. But, but moving that fast, like when I look back about like leaning into certain scenarios like that, like now it's about how fast can I move, how, how many decisions can I make? And I have framework for, you know, I love Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett, but particularly Charlie Munger that has like these frameworks about how to make decisions and you can actually make, I mean, they make billion dollar decisions in three minutes and they just process elimination. I mean, that's mostly what they do. But, you know, when you have frameworks on how to make decisions, you can make them extremely fast. And when you have the mindset of like, you're going to win some, you're going to learn some. Like, that's one of my favorite Mattress Mac quotes. And you just, the faster you make decisions, the faster you're going to get where you want to go.

[B]

Yeah. And it has a compound effect because your brain has a data set to reference that includes all the good and the bad decisions. But important part isn't the good and the bad decisions. The important part is the volume, total amount of decisions.

[A]

Well, and I mean, your definition of decision velocity is like, you increase the amount of decisions you make, so you make more decisions, you get more experience making decisions. So therefore you get better at making decisions because you've made a lot of decisions.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

So it compounds on itself.

[B]

Yeah. Because if you have a Data set with 150 decisions to reference, and you're like, okay, you know, 63% of these were not that great. And this percent was great. You know, you just have a bigger data set. You can't get worse by making more. You can only get better by making more decisions. Like, people will make three excellent decisions a year and they're poor and they're stuck. And someone might make 100 decisions a year or a thousand, even if only 10% of them are right, that person is light years ahead of the other person. And I don't know, it's perfectionism. And then the thinker doer thing is huge. I think I heard Hormozi one time talk about how the definition of power is the latency between the thought that you have and it existing. So if you think about God as having total power, there's zero latency between thought and materialization, if that makes sense. You know what I mean? He's like, let there be light. And there's no latency. And as a person it's like, oh, I want to be debt free. Well, your level of power is predicated on how long it takes for that to happen. So, like, there's this time variable. Like all this stuff ties together and hopefully this doesn't sound weird and abstract. But guys, this is the stuff we talk about, you know, this is why I love spending a day with someone like Rick. We're just talking about weird abstract things and all the big things and maybe we'll go back to volume. But what do you think about that definition of power? The latency? Like you want something to happen, it exists. If it takes a month, you have less power. If it takes a week, you have more power. If it takes a day, you have even more power. If it takes an hour, you have ultimate power. A billionaire has very low latency between things happening and what they want.

[A]

Right? Yeah. I mean, it's game changing. It sort of sets a pace for your team too. And it creates like, this energy of like, things just happening so fast. Like people. I've just had new people come into our organization. They're like, like they're intimidated because, you know, we move fast. We have high accountability. Like, you know, like when we say we're going to get something done, like, it's better be done. And, and it's not like. But we have this culture of like, it. Nobody ever, nobody ever doesn't do anything because, like, they're just so used to seeing, like, you know, somebody asked me to help them, like a sales team or something. Like it's done within 24 hours. Like an implementation. We don't think about it, we just do it.

[B]

And it's also harder to hide as a B player inside an organization like that. I think one of Hormozy's core values was speed is king when he had gym launch. But it's Harder to hide inside the organization when everybody's moving and going and think like, they basically find their way out on their own or they're exposed really fast. Where if you, as a leader are moving slow and we're always strategizing and strategizing, everybody can kind of do that. And it looks like everybody's being busy, but no one's being productive. You know what I'm saying? By the way, these Red Bulls for us. Yeah, I'm going to crack one of these bad boys. We're just settling in. It's going to get good.

[A]

Now I'm going to put a lot of water, get the juices flowing. Right.

[B]

So every. How often do you apply fertilizer to a lawn? Like every six weeks or something like that?

[A]

Five to six weeks.

[B]

So. So you're doing that 10,000 times every six weeks during the season?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

That's insane.

[A]

Yeah, you told me the other day, I think it was last year, we had 9,000 clients and, you know, we had 81,000 applications in a year.

[B]

That's so crazy.

[A]

It's a lot of. A lot of volume.

[B]

Squirting a lot of juice on a lot of lawns. I want to talk later, too about, like, frap. Just the way you've compressed, like, what you've done to your, like, margins and your economics per customer is totally insane. But I want to talk about volume still. So what am I talking about with volume? Here's what I'm talking about. With volume. I'll tell people, you know, do some flyers. You know, if you have a small company, either have time to grow your business or you have money, usually have one or more primarily, if you don't have money, you're fine because you probably have time. So it's like, go knock doors. Go pass out flyers. They'll come back to me. They're like, I did. It didn't work. I'm like, what do you mean, did it? Define what you did, and I'll determine if you did it. And they're like, well, I passed out 300 flyers. I didn't get one call. It's like, no, no, no. And I don't say this condescendingly. I didn't know. I grew up in a trailer park. And like, I was an adult in the trailer park. Correction. My point is, is it's not 300 flyers. It's 30,000 flyers. It's not your door knock 100 doors. You door knock 5,000 doors. You know, there's a misunderstanding of the amount of effort to, like, spin up momentum with marketing use. Get that? I don't know what clicked in your head, but just to set the table, and I'll just let you run with it. I'll have a lot of businesses that run Facebook ads, and they'll have three or four or five or the really overachieving ones will have, you know, 10 or 20 different ads are running. Just last year, you did thousands. Thousand. You can tell me the exact number of individual Facebook ads for split testing spending, you know, massive ad spend behind it. And the data and the volume you're doing is so abnormal, and that's why you're growing so fast. What do you have to say about all that?

[A]

Yeah, you know, you're one of the ones that kind of exposed me to, like, the volume. Like, one thing. It's kind of interesting when you talk to people that are like, if you understand what they're doing, people that are beyond you and you understand, like, the volume that they're doing, you know, you get like, this perspective shift and be like, for me, it doesn't bother me that it's a lot of work. What bothers me is when I can't figure it out and I'm stuck. And a lot of times when I can't figure something out, it's usually a volume issue. I'm not putting enough, like, effort. And I'll give you an example. Like, a lot of people, they don't know how to hire a new position. Like, when you're growing, you'll have all these new positions. You'll have a sales manager, you'll have a marketing manager. You have to hire these people that you have no idea how to hire, and that's completely normal. Like, you're not supposed to know. And normally it takes about three hires to find the right one. Unless you interview 20 people for the position. And I know that's so abnormal because I've never met anyone that's actually done it.

[B]

Yeah, but people don't even call the references. They ask for them. They don't do anything with them. It's all bare minimum. Bare minimum. And they get bare minimum results.

[A]

Yeah. So when I interview someone for a new position, I mean, we've got a couple of different steps. I do a pretty, like, intensive online questionnaire, which is my job. Ads are marketing. You know, I'm attracting who I want to attract. I'm speaking in their language, the people that I want. Very plain language. I'm not writing bullet points and all that dumb. Like, I'm not doing it that way. I'm writing a letter to someone to say hey, do you want to work here? And that's how they perceive it. Then they go to a questionnaire and I, you know it's not. If you saw one of my job ads, like my latest one, you'd be like what the is this? But, but that's how you stand out, you know.

[B]

And well, because it's marketing.

[A]

Yeah. And like, and I send them a questionnaire that's technically a pre interview. So they have to spend an hour filling it out and they have to like I just hired for an executive assistant and you know, I want to know their personality profile up front. I want to know what their MTVI is so I know how they think up front in their enneagram. And then I have them do a voice recording because a lot of times I can tell how intelligent a person is just by the way they speak. And I got 340 submissions and I read every single one of them. I mean if they didn't fill out, if they didn't, they didn't go to like some people would be like I'm not paying $2 for a personality protest. I'll do that after you hire me. And I'm like well this isn't important enough to you, you know. So I got 340 submissions for that. And I read, I read every one of them. I mean you know, unless they hit the dropout question and you know my questionnaires are fun. Like the last question is like what do you think is. And it's just like this open ended question that I got all kind of crazy answers for. And so, and then normally I'll do if it's a position that after I've you know, gone through, that's like pre interview. So I technically did 340 pre interviews and that takes time.

[B]

This is for your EA position.

[A]

Right. And then, but then when I, when I hired my marketing manager I did the same thing. But marketing is, you know, they have to think like me because I'm a marketer at heart. I call it I'm a treasure seeker is what I really am. Treasure hunter. Yeah. I'm looking for the nuances, the word that changes the way people think.

[B]

All my rich friends are like that.

[A]

They just the most valuable skill in the world.

[B]

Well that and say people introduce themselves. They're like I'm a plumber. It's like are you sure? Is that the identity you want to be? And not that there's nothing wrong with being a plumber. What I'm saying Is. It's a limiter. Like, marketing is everything. Everything is marketing. That's what we say. You know, the way you recruit, the nuance, the framing, the pre framing, the seating, the future facing, the. The languaging, the word butter, all of that. That's where all the money is, where.

[A]

The opportunity word butter from your recession. Marketing.

[B]

Yeah, it's where all the value is. It's embedded in that stuff, you know. But what about the Facebook ads? Another example of volume. How the heck did you do like 1600 or however many. How many did you do? We ran 3,000, 3,000 Facebook. I mean, but think of. Think of how much you learned and how fast you learned it by doing that. You collapse time by doing volume.

[A]

Yeah. And it still took a while to really, like, really learn it, even at that kind of volume, you know, and. But with that kind of. You're doing. And really what that is is a massive amount of iteration. And if you study Elon Musk, you know, he's blowing up rockets, but he's getting data back. And it's like doing it as fast as you can iterate until he runs out of, you know, without running out of money, basically. And that, you know, and that also brings in decision making and dealing with failure because, like, a lot of consultants won't. Won't tell you this. You know, you'll see Grant Cardone say, Hey, 10x your business by. I can't even tell you, like, how. How explained to you how what 10x even means. Like, I don't even know what his message is, except it's 10x on a book. But I mean, I mean, that's how unclear it is. But I have a very clear, like, definition of how to 10x your business is you fail 10 that you 10x your failure rate, you 10x your learning rate, and then you will 10x your growth rate.

[B]

Oh, that's so good.

[A]

That's the truth. And you. And if you're willing to, like, let yourself go there and let yourself fail and just call it experimentation, iteration, I mean, it's difficult. I struggle with it sometimes. I don't like to fail. You know, when I'm flying my helicopter and my instructors, like, I busted an airspace the other day when we were doing a maneuver, and, you know, it hurt because I was like, I just. I just messed this up. But then, you know, and then at the same time, we've talked about bounce rate. I'm like, well, I got to finish this check. This practice check. Right. You know, I'm going to. I'M going to bounce the faster I bounce. Right. Bounce back better. You're the one that told me that.

[B]

Yeah. A friend of mine told me that. He's a. He's a former professional golfer, and he said the number one KPI that predicts who's going to win the PGA Tour is this thing called bump bounce back rate. And it's, It's a. It's a measurement of how well you do on a hole immediately after doing horrifically bad on the previous hole. So it's. It's not about, like your whole round. It's only that next hole after crapping the bed on a hole, you know, so everything goes wrong. And then how well you do on the next one is a bounce back rate. And you said, you said so much stuff.

[A]

Sounds easy saying it that way, but, like, when you're in your day and you get kicked in the mouth.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You know, you get served with a lawsuit. Like, what's your bounce rate on that?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I mean, I got served with a lawsuit not too long ago. My day up.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You know, but. But it's a real thing to. To deal with, you know, bounce rates. It is.

[B]

Like, why are you the way that you are? Why is this happening to you? I mean, because. Let me just back up. You've been in business for many decades. You understand business and a piano and how to sell a job and how to hire. So you understand all the basics, like everybody listening to this does. And then something shifted in you. The last. I don't know what time frame, last few years. It's just exponential. Exponential. And like, your vision is bigger. Your momentum is bigger. Your team is galvanized. Your marketing is out of this world. I mean, really, it's. It's crazy. Rick's becoming basically famous in Jacksonville. He can't go to the grocery store because he's running so much Facebook ads and there's so much direct. Hundreds of thousands a piece of direct material, mail a week. Just bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb in Georgia, in two different markets in Florida. And it seems like you're having fun, but I've watched how hard it's been. What is happening to you and why. Why is it happening? And yes, you said you bought a helicopter. I didn't get to say that part, little yard boy that professors made fun of any of an airplane, too. He's bought multiple airplane. And I came down here because I'm selfish and I want to go for a ride in his chopper, which we're going to do after this record recording, which is so cool. Because I don't know, I mean, you're making kind of money that professional athletes make and you're just getting started. How. How did this happen? Not tactically, but like, what's the meta macro?

[A]

You know, I think it's like understanding who you are and giving yourself permission to be that person. Truthfully. You know, people like me are built to go fast. You know, I. We talked about Ferraris and minivans. Like, there's people that are Ferraris that feel bad that they're not minivans. You know, they're. They're like, well, I gotta go do. Go to T ball practice. I gotta spend eight hours with my kids. I gotta do this. And some of us aren't built that way. Like, you know, it's hard for us to like, let our minds slow down. And, you know, if you're. I don't like using the word add, but I like using the word hyperactive because that's kind of the personality type I am. My son is. You know, we need people that, you know, we're people that like to move fast. I mean, you know, we get distracted easily. But then if we. We also have the capability of hyper focus. So if you can tap into that hyper focus, you can probably work like four times harder than the average person. And you can. It's like, it's sort of like, you know, I quit drinking like four years ago and so. And one of the reasons I drank was because I, I wanted to shut my mind off and just have a break at night, you know, and it would make me more sociable. It would allow me to, like, just, you know, calm down a bit and. But, you know, really the alcohol wasn't serving me. And I can make an argument now that says like, will. Will alcohol help help you achieve your goals? And I already know the answer, you know, but think about that. And will alcohol make your family life better? You know, it certainly didn't make my family life better. My wife was, you know, grateful that I, you know, I don't do that anymore. But there's, there's. But at the same time, there's, there's, you know, there's consequences for that because that means I may not be able to go to sleep until 2am because my mind won't shut up and. Or I can't have. I can't like, engage in small talk. Like, I just have to bug out. Like, I'm done. You know, I can't talk about dumb. I don't care about. Like, that's just the Way I'm built.

[B]

Well.

[A]

And I don't have to apologize for that. Like, I've learned.

[B]

I don't know, but most people think they do. And they live their whole life trying to conform into this thing that they're not. They're a square peg. Trying, feeling shame that they're not fitting in the round hole. Or you and I. I know you already know this, but another friend of mine, Alex Charfen, wrote a little tiny book called the Entrepreneur Personality Type. It's called ept, and he says that entrepreneurs are evolutionary hunters.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

And so the way he describes it so fast that it gives me goosebumps, because I know you're vibing with this, but if you're in a tribe of 100 people living in the forest, you know there's a percentage, a small percentage of people that cannot stay in the village. You have to know what's on the other side of that mountain. And then there's a bigger percentage of the tribe that's, like, perfectly content to maintain the status quo. And by the way, nobody's broken, and no one needs to be fixed. The problem is that the status quo people are trying to pull in the evolutionary hunter people to be like, what are you doing? Why'd you take that risk? Get back here. And then the evolutionary hunter people are like, what's wrong with you? Why do you want to do the status quo? Both of them have to exist for society to work. And it's like knowing who you are, being comfortable with it. Or my friend Tony Greb Meyer. He has at least a $60 million business, has been growing fat. Maybe he's at 100 now. I haven't talked to him in over a year. But he's like, josh, you're not broken. You don't need to be fixed. He told me that maybe, like, eight years ago. And I was like. I wanted it to be true so bad.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And I'm like, is that true? It doesn't mean that we can't improve. That's not what that means. What it means is that your core nature is correct. You are programmed to be this thing, to look over the hill, right? You climb the tallest tree, and you're gazing and you're like, that's where we got to go. Like, visionaries are weirdos. It's lonely to be a big thinker, Ferrari person. And when you don't even know what we're talking about. Some people have never even heard people like us talk about this. It can, like, change your whole life. You can set yourself free because if you're raised by normies and there's a bunch of crop duster airplanes, and you're the fighter jet, and everyone thinks something's wrong with you, it's like, ain't nothing wrong with me. Like, this is what I am. Yeah. But you believe it, and then you live and die and don't do your purpose.

[A]

Yeah. And it's hard to connect with people that, like, really get it, and. Because everybody's. I just meet so many entrepreneurs that feel guilty about their work hours and. And some people are just designed to work like we are. That's just the way we're built. And when you. And I'm not saying don't spend any time with your family, it's hard. You have to figure out ways to do it that your mind will. Will be in sync. But, you know, Mattress Mac, you know, I just met him the other day, and he, you know, can you explain.

[B]

Who he is a little bit for people I don't know, because he was someone you were looking up to and, like, gaining a lot of, like, inspiration from.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

You got the chance to meet him, read a book.

[A]

He wrote a book a long time ago. Always think big. And I just loved his quotes. I'm a big quote guy, and he's just like, one of his. One of my favorite. He's got a couple favorite quotes about that I love. You know, you win some, you learn some, and you think that way you can't ever lose. And, you know, work is life's greatest therapy. And that's the way it's been for me. I've learned, you know, my business has been like a pressure cooker, like a furnace burning impurities out of me. I mean, if you want to lead a team, you have to be high character. You have to be. You have to do what you say you're going to do. You have to. And this is one of the things I've learned from you, Josh. Just like, you know, pouring into people. I mean, you've poured into me, you know, and if you want to set your team on fire, you pour into them and tell them who they are, man.

[B]

The power of words. It really goes back to identity. I view words as containers. You know, they contain life or death. They contain power. I always say, everything is marketing. Marketing is everything. But the caveat to that is the hardest person in the world to market to is ourself, you know?

[A]

Yeah. I mean, when you're at the top, nobody's gonna tell you. You know, I mean, I'm not saying I'm at the top. But like when, when you're, when you're leading, like, it's very hard for people to affirm you as leader and, and it's hard for them to see in you what you want to believe in yourself, you know, and you'll get these glimpses of like, what you can be. And I mean, I'm not a big fan of Tony Robbins. Like, I mean, you know, I mean, half what they say is Garber marketing gooberish. But one, one thing he does say, and he's a big, it may be his core principle, I don't know. But you know, identity can be a constraint. And when I, when I look at that, that, you know, if, if you identify as a $1 million guy, that's who you're going to be, that's your next constraint. If you identify as a $10 million guy, that's who you're going to be. And you have to continually, like he calls it, expand your identity. Because I mean, I look at constraints as one of the, the things I look at in business where I illuminate constraints as fast as I can. I try to identify them, illuminate them and. But considering your own personal belief in yourself as a constraint is a, is a totally different way of looking at things.

[B]

It's like the ultimate constraint too, because it's invisible.

[A]

What's the hardest thing? Because nobody's people aren't going around telling you, Josh, you're going to be worth a billion dollars. Nobody's, nobody's going around telling you that. Nobody's going around telling me I'm going to be worth $100 million.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And you know, in fact, they're probably telling you you can't do it.

[B]

Well, the closer you get, the more they want you to fail. Like, it gets lonelier the higher you rise. And it's, it's like a tribal nature of things.

[A]

You know, it's like, because you're exposing insecurity in others and in that insecurity in them wants to pull you down.

[B]

The other part of it too is like not every person necessarily is a pull down, negative, jealous person, but that's a large segment of the population. The other part of it, it's kind of like if you're a really beautiful woman, less men talk to you because they assume all the men talk to you. And if you're just doing things and you're in momentum, what's happening is a lot of the people that do believe, they don't say anything to you about it. Because they're like, you're the most confident person they've ever met. You're the most momentum person they've ever met. And so they don't really speak words of affirmation because it feels redundant or pointless. Like, you already know that. And so that happens too, you know, or I know I've met people that have mentored me or that have helped me. I don't know what to say to them. Like, you meet them. Did I tell you the story about Jordan Peterson and my son Maverick meeting him? We went to an event. I paid extra money for the meet and greet. And so Maverick loves Jordan Peterson. And so he shakes Jordan Peterson's hand. He's like, thank you, Mr. Peterson, you changed my life. And then Jordan Peterson, because he's just doing like, shake picture, shake picture. He stops, bends over, gets in Maverick's face. He's like, in what way did it change your life? Like, he genuinely was interested. And Maverick had no answer prepared. And he just stared at him all awkward, like, totally crap the bed on it. It was super hilarious. But it's like, what do you say to Jordan Peterson? And then the other thing is, when you do start getting validation, you become numb to it because people are like, even with my first podcast, and who am I? No one knows who I am. Right. But I've affected thousands of people. Not millions, but thousands of thousands. And people are like, Josh this and that. And it means something to me. But at the same time, it's like, my point is, is your identity at the end of the day, has to come internal. Yeah, it has to, because there's nothing else consistently going to be feeding it. You know, it's just nice to get that, that breath from someone else when you can. But you gotta ultimately believe it's hard.

[A]

For an entrepreneur to do that. And, you know, it's. Anne Rand is one of my favorite authors, how the Fountainhead. I just reread that book and, you know, they talk about, you know, Howard's talking to the inferior architect, and Howard's, you know, the guys saying, you know, well, what do you, what do you think of me, Howard? And he says, well, I don't think of you.

[B]

Oh, man.

[A]

And there's the virtue of selfishness. Like, you know, you can argue that there's some validity there. Like, having the self respect for yourself is a powerful, you know, when you frame yourself as, like, who you are and what you put up with and where you're, you know, who you are, it kind of reframes things. Like, if you have this internal like engine of self respect. I don't really like the word self love, but I like the word self respect because it means that you, you honor like who you are, what you've done, and it kind of gives you the energy to go where you want to go.

[B]

The word confidence comes from the word confide, which comes from the route to trust yourself. Most people don't trust themselves. Also, low level people mistake confidence and arrogance. They think they're the same, they're not. They can look similar to like the untrained eye, you know what I'm saying? Like if you actually get to know really high achieving people that might look intimidating or if you're like a dumb person, you're like, oh, that guy's arrogant. No, he's not. He's secure. He has self respect. He has a mountain of irritable proof that he does what he says he's going to do for decades, you know what I'm saying? And that molds you into a particular type of thing that has an energy on it, you know what I'm saying? When you meet these people. Now there's arrogant people, but I gotta be honest, man, like broke people are more arrogant and prideful than successful people by a lot, in my opinion. And even playing small can be a form of pride. And you know, a lot of people have said this, I think it's true. It's. People aren't scared of failure, they're scared of looking stupid while they try.

[A]

Yeah. And anytime you do something new, you have to look stupid.

[B]

Yeah. Even your Facebook ads, I mean, you push the edges with it. Maybe we can talk about marketing a little bit, but you do some crazy stuff and there's lots of losers to find the winner or. I remember when I first met Russell Brunson, I showed him my, one of my funnels. You know, he's trying to help me save this failing company. And he did, by the way. Way my software company had only done 900,000 in revenue in six years and I made no money. I never took a dollar out of the business in six years. I met Russell Brunson. Within 18 months, we did 4.2 million. The whole thing turned around.

[A]

What was the shift there?

[B]

Identity actually. Well, 100% because I got in the room with Alex, Hermosi and Myron and all these other. There's 100 people in this group.

[A]

What do you mean by that?

[B]

What I mean is, is, you know the quote, never meet your heroes. The biggest thing I think that changed my life more than Anything else in business was just spending time with people doing what I thought was unimaginably big things, and then coming to the irrefutably true conclusion that there's nothing different between them and me. The only difference is they think way bigger. And the volume, the volume of action in all areas of life is just disproportionate. That's it. They weren't geniuses. They're actually painfully average at most things. They're not particularly interesting in every cat. They're not like the Don Eckes guy. What's the most interesting man in the world? Nobody's actually like that. They're just doing speed, volume, and thinking big. And there's probably some other little things, but being around that group just for that first year, 18 months, I just went back home and did more. And I could have been doing that the whole time. I didn't know that I could. I thought that the constraint was I was missing a piece of tactical information. So I joined the group to get the tactical information. I realized, oh, my God, they're doing the fundamentals big. They're doing the fundamentals bigger, faster, that's it. And that doesn't mean tactics are useless. Tactics are amazing, but that's not the determining factor of success. It's a contributing factor of success. Because I can give perfect tactics to a person who thinks small and does low volume and nothing magical happens anyway. But if you give a tactic to someone like Russell or Meyer, anybody like you, you exploit it all the way. You squeeze all the juice out of the thing. And I think that is the biggest difference is I underestimated my own abilities by thinking I was a crop duster or that I was just Josh.

[A]

I don't know. I mean, I think, I think you were just exposed to the way that they do it.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And you don't know.

[B]

I didn't know.

[A]

Like you weren't willing to put in the work to do that. You paid a load of money to be in that group and be exposed to people like you were doing it. You had no idea what to do. And so you did the only thing you knew to do. And then when you were exposed, exposed to just the volume concept, then you did, you know.

[B]

Yeah. In the thinking bigger concept. You know, because the other thing you said a minute ago, if your identity is a million dollar guy, that'll be your first.

[A]

It's scary to think. It's scary to think big because, like, if you're someone like me, I, you know, I want to be true to what I'm myself and I want what comes out of my mouth to be true. And you have to have. But then you have to pair that with like, some level of delusion that you can do these things. And which, which basically means you have to assume the identity of being the guy that does the big things. But, you know, I hear people say they want to do $100 million and then, but then I look at their actions and they're. I'm like, well, you're never going to do 100 million because I don't see that the, the action that's required there. But like, when I'm telling my team, like, where we want to go, like, I'm a little cautious about, like, having these big goals because. And I don't really like, talk about, I don't really like talking about what I'm going to do. You know, I just, I hear everybody talk about what they're going to do and they never do it. Yeah, I'm really careful about, like, you know, if I say I'm going to do a certain revenue amount, then we model it out and like, have a plan. Plan on how to get there. And that comes down to like, you know, how many clients we're going to get off of this acquisition channel this year. And it's modeled, you know, I mean, I have a CFO now that, that, you know, we put data behind our goals because I want my team to be like, holy, like, we can do this. And here's the roadmap. And it kind of like increases belief, but I'm not even sure that's totally correct because, you know, it's, it's more about like the process of, of doing it. Like.

[B]

Well, it's. Action creates clarity. So it starts as 90 delusion. 10. Yeah, this. I logically think I can do it, but it's 90. As you're moving and you get in motion, you're taking action. It becomes 85% delusion. 75 delusion. And what people do is they perpetually plan. They're getting ready to get ready. One of my. I'm a quote not or do. When we talk on the phone, it's like, quote, bomb quote, bomb quote. We're boxing each other. It's, it's. Don't make a career out of laying the groundwork. How good is that? Yeah, people do that. I just want to hit one thing you said. If you, your identity is a million dollar guy, that'll be a constraint. And I agree. In addition to that, whatever you think big is has a lot to do with how long it takes to achieve it. So, like, what I mean is, is it's just something I noticed. I'm putting it in my book or I'm going to try to work it in the book. But when someone thinks a million dollar business is like a big business, it takes like 15 years for them to build it. And just that one shift. The reality is, is all of our businesses are a spec on the back of an amoeba on the back of a spec compared to real business. And people don't understand. They don't understand that the SBA defines a small business as any company with less than 500 employees. Right. So like all of our listeners, it's like no one's even close. Tommy Mello is like the only guy who probably has a thousand employees now. And I don't know, I. If you learn this stuff, though, it like unlocks things for you. And maybe it's not all. It's identity and belief. And I guess belief is part of identity, but belief is also goes beyond identity. Belief of what's possible, belief about the market, belief about what big is, belief about timeframes. People also have misunderstandings. Like, they're willing to do the work, but they misunderstand the volume required for a result.

[A]

And it's important to meet, like, really successful people. And a lot of times you'll figure out they're no smarter than you.

[B]

That's what happened to Russell's group. And I don't mean that like, oh, I was really smart. They were smarter than me in terms of life experience, tactics, some of the results they got. But they weren't smarter me intrinsically. Like, they had more hardware horsepower than me. You know what I'm saying? I didn't know that. Once I figured it out, I'm like, oh, my God, what? I'm good to go. I just got to do it, you know? And the difference between a goal and a dream is the plan and the action that you're talking about. So people say 100 million. They say it. That's not actually a goal, it's a dream. It's just a thing they say to operationalize a dream you have to have, you have to reverse engineer stuff and you have to do tons of stuff. Usually way more than you think.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. And if you can just. Just latch onto the do. Do more stuff, you know, we use, like, I don't.

[B]

More of the right stuff.

[A]

Yeah. Like, I don't. I told my CFO the day I hired him, I said, I hate budgets. And, and because we, our business is living, breathing, like we use dynamic budgeting where our budget gets updated every week. And that way, like if I, Charlie Munger has a saying that says if you have an edge, bet heavily. So if there's one thing that's working, the budget goes out the window and the gas pedal goes to the floor. And you know, if you operate like that, then you know. Cause a lot of people are like, well, I hit my budget in numbers this year and it's like your budget and numbers, like how hard can you go? Like how much, how much? You know, how much of us use 80% of our capabilities? 90%.

[B]

Almost no one. You know what's interesting about that though? One of my business heroes is a guy that no one knows. Self made billionaire from Australia. He was illiterate at 25. He didn't learn to read until he was 25. He was married. He used a dictionary on the toilet and his wife helped him. He ended up like becoming like a believer. And he was in a way so childlike and dumb. This is what he thought. He's like, oh, I'm the child of a king, therefore I can't fail. That's like what he thought. So he started a business, failed. Started a business, failed. He did this four times in a row. His wife begged him to get a job, he wouldn't do it. And then he built a multinational international real estate company. His family has their own gold bullion mint. They create gold coins with their own family emblem. It's like this whole crazy thing. Now that guy who then he was a mentor to like world leaders and he's insane. His name is Peter J. Daniels. That guy will do this exercise on the stage where he rate. He asks a crowd of people that come and sit in chairs on the stage to rate themselves on a scale of 1 to 10 on their competency in all these areas. And he puts like history, economics, finance, investing, business sale. He has like 10 categories and he's going down the row and people, the average person is rating themselves like a six or an eight. I'm a nine. I'm pretty good at finance, I'm a nine. And then after he has them do it, he rates himself. And the highest score he gave himself on any of them was a two. You get what, you see what I'm getting at? Like there's this misunderstanding of what mastery is. People don't. You know, one of the principles of learning is that the more you learn, the more you know that you know nothing. Which is why Socrates Quote is one of my favorite ones. The only thing I know is I know nothing. I didn't understand that. This. The more you know, the more you should know how much there is to know. You know what I'm talking about. Or the island, if you're the island analogy.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

It's like as your knowledge grows, the shoreline of your ignorance gets bigger. And. And that's why conversations like this are huge. That's why getting in different rooms is huge. I don't know what the X factor is. And, like, how you made it. How you made enough of the correct decisions to, like, learn certain things to then exploit those things. But you're doing it, right? I'm doing it. A percentage of people do it. I believe more could. Why don't they.

[A]

You think they're born with it?

[B]

I don't know. I don't think everyone's designed to be some, you know, movement maker or something. There's utility functions in society that are critically important. You know, I can't sit in a jungle and bottle feed an orphan baby, but I can build the orphanage and. But I need the person that was built to sit in the jungle and bottle feed the baby. So, like, there's massive value in all these things. It's not about good, bad, or hierarchy. It's just differences. So maybe we're just weirdos, and maybe we're designed to be a small percentage. I don't know. I do know that lots of people have dreams but no goals. But I know some of those people are meant to go big, but they just don't know this stuff. Maybe that's why I'm compelled to talk about it.

[A]

Or maybe it's their identity. They, you know, they don't. They don't think they can do it, and then that's the constraint.

[B]

Henry Ford. Whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're right.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Well, let's mix it up here before we land the plane. Let's just talk about marketing. Let's give a marketing masterclass. Let's help reframe people's brain on, like, not just volume, but just the creativity, the level of testing, the risks that you take. You're running a bunch of ads where you're doing all kinds, smoking cigarettes in your ads, you don't smoke cigarettes, but you're doing things to pattern interrupt people. And then the offer itself. And then even if you have the right hook with the right creative, with the right copy, with the right offer delivered at the perfect time, and even if your cost Per lead is correct. Even if you do all that, you can still lose because you don't have the back end. You don't have the scripting and the sales and answer in one ring and the follow up. And it's a whole machine. You know, I call that whole process a money lever. And it's like I tell people, if you have one lever, you can become a millionaire.

[A]

1.

[B]

If you have one message through one channel with the right backend process to ascend customer, if that exists, you can make a million bucks, right? You can do one thing and make a million bucks. You could just knock doors and make a million bucks. You can, I have two friends, I have 10 figure businesses, or I'm sorry, $10 million businesses just from door knocking. And you could do Facebook, direct mail, anything, anything you want. What, what's your philosophy of marketing and everything I just said?

[A]

Well, I hear a lot of people, like even supposed marketers say you need to have multiple acquisition channels. And I don't believe that. I believe you have one channel that you master and then you tap out and then you move to channel two you master. And this takes you. This takes years. I mean, this is, this is another reframe for me is like, why isn't this working after six months? And sometimes you, you'll tell me like, you've been doing this two seconds.

[B]

I always do the two second you've.

[A]

Been doing this two seconds, man. But then when you look back and you're like, oh, damn, that, that acquisition channel, that brings me millions of dollars a year. Took me three years to build. And all I have to do on this next acquisition channel is, is just spend the time doing it. And then you start applying decision velocity to that. And you're like, if I want to collapse the amount of time I just iterate on a faster speed. Then you kind of like, it helps reframe my brain because it's like not as painful to fail when I'm like, I'm supposed to fail at this. Like there's there. And I've hear other marketers say, like, there's no silver bullets. And they're liars. They're not even marketers. There are silver bullets. They're just buried under a ton of work.

[B]

You guys are doing. Like, and this is like the off season when we're recording this. It's a slow time of year. You're doing like 500 leads a week right now, approximately. Is that about right? 500 leads a week? I mean, whoever's listening to this, think about that. And the volume required and the financial risk. If you don't pay attention, you don't know what's going on. Marketing can shift really quick. In a day, things can happen. Your cost per lead. Right.

[A]

We don't even look at cost per lead. We just track acquisition cost, cost, total client costs. Because your, your lead costs can vary. You can have a ad that has low lead costs, but then it'll have super low conversion costs. But then you might run an ad that has high lead costs, that has super high conversion costs. So it's like we don't. We don't even look at lead cost. You know, without the conversion, you know.

[B]

You have to figure, what are some of the principles you think about when you launch? You know, you spent millions of dollars in direct mail, millions of dollars on digital. What is some of the cheat sheet, frameworky pieces? You got the hook, you got the offer.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

How do you think about that?

[A]

I mean, I was on a Dan Kennedy, like, Facebook group one time and put one of my direct mail pieces up and somebody hurt my feelings.

[B]

Yeah. Did that, did that feelings getting hurt make you money, though?

[A]

Yeah. He said, you know, the only problem with your piece, your marketing piece, is that it looks like a marketing piece. And you can apply that to everything. And, you know, the best marketing isn't marketing, you know, or doesn't look like marketing. You know, like we. When Elon Musk, like, threw the steel ball at the, at the window of a cyber truck, that had to be on purpose. You always wonder if that was on purpose because he broke the Internet.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

And it was a. It's really kind of vulnerable to be like, you know, damage, you know, showing his truck didn't have bulletproof glass or whatever it was. But, you know, I heard Peter Thiel call in. In 0 to 1, he called Elon Musk the grand master of marketing. And you don't think of him as a marketer. No, but that's what he is. You know, for a long time, he had a zero marketing budget for Tesla for he. He was just really creative.

[B]

If you think about, like, personal brands, he's got like, one of the biggest personal brands in history of the world.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Trump is a marketer too.

[A]

They can't take him off the platform. They can't be platform.

[B]

Well, he bought the platform.

[A]

He owns the platform. He made a shirt.

[B]

No, he. One tweet moves markets. That's crazy. But if you're speaking to a guy doing a half a million a year, they have a local business. What are some back of napkin rules for marketing if you were going to consult them. Is it one offer? Is it, is it. What's the most important piece? What have you noticed?

[A]

Well, I just Talked to a 25 year old kid yesterday and he just said a lot of the right things to me. You know, he said, I'm tracking the data and I meet $20 million companies that don't track their data. Like, it blows my mind. They're like, when I send out direct mail, I get phone calls. The phones seem to light up, you know, and they don't have the data. So that's, that's the boring part. But it's also like the part that will help you discover the silver bullet is, is having really accurate data on what works. And, and you, you have to pair that with iteration because, like, if you're just testing two things, you know, you're, you're gonna learn one of two things. If you're testing, you know, 10 things, you know, like people are like, direct mail doesn't work. And I'm like, well, how many pieces did you test? And they're like one. And I'm like, well, I tested 30, you know, and that one season.

[B]

Yeah, I was gonna say, if you had to pick one thing to improve, we'll just talk about Facebook ads. Is it the hook of the creative, meaning the video or the image itself? Do you think that would be the more impactful the copy or is it the offer? You could only pick one.

[A]

I don't know if I. Like, those are all important, right? To get. To break through the.

[B]

You're not allowed to break my fake question. You can't break. You're the most contrarian person I've ever met. So. Okay, you can break my question. What's your contrarian view?

[A]

You know, I think one of the things that, like broke through for us was like the messaging, you know, and.

[B]

Roy hall or like the video script or. You mean the copy or all of it. Well, or think of postcards. Is it, you know, the headline, all that's important.

[A]

And it's like your visual hook, your verbal hook, your. Your general message, your offer. But none of that will break through the clutter. Like, if you want to like, break through the clutter, like, you're going to probably have to be vulnerable. And I found, like, if you, if you like really study Mattress Mac and over his career, like, the closer he gets to, like exposing his true self to everyone, the closer, like that messaging will hit and be relatable.

[B]

He does 100 million a year selling furniture Right.

[A]

And there's other tactics. He's got, like, sense of urgency. You know, he'll deliver the furniture the same day, which is insane. Insanity. I asked him how many delivery trucks he had. He said he had 40 delivery trucks.

[B]

40. You have to. To honor that promise.

[A]

But all this, all the components are necessary, you know, because, you know, once you understand visual hooks, like, you'll see everything in visual hooks. And, you know, but even then, that's not the thing. I think the thing. Well, Mattress Mac is a moniker, you know, He's. He's. And that's been successful over and over again.

[B]

And what do you mean by that?

[A]

Well, he's a character on. In his. He's, you know, when he. He's got this story. I asked him when I met him last week. I saw one of his Facebook ads, had his cell phone number on it. And I'm like, I wonder if I call him if he'll answer. And I called him, and it went to voicemail. But then he called me back, and I didn't know what to say, and I bumbled around like an idiot. And, I want to meet you. I know. You know, I read your. And I want to spend a day with you. And he's like, oh, God, this guy's going to tag around with me for a day.

[B]

It's like the Jordan Peterson moment for Mavericks.

[A]

But then I got. He told me to call him back and after Christmas. And I called him back, and he said, I have my pitch down a little bit better. Hey, I just need 30 minutes. I recited several his quotes back to him. Read it, Told him. I read his book. I knew he answered 90 calls. Calls a day. I knew he was super busy, but I just needed 30 minutes. And he was like, all right, call me two days before you come. I'm real distracted, though. I'm real busy, you know, and he's, you know, he's pre.

[B]

Framing.

[A]

Yeah. He's not encouraging me to come, but he'll do it. So we ended up. Ended up meeting him.

[B]

But is he a marketing character, or is he just exposing who he is to the market?

[A]

Yeah, both. You know, he's got. I mean, it takes a lot of courage. Out of your mind. You know, when he first started, the way he got the idea to become Mattress Mac was he heard of this guy selling tires. He bought a crappy tire store, and the guy just couldn't figure out marketing. He couldn't figure out how to do it. He's like, I'm just going to wear a tire around My neck everywhere I go. So he went to church with the tire around his neck. He went to the T Ball with the tire around his neck. He went to the grocery store with the tire around his neck, and pretty soon everybody knew him as the tire man.

[B]

That's amazing.

[A]

And he became pretty successful, and that's what Mattress Mac did. Jim McVingal is his real name. And, you know, if you look at his early commercials, he's wearing a mattress and he's dancing around in a mattress. I mean, who's willing to do that? And.

[B]

And this is. Here's the thing. They're like, well, yeah, I'd do. If I had a hundred million dollar business. No, you have to do it to have a hundred million dollars. Our business.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Like, he was doing that when he did not have that right. He's doing it, and you're surrounded by normies. You're surrounded by small thinkers. Your wife questions your sanity. You're never home, and then she sees your commercial and you're broke. You know, or you can.

[A]

One of my commercials, I dropped the F bomb. It was the first time I've ever done that in a Facebook ad.

[B]

Actually, when you told me you did that, I didn't know Facebook would allow.

[A]

We didn't know either. But then that comes down to the testing and iteration.

[B]

Well, it's a marketing principle called splitting the.

[A]

And it's not like I'm Like, I'm doing something I don't normally do. You know, this is who I am. You know, my favorite two words in the English language are that, you know, when I met with Alex Hermosi, you know, I'm sitting in the table and I'm like that. You know, that's dumb. And he's looking over at me like, kind of like, you know, he was actually. He's like, calm down, break. Like, we get it, you know, but some guy across the day will be like, saying some model. And I'd be like that, this is what you got to do.

[B]

This is.

[A]

You know, but it was. It was a lot of fun. Alex got kind of. I. I think he was. He was intrigued. Yeah.

[B]

Yeah. Well, Maverick's gonna have a lot of fun editing this podcast.

[A]

A lot of. A lot of things.

[B]

While we're talking about Mattress Matt, what was the thing he did with the World Series, the marketing gimmick? It was a huge thing.

[A]

Yeah, I talked to him a little bit about that, where he. He bets he has this offer where I think it was first with the Astros. Is a big Houston fan. Everybody In Houston, loves them. And he was. I think the first bet was that the Astros would win the World Series. And he bet, like, $9 million, took it out to Vegas. Of course he had cameras, he had tv, made the national news. When I asked him, I was like, how do you get on the news, man? Jim. He's like, I do something newsworthy.

[B]

And that's actually deep. We could unpack that. Because a lot of marketing is basically white noise. Or I think a couple weeks ago, I was telling you about the Prolific index. Remember when we were talking, Russell taught me, like, messaging. If you're safe, it's invisible.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And you have to test the edges. You can. You can do what you did, which, you know, you can use, like, profanity and stuff, or you go the other way, but if you go too far, it also doesn't work. But there's, like, this sweet spot where you polarize and split the room, and it's like magic, you know? But people are. They don't even test stuff to find out, you know, the creative artist, like.

[A]

Even my wife is like, I saw the Facebook ad, Rick. And I'm like, yeah, before you say.

[B]

Anything, honey, let me.

[A]

Can I have this? This is. This is what we call iteration. And it's.

[B]

It's. It's risky because some people probably will never hire you.

[A]

But I guarantee you, like, some of our most. And a lot of times, some of our most, like, polarizing, controversial ads, like, don't convert. But there's also a theory there. You could say, well, they don't work. I'm not going to run them. But then I've just had people come up to me, and they'd be like, rick, I saw that video you did. You know, but they remember it. And Mattress Mac calls it breaking through the clutter. And if you're not willing to break through the clutter, clutter, you're gonna be the clutter.

[B]

And you're not doing it to be flippant. You're doing it to be strategic. You're treasure hunting. Like you said in the beginning, that's what this is. So you have a lot of volume, a lot of, you know, edgy thing. And it's not just like swearing. Like, you. You throw rocks at private equity really hard. Like, you just make fun of private equity and how these.

[A]

And we have to, like, think of ways to explain private equity to your common person, you know, and. And one thing we've. We've done well at is, you know, if you look at Donald Trump, like he's He's a master marketer. That's all. That's basically what he is. That's why he's successful. You know, he labels people like Sleepy Biden.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. Little Marco, Pencil Neck Adam, Shiv.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

He's got labels for everybody.

[A]

So we just labeled Crazy Nancy.

[B]

Crazy Nancy.

[A]

And you remember these things, right?

[B]

Yep. Fourth grade, fifth grade reading level. Simple.

[A]

So when we name. When we name private equity, we call them the Gucci guys. And we are, we are, we are. We are the exact polar opposite of that. You know, I wear a fishing shirt to work. You know, like, I have my company logo on a fishing shirt. And. And, you know, when you. When you. I realized how effective it was when I got a job ad for a branch manager one time that said, I work for the Gucci guys on the job. On the job questionnaire. You know, so he had seen my ads and knew he. He made the connection between Gucci guys and private equity. You know, I tell her, you know, in the ad, I'm like, we're not avocado toast eating, you know, buttercream latte sipping.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Loafer wearing.

[B]

Right, right. I was just telling one of our group coaching calls last week about the importance of labels. I call it labels.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Like, you want to label stuff in all areas of life, but when you're throwing rocks at the enemy, which is a marketing principle, like when you're doing that label, call them something. Label them something. Russell did this when ClickFunnels was growing. One of the big competitors is a company called infusionsoft. You remember them. He mercilessly attacked infusionsoft. I don't know if you remember this. He called them confusionsoft. He made T shirts. He gave away tens of thousands of T shirts. The whole community. Once they passed infusionsoft and revenue, he never talked about them again. Because you always want to throw rocks up, never down. Right. But. But it was. They changed their company name because of this. They renamed their company to Keep.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

Did you know that? It was brutal. And actually interviewed the founder of infusionsoft years ago. He's like the nicest guy ever.

[A]

Super.

[B]

Like, him and Russell would be best friends, but in the market. Russell, he's just a savage. But the.

[A]

If you can find a common enemy that both you and your clients. Yeah, exactly.

[B]

And you label it.

[A]

And that does mean you will piss off a certain percentage of your clients. Like, one of my principles is, you know, marketing has to elicit emotion.

[B]

It has to. I know. It's so hard.

[A]

That means you will get bashed, ridiculed, and persecuted. That means you will get bad Google reviews. That means you will get bad Facebook review reviews. Like, that's how you know your marketing is effective if you get pushback. That's why small percentage of your.

[B]

Dan Kennedy says, if you haven't offended someone by new and you're not marketing hard enough. Have you heard that?

[A]

I believe it.

[B]

You're doing it. You're living it.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

You've probably offended someone by 9:00am you know, today.

[A]

I know. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I know. I know I was dealing with somebody that was like, I've gotten a couple bad reviews for. For our door knocking team and I got a bad email yesterday. And I'm like, you know, like, I'm sick of like, these people. Like, I'm sick of apologizing to these. You know, I'm like, and he's sending me this whole awning and he's like just going off. And I'm like, who was rude first? Who was rude first to my canvasser? You know, and why aren't you supporting our youth that's out there busting their, you know, like, how dare you, like, email me and tell me my door knocking teams Rude and you know, like.

[B]

Yeah, but you can't reason with these people. No, that's why I told you.

[A]

But I could mind them pretty good.

[B]

Well, that's why I suggested replying with memes on your Facebook comments and that actually turn it into humor.

[A]

Yeah. Now we have people just go. Just read the comments section because they want to see the meme. Like, if somebody's like, I had one person. Person that was literally named Karen, saying, you are a disgusting, filthy mouth person. And it's like, I just. We just put a meme up that was like, stop, Karen. You know, and then I was like, I realized her name was Karen and I was like, I actually posted another comment that was like, you do realize your name is literally like, this is.

[B]

So in that comment engagement just drops your cpm.

[A]

So, yeah, I think on one of them we had like 276 organic comments.

[B]

Yeah. And those are your cheapest ads. They start cooking. We had a. We've actually had this happen twice. Like when we ran the frap challenge, the main winning ad that I couldn't beat, we put no effort into it was a picture of me dragging my wife by the foot.

[A]

Yeah, I remember that one because we kind of copied that after you told me.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So actually we did a little slightly different take. We did. I was. Did one where I was kicking triggering in the nuts, you know, but sort of the same concept, white background, like. Yeah, I lost a customer over that one, too, because he was like.

[B]

I didn't even. It didn't even cross my mind that that was a polarizing thing. I just threw it up to get something going while we started making the quote, real ads. All the real ads we did cost three times more than that.

[A]

Yeah, I know my marketing manager will put something like, unedited up on. On a. On an ad that's like, I like up the whole script.

[B]

And I know ugly ads work better, though. Have you found that to be true in postcards?

[A]

Yeah, we did one where we were doing it in a green screen. Screen. We had, like, a green screen behind us. And instead of, like, we didn't, like, cover, like. Instead of, like, just cropping us out in the green screen, he just let the green screen be. And then you see the building behind it. So you could tell we're like, right in front of a green screen. Broke the fourth wall.

[B]

But that's. But that's why it's good. Remember in 1999, everything was Microsoft clip art. And you remember Microsoft clip art, those crappy little pixelated images. And good design back then crushed. But it didn't. It didn't crush because it was a good design.

[A]

It crushed because it was different doing good design.

[B]

It's just pattern interrupt. But now with Canva, and, you know, everything's beautiful, and so it doesn't work. And so like ugly postcards, you know, simpler. You've even seen these billboards where it's like hiring a graphic artist. And it's in Microsoft paint. You know what I mean? The ugly stuff seems to convert better.

[A]

Yeah. I mean, I worked with the designer, but the problem was he made our direct mail look good.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And I had to learn how to use graphics so I can make it so ugly it would convert.

[B]

Well, even with one thing you do for fun. After we started first talking was I was like. You were like. You started flipping airplanes?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And even the way that you're flipping airplanes was just a masterclass in marketing. And just for the audience, like, Rick, he's a maniac, but he figured out a way to pull a list of every owner in their address that owned a specific exact model of airplane. He started sending them ugly postcards. These planes weren't for sale. The first one you bought, you flipped it made a hundred grand. And like, everything is marketing. Marketing is everything. I want to transition a little bit. So the person listening to this it's like smaller and they're like, man, I don't have budget to run ads. And it feels overwhelming. I know that what we're talking about feels like far away for a lot of people. Let's talk about frap, let's talk about unit economics that allow you to afford to make a mistake marketing without something horrible happening, allow you to find the silver bullet and scale it. Because most people, the smaller companies I work with, I usually turn all their ads off and they work with me. I say stop. Turned off all of it. I usually have them fire their agency because most agencies are liars and full of crap. Not all of them, but enough of them. Where I can use a blanket statement, I'll use it.

[A]

I went through 11.

[B]

Yeah. And have you noticed, by the way, it's just a sidebar, there's like 10 times more agencies today than there was five years ago. Like everybody that started a business and failed started an agency, they couldn't figure.

[A]

It out because it doesn't allow for iteration.

[B]

Well, you have perverse incentives. Like the actual business model goals of an agency is to do less hours of work per customer, get maximum retainers. Marketing takes massive amounts of attention and monitoring and it's contrarian to the goal of the agency. But I digress. My point is I'll have them turn off their ads because their unit economics can't afford ads. So if they have a thousand dollar annual customer value with a 10% profit, profit, they only make a hundred dollars a year off of a customer and their CAC might be 200 bucks. And they think that advertising is expensive, but it's not, is that their customers aren't valuable enough. And so after we do frat, we tweak their prices, we do all the magic sauce of high ticket and decoys and we script it and you know, frequency and camp, we do that. And now the customer is worth 2,000 a year at 25% instead of 1,000 a year at 10%, meaning they make $500 a year off of a customer. Then we turn the ads on and everything's fine. You've had a huge transformation profitability wise and just margin. So you can afford the massive growth that you're doing. Tell us about that, some of the moves you made, whatever you want, what your thoughts are on that.

[A]

Well, frequency is a big deal.

[B]

Yeah, I think you're doing six apps a year. When I first met you, six, seven.

[A]

We were doing seven, then you went.

[B]

To seven, then you went to eight.

[A]

My company, we, we typically, you know, we increase apps. That's one of the first things we do.

[B]

And you're at like nine now, right?

[A]

Yeah. Nine standard apps. Yeah. And then of course frequency and like.

[B]

I just want to make sure people understand if you're charging $70 an application, which a lot of fertilization companies do. Right.

[A]

Is that true? Yeah.

[B]

And they do six apps a year. Okay. That's $420 in revenue for those six applications. What people fail to understand, and this works for any business just in a different way. By going to 9 at 70 now there's $630. It's like a 50% increase in revenue per customer. And we're not done because then you start raising prices. If you can go from seventy to a hundred dollars in that now you have $900 instead of four. $400 and. And then if you know what I'm saying, and the margin totally changes. What do you think?

[A]

Yeah, I mean the frequency thing is big. The pricing thing is probably one of the biggest and easiest levers you can pull.

[B]

It's the scariest, but the fastest and biggest.

[A]

I think it's scary if you don't do it correctly. Like, like there's way to, ways to de risk everything. Like especially with, with like new, like new customers like Jeff Bezos calls this a two way door decision versus a one way door decision. A two way door is a decision you can walk through and walk right back out of. A one way door decision is you walk through that door and it locks behind you. So like with new pricing, you know that's a two way door decision because I mean again, it comes back to data. Like if you clack, if you track your close rate, your conversion rate, you can know for certain, certain whether the market accepts your new pricing. And then if it doesn't, you can just change it tomorrow and you basically lose nothing and put the lever. The opportunity is so big on pricing that I mean it can change your life, it can change your bill, you can change your model. I mean it's, it's massive. And even when you're like raising prices on existing customers, you don't have to do it on all of them. You can be very careful and just segment your pricing list, track how many cancels you get. And I mean every time I've raised prices, I've never lost like, I've never lost more than 5% even when I went up 20%. And I mean it's sort of it.

[B]

Well, not to mention we're on audio podcast, but like if we whiteboard if we math mapped out and wrote out the math, it's dramatic. And even if you would have lost 20% of your customers with the 20% increase, you still come out net ahead.

[A]

By some of the guys that I talk to on a regular basis that do lawn care, they're, like, trying to shave off. You know, they're trying to make their labor more efficient. They're trying to make their material cost more efficient. But you're talking about, like, 1 or 2%. Like, I mean, I'm not saying that's the bad thing to do. Like, you definitely want to be efficient, but, like, the major opportunity is in pricing. Like, I mean, you're talking one or two points on shaving. Like, you know, we have, like, 17% labor costs or 15% labor cost, whatever it is, if I shave, like, I could probably shave that 1% with massive efficiency effort on pricing, I can shift it 20, 30%.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

In one email.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Or. Or one. I could tell my sales team, this is. This is the new price. Like, and then you track your conversion rate and your. You. Like, we were. We were. Last summer, we were at, like, I think we were at, like, 79 and a half minimum. And most of our clients in Florida are on a minimum. And I just raised it to 89. I saw no, there was no drop in conversion. And then I went to 99, and there was no drop in conversion. And so it's just like, how much margin is there? How much will the market accept?

[B]

Well, then we get into, like, if you present it and you're like, oh, no, they're not accepting it. You still don't have to give up. What we can do is reframe it. It's the choreography of how you expose the price, reveal the price, unpack the value. Why they called it the right time. Now. I mean, usually what I do with people is I'll have them raise their price so much that they want to puke, but then they're always on sale. And so during the slow times, it might be 40% off, but their 40% off price is still 20% higher than their current price. And so even. Even that simple framing device changes it. Right. So it's one thing to say, oh, thank you for calling. Yeah, Your price is 200 bucks. Let's say that's your current deal. It's one thing to say, thank you for calling. You know, due to rising costs, you know, it's going to be 250. That's obviously horrible. That's what most people do. They, like, apologize don't do that. Don't even say Your price is 250. Say thanks for calling. Hey. So a standard service is 325. However, because it's January and you're a new customer, you get two 50. You know, you get a $30 voucher and a $20 voucher. And so it's gonna be 275 or mornings or afternoons better. And like that sounds dumb. It totally works.

[A]

And it's price anchoring, it's pricing.

[B]

You want them to be shocked and then pleasantly surprised. That's the order. Shock them and then wow and delight them. And people don't know. You know, I have one lady I'm working with, I already told you this earlier, but she's so scared to raise her price. She paid me a bunch of money to be in a group walking through frat and I told her, I was like, raise your price 1% because it's okay to baby step it. You know, sometimes we're so programmed in fear and orphan mindset, it's okay, let's do it 1%. Next Monday we're going to raise it 1%. Next Monday we're Going to Raise it 1%. And she's going to realize absolutely nothing's going to happen. Absolutely nothing. Probably far beyond her wildest what she thought the breaking point was. And then as she builds confidence and she gets more sophisticated and starts playing the framing game like I just described it literally. This lady has two autistic kids. She's taking care of her family. She is like a boss babe, holding her life together but choking death because of this one fear. You're like the ultimate frappe success story. And you know, frap isn't the reason for your success. You are in your identity. But a lot of the moves you've made are just post. They're just show ponies for frat. Like the way you've your frequency and the price raise everything you've done, even the business you bought a year and a half ago or two years ago. And in your do it man. And like, one of the reasons I'm here is to fly in your helicopter if the weather clears up. Did you think you were going to own a plane in the helicopter 20 years ago? Did you always believe it because you are like into it. You are a dork nerd about this, this aviation stuff.

[A]

I don't know. I don't know 20 years ago. But you know, and I have parameters on, on my flying too. Like, it's like when I told you I was gonna buy A helicopter. I said, I'm gonna.

[B]

You did.

[A]

I'm gonna watch you do. You know, because I was getting frustrated with the flight school. I couldn't fly. Fly. And I'm like, I want to. I want to buy my helicopter, then get my license. And I mean, I did it the absolute hardest way. You were like, you're doing this the absolute hardest way you could possibly do it, you know, And I also told you I wanted to make the helicopter free, you know, so, you know, you bought it smart. Yeah, yeah, Bought it. You know. You know, that required a lot of iteration, a lot of, like, no's. I had 30 people when I made them the offer, cuss me out and say, you're crazy. But, you know, the one. The one hel. The one. One guy I met, you know, didn't understand the value of it. Some of these helicopters are hard to figure out the value. They have different life. Life components on it and stuff. And, you know, I got in it for $100,000 less than it's worth, and I'm going to fly it for free until I get my next one.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And. And there was a certain satisfaction of, like, just the strategy worked, the patience worked. It took me a year to figure out, you know, how to find a good deal or what a good deal even look like. And then. But then, you know, I guess one of the things that I enjoy is like, you. You start as an entrepreneur. I was talking to this kid yesterday, and he's like, yeah, I guess I'm just. I'm just motivated by the money. And I bet you that's not what he's motivated by. You know, it took me a long time to figure out that's not what really motivates me.

[B]

No, it's what you think the money means.

[A]

The money is just like the school scorecard for me. It's the P. L. And even then, like, we reinvest so much in our learning and our. In our. In our growth. But for me, it was like the strategy. I get sheer joy when a strategy, you know, like. Like I was. I was flying. I was hovering my helicopter, you know, just on the. In the. I guess in the backyard, I guess you could call it. I live on a marsh. I was hovering on a marsh. And, you know, and I just had just sheer joy because all these things have started to come together. And. And even when a marketing strategy works, it's like finding a gold coin, you know, at the bottom of the ocean. Yeah. And. And then the other half of it, like, really, you know, One of my fleet manager wanted to get his license. He flew with me to pick up a fleet truck, a truck for the fleet, a new truck. And he was like, rick, man, I'd like to get my pilot's license one day. And I was like, well, I'll come up with something. If you want to do it, we'll figure out a way to get there. And I came up with a little bonus system for him. And he's a MacGyver genius, you know, builds our own spray trucks, I mean, out of raw materials. You know, it's. We have aluminum and plastic shipped to our. Our shop. And he welds the aluminum plastic, welds the plastic tanks, and. Just an amazing guy. And for one year, he completed all his to do's and went and. And got. For every. For every week. He got his to do done. He got his. He got his flight. He got one hour of flight time. And. And after 54 hours last November, you know, he sent me a picture of his license and a check ride.

[B]

So epic.

[A]

And I didn't. I didn't know, like, it would affect me. Like, I, you know, just seeing, like, my strategy work, like, like coming up with a bonus plan to, like, he was super incentivized. I mean, he got so much done. Like, it was amazing. But then, like, the sheer joy of, like, helping someone else, like, I mean, that was a. That was an identity transformation right there, come to think of it, you know, because now he's a pilot. Like, like, before, he was not a pilot. Now his identity shift to being a pilot.

[B]

And he flew with you to see Mattress Mattress?

[A]

Yeah, yeah. I added two hours onto my trip just to go pick him up, because I know when you get your license, like, it's an opportunity to fly with someone else. And I let him kind of. I always hated flying with people that didn't let me, like, touch the buttons.

[B]

And talk on the radio and just.

[A]

Sit there like a passenger. So I'm like, you're doing the radios, buddy. You know, we're flying through, you know, basically where airliners fly through Houston. We're flying on there. You know, we're vectoring around this massive, busy airspace, and I'm making him, like, do all the radio calls while I'm. I'm guiding the plane on autopilot. And. And, you know, it was just. It was a. You know, we went through some turbulence that, you know, if you ever see me buckle up in the plane, like, you better buckle up, because I call them head headset knocker offers. Where you, the turbulence is so bad, you hit your head on the cabin roof and your knocks, your headset, your sunglasses, terrifying. But, but yeah, we took off in like 40 knot headwinds in New Orleans when we had a stop over there. And you know, we get up in the air, we're like, damn, we just took off and gusting 49, 40 knot, you know, we're like fist pumping, you know. And you know, where, where's the fleet manager going to get that opportunity in another company? You know, nowhere. And, and not only that, there's the strategy part, but then there's like, and Josh has kind of taught me this. Like, like Josh, I think like his greatest gift is like pouring into people and telling them what they are you.

[B]

Talking about me or your, your guy?

[A]

You. You. And you know, and I've kind of learned that from you because you've like supercharged me, you know, you, you, you've told me like, Rick, you are, you know, this is who you are now start acting like it. And then when I tell my people that like one of them, I had a new branch manager, a guy that worked with us for 18 months, got floated all the way to the top to be branch manager at one of our locations. And he was like, he was telling me something about, you know, he was friends with the tech because he was a tech and then he moved up to branch manager and now he's, he's in a different level. He's like, he's like, you know, I'm really not their friend anymore. I'm their boss. And I'm like, yeah, you just assume that new identity, like that's who you are. And then if you can do that over and over with your people, like, not only will you have people that can go to war for you, like you are going to literally transform people's lives because they are going to look at you. And that's the other like half that I get really, you know, that has really affected me in ways I didn't, I didn't understand. You know, I didn't understand when that, that fleet manager got his license, like how much joy I would get from him, like accomplishing his goals. Like, I'm you as leader. You get like so focused on your goals, you forget about some of your people's goals. But you know, if you like, and as a leader, if you're like your true self with other people, like you give them permission to be themselves. Like, if you go to my website, you will see the craziest about us section liquidbot.com. this year you'll see probably like, you'll be like. And when people see that, they're like, I want to come work for you. Like I had somebody take a $45,000 pay cut to come work for me. And, and to me that means they believe in where I'm going. Like they're like, that's a temporary situation. Getting paid $45,000 less.

[B]

Well, especially now. You're in so much momentum right now. Now you're like a magnet for good things happening. We've been talking about that for weeks. But it's just like things are compounding. Time is collapsing in all kinds of weird ways. You know, you're just like doing it. And you know, I didn't tell you this. My 10 year old daughter, Finley, two days ago, for no reason, she came up to me, she goes, dad, you know what you're really good at? I was like, what? I thought she'd say like a fart joke or something. She said, your talent is seeing who people are and telling them talk about me getting emotional.

[A]

That's amazing.

[B]

She's only 10. And I was like 100% true.

[A]

Because I've told you that before, you know.

[B]

Yeah, it's actually, it's frustrating. Like when I walked, I just pulled up in my rental car to come hang out with you and I got goosebumps when I pulled in your driveway because we're sitting in a multi million dollar house on an intercoastal, you're building a helipad on your roof. Like the helicopter was a dream. Three years ago when I met you, we started working together and just our whole relationship, but like I'm seeing it. And what's frustrating for me is.

[A]

When.

[B]

You speak life into people, you tell them the truth. Most people still don't believe you. You know, it's hard. They don't. And maybe it's not that they don't believe me, but they don't have enough exposure to it, you know, because I can say something once or twice I said, I said the same thing to you for years and somewhere in an indeterminate point you believed it more and it compounds. But the thing is, is just we're not talking about positive thinking. It's truth. You know, you always were this leader and now you're. This is, this is what I didn't understand. Myron used to always tell me, josh, stop trying so hard to succeed. Start letting yourself succeed. When he first told me that, probably for two or three years, I repeatedly asked him. I just thought it Was dumb. I'm like, that doesn't make sense. What does that mean? I totally get it now. Can't you see it? It's like you don't have to become something. You have to let out what you already were the whole time. But you can't if you don't, you know, and you feel like a crazy person. And we're talking about becoming intentionally delusional, and maybe that's the wrong word. A reality distortion field. I actually think everyone lives in delusion.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Some form, all of them do. So it's not like it's a weird thing to become. But we. We get to choose the delusion. We get to choose which variant we want to pretend that we are. And I've literally watched you do it. And even you had a team meeting in, like, Key west or whatever, island down, fancy island, and you're speaking life into those guys. They're on fire. The production, the productivity, like, the momentum of it. It's not about money. But it is. Like, people that are broke say things like, money isn't everything. The only reason they say that is because either their own crippling ship shame for not trying to achieve anything, or it's from religious programming. But the very people that say it spent spend eight or ten hours a day trying to get money.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And it's like, then quit work. The ones that quit work, quit getting money. You can't. Money. I ask people what they want. When I go, those are usually the.

[A]

Ones that are the easiest to buy out. Yeah, it's the.

[B]

It's the ones that they don't value themselves at all.

[A]

Like, you couldn't buy me out. Like, it would have to be like, I don't. I don't do consulting because, like, I don't. Like, I get joy out of the strategy actually being implemented. And I would only want to work with people.

[B]

Well, that's why I charge a lot, because it virtually guarantees it does get implemented. And it's like, the price is this weird thing where it puts positive pressure. Just when I joined Russell's thing, the only way I don't get an ROI is if I'm literally super dumb and do nothing. You know, if I did part of what I learned there wrong, I still make more money than I gave him. You know what I mean? But when you have $100, course you sell, you get the most complaints. You know, you sell a $100,000 thing and you get the least complaints, and you get. I don't know, it's a combination. We covered A lot of ground. I know this is probably like a different type of podcast. Man, I thank you for coming on here. I want you to close it out with like, any final thoughts. I want you to pretend the person listening is 20 year ago Rick and speak life into him, tell him it's going to be okay, whatever you want to do. Like, what would you say to that person to help them get to where you are even faster with less pain?

[A]

You know, I think the one thing that's like, I don't know if this will help anyone, but you know that Bonnie Ware, she wrote a book. She actually wrote an article that went viral. I don't believe any of your other good. But it's just this one article is really powerful. It talks about the five regrets people have on their. On their deathbed. And I think like, the closer. Well, you know, and she found the number one thing is kind of surprising. It's the people. People. Their number one regret was not being their true self during their life. Like, not feeling like they were allowed to be their true self. Like, not living life on the terms that they wanted. Like, succumbing to what other people think. That's a big thing. I mean, it's huge. It's. You know, I'm not going to sit here and lie to you that I don't worry about what other people think is something like, it's really difficult, you know, to completely break that. That. That chain and. But I think the closer you get to that, that may be the number one thing. Like, because I think even if you're not like super successful, but. And success can be defined in many different ways. You know, it's not just money. It could be like being a fly fisherman out in the Bahamas. You know, just living life. You know, that could be one definition of success and not wealth. Wealth can be a chain. You know, you can get attached to that a billionaire identity and be chained to it, miserable. But I think the closer you can get to being your true self, the more like you will enjoy being around being. Just enjoy life. And I think there's probably some correlation to success there too, because, like, you look at Mattress Mac and he. He's like, really close to that person that he's projecting. Like he is. It's really close. And he just doesn't apologize for. For who he is. And, you know, if there's anything, I would just like to give permission to people to be like, just be who they are. You know, if you're a workaholic, like, it. That's who you are, man. Like, if you're, you know, if you're obsessed with something, like that's just who you are. And it's like come to terms with like not fighting your natural intelligence, not fighting, not fighting your natural tendencies and just being, you know, like, I would just like to give permission to that person to just be who, who they think they want to be. I mean, you probably know, you probably have that idea. And the closer you can get to that, the more fulfillment and satisfaction out of life. And I think the money will come.

[B]

You're not broken. You don't need to be fixed. Doesn't mean we can't improve. But you're fundamentally not broken. This was epic, dude. High five. Freaking awesome. Okay, we'll see you guys.

[A]

Love you.

[B]

Bye. Do you want to weaponize your brain and turn it into a money making machine? Consider joining Warplan Coaching. You'll get thousands of dollars in exclusive courses and training, a private community, the chance to come to in person meetups at Warplan Studios, and access to myself for Q and A every single month. Want to know the best part? It's free. Plus we'll send you a private weekly newsletter full of money making tips and cutting edge ideas. Just go to warplan.com to sign up. Hey, I'm your biggest fan. I'm rooting for you. We'll see you next time.

[A]

Sa.