Harmony of Hustle
Jump into the World of Justin Shoemaker aka "The Waterboy" . From Business, to music, this is the inside look of the world of the hyper-driven and their Harmony of Hustle.
Harmony of Hustle
Guest Appearance w/ Coach Kak on "Unmasking Greatness"
Chris "coach" Kak, is an IFBB Pro Body Builder, CEO of KAK performance and its a leader in the fitness space. I got the unique opportunity to sit down with him and talk about business, life, and how to win. Enjoy!
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Welcome to Unmasking Greatness. I'm your host, Chris Kikoris, a lifestyle fitness coach and mentor. This podcast is about unmasking your greatest potential, finding your purpose and crafting a life worth living. Health and fitness has been the gateway drug to all of my success. My continuous drive to keep learning and surround myself with other high achievers forces me to level up, which has developed my mind to something I never thought was possible. This podcast is here to share what I've learned and continue to learn with all of you. This is your sign to take back control of your health, mindset and personal environment. Strap in as we are recharged and always find value in the show. Please subscribe and share, as we can all get better together. Let's go. What's up, guys? Welcome to another episode of Unmasking Greatness. I'm your host, Chris Koukouras, and I have a very special guest, Justin Shoemaker. Hello, this is really cool because actually I don't want to make this just about the gym in general, but I met Justin literally two weeks ago, a week or so ago.
Speaker 2:Yeah, about two weeks ago. Yeah, I think we've seen each other working out quite a bit and then as you do with gym relationships. You kind of watch from afar with everybody and eventually, when you're doing something at the front desk, it's like, oh hey, dude, what's up? Yeah, that's really how it works.
Speaker 1:And that conversation started and then we ended up just chopping it up for a hot minute and then I found out more about you and what you were doing and I was like, oh, this is, this is a really interesting guy. Oh, thank you, yeah. And then he told me you have a podcast too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, um, was it a harmony? Harmony of hustle, yep, more business centric. Yeah, um kind of just started as a way to document me building the business from nothing yeah because, I mean, I think a lot of entrepreneurs it always.
Speaker 2:you know, we could always use more resources, for sure, and there's not a lot of uh, in my opinion, there's not a lot of content. We could always use more resources, for sure, and there's not a lot of in my opinion. There's not a lot of content out there where you can watch it from start to finish, from literally nothing to wherever it ends up going. So I wanted to start that. There was a podcast called the Startup, which was similar to that, where he was doing a tech business. I think he was pretty connected to people, like in Y Combinator, and so that was pretty inspiring. So I'm trying to layer that with visuals and do play by plays as things happen, but obviously more home service based for me.
Speaker 2:But I think you can learn from any business.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, that was kind of you know. We talked about that. You saw my studio and you said you had a podcast and so after we talked I looked it up and I was like I was listening to it on the way home and I was like this is really good so your content is actually really good. I mean, I listened to a lot of podcasts which got me into it, which I'm assuming is kind of similar to you.
Speaker 1:Yeah you just realize how much free knowledge is out there that people just don't tap into and you know at the end of the day, like if you're not taking the things that you're learning, then you haven't learned anything right, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean alex ramoji says it the best, right, I think he has the best phrases for things like this, but he's like uh, learning is same condition new behavior so if you just listen to something and you do nothing from it, then obviously you didn't learn, you just got entertained.
Speaker 2:And that clicked for me on a lot of stuff, because I've done that before, where I'll listen to business content and I get like this spiking motivation, or I'll watch like fitness videos and I'm like, oh, I can't wait to go to the gym, but I still got to go do the workout.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, you still got to do it.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, there's're going to listen to you, so you're in their ear a lot. That's why Joe Rogan is Joe Rogan, because a lot of people just enjoy that content and you feel really close to them. And podcasts have helped me out a lot because I road warrior all the time with the business, so that's where I'm able to get most of my knowledge and for me it's a great medium to learn For sure. So, like, if you're busy, you don't have time to read books, you can listen to a podcast over and over and over again and save notes and then actually implement what you learned. So for me it's great.
Speaker 1:And yeah, no, I'm like, I'm the same way, I don't. I don't have time to really sit down and read, so when I'm in the car, it's all listen to just podcast. Yeah, but yeah so we got Justin on here. Just a little background that I know of is that you were in the military Yep, served in the military and then you helped start up a solar business.
Speaker 2:Yes, Correct yeah.
Speaker 1:And that went from in one year went from $600,000 to $25 million.
Speaker 2:Yeah, top line yeah. So kind of to piggyback on how that happened was I was doing executive protection with NCIS out of the Pentagon, okay, so that's what I wanted to do, because federal protection is super fun.
Speaker 1:So explain that. What is that?
Speaker 2:So you know the people that drive Trump around like the Secret Service guys.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:It's that, but for whatever branch you're in. So, for example, some of my buddies now they work for like Department of Education, department of Transportation, and basically protect, like the top guy there, like the secretary or whoever, and it's a really fun job because unless something bad happens, of course but you get to go on all these crazy travels. I mean that was my first time ever going on like a G5, because the secretary flies on G5s, so you get into rooms you would never get into unless you're in like the upper echelon of government, which I thought was just super cool. I love to travel, so I got to fly on the government dime and get all the points and so for me it was just like a really fun job. Got to go see a lot of cool things.
Speaker 2:The job itself wasn't very hard. Again, I've been in security for 11 years, so for me it's kind of I've been doing it for so long, it's fine, because I was an anti-terrorism officer before that. So you know, pretty easy for me to do and the perks were just great. So that was my plan and all my buddies were doing that, and you know that job pays anywhere from $100 to $20, especially in the federal sector. $120 to like $180 a year, I think, is where you can get to maybe higher than that, and I never heard of that type of money before.
Speaker 2:But when I got out, code was going on, so no one was hiring and, happenstance, my buddy was in the water industry and I've always been into fitness and health, so he was like, hey, man, I know you're waiting to go back to the federal sector, do you want to just come sell water treatment systems for a while?
Speaker 2:And I was like, well, I didn't make money, so I'll I for a while. And I was like, well, I didn't make money, so I'll, I'll try it out. And at the time it felt like a huge step back because I literally went from in my opinion and again the opinions of probably my family and stuff this really high status job to you're now going into people's homes to sell them water systems and, to make it worse, like the in-home test that we used to do, you had this big briefcase. So I just like looked at myself, like I was like this door-to-door, like suitcase salesman, like from like the early, like 40s or whatever I'm like god and I was like all right, this, this is a part-time thing, I seem to make some money.
Speaker 2:But I actually got a system myself, changed my life and then I found out just by happenstance that I was naturally good at sales. So my sales training wasn't very elaborate when I went there, so I kind of had to teach myself like more advanced sales techniques from books and YouTube videos. The first sales book I've read was the Straight Line by Jordan Belfort, great sales book. Anyone that's watched sales content online if you're in sales, they've all pretty much just repurposed that book. It's kind of like the Bible of sales and I just started learning sales and I fell in love with it. And what changed for me was I was three months in and I had a paycheck for one week of work and it was $12,000. And I was like, oh, what is going?
Speaker 1:on here, people like water.
Speaker 2:I was like, oh, this is crazy. You can make this kind of money just talking to people and giving people value. And the cool thing about sales is sales guys and I've seen this in the solar side now there are unscrupulous salespeople that just want to make money. But when you sell something you believe in and you sell a product that actually works in a company, that's great. It's actually a beautiful industry because you're actually helping people get what they want. You look at anything, it's actually a beautiful industry because you're actually helping people get what they want. Like you, look at anything, it's all sales.
Speaker 2:And then I did more research and I found out everyone that's been super wealthy was in sales. Gary Vaynerchuk started in sales. Grant Cardone started in sales. Bronson started in sales I can't remember her name but the CEO of ABC Supply she started in sales A lot of them in door knocking right. So when I look at this I was like, oh, sales is actually the vehicle to make wealth. Every business sells something, anything that anyone has in their life. They got from some sort of a sale. So that really switched it for me and then I started making consistently 30k a month in commissions, I was like all right, my life has changed yeah, um, give me that suitcase.
Speaker 2:Yeah, right, right, right and my buddy he was working at. He's the one, a family friend of mine, who's actually a golf pro, um, super fitness guy. He was in solar his whole life, okay, and so he got recruited to that company and he said, hey, man, and we would talk all the time and he's like, hey, man, you should come to the startup. Because I kind of hit like my peak at that company I was at because it was a huge company. So lesson for you guys who are trying to grow even if you're the best guy there, if you're in a huge multinational, you're only going to go so far and I wanted more.
Speaker 2:So he's like, hey, there's a startup, it's brand new, they've been in business, I think, about a year and come down, let's see what we can do. And all I said was like I just want an office and I want my own team and then grew it from there. And then finally it got, uh, promoted to the sales director and then we were doing about, like I said, 600k in total revenue and then, with the same team, just with you know, some more oversight and sales training and scripting and building a culture, we took it to 25 mil, uh, in 11 months and it's also a team effort. It wasn't me, but yeah it was cool.
Speaker 1:So when you say there's a cap when you were at 30, is that from time, like you just can't sell anymore due to time? Or why is there a cap?
Speaker 2:Well, no, I guess it's probably sell more, but time is a part of it. I was saying like career advancement, like I wanted to be in management and leading and making decisions, but they already had managers, they had trainers. So my next step probably would have been like a training role. I probably would have been waiting longer to get to that position. I see, and I wanted to move quick. You know I keep on it, I wanted to keep growing. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, yeah.
Speaker 2:So the money for me at that point wasn't as important, as you know, because, especially in the in-home sales world, like it was draining, like you're driving a ton, especially for the work I was doing, like I was working more than anybody, I would drive four hours one way for an appointment, just so I could learn. So eventually you get tired of being on the road for five, six hours a day, yeah, and, honestly, being in people's homes, yeah. So I wanted to get out of that and luckily, when I built my own business, I have now tailored it so I can do what I love without having to do the stuff I don't like to do. I don't like going in people's homes, yeah yeah, so you shifted to solar.
Speaker 1:Do you think the big difference with scalability and obviously your income was you had your own team, that you were able to expand more? I think it was early.
Speaker 2:Really. Yeah, it was early, it was a startup, so roles haven't been defined yet, and so, being a top performer, you can kind of show what you can do and then you can create the role that you want to have. And so, obviously, because I was making the owner so much money, I had leverage to say, hey, this is what I want. Okay, here you go.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's like with anything it's a win-win.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, and with startups you have more of that control. When you're going to work with an established company, you're not going to have that much control because they've already got everything pretty much dialed in. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So that's kind of like when you look at what careers you want to go into, do I want to work for a startup or do I want to work for an established business? You're going to get way more long-term payoff at a startup, way more risk. Like that company ended up going out of business because the owner just did not manage it right. Which one? The solar company? Well, actually they both did. The water company did too, because it was attached to a solar company.
Speaker 2:Wow, yeah, a bunch of solar companies went out of business, just for I'm not going to go into it a bunch of reasons why, but you know so there's a lot of risk in a startup, for it could go out of business, yeah, but the potential upside is you know you'll probably get equity. If you're there early on, you can be at a higher role, you'll be an executive, because any big company where you look at the executives most not all the time, but most of the time they probably started when it was just starting out, right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, actually I had a client that was kind of her thing, because, you know, most people think I need a stable job, I need to build a career, and her strategy was completely different and it was crushing for her. She'd go to these startup companies and these startup companies still were pretty big, but she'd get equity in it. So she'd stay there for you know, two, three years, go to another one, gotcha, and she would just keep collecting.
Speaker 2:The equity? Yeah, the equity. And was she flipping?
Speaker 1:or she just like go in kind of get her equity and then she would just stack it, just keep stacking it, and then she also side note. Seems very stressful.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'll tell you another.
Speaker 1:Here's a little side business for all you guys that I just didn't know even was out there. Yeah, dog walking, oh, dog walking. She did dog walking on the side, yeah, and she was pulling in at least eight to ten Gs a month, jesus Walking dogs, that's wild. Get your steps in.
Speaker 2:ladies and gentlemen, you know what I'm saying I mean that's cool though, because I think it goes to show you can make a business out of anything, yeah, especially stuff that people don't want the time you know like that's a business.
Speaker 1:Do you know how much those guys on school? There's a company that they teach people this business model. You know how much money they're pulling in? The school community or like the school community. How much Last I heard they were at 60 grand a month teaching people how to pick up dog poop, like, if that doesn't open your mind to like what's possible, it's pretty impressive, it's funny.
Speaker 2:You can make money anywhere now and that's what I think getting out of the Navy and sales taught me. You know, I think I was like your traditional person that was groomed to go into the workforce and be like a worker bee because I was really good at the worker bee stuff. But when you go into entrepreneurship and you just see how the world works, like you can make. You may not be like a hundred millionaire, but you can make life changing money by just finding the service that people need or do or something you're interested in Like especially now with school is a great example. Like, if you're passionate about something and you can just consistently put out good content about it, you can make $20,000, $30,000 a month recurring revenue. Yeah, you know, working a job you actually enjoy, but there's a lot of fear around that. So I think that's where it stops.
Speaker 1:I don't want to like yeah, because I mean a lot of fear. Does there's risk? I think, even with you. That was kind of the other thing I was going to ask you because, yeah, you know, you leaving the water going from, you know, let's say, 30, 30 grand a month solar, was there an initial a little bit of pay drop, knowing that it could be more potentially?
Speaker 2:yeah, I, uh. I have historically regretted all my decisions after I made them.
Speaker 2:Learning lessons oh my god um, but there's like there's actually a quote. I'm glad we're going into this. There's a quote I recently read. It actually hit home for me because it it kind of encapsulates what most of my life was and now what it's not, and I don't know who to create the quote to. I just saw it online but it was crazy and basically it says the sheep spends his whole life in fear of the wolf, but at the end of the day it's the shepherd that eats them.
Speaker 2:And you can analyze that however you want, but to me what it really shows is that most people are afraid to take the leap to something because they're afraid they're going to fail, but at the end of the day, what ends up killing them is just staying in the same spot. It's the complacency that kills them, and I'd say every bit of fear is justified. But that is your brain just trying to hit a survival mechanism exactly. And once you actually get into the thing, you realize you're only afraid because you don't know what's going to happen, and everyone that has succeeded had that fear at some point. So if you have that fear, then you are in the same world and sphere as the same those people, people you aspire to be and so I try to keep that frame.
Speaker 2:But every yeah, when, when I made the switch, I literally, when I specially opened up that new office, like I went to a whole new industry I knew nothing about and I think I literally remember, um, this is like a defining moment of just like the probably the most pain I'd been in is we launched a new office and I had not made like any money, so I was making, maybe going from 20 30k a month to making like 2k a month maybe, like just was stressing, and we had a really good.
Speaker 2:We finally and I built the team up, I finally had a team of door knockers with me and we were finally seeing some momentum and one week I got like nine sales in in a week and so the way solar worked is, on those nine sales, once they get noticed, proceed. You get half the, you get half the payment right then and there, and then you get the rest after install three or four months later. So those nine deals and they're big systems I was probably gonna make 20k ish that week and I was like, finally, okay, money and I was like this is in a week now.
Speaker 2:So like, okay, now, if I can continue to do this type of stuff, I can get to the point where I'm making 100K a month. So I saw that and I was like, okay, we're good. It was like, probably four months in, so I was like really needing this. And, zone, I got a phone call on Thursday that they need to cancel their appointment. Another person needed to cancel their appointment.
Speaker 2:It got down to it, I only had two sales and then the two sales that I had like okay, they're solid. But I was already beat and kind of just distraught about it. And then, uh, I get a phone call as I'm driving home. Um, and it was the one girl who I thought there was no way she would cancel this, this sale. I, hey, justin. So I was like, oh, please. And I, literally I was so distraught. I was like please tell me you're not canceling. She's like, listen, I'm a real estate agent and we have a baby on the way. It's just I thought about it, we're probably moving, we just can't do it. And I was like, all right, I got it. And I just, I remember I pulled up to my driveway, just sat there looking up, just like crying like I was like what the hell?
Speaker 2:And it was like it was the most pit of despair I've ever been in. And, to what you're saying, I was like I just left this stable job where I was bringing in $20,000 for what? Yeah? And I called my mentor at the time. I was like dude, I don't know what I did. I feel like I just made a huge mistake here. And he's like Like it'll swing back, but if you can push through this, you'll build resiliency to go even further. And I was like all right.
Speaker 2:So that next week I went on the doors 15 hours a day just hustling, and then that next month I ended up making $35,000. And then consistently started doing that and then finally got to a point where I was making like 30K a week. Well, every two weeks, excuse me, oh yeah.
Speaker 2:It was like the peak and I think the most I ever made in a month was like 100 grand. After that, yeah, but you know, I bounced back and I started making more money than I did at the water company. But, yeah, there was always that risk and that fear and especially when I almost wanted to quit, I was like what the fuck did I do? Yeah, cause I could have gone back. But that's the thing you can always go back.
Speaker 1:That's true, you can always go back, but I think now, like you going through that. I always tell people this my level for stress is not to say you know, other people don't have a stressful life, but I have trained my stress level to be high. Yeah, exactly like that. You know, we'll have times that we're just we're crushing. I'm on a high. Next couple of weeks, months, you're like where what happened?
Speaker 2:Right Broke. You know something's broken.
Speaker 1:I got to fix something and it's and you know, those are the things we just kind of keep digging in the weeds but like having that emotional stability, you know, because you know it's one thing to have emotions but to act on them is going to be a detriment to your business, if you have one, you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, honestly, and I think fear puts you in the worst places. I mean, that's what put me my business to the point where we probably luckily, we're going to be out of it now. But I brought in partners because I was afraid of things I didn't know and I wanted to like in my head I thought it made sense, like limit the risk, but those people just took advantage of it and put me in a shit ton of debt, right, and that I know how to claw my way out of. So it's like if I was just okay being afraid and figuring it out and being okay going slower at the beginning and saying, oh, I'll probably make some mistakes and that's okay, yeah, I would have avoided these bigger mistakes, yeah.
Speaker 2:You know what I mean, so for, sure, I think, I think you're spot on with that. I think, being an entrepreneur and we talk about this a lot once you actually are responsible for your own income and everything else that goes with it, there's this consistent underlying level of just stress that's always there and at the start it's crippling, yeah, but now, like you, said you can.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's almost like a normality. If we don't have stress. It's almost something is wrong as well, right, like why is it? It's like the storm that's coming, you know. Like why is it so calm right now? You know why is it so sunny? Like things are too good.
Speaker 2:Like no, something's not right. When's the last time you you're like oh, I should be relaxed right now, but all the stress is technically gone. Yeah, no, have you done that?
Speaker 1:Uh, dude, my, my wife's going to probably listen to this and be like Chris. I told you you need to make it. We haven't gone on a like a legit vacation in probably three years. You know we've gone, obviously out of the country and stuff, but that was more for uh like like that. Yeah, like a legit, like just unplug and try to relax, which is hard for me to do to begin with. Yes, like.
Speaker 1:I get it, you know. But yeah, it's been probably like three years. Dude, I'm on this constant, like I'm still in a growth phase. You know, we're still we've been. We started in 2020 through COVID, you know and that and that was hard for me because you know I've talked about this in other episodes, just like my past, but I left kind of a stable job, like you, my father, he had a restaurant. I thought I was taking it over.
Speaker 1:You know steady paycheck, which you know I was getting five grand a month. You know a grand a week, plus a bonus, you know, yeah, which is enough to pay my bills. You know, have my house, have my car, you know, had a son that just got born. So I was, I was okay, wasn't thriving or like living my best life, but I had one vacation a year that I could save up for the dangerous middle right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:So you know we were there and then, you know, a lot of different pieces started moving around and I had to make a call which ended up being like the hardest decision of my life to leave there and. I was already doing online coaching as a side hustle, because I was you know, I was competing.
Speaker 1:I was already a trainer right, I went and I went to school and got a bachelor's in exercise science and a minor in psychology and thinking I was gonna get like a good job. Right. That's a false hopes. You know. I got out trying to be like a strength and conditioning coach and find other jobs with that degree. The most I could find in South Carolina was like 20 30 grand a year wow, yeah, it was that's crazy. I couldn't even pay off my student.
Speaker 2:I was gonna say, and just to get the degree itself.
Speaker 1:Yeah so I ended up uh, as I started just kind of doing this little side hustle, let's start snowballing a little bit to the point where I had enough clients to just pay bills and that was kind of like, okay, like I think I can do this. So I cut the cord at the restaurant and left there, left everything, and we did like a hybrid. So I picked up in-person training and blended that. Luckily, because of like where I'm at and I was kind of like born in the area, my clientele filled up pretty quick. Like within three months I was filled Like from seven to seven, monday through Friday.
Speaker 1:I left a two hour gap for me to like train and I would run it and it was great at first because I was like, oh, I'm making money, but then I was getting burned out.
Speaker 1:I'm like dude, this is exhausting. So then I brought on another trainer who I was like I'm going to give you all my evening clients. I'm going to train in the morning, you're going to take care of the evening, I'll also bring you on online. And at that point, a year later, I hired my first mentor. So that was kind of I knew there was more to the online space and there's a lot of good trainers out there, but they don't understand business Like me. I didn't understand it. I didn't know like client acquisition you know, what softwares to use, what apps to use.
Speaker 2:Pricing, churn all that stuff, yeah.
Speaker 1:So I ended up investing in that, which at the time it was $14,000 for four months, and I didn't have it. I had a credit card and I remember sitting in the back of the gym because I had the sales call and they told me, and I was just like, oh my God. I was like, well, they're a guarantee with this. And he was like Chris, do you guarantee that your clients are going to lose 50 pounds? I was like we can't guarantee that because, like, if they don't do the work goes, you will get the results. But you got to put in the time you got to put in the effort, which I respected.
Speaker 1:That answer, you know he could have sold me some pipeline dream, you know. But he was real with me and, um, I signed up and in that four months I never worked so hard in my life. I don't think I slept much. Yeah, because I was like I got to make this money back yeah you know, yeah and uh, first month I didn't make no money.
Speaker 1:Second month no money. Third month, a little bit. Fourth month, then we started jumping. I was like okay, because you know it's all getting back in, systems put in place and learning sales, like I didn't really know how to sell. I was watching, do you know badgers coolian? So he is, uh, the owner of the fit body boot camp franchise. Okay, super, super successful dude, but he was putting out YouTube videos on how to sell. Do personal training all?
Speaker 2:this kind of stuff.
Speaker 1:I'd watch all his stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And you know I remember looking up him for a mentorship. At the time he was charging 50K for the year, yeah, so I was like maybe one day.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know, now it's 100. I was like, all right, my man. But you know, there's value in that. Some people are like dude, I would never pay $100,000 to somebody. I have a close friend. I actually trained him for a national show. He started coaching other coaches' businesses. He got his business to right over a million, so hit right over a million. I saw him at a seminar that one of my mentors was throwing on and I was like, oh dude, are you in this program too? He's like no dude. He's like I actually just signed up with Bedros Nice. I was like, didn't he charge $100K? And he goes, yeah, and then he told me about his business. I was like, dude, let me know, I'm going to know. Like, is it worth? It. What's the?
Speaker 1:deal. In four months they tripled his income.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Four months.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's the investment no one wants to make is an investment in themselves, and it's the only thing that scales without cap. Yeah, Because the only thing that limits your growth is knowledge, if you think about it. So, and it's the same thing with business Like. And it's the same thing with business Like. You know, people were gawking when Alex Ramosi did his book launch Like, oh, $6,000 for these playbooks. I've gone through three playbooks and I've already increased LTV of my business. Right, and it's like invest in yourself, as long as you are the type of person that will take it and learn it and implement.
Speaker 2:Like going to your seminar makes so much more sense because you fill the gaps of your knowledge base and speed up because the playbook's already been made. They already know what success looks like, so now all you have to do is model that and then you can be successful. And I think that's a lot of people just aren't willing to invest in themselves, because it's like one of the few investments where you don't see an immediate return, where, like if you invest in Tesla, you can watch the stock market and see the charts go up and down, like, oh, I'm making money today or not. But with skill sets they compound, and they compound not by a factor like 2x or 3x, but 10x, 20x, because once you learn the skill, you're already going to get 2x or 3x better. But then you get better at that skill and then you pair that with your other skills and now you get this incredible return on that money.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so, yeah, I've uh, I I've changed my thinking on that a lot too, because I used to to balk at like, oh, why would someone spend 100 grand? But then it's like well, one, what has that person done in their life to be able to spend 100 grand? Yeah, right. So number one how can I model that? Because they can spend 100 grand on it. I'm going to assume they probably have the means to spend the $100,000. Sure.
Speaker 2:So I would like to get to that point. Yeah. And then number two is like okay, well, let's say, assuming they're an intelligent person, why would they spend that type of money? Well, they must want to learn a skill. They've always seen a return on that, and even bad ones. You know, I've spent money on courses that you know, objectively, weren't great, yeah. But I still found stuff that I was like, oh, I can take that and use that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't know if I told you that, because I was going to say that there's always a little bit of risk. Right, you know, I've been with three different mentors now. The first one amazing. The second one was great. They offered different things, so I gained different knowledges from different perspectives.
Speaker 1:The third one I'm not going to bash them or anything because it wasn't necessarily horrible, but it was the biggest investment that I've made, because it was $25K for six months and it wasn't very good. And I got in and I was like, okay, this is good, this is good. And then it just wasn't. I'm doing everything.
Speaker 2:Was it the knowledge that wasn't?
Speaker 1:good or the stuff you already knew. I think it was part of that. I think part of it was because, being in high-level mentorships prior, my back ends are set up. Everything level mentorships prior my back ends are set up, everything's set up, and my purpose of going in.
Speaker 2:There was solely legion gotcha.
Speaker 1:You know that was kind of like the only reason that I went in there and they're like oh, we have, you know, these done for you ads and you know we'll help you plug and play stuff and and that's not the case. Uh, it's not as simple, and this is for anybody that's in the business. You cannot just plug and play other people's content. You know you have to speak specific, especially when you're paying advertisement. You can't be broad. You have to be very specific for who you're trying to target and you've got to be creative as well.
Speaker 1:So there's so much more in depth about it. But anyways, yeah, we kind of had I don't want to say necessarily fallout- but we had some words.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And you know there's nothing for me to do. You know I signed up, you know I did it. I'll take what I can from it and then you know we part ways.
Speaker 2:What do you think was the biggest thing you learned from the ones that did work compared to the ones that didn't work? That actually helped you scale your business.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so my first mentor was Tanner Chittister.
Speaker 3:Oh, I know him. Yeah, I see him all the time, yeah.
Speaker 1:So he was my first real mentor and I stayed with him for a little bit over a year, okay and he helped me with everything, everything from like back-end systems to how to have a workflow, what app to use, which we've shifted over time, right. But all that back-end, like business stuff was just all new to me, right, so I'm just soaking it in. He taught me high ticket sales, because at the time, tanner has been still to this day, I want to say, um, one of his brothers, uh, he's over the sales department. And then benson, uh, chidester, he's actually working for acquisitioncom now.
Speaker 2:Oh, really um doing what do you know? Oh, I'd have to look yeah, that's cool um of course, of course they're gobbling up all the talent, yeah yeah. So we kind of like we'll message each other here and there.
Speaker 1:I'd love to see if he would get on a podcast with me too, because he's a wealth of knowledge but he's super cool, super humble dude, but anyways, yeah, they really kind of just helped me able to scale in just that back end stuff. And then it basically and again, this is not anything bad, but as he was growing his business too, they started opening up departments. So now we have a sales department.
Speaker 1:And so this is where it kind of took me back, because and it's you know again, nothing to knock, because, honestly, like I have nothing good words to say about them. They opened a sale department and they're like we'll run your ads for you. We're going to put it together, we'll run it, we'll track it, We'll show you everything, we'll give you the scripts $3K a month.
Speaker 2:That was like an add-on to the yeah.
Speaker 1:And then, on top of your ad, spend Gotcha, which they wanted you to spend anywhere from $ anywhere two to three grand a month on ads. Yeah, so you're talking about five, six grand a month, and I signed up for three months and didn't sell one thing, yeah, talk about a hit.
Speaker 2:And I was like yo, turn this shit off, we're done, and these are meta ads. Yeah and um, yeah, lesson guys, I have been burned on. Meta is a crazy platform to advertise on because you can like, if you can get a winner, it's great, but you get so much like bullshit in. You have to have a good enough funnel to really pre-qual people that actually you speak to, because I don't know if you had this situation, but I've when I just ran and I don't have any mad ads running now but when I was getting a ton of leads in I think I was getting like 100 leads a week and it was like the most garbage conversation. I was like, guys, what are you doing? You're sending me into a person that's in a crack house right now.
Speaker 1:What's going on. It was either trash people I was talking to or a ghost town, like tons of people. You know we do triage calls. I didn't sign up for anything. Is this your name? Is this your number? Is this your email? Oh, you know, like, come on. So yeah, it's just, it was just bad. So we tried a couple different things, but I think they were. There was some miscommunication within the department as well.
Speaker 1:They're like well, you know, let's, let us do one month free for you, and I was just like dude, I'm good, Like we're, let's just cut the rope at this point. So, but I will say from a systematic standpoint and they probably fixed that by now- I guarantee they have, but just in the beginning phase.
Speaker 1:So I was looking for something else. I was like ads burned me, I lost a ton of money, let's shoot more organic. So then I found a guy, jason Phillips, who has NCI Massive company as well, and his strategy, I mean. He basically said if you're not pumping out you know close to like 60, 70, 80 grand a month, like why are you messing with ads, which is a pretty like heavy concept Now I will say he has shifted that since then. That's an interesting perspective.
Speaker 1:Yeah so yeah, because with Tanner, you know, we hit 10K consistent, then we got up to 50. Yeah, and it kind of like, you know, a little bit of a wave at that point in time. Yeah. I think the ads it all comes down to. I need new eyeballs, right, right, well, switched over to Jason. Y'all getting the nitty gritty on these people. I never talk about this, I love it. So they had their three components were what they call like fast cash frameworks okay, okay and one of them is actually in alex's new book.
Speaker 2:I read it right. Yeah, I used I, by the way, I used one of those. If we go into it to uh pull, I think right now 15k ford to help pay off some of that debt we were talking about yeah so there you go. So that was super nice, but yeah, keep going, so yeah.
Speaker 1:so he ended up um. They had Fast Cash Flameworks. One was the scholarships, which is basically, I think, what Alex talks about in his book Okay Challenges and then webinars, these are all like legion systems, right.
Speaker 1:So I was like, okay. So as far as systems go, honestly, like, in my opinion, tanner systems were better, back end Got it, business systems, but lead gen, yeah, and even like CRM systems and all of that organization, just a little more advanced. And again, their processes were just different. The way that they track, because they did track heavy, it was just different, right, but I kept my systems because I like them. But anyways, so I sign up for them. And the first one we're going to run is the scholarship play, which is exactly what Alex is talking about in his book.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Is that the 12-week challenge?
Speaker 1:No, it's a challenge play, no, so basically, it's a you're giving something away for free a service for free.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's right, and you can sign up for the scholarship. And the people that don't get the scholarship you call them back and say, hey, sorry, you didn't get the scholarship, but hey, we have this, we can give you a discount or whatever. Yeah, Got it. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So we ran that and dude, insane dude Worked out well, hell yeah yeah. We had probably 150 applications telling us why they wanted to work with me, which is the key piece Wow. Yeah, why do you want to work with me?
Speaker 2:Right, because it's not just like gangster. Give me your info.
Speaker 1:Why do you want to work with us? And we, basically, and I did, I went through all of them and we chose. I mean, the whole system is fair. You know what?
Speaker 1:I mean it's not rigged, by no means. But we chose and we gave that person you know, for us it was free coaching for four months, right Something of real value, yeah. And then basically everybody else we followed up with and said, hey, listen, I know you didn't get it. I really liked you know what you had to say. You were close, right, and we'd tell them what they said so we were not bullshitting. Be actual, honest about it, yeah yeah.
Speaker 1:You got to be real you know and, honestly, we still want to be able to help you. So if you're open to the conversation, let's jump on a call and we have something different to offer you guys. We signed up probably I think it was close to 30 new clients in that month.
Speaker 2:What was the price point on those?
Speaker 1:At the time we were doing, I think, what were we doing back then? I mean, I think, back then too, it was three grand for six months, that's not bad. Yeah. So with all the new sign-ups, re-signs from current clients, and then you get a bit of continuity after that too. Continuity, I mean total sales. That month we hit 104, which is insane for coaching.
Speaker 2:You know what I mean. Wow, that's great.
Speaker 1:Now let me bring everybody back to reality. We call that a unicorn month. We have never hit that again since that day. And I'll tell you why. And I didn't understand at the time, Because with this organic play it works really good. I dried out my funnel. I dried out my funnel for the next couple months. So it was very here and there, sporadic, and then I was like dude, I need to run another play. We did it the following year.
Speaker 2:It did half as good and I'm like yo, what's up with this.
Speaker 1:So, as I started thinking or reflecting, I'm running the same play to the same people, right?
Speaker 2:you know what I mean. That makes sense, yeah, so unless you're having new flow of leads and organic too, it'd be. So you have to build your audience consistently. Then, too right, it's not going to work as good.
Speaker 1:So you know again. These are the things that I've learned. You know throughout the time.
Speaker 2:So do you think you know, just kind of to dig deep, then do you think it'd be better or another play is like okay, say that work, focus on just building your organic audience to as big as possible before you monetize it. A hundred percent Probably be for more, for more again if you have to do what you have to do. But longevity wise.
Speaker 1:Yeah, maybe no a hundred percent. You have to. I mean, you could, you always, should be like working again this for for our business specifically. You always gotta be working on content. You always gotta be doing research. Um, you always gotta be doing research. Um. Recently again, it's almost like a whole nother job to like create content, do research what's working.
Speaker 2:What's the hook?
Speaker 1:yeah, how to clip it? What's engaging? Uh, it's just constant, constant testing. But you have to do that yeah uh, and then you know part of that. Actually we just signed. I don't know, have you ever heard of a um software called notion? Notion, uh-uh, um, there's a couple different out there. It just helps organize tasks.
Speaker 2:Motion or.
Speaker 1:Notion Notion.
Speaker 2:Okay, I know there's one. There's an AI one called Motion. Yes, that like syncs to your Google and you have your own little email and it'll AI if a task is done, it'll automatically move it around. Yeah, yeah, something like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but we use that specifically for our content, so I have it to where like we basically created this whole pipeline and you know, there's our ideal system. Then we move it to scripting to filming to, you know, posting, and then we'll review it and see how it does. So it just helps me kind of stay a little more organized. In that sense you almost have to become like a media company.
Speaker 2:I feel like these days, like, no matter what business you're in, I guess, depending on what you want to do, right, like in the water space, that's the one thing that we're trying to do. A little different is no water company really has that figured out it's the same, like if you go and look up water treatment ads, it's the same. Ugc-created offers the same content. Like I'm the only company now that has a super high ticket offer that I'm offering. Yeah, um, which, to your credit, I think, puts you in your own realm for sure, because now people, like when you said, like the play for the scholarship, why do you want to work with us?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's like you have a super high ticket offer you can offer people. It's like, well, okay, they're different. Yeah, so I think that's that's beautiful. Yeah, yeah, but yeah, it's tough, like the side is tough, and one of the biggest things I want to save money for is next year is actually build out a content team, because I can say right now I'm you know my skill set on the recording, the lighting, it's not that great.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah so you know, you have to see like how much time am I going to invest trying to learn these skills, or or if I can build the company up enough to where I can just pay for someone to keep me on track.
Speaker 1:Well, I'll say this I haven't looked. I know you post some stuff on YouTube. I didn't see that, but I did go to your website. Yeah, whoever did that video looked good.
Speaker 2:So if you did that, yeah, I did that one your lighting is.
Speaker 1:I think the lighting is good.
Speaker 2:So if you recreate?
Speaker 2:that Camera and editing commitment, you know what I mean. Like, oh, yeah, it's, I can make it good enough, but there's, there's ads I want to run that. I know I just don't have the skill set for or the equipment for, like talking head stuff. You know it's pretty easy. Yeah, so that stuff is fine, but that let's be real like the talking head stuff is great for like the business content for what I want to do, like vsls and like the actual or operations got that unlocked. But we're talking about content and getting eyeballs.
Speaker 2:That's a whole different skill set, as you've seen, because you have to create something new.
Speaker 2:You have to create something that isn't just a carbon copy of other people's content, and there's so much good content out there now it's almost kind of hard to be unique, and so that's why I really want to try to focus on just telling stuff that I've done and try to find those little nuggets and gems of what can help people.
Speaker 2:And I think for me, until I can get a bigger team that can help me create content ideas that maybe would be better the documentation process, I think, is the best thing, because I can just document the journey and say this is what's happening. This is what's working and no one can really refute that. And that also just creates my own unique path and then I can. Also makes it easier because I can repurpose things like again, I'm gonna shill hermosi like crazy because his stuff has just been so applicable to my business recently where it's like I can say on my episodes and pox say, hey, this is what was in this playbook, this is what I learned from it this these are the results, and that creates its own new type of content.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of info in there. I've seen some people add They'll sign up for my thing and I'll give you a free copy of this book. Yeah, because I collected 200 books to give away. Yeah, I still have 190 of them.
Speaker 2:So if people want a book, I got books.
Speaker 1:So let's kind of shift gears. So you was in a water company, you went to solar. Then you went back to now starting your own water company. Yeah, so what made you shift from you know, obviously scaling to 25 mil in a solar company, to like you know what I think. One why did you want to do something yourself versus going into just like another sales position somewhere else?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's way more established. Yeah, because the easy answer is the owners in the company kept fucking up the companies.
Speaker 2:Fair enough, like I had been working my ass off in these businesses and the owners kept fucking it up and they wouldn't listen to us. Like, especially the solar company, we had a really good team I'm talking a really good team and all we needed was for the owner to get out of the way and let the team just do everything and just say, hey, we need to pay this and pay this and pay this. Now. He probably wouldn't have paid it, but that didn't happen and so the companies ended up unraveling. So I was in this nexus point where I had made the most amount of money I've ever had. So I had a nest egg now and the good thing about that solar company is I had actually me and the core leadership there were basically running it, because the owner was always off doing whatever. So I got to actually well, I didn't have as much experience I thought I had, but in my head at the time I was like, okay, I've been semi-running this business, I feel, and I know sales really well, like I know I can sell no matter what. So no matter what I know I can sell, so I'm good there. I don't know operations that well, which is why I tried to hire on the guy. That wasn't the best decision, but I was just looking at it I just turning 30 and I was like, all right, I got all this money. We have the house that we can sell up in Maryland and I was talking to my wife about it. I was like, well, listen, I can either go work for another company and I continue to probably make some good money, but I'll probably still have to work hard to make the money I want to make. So you don't just make 20, 30K a month without working hard. It's still a lot of effort. And I was like, well, if I do that, I'm just going to continue to make these other businesses a ton of money and I'm not going to see the long term benefits of that. And if I don't do it now, then when you know, now it felt like the perfect time of like we have money saved, we can sell the house to get even more money saved.
Speaker 2:I'm passionate about water over solar. I was like, if I'm going to start a bit and I know there's a market for it, so you know, I knew product market fit would be there. I knew Virginia wasn't like the biggest market for it at the time, but there was a market. So I was like, okay, if I don't start a business now, I never will. And I'm always going to regret not knowing, because at the time I was like I'm so sick of these owners just fucking the stuff up, like not caring about their customers. Like I know I can out care everybody and I know I'm going to work super hard to make sure my business is successful and I will go above and beyond for my clients if things go wrong or when things go well. So to me it was just like if I don't do it, I'm going to hate myself forever for not going for it, and I just played it out. I said if, if it fails, well, I'll just go back to sales. Yeah, if it fails, I'll go back to sales. I'll be a little embarrassed, yeah. But on the upside, if this thing succeeds over the next five to ten years, I could potentially build something that gives me, you know, wealth forever. Yeah, and I can actually dictate how I want things run and I can build a company I actually want to work in. Yeah. So that was it.
Speaker 2:It was just a bunch of you know, I didn't. I don't think I had, and maybe some people can relate to this. I don't think I had like the entrepreneurial bug. You know I didn't. You know I went to the military for a reason I wanted security. No-transcript, I'm going to go be this entrepreneur and have these like genius ideas of of, you know, changing the world.
Speaker 2:It just came out of desperation, like I was in so much pain of I just can't work for anybody anymore. Yeah, it's just I, I've proven to myself what I can do in the sales environment, which is somewhat like a business. That's why, if you want to get in a business, I think they should go work as a 1099, where you still have to eat what you kill. And so I gave him the confidence that I was like, okay, I can survive on my own, I know I won't starve. So that was just kind of the decision.
Speaker 2:I was in too much pain to go the other way. I was like I have to do something on my own, yeah, and I just I'm really in love with water treatment. So I was like this is gonna be the best, the best avenue for me to go. Yeah, um, and I knew customer satisfaction and water treatment super easy to do because, unlike solar, which takes forever or other industries, or even fitness where, like you know, you gotta like work with these clients for a long time and they may not get the results and then blame you. Like with water, I put the system in, you get results in four hours. Flush your water out, you feel the difference immediately. So really easy for me to look good, as long as my installers don't mess up. Yeah, so as far as the quality and obviously, I invest in really good units.
Speaker 2:I'm not buying the cheap stuff, but these are very expensive units so I put put them in. They're happy. There's a reason we have over 155 star reviews over our locations because as long as you don't mess up the installation, it's really hard to piss these customers off. And sometimes things go wrong, like there might be a manufacturer defect or things happen. As long as you address it and fix it and show that you're showing up, I've learned most customers are pretty understanding up to a point.
Speaker 2:But if you are as mad about a situation that they are and you respond to their request quickly and you don't just try to shift blame, customers generally won't leave you bad reviews and they'll generally work with you because they understand it's a business and they understand we're a small business. So I think that gives a little bit of grace. Yeah, yeah, I tell them listen, understand we're a small business, so I think that gives a little bit of grace. Yeah, yeah, I tell them listen. We're a small, veteran-owned business. Yeah, we're great at a lot of things. Some things are going to be a little bit slower at and I just think that's a long-winded answer.
Speaker 1:But yeah, yeah, no, I mean that's a good answer. I think customer experience is massive. You know, months ago, um, since we've been online, we, we didn't mess with like reviews like that right, tons of testimonials, tens of transformation pictures that's what really kind of helped us and word of mouth, so the better the experience I could get on top of the results, right communication, like that's how we've been getting clients for the most part no ads, no paid spend. The majority is just referral system. That's awesome. So now, coming here, we're kind of planning on making a couple of different shifts, cause I wasn't going to tap into the in-person but I have another coach. I think we're going to bring him here, and let him kind of run that.
Speaker 1:So I was like you know what, let's, let's get a business Google profile. I didn't have one, I didn't think I needed one, and so I just started and this is funny I had no reviews, Obviously. I just started this thing and, uh, in two weeks we had a hundred five-star reviews. Hell yeah.
Speaker 1:And you know why I have a hundred five-star reviews. Obviously, I have a lot of people that I've worked with in the past too. But, um, call them, yeah, text them, yeah, and and a lot of them, yeah, chris, dude, I'll do it. I'll do it right away. Give me a, give me a, give me later today, I'll get it done. They wouldn't do it. Yeah, guess what? Text them the next day. Hey man, I just want to make sure. Like, are you so cool with doing a review? Dude, I totally forgot right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the follow-up is so important. People don't understand the follow-up, and this is why, if you have CRMs, you can automate that now. Yeah, so you can literally automate it and it'll do it for you. And then you can just do your personalized ones after a certain cadence.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so for us we'll do automated follow-ups for four days and then on day seven I follow up.
Speaker 1:Oh gotcha, yeah, you know, yeah, yeah, it's important, dude, I mean with mine, I'm not going to lie. I went the extra mile for these because I really wanted to rack it up.
Speaker 2:Voice note. Ooh, that's good.
Speaker 1:I voice noted people with their name, you know. So it's not like AI generated, it's a real personal touch.
Speaker 2:That's key and I think that's super smart because I think, especially now, with AI becoming so prevalent and everything that is probably going to be the new meta of how you get people to convert is how personalized can you be? And I think we'll even see and we've been talking about this with my team for next year is sending little gift boxes, like real estate agents do, the handwritten thank you cards. I think that's going to be our next extra mile I wanted to create. I'm really inspired by First Form. When I purchased my first order from First Form, they sent me this little welcome box and it looked so good and so I want to start doing that for my.
Speaker 2:Obviously, I don't have the money to do it right now, but that is going to be something big that we're going to try to implement. It's just like a welcome box for them that just has like little goodies. It's like a nice Because that really did. I saw that and I'm like, oh, this is cool, and the people that first formed they'll write stuff. When I order different products, they're like oh dude, I see you got this flavor. This is my favorite new flavor.
Speaker 2:So you see, that type of stuff, especially now, that hits different. So I'm trying to implement more of that in my business. Especially now that we went fully virtual, it's gonna be even more important, I think, to to have that interaction with customers. And yeah, the follow-up is huge and to your point too for leads and getting sales.
Speaker 2:One shift that I found because I was an in-home sales guy, I always was like super big on like my sales skills to close people. That was like I'm the king shit of sales, I can do these word tracks and I can use these different tonalities. I went through the psychology of sales. So when I went to business I kind of thought the same way. But what I realized and this is just a new shift that I've had that has helped me make more sales now is customers don't actually care. That's not as important. If you have proof and the testimonials and video testimonials which I'm trying to get more now of, that's all you really need. The customer is like they don't need all the fancy sales techniques. Like if you have great proof and testimonials and a good product and you present it in a good way, then you don't really need to do the whole aggressive selling. You can literally say all right, a or B, yeah, yeah, let's go.
Speaker 1:They're almost already bought in, you know? Yeah, you just got to basically just open the door and close it for them, versus like kick it open and slam it behind them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know. But I think Alex Ramosi was saying that too. And you know me getting into sales too, especially starting my business, yeah, a lot of people knew who I was. So my close rate was like 80%. Yeah, like we were closing pretty much everybody you know which is high for ours. So but he's like you don't know how good of a salesperson you are until it's a cold lead, like they don't know who you are. He's like you don't train sales for them saying yes, you train for them saying no, like what. How do you follow up with that, you know, and so Objection handling yeah.
Speaker 1:And that was. That was an interesting concept.
Speaker 1:I was like huh no wonder mine was really good, you know because they've been looking at my transformation and testimony. But yeah, in the coaching space it's the nurture time has extended significantly. I think, and this is my opinion too, this is why school was developed. This is why a lot of these free groups have been developed. Because so many of these high ticket coaches. You know they're signing people up but then people are getting burned. They're like this is not what I signed up for, this is not the results I'm getting for, and we know it's just like dating somebody, right? It?
Speaker 1:doesn't always go good, the first time, right, you know, you find somebody else you know what to look for, but that happens over and over again. People are very hesitant and a little more cautious before they just jump into something, right? So if you can get somebody into a free group, where you're helping them with some like lower tier problems get them to a point they're like oh man, this, I'm getting all this for free.
Speaker 1:What if I actually paid this person, right one with me? So it used to be back, you know when. When I started, you know, three months was kind of like a nurture time that you should be able to close people, just follow-ups etc. It, et cetera. It's like six to 12 months now.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so that's where you got to play the long game.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you guys have a pretty, I'd say, a saturated but unsaturated market, right, there's a ton of people that do what you guys do, but it's a massive market cap to go for because everyone, for the most part, wants to get healthy or they go through seasons where they want to get healthy, right, get the body they want, and I think it's like one of those things where, like you're, if you are really good at what you do, especially in the service space, like you'll stand out amongst the rest. Because I've, it's like, yeah, I've had so many bad coaches the same way, where I've been in programs that didn't work, where I've done everything. And, um, you know, sean, credit to him local trainer here, sean france, sean, fr, france Trayden, really good guy, spent some of the best, the actual like and again, all natural with TRT and best transformation I've had out of any coach. But he also, you know he's a little bit more aggressive on calling you out on stuff and you know, just, yeah, he'll see stuff. Hey, dude, like stop being a pussy. Or like we'll do that, that and I'll pay for the in-person training which I think helps a lot and like actually learning how to work out.
Speaker 2:The right way for me has been super helpful, but no, it's. I think you're spot on with the school stuff and we've been trying to look at a way to do that. For us. It's a little tough just because it's like, unfortunately, people don't care that much about water treatment. Um, you have to educate and right now our client base are people who maybe will get into school community but they're not spending a lot of time learning, like a lot of time it is. We have this pain, this issue we want fixed. Help us fix it. I think the social media side will be part of that, but especially for, like, the coaching space, I think it's. If you can create a big funnel of free content, build that trust, then absolutely yeah, big funnel of free content.
Speaker 1:Build that trust and absolutely For us, because it is so large you have to niche down. There was a girl in our first mentorship group. She only works with vegans that are going through menopause. Women, that's it.
Speaker 1:You want to talk about narrowing it down. How much does she do a month? I don't know what she's doing now, but I do remember because we used to talk about narrowing it down. How much does she do a month? I don't know what she's doing now, but I do remember because we used to talk about the ads thing a lot.
Speaker 1:She's like I'll help you. Kind of show you. That is the cool thing I will say about getting in the right rooms or being in mentorship groups. Yeah, you have your mentor, but you meet some really really good people that you just want to see each other win. So we got on a couple of zoom calls and she would show me. But she was like because he goes this, this ad stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you want it to be good, but it's testing she literally had some sort of reel that she was running ads to. It didn't perform, she turned it off. All she did was like change like the headline and the captions, and she did a 100k month same video. Wow, exact same video. Just changed the words, the captions and, like that's crazy, it just, you know, just cranked and you know it'll and she said it ran great.
Speaker 1:I mean overwhelmingly great, is what she said. She's like I wasn't ready for it, uh, and, but she handled it and she ended up. I think you know usually a lot of those ads, man, they'll, uh, they'll run for a couple months and then you got to get new creatives or whatever. But a little hack. I don't know if you ever do this. If you go on Meta, there's a it's called a ads library.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:I have gone through there, yeah, so you can find people in your niche. There's a little hack for you guys and if you see you can't see exactly, you know, know their target, demographics and stuff like that, right, but what you can look at is the ad, the copy yep, and if it's been running for over 30 days, yep, then it's probably doing pretty good.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, I've tried that. Um, unfortunately, what I've noticed is the the ads are all the same and every water company, all my competitors are in the exact same ad. Yeah, and so I'm looking at like, okay, I probably run the same ad and get the same and every water company, all my competitors are in the exact same ad.
Speaker 2:And so I'm looking at it like, okay, I'll probably run the same ad and get the same type of people in, but then what ends up happening is they start price shopping and then I'm getting the same people that are going for that same ad. And so, like I said with the water treatment, I think if I can crack that code on the marketing and try to create a new avenue for it and I'm not trying to niche up to more higher-end stuff, I think that is going to be the new wave. Again, we'll see.
Speaker 2:I could be completely wrong but I think that's going to be the way, because I think right now people who sell water treatment, they sell it as a commodity and they feel like it's a commodity. I've talked to a ton of dealers who will price shop like crazy and what's changed my business? And this was hard for me to do. But we had a client who was emailing us back and forth and he's like listen, man, your systems I've been doing all this research, blah, blah, blah your system is $900 less. He's like I want to support a veteran-owned business. I just need you to beat that price and I can go with you. And he's like well, do you have? And I basically emailed back.
Speaker 1:I was like well, then I guess we're not doing business. I was like that's not supporting me.
Speaker 2:I was like I was like yeah, well, number one I have learned, especially in any home service industry. But, like the people that want to negotiate price down, you lose your money with them, no matter what. And then you lose respect on the on on your equipment and then, morally, all my clients have paid that plus more for better systems. So it's like what would I say to a client that spent seven grand with me and then they find out someone else got it for $2,000 less. Let's say Morally, that's not good, that compresses my margins like crazy, and that guy that complained is going to be complaining about the entire thing forever, and so then I'll have to keep going back to their house and comp things.
Speaker 2:And so it's like I've just learned that's not the right way to go, especially if I provide them clear value and what I told them and I even said like listen, I'm not gonna drop the price, I said, but what I can do and this is how I knew and this is a good litmus test, especially if you guys have someone that drops price is you don't want. I said we can get rid of the lifetime warranty. I can send one of my junior techs out there, so he's not going to have been in the field very long, I'll save you on labor. And I think I took like, hey, I won't give you the RO system and I'll save you $500 or whatever. And then he just emailed back and was like, no, I just want that price. And I was like, well, I guess we're not in the business, because it's not the same.
Speaker 2:And I have a price match on my units for that reason. Where it's, if you find apples to apples of my units and they're cheaper, then I'll match price Because I truly believe I have the best equipment on the market Now for 90 days, once I get my units, and I'll refund you to find the same. But you're not going to. I've done the research, I know what I'm offering. So when people come back though, I want to shoot that. Well, I don't want to work with you anyway, because you know all my clients. Now.
Speaker 2:I made this mistake early on the movement. At the beginning, I needed money, yeah, but now, like I get high-end clients who pay what my prices are and I can actually serve them better, yeah, and I think that's one thing that business owners I mean I know they make this mistake because I was making this mistake is you want you kind of like for your ego, want to say, oh, I have all these clients, yeah, but I have less clients. I sell less deals a month now at a higher price point. I make more money on it, which, by the way, I learned this in one of the Hermosi books. If you want to go through this, if you want to change your pricing. There's a mathematical equation you can use it's bonkers. It blew my mind when I learned it and my customers are worth more now. I don't have to work as many people. So now my operational drag has gone down, which is fantastic, and I make more money. So it's like it's a win-win-win. And so I kind of want to scale that more and all my customers are more happy because I'm able to also give them a better service, because they're paying for more, right, and I don't think what customers realize and what I try to tell my owners is there is a sea of dead, dead companies, especially in water treatment, in any industry.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and those companies are all these like smaller companies that just would continue to try to match price, beat price and go as low as possible. But you can only go so low before you lose all your margin and then you go out of business. And for me I want to beat everybody. So for me I'm going the opposite direction. I'm gonna. I have a super high ticket offer now that maybe three people will take a year, maybe more, who knows but yeah, if three people take that offer, I will be able to outspend every single water competitor I have and I'll be able to scale to the moon, yeah, and then those people that get that will get. I mean it's. It's like I literally said what's the most insane thing I can offer somebody so much. So, realistically, only 10% of my client base will be able to get it Because operationally it'd be too much to handle, you roll out a red carpet to their door like walking in.
Speaker 1:It's crazy.
Speaker 2:Essentially, yeah, it's crazy, like literally, it's the most. We cover everything for you forever. Yeah, it's the most. We cover everything for you forever yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's insane, you get what you pay for. I've learned this through many other ways of just trying to. Again, everybody wants to save money. I get it. I want to save money too. Last year we built a detached garage in my house, yeah Right, and I was talking to different people. I was like I don't know how to do this kind of stuff. You know, I have a friend.
Speaker 1:He does concrete, so I had someone that could extend my driveway put the, you know, the slat, all that kind of stuff. And my neighbor, you know, and he apologizes to me every single day now, but he's like I got this guy. I've seen his work.
Speaker 2:Oh, no, he does.
Speaker 1:Well, you, you know he does these refabs on these houses on the lake. Yeah, you know. So I'm like, okay, cool, let's bring him in this dude's a little sketch, you know when you're mad at him.
Speaker 2:He's a little sketchy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, you know kind of got some missing teeth and like you know, oh good, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:You know, kind of work. Anyways, he's like how much is this thing going to run me? This is what I'm looking for. This is the size, nothing crazy. I just, you know, this is it Probably run you about all in all and I'm going to overshoot 20 grand. I'm like, all right, cool, let's do it. So he starts working and, you know, for the first couple of weeks he's there every day, every day. And then I started seeing him being there every day and nothing else was getting done except, you know, four energy drinks within a six-hour period Great, awesome. And then he's not coming a couple times. Long story short, this thing dragged out for about four-ish, five months, and not only did he not finish the job, I called him one one day. I'm like dude, what are you doing? And he flipped out on me. He was like you know what, finish it yourself.
Speaker 2:So, jesus, at least, like you know, the walls were up, the roof was on lord, but like you pay him the 20k, at that point like yeah, all down I gave him, uh, partial in the front end.
Speaker 1:And then you know again, this is what happens when you mess with you know, quote, unquote, crackheads. You know what I mean. Like, hey, Chris man, just give me a little bit more, you know to hold me over till next week. And you know I'm like, okay, cool, I'll give him a little bit, a little bit. And then I yeah, that's what happened. I ended up paying to get two other companies to come finish a job for an additional ten thousand dollars.
Speaker 2:So that's what you get for saving money sometimes dude, I I had it when I moved to Greenville and I I was kicking myself because I had a quote and it was a high quote. And I got another quote. It was like half the price and they said all the right things. At the time I was like, okay, sounds good. I gave him my measurements that the other guy gave me oh yeah, I think. They said it was going to be $4,000, and the other guy quoted me $8,000. And it's the last time I ever go against this again. And I felt so stupid because I was like, oh yeah, this is a really good price for what you're offering. Awesome, let's do it. And the. And sure enough, it was horrible. And then they nickel and dimed us and because they have your stuff in their truck, they're like, oh, actually it's going to be an additional $4,000. So we ended up paying more than we got initially quoted from the first guy and they broke stuff. It was horrible, it was a nightmare. So, yeah, that has reinforced my decision that now I go for the best value, I don't go for the best price anymore. Yeah, because it never works out that way, because you also have to say well, who are they hiring? And yeah, it's a personal story for my company. Why I now even charge even more is my guy shout out to kier, I have probably the best installers ever right now.
Speaker 2:Prior to this guy, I went through four different people. The first guy just ghosted and chop shopped my truck, didn't even show up to his first job, found it in the hood with zero oh legit Legit Gone. We literally had to like it was crazy. It was like a PI and this was like my first install. I sold too. Thank God it was a referral that we knew them, so we had a little bit of grace on it. But first job ever he knows shows and I kid you not, we had to find his go. We had to stalk him on facebook and find out whose kids were. Go to his kids house, say hey, we can't get a hold of this dude, where is he? And then finally we get the location of the van. So I can't remember how he found it. We end up finding it and then he called me hey, man, uh, sorry, you're just been out of it. Is it cool if I still work here? I was like bro whoa fuck off.
Speaker 2:So he goes. So that was installer number one. And then again, mistake I made I should have. I spent a lot of money on a new truck and I wish I would have started with a shitty truck, because I'll try to be all fancy and look bigger than I was right. And so the truck got chop shop so I had to pay money to get that fixed. Um, and then my next installer was let's see if I can remember the order they went in.
Speaker 2:So then my next installer was actually a really good guy, um, but very unhealthy. So unless I've again, I try not to be rude but like I'm big into fitness and health and one of my, my core principles in hiring for certain positions, you have to be like somewhat healthy and this kind of reinforced that decision. And he just his job is moving these tanks and he had a son that helped him and I was actually getting a really good deal on him. He was taking a really low rate to help out and he was a great guy, really really good guy. And his installs. The problem is his installs weren't that good which I guess if you're sloppy, they're going to be too and you just couldn't handle the tanks. So he no-showed three jobs and so I was like, okay, you've got to go. And then my third guy was a young kid who I thought would be good because he was hungry. But then same thing. Now his actual quality of work was decent, but then he was smoking, weed out of the truck and the client knows it.
Speaker 2:So he had to go. But then he was smoking weed out of the truck and the clients knows it, so he had to go. Then I got my fourth installer and I was like, all right, this is the guy. Um, I wrong enough, no teeth. I was a little iffy on him. But he interviewed.
Speaker 2:Well, he had a, his resume was stacked Like he had been a plumber, done luggage stuff and he actually was crushing it. So he comes on and I was like, okay, maybe don't judge a book by its cover. And for about three months he was rocks. I mean I'm talking the work this guy was doing was insane, like high-end plumbing, like his plumbing was beautiful and it was great. He was getting jobs done quickly. But then I think he had a drug problem which I should have guessed. He started making money and then he and then I think I got back on drugs, got the thing and then it just fell apart and then I got Kier on to work with him and Kier crushed it and Kier's been with me ever since.
Speaker 2:But I saw how long it took me probably a year and a half to get one good, reliable installer. So when I know other companies are selling super cheap, it's coming somewhere, and I know how hard it is to find good talent, especially in the contracting space, for sure. So it's like you're paying for this because you're going to get someone that one is respectful of your home, is going to do phenomenal work, is a good person, isn't on drugs and actually cares about you, and you're getting the highest end equipment on the market and you're getting the best customer service team on the market, because my customer service staff is amazing and, and you're again, you're getting unequivocally the best equipment. So it's like you're paying for that. Yeah, and I know there's people that go cheaper are going to get hit by these installers, because it's. That's why I'll never my next business. I'll never do home service again, I'll never do something with inventory or yeah, it's that deliverability is horrible.
Speaker 1:Or you might be able to like scale yours into a point where now you start teaching other people how to do that business.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that would be great.
Speaker 1:That's where a lot of people are getting into, because I have people that ask me all the time like, hey, can you help me with my coaching? And there are a few people that I have and they've done great. Yeah, but it's just, it takes time out of my day, it's not really what I do, right, so I might help, like one person or something like that, if they really want it, but they got to show me that they want it. You got it. Yeah, I'm not playing around Like I don't got time to like follow up with you and stuff Like here, do this. When you're done, come back.
Speaker 1:Yeah, do this, come invest in themselves right, I'm like, I'm there, I'm cool, all right, well, you gotta do something for me, you know, so we'll figure out something that that works both in our favors, you know, yeah, but um, yeah, so I want to switch things before we end this one. Yeah, sorry, with with the fitness. Have you always been like working out, or is that something recently now like no, I'm a coach always, yeah, always up and down.
Speaker 2:So well, actually. So in high school, no, so I played, I I played varsity tennis growing up. So the tennis player so super skinny, lean, had to gain weight to actually get into the military. And then that's when I got really into fitness, because I was around a bunch of jack dudes all the time. I want to be like these guys, like you know, and at the time I was super like you know confident, and I see my mentor was like super jacked dude.
Speaker 1:He was getting all these girls and I was like I don't want to be like that, so I was getting really good fitness then.
Speaker 2:And then yeah, just kind of continued along that and I hit like my peak physical thing when I went to the Middle East because all you had to do was work out, yeah. So got super jacked in the Middle East and then came to Italy, stayed pretty fit, then lost it in the Pentagon gig because all I did was sit in a car for 18 hours a day and eat fast food and then, once I got out of the military, I really wanted to get back into it. But hitting your 30s it's tough.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah Things shift, things shift, things shift around. Hormones change, digestion changes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, weight stays on more.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, it's different. It's different. Do you see? A lot of, I guess, parallels from fitness and running business. A hundred percent, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:I think, I think, I think I wish I could marry the two more.
Speaker 2:I think if you had like a perfect marriage mentally between the two, it'd be like the perfect mentality, because in fitness, like you can't get jacked overnight. It takes like a lot of hard work and you have to do all the right things. Yeah, business is the same way, and like you can't shortcut it, um, I would say like there's certain plays you can do that are like a steroid that will, like make your business better. Yeah, but if you stop being consistent with the business, yeah, you're gonna lose all the gains that you made on it. So I think they're one and the same and I think, honestly, if you're in fitness, you'll probably be better at business too, because you learn how to do hard things for a long period of time to get to a certain physique that you want. And if you can just build that skill set, I think, not only in business but in life in general that's going to serve you so much better. I've had so many positive reinforcements from the gym, like meeting people like you. The gym community in general is awesome.
Speaker 1:I think putting yourself in the right spots, man. I think that's why I really enjoy this gym. You know shout out Carolina Iron this gym has been amazing Outside of the equipment and just the environment itself, the people you know. I met you. I met a lot of other people, a lot of business connections too. Yeah, that's just when you start surrounding yourself with the right types of people, it really kind of expands your mind to what's also possible and everybody's willing to help. All you got to do is open your mouth, just ask.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's probably the biggest hack that you just said there. For people that are trying to be successful is like sometimes you don't even need to do anything other than just get around new people and dump your current circle right if you want to be successful. Just get around successful people and I'm sure you're the same way, like I found, like the most jack guys here in the gym. If I go and ask them like fitness questions, they're just like oh yeah, please, let me just I'll help. What do you want?
Speaker 2:like I'll help you work out because Cool, because they love it obviously, and I think business is the same way, like if you go to a successful business owner and you're like humble and you say, hey, I'm trying to learn and I'm trying to better my life and I'm trying to like get into something, I'll work for you for free or I'll just kind of pick your brain for like 20 minutes. Yeah, most people do that and you know entrepreneurs I feel we are in our own little. Unless you're an entrepreneur, you don't understand like the values of despair you go through. So it feels very lonely and I think every successful entrepreneur has been in more of those values than anyone else. So they understand that. I think they want to help you get through it. That's like with AJ and stuff, like we always try to talk about this Like dude, what can I do to help you? Like, bro, raise your fucking prices. Sorry, carolina members, but it's like I'll pay more.
Speaker 1:We've talked about it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we've talked about it a lot.
Speaker 1:Raise your prices.
Speaker 1:So I'm not going to say whether he is or he's not. That's a different language. You know there's so many people that are like oh, people don't understand what I'm going through, you don't understand what I've been through or what's happening in my life, and maybe, but that doesn't mean somebody doesn't. Yeah, you know, you don't have to isolate yourself on an island by yourself, just you gotta swim to a different island, meetups and things like that. It's just like conversations flow, yeah, and plus we kind of, like you said the other day, you're like dude, I like nerding out about this stuff. I mean like you get into it and like as hard as it is and the struggles that you go through, and some days it emotionally breaks you, like it's a little bit of a toxic relationship. It's crazy Because you love it. It's crazy, yeah.
Speaker 2:So dragon like oh it sucks, but oh I'm that those good days feel so good yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So we just we ride the wave, yeah yeah, and the more entrepreneurs that you can just get around. You know the community is so important. I love it. And if you can get more people to support each other, you know the cool thing about business that you start to learn too is like, even if you're in the same space, like there's so many pieces of the pie that like everyone can get a big piece of it for sure everybody can eat and so it's just like, how can I learn how to make the pie faster, really? And that's why I love talking to the business owners, because, like there's so much stuff that I still need to learn and know and there's stuff that we've talked about, where you talk about, even on this podcast.
Speaker 2:The way you you did the challenge a little bit, or or the scholarship is a little bit different than the way even it's put as a concept in the books. So it's getting kind of like the actual nitty-gritty on how you implement things that, like I took from that like, oh, I could probably do something like that in my business in the way that you guys did it. So I think it's just super important and I think everybody I don't think everybody should be an entrepreneur, but I do think everybody should do something that they actually want to do, and if they're sitting in a cubicle somewhere hating their life every morning like you, don't have to do that. Yeah, that's true. And you say the you don't know what I've been going through? No, probably not. But I can tell you everyone's had stuff in their life and unfortunately, no one cares.
Speaker 2:You know like it might be controversial to say, but you've got to figure it out and everyone has had something happen in their lives. How you respond to something is what really dictates it, and if you allow it to stop you from doing what you want to do, then you just give it even more power. You know we've all had that stuff. I'm sure where it's, just like you know if you went into it you'd probably be traumatized or whatever. But I think if you just get around people that are successful, you'll learn that they've had maybe not the same things. They've had obstacles they had to get through and they can give you frameworks to get through those obstacles and be successful.
Speaker 1:I like how you said that too. I think a lot of this whole journey is really finding your purpose through the chaos, finding peace, Because at the end of the day, like you said, nobody really cares. Nobody's going to care if you fail, and a lot of people aren't going to care that you succeed.
Speaker 1:Either I mean, at the end of the day, people are watching from afar. They're looking at it from a different lens. They'll see one day that you just got successful and you're lucky, or they see that you failed and you'll be like I always knew he wasn't going to make it.
Speaker 1:People are going to say whatever they want. So I'd rather just, you know, put those the people that I want in my life currently in this season. I keep those and we hustle and we drive each other and help each other out and then from there. But you got to do it for yourself, have to it Like you should not be doing this for anybody else but you, because at the end of the day, like if you work on yourself, you can serve everybody else at a much higher level. Way better, yeah.
Speaker 2:Have you heard of, like, the thing called hedonic adoption? You've heard of that at all? So basically, it's when, as humans, we will get used to everything at some point. So novelty just doesn't last that long. If you ever achieve something great, like I mean, you've probably had some big achievements throughout your life, right, and Tim Grover talks about this in his book a lot but like success isn't the outcome. Like success and winning is not like the Super Bowl. If you're in sports, right, it's everything else you do to get to that point, because that one moment of winning it's fleeting and then it's right back to hell, to get back to where you wanted to get to right. And even in the business we have these great months. Everything's just great, and then it's back to the fucking shit.
Speaker 2:And hedonic adoption is you get used to the good things. So, for example, if you make 30K a month, well then, if that is my norm, I get used to it. So then, if you have these like because I know I thought this way I'm like oh, if I start making all this money, I'm going to feel way different. And I remember when I made the most money at the solar company, I definitely felt great when my debt got paid off Don't get me wrong, there was a huge,000, $30,000 paychecks I felt the same. I felt exactly the same. Now I was able to now use them to go do more fun things, which was great, but my actual well-being and my state did not change. So what that showed me? I was like shit. If there's stuff that makes me unhappy, this thing is not going to fix that. Yeah, and I've actually and I think this is a good gym analogy I get more enjoyment out of, like the actual journey of trying to get to where I want to go, and you know I get more from like oh, man.
Speaker 2:I hit my diet today. I had a great workout today. Yeah, okay, cool, I feel good about myself now and then eventually, you know, after six, seven months, you see like the progress and I'm like oh great, but then I'm back to the gym. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I think for business and life like that's the same type of thing and I have gotten better at my stress management and, I think, more effective by now not trying to tailor or focus my success on the end goal and more on, like, finding enjoyment. I know it's corny, but the journey right, yeah, follow the journey, not destination.
Speaker 2:Um, but actually trying to live that now has helped out a lot, because if I can actually just enjoy like oh I, for example, I made this new sales presentation which I was putting off forever just didn't want to do it, but I got it done and I was like, wow, I feel good about myself now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because I did something I did not want to fucking do. Yeah, and that has taken me a long time to do because I know, like every social media person has put out, oh, you've got to love the journey, not the destination. That's cool and all, but like I can tell you for a long time, like fuck that I want the fucking destination.
Speaker 2:Yeah yeah, I want the million dollars, I want my destination and don't get me wrong, whoever says the destination is not sweet is fucking lying to you. It's amazing to hit goals, but I did burn out the Sword of the Pearl example. I was trying to hit this really arbitrary goal and once I hit it I just learned how arbitrary it was. And then I hit this huge dump of well, fuck yeah. And then that's what actually forced me to say, okay, I actually need to enjoy the day-to-day, which is why I didn't go back into solar.
Speaker 2:I went to water because I hated selling solar systems.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know. Well, that's why you'll be way more successful in the water system One you're in control. Right doesn't seem the work you know. It just seems like it's just part of your day-to-day. There's many DeVito that works up front Some days. I'll leave here. I got here a little after 6. I won't leave until like 6.37 some days. He's like damn bro, like 12 hours. I'm like, yeah, I didn't even really realize it, man.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's a long day, for sure, but it's not something that crosses my mind.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Because at some point you know you'll talk to people and they're like you're so lucky you're out. I want to work, like you. You don't know how I work, Right? You know you hate your nine to five. We do five to nines every day. Weekends are not off, Vacations are.
Speaker 2:Do you think part of it, though, because you know, everyone knows, if you're in business, you're going to work more than a nine to five, right? You would hope Well, okay, if?
Speaker 1:you want to be successful, if you want to actually be successful.
Speaker 2:Like, if you're trying to start a business to not work hours, then you're not going to be successful, like you're going to work more hours. But I've been thinking about this a lot Do you think the reason why we can work those type of hours is because, selfishly, we know those hours are actually going back into something that we're building, so it doesn't feel like a waste? Because I almost wonder if why the nine to five is such a grind is because you're putting time and effort into somebody else's dream or somebody else's business that you have no equity on. You don't get to see anything from it, so you literally are just putting your fucking life force, I guess, into nothing, whereas in a business, every action you do it builds upon your thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it compounds. Yeah, 100%. I think it's just a lens that you look through. I heard this. There's something, man, I wish I remember what podcast it was. This person was talking about how you can take a picture of, like you know, the moon right Like a full moon. You could take a picture and, like you know, the moon right Like a full moon. You could take a picture and then you can look at the picture and say, man, that just this picture doesn't do justice.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Of what it really was. Yeah, right, yeah Because you're looking at it through a different lens.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:But, like through the naked eye, you see how magical this is.
Speaker 1:So when I look at somebody's physique, or when you look at your own body, you see what's really magical and what you're building there. Yeah, you know, versus like just, oh, just the work and the hustle and grind. Now there's something that you're you're building an empire, yeah, and so I look at it like that where I'm, there's something that I'm building and I'm working towards and it's it's something that I'm I'm doing. No one's doing this for me, know, and I think part of that ownership makes you drive and work harder. I think there is a little bit of letting people down and fear of failure and some doubt, like mixed in there as well.
Speaker 1:But every time you just get that little win or you finish a little sales presentation, that's all I need. That's all I need to be like no, we're doing it, we're doing something good. And then you get some good feedback and you're like oh okay, like this is, this is something special. And you're like, over the time you know over the years that you continue building you started like creating this thing and it's like a kid.
Speaker 1:I mean, you hear people say it's like yeah, your, your business is like a child, yeah, like you're, you're feeding it, you're nurturing it, you're training it to be something, something that's uh, it backtalks you yeah, sometimes smack your business around a little bit you know, but uh, but yeah, I mean for me. You know I've never been, you know I wasn't in the military, but I'm not scared of working right, hard work yeah like I wasn't the best in school.
Speaker 3:Yeah, um, I scratched by, but I didn't care yeah, but I care about this yeah, I think that's the biggest thing right and outside of just like you know.
Speaker 1:know we're here sitting and talking business making money is cool and stuff, but when I can impact somebody's life, that gives me a way better high than you know you writing me a check.
Speaker 2:That's a good point. I think that's actually what shifted me for water was we had a client and I was just a sales guy at the time and I was new in the industry and I was just a sales guy at the time and I was new in the industry but she was spending like 3K a month because her daughter she's probably like six years old had eczema issues and psoriasis issues like crazy. And one thing about water treatment is in certain states you can actually use it as a write-off Because it can actually help psoriasis and eczema issues. And so I told him I was like, listen, let me be straight up. I don't know if it's going to fix this, but hopefully it'll help. You know, the water's terrible out here, it doesn't help. So they got the system.
Speaker 2:She called me two weeks later, just bawling in her eyes. I'm like, oh my God, her condition's completely fixed, like it's completely going away, everything's great. And I was like, and that was with no creams, no dyes. And like I try to tell people all the time like, do you realize how much your water affects your skin in your hair? Yet you know, you see it. It's kind of like with the pfizer commercials trying to peddle medicine to you that you probably don't need. I see it all the time with psoriasis, eczema medications or these things where it's like maybe we just clean up what's getting put on your skin and sure, there probably are some chronic conditions where you absolutely can't get rid of it. Yeah, but it's like you'll be at less risk of getting diabetes if you stop drinking a liter of cola every day, yet you'll shower in a shower with an oxidative chemical that's a transdermal Chlorine goes right into your skin, into your bloodstream. You don't swim in a pool every day, yet you're still exposing yourself to these really harsh chemicals every day.
Speaker 1:So that's interesting concept, because once you get in a pool and you swim for a while, what do you want to do? You want to shower, you want to get the chlorine off. You feel kind of like either dry, irritated, yeah uh, that's that. It, that's a, that's a good perspective. I'll say that because you know, when I first, when you first told me what you're doing like water, like sp, water Like Spartanburg.
Speaker 2:Greenville water.
Speaker 1:That's the first thing I thought of and then when I started looking I was like, oh no, this is something different. I think a lot of. I mean it is it's a commodity, just like our work is also. It's an extra. But there's people that see a ton of value in that. I got friends. They will not drink out of a bottle of water. Yeah, like if it's done coming in a glass you know a glass container they don't mess with it.
Speaker 2:Well, and until you switch. Like my wife was super skeptical and I was a little skeptical at first, but once you live with a unit you're never going to want to go back to normal water Like, because then you actually feel the difference, because we get used to stuff. Like you know your body, you know it's adaptable, like you can eat takis every single day and the first two weeks or first couple of days you're gonna probably be shitting your brains out. But if you're eating takis every day for a month, eventually your body's gonna be like all right.
Speaker 2:Well, I guess I eat takis now yeah right, like your body's gonna adapt so, but probably not the best for you. Yeah, it's like now that I've been on like a good diet with my trainer, like really like dialed in. You know, now my body wants healthy food, like I want to eat like my chicken and my rice and my steaks and this stuff. And when we go out on the weekends, like if I have like something off plan and I try to stay as close now, I try to stay as close on plan for this reason. Yeah, if I go like a little off crazy with something like greasy, like I'm wrecked, yeah, I'm in the toilet. It's like my body like is rejecting it now. So the same thing for the water, which is, um, I try to tell people that you know, like I know it sounds crazy cause you've been you know, probably drinking out of this and showering it in your whole life, but once you make that switch, you're never going to go back.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you'll never go back. That's why I wanted to do it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Learning about business and meeting people like you, and I think that was where it becomes fun for me. I'm super competitive and business becomes kind of like a game in a way. How can we best play the game? That shift has made it more fun for me. I need to beat these levels.
Speaker 1:I was a nerd growing up.
Speaker 2:I like video games, like how can I beat this level, how can I beat this boss? And then the money is just like for me. I like watching numbers on the screen go up. So for me it's like that's my high score, like, um, yeah, I wanted to ask you a question because you are mainly in the fitness and something that I struggled with growing up, or even getting fit. How do you and maybe there's a parallel in business here, but how do you combat like people that gets like where you're at super fit competed to deal with like the body dysmorphia, or like saying, oh, this is a good enough or there is no good enough, or not trying to push it too hard, or someone may look totally fine, but then trying to push it too hard, or someone may look totally fine, but then it consistently there's like, oh, I need to get bigger and bigger, or more jacked, or yeah, that's, um, that's a hard one, man, I think.
Speaker 1:uh, everybody has some sort of level of body dysmorphia. Right, I will say going into competing, and then even at a pro level, which I got to to you, the standard is different. Right, we know we can't keep that conditioning, you just can't.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:It's unhealthy. It's going to wreck your hormones Like we need to eat. You know what I mean. Right, you can't just burn yourself out and kind of burn from both ends of the stick. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So you know you do reverse back. Now everybody's kind of different but I, you know, going into competing and working with multiple coaches, you know, with bodybuilding is very rigid. You know egg whites, oatmeal, chicken rice, like you don't steer off from that very rarely. You know, maybe a cheat meal here and there, if you even get those. So you're kind of on this plan and learning and watching your body change, which is great. But you start to correlate I have to eat like this to look like this, right. And so for you to stop competing and say, do I still have to eat like this if I still want to look good, that's a, that's a danger zone.
Speaker 1:I had a hard time with that because I was like you know, I'm a pro now, so I got to keep a standard look Right. And I got to make sure that I'm holding, you know, some sort of conditioning. So once I decided, okay, I'm going to take some time off, I don't want to compete anymore, it was literally like dipping my toes into different foods, just trying testing things like what responded well to me.
Speaker 2:Do you feel, like the if it fits your macro philosophy, like if you can build, do you think it's better to, like, go super crazy hard, build your physique to a position where, like you look really good and then just maintain macros and that'll maintain it?
Speaker 1:Or is that not true at all? Yeah, no, I think food quality does matter, yeah, just like water matters. Sure, you know the pH in your water, the cleansliness of it as well, because you could say you know that was a big one if it fits my macros. People were eating Skittles, oh, I got extra carbs Right. You know, or just like highly processed cereals and stuff like that. Yeah, yeah, but that will change the look right.
Speaker 2:So I think, there's levels, right.
Speaker 1:I kind of I use this example because again I had a friend that was pouring concrete for, you know, driveways and all that kind of stuff. I was like, think of it this way. I was like you want to do just macros. You got a truck full of cement, just pour it, just pour it down. Okay, will it? Will it make it down where it needs to go? Probably it'll be a little messy on the edges, it'll probably crack because you don't have the frame work up you know what?
Speaker 1:I mean, so it's not going to look pretty Gotcha Right. But if you want to actually eat quality food and it doesn't, you know, I like to do like a 90-10 kind of split. So 90% of the time I'm trying to stick with more whole, healthy foods. Think of that putting you know your wood bars up, you know you're framing things and then you let it dry and set. You're going to look way better and you're going to feel way better. Right yeah. And it's easier to handle that way. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Once you get your body to like a decent body fat percentage, a good body comp, it's a lot easier to maintain Gotcha. So for me, like I have kind of what I eat, what I enjoy eating, and that's the key dude Like find something healthy that you enjoy Dieting is not dieting anymore.
Speaker 2:It's a lifestyle when you get tired of it switch it up.
Speaker 1:So I find the things that I like the majority of the day and then, at the end of the night, my last meal. I typically eat whatever I want On the last meal of the day. So I don't overindulge. I have a normal portion meal and sometimes it is just like some salmon, some rice, some veggies, and then other times I'm going and having sushi, or you know, I rarely will do pizza Once I turn 30, dude cheese and dairy don't do me too well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know.
Speaker 1:so yeah, Certain things. I kind of shift away from, but, like you know, burgers, fries. Yeah, I eat that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1:But again, it's not every day, yeah exactly, but if you can find and this is my thing, for a lot of our clients too if you're constantly finding urges or you're wanting to binge on certain things, your plan is too restrictive. We need to give you a little bit of something, right? We had a client that you know. She ended up dropping 20 pounds in three months, but we set her up on a good plan. About two weeks in she's like Chris, I just started getting these really sweet cravings at the end of the night. I'm like okay. I was like well, how's the rest of the plan?
Speaker 1:That was great. It's perfect. I mean, it works with my schedule. I can eat it. I don't have no problems, but just at night I just want something sweet. I was like what are you craving? Let's try to figure something out. So I kind of restructured her plan and I gave her like a little ice cream cone every night Nice, every night and she was like that's all I need, I'm good. Yeah, she dropped 20 pounds on that, that's great Right, so again the majority of her day she's on point healthy, good whole sources of food.
Speaker 2:A little ice cream cone, you're fine. So I have a question. So this has helped me out a lot with my schedule and I don't know, and this is more into like the deep part of the fitness, like digestion. So one thing that I found that worked out really well for me because I am so busy is, on my plans it's normally a five-meal split, which I actually enjoy Like.
Speaker 2:These healthy plans are fine for me and when I go on weekends if I have to cheat I try to find like a like, for example, like a Dave's hot chicken. I'll try to at least get chicken. Yeah Something that's you know, it's got protein.
Speaker 2:It's got protein and I won't eat the bread I'll eat the bread eating, right, but what I found, like what can really set okay, which is like protein shake, some almond butter and, I think, a little bit of honey, um, in the morning, and then it's supposed to be a steak and then a chicken, a chicken. So it's a steak, steak with veggie, chicken with rice and then the. The last two meals are just non-carb for right now. Okay, but what has helped me to try to hit these macros that I need to hit is protein chow or whatever. A pound of the beef, a lean ground beef, just to get my 100 grams of protein in, and I can just put the veggies. I'll do it with romaine lettuce. So I still hit that and I'm like all right, that'll take me probably 30, 40 minutes to eat.
Speaker 2:Eat it while I'm working, yeah. Then next meal do either like 12 ounce or 18 ounce of chicken or another pound of beef, and now I got my, because that's it. I for me, I'd say like 200 grams of protein plus a day, but like almost no carbs. It's like I think my carbs are 80 grams, I think, or maybe they're 90 grams for the day, yeah, and calories are 2,000 calories on my low days and high days is like 2,300. So by doing that I hit my main protein goals and I still have calories to spare. And then at night I'm able to be a little bit flexible, but mainly for me, if I've noticed, if I don't do that I miss meals Because you get caught up.
Speaker 1:You get caught up in work, yeah.
Speaker 2:And then I come back and I'm starving. I'm like, oh fuck, I've got to throw two meals together or I don't eat. And now it's 6 o'clock and my wife's cooking dinner and it's like, well, yeah, yeah, you know You've got to sabotage yourself at that point.
Speaker 2:I don't know. I guess I'm eating that now. So I wonder what your thought process is on that, because I know potentially it could be digestion issues or you don't get all the protein out of it. But I wonder just kind of what your thought process is and maybe if there's other business owners out there that are busy how to kind of hack that.
Speaker 1:I mean anytime we work with clients, because we deal with a lot of business owners and busy professionals, Realtors, their schedules are all over the place.
Speaker 1:So we always try to. We actually start time blocking with our clients. So we'll say, okay, what time do you wake up, what time do you go to sleep? Yeah, all right, let's fill in the gaps and then we'll kind of plug in, like where you know, if they want to do three meals, four meals, five meals, at the end of the day, the science shows that it's not that significant whether you're doing two meals a day or you're doing eight meals a day.
Speaker 1:As long as you're getting the calories and the protein in, it's not going to make that much of a difference, do I think at some point it will stress your digestive system For sure? Sure, right. I mean, if you're trying to jam, you know 1200 calories per meal. Yeah, that could get a little harsh, right. But again, now if you were competing, I would say, yeah, no, we need to break those things up. We just want to be as efficient as possible, gotcha. But from, like, a lifestyle perspective, it's all about, you know, creating something that is cohesive with your lifestyle. Right, makes sense. Yeah, you can't take a bodybuilder's plan and give it to a business owner. They'll be like Chris dude. I said my life is busy, I don't need it to be busier, like I respect it right. So we have to find the hacks, whether you're getting meal prep company to cook your meals, getting your food cooked in bulk, or you do it. If you've got the time and you want to do it, throw it in a crock pot.
Speaker 2:You know what I mean. It's the best thing.
Speaker 1:yeah, you just walk away, come back, shred it up and space it out how you want, but it's just being efficient with that. I think for you like doing that. I would probably say I wouldn't do red meat for both, just because, you know, I just think that would be. You know, with red meat it takes a little bit longer to break down and digest as well, so make one of them like chicken or even fish is a lot lighter, easier.
Speaker 2:Yeah, sean's going to be mad if he hears that because he's like dude, just follow the phone.
Speaker 1:Just do the chicken. I've had these guys, I'm helping you out man, I'm just getting the truth.
Speaker 2:We'll talk and I'll talk Justin. He's such a good coach, he works so well with me. But there was times when I was like bro. I was like, yeah, I think we had the same snore guard that you ate like you ate, bro, why don't you eat the fucking stuff I put on the plan? Eat the fucking plan. Stop fucking making it up.
Speaker 1:There's a plan for a reason. Eat the fucking plan. I'm like I know.
Speaker 2:And I'm so hard-headed sometimes Like I'm a. I am a. What's the word I'm trying to say? If I'm a routine guy, if anything breaks the routine, I get fucked. And so now I've gotten better at like buying in bulk. I'll cook all my chicken in bulk, and if I'm doing that, it's so easy to stay on plan but, the moment. You don't like I've learned if I don't prep for the week prior or whatever it's like, yeah, I have to, you gotta set some boundaries outside of fitness in your life.
Speaker 1:You gotta set boundaries for yourself to make sure that you're still fueling and taking care of yourself right At some point you're gonna burn out if you don't you know what I? Mean so if that means you got to take, you know, 15 minutes out of your day to sit down and eat, like, do that? If you can't that's okay. Get a shake until you can eat you know you can get a little bit of protein just to hold you over right. You just never want to get to a point where you're starving, yeah that.
Speaker 2:where you're starving, yeah, that's when it's like all right, yo Domino's, what's up, what's up what y'all doing, oh come on dude.
Speaker 1:Yeah, he's gorge. Yeah, I mean, it ain't nothing for me to eat a whole large. You know what this?
Speaker 2:happened to me the other day. I was like, oh, let's go. So it was just a shrimp and pasta dish and I, you know, specifically did a little bit of pasta because I didn't want to destroy my carbs, and I just like picked out the shrimp and put like a shrimp bowl for me and I started eating it. And when I started eating the carbs, immediately my body was like cravings through the roof. I felt like I was starving. I went from feeling fine to the moment I had that first bowl. I felt like I was starving and I was like what the fuck is this?
Speaker 2:And I wanted to just destroy that entire pot. I didn't, but I looked at it and I was like you hear that song?
Speaker 1:I didn't, yeah, I was proud of myself.
Speaker 2:I was like I literally went there and I put my fork in the pot, started eating it and I was like, nope, stop, put it in a bowl, put it in the fridge yeah Good. But literally it was like I was just tasting like crack or something. I was like I need that whole pot right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah it will. I mean, those types of carbohydrates will send signals to your brain to like want more. You know, that's why, like most people, people you could eat a large bag of potato chips. But if I gave you like five whole potatoes, right, who's only five whole potatoes, right? Probably not, you know. But I, you know, especially when you know because I'm assuming you guys are like in a cutting phase right, having a good nighttime routine and a time you're going to sleep is a mandatory, because if you are someone that just kind of you stay up late and you start watching TV and things like that, you're gonna want a snack right now. Yeah, and we're actually talking about this with our clients too if you're eating food, you should not be looking at your phone or watching TV. It is a distraction and you'll be able to eat more than what you should be eating mmm you know.
Speaker 1:So I tell people, just like, be in the moment, eat your food, it'll fill you up a little bit more interesting. Yeah, but having having that time that you like you're cut off, you go to sleep, that'll save you. I mean, I've been time so many calories, yeah, because I've gone in my kitchen at the end of the night because I'm kind of hungry and I'll open up all my cabinets, close them back up. I'm like, why do you torture yourself like that? Yeah. So yeah, just having a have a, you know, a solid routine, that'll save you a ton of headache and just like stress, because when you're dieting you will get hungry.
Speaker 1:There's no way around it like you will, unless you want to, and I'm not going to open up the conversation of some of these glp ones, but right, oh my god, yes but again, that's uh, having having a routine is is the key piece because, just like business, you need systems, you need structure, you need a schedule. Your health needs the same, your lifestyle needs the same. Boundaries, equal freedom. Right, it's not to constrain you.
Speaker 1:It's to make you more efficient. Yeah, you know what I mean. So, like, why not take those kind of same concepts and apply it to your life? There's a lot of people that are really good at their job, not so good at fitness, or there's people that are really good at fitness and not so good at their job. You have the traits. You just have not been able to take them and implement them in a different fashion.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean it's funny you say that that implementation is so key, because and if you're like watching this or listening to this and you're like, oh, I want to start a business but I need to learn all this stuff first, this is like a perfect example of why that's not true, because I read before. I actually was like, so I started the business, but then me and my wife went on a vacation for about 35 days, came back and the business was starting, so during that time I just was reading books and learning just as much as I could because I didn't want to fail. The problem is I didn't have any context to apply any of that information. It's kind of like with my workouts and the diet I still have to do it and see how it works to get context, and what I've learned is I had to still make some of the same mistakes in the books. And then I went back to the books and read them after I've had some battle scars and been through the trenches.
Speaker 2:It's like, oh, now I see why this makes sense, or this is how I can apply this now, and I think too many people want to know everything before they start something and I think you should try to fail fast, fail fast, fail up, because you'll learn more by doing it, like with the sales. I've learned more because obviously I've read books about sales, but there's so many people that will spend tons of money for sales training, which can be very, very, very useful. But as an individual contributor, you can learn a lot from YouTube and just getting the reps in.
Speaker 1:For sure, and practicing yeah.
Speaker 2:Same thing for working out. You got to.
Speaker 1:Just digging the weeds you got to get in there.
Speaker 2:You got to do the bench press.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Which, speaking of lists, Sean Sean is a. I'm glad he's put me on the Smith's.
Speaker 1:Machine squat. I used to hate it, but now it's, it saves me. I got the weak legs. That's been enough. Listen, you know we're in a gym and there is a lot of bodybuilders in here, a lot of big people. How many of them have you seen do free weight barbell squats?
Speaker 2:none you know what? I've also working out since I was 18. Until I worked out with Sean, I don't think I actually ever really knew how to properly work out, Because my first time and I think he did this on purpose to fuck with me- so, Sean, this is kind of rude of you, but he gave me my plan and I remember I texted him like an idiot.
Speaker 2:I regretted this text to this day. I was like, well, this doesn't look very difficult because it was, wasn't that many exercises and they're all. This is when we first started working together and there were two sets. Every exercise, two sets. Um, now they're not like that. But yeah, and I was like two sets, how am I going to get the workout this? And I was working out on my own for the first, I think for the first four weeks. I'm like, oh, this is easy. Our first two weeks I was like this is easy. And like, oh, cool, you're ready to do an in-person workout. I was like, yeah, let's go. Yeah, and we did the same routine in-person workout. He showed me how to actually lift like a bodybuilder and I was like, oh, I'm an idiot because I didn't realize how like we and we granted the weights I was lifting. We probably dropped it by about 40 percent than what I was lifting and it smoked me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because of like, now you're gonna lift it with your actual muscles. You're not gonna. You're gonna be concentrated the whole time during the lift. You're not gonna rush these lifts, like, it's gonna be focused and controlled, full range of motion, every single lift, yeah, and he's like all your lift weights are gonna go down dramatically but you're gonna be crushed and you know, sure enough, sorry, you start getting results. Yeah, and I think that was the biggest thing, because even looking here all the jack dudes, I rarely see them doing massive lifting. It's, some of these guys are super strong, so they will, but relative.
Speaker 1:It's controlled, everything's controlled.
Speaker 2:Everything's so controlled and I love being in these environments because, like I told Sean, I was like listen, I'm not trying to be a professional bodybuilder, but I would like to get show ready at some point for just men's physique. The Ryan Terry division. I was like, that's the physique.
Speaker 2:I want, I want to look like Ryan Terry at some point, or close to it, yeah so, and being in this environment and seeing how people do, and that's why I think I wish, if you can invest in knowledge, like we said, it's the biggest thing, because again, I've been doing the wrong thing. For people that look good, but none of them are professional lifters. Right, they're meatheads in the military. Yeah yeah, Come here and learn from people that know what they're talking about. It's like whoa.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and, like you said, these people here, they're more than happy to help you just by asking a question. Oh yeah, you know. But when you invest into like a coach or a mentor, just time collapses everything that you could be like figuring out on the way. You know, you could have pulled that plan probably from. Like you know people say, oh, I use ChatGPT or go on YouTube. Sure, you can pull workouts from there. But like, are you lifting it right? Right, are you doing it correctly? You know, are you these sort of things? It does not say that you know, so it's just like the fine print that's not shown. That's really going to take you from here to there.
Speaker 2:Well, I don't know about you, but I need to kick in the ass too. I need accountability, like I need to know I'm checking in with somebody every week. Yeah, everybody does, because if I don't like, I will eat fucking Twix bars.
Speaker 1:Well, think about the pasta thing you were talking about. If you didn't have to go back to your coach and say, damn, dude, I messed up, you probably would have ate the pasta.
Speaker 2:Honestly, yeah, if I knew, yeah, and especially because you see the progress too. I don't want to ruin that, but yeah, if I knew, if I'd have anyone else I had to report to in the coming weeks, yeah, that whole pot would be stuffed. I'd be sitting here bloated to hell right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, accountability is everything. Dude, we tell people that all the time because you know, listen. Now you have full access to everything you know. You have YouTube, chatgpt, google.
Speaker 1:I mean people are just giving away free programs left and right, which is, you know, their way of building rapport. Yeah, if there's so much free information out there, why are we getting worse in obesity rates and overweight Right? Why would things be going the other direction when all this information is available? Information doesn't mean that you're going to take it and actually apply it, and most people don't know how to take information and apply it to their lifestyle, because they'll be looking at bodybuilders if that's what you want to be. Oh, this person's eating eight times a day.
Speaker 1:Well, they also don't know. You got a wife, you got kids, you got a business to run. These people eat, sleep and train. That's all they do.
Speaker 2:That's it, so it's easy for them.
Speaker 1:You can do that.
Speaker 2:Easy relative. Yeah, yeah, yeah, easy relative.
Speaker 1:I say allocation of time is easier as far as what they have to focus on, say it's easy, yeah, yeah, no, I mean, but you know you can. If you want it bad enough, you can do it. I tell people that. You know, when I was training to turn pro, I was getting ready for nationals I had a coach, I was working full-time in the restaurant, I was going to school full-time and then training twice a day. Sleep was on the bottom of the barrel for me. It was very minimal. Fortunately, like for me, I was able to like, take like a little from the restaurant, run to the gym that was five minutes away, get it in, get it in and run back, and you know that was enough for me to push through and I turned pro that year. That's awesome, you know.
Speaker 1:So not only did I just turn pro like I won my whole class and the overall Wow, and that was over 140 guys.
Speaker 2:Must be a pretty good feeling.
Speaker 1:It was a great feeling and a little funny story because I was thinking about this when we were talking earlier. I remember winning that and it was probably one of the highest times of my life I felt. And after you finish a show, you have to stay because they want to do an overall picture with all the classes. I remember sitting backstage. It's late, dude, the show is big, so it's almost midnight, which also I knew. The only place I was going to be open was like a Waffle House or something.
Speaker 1:But regardless, I'm sitting backstage and I don't know who it was One of the guys that was working in the back. He's like you won your pro card. I'm like, yeah, dude, heck, you know, I'm on like this high. He's like that's what's up, dude, I was like you're an asshole bro, but you know what? That was the realest thing anybody said to me that night yeah, Because tomorrow nothing changed.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know, people congratulate social media, but like my lifestyle never changed, I went back to the restaurant, I went back to just training, like I normally train. I mean it's not like oh my God, I landed this like you know NFL contract or something. Yeah, bodybuilding is a whole different ballgame. It's a great platform but you'll never build like a career through bodybuilding Right. Only like the 2%, 3% at the top are making like some serious money.
Speaker 2:Like the C-Bums and the yeah yeah.
Speaker 1:And even C-Bum's smart. He was able to build his business with his platform right. Exactly, most people they they let that slip because they're riding the high of being like I'm a champ, I'm winning shows. Yeah, you better take that thing and better use it now do something, yeah people are watching you, people want to be you right now, but you know my dad always says you know you're the new ferrari now you're gonna be the old ferrari later, you know what I mean it's so.
Speaker 2:Yeah, everything, everything's in cycles, right, and that's why also, we just you shouldn't get caught up on, you know, whatever else wants you to do, like cause you know you're gonna have hot seasons and slow seasons and and, like you said, you have to do it for you, cause if you do it for the outside validation, people just don't care enough. Yeah right, people just don't care enough. Yeah Right, you get your pro card, good for you, but you talk to like the average person, cool, whatever, yeah.
Speaker 1:Especially in.
Speaker 2:America, the average person is like obese yeah. So they're going to say, oh, you got your pro card. Okay, cool, whatever. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Now, it's great for clients, I think client acquisition, that's phenomenal. But at the time, yeah, I think we that good feeling is going to feel yeah, right, because you work, if you think about it, you work so hard for that one moment and that moment is glorious, right, it's an endorphin serotonin dump of just like, oh, I did this hard thing, yeah, but then that's it. Like you said, you go back to the restaurant, you go back to your normal day-to-day. So what really was the win? Yeah, the restaurant, you go back to your normal day-to-day. So what really was the win? Yeah, probably the fact that you got to become the person that got to achieve it and now you keep that forever.
Speaker 2:I think that's that's what really is what winning is. And yeah, um, I try to. I try to keep that frame all the time now, especially when, like, things are tough in the business, especially because you know there's moments where you, you, you don't even know if you're going to make it tomorrow and you're like you know what, if I can make it through this, then that's going to make me, even if I fail, it'll make me into somebody that can probably achieve something better and bigger. And if I can get through today, I can go to bed feeling good about the work I did today, and I think that can help you sustain, because those moments are rare. Right, you get it for a second and then it's now what.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it is, yeah. What's the next move?
Speaker 2:now and look at, look at Seabone. He has like a record right. Yeah. Give it 10 years.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It'll be hard for people to break stuff like that. But I think for me as now, because I look at things a little bit different outside of just winning competitions, I look at what have you built in your life?
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, that's a good point, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1:He has taken his platform and just supplement brand, and I don't know if he's part owner. He bought Gymshark and then, oh, platform, and just you know, supplement brand, and I don't know if he's part owner. He bought gymshark and then, oh wow yeah I mean, now he's got, uh, he's got a coaching app that apparently he's had for a while but they're expanding on. But none of that would mean anything without his status, right, you know his him just slapping his name on something is validation. Now, at this point, whether it's good or not.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, not. I don don't know. I don't take his stuff, but physique-wise and just mentality-wise I am impressed for sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think you know what I take away from the C-Bum story is just like he did something extraordinary, and I think that's what I think is getting content. So terrible now is that everyone wants to be the influencer or have that type of influence, without being influential and not actually like achieving something that people should aspire to be. You know, you see little viral clips of like oh, that was a cool word track, especially like the sales environment and like, oh, I can teach you how to make a bajillion dollars in sales, buy my course. Yeah, and it's. And it's funny because, like, I actually built a sales course for water treatment but I've actually and I've stopped. I haven't released it yet and I'm probably gonna. I was gonna charge for it, but I'm probably gonna release it on school for free.
Speaker 2:Yeah, for that whole reason of being like okay, I just want to. I need to prove that. Like, yeah, I know I can sell water and I've made a ton of money, but I actually want to prove that I can build a big ass business on it. Yeah, and I think that has shifted the way I do the content now. Before I wanted to do more like oh, let me train on certain things because I feel like I had knowledge to do it. But then I look at holistically I'm like well, what have you actually accomplished? I've done 30K. I think the solar thing was the biggest one, but that wasn't my company. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So yeah and it wasn't just me, right, Obviously, I was leading that charge about a great team under me yeah, that we helped build it. So now that I'm in this seat, I tried to really try. I try to not say, oh, this is how things should be done or work, because I need to prove it first on my my thing. I think for you too, you know us collectively like the bigger we can build our proof of we build this big thing, then the more influence we'll be able to have and help more people because we actually say we've done it Honestly. I think it'll be less stressful instead of people trying to say, well, this doesn't work, that's cool. Maybe it won't work for you, but I can show with unrefutable proof that what I have done does work. For the things that I'm doing in my water company, I won't talk about them publicly in a lot of detail until I make sure they work. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because it's a departure from what works now in the industry. I just have some fundamental beliefs that the way it works in the industry now it's not going to last in the way that culture is moving. Yeah.
Speaker 2:With, you know, moving virtually and online and stuff like that, and the way we sell water? I don't think is I think is outdated. Pretty much everyone sells it the same way. So I truly believe I'm putting a big bet that in the next two to three years this is going to be like the standard and I think we'll be able to take a lot of market share from some big companies. But I could be wrong, you never know.
Speaker 1:You got to think outside of the box so I could be wrong.
Speaker 2:You never know. So I think, document it. I think it'll be better. So if it fails, it'll be entertaining for people Like, ah, he failed, you suck. And if it succeeds, then people can see the thought process.
Speaker 1:There's something in that. I mean there's a lot of people they ask me like they see me coaching other coaches. And I think that's Do I know what I'm doing? Sure, do I know everything? Of course not. I mean, I would always be learning.
Speaker 2:But I feel like for me.
Speaker 1:I need to and maybe I'm wrong I need to hit this like certain income for me to feel qualified to teach other people how to do this. Because you know one of the first guys I helped out and he did. He paid me. We got him up to almost 20 grand recurring a month and then he went and worked with other mentors.
Speaker 1:That was kind of always the plan anyways but you know, and I've worked with other people, help them and get a handful of clients and things like that. So like, do I know how to do it?
Speaker 2:sure, I think that's enough proof you need though yeah, like if you get testamental like hey, because then the ad copy is just hey, we help so, and so make 20k a month, we can help you too.
Speaker 1:That's pretty convincing yeah, because I will say this I am very like. Even being in um in jason's mentorship group, I met a lot of cool people and one of the kids he was just starting and he was like dude. You mind, if we like jump on a call, I'd love to just ask you questions. I'm like dude, sure yeah and, um, I helped him.
Speaker 1:We had a couple calls together and and he's like dude, he's like I want to say like I think Jason's group is great, but they kind of put us more in pods, gotcha Versus, like a ton of like one-on-ones. The one-on-ones are every, you know, four weeks, once a month or something like that. Yeah, but he's like I get way more value talking to implement on versus kind of in it yeah yeah, so like I think there is a space for someone, that that's like that.
Speaker 1:But uh, yeah, it's been something that crossed my mind. It's been for a long time. I just again. There's people in our space, dude, that are and you're talking about. This is online fitness coaching, which people used to joke like oh, you're a trainer right, you know what?
Speaker 1:I mean, yeah, uh, there's this guy, he is pulling in. Well, hell, my first mentorship group there was this chick dude. She was doing almost 300 grand a month online, niche down or just only women. I mean, that was the one thing, only worked with women her whole team was nothing but women yeah so there was a lot of that, but like predominantly pretty general health stuff gotcha, I don't know if she ever niched down more. I think maybe she got in the market at a good time.
Speaker 2:I wonder how she was? She just like, super, like, super jacked, no Was her Not really Just like in shape.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was really wild. I mean you'd be surprised there's some people that are not that in shape and they got some pretty crazy businesses.
Speaker 3:Which is I'm over here like man, why am I struggling so much?
Speaker 1:You know I got these triceps and like.
Speaker 2:You know there's always and it's not the craziest thing, but as long as you don't bitch about it, like you know, there's something that they're doing that we just don't know. We got to figure that part out, like, what is it about what she's doing? Why is she getting like, is it just the ad copy? Like I, the more I look at I'm like and this is really hard for me to do, but it's like, if you can actually niche down the right way and make all of your, your marketing for that niche, yeah, it logically it has to work better, right, you know, if it's like the hey, I only work with clients who make 200k a year, i'll'll transform your body. Yeah, you are going to get people that you probably charge a premium for and then if you deliver for it and have testimonials, then great, but yeah, it's a.
Speaker 1:I know Alex Ramozy talks about that. It's like outside of just calling out your avatar, calling out who you don't want. That's big.
Speaker 1:Go ahead and like knock them out, which is always hard for anybody. But, like I said, I think his uh name's john john madden, and I want to say his last name anyways. He used to be a ex-nfl athlete. He coaches high level entrepreneurs. His ad copy is specifically like you're a guy that wants to get shredded like a god, you got to be making a minimum 150 000 a year, willing to invest into yourself. Uh, full guarantee and everything but. Dude, you want to talk. But in his copy he talks about who he doesn't want.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:And some people like, of course, would be like dude, you're so arrogant, like why would you only want to help the rich and the wealthy and things like that. But he has crafted a program and, dude, he crushes. Yeah. I mean, I think he's doing a couple six figures every month. I think he's doing a couple six figures every month.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's just scary to do, but I think that's why you have to do it right. We talked about the fear thing. I think it's you got to do it.
Speaker 2:It's not. The fear is in the unknown and once you know it's not that bad and like that, right now, like tonight, we're implementing our first new process that we did in the company with the ultra high ticket offer I ticket offer and I'm scared because we, you know, added more services which are raising our prices and we're changing our avatar a bit and we're now doing the exclusions a bit, where we're like, hey, if your home value is under this or you're only looking for this type of system like we're not.
Speaker 2:We're not for you anymore, but before we were still trying to kind of win that business to keep cashflow. So it's going to be tough Like it's scary, like I'm legitimately scared to, to make a super ultra high ticket offer that has never been made before.
Speaker 1:But it's kind of scared and exciting. I think that the terminology can be intertwined Because you know even what you're charging. Now, at some point I'm sure you're like ooh, that might be a little much. But when people start saying yes, you're like maybe not.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know like for transparency, like I train people here in person and I was. They're basically like paying for my time. Obviously, my attention, I do spend more time with them and we're more in depth yeah, but I charged enough that was worth my time, right, and I was like when people would come in, I would talk to them. I'd really push online, but they're adamant about in person. I'm like all right, well, this is the deal, this is the time I have, this is the price. Yeah, and without hesitation. Yes, nice. And I'm like oops, can I quote him? I meant you know what I'm saying. No, but like, yeah, but it was fair, you know it's fair for me, fair for them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they have an amazing experience. That's it. That's how I got my next in-person. Yeah, you know the price. Obviously you already told the price, so the price is the.
Speaker 2:And we've had better customers since we've raised our prices. More people are happier with us since we've raised our prices. Because we're able to actually do stuff better. I'm able to invest in better equipment, invest in more technicians. People never want to spend more money for things, especially if they think it's commoditized. But let's say and I even say this, let's say our units were exactly the same as another unit, but our service was 10 times better. You should still pay for 10 times the price, for sure, because you'll get more long-term. And like.
Speaker 2:That took me a long time to really hammer down because for me, I just you know it's easy to say, but when you need freaking money, it's like you kind of want to make concessions but you have to hold strong Because, like freaking money, yeah, it's like you kind of want to make concessions, but you have to hold strong because, like you, just you dilute your brand. And now all of my clients they pay. I don't discount anymore, like which is great, I I the only time I'll discount is if they take away services, that's it. I'm like okay, if you're gonna pay less, then it's gonna be easier on my business yeah yeah, and it's been so much better because the clients that actually want good equipment.
Speaker 2:They're super happy Because number one they also know they're getting a fair deal and they're not going to pay more than somebody else. They know we can serve them at a high level. And they also feel like they're getting something valuable, because price is an indication of value. Like if I go to a coach and they say, oh, it's $30 a month, I'm like, oh, it's probably not that good, yeah, yeah. Or it's probably not going to be that personalized. But if I go to a guy that's like, okay, it's $300 a month and you get this, this, this, this and this and this. Yeah, I want to pay more for better stuff. Yeah, yeah, no, obviously the value has to be and that's like you can't just raise prices if your thing sucks offers you make.
Speaker 2:If it's expensive, it better come with something that justifies the price and they should feel like they're still getting a good deal. Yeah, but you should still raise the price, yeah. And one thing I learned in the books is if you close more than 30% of your qualified leads, you're probably underpriced. Yeah, at 30% If you're above 30%. So if you close about 40% or 50%, you could probably raise your prices by 0.8 to 1.2. If you're 80%, you could basically double your prices or triple your prices. Yeah, yeah, that's pretty much what happened and the math behind it. I learned this. I don't know if I'm supposed to give this out, because on the book it says not for distribution. But this math changed the way I look at price increases and I think this is probably the most valuable thing I can say, because I called all my entrepreneur friends when I learned this because it blew my freaking mind.
Speaker 2:So there's a math conversion of how to figure out where you're the most profitable in pricing. And the math conversion is you take your conversion rate of whatever you're selling and you multiply it by the lifetime gross profit of the customer. So lifetime gross profit is not net profit, so it's just the cost of equipment deliverability. So if you have a trainer, what you pay them and then that's it, and whatever it costs you for software service stuff like that. So for a perfect example, let's say on my we'll use simple numbers let's say my lifetime gross profit at my current prices is $1,000.
Speaker 2:And I have a 30% conversion rate. I take 30% times lifetime gross profit, that conversion number is $300. Right, so that is like my benchmark number. And what's crazy is if let's say I dropped my price in half and I did this with all my products, if I dropped my price in half, to make the same money I have to close at least 80 of clients at that new price point. But what was cool is if you raise your prices I did I did like a uh, I think it was like a thousand dollar increase. So my lifetime gross profit was now like 1800 or something to make it easy.
Speaker 2:And what was crazy is I could actually close 23% of clients and still make the same amount of money at that 30%. So then it's like that just takes the fear out of it, because then you're like then you just test it.
Speaker 2:So you say all right, I'll raise my price for 30 days and I may close the same percent. If I close the same percent 30 or higher, shit way more money. If I close under, or if I close between 25% to 28%, I'm still making money. And if I close under that let's say I close at 15% okay, prices aren't where the market is at, I need to go back and cool. But you have an actual mathematical way to test it. And when I saw this, I was just like, oh, this is crazy, like medical way to test it. And when I saw this, I was just like, oh, this is crazy yeah.
Speaker 2:Like this is how you actually raise prices.
Speaker 1:I think it helps people get a little more justification and feel comfortable raising prices Like it makes sense.
Speaker 2:Well, you, have to with inflation. So when Warren Buffett took over the candy well, it's his candies he raised the prices by 3% to 4% every year, Every single year. Yeah, Just to keep up with the CPI. Yeah, yeah. If you don't keep up with the CPI and you sell at the same price every single year, your margins will compress, They'll go down.
Speaker 1:So you have to, yeah, yeah, it's true, it's true. Man Just to survive in business, that's just the reality Unless unless inflation goes away. Yeah, I'm waiting for that day. Yeah Right, so we'll look. Justin, I appreciate you having the ad on. We've been rolling almost two hours on this.
Speaker 2:Dude, that was great.
Speaker 1:I've never done one this long, so we might do this in a two piece.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's great. No, this is fun man, I love it. Like I said, I I could talk business and all day. Yeah, I could talk business all day.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I hope you guys nerd out about this kind of stuff. Yes, hopefully, this probably could have went another hour, to be honest, honestly yeah, Well, maybe we'll do it again.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah for sure.
Speaker 1:Awesome. I appreciate it. I'm looking forward to seeing how you grow physically Same dude, yeah and financially and business and everything.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you keep getting featured on the Carolina Iron Fitness page. That's the next goal. Yeah, they post everybody. I'm not getting not like this or not. I'm not letting that happen. I got to get let me get to that 8% body fat and then we'll.
Speaker 1:You'll get there. You're on your track. We're on the road man, all right, appreciate you man. Yeah, brother, appreciate you.