Run Your Business Like a Military Operation - Parker McCumber

What if you ran your business with the same discipline, structure, and leadership used in military operations?

In this episode of the 2 Comma Club Podcast, John Marsch sits down with Parker McCumber to talk about leadership, accountability, and how entrepreneurs can build businesses that operate with precision instead of chaos.

Many founders struggle because they treat their business casually. Parker explains how adopting a mission-driven mindset, clear command structure, and disciplined execution can completely transform the way a company grows.

If you feel like your business lacks clarity, structure, or leadership, this conversation will challenge how you think about running a company.

You’ll learn:

• Why most businesses fail due to lack of leadership structure
 • How military principles apply directly to entrepreneurship
 • The importance of mission clarity and operational discipline
 • How leaders build teams that execute instead of drift
 • Why accountability is the foundation of real growth

This episode is especially valuable for entrepreneurs who want to build a high-performing team and scalable business culture.

Connect with Parker McCumber

Website
https://www.parkermccumber.com/

Instagram
@therealparkermccumber

Connect with John Marsch

Free Masterclass

https://mypodcastleads.com/pfl-masterclass

Instagram/Facebook/TikTok
 john.marsch

LinkedIn
 John Marsch

Timestamps:

 00:00 Parker McCumber’s Background and Military Perspective
 02:45 Why Leadership Discipline Matters in Business
 06:10 Treating Your Business Like a Mission
 09:30 The Leadership Gap Most Entrepreneurs Have
 13:00 Building a Team That Executes the Mission
 17:40 Structure vs Chaos in Growing Companies
 22:15 Accountability and Operational Leadership
 28:10 How Mission Clarity Drives Business Results
 34:20 Developing Leaders Inside Your Organization
 40:05 The Mindset Shift from Founder to Commander
 46:30 Lessons from Military Leadership Applied to Business
 52:00 Parker’s Advice for Entrepreneurs Building Teams

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Welcome back to the Two Comic Club Podcast. Today I'm here with Parker McCumber. I'm really excited about this episode. We connected originally at Funnel Hacking Live, The Last Dance, and uh kind of been bouncing around each other's ecosystems ever since. So, um, Parker, since uh since I got you on here today, it seems like you've been diving into the uh podcasting world a bit. Got yourself a new studio, is that right?

SPEAKER_00 0:21

Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me, John. I appreciate the invite. And yeah, I I think I had maybe mentioned this to you before, but I'm I'm trying to monetize every aspect of my life. And I was thinking, how can I take podcasting from this expense where I'm buying the equipment and I'm paying videographers to how can I make it a, you know, an asset in my life? And that really ended up just being we bought this podcast studio, we've, you know, invested in the cameras, the equipment, the studio manager, the videographer, and now uh we can rent that studio space and and monetize podcasting as opposed to it being a drain.

SPEAKER_02 0:58

Yeah, that's really awesome. So, what uh what inspired the idea of being able to monetize every part of your life?

SPEAKER_00 1:08

Really cool um story. So back in 2020, I joined a Facebook community called uh Exotic Car Hacks. And I'm sure some of the people listening to this have heard of that community. But the teacher in that community, uh, his name's Pejman Gadimi, he teaches this concept of wealth transfer and using vehicles and watches and things like that as a savings account. So you buy the right car, the right make model spec, right? Very desirable options, and it will appreciate in value as opposed to depreciate in value. So I started testing that and I knocked it out of the park with my first car. I bought a Porsche GT3RS and uh I bought it for like$150, sold it for$215, you know, less than two years later. So it was a good chunk of equity that developed by having the right car. And then in addition to that equity, you also get back your down payment and the money that you've been putting in towards the principal. So I ended up, I ended up making money on this car, and it opened up a lot of like doors in my mind where I'm thinking about, okay, well, if you can do this with a car, and everyone always said you can't do that with a car, you can't do it with a liability like that. But if you could do it with a vehicle you're driving, why can't you do that with everything else? So then I started looking for ways to make myself make money on the things that I was doing, anyways. It just kind of shifted that thinking for me.

SPEAKER_02 2:42

Yeah, that's really kind of taken it to the uh the next level. So clearly you've thought about it in the the the concept of like content creation, podcasting, etc. What other areas are you kind of focused on building systems around monetizing that at the moment?

SPEAKER_00 2:57

Yeah, you know, it's it's kind of funny. I I'm glad you asked, but I it's not something I'm consciously thinking of so much, but I'm really doing it around everything, right? So um people had started asking me uh back really after 2020. Um I had started having just a lot of success in e-com. And I I'm a young man. I was trying to have some fun. So that's where I buy some of those flashier cars and things like that. But people saw that and viewed it as a signal of success, and people started asking me, Well, Parker, how are you doing this? So that kind of led into me writing a book to monetize that knowledge, which led into coaching to monetize the help that I was already giving people. Um we've done it with real estate and real estate development and property management and things like that now. Uh, we still do it with cars, we do it with watches, we're doing it with podcasting. Really, anything that I'm contributing a lot of time to is something that I'm looking to find a way to monetize.

SPEAKER_02 4:00

That's really cool. I like uh I feel like I kind of heard a little bit about like the timeline of events unfolding. So if I'm understanding correctly, e-com was kind of the initial uh entrepreneurial endeavor. Is that correct?

SPEAKER_00 4:12

I mean, it was the first real, real one. Uh when I was in middle school, uh, me and my my neighbor, like on my street, we started a landscaping company. And you know, you think it's like kids out there mowing lawns or something like that. Uh, but we were trying to do it big. So we were bidding on like neighbor projects to um like tear out the park strip, redo the sprinklers, put in uh gravel, zeroscape. Um, and you know, that really didn't go far. We made a couple thousand dollars doing that for a year. And that was kind of my my first entrepreneurial endeavor. When I left the army in 2016, I had started working in a warehouse and I had wanted to start a business. So I I tried to start very small. Um, well, maybe not too small. I tried to start with government contracts, like the movie War Dogs.

SPEAKER_02 5:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:09

Because, you know, I I was in the military. I'm like, ah, okay, yeah, I can play in that world. And I learned really quickly that I couldn't compete at the economies of scale that the large suppliers had. I just couldn't make competitive bids. So I pivoted, and that was that pivot was direct to consumer. And so instead of trying to provide protective gloves to the military, I started just selling them to people who were maybe in the airsoft space or MILSIM or were paintballing or were active in shooting. I was trying to sell them to National Guardsmen and really anybody that would have benefit for the product. Uh, and that was kind of the the first endeavor um in a real large business.

SPEAKER_02 5:54

Yeah, that's really cool. I like how the uh the flow of it was around like the niche of uh kind of the military-esque type stuff from your background and everything you could relate to, and then all the way through to the point where um it hits the the mass market, uh the airsoft and paintball games are so much fun. I love those. Um so in addition to you know these protective gloves, were there other products that you found in the e-com space that were really um kind of in that same niche or also like really beneficial to your uh endeavors?

SPEAKER_00 6:27

So, so one of the things that I did that I try to teach people to do now when they are interested in e-comm is one, you touched on it, I stuck around my passion and my background and the things that I was already interested and involved in. When I really was moving into the direct-to-consumer space, I started doing stickers and decals. And they were military, Second Amendment themed. Um, but again, okay, this idea of wealth transfer uh that we touched on with the cars, and you snowball everything into the next thing. I was doing that here and I didn't understand I didn't know it consciously at first. I mean, it just made logical sense. So I would start with stickers and decals. We would sell those, and if we had some that really were popular that sold very well, then that became the concept for the apparel. So then we would take the sticker and decal, we put it on a shirt or on a hat, and then sell those. And so it it allowed me us to test a product idea, when it was working, grow it bigger. Um, and then you know, we were able to obviously we try to be very data driven. So when we had something that was very popular, then we did offshoots of those things, right? Um, what what was relevant, what would play along with the phrase or the imaging. Uh, and that was that was wildly successful for us for a while. And at the time, um, I was living on the GI bill and going to business school. So I kept my expenses very low and uh reinvested everything back into the business. But then that let us try a variety of products. And to be honest, I failed way more times than I succeeded. Um but the beauty of entrepreneurship is that if you succeed once, it's a it, I mean, that that win is worth a hundred losses. So um I can remember, yeah, we tried all kinds of stuff, garden uh decor and home decor. And we tried custom made in the USA cutting boards for a while. I mean, really, really the beauty of it was we could just do we could try trial and error um because of how we had structured the foundation of it being we're gonna test products when we find something that wins, we can scale the win, and that gives us a really safe base, to be honest.

SPEAKER_02 8:51

Yeah, that's that's really cool. I like um the variety of things that you uh were able to try during that window, and and the things that you found were successful were the things you're passionate about. But I I love that you touched on one of the most important things about entrepreneurship that you highlighted was the fact that like you win one time uh and that outweighs the hundred losses along the way. And I find that entrepreneurship is just a a game of um, I think it was Andy Frasilla who said it. It's like 90% of the time you're getting kicked in the teeth, and then eight percent of the time you're wondering like what the hell's even going on, and then that final two percent of the time you're winning, and then you're right back into the 90%. And that's kind of kind of what I'm imagining when I hear the um that side of things.

SPEAKER_00 9:35

You get kicked in the teeth those 90% of the time. Uh but you learn, and then the more you learn as you go, the less you get kicked in the teeth in the future. So when you start, maybe it's 90%. But after you've been doing it for a decade, maybe it's only 50%. Like the the volume of winning increases with your knowledge base, which is why I think it's so important if you're interesting interested in entrepreneurship or or becoming an entrepreneur and a business owner, get out and fail. Fail quickly because the faster you get out and fail and learn, the faster you can take those lessons, apply them to the next thing, and do it better.

SPEAKER_02 10:15

Yeah, 100%. I couldn't agree anymore. Um, so diving into some of the technicals of the uh world of um, would you would you consider it uh what you were doing to be um more along the lines of like drop shipping, or were you buying the products and flipping them, or how were you doing that? If you're listening to this show, it probably means one thing. You're focused on building a successful online business. Well, here's the truth. No matter how good your offers or systems are, they only work if you have a steady flow of quality leads coming in. And one of the most powerful ways that I've discovered to create that flow is through a podcast. That's why I created the Podcasting for Leads masterclass. In this free masterclass, I break down how to design a podcast that consistently generates high-quality leads for your business by building relationships with the right guests, which gives you access to their network, their list, and their audience, all while positioning you as the go-to authority in your niche. So if you want to create a predictable lead flow, attract dream clients on repeat, and build the kind of authority that fuels your long-term growth, then check out the Podcasting for Leads Masterclass. The link is in the description down below. Now, let's get back to the conversation.

SPEAKER_00 11:21

So, all of the above, I recommend typically for people that are getting into e-commerce, drop shipping is a really good way to find proof of concept. It's a horrible way to do business long term. And the hard part with that is most dropshippers, right, where do they get their products? They get them from China, they get them from India, they get them from Taiwan. And it takes three weeks to ship those to the US, slow boat from wherever, and then they still got to get delivered to the customer. Um, and in the US, especially right now in the political climate and everything, people are they don't want products from outside of the US, generally speaking. Um so you run into a lot of angry customers that way. So you can do it for a little bit to get a proof of concept that your product is gonna be good, your sales are gonna be good. And then what what we did well was I was always looking for a way to bring that into the United States or to bring those things in-house. And one of the ways that we did that was when we had proof of concept for products and we were making money on them, instead of taking a paycheck early, we invested that back into being able to do like wholesale or to bring in a ton of a product at once and warehouse that ourselves and fulfill it ourselves so that when a customer places an order, instead of them waiting three to four weeks to get it delivered, they could get it in two to four days. And then that reduced a ton of the customer like frustrations and negativity. Um, so I'm a big believer that you can maybe start out with drop shipping, get the marketing right, the messaging right, learn how to pitch the product and the solution that it provides. But ultimately for efficiency and for customer satisfaction, you want to move that into a way where you can get a higher margin and where you can have higher customer satisfaction. And that's you bring those products in-house.

SPEAKER_02 13:10

That's really cool. I've never heard it explained in that uh regard before, because I know that I've I've talked to people who have like had a lot of success in just drop shipping or a lot of success in just the the wholesale side, but never somebody who's like talked about bridging from one to the other. Like that that makes it a really simple um step by step if you're like looking to get started. That's really cool.

SPEAKER_00 13:31

So I think a lot of people run into this issue and and you're you're hitting on it where they start doing something and it works, so they just stick with it, but they're not asking themselves the question of can I do this better or is there a better alternative? And so I I just think if you're in the business of actually building the brand and the company and your trust, you always have to be looking to improve the product and improve the service. And if you're not doing those things, you might be able to make a living and and stay well, right? But you're missing out. Like there's an opportunity cost that's lost there on your growth and your development and what you can do long term.

SPEAKER_02 14:12

Yeah, 100%. It's it's kind of like the idea of um I don't know, I don't remember the term for it, but it basically it's like uh when you're split testing like your strategy, so to speak. It's like you go through and you can try making the the tweaks to it that end up yielding significantly larger results. And I think that that's kind of how I would re uh restate what you said there is kind of split testing the strategy itself, you know? Yeah. Like you found the marketing things that are working in the drop shipping lane, but maybe you should try the wholesaling and see if you can take it to that next level.

SPEAKER_00 14:42

Um I'm a big believer too. Like wholesaling's great. You want to develop a I mean, for the the best possible return on your investment is when you develop a product that's your own, right? You own it. And then invest in the manufacturing for that product. Now, this is this is like large scale, right? So you start with drop shipping, you maybe are develop a relationship with a supplier or a manufacturer, you can move that into wholesaling. And while you're doing that, you can maybe make some some small tweaks to the product, right? But you're gonna get feedback from your customers. And in e-commerce, I think this is really important. On your advertisements, on your posts, things like that, you're going to get feedback about the product. Learn from it, like exercise the feedback loop here a little bit, collect the information and the data that your customers are giving you, and then take that back to the manufacturer and make the product better. And then you keep selling a better, higher quality product too, which further builds more trust in you and your brand and your company and makes everybody happy and you make more money in the process. But you have to go through these steps of progression to make it efficient.

SPEAKER_02 15:52

Yeah, and that goes back to the uh the concept you were talking about initially of making sure that you are willing to like actually endure the failure side of things because with each iteration, there's gonna be something else that goes wrong, but also something you're able to improve that makes it ultimately better in the long run. That's awesome. Um, so from a uh technical standpoint, um, I've seen like different versions of funnels where people are focusing on just a uh single product funnel page versus having like more of a library of uh bunch of different SKUs. Like, where did you kind of find your uh sweet spot?

SPEAKER_00 16:25

So I'm gonna give you my secret sauce e-commerce product thing. I don't I don't have a name for it. Yeah, there's a couple different e-commerce models that are prevalent. For example, in the ClickFunnels world, right? Like um when Russell or Trey Llewellyn and those guys were teaching uh e-com first, their idea was we sell a product, and then the upsell is more of the same product. Now you go do something like you buy a gun magnet, right? Uh magnet that you put on your car under a desk or something like that, it can holster your firearm. You only need one. Okay, maybe you need two. But the upsell thing of that is like buy a two-pack for 20 bucks, and then you complete checkout, you go to the next page, and they try to offer you 10 more for 20 more bucks. But nobody needs that. Nobody, nobody wants 20 gun magnets. So maybe you give them away as gifts, I don't know. But I think that that model was inherently flawed. The second model that's really common is like the Shopify. People will drop ship, uh, create a Shopify store, and what they'll do is they'll just throw up 120 products and look for something that works. That's the throwing spaghetti at the wall, right, in e-commerce and seeing what sticks. I think that that one fails too because you're never actually learning and refining the messaging around a product and becoming good at what you do. So the model that I found works better is you offer one flagship product. You can do it in a funnel or you know, even in Shopify, whatever. Offer a flagship product that brings people into the store, and then you do value ads based on that product. So, like if you sell a cell phone, for example, your next value ad, the upsell, shouldn't be another phone, because somebody only needs one phone. It should be the phone case. Or it should be a screen enhancement or a better processing chip or whatever, right? But it's something that adds value back to the initial product. It shouldn't be something that is just more of the initial product, in my opinion, anyways. So that was how we actually um started scaling products as we got better at e-commerce was we'd run a like a sales funnel. Um, this was how I got my two comma club, was we'd run a sales funnel for a single product, but the upsells were all things that added value back to that product. And I noticed that when we did that, our can now this was years ago, um, so I might might be not quite correct, but our our upsell rate was like over 50%. That's what I'm saying. Which is unheard of for for most things in in the funnel world. So all but sorry, I'm trying to think like there's so much thoughts. All that all that we were doing was just providing more value to the thing that everyone was already there to buy. And that's what what made the products and the company successful.

SPEAKER_02 19:28

Yeah, that's very uh it's very interesting. It's kind of like um reminds me of that uh book from my childhood. The if you give a cookie a mouse, he's gonna want like a glass of milk or whatever. And like or sorry, it's a cookie mouse, lol, a mouse a cookie. Anyway, um, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:45

He wants milk, so you sell him milk too.

SPEAKER_02 19:48

Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 19:48

Yeah. And then he gets a little bit sleepy, so he needs a blanket and a nightcap. Yep.

SPEAKER_02 19:54

That's so good. Okay. Um, so when you guys uh were putting these um different products out there, and you had the uh the funnel itself with the flagship product. Uh were you guys just doing like um paid ads to drive traffic to these funnels?

SPEAKER_00 20:09

Yeah, so I I'll tell you my whole strategy um and and kind of background with that stuff. So when I mentioned we first started and we were doing like stickers, decals, got into apparel, and we had like protective gloves because that was what we were first trying to do with the the government. We would I say we, I would, it was me, uh staying up all hours of the night, like a bum trying to make his business work. I would send two like 100 to 200 direct messages on Instagram every single day to people that had pages in the relevant niche. Like I said, uh military, airsoft, paintball, mill sim, whatever. And I would just say something to the effect of like, hey, I saw your page. I like the content that you're putting out. I just started this business doing military Second Amendment themed products. If you're interested, I'd like to offer you a partial sponsorship. Here's a coupon code for 30% off our entire product catalog. If you use it, all I ask in return is that you post a picture and tag us in it on your social media. And I I, to be honest, out of like one to two hundred messages a day, I'd maybe get like two to four sales. So I'm getting like a two percent conversion rate, give or take. Um there was some conversations that get started too, and I could convert, you know, maybe later. But on a daily basis, I would get two to four sales. That brought in enough money that then we could start investing a little bit into paid ads. So we would take the small win, delay our gratification. Like I said, I I I worked for two to almost three years, maybe, without taking a paycheck. Like while I was just trying to build this company. And it's because I was living in my grandma's basement, I was on the GI bill. Living on student loans, that kind of thing. Um so we would DM to get initial sales, take the money from the sales, and that would be how we tested our paid ads. And we did this over, you know, a year plus, and we're able to kind of like start to refine how we did the advertising, like the marketing. Um, we were able to test different avenues, test different messaging. And I can actually remember um it was in uh 2018, my wife and I had just got married, and it was uh it was actually the weekend we got married. It was like the first time everything really, really clicked. And our Facebook ads, yeah, it was Facebook and Instagram primarily, um, they took off. And like all of a sudden we were just we were just selling. And it was like we we put you know$100 in and we were getting a thousand dollars of sales and we're like, yeah, uh, we can do this now at scale. But honestly, there was years of of testing that went into that. Yeah. And the beauty of doing that messaging thing, by the way, and this this took time. Like I said, I did this for over a year of the messaging for sure. But every time one of those people, like I said, two to four sales a day, that snowballed into like I could get two to three maybe posts a day tagging me in them. And over the course of that year to two years, then going into that third year, we had a social following. I mean, we went from zero to like over 10,000 Instagram followers just doing that. And then those 10,000 people became our our primary sales base. That was how we got started, was just the messaging. So getting out there and doing volume, I think is irreplaceable for somebody who's trying to start a business.

SPEAKER_02 23:54

Yeah, yeah, I couldn't agree more. Gives you a lot of uh a lot of data to learn from, to tweak, and uh make better uh educated decisions on. That's awesome. Um, so yeah, so I think we we kind of answered the the marketing play of like the how did you get the traffic? Uh it was ads, the funnel itself, flagship product, upselling value ads, and then um obviously the offer itself was the different physical products. So then you said that um from after the e-com world, you got into the the landscape of like cars, people started reaching out to you and being interested in other things that you had going on, and you were um diving into the uh the world of uh leadership, if I understand correctly, is that right?

SPEAKER_00 24:35

Yes. So my my background, I joined the army right out of high school, and I was very blessed to progress quickly in that organization, uh, where I promoted rapidly. I got more and more responsibility, and I to be honest, it's something that always I was always interested in and passionate about. Like I was an Eagle Scout growing up and all that stuff. Um so I realized after being in e-com and and starting and growing my business for you know maybe five or six years, I realized the thing that was making me the most successful wasn't that I had some like great business acumen or that I was really good at, you know, tracking and learning from my KPIs or any of that stuff, right? I it was that I was a really effective leader and that I was building a good team. And the team was able to do everything that I couldn't do. The team was able to cover down all my weaknesses, the team was able to make the business better. And so I stopped and I assessed, okay, well, what what what aspect of leadership is actually working for me and what's helping me build the team? And I realized that I was subconsciously taking the military leadership systems that I had been using or had grown up with in the military, and I was plugging those into my business. And that's how I was running things. So I was using military concepts like a command philosophy. I was doing mission briefs, I was doing after-action reviews, right? And in the process of implementing those, the business was inherently put into a position where it had to grow and operate efficiently. So I kind of my first um dabbling in that specifically was at a Russell Brunson Inner Circle meeting, and I got on stage and I just presented about um command philosophy. Because I'm I'm sitting here and I'm like maybe a little bit self-conscious, a little bit of imposter syndrome. I'm feeling like I'm in the e-com space and none of these people can relate to me, and they're all coaches and consultants and infoproduct guys, they're all way smarter than me. I'm thinking all of those things. And so I didn't know what I could teach them that would be relevant to them. But I said, you know what? A good command philosophy is something that any business can benefit from. So I'll go teach that. And I'm sure they all already have it, but whatever. I'll just I'll just that's what I can teach. So I got on stage and I presented on that. And I was really surprised. I got a lot of like really positive feedback right after the presentation. I mean, people were asking questions, they seemed really interested in what I was presenting. And I got off stage and Fred Yelma's like, Parker, like, we we would pay you$50,000 to come teach that to our business right now. And I'm like, what? I'm sorry. And Herman Blanco is runs over. He's like, Parker, do you have a coaching program or any products that we can we can look at? I'm like, I'm sorry, I don't have anything. Like, I've never done this before. And I uh Edward Collins had talked the day prior about um asking Chat GPT, like using everything you know about me, what's your what do you think would be the best business for me to make$10 million a year? And he comes over to me after Herman and he's like, Parker, that's your$10 million a year business. He's like, you need to be teaching this. And I'm just blown away. One, I'm so grateful the support that that community gave me, like rewired my brain about what's possible and what I could be doing. And and man, I'm I'm really humbled by all of that. But I that's what snowballed me into this now. Um so as I've refined that over the last few years, I put it all together and I realized that one, um, just because you're a good marketer doesn't necessarily mean you're a good leader in your business. So I can help people with leadership systems. And every entrepreneur at some point becomes the bottleneck to their organization and they need to have a good team around them. So I can help with team development. And then putting it all together, um I called the coaching company Mission Ready Systems because these are the systems that the military uses to be mission ready. And we just adapt them and plug them into businesses. And that's how we develop the team and the systems that scale our revenue and our outcomes and let us spend more time doing the things we love with the people we love. And at the end of the day, if you can't do that, why are you in business?

SPEAKER_02 29:07

Amen. Man, that's really cool. Uh, shout out Fred Yalme. He was uh recent uh podcast we dropped. Great, great guy.

SPEAKER_00 29:16

Um I love Fred and Jackie. Yeah, they are some of my favorite people.

SPEAKER_02 29:21

Amen to that. Um, yeah, that's that's so wild. I love uh I love the synergy um from the masterminds and everything, like being able to be in there, uh getting the feedback and like thank you for sharing um kind of those like those thoughts that were running through your head, the the fears and everything that um you were overcoming at that time around um picking what you were going to uh share on because I know that you know that imposter syndrome, it goes around all the time. Like I have it probably like every day. Uh it's it's hilarious. And like I I'm sure anybody listening right now uh can relate to that on a number of levels. Um so once you switched over to the leadership side and and got the the mission ready uh leadership stuff together, like how did you go about um kind of I guess uh going and getting um some of those those people, did you just jump right into like helping Fred and them or were you able to go find another group of people to kind of help?

SPEAKER_00 30:17

Or okay, so no, and I'll own my my mistake here really quick. Um Mandy Keene, my one of my favorite coaches, she actually a couple weeks, maybe months ago now, had told me I need to go back and I need to make offers to all those people. And I'm still maybe dealing with some imposter syndrome because I did not go back and make offers to any of those people. Part of it was like, I I don't want to, I didn't want to force myself on that community because I really value the friendships and the relationships and the mentorship that I get there, and I don't want to do anything that taints it, and that's what I told her. Um so how I actually got my clients, awesome question. I'm doing the there's a couple avenues, so I'll just touch on all of them. I'm doing the hormose 100 rule of 100. And for the people that aren't familiar, yeah, he teaches you do 100 actions of outreach every single day. And that could be a hundred DMs or messages sent. It could be a hundred um a hundred minutes of content production that you can put out, you know, your your social media content and things like that. Or it's a hundred dollars of ad spend every day. She's like, you do those one of those three things every single day, your business will grow. So I'm doing 100 outreaches every single day. Um, and on average, I get like a 13, 12 to 13% um engagement rate on those. So I get 12 to 13% new messages. Um and like in the last week, because I actually just made a post on this. The last week it started uh 85 new messages. Out of those 85 new messages, I got three booked calls for my$50,000 a year offer.

SPEAKER_01 32:04

Nice.

SPEAKER_00 32:05

So I'm like, okay, that's just per week. And I if I close one out of those three, I'm like, great, that eight hours of messaging work, that comes out to be like I made$6,000 in an hour for that time period. So I'm like, that's just totally worth it. And if you're not doing that, I recommend that you do it because it's really not hard. But people get in their heads, like, oh, it's just mundane, or oh, it's not something that I I want to do. It feels like it's beneath me. So what? Do you want if you want to make money, do the outreach? Um, so that was the first part. The second part was I had taken on some smaller uh clients while I was like learning, getting my footing under me at the$10,000 range and then the$20,000 range. And those people were people that knew me already and would ask me questions or ask me for help. And I just I took a shot and I said, Hey, you know, I actually help people with this stuff. Here, let's get on a call. And then I did a uh very simple diagnostic. So I'm asking them about what their obstacles are, what their pain points are, what they need to overcome. And then I pitched based on those. And I I just kind of took those pain points and I said, Well, what would it mean for you if you could actually get over that? And I let them give me the answers to the test, and then I just pitched based on the answers they gave me. Um, and that worked pretty well for getting my first uh handful of clients, like uh a dozen clients or so. Um what I did with my first in-person event last October, and this is where the game changed for me. Last summer, in the decade and a day with uh Russell Brunson, he told me all of the reasons my coaching business was gonna bottleneck and how to prevent it. And I needed to one move into like a course and facilitator type model. So that's what I've taken. Like my previously$10,000 offer is now that. And then my previously$20,000 offer is now um, we've upgraded it substantially with the podcast studio, social media management, extra things that we can we can provide and help people with. Um, but we grew that into the$50,000 a year offer. And I pitched that at first on stage at my mastermind last October. And uh I mean, really cool experience. I'll just detail it real fast. So I got awesome speakers. I had Akbar Sheikh on there. I saw he was on your podcast not too long ago. I had Mandy Keene come down and speak. I had a local entrepreneur, Braden Thomasick, come speak. We had um Robbie Summers come down and uh do the MC, like all-star lineup. Um I sold 35 tickets to that. So 35 people in the room. Um I made a mistake. I presented last and then pitched at the end of the day. Now everyone's tired, fatigued, and we lost maybe 10 people throughout the day that had to go pick up kids, get dinner, whatever else. So when I got on stage, I was maybe presenting to 25 people. I used the perfect webinar format and just gave it on on stage live. And at the end of it, I had three people sign up for that offer. And I'm like, okay, three out of 25, that's better than 10%. Like, we've got a legit thing now. So that was my proof of concept to validate that. And now what we're doing, so I was previously doing sales calls, pitched in the live event. Now what I'm doing is I'm using um a software called Revio, which is, I think, Dan Martell's messaging software. And uh essentially what it is is we send our open messages, our outreaches, that's that 100 messages a day in there, and then pass it off to a chat bot or myself or my executive assistant, depending on what how the conversation is going. And that chat bot asks them qualifying questions. The qualifying questions position them for either my um foundation's offer, which is the kind of entry-level course with facilitator and weekly calls, or it facilitates them or it sorry, qualifies them for the$50,000 a year offer. Um, and then it makes a pitch appropriate, or it books the call for me based on that. And then uh we try really hard to make sure that that's set up in a way where we don't lose anybody. What I mean by that is if somebody's not qualified, we're still going to give them a lead magnet or try to get them into our free school community. And if we can get them into one of those places, then we can develop them over time, uh, build the relationship, build the trust. Like my evil goal in all of this, my super villain goal, is to just help people make so much money that it's a no-brainer that they stay on with me. Like if I can help you with my free school community, make an extra$100,000 in a year, isn't it worth it to pay like$2,500 for the 12-week facilitated program? And if it is, and I can get you into that program and I can help you make another$200,000 next year, isn't it maybe worth, you know,$40,000,$50,000 to come and coach with me? Like that's the that's the evil plan. I love it. That's awesome. It's kind of a general way of getting that. We we run some paid ads too, but primarily that's that's the structure right now.

SPEAKER_02 37:36

Yeah. Those um, so I'm I'm really curious to hear um what's been your experience with the outreach? Because I recently picked up uh something similar. I hadn't heard of uh Dan Martell's um outreach platform, but I heard of we had uh do you know Sean Malone by chance?

SPEAKER_00 37:50

No, I don't.

SPEAKER_02 37:52

I'll have to connect you guys, but um he has a platform called uh FlowChat and uh recently picked that up and it sounds like they're similar in nature with the outbound DM side of things. Um what have you experienced in terms of like the um the platforms that are the main social media like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, whatever in terms of like their uh their caps on a daily? Like how many how many hours. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 38:20

I haven't hit any um any caps, at least not recently. When I was doing the e-com stuff, I would hit I would hit caps because I was copying pasting, copy and pasting messages. Um and this was back in like 2016, 2017, the rules were a little bit different, right? Um so I would hit caps then at like 200 messages in an hour or two. But since using Revio, and I I've kind of intentionally been aware like there could be caps. So I ha I just haven't I haven't pushed beyond. I think the most messages cold, I mean open new opens that I've sent in a day is like a hundred and fifty. And then the rest of it is just messages that we're already maintaining. So I just haven't ran into them.

SPEAKER_02 39:06

Yeah, that's good. I love that. Okay. Um, so then let's see here. So we've talked about um the leadership offer, and then what um what kind of what are what are some of the big goals that you have for uh 2026? I know we're getting ready to be at the end of Q1 here.

SPEAKER_00 39:24

Absolutely. So podcast studio is a big one for me. My coaching business bought this podcast studio when we took it over. Um I like there was just a lot of potential I could see. So we were able to come in, upgrade a lot of the stuff. Um, and now we're we're trying to bring people in. We've customized the offers a little bit, changed those a little bit more. So we're trying to, instead of just having a place where somebody can come in and rent studio time, it's now a place where you can come in, tell your story, record your podcast, your YouTube, whatever. We'll handle the production, we'll handle the editing, we will host your content, we will post your content, we'll clip your content, we'll do your short form derived from your long form. Uh, we will help you structure your content if you need. So, I mean, it's been really cool because we've kind of moved into this realm of social media management for podcast clients, and that's brought in a lot more customers. We're trying to 10x this business this year. So uh it's like last year was$150,000 in revenue before I took over. I'm like, this year we're going for$1.5 million. Like we're gonna, we're blowing this thing up. And it's helped actually really cool, cool concept. Look for ways to monetize your life because they feed each other. So all of the podcast studio clients are interested in learning how I monetize my podcast. And they all want to learn how to get clients from the podcast. So now all of those people are warm coaching prospects. And then all my coaching prospects, if they're local, are warm for the podcast studio membership. And then anyone who's not local, even though they're maybe not coming in and filming in our studio, I have editors, I have graphic designers. You could send us your footage, we can edit that, we can clip that, we can do your thumbnails, we can do your social media posts for it. We can still take that off your plate and help you. So my big goal is I want to grow the studio. Um, and if we get the studio to a really good place, like that's it just takes so much um I don't want to say it's stressful because it's not, but it would remove any stress, doubt, worry of everything else. Because the expense or the the revenue from just the studio then could cover everything else that we do. Right? That would cover the expenses for the podcast business and the other employees and the coaching business and and the executive and VAs. Like you get it to there, and then everything else is just icing on the top. So that's how I'm I'm viewing that now.

SPEAKER_02 42:06

Yeah, that sounds like a really good idea. Um, I'm I'm genuinely curious to pick your brain because I know that um obviously I do uh my own podcast as well, and like I've thought about like what it looks like to potentially do that. But one of the things that um I'm eager to hear is like you've sat down, you've clearly uh executed, you're pulling the trigger, and you're brainstorming the idea of how to 10x it. What do you think is kind of like the biggest needle mover that's gonna make that happen for you at this time?

SPEAKER_00 42:33

Yeah, it was a re-offer. So the previous owner, um, he was offering like small memberships, right? You come in, you get, you know, four hours a month, something like that. We took kind of that as the basis, but then we added in podcast production coaching, and we added in um the social media management, and we added in uh coaching and consulting with me so I can come in and I can bring you the leadership systems and the team development systems, all that stuff, right? And we are pitching now, instead of a$500 a month, you know, membership for them, we're targeting the entrepreneurs, the business owners that are local that need a better marketing presence. They need to build trust with long-form content. They're maybe struggling to get eyeballs on their social media or their short form, their reels, their clips. We're targeting those people and saying, look, for less than the cost of hiring a social media manager in-house, you can get eight hours of studio time a month. You can get your long form videos edited, cleaned up, published with thumbnails. You can get all your clips made, we'll post your daily content, we'll respond to your replies, we'll drive traffic to you with your DMs and your comments. And we can do that for$4,000 a month. So for less than the cost of going out and hiring a social media manager for 50 or 60 grand, you can come into the studio. we can do that for you. And then our our our real goal, like dream goal, big, big reach goal, stretch goal, is we get a hundred people on that plan. Right. Um, and that's that's how we 10X. I mean, there's obviously some lower tiers to our memberships too, but that's the big one. That's the flagship right now. And if we can successfully grow and scale that offer, and and obviously we can tweak as we go, um, but that's how we do it. We're taking off what was formerly 500 bucks a month and now we're trying to position in such a way with a ton of added value. We're not just raising the price, but we're trying to provide so much value that it is unrealistic for people to not want to do business with us.

SPEAKER_01 44:45

100% that's awesome.

SPEAKER_02 44:48

Yeah, that is such a such a cool offer all that for 4K a month. That's that's really going to help take people who are not currently um what I would consider to be like on the map and help put them on the map. You know?

SPEAKER_00 45:00

Well so like we did it um one of one of our first clients to pick that up uh wanted to podcast anyways but wasn't prioritizing the time and he's like dragging his feet because you got to buy the cameras you got to buy the lights for less than the cost of a good camera you can come in professional studio right um we have all the equipment we'll set it up we'll run it you don't have to learn the technical stuff you don't have to figure out the editing software like all of those things we'll handle. So now all he has to do is schedule the time to come in. So he starts coming in and doing that. And he has eight hours he started doing four hours a month now he does all eight because he's getting the return on the investment. But like in his first three months he signed 12 new clients that all mentioned that they were coming from the podcast that he was doing in our studio. And then we're editing thumbnail posting for him and then clipping and doing social media for him. And then he's like oh man like I'm making my money back. Like I'm just this is great. Like I'm gonna keep doing this. So we've had uh some some good early proof of concept with it with a couple clients now and uh we're collecting their testimonials. We're starting to revamp our our uh landing page with those client testimonials and social proof but yeah it's it's a good a good program and a good offer um because it just takes so much off your plate. And at the end of the day like like I mentioned before for me entrepreneurship was always about time. And I realize that's kind of ironic I maybe work too much now sometimes, but it was about having the freedom to spend my time doing what I wanted with who I wanted. So if I could be doing things that I love with my family, if I could take my kid to a basketball game, you know, that that kind of stuff. And this I think helps a lot of people get into a position where they don't have to worry about the stress associated with long form content, short form content, or am I posts going live every day? Am I answering all the questions? We just take it off the plate.

SPEAKER_02 47:01

Yeah. Yeah I've I've heard um a lot of people equate the content game to basically like a second full-time job and it's like you run the business but then you also do that and you guys are freeing up people the opportunity to just focus on the one and then take care of everything else. That's really cool.

SPEAKER_00 47:18

Correct.

SPEAKER_02 47:18

Yeah okay um so as we're getting uh toward the uh end of the podcast here one of the uh big questions that I love to ask is um you know given all of your life experience and everything that you've been through up to this day um what would be like the one big piece of advice that you would love to kind of um record in history if you will invest in yourself early and often my biggest regret was that it took me too long to invest in my knowledge my skill my capacity and I also didn't understand how to do that effectively at first so it doesn't strictly have to be formal education it could be um the YouTube education that you're getting it can be going out and trying something getting the new experience right starting the business failing but I think I would have had a lot more success earlier if I would have bet on myself earlier.

SPEAKER_00 48:17

And even when I started going into business I was very concerned with failure and risk and the perception that other people were going to have of me if it didn't work out. So I I maybe played a little bit more cautiously and didn't invest in myself as much as I should have so I I think if you're on the cusp of entrepreneurship, if you're interested in building a better life for yourself, go all in on you and do what you do to the best of your ability. And if you can do that every single day you're doing something you can be proud of and you can put your name on heck yeah.

SPEAKER_02 48:50

Yeah that's really solid advice yeah I love that so uh for anybody who's um still with us at this time and they want to get involved in anything that you have going on where would you like to send them they better all still be with us.

SPEAKER_00 49:04

This was a great episode. Amen yeah you can you can find me at parkermaccumber.com I've got access to my book my programs everything's in there uh free free PDF guides for team development and for command philosophy uh and you're welcome to reach out to me I'm at the real Parker McCumber on Instagram I'm on X. You can find me anywhere.

SPEAKER_02 49:25

Heck yeah well thank you so much for your time today Parker it's been a great episode I appreciate it.

SPEAKER_00 49:30

John it's been a pleasure thank you