Cole Gordon Podcast
Cole Gordon Podcast
Dean Graziosi: Everything He’s Learned After $2 Billion In Revenue
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(0:00) The Power of AI
(0:27) The Difference Between a Campaign and a Company
(5:56) Scaling from Sales-Driven to Leadership-Driven
(13:47) Pivoting Messaging During Economic Shifts
(20:16) How to Reinvent Yourself or Business
(26:38) Lessons Learned Working w/ Tony Robbins
(33:16) Building a Powerful Network
(36:44) The 6-Step Framework for Life-Long Costumers
(42:30) Implementing AI Within Your Team
(45:46) Dean’s AI Advantage Summit
AI, especially, can be the great equalizer because you don't have to hire 10 people to start the company. Yesterday I told the whole team, I don't want to fire one person here and replace you with AI. But I need all of you to be twice as effective and efficient with AI because we're gonna grow without hiring people.
SPEAKER_00Now you're partnering with Tony Robbins. So I have to ask, being his partner especially, what's like the some of the biggest things you've learned just from working with him so closely?
SPEAKER_01I'm gonna share something I never shared before.
SPEAKER_00So one of the most impactful things you've told me, and this really was something that I just thought was it was so cool. It's how I shifted really looking at business, is you want to make sure you don't have a campaign, you want to have a company. Yeah. So can you expand on that and kind of what you've learned and seeing people over the years making that mistake?
SPEAKER_01For sure. And first off, I want to tell you it's been fun watching your journey. Thank you. I think we hired you as a consultant several years ago and connected you with Tony's company and watching you evolve, grow, shift. I mean, it's just the journey. And you're a prime example of what I'm gonna talk about the difference between a campaign and a company. Right. Right? I think you're experiencing it right now, and I appreciate you giving me credit on that, but you did all the work. Sometimes you just hear something, you go, oh, yeah. And and that's very specific for the industry we're in. But it could be it could be related to anything. And what I meant by that is I've been in the industry of helping people go faster with my experience, right? I first was inspired by my partner Tony Robbins 30 years ago, and I said I want to be in that industry. And during that time, when you start any business, you don't know what's going on, you're confused, and I and you're figuring things out and you're modeling other people and you're making mistakes and you're learning and growing, you're you're taking knowledge, and someday it turns into wisdom after you get beat up a little bit, right? But as I was growing, I remember prior to the internet, I used to be on infomercials because the internet didn't exist 30 years ago on at the way it does now. And I remember somebody would model what I was doing. I remember getting really upset. Be like, oh, they ripped everything off I'm doing. And then when you went online, people would steal your funnel, exactly. Same words, same model, same everything. And somebody'd say, Oh, do you see that that campaign is crushing? And I used to let it bug me. And then I realized there's a lot of people that understand marketing. They can model a funnel that worked, put it in their words, and it'll create results. And they scale up really fast. And doing this for 30 years, I can look at them and say, they'll be gone in a year. Because they found a campaign that converted and brought in money, but they didn't maybe have the experience yet. I'm not knocking them. Maybe, maybe they didn't have the operation set up, they didn't have good enough fulfillment set up, they didn't care about the clients at the level they should. And the campaign grows up. They think they got a company, they really don't. When the campaign fatigues, they're gone. Yeah. So I just, especially because I saw in you such a hard worker, I see how much you care about your clients and the effort and energy you put in. And I said, just make sure while your campaigns are doing well, that underneath you're studying how to be a leader, how to run operations, how to build a real company, because you're gonna have ups and downs. You're gonna have a campaign that kills it, and you think you're the smartest person in the world. I crushed this, this is killing it. Winner, next level. And then six months later, you're like, I'm the dumbest human being alive. It's not converting. Why isn't it working? I can't afford to pay my team anymore. I hired too many people, I got too big of an office, my life is ruined, right? You get both. Yeah. And if you work as much on creating a company as you do a campaign, it can balance off that you're still gonna go through the roller coaster. Just not as dramatic.
SPEAKER_00And and how do you exactly how do you exactly do that? Because you've been doing this for 35 years, so you've had to create a company. What are the big shifts that have allowed you to have that longevity? Because I see so many people, even my clients, come in, scale, you know, they come in at 50 grand a month, boom, they're at 800 grand a month. But then like you said, they might be gone in two years. So what are the kind of the key things that have kept you in the industry and in the game so long and have just made things um just giving you such a good longevity?
SPEAKER_01Really good question. It's not something I I've thought about, so I don't have a immediate uh, you know, story that I could tell the epiphany that hit me one day. It's time. Those things come when you realize that the roller coaster of it, listen, working for someone else, if you're not happy with that. I'm glad that we have team members that love what they do. But working for someone else can be hell if you know you're meant to do something different. We know that. So that's got its own side. As an entrepreneur, you know, did you ever see the memes where it's like it's the roller coaster of, oh, I got this, no one's just what you're saying. Then I can't believe right? I think the obsession is three things. And I'm I'm just gonna share this and then pick it apart any way you want. One is, and this is you know a little bit about me, sometimes I need to get you to pull me into tactical because I love being strategic on the top. The fact of the matter is when you fundamentally care about your clients and their results, not just the conversions or dollar per lead, it shifts everything. Because when you care about conversions, when you build a sales company that has to figure out how to fulfill, one of the death sentences, and you and I can probably name a few, is great salespeople who sell like crazy, do well getting people to say yes, they close $10,000, $20,000, $50,000 sales. They're a sales organization that figures out how to fulfill and doesn't really put a lot of pro-I bet you and I could name 10 right now.
SPEAKER_00Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_01They sell like banshees. But their fulfillment, like 90% of their energy is on sales, 10% is on how they fulfill. So they don't get repeat clients, they don't generate love, they don't generate referrals, and people are unhappy. So one of them is go upstream and care for your clients more than everybody else. Over-deliver. Whatever they expect, deliver more. As much money and time and effort you spend on marketing and sales, you need the the opposite side of spending that much money on delivering capabilities and skills that give people results. So that's that's one of them. I if you got any questions.
SPEAKER_00Well, the other thing I wanted to ask you about is you mentioned it, I was listening to a podcast from you on the way here. And you were mentioning that to get to, let's say, eight figures or 30, 40 million a year, you're a very marketing and sales-based person. Yeah. But the big thing that helped you get to 100 million and beyond was really actually shifting to becoming a good leader and also putting good operators within the company. So, like, speak on that, and what are some of the biggest shifts there?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so so this isn't dogging sales. Like the sales is the oxygen of every successful company in the world. You know, think of any company, if they don't have sales, they don't survive. But what happens is when you start getting the metrics and and and you start getting the numbers and you start getting the dollar per lead, and your return on ad spend, your return on your investment starts going up, of course, your energy, your company, your hires, your focus is all going to go, damn, the fire is getting big. How do we fan it? And when that scale happens, if you don't have systems in place to manage the growth, to deliver in a systematic way, to support those people. It just happens all the time. And then you're playing catch up forever. So it's really just, I mean, listen, we can go down the operations road, but I I've been I've been in this industry over 30 years. I've been self-employed since I was 17, 40 years. I would say I just became a better leader in the last five years.
SPEAKER_00Really? What were the biggest shifts?
SPEAKER_01And I think I was always, I mean, I think I was so good at sales, and fortunately, and I and you know me on this side, I obsess on delivering value to clients. Right. So I sold good and I delivered a really good product. That was enough to do really well for a long time. But operationally, I covered my tracks and my mistakes because I could outsell. I covered my tracks and mistakes operationally because people knew I cared about them and delivered a good product. But a lot of times it had me involved in so many pieces because operationally, and maybe 10 years now, but operationally I was a six. Marketing, fulfillment, 10. Operational, six or seven. And that took so much of my time and made scaling so reliant on me that when I realized I got one spot to fix, and I were I geeked out for about two years straight. Not only read every book, interviewed every uh every leader I possibly could. Obviously, Tony Robbins is my partner and he's so good at leadership training. And I just realized that the subtle nuances of relationships, building deep, understanding your leaders, understanding what their pains are, their their goals are, their constraints, their worries, their weaknesses, their strengths, and supporting them in an individual way and then giving them the authority to win or lose. It's like parenting, right? I was probably like a micromanaging parent. Like, don't do that, and I'll do this for you. Yeah. Right? Because I because you know, you build it from, you get this, you build it from one person, and all of a sudden you got 150 employees. Sometimes that one person mindset sticks. And the unlock was really empowering the team, trusting the team, hiring the right people, letting them learn on their own, even though I could have fixed it in many ways, and then meeting them where they are. And and it's been a huge transition the last five years.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and I know you've also hired really, really great operators to come into the company, but a lot of times, like what I know a lot of my clients worry about is when they bring in those operators, it becomes like they're this COO and everything becomes bureaucratic. So, how do you kind of keep the focus on your culture?
SPEAKER_01So you know so like you're getting married soon, right?
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Okay. It's like a marriage. If you're into personal development fitness, you want a family someday, would you marry someone who wasn't into personal development, they read gossip magazines, didn't work out, and never wanted kids. No, right? But it's like, what if it was that person? But she was the most beautiful human you've ever seen in your life. That's sometimes what we do. We hire a person with great potential. They they rocked it for other companies. They're they're beautiful in what they do, right? But their values don't match who we are. And I've done that before. You you gotta hire based on values and alignment first. You want an A player that's hungry, that's a killer, but has to have your values. Secondly, and this is a really important one to hear, and I've done this, I've made this mistake. Is sometimes we hire a players that are hungry, perfect, and because we didn't hire at that level before, we didn't hire that COO or that operator before, we don't have a great onboarding process. We never had to do it. So we take A players and onboard them in a really horrible way. We set them up to fail, and in nine 90 days, you're like, I gotta fire this person.
SPEAKER_00100%.
SPEAKER_01I've done it, and you know what I've done? I've had 90, 120 days in and go, not the person I thought they were, let them go, and I'll hook them up with another company just to be nice. And then the person call me three months later and go, Thank freaking God, best hire of my life. Dude, you change this guy's gonna be with me forever. And I'm like, we did it. You know what I mean? Like so be careful. If you're hiring an A player, you need to be, you need to know how to onboard an A player to get them, get them really immersed in your values, your culture, your goals, your constraints, everything, where you're going, where you've been, and all that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Well, that's one of the things we found too, even with just salespeople, but also executives, is a lot of times, you know, because I'm just such somebody you can throw me into the fire. So I will just throw them into the fire. And then, you know, what happens is they just don't get off to a good start in the first couple of months, and then they lose their confidence. And then they're asking themselves, is this even the right place for me? Did I make the wrong decision? And so we burned a lot of good people. Right.
SPEAKER_01And they feel this is a chaotic company.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And then the solution's really just like putting 10 times more of the effort on the front end.
SPEAKER_01It is.
SPEAKER_00So uh talking about kind of the industry and the economy and also messaging. So we're kind of in this place where the economy just kind of hasn't been good over the last several years. And even now, you know, the top 40% is doing well, the bottom 60% is getting less affordable and less affordable. And so people are, they're not necessarily reaching as much as they were, but they're kind of going for a life raft. And so you've been through this through the last 35 years, kind of having to pivot the company, meet people where they're at, adjust your messaging. How do you sort of think about how to lead your company and also the marketing through kind of these like economic transitions?
SPEAKER_01Really good question. You know, I um, if you don't mind me being a little nostalgic, I I've been doing this long enough that I was in business in 2007, 2006, when it was the last big almost felt overnight dramatic crash. You know, every every ho every other house in a neighborhood was for sale, every fourth house had a foreclosure sign on it. Right. It was and I taught people how to invest in real estate. So you know, good good time to be in that industry. And we were we so I I share that because there was an analogy that that prompted and and that shift in the market call actually took me from one of the educators in the in the uh real estate space, because that's where I started. I was a broke kid who got into real estate, so that's what I I taught for almost 20 years. That shift in the market because of one mindset shift took me from being one in the crowd within two years. I was the largest a uh uh uh real estate educator in the world with you know several hundred employees and and doing events all over. And it was this is we and this is a simple analogy, but hopefully it sticks forever. But and I haven't told this in a long time. But when the market shifted so hard, I was trying to figure out how do I meet people right now. They're saying real estate is the worst thing in the world, everything's in foreclosure, nobody's buying, you can't fix and flip. By the time you buy it and fix it, the house is worth less because the market's going down, right? So I remember thinking of this analogy, and it became around the Titanic, and you made me think about it when you said life preservers. Right. Because I thought when the market is good, 2020, when the economy's going good, it's like getting on the Titanic, the biggest ship, the fastest ship of all time, it's gonna take to me, take me to America in the fastest way, most luxurious way possible. It is aspirational. You get on that feeling. Then all of a sudden Titanic hits an iceberg and you're in the water and it's freezing. Sometimes we don't adjust our message quick enough. The the same thing that if you and I were salespeople to sell tickets to the Titanic, that messaging now all people care about is a life preserver.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_01And sometimes we adjust 10% when we have to adjust 20 or 30% to meet people where they are. So I remember watching other people in the real estate education space talking about the second house and making money.
SPEAKER_00Just inflating inflating the claims almost.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and I'm like, that's not where they are. People just want to feel safe. And I wrote a book and switched the message to say, hey, fix and flip is dead right now. Buy and hold is scary. I said, but there are institutional buyers buying houses cheap. I could show you how to make a decent, a good living by it was called wholesaling at the time. But long story short, I sold life preservers and I shifted my message into protection. Because listen, if you know how to sell better, can you survive a tough winter? Of course you can, right? If you know how to impact, if you care about your clients. There's foundational things that no matter what the economy does, there are people that are going to survive. So I would shift into the mechanisms that protect people. So I shifted my whole messaging into protection mode, selling life preservers. That's what I told the team. I shifted scripts, philosophy, wrote a book about it, and we not only grew, everybody else went out of business and we became number one. Now, what I'm telling you is for a while though, if you have a life preserver and you're just feeling protected, uh how I evolved out of it is eventually that changes. And I thought to I remember being a year or two in and things were getting a little better. And I thought to myself, we got to kick them. Now they're getting comfortable with all the craziness. Like when craziness first starts, it's like shocking. And then you get kind of used to it. Right? Foreclosure talk when it first happened was like, oh my God, then it was like, yeah, all my friends are doing foreclosures too. It's an easy way out, right? You get used to it. So then I thought to myself, when we were about two years in, is I got to kick these people off the life preserver. I got to get them disturbed with inaction because when everybody else is sitting on a life preserver, if you're the first one to take action, sell better, flip better, buy better, sell better, love better, if you're the first one to shift, then this is an absolute unfair advantage. So I shifted my message away from life preservers as to get your butt off the life preserver. It's time to do work again. And then we went back up into the aspirational piece. So I think just looking at those phases is we have to dramatically shift the way we communicate with people. And sometimes it's not the offer.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_01It's just how we communicate the offer.
SPEAKER_00It's the packaging.
SPEAKER_01It's the packaging around it.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And so one thing I want to double-click on too is that a lot of your competition kind of got wiped out during that part. Because I know a lot of my clients are like scared of okay, what's going to happen with the economy? What's going to happen with this? But if you're able to pivot like you were, it was actually one of the probably the best things that helped your company get to where it wanted to go.
SPEAKER_01The best thing. Yeah. The best thing. You know, sometimes people with a campaign aren't going to make it through. People with a company will. It's why you'll always hear me go upstream and talk about mindset and the foundation of that. Because when things shift, if you're if the voice inside your head is saying, This is scary, you have AI coming, a bad economy, you don't know what's going on, can we really survive? If if that dominates your thoughts, then you don't have space in there for innovation, creativity, how to shift your messaging. It just doesn't. So protecting the voice in your head, protecting what you allow to go in, protecting who you surround yourself with. There's a person next to you say, Cole, you you always come through. You're going to find something. I know you're going to thrive through this. Or, hey, do you think we should downsize? Do you think we should protect ourselves through this? This is, man, I don't even know if you're going to, I don't know if I'm going to make it. I don't know if you're going to make it. You have to protect yourself against all of that because the outside voices, I'll just be honest, they're going to get louder, especially where things are going. They're going to get louder. They're going to get scary. And if you don't have the focus and the energy on the creativity you need and the innovation you need, you fall into, you fall into a trap.
SPEAKER_00And I and I bet going back to creating a company, not a campaign, when your team can see you pivot in those hard times too, I feel like it really solidifies things. Like one of the things my company has told me is when we went through around like I think 2022, 2023, a lot of the industry got really hard. And we still were able to keep going. And a lot of people, it makes your team also feel safe that they can actually even rely on you too.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. Literally, we had a in this room here yesterday, we had a meeting with our 130 employees in the one company that we have, and we're we're making a massive pivot. And I told them, I said, I I wanted everybody to be on the same boat. And and I said, The reason we're pivot is because the world is changing and most people are going to wait and we're not. We're going to meet people where they are. We're going to get out in front of this wave. I said, and I I I laid out all the things we're shifting, and then I told them the purpose that we're shifting. This isn't just change for change. I've been doing this for 30 years. My my intuition, my gut tells me this, but the data tells me this. And with this shift, we're going to meet people where they are. And I watched, you know, I got I get to see a hundred of them on the screen in front of me here. I watched like relief. Because everybody's scared. And then I said to them, Who right now, if you're being honest, you're excited where the world is going because of AI and all the cool things, but simultaneously at the same time, you're scared to death. There was a hundred yeses. Right? People are scared right now. People are in this. Is it is is you know, are the changes AI, is AI gonna be Armageddon, get the the uh the the the nuke codes and steal everybody's job and make us lazy and make us dumb and end the world, or is it gonna cure cancer, allow us to do repetitive work and let me be more innovative, more creative, and more time with my family? I think we're in the middle looking at both right now, going, damn, I don't know which one. And sometimes we get caught in that middle and we don't realize, and if we're caught there as leaders, then our team's caught there. Our our our spouses are caught there, our kids are caught there. I think this is a time that we must be, we have to be leaders in the strongest way. Even if we're scared on the inside, we got to find whatever it takes to create an unstoppable, courageous, move forward anyway mindset because the people around us deserve it. The people we love deserve it.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And so speaking of making pivots, because you know, we were at dinner uh the other night with a bunch of high-level entrepreneurs, and we were kind of going around, sharing a little bit about what was going on in our business. And one of the things that was really interesting is almost everybody, even including myself, had had a big upward trajectory, and we were all kind of in this phase of like, what's the next level, or how do we reinvent yourself or ourselves? And you shared a really great story about when you reinvented yourself, kind of going from real estate to personal development. And I was wondering if you could share that and what are kind of the keys if you feel stuck for a lot of those higher l higher level entrepreneurs out there to sort of reinvent themselves and get to the next level.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and so I I I I forget the context of how we got there, but I'm I'm glad the story landed. But but there's a there's a there's a fine balance. Um one is making sure that every time things get hard, you don't look over the fence and think the grass is greener in your neighbor's yard. So we have to make sure of that because there is a fine line between I'm ready to evolve to something new or this thing's not working. It probably it looks easier. I'll start a sales training organization. Right. And then you're almost there, it's like, oh, this is hard. There's a lot of competition out there. I'm gonna teach people how to do this, and and that happens. So you just gotta be a like you gotta make sure you're giving the opportunity you're in everything it's got. Right? We're we're in a a place where we're a mile wide and an inch deep rather than an inch wide and a mile deep. So just just just put that in the back of your head. Secondly, though, there are times when you know it's time to pivot. And I enjoyed educating people for for years on real estate, but partnering with Tony Robbins and and knowing that the foundation Of all success was is personal development and getting an unstoppable mindset. And looking over 30 years of being an entrepreneur, I found these habits that shifted my life in a huge way. And I just had the passion of saying, I want to go upstream. I always talk about that upstream. Like, how do I go above? So if people use this, they could be successful in anything. And I wrote Millionaire Success Habits and I went all in. And this the truth of the matter is I again, I don't remember the context of sharing it. But during a shift, let's talk about you're not a dabbler, you've gone deep in one company, but you know it's time to evolve. So we know that. When it shift, when it's time to shift, I believe the universe makes you pay that success tax hard. Because sometimes we forget how hard it was to even start the first business we're in. Yep. Right? If if you go back to when you started when your family's like, uh, you know, I'm just coal and can you get it? And the first time you couldn't make payroll because something went sideways, or you know, all those things, you kind of forget about it when you have momentum. Now you're thinking cost per lead, dollar per lead, you're thinking high-level operations to higher. Where, you know, where am I going to move with my new family? If I have kids, what school are they gonna go to? Is it private school? Should I get a nanny? All those things like you start forgetting. And I think the the universe, at least this is my crazy little metaphor, makes you pay your success tax in the transition to remind you that none of this is easy. All of it's worth it, but none of it's easy. So now you gotta imagine we, you know, my real estate brand had done a billion in revenue, gross revenue in a 10-year period, and we were impacting lives all over the world. And now I'm like, I'm gonna take everything I know. I wrote millionaire success habits, I'm gonna go upstream and show people that with the right foundation they can be successful in anything. And I launched the book, it was like a ghost town. We were selling two, three hundred books a week. I was used to selling thousands and thousands of books a week, and I went all in from a coaching to a mastermind to everything, everything I knew how to do, and it wasn't working. And we were three weeks in, six weeks in, eight weeks in, twelve weeks in. And I gotta say, for the first time in a long time, and and if anybody, maybe just one person needs to hear this today, those voices that I thought were gone still live inside of you.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Hey man, nobody wants to learn personal development for you. Tony's the one who pushed me to do it. I'm like, Tony's the goat. Why would I do this? I'm the real estate guy. Nobody wants to hear success habits from the real estate guy. Maybe I should write a real estate book. Maybe I should stick to my lane. Who am I to think that I could do this? Man, I love Wayne Dyer and Dale Carnegie and Earl Nightingale and all the friends. And that voice was getting so loud that it got so loud that I forgot to be creative. I got to be forgot to be innovative. And I can't tell you what shifted it, Cole, but I something snapped me out of it when I was about a week away. My team wanted to shut the campaign off. I was about a week away of saying they're all right. And something snapped in me and said, look at you feeling sorry for yourself. You haven't innovated, you hadn't created. I don't know if you remember when Millionaire Success Habits hit. You couldn't go anywhere without seeing that. We went from selling nothing and I just locked in and read a thousand messages. I shifted, I filmed 20 ads in one day. I filmed another 20 that following. Within two weeks of just shifting my mindset, I wrote the book Millionaire Success Habits, and I was thinking, poor me, the voice was holding me back. I wasn't innovating, I wasn't creating. Within two weeks, we shifted it. We hit 2,000 books a week. The week later, we hit 5,000 books a week. A week later, we hit 8,000 books a week. And it turned into one of the biggest campaigns, and it shifted me in that direction. But I have to tell you, I was a millimeter away from quitting. And I feel like the universe was like, you gotta, you gotta see what it's like. You got and I think we just gotta remember that we have to pay our success tax. Like it's coming. And but on the other side of that, most people aren't willing to pay it. And if you are, I think we got great opportunity.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and I and I actually know some people who are working for you at that time. And I think they probably saw that shift because one of the guys who's an ad agency owner now, he was saying that he's never seen anybody shoot as many ads as you were shooting for those campaigns. And he always uses that as an example to like get his clients on the creative wagon.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00If you're looking for a mastermind to take your business to 10 million a year plus, then you want to check out our eight-figure border mastermind. So after doing 100 million in total cash collected for my own companies, I've created a mastermind where I really pull back the curtain and show you exactly how I've done it. So I not only share with you what's working for us across marketing, sales, fulfillment, operations, finance for all of our different companies, at the same time, you can network with some of the top people in the industry and also listen to world-class speakers like Patrick Bit David, Dean Grassiosi, Neil Patel, and Tom Bailu, and many, many others. So if you're interested, check out the link in the description and get more info. And then the rest was history. Now you're partnering with Tony Robbins. So I have to ask, because Tony's obviously just Tony. Yeah, the great. Um what's the big just being his partner, especially? What's like the some of the biggest things you've learned, business-wise, even personal, just from working with him so closely?
SPEAKER_01Uh, so many good things. You know, so uh one of the biggest lessons I learned from him, and him and I we talk almost every night. We leave voice memos for each other. So we communicate literally, he stays up till five. I wake up at 4 a.m. So there's like an hour. So we joke we got the world covered for 24 hours, right? But we're always leaving voice memos for each other. And we've learned to speak each other's language so well that there was there were two words that he said to me that have lasted. And I think this is worth this is worthy of you hearing too. Maybe it's the most important part of this this podcast. So when COVID hit, Tony's a live event guy. He's been doing live events for 40 years. COVID hits, shut down live events. And Tony and I are partners in several other companies. I mean, I just couldn't see this man who lives at this phase of his life lives to impact others. He doesn't need to do another thing in his life for four more lifetimes, but he lives to impact others. So I was like, you gotta go virtual. The studio you're in, we built a bigger one than this in Florida. So I'm convinced he's like, no, I can't do virtual. So we're going back and forth. I convinced him to do virtual. We do a big virtual launch, um, you know, head towards a million people, attend our first one that we do, and we fill up a virtual unleash the power within. First virtual one in history. It was the biggest one he'd ever done. We we turn the company around. Tony says to me, Hey, now that we're a virtual company brother, could you be CEO for a little while and help me spin the company? So he's my brother. So I'm like, Of course, you don't have to give me any title, but I'll go in and help convert it because COVID had everything shut down. Long story short, we do that. And it was the first time in my life, and maybe there's a couple lessons out of this. Like, sometimes the hard path is the one you need to grow. So I've built companies since I was 17. So whether it's a good culture or not, you watching right now, whether you have one employee or a hundred, you build that culture based on who you are, what your beliefs are, all that kind of stuff. Tony introducing me to his company of 300 people as the new CEO. It's like adopting 300 children. They didn't see you, they didn't grow through it. They they're they're Tony's culture. They're not me. Tony on a on a on a company-wide meeting said Dean's our new CEO. Some probably thought, uh, Dean's his friend, and why is he doing it? Maybe he wants significance. And as I go in there, it's it was cool for me because I saw from the outside in things that I know what I'm good at with marketing and shifts, and we really made massive leaps. But there was a lot of people like hesitant, pushing back, back to channel talk, all those pieces. And I was being efficient, Cole. I was like, that part's broken. We need a new row, gotta shift the ads, gotta change the thing. Don't jump through some so many hoops. Asked you to come in, help with the sales team. I'm making all these moves and I'm ruffling feathers without realizing it. And Tony got on the phone with me, and really simple, he said, You are really efficient, but sometimes we have to be effective. And what he meant was I was moving so quick to try to save the company. I wasn't building relationships, I wasn't being effective by slowing down and going, Hey, Cole, you've been this with this company for 18 years. I get it. I seem like Tony's friend. I'm only here for one reason. He's already my friend, and this is what I told everybody. He's already my friend, so don't need that. We talk every day. I don't need his money, I don't need significance, I already own my own company. I'm only here because I want to help shift this company because Tony has changed so many of our lives. You, me, everybody included. And I want to do and and when I started getting effective is when I built relationships with the leaders, and everything went in hyper speed. That's wild. And and I learned to uh it problem taking that on taught me how to be a leader. Because when you adopt 300 employees, you gotta learn all the you you have to truly become a leader, else nobody's gonna follow you.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And uh so effective and efficient. Um, another one that's really powerful that I just I was with my kids this weekend for spring break, and we had a little, every day we had a little mastermind, and the last day's topic, just an hour a day with the kids, I older ones, um, was about instead of focusing on what you're gonna achieve, how about focusing on who you're gonna become? And I talked to them, and that's Tony's a big one on that. He's like, you can achieve anything, but if you don't become the man or the woman you're proud of, then what's it all for? And uh and uh my kids were like, What does that mean? I'm like, okay, five years from now, people are sitting around and they're describing you. What are they gonna say? And I asked them, and my daughter's like, I want to be a hard worker, not just Dean Graziosi's daughter. You know, I I want to be innovative, I want to be creative. My son said, I want to give advice, I want to help others. I'm like, if we focus on, because Tony Robbins asked me that at 47 years old. He said, Brother, you've accomplished so much, you're gonna accomplish and do millions and millions more, but who are you gonna become in your 50s? And I remember like that hit me hard. I was like, what kind of father do I want to be? What kind of leader do I what kind of friend do I want to be? What kind of you know, and um, if you focus on who you want to become, I think there's no way success doesn't follow that because you're so in alignment with who you're meant to be.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So that's that's a couple of things.
SPEAKER_01I know it's a long answer to a short question. No, it's really, really effective and efficient thing, even though it might not sound that way because we talked code. I knew what he meant immediately. Yeah, I'm like, I'm just blowing through. Fix this, do this, do this, do this.
SPEAKER_00I'm the same exact way. And it's it's interesting, even too, when I was working with Tony, I'm I kind of did the same thing. I'm like, let me just fix everything all at once. And where I felt like I ended up adding the most leverage was really creating a great relationship with the managers. Yes. And it's like, okay, I'm your servant. How do I just support you?
SPEAKER_01And how does it change when you do that? Immediately like, yeah.
SPEAKER_00And they still text me and ask me questions and help them out, or I saw one of them at an event. We sat down for a couple hours, we're talking about the business mastery team. And it just kind of, you know, I know it sounds cliche, but it really is that like servant leadership.
SPEAKER_01You know, it is.
SPEAKER_00Uh another thing both of you guys are really good at is building relationships. And I know like when you've had problems in your company, you can round up all the experts in a certain domain and then have a mastermind and solve that problem. And you've told me one time it's always stuck with me, is Tony opens all doors, you know, because he's such so good with relationships. And I think our industry, you know, we're so focused on the funnel or the ads or like the transaction that we we don't necessarily embrace that as much. So, what's really helped you do that and just build such long-lasting relationships in the industry that have really helped your company in the long term, if that makes sense.
SPEAKER_01So I'm gonna share something I've never shared before because I don't want anybody to think it's a strategy. Maybe because I'm a little older than most people in the industry and I still work every day like I'm broke. I I joke, I don't just work like I'm broke. I'm the I work like I'm broke and I owe somebody money. Yeah. I just love what I do. But sometimes we feel like people are a competition and you got your own industry secrets. It's like a chef who has their own recipes and you kind of protect those recipes. So I don't want you to think I'm not saying this is a strategy, but for the last decade especially, I love serving first, helping out anybody I can with what I know. And when you do that, expecting nothing in return, the only way that works is if you don't keep score. Right? So if there's something I can do to help you, it's not like I'm gonna help him, but he better help me with my sales team. He better give me those secrets. If you could find a way to help out more people in the industry that everybody else might think is competition, if if you look at the people I'm blessed to be able to help and serve and get, you know, if I have a if I have a strategy, I can make a phone call. I mean, I I we're we we launched a community and continuity. And I'd sent out one text, and three days later I had Hermosy was here, Alex Hermozzi was here, Dan Martell was here, Stu McLaren was here, everybody who was great with community. They were here three days later. It's like, let's put our best ideas together. But when Alex was selling his company, he spent the day with me five years ago talking through acquisition.com. I just gave him everything I had. When he was doing a book launch, I gave him everything I had. He took it to a whole nother level. I'm not taking any credit for Alex, but I gave him my entire book launch. We, we, I sent my team down to set up his studio. Yeah. And when he's like, What can I give you? I'm like, my reply was, give me, I want everything from your launch uh right of the decimal, is what I told him. He sent me a check for like eight cents as a joke. Right. I said, I want everything right of the decimal, right?
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01But there's people who do that in your life that you know they're doing it because they're eventually gonna ask. Do you ever have somebody reach out and be like, hey, Cole, how's it been?
SPEAKER_00You're like, Yeah, here it comes. Here it comes. Yeah, right?
SPEAKER_01Maybe your girlfriend or a friend is like, oh, look at this text, you know what's coming next. Yeah. Right? But what if you're the person where it's like, damn, when Cole reached out, man, the guy just always wants to serve. And I I think I try to do that, right? I saw um when Cody Sanchez was growing in the industry, and there was a couple things I knew could absolutely shift what she was doing. I reached out to her and she's like, Oh my God, why'd you reach out? I'm like, hey, here's three things. I was like five years ago. I I talked to Cody on a regular basis. Anything I can do to support her. I'm not looking for anything from Cody, even though she'll speak at any one of my events and do whatever I want. So my my point is this masterminding, brainstorming, delivering more than you ask for, it compounds to where people can't wait to pay you back when it's time. And and I and I think that's a subtle shift. I I I that's why Tony and I own mastermind.com. Right. What's the fastest way to solve a problem? Put smart people in a room with a collective outcome, you're gonna get it every time.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And speaking of the one you put together about community, another thing I was gonna ask you is a big part of really creating a company and not a campaign is getting customers who come back and really building the relationship with those customers. So when it comes to, because I think you guys just do this so well. If you if I ever speak to any of your customers, they're just die hard fans. And so, like, what are kind of the tactical or things that you do that sort of build that community and keep people around for a long time, if that makes sense?
SPEAKER_01Okay, so so here's something. Um really take this one to heart is so Tony and I started an AI education company. And the reason we did that, I don't even call it AI education company. Tony called me about a year ago and he said SAI is gonna freak people out and they're gonna get overwhelmed, they're gonna always feel behind. We gotta apply our methods to AI and help people. So within 90 days, I interviewed 50 AI experts from Mark Benny off of Salesforce down to people that we knew were crushing it, being innovative, creative, and just looking for pattern recognition. I'm not an AI expert. Tony's not an AI expert. I mean, we're way more of an expert now after interviewing 50 people, you see common threads, right? But here's the part that I I and AI helped me extract this. Like, what makes Tony's education stick? What makes raving fans that actually get results? I mean, that's what we all want. You could be good at sales and have a good product and still be good, but you're good at sales and have a product that blows people's hair back. That's that's why you do so well. That's why it's why Tony's done so well. And and AI was the perfect example, Cole. So this is what I want you to hear. Right now, the federal government, Department of Labor put out AI training for free. They spend tens of millions of dollars. It's a good training, nothing wrong with it. Anthropic, so many of them have AI education. AI could educate you, but it's missing the pieces that make it stick. And I went back and I used AI to help me. Like, what is the common thread that we get so many results, that we have so many people happy? We have raving fans that talk amazing about us everywhere. I want more of that. And it it broke it down to the education, is really step five. And most people start with the education like here's how to use anthropic and claude. And what are the parts before that? So a couple of things is one, and this wasn't a framework until now because I I kind of looked backwards of what we do, because some of it is just you just evolve between the two of us, 78 years of doing this or 77 years of doing this. One, everybody needs a purpose and a why why they're gonna do it. If you just say learn AI because uh you're gonna get left behind if you don't, that's pretty cool. Learn AI to be more efficient, that's pretty cool. Learn it because you need to. That's kind of cool. But if you say I'm gonna learn AI because I'm gonna get back 15 hours a week, and five of that I'm gonna learn, I'm gonna use to grow my company, but ten of that I'm gonna be connected to my family. I'm gonna be home for dinner. I don't know what it is. But when we all have a purpose, like uh if you are a weight loss expert to help people get in the best shape of their life, do you think you could just start off day one counting macros and get results? When you have to get in their head, like, why do you want to do it? Yeah. You want your kids to see a good example? You want to be here for your grandchildren? You want to be able to run up the stairs at 50 years old and feel good? Like, you need that. We all need a purpose for everything, and most people miss that. Especially if you're an employee. Why the hell should I learn this thing? It's gonna take my job anyway, right? Purpose. So, number one, purpose, why they need to do it. Number two, is you gotta help people overcome fear. And whatever it is, fear of walking in the gym, fear of a cold call, fear of learning AI, or fear of AI itself that's gonna run the world. So we gotta we gotta find a way to embrace and overcome the fear in their head. Now, this doesn't have to be a long training, but it's gotta be sewn into everything you do. Number three, which most people miss, is though we say we like change, no one does. Right? Change what somebody in your company's doing tomorrow. Just start and say, hey, we want you to be freaked out for weeks. Yeah. Right? And why is he doing it? Is this my way out the door? Like their brains go. So change is difficult. So we have to embrace change. We have to give them a mechanism in which they see a bigger and better future by the shift than staying where they are. And then the fourth thing we have to do is clear the clutter. If you think of sales, there's a million ways to sell, but you have a framework that puts you right down a lane. Follow this process. With AI, there's 50 new tools a day coming out. Like, do I do this? Do I need to get a wow, I need to get a Mac mini and a claw bot? No, don't do that. Just do Claude Code. No, Claude Code's too hard. Oh no, but Claude has cowork. No, there's like, ah, and then you get frozen.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01When you clear the clutter and go, hey, there's a lot of stuff out there, but here's one path to go deep. So if you think about it, if you give them a purpose, you overcome their fear, you get them to embrace change, you clear the clutter. Number five is you get the right to educate.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_01And when I looked, it's what Tony and I have been doing naturally for decades and without even realizing it. So even in my real estate, people used to rip off my real estate education, and I'd always think, ah, they're going to do as good as me. They just jumped to the education where I worked on the purpose, overcoming the fear, embracing the change, clear the clutter. And then there's a sixth step is help them to utilize it on a regular basis.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So once you educate them, once you learn AI, now how do I, using AI as an example or losing weight as an example, how do I maintain the weight? How do I put AI into my life on a daily basis? And most people miss the first four steps and number six, and they jump right to five. Yeah. Long answer to a short question, but no, it's really good.
SPEAKER_00And you're talking about also educating your clients and your members and all that stuff about. In your team. You're probably using the same framework for your team. I am. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And so Yesterday I told the whole team, I'm telling you right now, I don't want to fire one person here and replace you with AI. Right. But I need all of you to be twice as effective and efficient with AI because we're going to grow without hiring people. And there's no way you can survive if six months from now you're not using AI to go faster. That means you self-select to go.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_01That's literally what I told them.
SPEAKER_00And then that gives them more leverage. And so when the company grows, they're going to make more money.
SPEAKER_01Of course.
SPEAKER_00Of course. Is there anything specific, interesting that you're doing with AI, with the team that's been impactful so far?
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_00Within your company.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, a lot of things. I mean, the dat the depth of data you can get so quick. You can break down data and understand people's decisions, their choices. I'm sure you're doing it every day with using AI to analyze sales calls and coaching calls, right? In a moment, what you used to have somebody listen and try to this is pattern recognition at hyper speed in seconds to find, you know, where they lost the sale or where they didn't make an impact, where they didn't listen, follow-up sequences. I mean, you know, can track their people's moves and meet them where they are, all those pieces. But but what I really love is this evolution of where we're at now. Um, you know, I I don't want to go down the road of agentic AI and all the pieces because I think it's just it's it's it seems so big. It's like especially when you got people online saying, yeah, AI runs my entire company now. I mean, we're getting there. But, you know, um, but what I what I love right now, like on my phone, I have an AI assistant. I call him Marco. I'm Italian, so all of our AI assist agents are our Italian names. It's pretty funny. Nice. But the evolution of getting AI to know you deeply, right? To know you and your company. So the the first thing was a a just a big open for me, a big, big lift, is when I really trained AI to know me, to know my company, to know the metrics, to know my goals, how I think, how I sell, my values that I want to sell through service. my ideal client when I fed all that in, it went from being super helpful to being truly a partner that thinks like me, talks like me, goes faster, helped me get better answers quicker. So the first step was getting it to know me. Then my answers got better, my thinking got better. And then all of a sudden it worked alongside of me. It helped me get things done faster. And now the evolution is because of so many changes in the last literally eight weeks. An agent isn't as hard as it was. Now an agent could be set up in a day simple. Now not only is it know me and work alongside me, now it's working for me. Right. So Marco's doing work for me right now, some research. We're doing some fun stuff with JP Morgan and it's doing research and creating a deck for me right now while I'm sitting here.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Right. And so that's this next evolution. And again, I I just want people to realize that this is coming. Everybody knows that. But don't think of it as replacing you. Think of it as allowing you to become more human. Because today like you asked me to do this interview the reason I have this time to sit with you right now, especially we're a week before one of our big events is because I have AI helping me do a lot of stuff. It's not replacing me. It's not taking my words it's allowing me to do things like this. It's allowing me to think more creative. It's allowing me to do more things that actually make me human. And that's what I want for our entire team. And I think everybody should want that. Listen, we have a choice to choose that AI is going to ruin the world or save the world. What we believe is what we're going to feel. You might as well believe it's going to save the world. Right? Yeah. We can choose to believe what we want and then find the time to to make it a part of your everyday and your team's everyday.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And so I know you have a launch coming up with uh AI Advantage. So that's all about this. Right. Do you want to talk about what that is for a second?
SPEAKER_01Yeah it's on April 23rd through the 25th. Yeah when Tony called me a year ago and said let's uh let's create an AI education company. Again we're not the tech guys but we interviewed the top tech guys and then we partnered right we interviewed 50 people one of the guys we interviewed was Igor Pagani who's one of the top YouTube AI educators and we bought his company and made him our head of education.
SPEAKER_00Oh jeez.
SPEAKER_01So now you got Tony and I's foundation and a guy that has the same values knows how to take complex things and make it simple. He's on the cutting edge but knows how to talk to the average person. We made him our partner and we did our first uh uh event last November and we had 638000 people sign up for it twice as much as we many as we thought we would sign up um and with all the changes in the last six months we knew we had to do it again so it's gonna be amazing with myself Tony Igor and about seven amazing experts that that uh are gonna just light it up for people. Cool.
SPEAKER_00And it's free. And it's free. Well we'll have a link to that in uh below the video and again thanks so much for your time appreciate anything you want to end off with.
SPEAKER_01Now just listen so many times when when life gets crazy we think this is the hardest times. This is still the greatest time in history.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Would you want to be alive a hundred years ago 500 years ago thousand years ago this is the greatest time in history. Yes things are changing fast faster than our brains could even imagine but this is still an amazing time to embrace where the world is going. Whether you learn from Tony and I or someone else figure this out opportunity AI especially can be the great equalizer because you don't have to hire 10 people to start the company you don't have to hire a copywriter when AI can there's so many things you can do faster and quicker now to start your own thing, to scale your own thing. So I I would just say look at this as the land of opportunity, the golden era whatever your friends believe, whatever the news says, just let that fade for a moment and focus on you and your family and take advantage of what's in front of us.
SPEAKER_00If you enjoyed this podcast you're also probably going to like this podcast I also did recently that you can check out by clicking the screen right here.