From Chaos to $200M. Ryan Deiss’s Method – Business Podcast for Startups

Andrew Warner: Hey there Freedom Fighters. My name is Andrew Warner. I’m the founder of Mixergy, where I interview entrepreneurs about how they built their businesses. Joining me is somebody who built a business, it’s a traffic and conversion summit among others.

I’ve gone to the conference. It was killer. And then he sold the business, which was an amazing thing to do because what I’ve seen in this space is a lot of people create conferences and then the conferences slowly die down. And in his case, he. Built it up and allowed himself to exit. He’s also built, many other companies, including digital marketer, which is, I thought incredibly successful, still is incredibly successful company in the content, educational space.

Anyway, the reason that Ryan Dice is here today is he wrote a book called Get Scalable. And the whole idea behind the book is how to run a company, like how to create an operating system for a business, which I think is. The way you wrote it, Ryan, is, fantastic. The system behind it I think makes a lot of sense and it’s something, frankly, that I’m, looking to learn from so that I can use it here.

we’re going to find out about the book called Get Scalable and about his businesses. Thanks to my sponsor, Gusto. If you’ve hired people, contractors, employees, the rest, you need software to manage your payments and benefits to them. I highly recommend you go to gusto. com slash Mixergy. But first let’s bring Ryan here.

Ryan. You’re always so freaking relaxed. You’ve got a nice smile on your face. You’re happy. You’re like the adult in every freaking room. Give me a sense, what are your businesses running like and how are they using the ideas in Get

Ryan Deiss: I can tell you what it is today, which is not how it always was. but today, very fortunate. We’ve got a portfolio of 14 different companies, right now today, that portfolio group last year did in excess of 200 million dollars, in revenue. I currently, as it stands right now, have day to day operational responsibility over one of them.

And largely it’s because I want to. and the rest of them are run by operators who are all operating an operating system. and that really is the core of really what we do and what I’m excited about. As somebody who, my background is marketing, I know marketing, I know growth. I love marketing, I love growth.

Had to learn the hard way a number of times that growth isn’t enough. Had to figure out the system stuff. And really wanted to build a system that would go across multiple different business units in multiple different types of industries. So yeah, where we are right now is, I’m relaxed. I mean, look, it’s still entrepreneurship, man, right?

I mean, there’s still pretty crappy days. stuff still happens, but, it’s certainly better than it was.

Andrew Warner: When, you talk about an operating system, we’re going to get into the details of it. That’s my goal for this, to understand how the operating system works. Then if people want to go and get deeper into it, they can Get Scalable, the book. Give me like a top, View of what that operating system looks like for one of the businesses

Ryan Deiss: So an operating system at its core. Answers the question, how does this company create value? And that’s so incredibly different because if you look at a lot of business operating systems, they’re largely goal setting and meeting rhythm. And there’s checklists and there’s SOPs and those things are good.

But an operating system has to start from who do we serve and how do we serve them? Because that, at its core, all businesses do those two things, right? They make stuff that is good for people and they sell that stuff to those people. from an operating perspective, we want to start with that question, How do we create and capture marketplace value?

And the way that we document that, the core, the foundation of everything that we do, is by creating these visual business process maps. And nobody else is really doing this right now. in kind of a small business space, but that’s been the difference maker to be able to visualize, Oh, that’s how a customer happens.

They will do visualize, Oh, that’s how we serve them. Once we have them, that’s the core, that’s foundation and everything else we do. Falls from that.

Andrew Warner: you’re talking about the flow chart that shows customer comes in, this happens, that happens, decision happens. If this, we go in that direction. If that we go in the opposite direction. Okay. You’re saying this is the way things work at your company right now. And along with this flow chart, as I’m calling it, I forget the actual name that you use in the book for it.

Along with that goes a set of playbooks, which tells people how do we tee up our email goes, a set of, meetings, like a weekly check in on people’s numbers and so on. before you did this, what did your business look like? Why wasn’t growth enough? You’re the growth machine.

Ryan Deiss: I think our business looked like a lot of other businesses, which in the beginning when it was small and simple, it was easy. I’d showed up every day and say, what do we need to do today? And there was a small team of people there we throw out ideas and everybody gets to work.

And it was fine as those businesses scaled though. Now, that didn’t work. And I think any entrepreneur who’s grown a business beyond about 10 team members, you know, this, you felt this, you’ve experienced this. and so what I tried to do was to overcome that by just working more and just working harder.

But obviously that it’s going to yield diminishing returns. There’s energy, limits. there’s time limits. So what we were doing was just trying to throw human beings at the problem. I don’t know if you’ve ever done this, man, but it’s like, okay, now we can’t do this.

can we just get somebody else to do it? And so we would hire a human being and we would basically fling them at a

Andrew Warner: like, what kind of problem would you hire a human being in Flingham?

Ryan Deiss: we need somebody who can handle our content marketing. Because the person who was doing content marketing, they can’t do it anymore.

They need to focus on email or they need to focus on ads or on the fulfillment side. We’ve got clients that are coming in and our account managers are overworked. So let’s bring somebody else in and have them work with these clients.

Andrew Warner: Okay.

Ryan Deiss: So any problem, it was always like, we’ve got this constraint. We have this problem.

Let’s throw a human at it. The challenge with that is, is that these people come in, they don’t actually know how to do the job. And that’s fair, right? The bigger challenge is you don’t have the time to teach them how to do the job. And so one of the biggest changes that we made. is we shifted from being people first to solve problems to being systems first to solve problems.

I firmly believe that good people don’t fix broken systems. Broken systems break good people. and so we had to pause long enough to say, okay, let’s start to systemize this. But then we made the second big mistake that everybody makes, which is, Ooh, I know I’ll go and create a bunch of SOPs. I’ll create a bunch of checklists.

let’s document how we do that, but that’ll work either. and I, tell you some stupid mistakes that we made on that front, but that doesn’t work either because that little checklist in isolation, so you bring somebody in from the outside and you say, okay, here’s your checklist.

This is what you do. Well, business isn’t that simple, man. our listeners know this, there’s going to be changes and tweaks. And if it’s not on the checklist. They don’t know what to do. That’s when you get the shoulder tap. That’s when you get the got em in it. That’s when you say, screw it, nevermind.

I’ll just do it myself. And the whole system

Andrew Warner: And Ryan, and every time I’ve interviewed somebody on systems here on Mixergy, and I would say. The checklist goes out of date, or maybe it isn’t like up to date and the person doesn’t use it. Their answer was, you have to force ’em to use it. Their answer was, then you have to update it. But the reality of a bunch of checklists is that people don’t use them because they’re too smart to have to go back in or because they’re busy doing it all right?

You say, look, before we get even into checklists, and you actually say no checklists. Before we get into what your alternative is, the first step is to do what? To create the flowcharts?

Ryan Deiss: To answer the question, how do we create value? And there’s two sub questions of this. How do we get customers or clients or patients, whatever you call them? And then how do we serve them once we got them? Those are the two fundamental value chains of any business. And so you need to visualize that. And this is simple enough to do.

And we use just basic post it notes. You can use flow charting tools. But you say, How do people even become aware that we exist? Are we running, Facebook, Instagram ads? Are we, exhibiting at trade shows? Are we buying lists? Cause we’ve got more of an outbound sales strategy.

What is it? How does awareness happen? And then you say, what’s the end of the growth thing? Okay. They bought something. They gave us money. They signed a contract. So we got the beginning. We got the end. You go back to the beginning and you say, okay, this is where it starts. Then what happens? then, they’re going to go to this landing page.

Andrew Warner: let me get more specific. It’s, for the businesses you described it, and for, and frankly for my business and other businesses, it’s create content. That would be the beginning of this whole flow?

Ryan Deiss: Yeah. So the, the content creation would be, yep. So I’m going to create content and I’m going to post it on social,

or you’re going to, you’re going to upload the podcast to here. And so they’re going to find you on one of the podcast networks. Great. Then what happens?

Andrew Warner: okay. Let’s suppose then it goes to a landing page. Then what happens in the example you gave in the book, someone qualifies them, then what happens if they’re qualified, they’re sent over to a salesperson. If they’re not qualified, they maybe get a drip campaign and so on and so forth. I have all this.

How granular are you looking for this to be?

Ryan Deiss: Not that granular. The rule we use is if you can’t fit it all on one whiteboard, if you’re using the, the normal kind of size post it notes, then you’re getting too granular. And this is where the playbooks come into play.

Andrew Warner: I’m not putting on this. How do we find content to write about? I’m not putting on this. How do we post it? It’s just, we write content. They do this. If they’re qualified, we do that. If they’re not, we do this other thing and so on. Okay.

So now that’s the overview. I should be able to see it on a big board or on a big wall in my office. What’s the next step after I do that?

Ryan Deiss: The next step is to ask the question, how do we actually do these specific things? And, and what are the ones that we don’t want to screw up? And so going back to your page, like in any one of these, and we call them value engines, right? So you’ve got a growth engine, you’ve got a fulfillment engine, growth engine documents.

This is how customers happen. Fulfillment engine documents. What do you do with them once you got them to actually deliver on the promise value? So I got this thing visualized. I’ve got my flow chart. Now we go back to the steps and we say, which are the ones that we really do not, cannot screw up. Like it is critical.

If we mess this thing up, everything falls apart. if you think about a landing page in general, a landing page is going to do its job. People are going to opt in or they aren’t. Now you could go and create a bunch of checklists around, how do we know this is a high converting landing page.

But if you just got one landing page. And it’s built and it’s working. Don’t build a checklist for how to create a landing page. It’s done. Build checklists, what we call playbooks around those critical power stages, the stages in your value creation process that you absolutely positively got to get right.

Andrew Warner: What is it in your business? what are some of the examples of things that need playlists?

Ryan Deiss: So I want a playlist for how we, since we do run and test a lot of ads, we’re going to have a playbook for how do we test ads? Cause that is the start of our growth engine. We don’t want to screw that up. If we ever get bad Everything’s downstream from there. Now, landing page, all those things, not a big deal.

To your point, we have a qualification process as well. How do we qualify somebody? What is the script during a sales process? So there’s playbooks for all of these, but man, in a given business, and I’m talking about businesses doing 10 plus million dollars in revenue, maybe a dozen playbooks, maybe a dozen.

And so to your point about like people getting frustrated with checklists and SOPs, it’s because we over checklists and we over SOP things. there’s a book called the E Myth. Most entrepreneurs have read it. If they haven’t read it, they bought it and they tell everybody they read it. And the basic fundamentals of the E Myth is to essentially McDonaldize your business.

To document every single thing that you do. And that is one of those things that is great in theory, doesn’t work in practice. And I know it because I’ve tried it. I’ve tried it so many times and it doesn’t work because people get, your team gets fricking frustrated. They’re like, why are you making me stop doing what I’m doing to build this stuff?

They think that you don’t trust them or that you think they’re dumb. They think they’re going to get fired, and at the end of the day, because you have so many of these things, there’s discovery issues.

that is shocking to me that you’re saying in any one of your businesses, no more than a dozen of these checklists.

about a dozen. And that’s between the growth engine and the fulfillment engine. So how do we onboard a new client? We’re gonna have a checklist for that for sure. But the follow up campaigns, man, that’s just going to happen. It’s going to happen. I don’t need to create it. No, later on, if you want to go nuts.

We also, by the way, don’t bother creating playbooks around how do you request paid time off, We don’t create around a lot of these. We might get to it later, but I’m interested in creating playbooks for things that drive value in the business. And value falls in two categories. We make stuff, we sell stuff.

So I’m interested in documenting those two things first. Everything else can kind of happen in its own time after that.

Andrew Warner: you know what? I’ve gotten into the trap of over checklisting things. And it is very satisfying when it works. Like even. What do I do to make sure that I’ve got this interview set up right? I would have plug in the mic and all that. And it’s fantastic when it works And then you just ignore it.

could see then what you’re saying is, look, if you need to create it, but for most things, you don’t need to do it. People feel stupid for having it. Then I think if it’s only 10 or 12 different checklists that you have at your company, I keep calling it playlist. I should say playbooks.

Ryan Deiss: Yeah,

Andrew Warner: why then do you also insist that everybody always have a screen up at their company with one of these playbooks up?

If it’s so rare.

Ryan Deiss: If it is one of those critical areas, if it is one of those power stages, one of those critical areas that we cannot screw up, but it’s not when they’re doing absolutely everything that they do during the course of business. But what we want to do is we want to elevate. There are some things that are more essential than other things.

not necessarily more essential, but there are some things where the margin of error is too low. to want to mess with. And it’s the same reason that pilots know how to fly a plane, but you better believe they got a pre flight checklist and they’re going to go through it every single time.

Cause the margin of error is just, too narrow. the downside loss is just too great.

Andrew Warner: So now we know what we do. We have a flow chart that shows how to do it. We have clear playbooks for the things that matter, but not overloading them by doing the things that don’t matter. We come back to the team. You talk about a high output team. What is a high output team?

Ryan Deiss: A high output team is a team that is doing the essential work very well. and when this means a couple of things, number one, it means that they know the things that are truly essential and critical and they focus on those. And just as important, they’re clear on what isn’t as essential and they don’t focus on those.

In my experience, the team members that we’ve had or we’ve struggled with is they cared, they genuinely cared and because they care, they wanted to try to do a lot of things to make an impact and they wound up doing a lot of things that we frankly just didn’t need them to do. and they created a lot of chaos and busy work in an attempt to try to do more in terms to try to do more value.

So when you visualize these value engines, when you’ve had these flowcharts, now you can go back to each stage and say, okay, who is uniquely accountable for this stage? or whom? Maybe it’s more than one people. What about this one? Now we can begin going and assigning out, you could call it a job description.

We call them critical accountability bullets. But what are the areas where you are critically accountable to, but we don’t start from the person and say, what does this person do? I think that’s a huge mistake. Don’t do that. Don’t start from the person and say, what should this person do? And definitely don’t ask the person, what do you do?

You’ll get an answer, but it may not be the right one. It could embarrass all involved. Start from the value creation process and say, who should be doing this? We want to start from value and work backwards to who does it. Now you all of a sudden can figure out who are the people on our team who are more involved in value creation activities than others.

who’s overwhelmed, who isn’t doing a damn thing, They talk a good game, but their name is never popping up.

Andrew Warner: So for us in this example that we had earlier, it would be who’s in charge of content creation. That’s where we’re bringing people in. Great. Who is in charge of this process of qualifying people? If they’re qualified, they get, to talk to a salesperson. Who’s in charge of that sales process?

If they don’t, we warm them up. Who is in charge of that? Got it. you had this great example in the book. You said, look, we had this team, we had this output, which was creating a newsletter. The content team was putting a newsletter together, but somehow the marketers were in that meeting every week.

And when you think about why the marketers were in there, it’s because they might put in an ad or something into the newsletter. But they have no contribution beyond that. Could they be helpful? Sure. Cause they’re smart, but are they needed there? Not at all. And so you uncovered that and you freed them to not have that meeting.

How do you get to that where you realize somebody is wasting their time doing something that looks meaningful that they can contribute to, but it’s unnecessary.

Ryan Deiss: So after you audit your value engine and you say, okay, who does this? Who does this? Who does this? Now, what you’re doing is you’re building out everybody’s critical accountability, both their job description. Okay. So Jan, you do this. Cause we pulled it from this one. You do this one, you do this, this, this, and it starts to build.

Then what you do is you ask your team, okay, everybody, what are you currently doing that isn’t on this list? Now, some of those things will be whirlwind right in the business. There’s always stuff that needs to get done. That doesn’t, maybe doesn’t directly connect. to one of those stages in the value engine.

But in this case, yeah, there, there was a team there saying, Oh, we’re producing this newsletter. every month I’m like, okay, well that newsletter isn’t currently represented on any value engine. It’s not like we’re sending out this newsletter and it’s driving people in that, back into the value engine. So in some cases you’ll discover when you ask people, what are they doing that isn’t represented?

Sometimes you’ll discover some things that need another sticky note. They need to be like, okay, we’re doing this. We forgot about it. Oftentimes you’ll discover orphan tasks and activities, people doing things. That have no role to play whatsoever in any value creation process. And that’s when you can free them from it.

Now, when you do this, you got to be careful. Cause the first time I said to somebody, I was like, Oh, good news. We don’t need you to do that anymore. It was a young woman who worked for us. She started crying and I was like, Oh. Oh no, what, what did I say? Was this, she’s like, does, does this mean I’m getting fired?

And I was like, Oh God, no. Oh no. There’s so many things that we need help with that is driving to a critical aspect of our value creation process where we need help. And so no, you could be so much more valuable. And this person, when I’m getting plugged into a role in the company where she could clearly add value, she had clarity of role.

And this is the biggie. She had opportunities to grow within the company because the work she was doing, there was a clear through line to how it added value. and so once you audit it, okay, team, what are you currently doing? That isn’t here. It’ll speak to things that you missed that you need to add, and it’ll speak to orphan projects that you need to free people from,

Andrew Warner: Got it. And so in that example, I missed it. You were saying, not only do we not need the marketers in the email newsletter. meeting I did catch it. You said we don’t need the email newsletter in meeting in the book, but you’re saying you may even end up coming back and saying this email newsletter doesn’t contribute to anything on this flow chart.

I’m just going to get rid of the whole thing. that’s the vision here.

Ryan Deiss: or you say, okay, so we’re sending out this email newsletter. How does it. Drive to this. And so in that particular case, yes, that was a case where there are people who were involved in a project. They didn’t need to be anymore, but there’ve been times where we’ve killed things completely because it wasn’t going anywhere else in our value engine.

And never would. so I’ll give you another example. I didn’t mention in the book, but that also happened. we had somebody on the team who was writing regular blog posts. And when that’s, how simple is that? Right. Writing regular articles to your thing, like very basic. And yet when we were looking at the value engine, blog articles were not represented anywhere on our value engine, uh, anywhere on our growth engine.

And, and reason being we got basically no leads. From any of our articles. Do you know why there was not a opt in or a call to action on any of them? And so this person who is in charge of this are one of our content managers, she said, well, I’m spending all this time we’re posting, five to seven new pieces of content every week to the blog, and that’s not represented anywhere on a growth engine.

I said, well, marketing manager, how many leads are we currently generating? From the blog. Well, none. That’s why I didn’t put up there. Okay. Well, that’s a problem. Y’all, you need to get together and let’s get some calls to action on these things so that we can add it to. And sure enough, we were able to do that.

And now that became another channel of awareness that, that got added to, but because it wasn’t there, we knew there was an orphan.

Andrew Warner: Let’s get, before we get into meetings, which I’m curious about how to do them well, let’s talk about scorecards. My friend, Brian Harris will have these Google docs with not just job descriptions, but scorecards so that he knows how well everyone is doing based on the description of the job that he set up.

I’ve always struggled with those. There are books on how to do this, but walk me through it. How do you find what to give a number to? How do you find what that number is? How do you manage it? Like walk me through the whole scorecard aspect of this.

Ryan Deiss: Yeah. Again, I’m not a believer that everybody in the company needs to have a number that they’re accountable to. I realized that that is like heresy. Okay. In the entrepreneurial world.

Like people say, everybody in

Andrew Warner: believe that now, because it’s, it would make things a lot easier if you could turn people into computers or, or aspects of a computer, because then you could see the numbers and, all right, so then you’re saying not everyone, what does get a scorecard then? Who does?

Ryan Deiss: again, I don’t start from the people on my team and say, how do we know you’re doing a good job? It sounds logical, just like starting from money and saying, what do you do? You’ll get an answer, but it may not be the right one. I start from our companies. How do we create value? So I go back to our value engines and we do another audit.

And instead of asking, how do we do this? Which is the question we asked when we created the playbook. Instead of asking, who does this? Which is the question we asked to, to build the high output team canvas and assign. I go back to him and I say, how do we know this particular step or stage is working?

What metrics should we track? And so we have a growth scorecard and the growth scorecard. If I were to start at the top, those metrics would align with those steps and stages that are at the beginning of the growth engine. So for us, it would be really, really simple. it would be if we’re running, meta ads, it’d be, okay, what is our average cost per click?

how much are we spending each week? And so I’m going to let the value engine dictate the scorecard. And what that now means is I’ve got a picture. I can look at it from top to bottom and I can see, and ours, by the way, are all manual. Every scorecard we do is manual. I want people doing manual data entry.

I want to manually saying red, yellow, green, good, okay, bad. I want all this done manually. Cause I want them not just data, but insights. I want them to know their numbers, but I can now scan down the right hand side. And if I see red, I know exactly where in the value engine, there’s a bottleneck. I know exactly where to go and look.

And so I need a scorecard that tells a story. I don’t need to find out, ooh, is this person doing quote unquote their job? If value is being created, things, people are doing their job.

Andrew Warner: And I guess the reason that you want them to do it manually is because you want them to feel it, you want them to pay attention to it, and by getting the data, typing it in, they are paying attention. Just like when I’m talking to somebody and I take notes, I’m forcing myself to pay attention. Alright, I get that. I’m looking at one of, what are the flowcharts called in, the book? I’m looking at one of the flowcharts.

Ryan Deiss: there’s an overarching company scorecard, which is basically a roll up of the growth scorecards and the fulfillment scorecard.

Andrew Warner: Okay,

Ryan Deiss: And so the growth scorecard is going to be, that’s going to tell the story of the growth engine. Fulfillment engine is going to tell that story. And then these are going to roll up to the company scorecard, which gives me the high level metrics that I need for all the different departments.

But again, they’re the important metrics that are pulled from those, other value engine based flowchart based scorecards.

Andrew Warner: okay, so I’m looking at one of the flowcharts here. It has a start oval. That’s what, that’s what you start all of yours with. The next step in it is workshop topics calendar. What does that mean and would that get a scorecard?

Ryan Deiss: So in this case, that, that particular scorecard is a fulfillment scorecard. So we need to fulfill workshops for this particular business. Every single month we’re putting out a new workshop.

Andrew Warner: Meaning they’ve hired you to do workshops and what you’re trying to do is someone is in charge of fulfilling the workshops and you want to know how many did we do? Got it.

Ryan Deiss: Correct. Yep. So it might be number of workshops.

Andrew Warner: are we supposed to do?

Ryan Deiss: Correct.

Andrew Warner: Okay. All right. I’m sorry to interrupt. I’m interrupting. Cause I’m trying to make sure that I fully get this.

I like the logic of this, Ryan. I think that there are a lot of people who are in the EOS world.

the whole thing is just full of all these jargony things and what I like about your book is there’s similarities and overlaps, but it’s much clearer, it’s much more well organized.

My concern with this book is that people are going to miss it for two reasons. First, I think the kid on the, on the cover doesn’t do justice to the substance on the inside. It feels more, is this like a jerky thing for me to say to you? Maybe it is. but I’m here to speak from, I’m here to speak from like as honest as I can.

I’m worried that people are going to see that and go, I don’t know, this feels like some kind of handmade book with clip art on the cover or with stock photography. It’s not, it makes a ton of sense. And it’s like a real, like clearly laid out structure for running a business by someone who’s a logical thinker, who cares more about you understanding than you appreciating the system, whatever.

So that’s one concern, the book that people are going to miss. The second thing I think that people might, miss it from is you are not known outside of your world, in your world, digital marketer in that space. You are a killer. Your name is it’s gold outside of it. I worry people are going to miss it.

And so I want to make sure that I’m catching these ideas and then communicating to the audience. This, makes sense. If we dig into this, this is a clearly laid out way to run a company. and I’m here to serve my audience. I’m here for somebody 10 years from now to go, dude, I heard that interview.

You’re a bit of a jerk. I don’t know why you do that, but fine. And that Ryan dice guy stuff worked for me. that’s my vision.

Ryan Deiss: No, I love it. And, you cannot hurt my feelings on this stuff. I’ll tell you on the cover. I agree with you. we ran a split test and that was the cover that won and it was maybe one of my least favorite. but that one sold the most books. Now, what we don’t know is did it get the right type of person. So I think, we’re going to do another test when, another version comes out.

So I’ll give you that one. Cause I, I felt exactly the same way. I also agree with you. Yeah. My brand is I’m a marketer. here’s the reality. I’ve been playing a marketer on TV for the past decade. I run companies. And so a lot of this is also kind of my coming out party, I guess, of, Hey, everybody. this is actually what I’ve been working on for the last decade or so.

And I can tell you as somebody who is a marketer, as somebody who has scaled a number of companies, including a couple of them into near bankruptcy, growth is not enough. In 2016, I had three different companies, three different companies that were in our portfolio group all make the Inc 500 list.

Three companies in one year, not one company, three years in a row, three different companies all in one year. One of those companies, the one that was actually the highest, it did a half a million its first year, 3 million the next year, and then did 30 million the year after the year that it hit the Inc, 500 list.

That business was basically out of business. We had to lay off 180 people within three months of appearing on the Inc 500 list. Right. The one that was the lowest on the list that was growing the slowest, but it was building systems along the way. That’s the business that had a life changing exit. That’s the business that’s still rocking and rolling today.

That’s the business that formed the foundation of all the other companies that we launched. So I almost feel like it’s my job. It’s incumbent upon me as somebody who is. trumpeted marketing and growth for the past couple of decades to say, Hey, y’all as a growth guy, growth ain’t enough. As a growth guy, it sounds really cool.

I still get introduced as a multi Inc 500 founder, but it’s weird. They don’t, they ask you how quickly did you grow? They don’t ask you how much money you made. and I’m in this for the bottom line. And I think most of your listeners are too.

Andrew Warner: You know what? And I have to say I’m one of those people who just talks about the top line. What’s the revenue? And it’s because it’s so hard to understand why someone’s bottom line is where it is. And some people justify it by saying I plow all the profits back into growth. Other people, it’s because they’re struggling and they’re basically paying for growth.

And it really is a much more difficult thing to analyze and to have just one big number, which is why it’s the Inc. 500. And there isn’t an equivalent, I don’t think, for private companies based on profit. by the way, it’s

Ryan Deiss: I can tell you, by the way, the most important metric to look at along those lines, because we talked about scorecards before our scorecards, we have evergreen number, evergreen metrics at the top. These are the ones I’m basically always looking at. And they almost never change just below that. We have Northstar metrics.

Those are the metrics, the leading metrics, that we’re looking to optimize in the next 90 days. And then below that, that’s when we’ve kind of got the team based metrics that, that are going to tell me the picture of how, how all the different value creation processes are performing within those evergreen metrics.

One of the metrics that I get that I’m looking at is distributable cash. To me, distributable cash is the most important business health metric of all. If you choose to redistribute that cash back into the business for growth. Fine, but I’m a big believer that more businesses should be distributing their profits because it keeps you honest and this whole idea of like, Oh, no, I’m, I’m reinvesting it back into growth.

It’s like, no, you’re probably just being sloppy, or you’re probably spending money on things that are for ego, man, I had like an 80, 000 a month office space before COVID. Post COVID, it’s like, we didn’t need it anymore. That was ego. Building, with the, with our logo at the top of it. had we been forced to, to make distributions and not quote unquote reinvest it in the business just through expenses, I would have realized that a lot sooner.

I would have made it, frankly, have much higher net worth today. Yeah, so

Andrew Warner: and so that would mean not, it’s not EBITDA because we’re EBITDA still keeps, still allows you to put money back into buying more ads. It’s a whole other income statement that you’re saying to do. It’s not taking this or that out from the income statement. It’s creating an income statement differently, right?

Ryan Deiss: Yeah, so it’s not really even a financial statement. What, the way that we do this, and this goes into cash management, is for all of our different business units. there is an amount that they need to keep in savings and that is loosely call it one to three months operating expenses. We want them to keep in savings in the operating account, the normal checking account, we’re going to basically have a month.

In that, right, there’s going to be a month worth in there and everything over and above when we get to the end of the month, or it it’ll either be at the end of the month, or it’ll be after kind of the first payroll and rent. It’s like after the 1st, the big expenses have hit, we sweep up every dollar over and above we check and see, like, is their savings account fully funded?

Yep. Do they have at least X amount, you know, 1 month’s operating, which we define, and it’s a round number might be 150 grand, 300 grand depends on the business. Everything over and above that gets swept up. Now, if we’ve got a CEO that says, Ooh, but we need this for reinvestment. Cool. Let’s talk about this, but possessions, nine tenths of the law, we’re going to get it gone.

If you want it back, you better justify it. and I think if more entrepreneurs treated their own companies that way, they’d run them a lot more efficiently.

Andrew Warner: Sam Parr with My First Million had an episode on this about the entrepreneurs who are running businesses this way. It really is a way of. Holding yourself honest. And also when you take it out of the business, you’re forced to explain why you need it back. It’s not that it disappears forever. but You’re forced to explain why.

All right. I want to get into meetings in a moment. And then I also want to know what these different parts of the empire are, because I had no idea you were running all this. I thought you were doing one thing, frankly, to be honest with you. I really thought you were playing golf these days. but let’s talk in a minute about that.

I want to talk first about Gusto. If you are paying people, have you used Gusto at all? It’s okay to say you use a competitor.

Ryan Deiss: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, we, Gusto is one of the solution we use it at some of our portfolio companies. It’s great.

Andrew Warner: Dude, what do you like about him? What do you know about him?

Ryan Deiss: So I would have to turn to my HR team on that, but I know what I liked about it is they picked it and they don’t complain.

Andrew Warner: Right!

Ryan Deiss: from a CEO perspective. If my team is not complaining about software, because they love nothing more than to complain about software. So if they’re not complaining about software, that’s my favorite thing.

Andrew Warner: I used another one that was a sponsor, and then I had to say I can’t have you because I would complain about it all day long, and then I realized I’m the one who made the decision. It’s my fault, and the reason is, I couldn’t figure out where am I going to pay someone? How do I, if, like, in the moment, how much should I pay them this week?

Do I have to go to QuickBooks to do it? Can’t I just see it in here? Because this would be the most accurate thing. No, you can’t. It’s hard. And then if there’s a question, is there customer support to go and answer that question? My customer support questions need to be answered, but also my employees, my contractors, customer support questions need to be answered at the end of the year, can I quickly get up a 1099 or do I have to go and work it out in some other software or frankly, yes, I’m paying Zenni, this bookkeeping company to do it for me, but do I have to go to them?

To do this too. No, it should just be easy. It should be super simple. And that’s what gusto is super simple. I promise you, if you’re listening to my voice, you’re not going to complain. In fact, I’m actually going to do better than money back guarantee. I’m going to tell you, go try it for free right now.

Just go explore it, play around with it. It is beautiful. And you know it from the second you see this page and I’m about to give you the URL is gusto. com slash mixed surgery. Now’s the time to switch over, make it easy for your team to get payroll and benefits handled, right? Gusto. com slash Mixergy will let you use it for free.

All right. It’s not that expensive afterwards. so money’s not the issue. Try it. And that’s the issue. If you try it, you’re going to love it. People. Okay. I’m curious about meetings because I do hate meetings. And I think that because I hate meetings, I don’t do the right meetings. You’re saying once a week, there needs to be a meeting on the numbers.

Am I right about that?

Ryan Deiss: Yeah, we’ve got a rule, no scorecard, no recurring meeting. So if I’m going to be in a meeting, and if somebody’s going to put a, there’s going to be some times, I draw a distinction between kind of the recurring meetings that you just have, that most businesses either, they probably don’t, they probably have too many.

just different, everybody’s put meetings on everybody else’s calendar and there’s too many and they just need to go away. I am okay. And then there’s gonna be ad hoc meetings. Hey, we need to meet and talk about this thing. Cause something happened. I get it. Like that’s business. You need to get everybody together, get all the, get people around the table, virtual or otherwise.

Fine. If you’re going to put a recurring meeting on my calendar or anybody else’s, what’s the scorecard that we’re looking at because no, no scorecard, no meeting that, that is so incredibly important. So we’re going to come to this meeting. We’re going to be able to examine a scorecard. And the beautiful thing is a lot of our meetings, they’re really short.

Cause it’s okay, everybody I’m seeing generally green across the board. Does anybody have any issues, challenges, bottlenecks that we need to discuss? No? Okay. Then I’m going to pivot real quick and say, what can we do since everything’s green to optimize what’s already working? Maybe we have a discussion around that, but in general, we’re done.

If we have this meeting and we’re looking at a scorecard, if somebody is going to put red or yellow on a scorecard, if it’s yellow, especially, I want to see that they’ve got a plan to how that, that yellow is going to get back to green. If it’s red on the scorecard, that’s basically them saying this is broken.

It’s a problem. I don’t know how to fix it. I need help. And so very often that’s when one meeting might be like, okay, everybody, let’s go ahead and pause this meeting or anybody else who’s not involved in answering this, you can go. but we have a weekly leadership meeting where we review the company scorecard.

And then each team is going to have a team meeting where they review their team scorecard. If it’s sales and marketing, then it’s a growth scorecard. but no, no scorecard, no, no meeting

that that’s what we do from a week.

Andrew Warner: There’s not like a daily stand up. Everyone check in, tell us what you’re up to. None of that.

Ryan Deiss: Some teams will elect to do that. but so I’m not going to dictate that they could or should have, we’ve got some developers that they like to do that. Salespeople do that and that’s important. I don’t so much consider that, it is a meeting, but it’s really more an aspect of their work cadence.

Um, but we certainly wouldn’t do it, you know, across the board from a daily basis, because what are we talking about now in most of those standups for the sales team, they got scorecards and their cadence, you know, the, their cadence is fast enough that it kind of makes sense, but now in, in, in general, for most teams, it’s one weekly team meeting, we do have a monthly business review that we do, or we’re going to look back at the scorecard for the entire month to say, what pivots do we need to make?

Uh, and we do a quarterly one or two day. Um, Planning meeting. So I also just hate annual planning. That’s another thing I think is just a complete waste of freakin

Andrew Warner: I saw that. Why do you hate everyone does annual, why do you hate annual meetings or annuals, uh, annual plans,

Ryan Deiss: It is a spork, man. It is too long to be predictable, but too short to be meaningful. So there’s only so much you can accomplish in a year. So what we do, and we’re doing, and the other thing I, that I hate is like the 10 year BHAG. and this is a thing that’s always taught. It’s like, Oh, we’re going to like, that’s just entrepreneurial arts and crafts time.

just hang posters with eagles in flight while you’re at it. it’s just not like, what are we doing here? 10 years. You don’t freaking know what’s going to happen if you’re running a smaller entrepreneurial company, GE fine. They got floors filled with analysts. They

Andrew Warner: we be having a vision for what we want our company to be like, even if it’s not to get there in 10 years to know this is what we’re aiming for. We, yes, we’re doing, I don’t know. Yes, we’re doing podcasting, but we plan to be. A big course creation. Are we planning to have conference? You don’t think that makes sense.

You think three

Ryan Deiss: do. I think to me, that’s called a company purpose statement. But I believe that a company purpose statement shouldn’t have a timeline. I think a company purpose statement should be something you’re so excited about that you don’t care if it takes three years, five years, ten years. this is a horizon line that you will chase until the day you die with a smile on your face.

And so a company purpose statement is not constrained by time. This is who, this defines who we are. and it, but that needs to basically say this is what we do and this is the impact it delivers. so when Google says, to organize the world’s information, to make it universally accessible, that’s not a 10 year vision.

That’s just their purpose. So I love a purpose statement. The problem with things like vision and mission is nobody agrees on what they mean. And so the words aren’t helpful, so we don’t use those terms at all.

Andrew Warner: I do also like the idea for a rallying cry for every quarter. You have things like expand the brand. Uh, what was the one? Stack the cash, I think was one for it’s just different, interesting ways to make sure that people remember, these are what we’re focused on for the quarter. All right. What about this?

I’m thinking about internally for us. One of the things that we have is a Kanban board where we take not just this podcast, but other podcasts, and we’re taking them from booking a guest. to publishing. Somewhere along the line, people are missing something and not knowing what to get done when. And I’m wondering, how do you put a scorecard on that?

How do you have a meeting every week? Is it like, how many, how many things did we drop? But it’s more I don’t know. It’s less, it’s, it’s less, it’s more qualitative than quantitative. How do you do some, how do you take something that’s qualitative and put a number on it? I

Ryan Deiss: So, I love a com a Kanban board is basically an interactive playbook turned on its side. Right? I mean, that’s kind of what it is. So if a playbook or a checklist is just kind of a, here are the things that need to happen, a Kanban board is, you’re saying, here’s the sequence we’re doing it, you’re moving them across in a card type form.

So what we will do is we’ll ask, what is the critical stage in here that we, that, that is like, we know we got to get people to this moment. So let me, let me use an example. That’s that relates to us and might relate to some of the listeners. If you have clients and you’re doing client onboarding, there’s going to become a moment where.

They really have experienced a big chunk of the value. They’ve experienced a big aha. They’re not done. You know, some of you, if you, if you’re doing client work, it’s, you’re never done. You’re, you might be working with them, you know, forever, but there’s a moment where we got to get to this point and then everything else sort of takes care of itself.

So what we will do is we’ll track how many clients did we get to this moment this week? So how many clients reached this kind of aha moment, um, this week, and we’ll, we’ll know the next week because we’ve got a monthly total, how many should reach it? And so we can see if we’re behind. So if you know that you’re doing a podcast episode, you’re doing.

Whatever, um, 10 a month. I don’t know how many you’re doing in a month, but let’s say you’re doing 10. Um, then on average, you know, you would say, okay, every week we should get one of them, you know, or two of them to this point. And so how many got there this week? And that’s a good way to look at it.

Andrew Warner: Okay. I see. It’s what’s the outcome of this process. Let’s put a number on it. And then if we don’t get there, what is it that’s keeping us in the orange, as you’ve said, or are we in the red and somebody needs to come in and help? Okay. I got this. I think I’ve got the broad strokes of how, how your process works.

Let me understand the business because I do like whoever booked you here. Actually, you and I booked ourselves. And then someone else reached out and said, Hey, do you know who this Ryan guy is? I think you should be a guest on your podcast. And I go, yeah, of course I know who he is. I think they undersold you.

And I think the problem is, as I was researching you there, you’re not talking about yourself much. Like I look at your, at your Instagram. And it takes me to scalable. co and digital marketer. And then it spends more time telling me about how you’re a father and a husband. Like, what are these businesses that you’re running?

I had no idea.

Ryan Deiss: Yeah, man, I’m the word. Don’t do not follow me for personal branding advice. Um, I suck. I’m trying to get better. I, this is the year I’m going to get better. Um, I am very, I value my privacy and I’m really shy. And there’s a lot of people who are in this for the fame. I am in this for the money. Let me be clear.

I mean, yes, I want to have an impact and all that other stuff. Um, but I would, I would be happily anonymous if I, if I could. And so it’s a struggle for me to, um, to do that. So I just want to, uh, I want to throw that out there. Cause I don’t want anybody being like, Ooh, I’m going to model what Ryan Dice did for his personal brand.

Don’t.

Andrew Warner: You know what I have to say also that hearing that from you one time, like in private, you told me that helped me see that you weren’t like aloof to me. You are just not into that. Like we go to conferences and you’d be, you’d be nice sometimes, but also there’s times that you’d be like, really in your own head. And I go, is Ryan just like above being over here?

And maybe you were, but you go, is Ryan just like above being who go to speak? Like me, frankly, I go to speak a conversation, a bunch of other. And you’re not like that. And I think there was one time when you explained that to me, that you were just, you’re not in it for the social, you do your own thing that I thought, okay, I get it when you give the guy his space and it’s not about me.

It’s just, you’re not

Ryan Deiss: crippling social anxiety that I’m constantly battling against. I’m not even kidding.

Andrew Warner: Even if we were to go to, when we went to breakfast, Noah Kagan invited you years ago to breakfast at South by Southwest, we sat down. I thought you were like. Totally like, I don’t know, like an adult, most people here are in the startup world, a very kid, like you were very adult. Like, it seems like that’s not where you have an issue.

Right.

Ryan Deiss: One on one, I’m fine. And I’m great on stages with thousands of people because there’s separation. So I’m not afraid to speak. I can do that. You drop me in a room of a dozen or so people, especially people I respect. And man, oh man, it’s embarrassing. I’ve been forced. I’ve been forcing myself.

you and I have a lot of mutual friends. and I’ve asked many of them. I think I even asked you. It was like, Hey. Not to be weird, but like, will you invite me to stuff? And, and if I decline, will you not take that as an insult, but instead like, be like, nah, come on. Cause it’s an area I know I need to grow.

I just do. And so I, it’s not something that I say out of some faux humility. I really do think it holds me back a lot. I think I would be far better if I were a better self promoter because I do, I see people who are out there trumpeting what they do and, they get a lot of deals from it.

They get, I’ll tell you, man, talent acquisition is such a big thing. And I, people should want to, when I look at what all we do, people should be kind of banging down our doors to want to come and work here. And yet they don’t because, I don’t talk about it.. And so even writing a book was terrifying because I knew I need to do stuff like this, but I know it’s good and when I’m done, it’s like exercising.

I’m glad I did it, but man, in the moment. And so I know I’ve been to, I’ve had good friends tell me like, you kind of seem like an asshole. Like when you’re around lots of other people, I don’t mean to be, I’m sorry. so yeah, thank you for the grace, that you’ve given me

Andrew Warner: No, no. And, and, um, I will say this, I have hired consultants who have worked for your companies before. And so they’ve told me you should be operating more like Ryan’s team. Your team operates. Incredibly efficiently. And more importantly, a lot of them were not great at it when they came in, they went there, they watch what you did.

And then they saw that there’s like a logic here that they could go and implement in their consulting company or something else. And then they went off and did that. So I get it, but I can see how if you were more public, you’d be bringing in. I don’t know. I feel like you’re public a lot because you do have a good community.

Anyway, let’s get into, let’s get into the business. And I appreciate you saying all that about like the personal stuff, but what are these businesses?

 

Ryan Deiss: I’ve always operated multiple businesses. I started my very first business from my college dorm room in 1999. That was literally selling an ebook on how to make your own baby food. And so for me, I’ve always had entrepreneurial ADHD. I’ve always wanted to try a lot of different things. And so I’ve always had holding companies.

and so going back, we had a lot of stuff in the consumer media. And, product brands and things like that, whether it was survival and preparedness or makeup and beauty or homesteading, all kinds of stuff in 2018 and 2019, we exited most of that portfolio. So exited just about all of the consumer products sold one of our events, traffic and conversion summit.

And so, which good timing to sell that in 2018 and have your earn out in 2019. Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good, but, but all I was left with essentially was digital marketer. And for me, digital marketer, I never really saw, treated digital marketer like a real business. Until like 10 years of running that thing.

It was just, this is the place where I talk about the stuff I’m doing in all of these other businesses I’m running. And so when COVID happened, I kind of chilled out for that year and didn’t do a lot of new stuff. but I was bored. And so my business partner, Roland Frazier and I, we were like, let’s get out there.

Let’s start doing some acquisitions. let’s see if we can’t, maybe start a few new things, but in general, we’re doing things primarily through, through acquisitions. So we’ve got businesses that are in the restaurant, like small bay, quick serve restaurant space, everything from, that all the way up to professional services, and everything in between, we generally, I don’t want to do.

Heavy e com anymore, because I did that. I’ve danced that. I’ve had boats filled with, stuff floating outside of Long Beach because of a long term strike. I don’t want that anymore. and we also try to avoid a lot of heavy technology stuff because we’re just not great technologists. but professional services, retail, those kind of things, that’s the group that we’re building.

Andrew Warner: Meaning there are restaurants now out in the world that I can go eat in that are owned by you.

Ryan Deiss: Partial, so I’m a minority owner in most of these ventures, just so we’re clear. and that could be on the low, low end. 10 percent and on some of them, but my game right now is. I don’t want to be the main person anymore. And so with the exception of the scalable company, which is the company that published the book and that does all the operating system work and digital marketer, which we still own those completely and a handful of others.

all the other businesses, there’s an operator they’re running the day to day. it’s their vision. We’re there to support them. and so they own the majority stake in it.

Andrew Warner: And then do you take money out of these businesses or is it all about equity?

 

Ryan Deiss: so our deal is we, when we’re coming into most of these deals, it’s either a 10, 10, 10, or a 20, 20, 20. And it really just depends on the scale of the business. and what it is, is it’s, we get a 10 percent profits only interest in the company. We get, the greater of that 10 percent profits only interest distribution or 10, 000 per month.

And we get a 10% we get 10 percent of the proceeds on sale. It basically triggers. So phantom equity profits only interest. That’s typically where we’re, where we are coming in. when you do it that way, your gains are treated, as ordinary income, not capital gains, but it’s so much simpler and faster to get into this deal, I’m not trying to play, play the tax game as much and with most of these businesses.

Let’s say we come in at 10% or at 20%, and if it’s 10%, then it’s 10,000. minimum 10,000. If it’s 20%, it’s minimum 20,000 or the higher of the distribution, and then 20%. and that really, again, just depends on the business stage, our value add, things like that. Those are the typical ranges, but in a lot of these businesses, we may decide that we want to buy in for more, or those kinds of things.

So it might wind up increasing a little bit, but that’s our standard. model

Andrew Warner: and how are you finding these businesses? where do you come across them? So

Ryan Deiss: Most of them are coming through our communities. So the reason that I need to do a better job of getting out there, is for reasons of deal flow, the reason I wrote the book, I’ll tell you So my, my both digital marketer, less so, and the scalable company and this book, it is all a massive front for private equity, for our own, private equity investments.

That is the whole game. it’s something that Alex Hormozy and I chatted about, years ago, he executed on it next level. You want to talk about somebody who’s the opposite of me, who’s like out there and fearless, that’s Alex. And you just look at what Alex is doing. Like. Impressive.

Amazing. Um, we’re doing it similarly, but, um, more under the radar, let’s just say, but there’s so many deals out there. It doesn’t matter. It’s good.

Andrew Warner: there’s someone who maybe is in the digital market or community has seen your stuff says, you know what, I want to bring Ryan on to be. To be my business partner because I want some money put in, but I’m also counting on him helping me think through my marketing because now he has upside helping me think through my company structure and all that stuff, my playbook, that’s

Ryan Deiss: Yeah. I’ll give you an example. You want an example?

Andrew Warner: Love it.

Ryan Deiss: So there was a, I can’t say the name cause we haven’t closed on deal yet, but it is a, software enabled service, but they do have really good solid proprietary software that’s backing it up. that’s, in the bill pay payment recovery type.

time space doing about seven ish million in revenue, but about 3 million in EBITDA. because they’re just, they’re, it’s just it’s this cash cow, but they haven’t grown. In fact, they, pull back a little bit. and so they know through our, sales and marketing abilities, through our network that we can probably double that business in 12 to 24 months, and experience a big exit.

So they’re happy to bring us in at one of those 20, 20, 20 deals. And look, if we don’t perform there, there’s ways to unwind it. we’re not in the business of doing 10 or 20, 000 a month consulting contracts.

Andrew Warner: But you go in and you will actually have a team that goes and analyzes their marketing that helps them do that. You do.

Ryan Deiss: Yeah. So our, one of my business partners, like, and this is why like all everything that we built from an operating system perspective is so that we can do this work, right? It was all built to be able to go into deploy into this business. Cause we know that’s, what’s going to create the additional capacity.

We have similar systems on the sales and marketing side that we can go in and add a lot of value. And so, yeah, our, our, the same people that, that help our clients do this. Do it for our portfolio companies because we will have people who, so right now, if you were to come and say, Ryan, I want you to come in.

I want you to fully build out everything that you talked about in the book. I want you to do that for my business. Cool. We do that. It’s 15 to 18 grand depending on payment options and stuff like that, which somebody may say that’s expensive, or they may say that seems cheap. Doesn’t really matter. That’s what it kind of costs to make the margins work.

We love that good business. What am I mostly interested in? The 2 percent of the people we’ll work with who say, This was great. This was amazing. Can we keep working together? I want to have you involved in the business. And effectively, we’re getting paid to do due diligence. We’re getting paid to diligence these businesses.

So, That is the great game.

Andrew Warner: So that’s what scalable. co is. That’s the focus right now. Digital marketer. I think digital markers got a good team. It’s got good rhythm. It’s been growing on its own. you’ve adjusted to market changes a lot, like the certification, moving up market to businesses and so on. I get how that works.

I didn’t understand scalable. So that’s what scalable is. Scalable is we will come in and help you implement your own operating system in your company. And by the way, if you like our system and you want more help from us, marketing and systemizing, we’re here to do that. All right. The book is Get Scalable.

it’s available everywhere, Amazon. And then I guess the website, is there a reason for people to go to scalable. com? To get like what, when it says get the playbook, what does that mean on the homepage?

Ryan Deiss: Yeah, so, I mean, all the tools that we talked about, the high output team canvas, our scorecard templates, at getscalable. com forward slash resources. I just give them away for free.

Andrew Warner: Wait, is it com or co?

Ryan Deiss: so it’s get scalable. com is for the book, scalable. co, is for the business. Couldn’t get the. com. It’s an IT services company.

and, if I had to do it all over again, I might’ve done something a little bit differently, but there you go. I hope nobody, if anything else, I hope that people listening to this go, you can kind of be a jackass and pull some of this stuff off. that’s, I feel like that is my main role.

out there in the market is to realize how low the bar has been set.

Andrew Warner: I don’t know about that, but I do like that there are places where you say, where I look and I go, okay, you know what? I could do that. Like, I bet if I looked at the source code of this page, get scalable. com slash resources. I bet I would see what tool you were using. And it’s probably the same off the shelf tool that I could use.

It’s a WordPress thing. And anyway, all right. Thanks so much for being on here. I do like the book. I told you I had another plan. if the book sucked or if it was just like some marketing paraphernalia, I would have. I would have pivoted to something else. I liked that the book was good because it gave me an opportunity to actually talk through a topic that I’ve been thinking through internally too.

Like, how do we do this? How do we run it better? Thanks.

Ryan Deiss: Thanks, man. I appreciate it. I really did work hard on it. It wasn’t written by AI. it, my thing was, it’s the book I wish that I had had when back in 2016. I would have saved a lot of heartache, would have made a lot more money. I wouldn’t have, burned out myself. I wouldn’t have had my wife basically, say, Hey, figure your stuff out or figure your stuff out.

So it, it was one of those labors of love. so thank you. I appreciate the compliments on it.

Andrew Warner: You got it. Thanks for being on. Thanks everyone. Bye.