Episode 227 – Mark Drager

[00:00:00]

Welcome back, to the Hero Show. My name’s Richard Matthews, and today I have the pleasure coming on the line. Mark Drager. Mark, you there?

I am here, Richard, are you there?

I am, I am, but only sometimes. And it seems like we have a tiny bit of a delay, which hopefully won’t be too big of a problem. But what I want to do is before we get far into the interview is just, so you’re calling in from Canada right up in Toronto area?

Yeah. And we’re lucky because it just somehow went the last few days from like very winter to very summer. And it’s amazing. It’s like I was out at the spa in a bathing suit outside all day yesterday or the other day. And it was like 75 degrees in sunny or something.

That is glorious. I think you probably sent the winter down here to Florida cause we’ve been cold the last few days. But I always tease, one of my best friends is in Toronto, Canada and I always tease her whenever winter comes around. My favorite meme is there’s this little, it’s a guy in a [00:01:00] fishing hole and out of the fishing hole pops a, you know, Canadian guy in like full hockey gear and ice skates and he just pops outta the fishing hole all wet and skates off on the ice.

And I was like, and it’s just says actual footage of a Canadian being born. And I’m like that. I send it to her every year cause it cracks me up.

Can I be, can I like, is this platform, is this show? Can I be really honest with you or am I allowed to be really honest?

Really honest.

Okay. So I live, I’m gonna be really honest with all of the listeners. I need you guys to really lean in and hear me on this. I hope it’s a safe place. So I was born and raised in Toronto.

And most people don’t realize that Toronto and Southern Ontario, which is the province I live in, it’s kinda like the state, it’s our province is actually as far south as Northern California. And so we get way less snow than northern New York or Pennsylvania. We’re less cold than Northern Michigan.

We are way far south. Like I’m talking hours south of like the [00:02:00] Dakotas of Montana of Washington State of Minnesota. Like we are so far south. And we get so little snow here that a few weeks ago I was in Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, which is one of these prairie provinces, north of I think we were north of like the Dakotas and like far north it was almost minus 40 outside.

And I felt like I was just being introduced to Canada for the first time in my life.

Oh, that’s excellent because I’ve been to the Dakotas and been to, you know, Oregon and been up to Maine and all that kind of stuff in New York, and it gets wicked, wicked cold up in some of those places. And so, if I’m understanding correctly, like, you know, we always look at the map flat, but if you wrap it around the globe, actually where you live is further south than like New York would be?

I think we’re like on par with New York in terms of [00:03:00] longitude or latitude or whatever it is. But, a few things to keep in mind is like, we’re only like as the bird flies, we’re only like two or three hours drive. It takes five hours to get around the lakes north of Pittsburgh, right? And so you know, again, like, now if you’re in Florida, if you’re in California, if you’re in Texas, you’re like, damn, that’s north.

But like, we’re nowhere, like we’re south of northern New York. We’re south of Maine, of Vermont, of New Hampshire. Like all of these northern things, we don’t have any of that stuff. So anyway, I just wanted to say I love the idea of coming outta the ice with a hockey thing, but that’s not us.

That’s not your part of Canada. That’s another part of Canada. I got it. So what I wanna do real quick is just go over your introduction and we’ll dive into your story a little bit. So Mark founded his creative production company in 2006. He grew it to a little over 2 million in annual revenue, and then slowly watched it as it all crumbled around him, which I’m sure we’ll get here a little bit about today.

But through the hard lessons learned and working to not make the same mistakes twice today, Phanta Media focuses on less on growth and keeping the machine fed and more on [00:04:00] doing extraordinary work with really cool people. So what I want you to start off with is why don’t you tell me a little bit about what you are known for what’s your business like, who do you serve, what do you do for them?

Yeah, no, thank you. So great, great question. Especially when you’re like, Hey, over the last 15 years, what have you been doing it up to? So, I mean, today what our agency does is we help coaches and consultants as well as entrepreneurs who own B2B or service-based businesses. We help them figure out their advantage.

We help them develop offers and their positioning, essentially, at the end of the day, we help you turn your brand into a sales engine. We help you monetize your brand. We help you sell more. We help you move away from just word of mouth and referrals and get ready to scale your business to all of those other traffic sources that people tend to lean on.

And I say that because we all, as entrepreneurs think of tactics. Like, you know, you go to, oh, I need a podcast, or I [00:05:00] need an a funnel, or I need an advertising campaign, or I need to be on Facebook. Or I need social media, or I need to be on TikTok, or I need YouTube, or I need to hire someone to start cold calling.

And all of that stuff is amazing. But that’s all amplification, amplification of what? Your unique selling proposition, your offer, your positioning, the messages, all of that core stuff. People jump into tactics, they start spending money. None of it works and it doesn’t work cause you’re not saying the right things to the right people at the right time.

That’s what we help people with.

I actually love that about your company that you guys work on the message and the offer cause we run a podcasting company called Push Button Podcast, which is tactical. And I tell all of my clients ahead of time before they come in, I’m like, listen, if you don’t have your message in place, you don’t actually have a good offer.

You don’t know what you wanna say to people. Like, we’re not going to be able to help you. And we’ve seen that borne out and, you know, when we say yes to people we shouldn’t say yes to. [00:06:00] Having people who really have their message dialed in and have their offer dialed in, do a lot better with a podcast and, you know, content that’s coming out daily, then people who don’t.

And so it’s, that’s like a foundational piece of actually being able to use the more tactical things in your business to grow.

Well, it’s based on, I mean, if we go back to just the scientific principle, right? We have a hypothesis we’re going to run a test. We’re gonna objectively, if we proved our hypothesis correct or incorrect, and did it get closer to our outcome that we wanted or not. So if it’s good enough for science, if it’s good enough for engineering, if it’s good enough for everything, why don’t we do this in business?

Right? And we don’t, because we’re entrepreneurs and we want to make sure that our investments pay off right away. We only wanna spend time and money on the things that are gonna work. And that’s cool. But you go ahead and launch your podcast, as you said. And if I’m sure the people who you say yes to who aren’t quite ready, they’ll come to you and they’ll say, why isn’t it working?

And you go, what is working? Have we defined what [00:07:00] working is? Like, I don’t know what to diagnose. I don’t know what to triage. I don’t know what to fix. I don’t know what to test. I don’t know what to do. It’s not working. Cool. It’s not working. What do we do next to fix it? We don’t know because we haven’t created like a really clear objective, like what do we want this to do for our business?

Who are we speaking to? What do they care about? What do they know? What do they understand? How are we gonna get our message in front of them? Or introduce them to us? And when we do introduce them to us. Do they have preconceived notions? Have they been burned before? Do they love us? Do they hate us? Do they know anything about our industry?

Are we using the right jargon, the right language? Are we talking over their heads? And then on top of that, who else is out there? Like, who is the competition and not just the person who’s trying to steal your listeners. Let’s say if it’s a podcast, or steal your clients or compete with you for the dollars.

Who is in the market right now, distracting your targets from your message, who is taking the disposable income that should be reserved for your product or [00:08:00] service? And who is going ahead and stealing it? Who is at introducing so much fear and uncertainty into the market that everyone’s too afraid to take action or move forward on stuff?

That’s your competition. So what are they doing? What are they saying or what are they not doing? What are they not saying? And if you get really clear on what you want and you get really clear on who your audience is and what they care about, and you get really clear on your competition, hey, guess what?

Just by answering those questions, you are gonna be able to actually create an offer, create positioning, create a unique selling proposition, create benefits, create everything that you need to create to connect with the right person, with the right message at the right time.

Yeah. And when you do it right you’ll start having, and, you know, people struggle with sales a lot, and I know when you get your offer right, sales don’t become a struggle. It’s a thing where people tell you to shut up and take their money.

And if you’ve never been in that spot before where you have an offer where people tell you to shut up and take your money, you haven’t done this [00:09:00] work yet. And that’s a really important bit of work I think that most people in business need to work on.

Yeah. And you know, if you can’t consistently raise your pricing, If you can’t afford to turn people away, if you can’t get picky and choosy with the good people and the bad people and why you want to take them. If you can’t push back on your clients when they say, we wanna work with you and we love you, but we kind of want you to do it our way, and you go, I don’t do it that way. Like, if you’re not in that position, you haven’t done this foundational work.

Yeah, that is extremely accurate. And as someone who has, my business used to be very flip-floppy in a lot of those ways, and I used to have to really struggle for sales and stuff and like to the point now, like we know exactly what we do and what we offer the market. And I regularly have, people are like, Hey, can you do this?

Or can you use other thing for us? You know? And like, for us, we do a weekly podcast is one of the things we offer in people regular ask us. Like, well, can you do a daily one? And I’m just like, no. Right? I was like, like, no, we can’t, you sure you can do a daily one, but I’m not gonna help you with it. It was like, we do one thing, it’s this thing and this is the only thing that we do.

Right. And it’s [00:10:00] that sort of like knowing what it is that you do that has allowed us to get to the point where we can do things like, say no to people who are not right or say yes to people who are right. Or when you have your sales calls, when they are the right people, they actually tell you, shut up and take my money.

Right? And that’s a very different place to be in than, you know, not having done that work. And a lot of that in my case just comes from failing at it for a long time and finally getting good at it. But yeah, that’s.

That’s what I had to do too. I’ve done it two or three times where I fail. Like, and it’s not just failing. It’s like two or three years of constantly saying like, what am I doing and what’s going on, and when is this gonna pay off and will it ever pay off? And will, and then suddenly, like, this has happened to me and we can get into my story, but it’s literally like after two or three years of just trying to figure stuff out, suddenly it all snaps together and it all takes off.

And it all works. And frankly, I don’t want anyone listening to spend two or three years with the hardship I had to do. This is, we’re gonna talk about superpowers and all this. Like, this is what we do, this [00:11:00] is what we are best at. This is where I realized like we have a massive gift. And it’s something that people overlook.

It’s, there’s not a lot of competition doing what we do because most people want to do everything and we’re like, no, I don’t want you to have to spend three years of living in poverty with all of the stress that goes with entrepreneurship and all the risk to figure out what makes you unique.

Who are you talking to? How are you different than the competition? And what can we say, how do we need to look? How do we need to make people feel to just have them trust us, know us, like us, move forward through the process. It’s not rocket science, but you don’t have to figure it out the hard way like you did or I had to. Like there are people who can help you now.

Yes. I love that. So with that, let’s actually get into your story, right? So, we talk on this show, every good comic book hero has an origin story. It’s the thing that made them into the hero they are today, and we wanna hear that story. Were you born a hero or were, you know, bit by a radioactive spider that made you wanna get into helping people build their selling propositions, right?

Basically, where did you come from?[00:12:00]

Yeah, let me firstly admit that I’m not a huge superhero fan. So I haven’t seen all the Marvel movies. You know, I grew up reading comic books, but they were all like Richie Rich and Archie from the sixties. So anyway my origin story. So I grew up in a family of builders and I was really, really, really lucky.

My grandfather came to Canada from Germany post World War II, Germany. He was a refugee. And he survived the war, but he lost everything. And he came to Canada with his three cousins, and they were brick layers. They were stone masons and they’re working on a house, and the general contractor who’s working on the house is messing everything up.

And the owner comes to them, the owner of the home, this doctor or something in this is like 1951. And so comes to them and is like, oh, I’m not sure about the, and my grandfather and his cousins had the chutzpah or the, like, the courage or whatever to say, we could build this house for you. We could build this house.

This person is cutting corners. They’re doing it wrong. We could do it. [00:13:00] Now, had my grandfather what is he born in? 28. And this is like 51. So he’s like, what In his early twenties, does he know anything about building homes? Not really. Have they ever been a home builder? No. Have they ever done general contracting?

No. They say we can do it and they do a great job. And then one home becomes two homes and then it becomes three homes. And then, you know, they’re doing some small renovations and contractors and they get a truck. There’s this old picture of them 1954 standing in front of this old truck that says Chicken Dance Brothers on the side and has all of them in their, you know, their slacks and their dress shirts with their cool hats on, leaning against their truck cause they’re proud that they truck.

But it flash forward to many years later, they are residential developers. They’ve built apartment buildings and condos and commercial plazas across Canada and across the U.S. And so I grew up in this family of the European immigrant who could do anything. They could build anything. They could make anything happen like with their own hands.

[00:14:00] And my mom grew up in that world. And so I remember watching my mom even go like, oh, there’s a plumbing leak. Because something broke over the winter at a cottage. She got a book, I have it back here on my shelf still. She got a book about plumbing in like 1992 and fixed the plumbing. And I remember having this light bulb moment where I was like, she did not know how to do this.

She got a book, she followed the steps of the book, and suddenly she knows how to do plumbing. Is this it? And when you combine this like, oh, I’m in this world, a family where they can build anything and they can do anything and they can turn what’s in their head and they can make mistakes and kind of design build as they go, pair that with like someone like my mom who just goes like, oh, I can figure this out.

And so by the time I came to Age Man, I just wanted to be an entrepreneur, like not an entrepreneur to like make money and buy businesses and hustle. Like I just, I wanted to build my own thing. And so ultimately the way I became an entrepreneur, 23 years old, it’s 2006. I’m working for our company making $45,000 a year.

My wife is also 23 [00:15:00] and pregnant, and we have our first daughter, she’s not working, she’s not on mat leave. I decide I’m gonna quit my $45,000 year job making videos for this company and I’m gonna start Phanta Media, my agency as a video production company, and I’m just gonna quit my job. So that’s what I did.

I quit my job. My daughter is a week old, my wife has no income. I quit my job and I go, I’m starting a video company. And what took me two or three years to figure out how to sell. It was a slog after that man.

That’s amazing. So you started this company in 2006 and you started running Phanta Media. How long did it take for you to figure out like what were actually selling and actually put something together that people wanted to buy from you?

A long time. So I made kind of this mistake I think a lot of early entrepreneurs make, which is I went to film school, I had a job making videos. [00:16:00] So when I started my company, what did I start? A video production company, and, you know, I entered the world by going, like, who needs a video?

Right? You need a video? Who needs a, like Richard, do you need a video? I make videos. If anyone needs a video, let me know. I make videos. And what I didn’t realize was anyone who was actually looking for a video was a pretty big company at the time. 2006. I don’t know if you remember, but social media was not a thing.

We were still compressing things to flash files and iPhone hadn’t been launched. We were compressing to, I had a Blackberry, but we were compressing swift files and flash files for specific servers we had to rent and we had to create these little aspx files for Windows Media video for dial up at 56 kilobytes a second.

The videos back then were a lot of, like, since 1982, ABC Corporation has been helping the engineering world, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, that’s what video was. And [00:17:00] so, anyone who is looking for a video production company or video, frankly, they were not gonna work with us. We were too small, didn’t know what we were doing, had no portfolio.

The work was bad. It was just me alone. So anyone who was looking for video overlook us. Anyone who frankly we could sell to and were small enough, that would take a gamble on us. They weren’t looking for video. And so it took me like six or nine months until finally I hired, like I was just going broke.

And I hired a business coach to help me figure it out. Cause I just did not know what to say or who to target or what to do. And they helped me figure out some really simple things that I didn’t really realize, but now I love helping people with. And we take this now to the, like, to the next level.

But at the time it was like, who might need a video and why might they need a video? And I started connecting dots like, oh, if I’m doing corporate [00:18:00] video, then maybe they need it for a sales team. Maybe they need a demo. Maybe they need it for recruitment. Maybe it’s an HR team. Maybe it’s training. Maybe it’s corporate communications from a CEO.

Maybe it’s the retirement of a longtime staff member and they just wanna do something fun for someone. Now, none of those things sound very sexy or very cool, but I didn’t even realize like, oh, that’s how people think about video. They think, what do I need to accomplish? And video is a medium, it’s a tool, it’s a tactic. And so that was the first step was me figuring that out.

Absolutely. I love that too, where you realize that people don’t actually buy your product or service, right? What they buy is they buy the life after the product or service has been consumed and used. The result, the I call it the promised land, what life is like after they have used it. Or gotten the benefit of whatever the thing is.

People are buying outcomes, right? Like it’s more like, I want a certain outcome. Help me make the outcome happen.

[00:19:00] Yeah, absolutely. So you have to learn how to communicate both figure out what the outcomes they want is and how to communicate that you can help them get that outcome if you wanna sell anything.

Yes. So that took me a year to figure out only a year, cause the first six or seven months, I didn’t know it. And we were on the vert like I only started the company with a $30,000 loan for my mom. And so five, six months in, like, we’re almost bankrupt. We had to live off something. We’re living off this like two grand a month, like really limiting.

And we’re living in Toronto at the time, and that’s like the New York of Canada. It is not an inexpensive place to live. So that took me a while to figure out, but when I started working with someone and they even gave me other tips, like, hey Mark, you’re a young guy and you’re kind of likable. Why don’t you take the two or three people you know, out for lunch and say, I’m 23.

I just started this company. My wife is at home. My daughter is a few weeks old. I need work. Is there anyone you know who I can work with or help? [00:20:00] Now, I didn’t wanna do that, right? Like, I didn’t want to ask for help. I didn’t want to admit I needed help. And here’s why. When I started my agency, I don’t know about you, but when I started, people were so worried for me and impressed.

And so they’re like, wow, Mark, you’re starting a company. Wow. You’re stepping out on your own. Wow. How are things going? Are things great? Oh man, I don’t have the courage to do what you’ve done. Wow. You’re so like, and meanwhile it’s like, no, things aren’t going great. No, I don’t know what I’m doing. I think I just made the biggest mistake of my life and everyone’s like, oh, it’s so great.

And meanwhile, you don’t wanna say to them, like, to your family and friends, you don’t wanna say like, this is not going well. This was a huge mistake. I don’t know what I’m doing. And so it’s like every time people are like, how’s it going? I’m like, it’s awesome. It’s not, oh, are you keeping busy? Oh, I’m so busy.

I’m not busy at all. I’m going to my office all day and just like sitting there cuz I have nothing to do. Oh wow, you’re so courageous. I can’t believe you did what [00:21:00] I am too afraid to do. And meanwhile I’m like, I don’t know what I’m doing. So the best thing I did was to ask for help, which is what got me my business coach.

Then the next best thing they taught me to do was reach out to the people and who I have a little bit of pull with. And they went, Mark, you’re kind of likable. Like, why don’t you ask them for help? And I’m like, okay. And I ask those people for help and guess what? They help me like, like every time that I’ve run into a problem and I turn to someone and I just say, I just need some help. People help me. I don’t know about you. Do people help you when you ask for help?

That is, I love that story for two reasons. One, I feel the beginning part of the business stage, right? Because I started my business right outta college. So it was like 2007 timeframe. And I don’t know, first, probably from 2007, 2012, it took me longer than took you to realize that I had no idea what the fuck I was doing.

And it was more along the lines of like, I could do good work, but what I [00:22:00] didn’t know how to do was run a good business. And I actually ended up shutting down my business in 2012 and I took a marketing director position instead and ran that for 18 months and spent those 18 months basically getting mentored by the president and the CEO of the company and the CEO of the company was like from Microsoft and had like 12 companies under his belt.

And I got the privilege of like sitting there and just pestering with questions. Cause I was technically C-level at that company for every week for two years. And I learned a significant amount about how to actually run a company which is very different than being able to do a thing. And I was good at doing a thing.

And that thing that I was good at doing was marketing, but doing marketing is not running a company. And so when I finally left that company and was able to start again and I remember a lot of it for me, it wasn’t learning to ask for help it was just admitting that I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

And going places where I could start getting that sort of education. And as I got into the business community again the first thing that I did [00:23:00] after I started my own company again, was hire a coach. To your point of, you know, people who could point me in the right direction.

And it was hiring a coach and getting into a mastermind. And I’ve met with the same mastermind group of four people every week for many, many years now. And anytime I have asked for help or had problems, we actually have a practice in our mastermind where we come with a problem every week and a selfish ask that we talk about between ourselves.

And it has been some of the best things we I’ve ever done for growing my business over the last many years. But yes, it’s amazing how big of an impact being able to have other people who can point out your blind spots or help you when you have problems because, or you don’t know what you don’t know.

It’s funny I didn’t even mention the mastermind. I got a business coach at month five, and by month seven I joined a mastermind group. And Evan Carmichael, some people may know him. He’s a YouTuber, 3 million subscribers. Evan Carmichael was running that mastermind group, and I met him and he, I don’t even know how I got in, but I got in [00:24:00] somehow and I was a part of his group for 12 or 14 years or something.

So peer mentoring, also mastermind group’s. Peer mentoring was a huge thing as well. Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. I love that and I love that part of your story. It’s very similar to mine, just, you know, different ways we did it, but yeah, it’s realizing that being able to ask for help and being able to have mentors and peers and what not who can help you grow. Really do a number for actually being able to build a successful business and get to the point where you can, you know, have people to tell you to shut up and take your money.

What I wanna get into though, is I wanna get into your superpowers that you have developed in your business, right? And we talk on this show. Every iconic hero has a superpower, whether that’s your fancy following suit made by their genius intellect, or the ability to call down, you know, thunder from the sky or super strength.

In the real world, heroes have what I call a zone of genius, which is either a skill or a set of skills that were born with or you developed over your career that really energize all your other skills. So the superpower is what sets you apart and allows you to help your people slay their villains and come on top of their own journeys.

And I [00:25:00] like to frame this if you look at your skills, there’s probably one that’s sort of like the common thread that ties all your skills together. And with that sort of framing, what do you think your superpower is in your business?

I love that so much. I’ve done so much work on this because part of figuring out in the early years what we needed to do as an agency, and then, you know, every two or three years on your growth, you’re gonna have to requestion this. And for me, as we grew to a million, and then we grew past a million to 2 million revenue, and we grew our projects and our teams, and we grew from eight people to 12, from to 16 to 24 and all of that stuff.

And then Covid came along and I had to burn the company down because it just, it was so broken. It was just so broken. And the business model didn’t work and things changed that I had to like, question again. I’ve spent the last three years questioning, again, at this point in my life, what am I actually like?

I call it kind of god level act, but what is my superpower? And so I say all that because when I first had to figure it out, I couldn’t even see it. It [00:26:00] came so naturally to me. It came so easily to me that I didn’t even value it. I didn’t even realize that it didn’t come naturally or easy to other people.

When they would ask questions, I almost thought that they were stupid for asking them because it was just so obvious to me, and I didn’t know how to charge what I was worth because again, it came so naturally to me and I enjoyed it and loved it so much that I probably spent a decade giving it to people for free as like this lost leader into our company.

So that way we could then sell them all the crap that I hated doing, which doesn’t even make sense, right? Like I would do this, my superpower so naturally, upfront for free as a loss leader to bring people in. And then all of the stuff we made money on is the stuff that I hated doing. That’s how broken my company was.

So, hold on. Have I teased it enough now? Because I keep talking vaguely. So ultimately, my superpower and what I’ve come to realize more than anything else is I would say it’s probably two or three things. But if I had to bring it down to one thing, it’s really [00:27:00] understanding and connecting the dots between an objective, an audience and a message.

What do we need? What do we wanna accomplish? And who are we speaking to? And, I can very quickly render out the different situations, the different backgrounds, the different people and, all the different possible combinations of them. And then I can kind of figure out which one’s the highest value or the lowest value, which one’s the highest risk and the lowest risk.

And then what do we need to say, or what can we possibly say with what tone and what message? And so some people call it positioning. Some people call it spin. I mean, ultimately I am very good at asking questions. As well, which has helped me learn. But the reason I’m able to get to the objective and be able to get to the target audience and be able to get to the right message is because I just keep asking questions until I’m convinced that I understand this and know this.

And so, I do that, and then I’m very good at synthesizing that and giving back people what they need in really simple language.[00:28:00]

That is an impressive superpower. And the thing I wanna call out from it is how long you struggled with realizing that it was valuable? This is kind of discussion I have a lot with my family, my wife, my, you know, people that are in my mastermind group is that, generally speaking, the thing that you most often think this is easy and therefore valueless is where the most valuable work you can do is located.

I agree. Which is why I was, we used it for so many years as a loss leader. It’s because now let’s think about this in a sales situation, you know, some comes to me with a challenge. We need to grow our email list. Great. Like right away I’m like, perfect. So what’s the actual objective? Like, what are we doing the email list for and what are we growing it for, like, who are we targeting?

What’s your current list? Are they warm? Are they cold? Do they engage? Do they not engage? What have we done in the past? Like right away? I can, like, I haven’t even done this before with someone like recently, so I’m just rendering off the questions that come naturally to me because I wanna understand what’s worked, what hasn’t worked, what have we done, what have we tried?

Who are we [00:29:00] targeting? How old is the list? What do they care about? Why did they sign up? How did they sign up? How long ago did they sign up? What have they done recently? What have you tested? What do they care about? Who are they? You know, and then ultimately, what do we want them to do? The subject line has to get the open, the email body first paragraph has to get the second paragraph.

The second paragraph has to get the CTA. The CTA has to get to the landing page. What are we asking to do on the landing page? Is this a really light thing? Or is this a really heavy ask? How skeptical are they? Do they have preconceived notions of you? Have you dropped the ball in the past? Like, all of these things I want to know because if I know all of these things, I can literally give you exactly what we need to say to manipulate, to influence, to encourage, to push people forward, to entice, to build up fear, right?

Like to me, it’s not that it’s a game, but it’s a game. And we can get really, really good at making deeper connections with people and giving them what they need, giving [00:30:00] them what they desire, and giving them what they want. And it helps us. And if we do this for the right reasons, it helps them. So that’s the thing I love more than anything else.

I love that I realized a long time ago that I had a lot of skill in the language department as well, and I’ve started referring to marketing as modern day alchemy, right? Because you learn to master it. You can turn your words into gold, right? And you mentioned earlier you could use the language to manipulate or to persuade or to change someone’s actions.

And that’s always sort of what fascinated me about marketing and language in general, is that if you string the right words together in the right order for the right people, you can literally change their lives for better or for worse. And I realized a while back, that persuasion, which is really what we’re talking about, it’s a neutral tool, right?

It’s like a hammer, you can use it to build a house you know, or you could use it to bat someone.

Or you can hit a, yeah, a congresswoman’s you know, husband or something. Right?

All right. Like, you could do good things with it, you could do bad things [00:31:00] with it. And that persuasion is the same way. Right? And my current definition for that is, I tell people that when we use persuasion for the benefit of the other person or the mutual benefit of myself and the other person together, we call that leadership.

But if we use persuasion for my benefit, for the benefit of the one doing the persuading, we call that manipulation. And we have negative connotations around that and positive connotations around leadership. So a lot of my personal work goes into trying to figure out how do we make it so that we can use persuasion to better other people’s lives, right? For them to make better choices for themselves and their families, and communities.

That’s so interesting because I don’t even worry about that because we would never work with anyone who wasn’t using it for good. Like it goes against my moral compass. So I wouldn’t do that, but I can actually remember the exact moment where I realized, the power of this.

And so I was in film school and one of our film projects was to make a documentary. And you know, when you’re in film school and you’re just [00:32:00] doing stuff, you’re learning, it’s not very good. So, you know, who do you turn to? Friends and family. And my brother-in-law, and I at the time were doing a lot of rally racing.

He was the driver, I was the navigator. I figured I’m gonna do a documentary on my brother-in-law. And you know, he had just lost his mom at a very young age. Him and his dad were doing this family business. There’s stuff going on. So, my whole premise, my whole thesis was like, I’m just gonna do a documentary on him and why he likes speed and why he likes driving fast and why he thinks cars are cool.

And it ended up calling it therapeutic speed, which was not a very good documentary, but there’s this moment, that I remember sitting in front of our old editing suite, these were Mac G3 a long time ago. It’s like 2002 I’m talking about. And I’m sitting in front of this editing suite, just learning final cut for the first time.

Just learning non-linear editing, cause we used to edit on everything on tape. And there’s this moment where I asked my brother-in-law a question and I said, how’s [00:33:00] family? Isn’t family important? But I didn’t ask him that question in the scene I was showing. I asked it to him like days earlier, somewhere else.

But I lifted my audio saying, Hey, what about family? Isn’t family important? And I used it over a shot of him driving, looking to the left, looking to the right, looking in the rear view mirror and swallowing. And he goes, no, not really. Or it’s important but not that important. And then as soon as he said that, I made it go slow motion cause he was just swallowing.

But if you move things to slow motion and someone swallows it actually looks like they’re digesting the emotion of the moment or suppressing something. So he says, no, not really. So I take my question from here. I take my answer from here. I move it into slow motion. I bring the music up and I make everything slowly fade out. And I remember going, holy crap. I just took all these different elements [00:34:00] from all these different periods of something that didn’t actually happen, and I can make the audience believe it happened and feel something I can make them. And I realized in that moment, and going to film school really helped me with this.

Storytelling really helps me with this. You are not a journalist. I am not a journalist. You know, on my podcast the interview you’re doing with me, I hope you don’t take me out of context, but if it serves me and it serves the audience, take me out of context because what we’re trying to share with people it’s not, we don’t have to capture history or time as it perfectly happened, so that way future generations know exactly what happened.

This is not a transcript. We are storytellers. We are people who need to shape people’s feelings and emotions of what is happening. And so take bits and pieces from all over the place and do whatever you need to do to tell the story you need to tell, to do the work you need to do. And so this is what we brought into [00:35:00] Phanta as an agency.

This is what we bring into our positioning. This is what we bring into everything. I don’t honestly care what the truth is. If we’re not being immoral, if we’re not lying to people, I don’t mind us inventing a new persona, a new version of you, a new story we need to tell if it’s still true to you ish.

You know, my brother-in-law was still true to him. I didn’t lie. But I just did a bunch of work behind the scenes to accentuate what he couldn’t say or to say it in a way that didn’t have the emotion or feeling we needed. That is what great branding does. That’s what great positioning does. That’s what great storytellers do.

Yeah, it reminds me of you know, just to bring that home for people. You ever have anyone in your family who goes fishing, right? And they catch a fish and they come back and every time they tell the story about the fish, the fish is a little bit bigger. Right? You know, it was this big, you know, the fish was this big, no, the fish was this big.

And that’s a tongue in cheek example. But the reality is we are a story born people and [00:36:00] we care less about how big the fish was and more about how catching the fish made you feel in the moment, right?

Yeah, my father-in-law always says, don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story.

Yeah, exactly. And the emotion and the way that we tell a story is more important than the facts. Now that is not to say that you should lie, right? We’re not. That’s not what we’re talking about here. And it’s such a fine line for people to walk. And I know people are gonna hear us say this and be like, oh, there are a bunch of liars in hooligans or whatever.

But when you’re talking about storytelling. Storytelling is, and I’m a professional photographer by trait. It’s how I pay my way through college was as a photographer. And one of the things that cameras are really good at and I’ve gotten better at, is capturing the world exactly as it is. And I always tell people as like, the reason my photos are better than yours is because I don’t stop at the camera right, when I click the shutter button.

Maybe a quarter of the work has been done. [00:37:00] The rest of the work happens in the editing room. And you know, nowadays, right, the editing room is on your phone and you can do a lot of it like immediately after you click the shutter button. But, you know, back in college I had to go to a whole like editing program and do all sorts of stuff with it.

But it’s taking things and you’re pushing the contrast and you’re, you know, pushing up the texture in the things. You’re pushing the color and you’re pushing everything to extremes that don’t exist in the real world to tell a story with an image. And then people look at it and go, that is amazing, right?

Because you can, I don’t know if you’ve ever been to super cool places, right? We’ve traveled the country, right? And we’ve stood on the base of the Grand Tetons. If you just take a picture of the Grand Tetons as they are and share it with someone, it will be lackluster because they’re not getting the entire experience that you are standing in front of the Grand Tetons.

So when you’re showing them a photo, you have to push, you have to take the truth that is there and pull out the details and make them stronger and decide which parts of the things you want to accentuate so you can capture some version of what you saw in reality or what you [00:38:00] felt in reality. And that’s an interesting thing do.

Oh, it’s such a great point. And I know that we do it, and you just explained it better than I even explained it, so I’m gonna steal that and start explaining it more. But you know, it’s everything that we put out there needs to be a little bit over the top in some way.

So if things need to be serious, they need to be really serious, otherwise they look bored. Right? Maybe, you know, I don’t know. Sometimes you ever take a photo of yourself and you just feel like you are smiling and you feel like your eyes are as big as they can be, and your smiles as big as they can be.

And you’re like, you feel ridiculous over the top. And then you look at the photo and you’re like, oh, is that it? I thought, you know, or you’re like, I’m gonna look really cool. And then you look at the phone and you’re like, oh, I just look bored. You know, resting bitch face is a thing. Or like, I have this resting angry face that my kids are always like, oh, are you okay?

And I’m like, yeah, I’m fine. I’m just thinking. They’re like, oh, you look really frustrated though. I’m like, oh, that’s my thinking face. So we’re really bad at that stuff. But if you’re doing a live event, [00:39:00] the live event has to go past your comfort zone for everyone in the audience to feel it. It needs to be louder, it needs to be faster, it needs to be brighter, it needs to be darker, it needs to be more eerie.

It needs to be, whatever it is, whatever feeling you’re going for, you have to push past it because we’re really good at filtering stuff out. And if we just go to like a base level, you know, if you wanna romanticize your partner and give them an extraordinary night out, going to a slightly better movie if you go to the movies all the time or buying a slightly better seat, or, you know, going to a slightly better restaurant is not enough to impress them above the baseline.

What you have to do is go all the way, like over the top and people will think it’s cheesy or they will think it’s sentimental or they’ll think it’s ridiculous. And if you’re an objective observer from the outside, it is, but if you’re experiencing it, it feels so right.

Yeah, absolutely. [00:40:00] I’m not sure why this popped into my head, but there’s a song that’s been stuck in my head for I don’t know, going on a month now. It’s from a Netflix movie called Vivo, which if you have young children, you’ve probably seen it, but if not, it’s one of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s movies.

So he, like, he did Hamilton and Encanto and Moana. So he is really good with the music stuff. And there’s a song in there where it’s called Keep the Beat and worth listening to just the pull up the album and listen to that one song. And one of the lines is All I can Do When the Road Bends is Lean into the Curve.

Right? And that hits really hard for me because a lot of what we’re talking about is like, Hey, whatever is happening, if the road bends, lean into the curve because that’s how you’re actually going to accomplish what you wanna accomplish is you have to lean in. And it’s a lot of what, when I started seeing meteoric shifts in the success of my business and the success of my team and the success of my family has been around learning to lean into the things that are happening.

Lean into your [00:41:00] strengths. Lean into, you know, pushing the contrast of the story, right? Pushing the envelope, and really just whatever it is, just push a little bit harder in that direction. And when you lean in you get better results, you get better outcomes.

What you’re talking about, and I love it. What you’re talking about right now is earlier you said, Hey, you might think I’m a liar. Like audience. You guys might think we’re liars and we’re not saying to lie or anything else like that. This is the nuance that most people are missing. You leaning into it. You pushing the boundaries outside of your comfort zone. You going a little bit, you know, if we wanna be sentimental, more sentimental, if we wanna be touching more, touching, if we wanna be fun, more fun, if we wanna be exciting, more exciting, if we wanna make claims, make bigger claims, make bigger promises, like all of this stuff is what most people who are not entrepreneurs think entrepreneurs do.

People think that business owners and entrepreneurs just make it up. You know, they’re lying. It’s a big vision. They’re telling, you know, funders one thing, and then they’re stealing money and they’re doing the Theranos stuff. Like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, [00:42:00] no. The vast majority of people in our space are actually too humble.

They don’t, you know, if they share their benefits, they’re actually sharing their personal benefits, their internal benefits, and the things that frankly, that the audience doesn’t even care about. The targets don’t care about. The salespeople don’t care about, like, your customers don’t care about.

So it’s not that they’re like bragging, they’re just saying the wrong things. They’re just missing the mark. But in my experience, again, most people are actually a little too humble, a little too generic, a little too passive, a little too vanilla. And that’s just, it takes just a little bit more because everybody is so vanilla and everybody is so humble and everybody is so the same that like, it just takes a tiny bit more and you will get huge results in standing out, like go to your local town, go to like I dunno, Cobb County, which is a county outside of Atlanta, Georgia, go to Cobb County Dentists type that in and try to convince me that they don’t all look the [00:43:00] same.

Absolutely right. And it’s the same thing, the reason I brought up that photography example, right? Because everybody has a camera in their pocket now, and they all have really good cameras in their pocket now. And the difference between a good photographer, the ability to take a good picture and a great photographer is now entirely in the photographer’s hand, is not in the gear, right?

Because, you know, 10 years ago, if you wanna take a great picture, you had to have a great camera. And nowadays, like literally everyone has a great camera in their pocket. And as a great photographer.

Honestly, my Pixel 6s Pro, whatever the hell this is. Actually, like we were on set and it was taking better pictures in low light than a DSLR was.

Yeah, I used to record this podcast on $2,500 worth of camera gear. This is my iPhone, right? It’s pulling through on my iPhone now and that’s what I use.

Okay, so if anyone who is watching this though, you can see him on his iPhone I’m still sitting in front of like $6,000 worth of gear because one of them is like a $3,000 Olympus lens that I’m talking to you through.

And I have all of that. I have the $2,500 camera and the thousand dollars [00:44:00] lens and the $400 capture card that plugs all into all this.

The point is you don’t need it, right?

I don’t need it anymore. And the point for that is that a lot of people nowadays, it’s a regular practice to take a picture and share it on social media.

And most pictures you see shared on social media are terrible. And the reason is because they don’t take it. They’re just capturing reality as is. And they’re not taking the time to push on the details, to push on the nuance. And when you do that, that’s how you go from, I’ve captured reality to, I’m telling a story with an image.

Right. And if you just extrapolate that into all of your storytelling, that’s really where the power is.

Let’s think about it this way. You know, if you went to an art gallery and someone didn’t curate the stuff up on the walls, it’d be really hard to understand what the hell you’re looking at. And there would be no one gating quality, right? If you’ve gone to Amazon recently and looked up like, you know, independently written [00:45:00] self-published $1 books or something, there’s no one gating that content.

There’s a lot of garbage out there, right? And because publishers didn’t gate it and editors didn’t help edit it, you know, back onto the book thing, you know, the first what we read authors have written, I’ve spoken to just tons and tons of authors, and I always ask them the same question, but it’s like the difference between what their first draft is and what they wrote and what I’m reading, it is not even the same book.

It’s been, I had Brent Weeks on my podcast who’s a New York Times bestselling fantasy author. He writes epic fantasies. His whole career is just writing fantasy books. And I said like, Hey, man, how many times do you rewrite stuff? And he’s like, oh, you know, if it’s not that important, then I’ve probably only rewritten if you just flip through the book.

I’ve probably only rewritten like eight or 10 times. If it’s kind of a key scene, then I’ll probably write it like 50 or 60 times. But if it’s really important, like the first chapter of this one book I wrote 250 times, and you’re like, you rewrote the work 250 times. Like, what? And he’s like, yeah.

It took me about a year and a half to figure out how to open this book. [00:46:00] Now, here’s the lesson though, right? A professional author who is published, who has New York Times, bestselling books, who writes these epic fantasies, and each book is just book after book after book. He’s a professional, right?

And now he takes the time to rewrite the opening 250 times. What makes you and me think that we can just do a one shot blog post and anyone will care about it. What makes you, and I think that the podcast conversations we’re having where we don’t even take the time to edit anything. We’re not selective with the guests that we have.

We don’t package anything on the backend and actually spoon feed it to the audience. What makes you think that the people who are used to watching YouTube shows and Netflix shows, and Amazon shows and television and all of this stuff that’s super produced, what makes you think that they’re gonna wanna watch your uncurated, unedited garbage?

Nobody, nobody, nobody would want to read Brent Weeks first draft of his book because it’s not good. [00:47:00] And so entrepreneurs, and we fall into this trouble all the time, I don’t think anyone should put out anything that is not editorialized, which means you’ve at least looked at it to say, is this right for the audience?

Is everything in this driving the story forward or the interview story forward, or is it valuable or does it add something to my audience in some way? If it’s not editorialized, which is what you’re talking about with the photography, right? You go back and you make decisions, bump the contrast, bump all this stuff, but it needs to have creative decisions or producing or editorialized or it has to be curated in some way.

Stop just making crap and putting it out there. I had Robert McKee on my podcast, he’s the author of a book called Story. Since 1984, he is, I mean he mentored Peter Jackson, he’s mentored Hollywood’s greatest screenwriters and he wrote the book called Story because he invented literally how Hollywood now tells stories and writes stories.

And I asked him this question and his response was, everyone [00:48:00] today thinks everyone is putting out shit. Like this is a quote. He goes, everyone’s busy putting out shit. And they look at this shit and they think my shit is better than your shit. I can just put out shit. Don’t do that guys.

That hits different. And it’s true, right? And I know I always wonder with our own podcast, right? And we do, I think we do a fairly decent job of getting good guests and telling good stories. But a lot of what we’re trying to do with our podcast in particular is capture the, what would you call it?

The fireside chat sort of aspect of life, right? You know, if you were sitting around a fire with a group of buddies and a couple of them were chatting about, you know, in our case, storytelling. The people who are sitting around the fire with you are they getting any value from that? And that’s sort of the way we produce and cut the episodes, is that they sort of feel a little.

They feel raw. They’re not raw, but they feel raw. And that’s intentional and I always wonder if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but it is certainly what we’re [00:49:00] doing. And I’m like, you know, maybe we could cut it all out and just have, you know, the highlight things. Maybe there’s other things we could do with it.

But from a storytelling standpoint, it’s hard to know what the best way to create content is, right? Because there’s, you know, everything from Hollywood movies to YouTube videos to podcasts to, you know, there’s value in a lot of what you can create and how you tell stories. And there’s no one right way to do it.

There isn’t. It’s what you want to do and what you want to build and what you want to create. We talk about superpowers and zone of genius, what you can do all day, every day, and it fires you up and you love it. So that’s on one side of things. On the second side of things, there’s the people that you want to create stuff for.

A lot of people fall in the trap of trying to talk to people who aren’t listening, trying to create products for people who will never buy. Like, and we do it for the right reasons. Like, we’re like, oh man, if, you know, I have a friend who’s developed a new offer where his offer is for people from [00:50:00] zero to a million dollars in revenue.

Well, there’s a very big difference between someone with zero revenue and a hundred thousand dollars revenue.

Yeah.

The people with zero revenue, they have nothing. They’re starting but they may have less than nothing because it has to take an investment of time and capital to be able to start.

So they may not even be ready. They may not ever be able to do it. You might be creating stuff out of the goodness of your heart. You wanna help those, that person go from 0-10 and from 10 to a hundred, and from a hundred to a hundred thousand and from a hundred thousand to a million. You wanna help them do that, but they may never be open to it.

They may never be willing. There may be no way to get your message in front of them in a way that’s compelling, and caring, you may never be able to get them over the hump to be able to make the investment of time and money it takes to go from 0-10, from 10 to a hundred, from a hundred to a hundred thousand or what have you.

So by him just going, nevermind, this is actually a hundred thousand to a million. Just that one little switch totally changes who you’re creating it for and what you wanna create. Now, if he said to me, I really [00:51:00] have a heart for this. I don’t care if I make money or not. Like you’re basically running a charity or a nonprofit and I really wanna help people with zero, great, let’s help people with zero.

But we can’t combine them with people with a hundred thousand or 500,000 or a million. Totally different, different people, different part of life, different background, different needs, different requirements, different process, different everything. So what do you wanna build? Who are you building it for?

And can you even get your message in front of them, and do they even care? And what do they want and what do they like? If you love raw and slower stuff, we’ve run into this all the time. If you wanna run a raw, slower, cooler, more fun podcast, which are the things I love, it will not work on YouTube.

It will not.

It will not work on YouTube not, it will 100% not work on YouTube at all. And you can go look at someone like Rich Roll, right? I dunno if you know Rich Roll. He’s this endurance guy, and he’s got a huge podcast and he has like millions of listeners on audio and his videos on YouTube get like 10,000 views or [00:52:00] 30,000 views.

Like for someone with like a million subscribers on YouTube and millions of listeners, 30,000 views is nothing. And it won’t work because it’s just a totally different platform with a totally different audience who finds it in totally different ways and are up for a totally different experience, right?

YouTube is search based. Even the shows that you watch tend to be faster, right? The first minute, the first minute of retention is what the whole algorithm is based on. So if you’re not getting people to get the impression with your title, get the click with your thumbnail, hold on to a high retention rate in your first minute.

So if you’re not frontloading the content to like get people to stick, it will not take off. It will not go anywhere. It doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter. No one will watch it, no one will see it. It won’t even show it to your subscribers. So like, your really great podcast isn’t gonna work on YouTube and your really great YouTube show is way too fast for podcast listeners.

Like, podcast listeners don’t want this, like rock and roll and bababa, and TikTok, it’s crap, right? They just, they wanna hang out with friends and they wanna learn and they wanna [00:53:00] be a part of a community and they’re driving, or they’re exercising or they’re doing the dishes, or it’s all this secondary stuff.

So what you wanna do and who you’re talking to, and do they even care? And then lastly, the platform, the competition, the market, whatever it is, that’s your third component that you have to be aware of.

Yeah, absolutely. So we spent a good deal of time talking about your superpower and knowing how to put those things together. I wanna flip that over and talk about the fatal flaw, right? Which is the flip side of every superpower. And, you know, just like Superman has a kryptonite or wonder woman can’t remove her bracelets of victory without going mad.

I wanna talk something that you struggled with, right. For me it was perfectionism. I struggled with perfectionism for a long time and kept me from shipping product or shipping anything really, cause I thought I could make it better before I’d go to the market with it. Which, you know, doesn’t work in case you were wondering.

But yeah, what I wanna find out from you is, what is the flip side of your superpower, and I think more important than what it is, is how have you worked to overcome it so you could continue to see success with what you do.

So it took me 10 years to figure out my superpower and my weaknesses. I mean, I’m the type of [00:54:00] guy who I struggled with self-esteem. I struggle with confidence. Even most people think I’m pretty confident. And I struggle with risk. I struggle with doubt. You know, I need recognition constantly.

I’m really good. Like, if you wanted to spend the next hour or two talking about all the stuff that I’m not good at, I have a long list if you wanna talk stuff that I’m great at. It’s taken me so much time and effort to even be comfortable saying it out loud. And I think like most of us we’re really good at getting stuck on the problems.

And so for me, I’ve always known that your strength is your greatest weakness, like you spoke about, right? Your strength is your greatest weakness. But the real power came in over the last year when I realized that my weaknesses are also my greatest strengths. And so all I’ve done is looked at my weaknesses and then I went, oh, hold on, hold on.

If this is a weakness in this situation, in what situation is this weakness actually a strength? And so you talked about zone of genius, we talk about superpowers. Your zone [00:55:00] of genius and your superpower is just you noticing your strength in a given situation. But in another situation, it’ll be a weakness, right?

If you’re really decisive and good at making decisions, that can be a strength. If you’re in a situation where you need to make quite quick decisions, you need to be a leader and you need to go. But that can also be a weakness if you’re constantly making quick snap decisions without any research, without any strategy, without talking to your team, without involving any other people.

So you’re a really decisive leader. That’s great. You’re not a very collaborative leader. And frankly, you might be doing flip flopping all the time and whiplash, and you might have shiny object syndrome and all this other stuff. So that’s an example where with an most entrepreneurs are really good at snap decisions.

So my weaknesses are I’m indecisive you know, and so, I just talked about all the research I do as a superpower, right? And all the questions I ask. So if I was super decisive, I probably wouldn’t ask all of those questions and I probably wouldn’t do the things that I need to do. [00:56:00] So I have not really worked very hard on my weaknesses.

I have spent a lot of time and energy trying to engineer my life and my business around my weaknesses. I no longer apologize for my weaknesses.

I love that. One of the biggest wins in my business was learning to ignore my weaknesses. And what I mean by that is being able to find people who have strengths where I don’t. And instead of trying to shore up my weaknesses, instead focusing only on applying my strengths and then getting the things that need to get done right.

And you know, in my case it’s the, you know, it’s silly things like admin work. Like, you know, making sure payroll gets processed every couple of weeks, right? Like terrible at that. And, I could build all sorts of complex, impressive systems to make it so that it was easier for me to run payroll, or I could just hire someone who’s better at it.

It’s just gonna remember to do it every couple of weeks, right? And then focus all of my time instead on doing the things that I’m really good at doing. And you get so much more, [00:57:00] I don’t know what the right term is. So you get so much more bang for your buck when you focus on your strengths than you do focusing on making your weaknesses stronger.

And here’s some advice I got on that on top, I totally agree, but here’s some advice I even got on that. While you’re busy struggling through your weaknesses, you’re not leaning into your strengths, you’re probably not super happy with what you’re doing, which means you’re not showing up in the right spirit or the right energy for everyone else.

Your business can’t leverage, like exponentially leverage your zone of genius or your superpowers. And frankly, you’re taking away from someone else the opportunity to lean into their superpower. I think admin is boring and stupid. I hated admin. I hate contracts. I hate admin. Like, I like getting people to the point where they say yes and they’re like, yeah, let’s get started.

And then I don’t wanna figure out any of the other details. I don’t wanna do anything. I don’t wanna deliver anything. I love painting the picture for what could be, figuring out how we could get there, and then letting someone else worry about the rest of the stuff. Now I could grip my [00:58:00] teeth, which is what I did for a long time.

Grip my teeth and push the team and build all the stuff and not be happy and not enjoy it. And then the business doesn’t grow as fast. I can tell you it’s much easier to sell stuff that you don’t have to deliver, right? Like it’s really hard to sell stuff when you know in the back of your mind, oh crap, I gotta do this and I gotta do this.

And so like, leaning into your strengths, ignoring your weaknesses, and realizing that you’re not letting anyone down by offloading your weaknesses, you are giving someone else who loves the admin work, the opportunity to make the business better. You’re giving to someone else who loves project management and administrative follow up and attention to detail, the opportunity to wow your customers.

And they’re gonna do it better than me because I’m kind of inconsistent. And so as much as I might think I’m awesome when you’re on a call with me, I make you feel so good. My inconsistency and lack of follow up does not make them feel good. So just give it to someone else.

Man, I feel like you could be describing me. My biggest.

I’ve worked with a lot of [00:59:00] entrepreneurs, man.

My biggest win over the last couple of years has been taking two things are deliverables and are onboarding and getting those off of my plate and into other people’s plates, and having good systems for those. So, to your point, as soon as someone said, shut up and take my money, I could just hand it off to our onboarding coordinator.

And all of the things that need to get done would get done. I sell better and I sell more, and we sell more regularly when I don’t have to do any part of the deliverables. Because to your point, exactly when I was doing more of the deliverables as a younger entrepreneur earlier in my career I would, and looking back on it, I can see myself self-sabotaging sales because I would realize the kind of work that would go into that and realizing that I wouldn’t be able to do it or be able to deliver it in a way that would make them happy.

If you’re perfectionist, that’s even worse.

It’s worse. So yeah, get the weaknesses off of your plate. Don’t worry about them. Just do the things you’re great at. Right? And it sounds like for you and me, it’s the storytelling, the [01:00:00] vision, casting the beginning parts, and helping people like us figure out what they wanna do next, and then getting them off to someone on your team as soon as possible.

100%.

Yeah, I love it. So I have a few questions that I normally ask that I’m gonna skip just cause we’ve talked for a while and I wanna talk about your guiding principles, right? So it’s one of the things that makes heroes heroic is that they live by a code.

For instance, Batman never ever kills his enemy. He only ever puts in Arkham Asylum. And what I wanna find out from you is the top one or maybe two principles that you live your life by, that you run your business by. Maybe something you wish you’d known when you first started out as an entrepreneur.

Oh, that’s such an interesting question. So, I’m really good at segmenting or compartmentalizing and again, it’s a bit of a superpower that helps me, but it’s hard cause when you say, Hey, what’s your guiding principle? I go like, you mean for business? You mean personally? You mean with my family, my wife, my kids? Like, which version of me do you want?

So I’m gonna answer the one that popped in my head first, which is business. Cause we’ve been talking about business our number one guiding principle. And I [01:01:00] realize that this is what we’ve always done is, and I tell people this, our mission is to make people look good. Like, that’s it. And we ask ourselves, I ask the team this all the time, and here’s a perfect example. We had someone on the podcast who is a really big interviewer. Like meaning like he’s written for Esquire a long time. He’s spoken with presidents and prime ministers and world leaders and movie stars and all these things.

He made a reference cause he’s a little older. He made a reference to like people and he goes, Hey, if you wanna be like this star, this star or this star. And the three stars he mentioned were all had all passed away. And I thought this was the funniest thing in the world because as we’re doing our review meeting, I’m like, come on.

Like, he’s saying, if you wanna be this people and all of them like have passed away. That’s hilarious. Like he’s referencing people like if you want, who wants to be like these people who’ve been dead for 10 years. Nobody. And so I thought it was funny. I thought it was interesting. I thought it would play so well on the internet, but my team was like, ah, I don’t know, Mark, does anyone find this funny? But you, and they kind of did and they all kind of agreed. But [01:02:00] here’s the problem.

My COO reminded me, it didn’t make the guest look good, right? Like it just, it would be, it would play well. It would be funny, it would be great on the internet. It would be a great story, a great clip. But it just didn’t make the guest look good for us to make fun of the fact that he referenced three people who happened to pass away, which makes us say like, oh, look at how old he is, or all this stuff.

And so our guiding principle, our number one thing at the end of the day is we are here to make people look good. Now, this not only means the messaging, the positioning, the offer, right, that’s gonna make people look good and help them sell more. Not only the sales tools that we developed for people, or the sales enablement, or the brand and the design that makes them look good.

But it goes a step further for me. When someone hires our firm, they have to justify that to their business partner, their shareholders, their team, their staff or themselves. They have to say, I am going to invest in my positioning, in my sales and my offer and my brand. I am going to pick to work with Mark and his team.[01:03:00]

We better make him look good for picking us. We better make him look good for giving us his money. And then when we blow it all the way out of the water and she starts to refer business to us. We better make them look good by making sure we treat those referrals with class. If we’re gonna invest in advertising, we not only need to make our campaign and ourselves look good, and our clients look good and pick us, but when you jump on a call with us, we better make you look good for having given us your time.

And so for me, it’s like we take perception and again, maybe this is my superpower or something, but I just know how important perception is and I know how important experience is. And I know that for all of this stuff to work, you can’t have little doubts. You can’t have little fears, you can’t have people, you can’t say one thing and then do another and introduce all of this risk or what have you.

You need to, [01:04:00] you know, we’re a done for you agency, so we better have the answers. We better have the experience. We better raise the red flags. If we can foresee that something is gonna go wrong down the line, mistakes will happen. But how do we react to the mistakes? And what do we do? And this is why my inconsistency as a weakness needs to, like, I need my team to be consistent because my inconsistency hurts making people look good.

It gives them doubt for picking us. And so that is our number one mission. That’s our number one guiding principle. We have tons of other stuff we talk about for sure, but it always comes back to we get paid to make people look good.

The word that I kept hearing, sort of like undertoning what you were talking about there is integrity, right? That you have a you know, you’re applying it to making people look good in that perception of reality. But the underlying principle there is that you have integrity.

And [01:05:00] I love that. And it’s one of the things that I found fascinating about running this podcast in particular, and why I never skip that question even, you know, when we’re running the time constraints, I always ask it because it’s struck me how frequently entrepreneurs respond when asked what their guiding principles are, how often it comes back to some form or story that leans on integrity.

And one of the reasons I run this podcast at all is because I think culturally we struggle with entrepreneurship. And we regularly have in our media everything from stories to books to TV shows. The villain is always some variation of, you know, entrepreneur pour oil and ducks for money. Right?

And while that’s certainly a possibility, and while we certainly have villains in the entrepreneurial world the vast majority of entrepreneurs are looking to improve the world, looking to add value to the world and are running businesses with integrity. And I’ve always, I wanna sort of like shift that conversation a bit and so it just makes me happy to hear [01:06:00] you say that just in another way that, Hey, what you’re doing is looking to show up in this world and provide value and have integrity and do what it is you do at the top of your game.

I’ve heard people say that entrepreneurs just try to shape their little version portion of the world into, not their likeness, but what they believe the right thing is to do. Right? Like there’s, they have their perception, they have their perspective, they have their skills, they have their mission, but it’s just like, they’re just trying to shape the world into the way they believe it should be.

And yeah, I think this is, you know, I love working with entrepreneurs and with, really, I mean, we say like anyone who bets on themselves, if you’ve taken a bet on yourself, if your livelihood, if your team, if your future, if it’s on you, on your name, on your reputation, on your brand, that’s who we wanna work with.

Because I love being able to help those types of people. But I don’t meet a lot of, I don’t spend time with a lot of untrustworthy, dishonest [01:07:00] people. I know they exist. I just don’t have any interest in working with them.

I know they exist too. And I also could tell you like, we’re on like 220, 30 episodes in this podcast now. I’ve interviewed people from everywhere, from Silicon Valley to like coffee shop owners in the Philippines and everything in between. It is more difficult to find the untrustworthy, lying pieces of shit than it is to find amazing people.

Right? Like it’s, I’ve not run into one yet. And maybe it’s just cause of what we’re doing, who knows? But it is, I find it as far more often that you find entrepreneurs who are, like you said, they’re trying to craft the world to be a better place in their own small way that you know, anyways, I love that about you.

Have you read the book “Small Giants”? Are you familiar with this book “Small Giants”?

I have not, it the needs to be on my list.

Bo Burlingham is the author “Small Giants” companies that choose to be great instead of Big. Now I found this book because now it was written I think in 2004 or five, and then it was revised in 2013 or 14, which is great. It’s a great listen. I heard Ryan [01:08:00] Holiday and Tim Ferris talk.

And they, in passing one of them were like, oh, “Small Giants” is a great book. And I was like, anytime that Tim Ferris or Ryan Holiday mentions something some kind of source material, I immediately downloaded. Cause I respect them. I love both of their work. So I’m like, okay, if they’ve gone down the rabbit hole, I’m going down the rabbit hole.

And I wish I read this book 20 years ago. It is so mind blowing for me because the whole premise of the book is that the vast majority of our media. And our understanding of business or entrepreneurship is based on publicly traded companies or VC backed entrepreneurs.

Now, we understand freelancers, we understand small businesses or local businesses, but in between the VC backed want to go public tech type company or publicly traded company, and like, the solopreneur or the small business owner, there’s the vast majority of our economy and there are people [01:09:00] who want to get bigger but don’t want to go public.

They’re people who there are companies who want to have the best culture or have the best service or have the best product. There are companies who place, who place their own. The integrity that you spoke about what they’re building above growth, above the exit, above scaling above what we believe is the hustle culture of entrepreneurship.

And this author who used to write for Inc. Tried to find, Hey, how do I find these companies? I’ve heard of them. How do I find them? How do I qualify them? What do I do? What things do they have in common? What characteristics do they have? And it is just I feel like it was written for me. I feel like it finally articulates what I think I’ve been trying to build for so long.

But I actually thought I was kind of crazy. Like I wanted a certain culture and people would even on my team, but people would make fun of me. You know, I’d wanna do certain things. I’d wanna invest in certain ways or have certain team meetings, or have a certain culture or have certain marketing or be known a certain way or whatever.

I just [01:10:00] wanted the best of the best of systems and processes and people would be like, oh, that’s like, That’s not as profitable as it could be. That’s not as fast as it could be. You’re not gonna grow as big as you could be, and it’s like, but this is the kind of team and company I want, and I realize this because I want to build a small, giant type of company.

So I’d suggest everyone listening when this is done, go download the book.

I’ll put it on my audible list. My son and I have an audible subscription and we get audio, we get a bunch of books like that. So I’ve got a list. It’s probably be like three or four down. But anyways, it’ll be on my list of what we’re spending our credits on. The thing that I wanted to just point out there is like, I feel that like down in my soul, because my goal with my business is not to be an Inc 500 business.

Or Inc 5,000 business even. Right? It’s like, it’s just not where I’m at and it’s not what I’m interested in. And what I found is, like most people that I talk to who are running successful companies, that’s not where they’re looking for. They’re looking to create their own little piece of heaven, so to speak.

And, you know, I’m looking to build maybe a million, $2 million a year business that’s got a [01:11:00] small team who is passionate, loves what they do, and, you know, we can output 30, you know, 40 hour work week type outputs on 30 hours a week. Right? And, you know, that’s like what I’m trying to accomplish.

And so that, like, one of my rules when I hire people and when people hire me, I always tell them this, that, you know, we have, you can tell people’s priorities by their calendar. And here’s the way ours looks is like, it’s family. We run a family first company. And that means my family comes first and then in the company it’s profit first.

Team second, clients last like they’re the fourth priority. So I was like, so if you’re gonna hire us, if you’re not okay with being fourth priority, then we’re probably not a good fit. Like, just knowing what it is that you wanna build and being confident and being able to say it and work that way.

And you realize that like there’s a lot of people who will come up and support you in helping to build those things and build that way. And yeah, what you’re trying to build, I think is definitely different than what a lot of people think entrepreneurship is because they think entrepreneurship and they think Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, the big names they see in the media and they see on,[01:12:00] you know, the New York Stock Exchange. They don’t think of, you know, all the businesses in between, as you said.

Yeah. And it’s interesting that you place so family, profits, team, customers, I believe in you know, and this is my take on it. Everyone’s to their own, but I’ve learned over the last bunch of years that really, when people say that it all comes down to people, one of our values speaks about this.

The only thing that matters is people. Your customers are people. Your clients are people. Again, we’re a branding agency, so we’re trying to help you sell more. The people you’re trying to sell to are people, they’re all individuals. They all are unique. They’re all super quirky. They’re all super strange.

Our employees are people. We’re not putting out widgets, you know, so it’s like the greatest systems in the world are awesome. The greatest operations are awesome. Efficiencies are awesome, but it’s still about people. And so we will only be as good.

I said this to my integrator, my COO, I got him a coach because I was like, we the agency will only ever be as good as you are.[01:13:00] And you know, the vision and what we’re building and the R&D and the process and the outreach and the brand will only be as good as what I think I’m capable of doing.

And so even with our team, I would challenge you to say that people should come above profits, but both of those should come above customers. Both of those should come above customers cause you need profits to make, to hire better people and to invest in your systems and your teams and do the R&D and even come up with better stuff for customers.

So, in my opinion, it should be people, it should be profits, and then it should be customers.

Yeah, I like that. I have no problem with that. I just run them that way because one of the things is like, without profits, we don’t have people, right.

So, like if I don’t run a profitable company, then I don’t have a company, right? I don’t have the ability to do things. So the profits is less of a, we focus on profits and more of a, we protect profits.

That’s a cool little nuance. I would just always be like if we make a mistake, if even if a customer makes a mistake, like we don’t, I don’t [01:14:00] believe in changing budgets.

Yeah.

Like everything we do is fixed rate. It’s fixed rate because I’m like, well, we’re the professionals and you didn’t know what you didn’t know. And if something changes later, even if you are the one who’s asking for the change, I’m not gonna change budgets on you because it’s just not fair. I’m not gonna nickel and dine you. So that’s why for us, profits are a little bit lower on the list.

Happy people.

Happy people. And I think we would probably fine, we run our companies the same way. It’s just the way I’m describing it, but the people. It’s like, I mentioned this particularly with like my staff and I tell them all the time, I was like, listen you shouldn’t miss your kids’ baseball game because you work for me or because we have deadlines.

If our company is not resilient enough for you to be able to go to your kids’ baseball game, then we’re doing something wrong with our systems and our processes, and we should figure out how to fix that, improve that, because really our businesses should fit into our communities and improve our communities and not detract from them.

And so, you know, we’re trying to build our businesses and build our systems and build our teams and build all of it with that idea. That’s where whole family first part comes in of like, you know, [01:15:00] I run my life where my family is my first priority and I expect my staff to run their lives the same way where their family is their first priority.

And the same thing with my clients that, you know, your family should be your first priority in your business. And if it’s not, we’re probably not gonna be a good fit, right? Cause you won’t like the way we run our company. And we won’t thrive well together.

And what has been interesting to me is the more I have mentioned that and talked about that to our customers, to our staff, the more our customers have started to come back to us and tell us that they’re like you telling me that and then watching you operate your company the way you do has given us permission to do the same kind of things in our company.

Yeah, I love it. When I shifted from corporate, mainly corporate clients, mainly corporate, corporate, corporate, corporate, corporate to entrepreneurs. The biggest adjustment for me was realizing if I told my entrepreneurs, oh, I’m so sorry. I’m in Tampa for this week for a conference. They’re like, oh, okay.

Or if I’m like, oh, you know what? I’m gonna be out Friday actually cause I’m taking my daughter to a dance competition. They’re like, oh, okay, great. And it was like so weird to me cause when I was working with corporate clients, I’d be [01:16:00] like, oh, I’m gonna be down in Tampa for conference. They’ll be like, oh, it’s gonna delay the project.

Oh, what do you mean? Oh, you should be at work, you should be at your desk all day, every day. That’s what we do, right? Like, oh, you’re gonna take a Friday off to go take your dad or to a dance competition. Like they never said that, but I can feel it. And with others who are, you know, like who are running a business, like your business.

Like if you told me, I’m sorry, I can’t get this to you today because I’m taking my son to the dentist, I would be like, oh, okay, cool. And equally, if we jumped on a call that wasn’t this recording, but we were just hanging out and jumping on a call and if I happened to have you on my earbuds and I was out walking, cause I’m walking my dog.

One, I mean you might stay like, what the **** professional. But I wouldn’t even think of it today. Years ago, I would never do that. I would never, never, and today it’s just like life needs to happen, business needs to happen around life. But I will tell you what’s perhaps a bit different is I think about work nonstop all the time. And, I wanna work with people who think about work nonstop all the time as well.

So [01:17:00] while family might be number one priority and I think it’s important, I think work life balance is important. What’s more important to me is people who realize how hard it is to build stuff and love working hard and they love what they do and they’ll do this all day, every day cause it fires them up and it’s their zone of genius and it’s their superpower.

I want to put the right people in the right seats with the things they love, so I never have to make them work because they just love it so much. That’s what I want to build.

I love it. I love it. Yeah. One of the metaphors that I talk to people about is you know, this whole, you mentioned the work-life balance, right? And people think of this work-life balance as like that legal scale, right? You know, work , and life, I gotta try and equal them out. And then there do these two separate things that you have your life over here and you have your work over here.

I’ve always hated that metaphor because I think it’s wrong and it doesn’t do any service. And the metaphor that I use instead for people with work-life balance is, it’s far more to a rubber band where at certain periods of your life you stretch and you pull really hard and you have to put in a lot of effort and a lot of time and a lot of things to do things, but if you want to [01:18:00] have forward momentum, you have to let go of the rubber band, to shoot forward.

And the state immediately after stretch is a relaxed state, right? Because that’s where the movement happens. And so work-life balance is far more akin to stretching the rubber band and releasing the rubber band and stretching their rebrand. And releasing the rebrand.

But it’s your life and it doesn’t change, right? And sometimes you are out with your kids, you know, jumping off of waterfalls, and sometimes you’re putting in 12 hour days to get things done, but it’s the same life and it’s the same work. And you cycle back and forth between rest and recreation and labor.

And there’s nothing wrong with that as long as you’re actually doing the cycle. But if you just try to stretch and stretch and stretch and stretch, eventually you’ll break the rubber band. That’s where you get things like burnout and breakdown and depression and other things that don’t serve anyone.

And so, if you wanna show up and do good work, you actually have to take the time to take care of yourself and to, you know, be there for your family and to, you know, take the dog for a walk, right?

Yeah. I love that. I’d never heard that before. You know, we have a principle in the company called Earn the Recovery.[01:19:00] Which comes from, you know, I lost 70 pounds and I was never fit and I’ve gotten fit and I was never athletic and I’ve become very athletic. And I learned this principle along the way where it’s like.

You have to like, I don’t know, do you run, do you lift weights, do you exercise? Do you do anything like that?

Several of those things, but they’re not, it’s all, we travel frequently, so it’s more like kayaking and hiking 10 miles and like that kind of stuff. And my son and I are currently learning windsurf.

Oh, okay. Those are all awesome things. I love hiking as well and walking. But where I’m going with this is there is when I first started I wouldn’t push myself super, super hard. I don’t think most of us really realize what our zone is. And I wouldn’t push hard or I would save, you know, let’s say you’re going for a hike and you’re like, oh, I’m gonna walk a little slower to start with cause I wanna save my legs for later just in case I need them.

And so then on the back end, you know, when it’s you’re time to recover, recover from weightlifting, recover from hiking, recover your legs, take a 10 minute break to drink some water and rest. A [01:20:00] lot of people don’t push themselves. And then when the recovery comes, they didn’t really earn the recovery.

Didn’t really do

And they might anxious. They didn’t earn it, they didn’t do anything. And they may not even be anxious for, they may be anxious to get started again. They’re like, I don’t need 10 minutes. I don’t need 10 minutes.

Let’s go. Like, I’m ready to go right now. It’s like you didn’t earn the recovery. Whereas I’ve hit the point when I’m running, when I’m jogging, when I’m lifting weights like my recovery, my 32nd walk after a three minute sprint or something, like my recovery is, tastes like drinking the sweetest nectar in the world.

The seconds feel like they go by way too fast. And I love every single moment of it. I just want it to last. And I just like, I give myself permission to just bask in every single moment of the recovery cause I know I earned it. And when I’m pushing really hard and I know a recovery is coming. I know how beautifully sweet and magical it’s [01:21:00] gonna be.

So in our agency, we have shutdowns. We have forced shutdowns two weeks for Christmas, one week in July, one week in August, and then we give our staff another two weeks on top of it. So they get six weeks of vacation. But, four weeks of it is forced shutdown. We stop all of our projects. We let all of our clients know nothing is happening during these periods of time.

Now, I tell my team, because we give them all of this paid, but I tell my team, you better earn the recovery, right? You go so hard right up to the very last day, and then when we’re in shutdown and you’ve earned that recovery, I don’t want you thinking about work. I don’t want you on your emails like you have earned the recovery.

It better every moment better tastes sweet, every moment better feel like a little slice of heaven because you’ve earned the recovery and this is your recovery. This is your time, this is your gift. But when it’s go time, we’re pushing, we’re working. We’re like, we’re stretching. We’re like, you gotta work to earn the recovery, and then [01:22:00] I’m gonna give you the greatest, sweetest recovery in the world. That’s how I want us to work.

I love that. I’m gonna steal that. I’m gonna figure out how to integrate that kind of stuff into what we’re doing. Cause I said like, what I’m currently actively working on is trying to get us down to all of my staff have 30 hour work weeks but 40 hour pay. We’re getting there. Like that’s one of my first goals.

And cause I think we can do that, especially with a lot of the tools that are coming out now. But I like the idea of having the forced recovery and it just, it reminded me of, you asked if, you know, do we push hard? And I told you my son and I are learning to windsurf and like I’m pushing 40 and my son’s 13.

Which it’s sort of great, right? Cause I’m not like too old to keep up with him and he’s not quite, you know, old enough to beat me yet at anything. Which, so it’s like we’re, there’s a little happy medium there and so we’re learning to windsurf and windsurfing is really, really hard. You wouldn’t think it’s really hard.

Hard on your back, hard on your arms. Crazy core strength.

And so, we spent so much of last summer out just like teaching ourselves to windsurf, like YouTube learning. This [01:23:00] is what we were doing is we’re like watching YouTube videos and then going out and tempting it on the water. Which is probably not the greatest thing ever. We should probably hire a coach and we probably will hire a coach this summer.

But my point is we spent so much of last summer, we’re like, I’d be like my son and I would tell my wife and my three daughters we’re like, we’re gonna go out and windsurf again. And they’d be like, we’ll come back, like when we’re dead kind of thing. And we would go out there on the lake that was by where we were staying and 3, 4, 5 hours at a time and just beat the ever living hell out of ourselves.

Which, you know, when you’re my age the next day you pay for it a lot. My son doesn’t pay for it at all, which kind of pisses me off. But the idea like when you get, the next day when you’re like, you need the recovery. Like,

Well, I will you a little secret. I’ll give you a little secret. I’m older than you. I just turned 40 a few weeks ago. And I don’t know how to say this without contradicting what I just said, but you definitely wanna earn the recovery.

But if you actually do what you need to do every single day, you hurt less. I don’t know why it is.

Yeah.

On your recovery days. It actually hurts a lot more. [01:24:00] Anyway, I got two minutes just so you know.

Yeah. And for those two minutes, cause I was just thinking the same thing. I was like, man, we’ve been going for a little while here. I’ve got one last thing that I do though that I wrap all of my interviews up on, which is, I call it the Heroes Challenge. And I finish every interview with this and it’s basically, you know, it gets me access to stories that I might not otherwise find on my own.

Cause not everyone’s out doing the podcast rounds like you and I are doing. And so the question is simple. Do you have someone in your life or someone in your network who you think has a good entrepreneurial story? Who are they? First names are fine. And why do you think they should come share their story with us here on The Hero Show?

Oh, look at you strong arming me into giving you a referral right here on the show. Who has an amazing story and should be on? First person that popped into my mind is a friend and a client and someone I’ve known for a few years. Anthony Trucks I dunno if you’re familiar with Anthony Trucks, but he’s an ex NFL football player.

He completed the American Ninja Warrior stuff, and he is a speaker, he’s an author. He’s a podcaster. He’s quite well connected, but what I love about Anthony is, Anthony grew up, his whole thing is about [01:25:00] shifting identities and mindset shift. So he grew up in the foster care system in California and he wasn’t allowed to play football.

He wasn’t allowed to play sports. He was in a foster care system and he had a big chip on his shoulder. You know, he’s growing up as a young black man in America. He’s in a white family that’s a foster care system. And he had a chip on his shoulder. And when he’s a teenager and he’s not doing well in any sports, in anything that he wants to do, he’s actually right on the edge of like a life of crime and all of this stuff.

He hears one of his classmates say, I can’t do that cause I’m a foster kid. And he realized in that moment, hearing someone else say it, this is the story and the excuse he, this is the out he gave himself. I can’t do that because I’m a foster kid. And he didn’t want to be that person. He didn’t want to have that excuse. And so, I won’t go through his whole story, but this moment kicked off for him to take him from not even being able to sign up to taking the whole system to court, [01:26:00] standing in front of a judge and being removed from his birth mother’s care, getting adopted, being able to join the high school football team, graduating from high school, is the only person in his high school, or the earliest person in his high school to get a full scholarship for division one sports.

Played in Oregon. Oregon for the ducks, went to the NFL. Like just a crazy career. But it started in that moment when he’s like, I don’t wanna be that person. Now he’s dedicated his whole life to helping people shift their identity. You guys all gotta check out Anthony Trucks.

Yeah, so we’ll reach out and see if we can get an introduction to him for the show. But, you know, in comic books, there’s always the crowd of people at the end who are, you know, cheering and clapping for the acts of heroism. So as we close, our analogous to that here on this show is where can people find you?

Where can they light up the bat signal, so to speak, and say, you know what, Hey, Mark, where can I go to find you? And I think more important than where is who are the right types of people to actually reach out and ask for your help.

Yeah, so I mean, if you wanna check out the podcast, we do hard things head over to YouTube. [01:27:00] It’s a show for creative entrepreneurs and it’s really to help people, encourage them to bet on themselves. We’ve had some of the crazy people from Grammy winners to people who come in third place in America’s Got Talent and just all kinds of fun stories.

But ultimately, if you want help scaling your business, scaling sales, moving away from referrals and word of mouth only to being able to sell more. If you’re a consultant, if you’re a coach, if you’re an entrepreneur with a B2B or service-based business. Go ahead and reach out to me. I have a bunch of free playbooks.

I have a bunch of free offers. I could just jump on a call with you and bat a few ideas around. It would be my pleasure. Head over to Instagram. My handle is @Mark.Drager. And just send me a DM and say, you heard me on the show, and let me know a little bit about what you do and I can help provide some advice.

Awesome. Thank you very much, Mark, for coming on. I know we chatted for a good long while today, but I think, you know, given our conversation, we could probably spend a few more hours and having a good time talking. But thank you for coming on today and do you have any final words of wisdom for my audience before I hit this stop record [01:28:00] button.

Go, make it happen. I don’t know. Nothing more. Just go, go. Make it happen.

Go do it. Thank you, Mark. Appreciate you being here today.