Episode 092 – Tanner Larsson

Tanner Larsson 0:01
Number one thing in the e-commerce space that we deal with with our clients is their belief that if they just got more traffic, their problems would go away. Like, if I could just get more traffic I would make more sales. If I could just get cheaper traffic, I’d be profitable. It’s always traffic, traffic, traffic-related and the reality is, traffic is not your problem in ecommerce. It never is the problem. There is an infinite, the abundant amount of traffic available out there that will convert for you if your setup and able to handle it.

Richard Matthews 0:39
…

Hello and welcome back to The Hero Show. My name is Richard Matthews and I have a treat for you today. I’ve got Tanner Larsson of Build-Grow-Scale with me today. Tanner, are you there?

Tanner Larsson 1:51
I’m here.

Richard Matthews 1:53
Awesome. Glad to have you. Here we are, as you know, in the midst of our COVID crisis and we have picked up steam on our podcasts publishing every other day now just to get some cool stories out. So excited to get you on to talk a little bit about what it is that you guys do. So, to start off with, tell me what it is that you guys are known for now, what is it that Build-Grow-Scale does and why do people come to you?

Tanner Larsson 2:16
So, what we’re really known for is taking ecommerce stores and turning them into behemoth like profit polling machines. Build-Grow-Scale is a ecommerce data optimization company. We, basically are the geeks behind the scenes who can go in there, look at all this crazy data that most people don’t even know exists. Analyze that data and turn it around into helping stores make way more money from the traffic they’re already getting. Our kind of claim to fame is that we can usually double the store’s revenue within 60 to 90 days with no increase in advertising.

Richard Matthews 2:48
That is ridiculously cool. And I’ve seen that firsthand. Because of the work you and I have done together and seen you take sites from, 1 and 2 and 3% conversion rates to 4 or 5-6% conversion rates. Doing whatever mystical magical wizardry you guys do over there. So, it’s really cool.

Tanner Larsson 3:04
Definitely more than wizardry stuff. We wave our hands and do this dance and stuff like that.

Richard Matthews 3:08
Dance around and do some rain chants or whatever and make it rain.

Tanner Larsson 3:12
Totally.

Richard Matthews 3:13
Absolutely. So, what I want to find out from you is your origin story, right? We talked on this show, every hero has an origin story, it’s where you started to realize that you were different that maybe you had superpowers, and maybe you could use them to help other people. How did you get started on this entrepreneurial journey, whether it was with Build-Grow-Scale, or you know, your first venture into entrepreneurship?

Tanner Larsson 3:33
I mean, it really started a long time ago. I mean, I could give you the whole like, I had the candy store and the lemonade stand and stuff like that because I did. But that’s not, I mean, that’s just what kids do. The more entrepreneurial aspect of it like I’ve always wanted to be in business and likes that kind of thing and thought that way, but it wasn’t until I got hired as a window cleaner as a job that my mom found me because one of her teacher friends had a side business and needed someone to work for him and I was out of work. And I started doing that. And I was learning how to clean windows which is not rocket science and helping basically running this business for this guy while he was a full-time teacher, and I’m looking at it I’m like, I don’t know anything about business, but this guy’s an idiot. Like, I could do this. And he wasn’t treating me very well and I was like, “Okay, screw this.” Like, I’m going to go do it on my own. So that was it. Like, I went out I printed a bunch of flyers. That day I was in business practically I hired my sister to help me and you know, fell face forward into it and price myself almost out of business because I didn’t know what I was doing. And I basically was cleaning houses for free at the price I was charging it, it was taking so long and little by little I stuck with it. And that turned into a big business because I realized that I actually had to learn how to do it. And do business right, and I started studying and looking at other services and became a student of direct response marketing and all of that stuff and turned outgrowing that business into a very large window cleaning an extra your building maintenance company. And also, in the winter, we supplemented with Christmas lights. We had a luxury Christmas light division that actually made more money in 60 days than we made all year cleaning windows. Right about the time, and that was growing really, really well. I also thought because that was during the economic boom before. Right near, mid-2004-2008.

Richard Matthews 5:18
Yeah.

Tanner Larsson 5:18
When it was just, when we were in Reno, it was going 18% quarter homes are going up like crazy. And I couldn’t hire people fast enough to keep up with demand. And I thought I was God’s gift to business. Not realizing anything else. I’ve never grown a business during a slow time, but only in a good time. And that was great. But about, right before the crash, right before 2008, I think it was like 2006-2007, I went blind in my left eye. And I had to have a cornea transplant and they put me on a donor list. And when that happened, the healing process was two years and I couldn’t go outside. I couldn’t lift anything over five pounds. I had to stay indoors and like I couldn’t even finish school like all this stuff was bad because I couldn’t carry a textbook. So, I had to withdraw. And at that time, like I had some people in my life that were I considered early mentors and stuff. And they’re like, Hey, your numbers look good. You can’t run your business. You can’t be involved in it the way you were, because it wasn’t structured in a way that I could absent myself from it. He’s like, maybe you should look at selling. So, I sold and luckily I did because within, eight months, everything started tanking. And what’s the first thing that happens in a depression? Home Services get cut.

So, I got out well, decent there. And then I was living off savings, realizing that wasn’t really awesome. And I was when I turned on the computer and back in the day, the early 2000s. I had done some eBay stuff and was a power seller and I was selling for the Platinum power seller during that time. But I got sick of it because my house turned into a warehouse. And it was the technology wasn’t there to do what we can do now. So I quit doing that. I kind of got off the computer. I was like, Man, that’s way too much work. I don’t want to do that. I’m gonna do my window cleaning stuff and then that I sold the business I had nothing was living off savings. And that was when I started looking back at the Internet and going Hey, well this eBay thing actually did work I made good money. What else can I do? And that was when I stumbled on to info products. And, I stopped on Clickbank like, oh man this thing looks amazing. How about I create a course and at the time I was like, what do I know? Window cleaning, so I created a how to create your own window cleaning business course called Street Free Profits. And it was a multimedia course. I went way overboard in this thing. I do with everything and I had downloadable marketing flyers, editable flyers, video training 300-page book pricing guides. All this stuff is massive package which I of course underpriced on Clickbank because that’s what you do. And I held my breath and didn’t make any money. And I didn’t understand why I wasn’t a millionaire when everybody on Clickbank a millionaire. And then, I realized that hey, the online world is no different than a real business. It’s just a different medium. So, at that point, I started all over started looking at direct response and how it applies online and became a student of that. And through the years, I went from info products and the membership sites, I did the AdSense stuff, I did all of it. But all through that, I kept coming back to physical products. I always liked selling physical products. It’s a definite value of what you’re getting people to know what they want. It’s like it’s an even exchange. I also like the fact that when it was an info product, you had to write a 45-page sales letter to get someone to convince someone to buy it. Whereas, you want my book? Here it is. Or you want my – what you like – Here it is.

Richard Matthews 8:34
Take a picture of it. Take a nice quality picture.

Tanner Larsson 8:37
So, I really always liked that and I started applying in direct response to physical products and building using funnels and more persuasive marketing techniques, which really at the time wasn’t done. Ecommerce was very antiquated. And it really worked well and all the stuff we were doing, really blew up and we’re making millions and millions of dollars. Doing that we transitioned our products and built Amazon brands have those same products and it just kind of scaled out into this ecom thing. And over time, we started to see more and more into that. And then we started realizing, you know, more of the data side of things. And my bit current business partner Matt Stafford, he and I joined up on a kitchen brand that we had. And it was one of those ones that we were scaling so fast we were going broke. Because one of the things in ecommerce is cashflow sucks. So, if you’re not really good, and the hyper-growth usually leads to massive inventory buys, and when you’re turning over multiple types of inventory, purchasing raw materials in advance and having this, you don’t usually have three to five different allotments of inventory in various stages of production at any one time. And those keep growing with scale when you have admin and everything else. So pretty quickly, money is just not there. So, I was supplementing with basically $200,000 worth of personal money every month to keep this massively growing business going. Because eventually, it would turn a profit, right? And we didn’t. Until it didn’t, because what happened? Facebook changed. That’s never happened to anybody, I’m sure. But anyway, Facebook changed and all of a sudden, what was working wasn’t working anymore. And you know, the store started tanking. So that was when Matt and I really got into, we threw everything we could at it, doing everybody that you just guessing, throwing sticks at the wall to figure out what sticks. And then we stumbled on to some of the data stuff when we were doing basic data testing and things like that most companies do. But then we realized the power of Google Analytics. And we started really looking at deep stuff like different device segments and browser segments and things like that. And realizing that there are different conversion rates based on different types of browsers, different types of like, someone on Chrome converts differently than someone on Safari than someone on iPhone x and someone on an iPad versus a tablet or a Kindle. All these things and you can optimize different levels of app simply by making tweaks and when we started diving into that world, every changed it all over again. And then all of a sudden, it didn’t matter what Facebook did or what Google did or anything else. Because we were making so much money per batch of traffic that we purchased our customer, our lifetime value is increasing, that we could afford, we could literally do what Dan Kennedy always says, which is, who can afford to pay the most to acquire customer wins, we finally actually did that. And that’s how we Build-Grow-Scale evolved into what it is today. And now we are basically just a data geek company that optimizes ecommerce stores.

Richard Matthews 11:30
That’s a really cool story. And it’s interesting that you got into ecommerce in the time which anyone who’s been following along ecommerce forever, you were competing with the people who were taking screen grabs from the manufacturer or website with their bullet points and the crappy pictures from like, the old flip cell phones, right. So you have to do much to compete. If you have like a real picture and wrote some copy, you are winning. And you’ve seen that transition all the way through to today where you where I call it the market consolidation. Where you have the wild, wild west phase, we’re no longer really in that wild west phase, you’re seeing a lot of the shops and everything and but it’s consolidating to the people who have skills. And that’s where –

Tanner Larsson 12:13
The market has evolved. The customer has evolved.

Richard Matthews 12:16
Absolutely. And what’s interesting is like you were just saying before we got on the phone call that all of ecommerce before our nice, wonderful pandemic here only represented like 17% of the market.

Tanner Larsson 12:28
So, that’s actually even you mentioned market consolidation and like the Gold Rush or gold period has ended. Honestly, I feel that because of this pandemic, we’ve opened where we started the Gold Rush all over on ecommerce and digital and digital sales. What I said before on the call, ecommerce represents trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars of spending a year, but up until recently that only accounted to about seven to 12% of shoppers. That was it. That was all who shopped online. Most people, most of the world’s still doesn’t shop online. However, now we’re in this pandemic where quarantine were in shelter in place orders. The government’s putting pressure on stores, certain stores had to close already. Other retailers are being restricted on what items they’re allowed to sell in stores. Some of the big box retailers in some states are now being sold. They can’t sell frivolous items like you can’t sell TVs. They have to quarantine those areas off from the store.

Richard Matthews 13:24
I’ve seen the pictures of Walmart, Walmart closing off the clothes sections, electronics sections. So anywhere you’re at,

Tanner Larsson 13:31
But here’s the thing. All these people are trapped, right? And they’re bored out of their mind. So the internet’s there, they’re obviously going to be going online. And their desire and need to consume doesn’t stop. Birthdays don’t stop happening. Anniversaries don’t stop happening. Clothes, don’t stop wearing out. Shoes don’t stop wearing out. TVs don’t stop breaking, all that people still have to consume. Now and also when you’re bored, you consume more because you have nothing else to do with your time. So what we’re seeing right now in our space, like on our bigger scale, we have our amplified partner side of the company, where we actually partner with bigger brands and become the data optimization back end. You obviously know that but for people watching, they don’t. When I say our stores, I believe these partner stores, we’re seeing an average of four to five times more traffic at any given time of the day on these stores, not necessarily just from ads or whatever else, but like four to five times more traffic than usual. Because there’s so many more eyeballs on the internet, and our insider members are seeing the same thing, our accelerator members.

Richard Matthews 14:33
And if you think about why that is right, I mean, we’ve heard a lot about the increased unemployment but if you look at our numbers, we do have an increased increase in unemployment, but a huge section of our population doesn’t, right. We still have a lot of people in service industry, a lot of people are able to work at home. And there’s a lot of money that’s no longer being spent on restaurants on your gas tank on, on shopping elsewhere, right. And that’s all that that energy and funding and monetary stuff are being redirected to online spending. So it’s absolutely it’s changing the game. And what I think is interesting, and we’ll see how this plays out. But I really think that what we’ve done will have a massive impact on future economic stuff, because we’ve taken a whole group of people who may not have just like as a, for instance, my mother is not a fan of shopping online, because she’s just not used to it. And so when you force her to shop online, now you create a skillset she didn’t have before.

Tanner Larsson 15:31
Correct, same thing and the level of comfort.

Richard Matthews 15:33
And a level of comfort that she didn’t have before. And that like that same thing applies all across the board with everything from homeschooling to you know, working from home, we’re going to have a whole segment of our population that now has a baseline level of skills they didn’t have before. It’s like we’re gonna take a 10-year jump at skill set for the population.

Tanner Larsson 15:49
100%. Where the whole back to normal business as usual, it will never happen again. We are literally creating a new normal as we move through this problem. And again, there’s some downtime to this whole a lot of downsides of this whole pandemic thing, but there’s also an opportunity and some silver linings that need to be looked at from everybody. If your business isn’t set up to capitalize on some level of online even services, you need to figure out how you’re going to compete because it’s not going to ever go back to the way it was. We’ve already created that shift.

Richard Matthews 16:22
Absolutely. And you know, I’ve already seen the shift just in the conversations I’m having with clients in my service business and a lot of those things and like I’m gearing my team and our stuff up for growth because we’re looking at all of this stuff saying like we’re gonna shift into some high growth phases here in the next little while.

Tanner Larsson 16:41
— for your services,

Richard Matthews 16:42
Absolutely. So, my next question for you has to do with your superpowers, right? This is you individually what is it that you do or build or offer that you think helps really solve problems for people things that we say use us to slay the world’s villains? I mean, the way I’ve been framing this for my guests recently is like if you look at your setups skills you’ve developed over the years, you probably have one skill or maybe two skills that really energize everything else that sort of is your zone of genius, the thing that you bring to your company that that really helps you do what you do?

Tanner Larsson 17:15
I mean, really twofold. For the most part, like, one thing is, I’m very good at taking an idea and making it a reality like, in terms of like I can, I can see if that’s where I want to go, I can figure out very quickly what the pieces are that need to go into place. Even if I don’t know how to do them. I can figure out what they are, and make it happen and bring the rest of the team into alignment to get that done. Like it just was something I’ve always been able to do. I see it I know exactly what to do, and I’m off to the races while everybody else is still figuring out. Okay, this is what we have to do. What’s the first step? And we’re already three steps into it. The other aspect of it from our education side is really what my true passion what I consider one of my greatest superpowers from the teaching front, I’m really good at taking complex and convoluted topics or things and breaking them down into a very easy and teachable format with energy that people can follow. I don’t teach like Ferris Bueller, The Day Off or the Ferris Bueller like it’s very, I take stuff that people are like, Man, this would be really boring. But I really enjoyed the way you taught it and I can conceptualize what you’re teaching. So that’s been one of our big things in our education side of our business is our students get massive results. The information we have is good, but it’s also in my superpowers in the way we teach it and break it down for them.

And I have to have them on the lower shelf because I’m not that tall.

Richard Matthews 18:40
So, I’ve always called that superpower, the ability to take the cookies and put them on the lower shelf. And that’s always been my metaphor for that is you can take the cookies up here and put it down, wherever.

That’s the way it goes. But the other thing that you mentioned, which is seeing a big end goal, and being able to know where to start. I’ve always been really fascinated by that skill in particular, because it’s something that you see a lot of CEOs have, right? And it’s sort of like a visionary skill. And I’ve been I’m just curious from a tactical perspective, is it something where you like you actually see an end goal and you start working backward to see what the steps are? Or like, how does that actually happen in your head? And does it happen slow enough for you to actually see the steps to explain it to someone else?

Tanner Larsson 19:27
So, that actually, you get, you pointed out one of the pitfalls of my skill is that it happens in my head. And I happen so quickly, that it’s very hard for people often to keep up and for me to- I’m already four steps ahead. And it’s like my COOs skills like, Whoa, dude, I have questions. I’m like, bro, we’re already moving like, what do you –

Richard Matthews 19:51
We’re done.

Tanner Larsson 19:52
I already said go. You should be running right now. So, it’s funny because I actually – Our whole team, we have a 45 person team. And we just, all collectively does the Gallup strength assessment, strength finder test. And where it finds your five ranks your five things, and we ranked all of ours, and we’re having a coach go through and organize them and look at our different pods in our company to see how they all interact with each other. It’s really cool. But that was one of the things in mind was it actually pointed out that yes, this is a thing of mine. And in my head, like, Okay, this is what? This is the goal, this is what we’re going to do. I want this end result, and I put it in my head, it’s like, a picture. And it’s like, okay, boom says it. And then I just start seeing, like chunks of the things that have to happen, like the major milestones. And I’m already like when I see whatever the closest milestone is to me in my head, and whereas as that sounds, I already start moving towards it. And I’m, as I’m moving, I’m like, Okay, the next thing I got to do is I gotta build this site, and I got to create this page and I have this list of actually a good example when we did the product launch or for the book the first time the team’s like, oh, cool, we’re almost done. We’ve only got this. And I’m like, Oh no, we have this, I start to sort of talking in there lifting out. And for about 10 minutes straight, I kept lifting out little bullet points of all the different things, the emails, the links that had to go in the emails, and all this stuff that had to happen. And there, my team was sitting there, like, Where did that? Where do you have that written down? And I’m like, I don’t I just thought of it. Like I just know, that’s what I have to do to make this book with the complete funnel and all the fulfillment and everything that goes along with it in the member’s area and exhilarate content, that affiliate program, these are all the pieces that have to be in place before that book can go live. And it just, it just comes into my head that way. And now did it It didn’t just come into my head from day one that way I’ve got, you know, 20 1918 years of doing this type of stuff that has given me that skill set. But even when if I don’t know, to have the knowledge, I still usually know conceptually the pieces enough to move forward and align the other pieces now.

Richard Matthews 22:11
And it’s really a fascinating skill too, because one of the things you mentioned is like you see the first milestone you immediately start moving towards it. And I actually think that’s one of, it’s sort of a fatal flaw a lot of entrepreneurs don’t do is they don’t – they wait until they’re ready for something, instead of realizing the part of the process of becoming ready is actually taking the movement doing the things, it’s never gonna be ready. And it’s a habit that you have to train yourself to get into, right, unless you have that natural inclination like you do. But like, for me, it’s something I had to train myself to get good at is to just take action first move forward, and because it’s easier to correct the course of a ship that’s moving than it is to change the direction.

100% Yes. Not to say we don’t screw things up or have to backtrack or change or pivot or whatever, we always do, but one of the things that makes us good is we’re pretty good at pushing and moving. And our team actually is we’re developing, it’s funny to talk about the Gallup thing, our that that push forward thing in Gallup is called achiever. And that’s one of the things that you have our entire C level executive team and our first-tier below that every single one of the people in those 11 positions have achiever somewhere in their top five is not intentional, but it’s you attract kind of in our culture and dictates. And I would say, can’t know the executive summary is over, over 70% of our 45 people have that achiever trait in their top five, I don’t know, it could be higher, it could be a little lower, but it’s somewhere in it’s a massive amount of our people. So we’re all very much action takers. You know, let’s do it and then figure out what else we have to do.

So do you find –

Tanner Larsson 24:02
– trouble though.

Richard Matthews 24:03
Do you find that you have to, you have to have people on the team who are more on the you know? So the achiever is really the ready, fire, aim. And then the flip side of that is the, ready, aim fire. You have to have those people to hold you back a little bit. “I can’t wait.”

Tanner Larsson 24:20
So it does help. It does help. Now, I mean, I would have told you, because the majority of my career was as a solopreneur, or window cleaning. I had like 60 employees, but that didn’t really count. But like in the online space, it was mostly solopreneur to like a couple, like two to three people max on my team. Now we’re at 45 people with you know, COO, CMO, CTO, like the whole shebang. And yes, what the once your team starts moving, I think that’s very important that you have the people that can stop and take that more analytical look back is really good about that. He’ll ask me it’ll keep going. But if he doesn’t get those questions answered, he can’t move.

Richard Matthews 24:59
Yeah, Absolutely.

Tanner Larsson 25:01
It’s super important to have those people but as a solopreneur, honestly, I think having, like, if you have to pick one or the other, it’s better just to get out there and go. Because you can pick up the pieces, you can adapt much easier than you can if you have a team of people moving than you can. You’re like a speedboat, you can turn on a dime, big shifts take more turning,

Richard Matthews 25:23
And people appreciate it when you apologize, and you make a mistake more than if you never make a mistake ever, ever. So it’s a important thing to learn. So the flip side of the superpower then is obviously the fatal flaw, right? Just like Superman has his kryptonite or Batman is just a ninja, he’s not actually a superhero. What would you say? Your fatal flaw has been in growing your business and you know having the position that you do and how have you worked on that for so people who are listening, who might struggle with the same kind of thing.

Tanner Larsson 25:55
my fatal flaw is definitely tied to everything we were just talking about. It’s like It’s my greatest strength, it’s also a great weakness. I have the ability or my strength or have the ability to burn people out. Because and like, make them feel inadequate, it makes them feel like they like because they don’t think the way that I do. That I don’t value what they have to have input on. And I can’t like it’s, if I’m explaining, hey, this what we’re doing, and then you have questions. My flaw is that and you are like, why the hell do you have questions like, seriously, I just told you what we’re doing. Let’s go do it, we could have been done already. And that is not a good feature for a CEO who has a team of 45 people that he has to actually inspire and read the vision to get them going. So, I have to be very aware of it. And honestly, I would say that 17 of the 18 to 19 years that I’ve been doing this kind of stuff. I was not aware of that. I just thought what the hell is wrong with all these people? Why can’t they get in line with what I’m trying to do? And it’s only been recent, as we’ve really grown the company and done a lot of emotional intelligence work, been taking classes and really paying attention and like, to what’s going on, did I become aware that I have that impact and aware of what other people are seeing insane and the personality types that, I have to be aware of that don’t necessarily jive with what I have, but they don’t relate the same way that I do. So I need to make sure that I can approach it in a different way. Step back look at it from their position so that in the fact that I’ve done it because I know that my intensity burns people out.

Richard Matthews 27:39
I’m very familiar with the DISC profile system. If we were looking at the DISC profile, you would be a high D. And on the other side of the high D., You have the high SS and the high D and a high S in the same room. You’d make them cry.

Tanner Larsson 27:52
Oh yeah, definitely can do that. And I have to say it’s not just in business though, this is me, right? So this is how I am in life. It affects my family, it affects my kids, it affects all of it. So, and it’s something that I’m very grateful to now be aware of and be able to work on it. And you know, since I have been aware too, like I’ve discovered a whole bunch of stuff about my wife and our relationship my kids like everything has improved since I’ve realized that fatal flaw and like that I actually can it’s not a foregone conclusion, I can not necessarily control it, but I can adapt it and I can adjust to not have it negatively impact those around me.

Richard Matthews 28:38
I have a similar, way that I operate and was blessed with a daughter or two that are on the opposite side of that spectrum. And, it’s very helpful to have a little girl who loves the crap out of you that you have to be very, like you have to be very conscious of how you act. You ended up with a bundle of tears and I found that has been helpful for training myself.

Tanner Larsson 29:05
My daughter is very much that same way. She’s got a lot of my like the toughness but she also has that super soft. And she’s my son is like a bull in the – like he’s me. You don’t care what I say. My daughter or how I actually could care less my daughter though. It’s, it’s like, oh my gosh, now we’re crying. And I you know, I have to figure that out. But yeah, it definitely makes me more aware. Definitely better in companies. My work too.

Richard Matthews 29:28
I have a lot of times where I’m like, oh, and I made her cry. There we go. And we’re broken down in tears. I’ve gotten really good at doing the we do pity parties. So it’s like to sit on my lap and cry on my shoulder and I’ll just be here for you. Even though I don’t understand –

Tanner Larsson 29:49
Have your moment,

Richard Matthews 29:50
Have your moment. So my next question for you has to do with your common enemy and the common enemy is something that and I think it probably would be most helpful if we picked one of the audiences that you work with maybe the your EI members or your amplified partners. It’s if you something that you constantly like banging your head on the wall, you know while against that you constantly struggle with your clients that if you had a magic wand, or you could just wave it and get rid of that thing. What would it be? What’s the thing that you have to fight against all the time with your clients with the service that you do?

Tanner Larsson 30:23
I guess the biggest thing is, you know, there’s so much noise in the marketplace in almost anything, right? There’s good advice, bad advice, just so much of it is hard to filter out what’s good. But the number one thing in the ecommerce space that we deal with our clients, is their belief that if they just got more traffic, their problems would go away. Like, if I could just get more traffic, I would make more sales. If I could just get cheaper traffic, I’d be profitable. It’s always traffic, traffic-related and the reality is, traffic is not your problem anymore. It never is a problem. There is an infinite, abundant amount of traffic available out there that will convert for you. If you’re set up and able to handle it, one of my favorite books is the road less stupid by Keith Cunningham. And he talks about how most companies don’t die from starvation. They die from indigestion, meaning that you’re not dying from a lack of traffic, you’re dying from an inability to digest that traffic into sales. And that is the reality of e-commerce. You know, most ecommerce companies don’t sell to their customers in more than one time. Like it’s like 90 plus percent of e-commerce companies sell to their customers only one time. So they’re not doing that. They’re also not, they throw up a store or a funnel and then that’s it. That’s up. It’s mostly good. Now I spend all my time buying traffic courses and learning how to get cheaper cpms and Facebook and Twitter, Twitter and Pinterest and Snapchat traffic, and all this other crap. And yet, the fact is you have a point six conversion rate or a 1% conversion rate. That means that for every hundred people you get to your store who clicked on an ad, and they were interested in what you had only one bought. So your thing is, let’s get 100 more, I’ll get one more sale, I get 100 I get 200 I’ll get two sales. Why not fix that one, make that a four or a six or an eight. And, you know, it’s not just conversion, though. It’s also average order value, lifetime customer value, all those different things. But none of those are focused on. We host a big event called Build Grow Scale Live, and we survey everybody and the event sales page literally says we will not teach you traffic strategies. We won’t teach you about traffic. The whole thing is about how to optimize your store and everything else. The survey we asked them an interest survey and we have an exit survey. On both of them. There’s always a huge thing is we wish you had taught us traffic or I need more traffic. Like what is wrong, like Get that through your head. If they don’t need more traffic, they literally need to be able to Digest’s the traffic, they’re getting better. And once they can do that, they’ll never have a traffic problem again.

Richard Matthews 33:07
It’s interesting because like I work a lot with people who do the educational funnels, where they’re, don’t like the book funnel like you have you held up earlier and things like that. And I regularly have clients come to me and we get on, like our strategy call to go through like, their funnel, what they’re doing. And they’re like, my biggest problem is I just need to be able to get twice as much traffic for less money, or I need to like they’re always interested in like, I just need more traffic, or I could just double the amount of traffic I was getting, then I would, you know, fix all my problems. And I was like, What if we just kept the same amount of traffic, and we added an order bump here, or we did some stuff, you know, we actually like build out a funnel, do an upsell, like actually for increasing average order value or increase our conversion rates and things like that. And I’ll build a little Excel model and be like, here’s your version. And, you can scale it up and down with traffic and you notice it like the profitability never changes, right? Doesn’t matter how big you scale it. You’re still stuck at whatever your profitability level you have now.

Tanner Larsson 34:02
You just create bigger problems.

Richard Matthews 34:05
You just create scaling problems. Like, you were talking about with your kitchen brands.

Tanner Larsson 34:09
Oh man, that was a nightmare. And that was exactly what we were doing. We’re pouring more traffic. It’s like, if some are good, more is better, right? It’s like you water a flower with a fire hose. You’re gonna destroy the flower.

Richard Matthews 34:21
And so like, we’ll do the other model, we’ll show him like, hey, so here’s like, we can take a funnel. There’s like like a book funnel that you start with like seven or $9 sale and you add a single order bump to it. And the average order value goes from $7 to 21. And it changes the game completely. Like, that’s just one thing. And like, that’s what you guys do with ecommerce stores, show people that there’s more to it than just adding more traffic.

Tanner Larsson 34:45
Totally. I mean, our thing our example that we always talk about is the leaky bucket. Right? You know, your business is the bucket and your business is leaking all the time is full of holes. And the water coming into the bucket is your traffic and water that falls out of it is lost sales, wasted money, lost opportunity, why pour more money into a bucket that keeps leaking? Our thing is let’s fix the bucket, let’s patch some as many of the holes as we can, and then turn up the traffic and then that way all the money that’s all the water that stays in is captured sales. And people just don’t seem to get that. And when we do finally get through to them when they like the people who come to us, it’s like literally the light bulb goes off and all of a sudden, they’re struggling or mediocre store turns into a behemoth it starts, you know, in our ecom insider program that you mentioned our average conversion rate, our benchmark is over 4% like that’s people crying their conversion rates 4% you know, these are like dropped from what from six or eight you know, and conversion rates just a vanity metric. Anyway, there’s a lot more important stuff profitability and actual money you keep in your pocket, but, you know, at least eight out of 100 are getting converted into a sale versus the industry average of one to one and a half.

Richard Matthews 36:01
So, I just had an idea for you based on what you’ve said for I know you guys are working on a new course for you. What do you call it? A way to talk about it? You could start calling it like build a better bucket.

Tanner Larsson 36:14
Build a better bucket. That’s good – examples.

Richard Matthews 36:20
Right, so if you’re going to do a beginners course for people you could you talk about building better bucket from the ground up that doesn’t have holes in it.

Tanner Larsson 36:26
Good point, actually.

Richard Matthews 36:28
There you go. That’s my value add for the podcast today. So, my next question for you is the flip side of the common enemy. So, the common enemy is what you fight against. The driving force is what you fight for. So just like Spider-Man fights to save New York or, Batman fights to save Gotham or Google fights to index and categorize all the world’s information. What is it that you guys fight for, at Build-Grow-Scale?

Tanner Larsson 36:49
So our big thing is, we, I mean, obviously, we’re in the ecommerce space and our preferred audience, the people we truly want to help are the small businesses that the ecompreneurs that are just product sellers that we work with some big stores too. But the really the ones we have, the greatest impact helping are the mom and pop shops. The small businesses that are stuck and they have a good product. They’re good people, they’re doing everything that they think they’re doing right. They just need a little help to go up and that, we like, we’d like helping them. That’s our focus. And our goal is what we have like we always call ourselves the best-kept secret in ecommerce. And actually we don’t call it that our customers call us that. But our joke is we’re not trying to be a secret. Like, because what we have literally can revolutionize the modern-day ecommerce industry. Because it’s such a different way of thinking and it’s not a concept of going to be saturated. It’s literally just an applicable thing to all businesses. So that’s our goal. That’s what we’re trying to help. That’s the common good that we’re trying to solve is we want to help the ecopreneurs. You know build their businesses, because the small business owner is the one that changes America. They’re the ones that make the world a better place. They create the most, they create the most impact. They change their economies. It’s not the big companies, it’s the small companies. And those are the ones –

Richard Matthews 38:13
That’s why we invite them on the podcast and have them tell their story. So, I have sort of a meta-level question for you that sort of popped into my head. And it has to do with you told your whole story about all the different things you’ve done in your business and in your life. And it seems to me like you hit a point where you became laser-focused on a single outcome, and your business exploded? And I’m curious what your thoughts are on that concept and how you can get yourself there if you’re not there yet in your business, right, having that laser focus.

Tanner Larsson 38:47
So that actually is, truthfully I if I had to say there’s one secret to my personal success, or mine and Matt’s success, and that’s a principle called success by subtraction and I used to believe that the more things I had going, the more successful I was. And the better I was, the better I was and everything else. There was a time when I had equity in like 15 different companies, where I was actively working, and I almost killed myself doing that I actually collapsed on stage right before I got on stage at my event and had to go to the hospital. It was a major turning point in my life. But it wasn’t till a few years after that, where I really embraced the simplicity by some charts of success by subtraction principle, which is you have focus, right, if you have this ball of focus, and we’ve all seen a diagram of this before, but when you have multiple things, like say I have five things where my focus goes in five directions, nothing gets the full impact. Whereas if I only have one thing, all my energy all my focus goes towards that one thing and it gets all my attention, what gets attention gets improved in it and it grows. The same concept can be another example of that would be taking Five glasses of dropping a marble, which represents time, money and energy into each one. And you keep doing that. Which one fills up first? Which one really grows?

Richard Matthews 40:09
None of them really?

Tanner Larsson 40:11
None of them. But if you just take one, and you drop it all into there, it’s all your time, all your focus all your money, all your attention, it explodes. And when we finally started embracing that, and the magic of that power is literally the word no. The more we said no, and meant it. The more money we made, the easier our lives got, the more successful the company got, the better our team got. The more we focus and drill down to just the one true focus that we want to do. It took off we even there’s even things within our focus that we thought that are good things like we had a mastermind called Black Label. One of my favorite things we ever did, had as a reference for three, four years we ran that we finally had to do simpliciter subtraction and successfully subtraction. We looked at it we said you know what? This is actually a distraction from our true focus. And we actually can make more impact by cutting this out, shutting it down or temporarily, in my mind is always temporarily because it makes it easier for me to live with. It may be temporarily or it may not be, but if I ever said to shut it down forever, I could have never shut it down. So you have to figure out how to work with your own brain to make those things happen. But once we did that, which most people would say, oh, that fits within your business model, you should keep it that’s not true. It was a distraction from the main push the main focus. And as soon as we dialed in on that, it’s been, you know, ridiculous growth. And so like it’s a lot easier.

Richard Matthews 41:38
So I have some interesting questions just in light of that because it’s something like that I’m struggling with my own head right now as my business grows like we for you know, I’m not sure when this will, this will air but like tax day was yesterday and right. I just had my biggest tax bill I’ve ever gotten from the government, which is kind of a cool place to be in. Yeah, I have to like to start looking at more advanced tax strategies. So that’s always fun. But one of the things that I’m looking at Now is like, I want to start, you know diversifying income a little bit and like putting money into maybe real estate or into some other, you know, maybe dividend-paying stocks and stuff like that. How do you? How do you? What do you say? Like, how do you keep that together with having a very singularly focused business and realizing that personally, you still might want to take the profits and the stuff that you do in your business and put them into other things without letting that distract your focus?

Tanner Larsson 42:25
So first, I think we’re almost looking at two different things. But one thing I will say is, that’s the most important thing you can do. I have made if I had kept even half of all the money that I have blown on stupid stuff. I could have my own island right now. But I didn’t. I lived I made money. I spent I mean ridiculous amounts of money going out. I had a great life. A lot of fun, didn’t have anything to show for it wasn’t until I grew up a little bit, but I realized, Oh, you know what, I should have kept some of that. So 100% like you should be taking the money from your business, reinvest into it, but always putting some aside and then investing that into things that can grow your money without you doing it. That hundred percent and Matt and I are big, big believers in that we build grow scale is our living. And we’re building our scale for us is not an equitable company we’re not trying to accident it’s a it’s our passions our play but the money that we make from that goes into other ventures that we can, you know, potentially exit or just grow on their own and make money, whether they’re hard money loans, real estate, things like that.

Richard Matthews 43:24
The question is, how do you keep that from distracting your focus?

Tanner Larsson 43:27
So, you kind of, has to do a couple of things. Number one, like if it’s a passion area, like let’s say you like trading options trading or something like that if you want to do that, and that’s like your thing like your hobby or something, that’s cool. But don’t try to build a business and then a course and then a service and then everything else doing that. Just make that your thing. But if you want to start investing, doing options, and real estate, and hard money lending and all these different things are not the right thing. You can’t you personally can’t do that. The only way you could if you assemble the team, where someone actually has to have like runs that for you, and they report to you The other way that we do it like we do a lot of real estates investing as well, we don’t actively do it ourselves. We go through a guy who actually does the his business, and we become investors and partners with him. If you can’t become a partner, you find someone who actually needs money for flips or for whatever else, and you just became a silent investor. That way you get into the real estate market, but you’re not actually doing it or you pay him to find you a property if you want to get rental, but you don’t actively go out and learn the expertise and become the person who can go do those things. Because, again, it’s a distraction of your main focus, if I’ll give up and I used to not think this way, but I would easily give up, five or six points if I can not have to touch it and it’s going to work. You know, and let someone else do returns a small piece of the pie with no time direct investment. But yes, you know, that’s a big thing too, because it can be very easy. I got really into hard money loans for real estate and different people. And I got really excited about that and like, building out this thing, getting all into it. And I realized that it was taking so much time away from my actual running of the business that I had to stop doing. I was just like, Okay, well, I’ll loan on this, I can loan on cars, or 8%, I could do all this different thing and have all these different people pay me money, and make interest on it. And I said You know what, this isn’t gonna work. I’m just gonna find one. I actually have three people now, the only people I lend hard money to. And it’s cuz they can take as much as they need. But that way, I don’t have to deal with 70 different loans and try tracking them down because it becomes a full-time job. With these three, it’s very simple. We have a system that works and I keep making money and one of them has the demand that he has more business than he can handle. So he needs more money than I can give him which is great. So whenever I have extra, I can throw it at him and it gets invested.

Richard Matthews 45:58
It’s really awesome. That’s a good way to like think about it too, because we’re like, I’m not there yet. But I know like that’s where the trajectory is. So it’s good to hear a little bit of like how you’re thinking about that aspect of growing your business and how you keep your focus. So thank you for that. So my next question for you is more on the practical side, right so we call this the Heroes Toolbelt. Maybe you got a big magical hammer like Thor or bulletproof vest, like your neighborhood police officer, maybe you just really love Evernote, what are some of the tools that you guys use in Build-Grow-Scale that you couldn’t live without that you couldn’t do what you do for your clients without those tools. And you know, just couple, maybe one or two of the big ones that you guys use all the time.

Tanner Larsson 46:39
So, from a big standpoint, there are three big tools that we could not live without one of which most people can afford the other two, they might not want to they are pricier. Lucky Orange for browser tracking and heat mapping and all of that kind of stuff is just amazing. Session recording, we use that a ton. We were one of their biggest users on the platform we have we use more impressions than almost any other customer they’ve had. Then we also use https://www.convert.com/ is what we use for split testing. Google Optimize is great for smaller sites. But when you want to get like into the big stuff, convert.com is a great tool for that. And then one of the ones that help us find massive, massive wins is Browser Stack. And Browser Stack is a total geek tool that allows you to basically, because all browsers every time a new update comes out doesn’t mean everybody updates to the new browser. So people are on different versions of browsers. So browser stack lets you test every browser along with every version. And you can see how your different your site’s performing, go back and figure out what you need to fix and on each different browsers segment. Some of the biggest wins and restores in the source performance can be found in browser testing.

Richard Matthews 47:56
Interesting, so I’m just out of curiosity. I know a lot of your partners and whatnot operate on the Shopify platform. Does Shopify offer the ability to do things like speed enhancements? I know like speed is a really big deal for conversion.

Tanner Larsson 48:12
So they don’t, they don’t offer anything like that. But the ability to do it is there in the code. I mean, there are simple things you can do like optimizing your images and things like that. But from a code standpoint, there’s a lot that can be done to speed up a Shopify store. Some of its simple, some of its pretty intense to do. But it does make a big difference. Speed is one of the most important things that you can do. Amazon actually reports that for every one second of speed, increased performance that they get on their store, their conversions go up by 2%. Now, they obviously are so damn optimized already that they can’t gain a second all the time, but they’re constantly micro tuning to get that fraction of a second because it means a massive impact to them. So and we see the same kind of numbers. Speed is huge.

Richard Matthews 49:00
And I know like with your Amazon size 2% change over a billion transactions is a lot of money.

Tanner Larsson 49:07
Yes, it is. Even a fraction of a piece of that is a big chunk.

Richard Matthews 49:12
Absolutely. So the reason I ask is because like a lot of the other platforms are generally self-hosted. Right? So everything from like WooCommerce or big commerce, stuff like that, where you control the server, but something like Shopify, you don’t control the server. So you don’t that’s like a big chunk of your speed stuff. I’m just curious where that fit in for you guys.

Tanner Larsson 49:29
I mean, there are some limitations. Anytime you use a hosted platform. You know, the truth of the matter is, whether you’re on WordPress by doing WooCommerce, or Magento, or big commerce or I mean, even 3d card or any of the other I’m not that I would ever suggest anybody go on 3d cart. It’s just very in. But any of those platforms or Shopify. There’s some part of your site that’s making server calls, like external calls, whether it’s from an app or something else that you’re using or a plugin or something. Calling external files that you’re waiting on as part of your load time. So you do the best you can. And then you can also do lazy low techniques where you’re having certain things load later in the queue to make sure that everything that’s more important gets loaded first. And then those lagging ones, you can let that come later. So there’s a lot of different tricks you can workaround to deal with this stuff where you actually have to call out or wait for other server times and Shopify from for their thing. They’ve done a pretty good job, and they are keeping their servers speeds up and making things faster. The ones that have not that really suck at that, and sorry, Russell, but it’s Click Funnels. There they have some of the slowest server call type stuff, you cannot do hardly anything to improve page performance and speed on a Click Funnels page. Which sucks Oh, I love the platform its slow.

Richard Matthews 50:55
So, my curious question for you then is just of all the things that You can do to improve conversion for a website, what’s your guys’s first like, go to that you recommend to clients all the time? Is it something like server speed? Or is it like tracking? You know, the doing setting up tracking? Like, what’s one of the big things that you guys always start with for like, Hey, if you’re – you would immediately

Tanner Larsson 51:17
The number one thing is setting up Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager correctly. And that’s the problem. Honestly, Google, it’s amazing software, amazing program. The problem is it’s not user friendly. It’s not very easy to set up correctly. And the problem is it will report data, however you have it set up as if that data is accurate. You have no way to know that it’s not going to say oh, this data might not be accurate. It’s just going to show it to you and you’re going to think it’s good. We’ve never and all the years we’ve been doing this, we’ve never had a single store that we’ve worked on, come in with our data perfect. Even our own. We’ve had to fix our own and we’ve gotten really good at it. But clients will always say oh yeah, our data is perfect. We’ve got it good and we go in there and we realize No, it’s not we change it. And they realize that a lot of their stuff they were making decisions on was inaccurate. So the first thing we do go in and dial in Google Analytics, set up Google Tag Manager and tag every aspect of the site, every link, every image, every video, every everything, every button. So no matter what’s clicked on, we can track it all the way through to the end conversion. And see, you know, people who click on the About Us page, what do they convert that people who watch 30 seconds of this video, they converted this to watch 45 seconds convert this and we start collecting that data. Because Google Analytics data is only forward collecting. It’s not we can’t go backward. So the sooner we can get that the sooner we can start establishing what their true baselines are and look for gaps in the data to optimize on and then we find the low hanging fruit. The second thing once we get the data going is we start working on the bounce rate.

Richard Matthews 52:51
Bounce rate is when someone hits a page and then leaves versus a person continues on.

Tanner Larsson 52:56
Hits the page, however long and then they leave what you know. So the idea is to reduce bounce rate as low as possible. So that more time on-site that typically, bounce rate is caused by a couple main things. But the biggest things is slow sites. And sites that cause confusion or don’t provide clarity that they’re actually in the place that they want to go. So they click off an ad expecting to go to a purse store and they land on a store that looks like Walmart. But they just clicked on a purse like where’s Why am I not seeing that purse? That confusion caused? Where’s the purse? Yeah. So they exit those -? Clarity and consistency. But this speed is the number one, especially on mobile, because you think about it. When mobile stuff loads slow. We are we’re already doing mobile because we have no attention span. So it’s even worse when the site doesn’t load on mobile fast. or poor, you know, on mobile as well.

Richard Matthews 53:53
Like, I have a lot of patience because I do web development. But if you get to like three or four seconds, I’m leaving.

Tanner Larsson 54:00
Well, there’s an example. One of our favorite companies we buy. We like to buy cars from Matt and I go to Charlotte McLaren. They’re a great company. Good, good guys. We love them. Their website is so terrible on mobile that when we were trying to look at cars and it just does not work. When we were in the airport when we were doing this the first time because we had talked to the guys on the phone they’re like, just go to our website. We call them back and said, Guys, we’re not we literally are over the car. Like you know why it’s beautiful. You can’t even find it. The website was so bad that we almost never did business with him. If it wasn’t for the personal phone support from the owners, we would never have bought cars from them.

Richard Matthews 54:44
That’s amazing. And it does it changes the game for people I know. Like, if you just anecdotally talking to people like my wife and other people that you know that I interact with on a regular basis. They have a lot less patience than I do. Oh yeah. So, they’re like, if it doesn’t work the way that I think it should work the first time I just, they’re just deleted, I’m gonna go back there and talk about them. There’s just like that. Never again

You’re out of my life. We are not Facebook friends anymore. You’re done we’re done right like life is over.

I’m blocked that company don’t show me their ads anymore

Tanner Larsson 55:22
And she’s the perfect consumer. Like my wife loves to buy everything. So you know, if but if she does if she if the site doesn’t work the way she thinks it is, like she like an important person that it should work for her. She is the end-user. That’s the other thing store owners all the time we get on the store. We’re like, I tried to do something. And I’m pretty good at stores, like I know how to make them work. And I’ll get I’m like, wait a minute, this wasn’t right. And they’ll be like, Oh, well, you have to go here to do that. Because of this. And I’m like, “Are you on the phone with every person who visits your site to tell them that?” Well, no. So then, how do they know? Because the site works for you, the store owner because you know the ins and outs, but the end-user can’t use it.

Richard Matthews 56:03
And drive you bonkers. So my next question for you has to do with your own personal heroes, right? So just like Frodo had Gandalf or Luke, had Obi-Wan or Robert Kiyosaki had his Rich Dad. Who were some of your heroes? Were they real-life mentors? Peers who were a couple of years ahead of you? Maybe speakers or authors? And how important were they at what you’ve accomplished so far in your life, in your businesses?

Tanner Larsson 56:23
Well, for sure Yoda like he’s number one. Yoda’s, big. And then -. He’s just like a I want armor like that. He’s just awesome. But in real life, I would say a current heroes slash mentor who I have not yet met who I plan to is Road Less Stupid, keep telling him that he has had a massive impact in the way I’ve reshaped. And Matt and I both have and actually it’s like the required reading in our company. That important of a book. But he’s been very influential. Just in the way he thinks about business and like the common things that we don’t like to admit, or think about as, as business owners, like the whole starvation over indigestion type thing, it’s true, but we don’t look at it that way. We like to bandaid stuff instead of solving the actual problem. You know, he’s probably the most current guy that I’m like really, really enamored with. I love watching, some of the bigger guys. I like working with Elon and those guys are doing just from like, a big picture like man, you could you literally can do anything you want. Like, those guys are printed. Anything in the world is possible. How I want to have a rocket company and put stuff people cool. I want to launch my roadster into space, so he just does it. So whenever I started having like that kind of, like, self-doubt, like “Oh, we can’t do that.” I like to look at guys like that and just be like, of course, I can. I can do anything I want like, look at that. If he can launch this car in the space just cause. I can for sure launch this next course or, go change, change the ecommerce industry, you know, things like that.

Richard Matthews 58:11
Get a book written or do whatever it is you’re gonna do.

Tanner Larsson 58:16
We limit ourselves so heavily but I actually get and I also get inspired by just you know most of our clients like seeing these guys taking a business you know an idea from scratch, grinding putting blood sweat and tears and staying the course to develop a you know, these amazing companies that are transforming their industries, their space and making it a big deal. Like, I love watching that and I get ideas from him and inspiration all the time.

Richard Matthews 58:45
Absolutely, that’s really cool. And I like the like I do the same thing where you look at people who are like, doing really cool things. And you’re like, I know that I’m at least as smart as that guy or that girl. If you can do it, I can do it.

Tanner Larsson 59:01
I totally own up to the fact that I do not think I’m as smart as Elon I’m not that kind of brainiac. That’s just the way I think but not I do believe that anything’s possible.

Richard Matthews 59:13
I don’t know if I’m on Elon level, but there’s a lot of people you see in business you’re like, I don’t know how that guy can even like tie his shoes in the morning –

Tanner Larsson 59:22
Totally. And, like, for sure. And it’s, I think that’s the self-belief because the biggest critic we ever have in our life is ourselves, right? We’re the ones that are going to be harder and ruder and meaner. Like, honestly, if we had the opportunity, we wouldn’t even be friends with ourselves. Because no one is going to be as mean to us as ourselves. Like, we would not choose to be friends with us. So, if we just need to distance ourselves from, and realize that it’s all head trash. It’s all bullshit in your head telling you that you can’t do something or whatever stopping you from doing it. It’s only you. There’s nobody else stopping you and to evolve. But it’s really true. When you really really get down, remember that you are not your best friend. You actually – yourself.

Richard Matthews 1:00:07
And that’s actually one of the reasons why we talk about you know your heroes right? Because it’s those people that help you get over your own head trash in some form or fashion.

Tanner Larsson 1:00:17
I mean in terms of out of my own head trash would really be my COO Zach and my business partner, Matt. Those two like we collectively together spend a lot of time talking to each other out of our own stupidity and head trash and just like self-doubt stuff, actually build that into our, we have two weekly calls that are dedicated to that.

Richard Matthews 1:00:39
I actually, I have my best friend and I do that we run separate companies, but we do that all the time. We get on the phone a couple times a week. And literally, it’s just like, Hey, I’m gonna like you shouldn’t you should stop thinking that way. It’s your own head trash. Gotta get out of it, move on, get it done.

You gotta have your running partners, whether they’re a co-owner or something like that, or running partner and other business. It’s really important aspect of having someone to kick in the ass when you need it.

Tanner Larsson 1:00:54
You need it.

And even just reassure you that you’re good and everything is okay. One of the things that Matt does to me all the time is, I’ll be like, Oh, man, this, man, this sucks, like, we’re not doing well or something’s bad. He’s like, do you need me to loan you money for groceries? Are you and I’m like, shut up, like, I’m fine. But that’s the thing. Like, it pisses me off every time because like, I’m asking like, the world is ending. And he’s like, do you need money for groceries? Because you’re really not. Nothing’s wrong.

Richard Matthews 1:01:40
He’s like, stop being a toddler. You’re fine.

Tanner Larsson 1:01:42
We had an ad turned off. You know, it’s not a big deal.

Richard Matthews 1:01:47
That’s funny. I can totally see that being a thing that like I would need right where that where it’s like, it’s like blow up because it’s not working. And so, we’re taking the asker like you’re breathing you have food. You have a wife, you have beautiful children like this. That’s exactly what it comes down to.

Tanner Larsson 1:02:05
And he knows how to needle me on it. And it just pisses me off to no end. But it gets me out of that little tirade and funk.

Richard Matthews 1:02:11
Absolutely. So I want to bring it home for our listeners and talk a little bit about your guiding principles. That’s our last sort of question. And what are the top one or two principles or actions that you personally put in place every single day that you think have an impact and contribute to the success and influence that you guys enjoy at Build-Grow-Scale?

Tanner Larsson 1:02:32
So, I think a big part of it is, well for me, I mean, I have like morning routines, some kind of consistency to your day every day. One thing for our company, though, like we have a gratitude practice in our company that all of our team members start the day with a gratitude post in slack that we all get to be a part of, and it’s a three-part thing. I have explained why. The first part is gratitude for something in something person, place or thing in your, in your personal life and why. Gratitude for something in your professional life person place a thing and why gratitude for something about yourself, and why. And those three things and we post that. And so, people have all seen this stuff out, gratitude like that literally can like change the neural plasticity in your brain and like rewire your brain for happiness and positivity and better thoughts and I didn’t buy into all that crap for a long time. And now, I literally eat, sleep and breathe it. Because we saw that the complete shift in our company and the happiness of our employees and just everything. So, for us, gratitude is huge. And it’s not going to be material but just gratitude and everybody expressing it and reading everybody else’s gratitude ties the community together create a better culture and everybody is just happier. For us, delivering excellence is a core guiding principle of who we are. We don’t do anything without excellence like anything that we do in the company. Whether it’s a company facing or inward-facing or external customer-facing is a big thing for us. And it’s in our culture if someone doesn’t have that kind of belief about themselves in the way they want to operate, and you know, they’re not going to last in our worlds because it’s just not that we don’t like them, they just don’t fit, they won’t feel comfortable. And the other thing is a success by subtraction, simplicity. And focus that ball of energy, we can go one direction very, very well, or we can go five directions very -. So let’s stay in that one direction.

Richard Matthews 1:04:35
I have a further sort of question on that just in terms of like you having a larger team. And so you have your company’s focus, like the one thing that you do, how do you guys manage keeping people in the place where their focus is lined up directly with their zone of genius? Where they’re operating in really good places? How do you guys manage that as a company?

Tanner Larsson 1:04:56
So I’d love to take credit for that, but that’s literally Zach, that’s one of his skill sets is figuring out and he and Matt have spent a lot of time. We’ve done a lot of personality testing a lot of different things like that. And, you know, interviewing and figuring out what our people are good at. We’ve had a lot of people in the wrong roles that we’ve moved around. And now that they were people, we actually one of the girls on our team who’s a rock star, we actually let her go. And then realize, I think we just had her in the wrong position, we moved her to a new position, and she helps dial in our entire internship program to train all of our team members internally. And she’s by far one of the most amazing people on our team. But we actually fired her and then brought her back. So what keeps them focused, though, on what they are, is that you know, that’s where it comes down to. We break things down into pods and groups of people like they have different focuses and different things that they’re supposed to focus on. The biggest part is me, not coming in company-wide and going, Okay, here’s my new idea. Because that is what derails folks. Because our course curriculum team has decided our course frameworks and all of our educational design stuff. They’re working on it. And they’re like thinking, Okay, my job is to do educational design and map this out. And then I tell the company, “Okay, guys, tomorrow, we’re going to go create this and we’re going to make, we’re going to onboard 75 amp partners.” Like okay, so do I design a course curriculum or do I help partners? That’s where how you keep them focused, is you don’t let people like me get in there and throw all my 30,000 ideas that I have a day into the mix. That has to stay

Richard Matthews 1:06:39
A filter.

Tanner Larsson 1:06:40
That goes between me, Zach, and Matt, and it does not get pushed out. But the other thing is there has to be a team lead or a department lead if you will, that has that ability to stay focused as one of their core skill sets. In terms of just how they operate. They don’t get distracted easily. They’re easy. They’re able to stay the course. And then, they have to have regular check-ins, with whoever their higher level is, whether it’s Zack or me or Matt, to, you know, make sure that what they’re keeping their team focused on. Is it still in alignment with the vision of whatever the next step of the process is? It’s actually not that complicated to do, as long as you don’t have that maniac monkey running around, distracting everybody. And that’s honestly what kills more big companies and teams is that maniac monkey, and I have a lot of friends who are just like me, who are that maniac monkey, who is basically like taking, like if your company has a horse and you have the reins and you’re just getting into the head around like this and it doesn’t know where to go. It can’t even take a step because you’re so excited to go 75 different directions.

Richard Matthews 1:07:50
Absolutely. So it helps having someone to filter that or give you a place to go and like get it all out.

Tanner Larsson 1:07:58
Instead of getting it all in one of your fleets. Do I get it all? Like, okay, so of those, which one is the most important? Well, they all are. No, let’s break it down, you know, which one’s the most important which one actually fits with what we’re doing. So we kind of, a process of elimination. And usually, we wind up with, none of them are the right thing. Because if you go with simplicity and focus, and success by subtraction, the reality is, is that there are lots of good ideas, but most good ideas are not for now. They’re for later. So and if it’s really a good idea unless it’s Uber, then it’s a good idea later to otherwise it’s not really a good idea. So, if it’s not the next Uber, it’ll be a good idea later if it’s truly a good idea, and you’re better off staying focused on what you’re doing.

Richard Matthews 1:08:47
It’s not gonna die on the vine, waiting for its time. So that basically wraps up the interview portion. I have one last thing we do on our show every time I call this the hero’s challenge. It’s pretty simple. And we do it on every show. And it’s basically it’s you have someone in your life or in your network that you think has a cool entrepreneurial story. Who are they? First names are ok. Finally, why do you think they should come to The Hero Show and share their story with our audience?

Tanner Larsson 1:09:14
A couple of buddies.

Richard Matthews 1:09:17
Can’t be Matt though, because Matt’s already booked.

Tanner Larsson 1:09:19
No, Matt’s already on it. You should really get Matt on here. Well, honestly, if you want to talk more of like the team-building stuff and how to structure and make things work with a big team, you should probably get Zach, on here. But that’d be a lot of Build Grow Scale people and you probably want some diversity. So, Vinnie Fisher would be a good one to interview. Vinnie is CEO of Fully Accountable. He’s also built some massive nine-figure companies used to own brain host built from the ground up, he’d be really cool if you haven’t had him. He’s one of those crazy monkeys that yanks things around. That’s, he could tell you all kinds of stories about that and how to fix it. Another one would be Justine Singletary from Fulfillment.com. Justin is an ex-sniper Ranger, done some really really cool stuff, and then decided to move into the business world. Built a ridiculously awesome fulfillment company has a really cool story and hero’s journey, which is kind of like your show. So he’d be a good one to get on. And he’d love to do stuff like this. And you should want to get Pat on here. – has an awesome story.

Richard Matthews 1:10:26
I’ve been chatting chat chit chat with Pat, he’s a really neat guy.

Tanner Larsson 1:10:32
-a million things going.

Richard Matthews 1:10:35
I know and he’s very dedicated to what he’s doing really loves his audience. Why not? It’s cool to see. So at this point, I just want to thank you so much for coming on the show. And I really appreciate it. My last question for you is where can people find you? Where can they get ahold of you? What are some of the things that pick up your book, or here’s some of your training or that kind of stuff, and who were like the ideal people to reach out to Build-Grow-Scale?

Tanner Larsson 1:10:58
Gotcha. So, ideal people to reach out to Build-Grow-Scale, we are launching a new, like a beginner program, which we haven’t had in the past. So if you’re looking to start an e-commerce business, we can actually give you the foundational training now that will help you get going. If you’re an established e-commerce business, and you’re looking to grow, we’re definitely the ones that come to you for that. And then, you know, the Find us https://buildgrowscale.com/ is by far the easiest. You can find all of our different programs there all of our free content is with Richard’s help. We’ve now got our podcasts and our blog going. And actually, our YouTube channel is going with some really awesome content. Actually, we just released a six-part series on our blog that honestly we might take down and make a course because it’s a little bit too detailed, but it’s there for now. So, if you guys want to check that out, again, https://buildgrowscale.com/

Richard Matthews 1:11:45
Go really quick.

Tanner Larsson 1:11:47
And if you want my book, go to Amazon, you can grab it. I would say go to our book funnel, but we’re about to pull that down and change it around. So just go grab it on Amazon, get prime shipping and it’ll knock you out. Put you to sleep for sure.

Richard Matthews 1:12:02
Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on. Man. I really appreciate you have any final words of wisdom for our audience before we hit the little stop record button here.

Tanner Larsson 1:12:09
Quit trying to do too many things. That’s the biggest thing like, narrow it down, simplify focus and just drive home with that one thing.

Richard Matthews 1:12:18
Awesome. Thank you so much Tanner. Appreciate it.

Tanner Larsson 1:12:20
Yeah, thanks for having me.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai