Money Making Expert: How to Turn Attention into $$$

Rory Vaden discusses the importance of automation in personal branding, emphasizing that personal branding is essentially the digitization of one's reputation. He also highlights the importance of being mission-driven and obsessively passionate about one's work, ultimately leading to greater success and impact. Codie and Rory emphasize that trust and reputation are foundational to success in any venture. Powerful email & SMS marketing - without the insane cost. That’s why I use Omnisend. It does everything I need to grow - and more. Start scaling smart with Omnisend here: ⁠https://your.omnisend.com/codiesanchez30 To request a free brand strategy call with Rory’s team visit http://freebrandcall.com/codie To download the national research study Rory talked about in this interview visit http://freebrandstudy.com/codie To download a free early release audiobook of Rory’s brand new book visit http://freebrandaudiobook.com/codie Want help scaling your business to $1M in monthly revenue? ⁠Click here⁠ to connect with my consulting team. Chapters 00:00 The Power of Automation and Personal Branding 02:46 Building Your Online Presence: Starting from Scratch 06:06 Identifying Your Audience and Their Needs 09:09 Creating Value: The Key to Building Trust 11:56 The Importance of Giving First 15:01 Depth vs. Width: Serving a Smaller Audience 17:46 Fractal Math: Maximizing Revenue Without New Customers 20:54 Mission-Driven Messengers: The Future of Personal Branding 23:52 Obsessive Passion: The Key to Success 26:55 Finding and Exploiting Your Uniqueness 31:39 The Power of Obsession in Service 34:01 Revenue Stream Assessment: Finding Your Focus 41:14 Crafting Your Expertise: The Roadmap to Recognition 47:40 The Importance of Books in Building Trust 52:43 Frameworks for Success: Productizing Services 55:35 The Role of Personal Branding in Business Growth 01:00:00 Trust and Reputation: The Cornerstones of Success MORE FROM BIGDEAL: 🎥 ⁠YouTube⁠ 📸 ⁠Instagram⁠ 📽️ ⁠TikTok⁠ MORE FROM CODIE SANCHEZ: 🎥 ⁠YouTube⁠ 📸 ⁠Instagram⁠ 📽️ ⁠TikTok⁠ OTHER THINGS WE DO: 🫂 ⁠Our community⁠ 📰 ⁠Free newsletter⁠ 🏦 ⁠Biz buying course⁠ 🏠 ⁠Resibrands⁠ 💰 ⁠CT Capital⁠ 🏙️ ⁠Main St Hold Co⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Automation is to your time what compounding interest is to your money.

• 0:06Codie Sanchez?

  If you have ever wanted to grow on social media, to be seen as an expert in what you do, to leverage audience to make more money, to get more sales, and to figure out how the biggest names in the world actually got there, this interview is for you. This is an interview with Rory Vaden, who is a multiple times New York Times bestselling author himself, and he has created what I would say is the formula for growing online, growing audience, and then figuring out how do you make more money in your business and your life, once you become an expert.

• 0:38Speaker 00

  When you have a genuine passion for helping other people, and if you can obsess about it, the way that Dave's obsessed about getting people out of debt, the way that Lewis obsesses about helping people overcome self doubt, your world starts to change, and you start to change the world of people around you.

• 0:54Codie Sanchez?

  You have a lot of systems and ideas for how you get people to think in frameworks.

• 0:59Speaker 00

  Think about it like a rocket. Your personal brand should be the sort of side boosters that you use to get the business off the ground, but then, once you get it launched out into space, then your personal brand falls off, and the business can just sort of follow a trajectory and live on without you.

• 1:16Codie Sanchez?

  Interesting.

• 1:17Speaker 00

  The best form of marketing in the world is

• 1:23Codie Sanchez?

  This is the Big Deal Podcast, and I'm Codie Sanchez. This interview is really interesting. It's hyper tactical. If you don't want to learn about how to make more money online, and you don't want to learn about how to grow online, you're going to hate this interview. But if you do like that, I would sit down, grab a pen, listen up, maybe listen to it twice, because this man has not only done this for himself, but for many, many others. Without further ado, I want to bring you my dear friend Rory, and I want to get into it. So, when I was thinking about writing my book, and then I was thinking about marketing my book, there was sort of one human I called all the time, which was you, and we talked about, man, you know, how do I get on the right stages? How do I make this go really viral? You know, who are the people that are behind sort of the biggest names in the world?

• 2:07Codie Sanchez?

  And your name obviously came up, and we've shared many a stage now across the country. But you know, today, I I thought we could start.

• 2:14Speaker 00

  By the way, that book went New York Times Bestseller, baby. Didn't it? It sure did.

• 2:18Codie Sanchez?

  And you said we were going to too. I was like, I don't know. Is it?

• 2:22Speaker 00

  It was, it was awesome. I'm proud of you, dude.

• 2:24Codie Sanchez?

  Well, thanks. You helped a lot. We, um, mini a late night, uh, text and we were joking, but I hate voice notes. You love voice notes. So I had to outlaw them.

• 2:34Speaker 00

  We had conflict.

• 2:34Codie Sanchez?

  I know exactly, except they were so good that I had to listen to them, which was so annoying for me, too.

• 2:39Speaker 00

  And then you, I learned a lot because you were like, hey, I need you to communicate with me in writing. And I was like, okay, that's good. I will write, I will write it out for you.

• 2:46Codie Sanchez?

  Cody is honest. Cody is too honest. Um, but where I thought we could start for people today was, um, I believe that the internet and attention is the most powerful weapon that you have today in the 21st century. And if you have money, you can buy attention. Uh, but if you don't have money, you can't buy attention. And so for people today, I was kind of thinking, if we could break this down from, let's say, right now, you have no audience, no followers. Where would you start?

• 3:15Speaker 00

  Yeah. I, I mean, you, you have to start by changing how you think about online. I mean, I think when we talk about personal branding, people, their mind goes crazy to like TikTok and, and, and algorithms and brand guidelines and colors and logos and fonts. The way that we define it is that personal branding is simply the digitization of your reputation. So what I would want, if you're just starting out, what I would say is, remember that this is reputation. It is as old as time. Like what matters more than the number of followers you have is the depth of trust that your followers have with you. And so people get all freaked out about like who they're going to be on camera and what they're going to say.

• 3:59Speaker 00

  And it's like, be who you are in real life. Be someone that is an expert. Be someone who adds values to people to that. Be someone who adds value to people's lives and, and build trust first and foremost.

• 4:12Codie Sanchez?

  Love it. So if we were going to get super tactical.

• 4:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:15Codie Sanchez?

  So first we got to start out with. Getting an online following is really just reputation increase, right? But if, if somebody came to me and they were like, I want to grow my personal brand fast and I want to follow your system, Rory. What would be the first couple of steps that you would tell them? Do you have like a steps one through 10?

• 4:32Speaker 00

  Sure. Let's, here's what I would say. Don't start with why, start with who. So I love Simon Sinek and, but when you're building a personal brand, what matters most is being clear on who you're talking to. The sooner, once you're clear on who you're talking to, every other downstream decision becomes clear. What are their problems? What content will attract them? What can I sell to them? How much can they afford? What do they need? Where are they? How do I reach them? If you are unclear on your who, every other decision becomes fuzzy. Like, what do I say? What do they want to hear? What topics? What it's, if you have diluted focus, you get diluted results. So you have to get crystal clear on who you're talking to. Now, the shortcut on this to figure out who is your who?

• 5:17Speaker 00

  What we realized is that for all of us, you are most powerfully positioned to serve the person you once were. You are most powerfully positioned to serve the person you once were. That's the fastest path to get clear on your who. And once you nail that, now all of a sudden I go, I can serve that person in the deepest way. And now all of a sudden you have, you have a chance to make content that breaks through the noise. So that's the first place you start with who.

• 5:44Codie Sanchez?

  That's so true, which is basically just like in business, you build an avatar. You build your digital avatar, who's going to be the person you sell things to. And if you're selling attention, it's the same exact thing, right?

• 5:53Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 5:54Codie Sanchez?

  And, and the biggest problem I think most founders have is they think, oh, it's my product. You know, I need to sell this coffee. The coffee's not selling because the coffee's not perfect enough. But often your problem is actually you don't know who you're selling to. And so you never can.

• 6:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. And look what you're doing. I mean, you, you are, you are serving the person you once were. You're teaching people how to do all of the things. Same with us, right? What are we doing? We're helping experts, entrepreneurs, speakers, authors, coaches, whatever. Because we've been in this space our, our entire career. That's the shortcut.

• 6:22Codie Sanchez?

  Let me guess, you've got one tool for email, one for SMS and another for forms, maybe a separate dashboard for analytics? And somehow you're still not sure if anything's working? That's, I think the reality for most e-commerce brands, bloated tech stacks that eat time, wreck your margins and require a full-time ops person just to function. Omnisend changes that. It's a single platform where email, SMS, signup forms, automation, segmentations, analytics, all live in one clean dashboard. You get powerful tools without the learning curve or the price creep. You can launch campaigns in minutes, not hours, and you can buy customer journeys that trigger automatically based on behavior. And the data, it tells you what's working, what's not, and where to double down. Whether you're running lean or managing a growing team,

• 7:05Codie Sanchez?

  Omnisend makes your marketing operate like a real system, not a to-do list. So if your stack feels like duct tape and prayer, it's time to upgrade. Omnisend was built for brands that are serious about scale. So after you've figured out your who, what is next if you want to grow online?

• 7:19Speaker 00

  Be able to answer this one question in one word. What problem do you solve for that person? If you look at some of the biggest personal brands in the world, you know, I think of like Brene Brown. Brene Brown owns the topic of shame. She has studied shame for decades and she became one of the world's leading thinkers, one of the most influential people in the world because she owns that topic. You look at Dave Ramsey, Dave Ramsey owns the topic of debt. Like he owns that, he owns that word. This is part of how I broke through the wall originally in our first company. All I did was study procrastination, was the psychology of getting people to do things they didn't want to do, right?

• 7:59Speaker 00

  My, my first book was Take the Stairs and it was just a metaphor for how to get yourself to do the stuff you hate doing. Brand Builders Group now, the word that we solve is obscurity. All we do is help people become more wealthy and well-known. So most personal brands cannot speak with a level of clarity about what is the problem they solve for people. And in order for people to pay attention, I have to be able to solve a problem for them, or I at least have to be useful for them. So I would try to narrow that down to one word. And then I would also make a list of maybe 52 questions that your prospect has about the problem that you solve for them. And I would start systematically addressing them.

• 8:41Speaker 00

  And I'm just trying to go, how can I be so useful? That they can't ignore me. How can I be so valuable that they have to pay attention? You know, when I got introduced to you, that it's like when you get, when you meet high profile people, you can't just jump in and sell them stuff. The goal should be, how can I be so useful? They have to pay attention to me. At least that's, that's the goal. That's our strategy.

• 9:08Codie Sanchez?

  It's actually so true. A lot of times people will say, how do you get a mentor? How do you get a mentor? And I think the answer to how you get a mentor is exactly that. Make yourself so useful that you become so valuable to them for $0 that they end up eventually wanting to pay you a lot of zeros. And it is this weird flip. And I think a lot of people struggle with that early on because they're like, well, I don't know anything. How am I going to be useful to a Rory, right? Or how am I going to be useful to a Dave Ramsey? But they don't realize that all of us, we have actually just massively more needs. The more successful you become, the more holes you have to fill. And so anywhere that you find some curiosity for a super famous person or for a super successful person,

• 9:49Codie Sanchez?

  and you think, God, I just want to go down this rabbit hole. And I looked at their website and I found all the spots that I didn't understand. And I went to their social media and I created like three ideas for videos that they didn't have. And I just gave them the scripts. It's almost like this upfront work gives all of this back end opportunity.

• 10:05Speaker 00

  Absolutely. And I would say philosophically, that's another thing that, that the best personal brands in the world do is they, they give first, they serve first, and they allow the money to show up second. It's like paying in rears versus paying in forwards, right? So there's some services we pay and then we get the service. But in the online world, it's like, I have to automate trust at scale. I have to be, I have to, one of our, one of our, our mantras that we say is save the best for first. Save the best piece of content you have for the very next thing that you teach. Like the, you don't have to be scared about giving away all your good stuff. And then no one buying, you have to be scared about not giving away anything good enough

• 10:50Speaker 00

  that nobody ever comes back. So you have to always push yourself to be like, again, it's just that, it's that value throttle. And it's like, how can I increase the throttle here on adding value to everyone around me? And that applies, I think, offline and online. But I mean, the reason people pay attention to you is your content is so freaking good. It's so useful. And I think when you're picking your content strategy, I mean, high level, it's one of the three Es. We call it the three Es. You're either entertaining, and I'm not that entertaining, but some of, some of you are, some of you can be. You have encouraging, so you can be inspiring and uplifting and, and I try to be a little bit about of that. But for most of our clients, it's educational. And it's going, what can I

• 11:35Speaker 00

  teach? And everyone thinks, oh, I don't have anything to teach. And you go, unless you're serving the person you once were, then all of a sudden, all of us are qualified to teach because we've experienced the pain. We've overcome the obstacle. We've walked through the setback. And now all of a sudden, that's all the credibility that I need.

• 11:56Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah, it's such a good point, you know, and it's, you know, one of my mentors said to me, when you get in rooms with people who have more zeros than you, they can actually see into your future because they've been there. And so it's the same idea of, you know, I remember the first time before I was making a million dollars a year, before the business was making eight figures, before the business hit nine figures, I just got lucky in being in rooms where other people already had the business that I wanted. And it, you know, it was wild is because I got to sit next to, you know, John, who had a business that was already doing, you know, eight million dollars a year, back when mine was doing a million dollars a year, John basically said, oh, here's going to be the next five issues that you have. And so because I knew that, since he had already been through it, I got to steal his 10,000 hours. I got to compress seven years into one year from

• 12:40Codie Sanchez?

  his interaction. And so it is, it's a real value, I think, that people don't realize that if you have something to share from your historical lessons, you know, you're doing the world a solid when you put it out there. And I didn't realize that at first because I thought people who taught just couldn't do, we've all heard that adage. And I also thought, well, God, if it works so well, why are you telling other people? You know, why wouldn't you just go do it yourself? And I remember seeing like a clip, we could actually play the clip here, which is from Mark Cuban. And his clip basically said, if they're telling you about how to do it on the internet, it doesn't work because if it worked, they'd just go do it. And I thought that was so funny. Sounds great, except it's wrong because what actually happens is when you give more, you get way more in return.

• 13:23Codie Sanchez?

  You know, and why do you think some of the richest men in the world, Ray Dalio, for instance, are out telling his theory? Because he gets more clients from it. He gets more deals from it. He gets more hires from it. So I think it's super, super powerful to do all of this.

• 13:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, and I would, I would report that there's another massive piece of the transaction that you don't hear enough about, which is, yeah, you get money. Yeah, you get followers. Yeah, you get influence. The other thing you get is significance.

• 13:49Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah.

• 13:50Speaker 00

  You get purpose. You, there is nothing like the feeling you get when you help somebody else succeed. Right? And you go, well, if you're so rich, why don't you go do it? And it's like, well, there's a point where you go, I'm not playing because I need more money. I get my thrills. Like, no kidding. When I walked into your office downstairs, the thing I was so excited to see was right next on your wall is a picture of your book cover that says, New York Times Bestseller. I get, I'm so much more excited when a client has a level of success than even with our own these days. Because you climb that ladder enough times and you realize it's great, and it's, and it's, it's worth doing, but it's still, there's always, you're moving the goalposts.

• 14:33Speaker 00

  There's always, there's always someone bigger than you, something better, there's, there's, there's something, you know, ahead. But when you help somebody succeed, it's not just, it's, it's a feeling you get. It creates context and value for your life. And I think that's what not enough people are talking about with the internet. And the other thing is, you also don't need to have millions of followers to make millions of dollars. One, one thing that the people watching this need to, need to understand is, very few people are gonna be you. They're gonna, there are very few people are gonna reach millions and millions and millions.

• 15:05Speaker 02

  Your sausage McMuffin with egg didn't change, your receipt did. The sausage McMuffin with egg extra value meal includes a hash brown and a small coffee for just $5. Only at McDonald's for a limited time.

• 15:17Speaker 03

  Price and participation may vary. Promotion pricing may be lower than meal pricing.

• 15:20Speaker 00

  The good news is you don't, not everybody has to. It's actually a lot, it tends to be easier for the average person to make more money by serving fewer people in a deeper way, right, than it is to serve lots of people in a very shallow way. It's like you have to, don't be so focused on the width of your reach that you overlook the depth of your impact. Because, just because you have a cat video go viral and you get lots of followers, that doesn't mean that people are gonna trust you and buy from you, right? Just because a lot of people are watching, doesn't mean they're gonna give you their money. Now, you might make money from the platforms, but even that tends to be pennies on the dollars.

• 16:05Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah.

• 16:06Speaker 00

  If I can serve a really small audience in a deep way, if I can be their favorite, if I can be their most trusted, if I can be the person that they look forward to consuming their posts, that they don't just look in their feed, that they search my name, then I go, that person is likely to hire me. And not just buy a $20 book, but someone who might spend a few thousand to tens of thousands of dollars in a program. For most people watching, that's the actual path to get rich. It's to serve a smaller audience in a deeper way. At least, I think that's the more scalable way to do this.

• 16:41Codie Sanchez?

  Give some examples of that, because I totally agree with you. And I think actually, there's a lot of downsides to super big reach, which is you have to almost water down your message slightly to go so wide. And it has a direct anti-correlation to conversion, aka getting people to buy things from you. And so, there's plenty of people who make way more money in their businesses with a much smaller audience set. But like, give some examples. Like, what would that be?

• 17:05Speaker 00

  Well, one example would be us, honestly. So, you know, many of the, a lot of people have heard of our clients, right? You know, like Ed Millet, and Lewis Howes, and Amy Porterfield, like these really amazing clients that we work with. A lot of them have millions of followers. We do not, right? But we're generating multi-eight figures, and you're going, "How? We only have 1,000 customers." And it's actually because of a technique that we call fractal math. Have you, have you, do you?

• 17:29Codie Sanchez?

  No.

• 17:30Speaker 00

  Okay, we need to talk about this. Okay, so, for those of you that aren't numbers people, just stick with me for a second. I'll keep it simple. Fractal math is a strategy that we teach that says 10% of your customers will invest at a level 10 times more than they just did if you give them more intimacy.

• 17:50Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah.

• 17:50Speaker 00

  Um, so let's say you have a thousand customers and a $30 product. Okay, that's 30,000 in revenue. If you said, "How can we double our business?" Most people would think, "Go get another thousand customers." And that's not wrong, but that is the most expensive way to double a business because the most expensive customer is a new customer. So it's not that you shouldn't do that, or that you can't do that, or that it doesn't work. It does work, but there's another way to do it. The other way to do it is to use fractal math. So if you had a thousand people give you $30, fractal math says that 10% of those, which would be 100,

• 18:31Speaker 00

  will give you $300 if you give them a level up in intimacy. And then 10% of the, which is, by the way, that's another 30,000.

• 18:40Codie Sanchez?

  Yep.

• 18:41Speaker 00

  And then 10% of those, which would be 10, would give you $3,000. And 10% of those, which would be 1, would give you $30,000. Here, you've quadrupled the revenue without a single dollar in customer acquisition cost. That's what I mean by going deep. It's by serving a smaller audience in a deeper way. And again, there's nothing wrong with wanting to serve millions of people. But the very definition of reaching millions of people means you have to create content that is applicable to millions of people.

• 19:16Codie Sanchez?

  Yep.

• 19:16Speaker 00

  Which means it tends to be money, relationships, spirituality, health, politics, right? Like, and you tend to kind of have to stay high level. To play that game, it's hard to also serve people in a really, really deep way. It takes a lot of resources to play that with game. So anyways, it's just realizing that there is another way to do this. So you could be a chiropractor and go, I'm going to service a small number of clients in a deeper way. You could be a counselor and say, or you know, say you're a marriage coach. It's one thing to have viral videos about marriage.

• 19:57Speaker 00

  You also can sell books, but you go, are there a few couples that I could truly counsel and go deep with? And you know, as intimacy increases, price increases.

• 20:09Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah, you know, it's wild. So basically, if you wanted to quadruple your business with one move, it would be that. And it's not so much more sophisticated than pricing. But it's really understanding that there's this correlation between pricing and intimacy when it comes to, let's say, knowledge products. You know, it's wild. Over the last two weeks, you are the only reason this podcast has grown. I don't know if you're new here or you've been here for a while and y'all just started sharing more, but you were the only reason that we continue to climb the charts and hopefully provide more and more value for you. We just moved up from top 100 to top 50 in biz on Spotify, which is cool. So thank you for sharing with your friends and thank you for sharing with your employees. And thank you for sharing in your Slack groups and social media and everywhere else.

• 20:54Codie Sanchez?

  And if you like this podcast, please do send it to another human that you care about. Because you are a big deal to me and I know they are a big deal to you too. So it's a beautiful thing to do. Thank you for sharing the pod. I know you have something special for anybody that's listening today. If they want to go and get a free.

• 21:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. So, so we do, we work with people one-on-one. We work, we work in a very intimate way. So if anyone is listening to this and they, they feel the calling to go. I want to share my expertise with more people. I want to share my story with more people. If you go to freebrandcall.com forward slash Cody, you can request a call with our team and we do the first call with everybody for free.

• 21:32Codie Sanchez?

  And you'll tell them if they're, if it's not a good idea for them.

• 21:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, the first thing honestly, what we're going to want to do is we're just going to want to hear your story.

• 21:38Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah.

• 21:38Speaker 00

  We want to go, tell us your story. Where are you at on this journey? How fresh is this idea? Do you have a team? Do you not? And we can work with people at all different levels. Not everyone we work with is Codie Sanchez. Most of them are like, start, starting out.

• 21:51Codie Sanchez?

  You don't want more than one of those. She's a handful.

• 21:53Speaker 00

  But the, uh, yeah, and we will tell people, we'll say, hey, we feel like we can help you.

• 21:58Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah.

• 21:58Speaker 00

  And there's, there are certain people that we go, we can really, really help you. We call them mission-driven messengers. It's the people who are not just trying to make money, not just trying to grow their reach. The people who are on an absolute crusade to go, this isn't, this is a calling for me. Those people culturally are going to be the best fit for us. And you know, there's certain parts that we can really help them with, and if we can't, we'll point them, we'll point them somewhere else.

• 22:23Codie Sanchez?

  I want to talk about, um, you've worked with, you know, a million different celebrities and sort of online influencers. You run the real, real gamut. Who do you, what celebrities do you think are nailing personal brand the best today?

• 22:38Speaker 00

  Well, so I, I think I'll use the, two of our, our most flagship clients would be Lewis Howes.

• 22:44Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah.

• 22:45Speaker 00

  And Ed Mylett. And I'll tell you the story about Lewis. Okay? So one of our central philosophies, I've, I've said this already is if you have diluted focus, you get diluted results. When we first started working with Lewis in 2018, we took him through an exercise that we call the revenue streams assessment. And we listed all these revenue streams on the board and he had 17 revenue streams and he was like really proud of that because he's like multiple streams of income. The problem is that he only had like 12 people on his team. That's a lot of revenue streams to manage with only 12 people. And so the only thing we ever did for Lewis, I mean, Lewis gives us a lot of credit publicly, like frankly, we have not done much for him.

• 23:22Speaker 00

  But the one thing that I did kind of do for Lewis, I said, Lewis, what would happen if you shut all of this stuff down? And just went all in on this podcast thing? Because for him at the time, he had about 30 million downloads and it took about eight years to get there. Wow. And it was, the podcast was a traffic source. He was really making money from courses at the time. But the reason I mentioned him Cody is because he had a mastermind that was generating multi seven figures in revenue. And in one conversation, he, he told me, he said, "Look, my, my real vision is I want to impact 100 million people every week."

• 24:02Speaker 00

  And I said, "Well, if that's true, and this focus thing is true, what if you went all in on that?" And he, out of one conversation, walked up and shut down a 2 million plus revenue, $2 million revenue stream in one conversation. And he went all in on the podcast. And what happened was he went from 30 million downloads in the next two years to 500 million downloads. That is a decision about purpose. That is, is a decision to stay true to what the vision is. To say, "I care more about making a difference than I do about making a dollar." Now, they're not mutually exclusive.

• 24:43Speaker 00

  Louis has made plenty of money, but he did make a short-term financial sacrifice to go all in on the vision. That is, I think, an epic story that is not something that data could really tell you to do. It was an instinct, an instinctual decision. So I love that. The other person that I always use is I'll use Ed Milet. I've gotten a chance to know with Ed. We got to work with him a little bit over the years. Ed Milet does not need any more freaking money. No, he doesn't. I've been, I've been to his house, one of them. Yeah. And they're very, very large. They're very large and lavish and amazing. Why is Ed Milet speaking on stages? He doesn't need the money.

• 25:26Speaker 00

  He's doing it because he actually gives a crap about helping people. And this is what I believe is the future of the online influencer. It's not just so much, what's the algorithm? How do I test the thumbnails? How do I split? Those are tactics that are important. They're like fundamentals of the business. But in a world of AI that solves those problems, that can generate thumbnails and can split test things and can optimize ad spends and landing page conversion, what's going to separate is actually the humanity of the messenger. The person who goes, "I'm here because I actually give a crap about making your life better." By the way, this is the thing that attracted me to you.

• 26:09Speaker 00

  Was that when I saw you, I saw someone who didn't need money. I know that you're financially motivated, which is great. But what really attracted me to you was that you said, "I want to help Main Street America. I want to take the money, not just take, steal money from people, but I want to teach the principles of Wall Street and I want to take that to the people on Main Street." I think the reason you succeed, Cody, is not just because you have a great team and you guys use data and you're smart and you're intelligent and you do all the systems. The reason you succeed is because people can tell that you care about helping them. You're actually on a crusade. And I would suggest that the more that AI

• 26:53Speaker 00

  levels the playing field of the tactics, the more that that human energy matters. That's what I'm drawn to and that's what I think people are drawn to. So I go, who are the people that genuinely care? Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, another client of ours. When Dr. Lyon, we first started working together, I don't know, she had 100,000 Instagram followers. I don't know what she has now, but it's many times over that. I don't know how much money she's making. I know that she's impacting lots of people. And I know that when we first started working together, that's what she cared about.

• 27:28Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah.

• 27:28Speaker 00

  This is Dave Ramsey, right? I introduced you to Dave Ramsey. I've known Dave Ramsey since he had 100 employees. He has a thousand employees now.

• 27:36Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah.

• 27:36Speaker 00

  They do multi nine figures a year in annual revenue. There's a lot of people that don't like Dave Ramsey and there's plenty of things he says that are controversial. But Dave is on the freaking radio every day for three hours, 30 years later, still. Why? He didn't need money two decades ago.

• 27:55Codie Sanchez?

  Nope.

• 27:56Speaker 00

  He's on the radio because he gives a crap about helping people be out of debt. Because he tells the story of what it was like to go bankrupt and have somebody come into his home and take his daughter's crib. Like, that matters to him. That's what a mission-driven messenger is. And I think that's the part that AI can't replace. That's the part that, that's the part that we can only feel as humans. And I think that that is the part that is gonna matter more and more and more. And I'm not anti-AI. I love AI. I'm just saying, I think this is the part. I think this is the future. It's the, it's not the vanity stuff. It's the, it's the humanity stuff.

• 28:34Codie Sanchez?

  It's so true. Well, and even, you know, I remember when I was in Dave's headquarters after you introduced us and what blew me away, and, and I think transcends if you want to build a big company that lasts forever, and also if you want a lot of people to care about you on the internet, and also if you want to have a huge impact, like obsession is really hard to beat. And so, you know, people might think we're being touchy-feely by saying, we care about people, and if you care more, you'll get more. It's like, it's not enough to just care. You've got to obsess. And when I walked into Dave Ramsey's headquarters, and the first thing that you see is like, an example of the old car that he used to have that he sold books out of the back of. You know, it's an entire huge wall and almost like museum exhibit of every single person who's now debt-free.

• 29:20Codie Sanchez?

  You know, it's, the, the public is allowed in every single day and given fresh cookies if they want to come and listen to Dave talk. And it's that he brings in his family, you know, it's that, and then he's so obsessed that he like squeezed every bit of productivity out of me in that day that he possibly could have. I think I did three podcasts. I met with his team. We had lunch, like, because he just, he's obsessed about, about his problem set. So I think the other thing, if you want to be really successful on the internet and you want to grow online. It's the most competitive game you could play because anybody can do it. And so the way that you win is by being obsessed about the thing that you're really interested in. And if you're more obsessed in something small, even better. So I totally agreed with that.

• 30:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think, I love that. And that is, he is a great example. And that is, you know, people like, I'm so nerdy about book launches and the art of speaking and the business of speaking and copywriting and like, and it's like, but this is my uniqueness. And I'll share with you the best piece of branding advice I've ever received. I wish this was my quote, it's not. This came from a guy named Larry Winget. He said, "The goal is to find your uniqueness and exploit it in the service of others." "To find your uniqueness and exploit it in the service of others." "To figure out that thing that other people would think is so weird." They'd be like, "Rory, why do you care so much about like, books?"

• 30:48Speaker 00

  And it's like, "I don't know. It's just who I am." Right? It's the reason why Cody cares so much about laundromats and like, buying boring businesses. It's just who you are. But you go, that is, you lean into that. You become more of that. Here's another great quote. This one's from Sally Hogseth. She's my friend. And she says, "The world isn't changed by people who sort of care." Right? Nobody changed the world who sort of cared. You change the world by caring so much that it's like you'll endure tremendous pain and tremendous sacrifice. But I think that, you know, there is a certain amount of money for most people that it starts to lose its drive. There is a certain amount of followers at some point for most people

• 31:32Speaker 00

  that starts to like, lose its drive. There's a certain amount, once you've spoken on stage in front of 10,000 people 100 times, it's not that you're not like, excited to do it. It's not the same. But when you have a genuine passion for helping other people,

• 31:50Speaker 00

  It's this insatiable desire that's healthy.

• 31:54Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah.

• 31:54Speaker 00

  And, and if you can obsess about it, the way that Dave's obsessed about getting people out of debt, the way that Louis obsesses about helping people overcome self doubt, the way that Dr. Lyon obsesses about people being healthy and getting accurate health information, the way that, the way that Ed obsesses over helping people realize that they're capable of doing more, then your world starts to change and you start to change the world of people around you. And anyways, I don't know, I'm just, I'm a geek for this game.

• 32:21Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah, well, I also think it's the way, like the way that you never lose money and the way you don't lose everything is you make sure you really know who you're serving. You know, I think a perfect example of like an anti-goal would be like the Hawk Tua girl, right? Like, so she got super famous on the internet, on Twitter for kind of like a goofy thing that she said that was kind of a little, little sexual about, and she was this cute little girl from Alabama. And she went viral everywhere and she got a podcast deal and then what did she do? She confused virality for actual direction and she ended up going all in on this crypto coin and, and her followers lost tens and tens and tens of millions of dollars. That won't happen to you if you know who you're serving, because you'll remember what you're actually trying to accomplish.

• 33:06Codie Sanchez?

  And I think a lot of people blow up spectacularly online and lose their focus because once you do start getting a little bit of success, you'll get a lot of optionality and you'll have to make really hard decisions that make people don't like you by saying no to things. And you have, I mean, we just had this conversation actually not too long ago. There was a, a thing we were both gonna, kinda knew about a person that was doing something online. That's like the most nondescript thing ever.

• 33:31Speaker 00

  There was a thing.

• 33:32Codie Sanchez?

  There was a thing that came up and, you know, found out some information that just wasn't ethically aligned with me to stand on that person's stage. And so I ringed you and I was like, did you know about this? Let's talk about it. And it wasn't because I don't want to be next to that person. I don't know them. It was because I know my audience is trying to figure out how to get financially free and they trust me, some of them, and they want to move to the next level. And if I put them in any situation which might not give them the best advice or the best trust from another human, that's breaking my mission. And so if you don't. Really stand up for something, you'll fall for anything. And, and those are the hard decisions I think you have to make as you build a business and get a personal brand.

• 34:16Codie Sanchez?

  One other thing I, I wanted to actually talk about with you here is.

• 34:21Speaker 02

  Your sausage McMuffin with egg didn't change. Your receipt did. The sausage McMuffin with egg extra value meal includes a hash brown and a small coffee for just $5. Only at McDonald's for a limited time.

• 34:33Speaker 03

  Pricing participation may vary. Promotion pricing may be lower than meal pricing.

• 34:36Codie Sanchez?

  You have so many frameworks and tools and, and resources that you use. You talked about one, which is this revenue stream breakdown. Can you run us through that in like 30 seconds?

• 34:48Speaker 00

  The revenue stream assessment?

• 34:49Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah, yeah. How do you figure out what revenue streams you should be doing and what you should not be doing using your revenue streams assessment?

• 34:54Speaker 00

  So, simple. All you do is you, you list out all, all your revenue streams on the wall. And you, we just put it through a simple scoring process and you go, okay, what, how, how many years have you been doing it? How much revenue is it? How stressful is it for you to keep up? And what's the DARES score? So, DARES is an acronym that we use. It's five criteria that make a great revenue stream. We're looking for things that are digital, automated, recurring, evergreen, and scalable. Digital, automated, recurring, evergreen, and scalable. So basically like how scalable is this revenue stream? And then how life giving is it to you? And you basically just fill in those numbers and you kind of look at it.

• 35:38Speaker 00

  And a lot of times what will happen is you'll, things will jump off the page like, oh, we're doing this just because it makes a lot of money, but it's actually really hard. Nobody likes it. It's sucking the life out of our team. And other things like in, in the case of Lewis, where the podcast wasn't making a ton of money, but it, oh, the other one is which has the most natural momentum? That's one of the other big ones. And it was like, it had so much natural momentum and it was so life giving and it was low stress and it was like. All right. Well, what would happen if we did that? So, you know, we, we tend to not be fans of multiple streams of income early on.

• 36:16Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah.

• 36:17Speaker 00

  I, I think most of the people who I know who are rich or filthy rich, they didn't get rich from multiple streams of income. They got rich from doing one thing really, really well. They had one business that really blew up. They, they, they focused on concentration first, then they broke through the wall and then did diversification second. So it's like, yes, many millionaires have many streams of income, but that's not usually how they created the first, usually they create one stream of income. So, most of our clients that we're working with are, you know, they're personal brands or they're, they're small businesses or they're, they're executives of small companies. And so we're trying to go, if you don't have a huge staff,

• 36:59Speaker 00

  then you need to figure out what one revenue stream is most likely to succeed and go all in on that one thing. So the revenue streams assessment is just like, helps us sort of spot the winner.

• 37:10Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah, it's true. I often think, I'm tortured on that advice because I think you won't know what to go all in on until you try a few things.

• 37:18Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 37:18Codie Sanchez?

  And so I think there's this like middle ground. It's almost like you have to actually do a bunch of revenue streams to start.

• 37:24Speaker 00

  You're testing them out?

• 37:25Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah, you have a test period. And during that test period, you will actually, you'll, you'll think that one does really well and then you'll realize, oh wait, it's actually missing core components. And you'll have to do that for a bit of time until you do another analysis where you say, oh man, of all of these things that we have, it's really one or two that matter. And then you double down on those.

• 37:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:45Codie Sanchez?

  And then you hit this, it's, it's like, is it like a, I think it might be three steps. It's like first step, revenue stream test and proliferation. Second test, second step is like revenue stream divesting. And third step is

• 37:58Speaker 00

  Meaning getting rid of streams.

• 38:00Codie Sanchez?

  Correct.

• 38:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:00Codie Sanchez?

  And then third step is revenue stream diversification.

• 38:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:05Codie Sanchez?

  And you kind of like do a circle all the way back to. You start diversifying, you end diversifying, and in the middle you win by picking winners.

• 38:13Speaker 00

  By focusing, yeah, and optimizing, optimizing one thing, right?

• 38:16Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah.

• 38:16Speaker 00

  And even, even like investors, right? It's like, they go, well, that's multiple streams. Well, it's like, well, if you're an investor, like, you're just investing. Like, that's the only thing you're doing. You're not often balancing a whole bunch of stuff until you break through the wall. And you have a team. Once you have team, time, talent, like, technology, capital, then you can do all sorts of things. Right? But in the beginning, when you don't have a lot of resources, if I have 10 initiatives, and I have 10 units of resource, then on average, each, each, each initiative gets one unit of resource.

• 38:51Codie Sanchez?

  Yep.

• 38:52Speaker 00

  Once I become wealthy, and then I can hire people to do stuff, now I can, I can put more resources on more initiatives. But early on, it's like more, more people lose because of a lack of, of focus in that kind of like, I think in that scaling phase of going, you know, I think a lot of small businesses, like, they're, they're quick to add 70 revenue streams instead of figuring out, let's, let's keep the main thing, the main thing. But I do agree with you, you got to test early on to even know what works, what feels good, what is your audience responding to?

• 39:22Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah.

• 39:22Speaker 00

  Uh, so I like that.

• 39:23Codie Sanchez?

  But I like the dares analogy. I would totally use that on top of a business analysis. We use RICE often.

• 39:29Speaker 00

  Oh, tell me.

• 39:30Codie Sanchez?

  Which is, so typically it's reach, impact, cost, and, um, what's the last one? That's bad. Um, there's one that basically says, like, I can't remember what the word is, but it's like, how much time it takes for your team? And so it's a literal formula, and, but I changed mine from reach, which is like, I think could be touchy feely, to revenue. So how much money do you make? Impact to the business, which might mean like, how many people need to be on the assignment for it? Cost, how much is it going to cost you? And then how long will it take you? And so you actually lay out this, this revenue model that at the end gives you a number. And the number... Then you can stack rank them and decide, okay, what's the next thing that we're gonna do?

• 40:13Codie Sanchez?

  And every time I come up with a new idea now, I try to make myself run it through a RICE model. Because otherwise, you have too many, too many brilliant ideas that turn out they're not so brilliant when you compare them through your opportunity cost. You know what I mean?

• 40:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, opportunity cost is, is huge. It's like, it's like the biggest, the biggest invisible cost that people don't pay enough attention to is just going like, well, I could do that, but what does that pull me away from? Like that, that being able to calculate the opportunity cost, I think is one of the

• 40:47Codie Sanchez?

  It's hard.

• 40:47Speaker 00

  It's hard, but it's one of the things that people like you do. And, and going back to what our conversation about trust, it's like never doing anything that compromises the trust of your audience. Because that trust is the big opportunity cost. It's like, even if I could sell you something, right? It's like, sure, we could sell them some t-shirts. Is that, is that the right thing though at this moment? And it's like, we can make a quick buck doing this or that or whatever. But it's, it's going, don't ever compromise that trust of your audience.

• 41:16Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah, let's talk a little bit about, um, so if I want to get paid for my expertise, what's the roadmap? Like, how do you go, okay, I right now am a chiropractor. I do want to become an expert that is known publicly. I want to break out of obscurity. I run a, maybe I even run a service business and I want people to know who I am. What, what is the process that you take people through?

• 41:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:41Codie Sanchez?

  So we've gone through the first two steps, I think.

• 41:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, finding your who, right? And, and then you gotta figure out what problem do you solve? Then you figure out, how do you solve it in one sentence? It's really tough. It's going, how do I solve that problem for that audience in one sentence? The next thing we do is we figure out what one revenue stream matters above all in my, in my business. Then the next thing is we create, we, we, we take people through a process called captivating content. So we then extract out of their head, what is their system that they use for solving that problem? And we want to create original thought leadership, truly innovative intellectual property. Um, you know, my, my TED talk that went viral was called How to Multiply Time. There's thousands of books on productivity and tons of people who talk about time management.

• 42:27Speaker 00

  But the focus funnel, which was the, the thing that went viral, my talk, you have to get that from me. Why? Because it came out of my head. So we really work on that to go, you can't be someone, you're not going to be paid at the highest level if you're playing cover tunes. That's so good. Like, it's not wrong to play cover tunes, like, that can be fun, but don't expect to be the person that sells out arenas if you're playing cover tunes. You've got to learn to write your own music, and expertise is the same way. So we teach you how to create quotable moments, how to create visuals, we call them frameworks, you know, charts, tables, diagrams, that are unique to your methodology, the way that you do it.

• 43:10Speaker 00

  And this is why, again, we come back to serving the person you once were. Because the credibility is not that you get somebody else out there who waves a wand and says, "Oh, you're credible," or "You have a designation." The credibility comes from you've walked the freaking path. Like, you've overcome that obstacle, and you go, "This is how I did it." And as long as you're teaching people how you did something that you actually did, or how you helped other people to overcome that, we bottle that up. Then we put people through something called world-class presentation craft, which is preparing their content for the spoken word. So, in our universe, the spoken word is the fastest path to cash.

• 43:51Speaker 00

  To take someone from an absolute stranger, "I've never heard of you," to a lifelong fan, can happen in one hour if you have a world-class one-hour presentation, which can be a podcast interview, it can be a webinar, it can be on stage, it can be a breakout, a workshop. But if you do it right, and you structure your content, someone can go like, "How have I never heard of you before?" To all of a sudden, "I am binging every book you've written, every podcast episode." Then in Phase 2, we do all the digital stuff. That's social, funnels, you know, copywriting, etc., podcasting, ads. And then you get to Phase 3, which is often a book.

• 44:32Speaker 00

  A book, still to this day, is the primary way that you break through the wall of the mainstream to become recognized as a true thought leader. So we do a lot with that, also the business of speaking. And then, and then we really focus on sales, and how to have a sales conversation. And then Phase 4 is scaling, scaling the infrastructure.

• 44:53Speaker 02

  Your sausage McMuffin with egg didn't change, your receipt did. The sausage McMuffin with egg extra value meal includes a hash brown and a small coffee for just $5.00. Only at McDonald's for a limited time.

• 45:06Speaker 03

  Pricing participation may vary. Promotion pricing may be lower than meal pricing.

• 45:08Speaker 00

  Sure of the team you need to like pull all of this stuff off.

• 45:11Codie Sanchez?

  It's so good. I mean, the, you know what the funny part to me is, is one, books suck to sell. So I think the

• 45:19Speaker 00

  It's so hard to sell.

• 45:20Codie Sanchez?

  They're hard to sell and yet I think a lot of people want to hit the New York Times. You and I both know what it took to hit that, even with a giant audience. It's a lot of work. And, um, and anybody who says that it's not a lot of work, by the way, is lying.

• 45:35Speaker 00

  Lying.

• 45:35Codie Sanchez?

  Can we talk about that? I mean, see like I'm, I, I giggle so hard. It's like, oh, I don't care that much. And then I talk to you and you're like, well, I know what they're really doing. You know, it's so good. Um, but, but the interesting part about books is you don't have to sell a ton. And that was one thing that, you know, you opened up my eyes for a lot of our portfolio companies and our CEOs who are the best, you know, painting company in the world, that one painter, you know, who run an incredible franchise company, Resy Brands that we run. And I'm talking to him about a book because I'm like, man, you know, you don't need to sell hundreds of thousands of copies. Actually, you just need people to know that they have an opportunity to go deeply into your mind and decide that they want to trust you on your venture. And a book does that in a way very little

• 46:20Codie Sanchez?

  else does.

• 46:21Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Absolutely. One of our other mantras around books is we say, uh, bestseller lists don't change lives. But books do.

• 46:30Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah.

• 46:30Speaker 00

  Books change lives. Books automate tru- books automate trust, just like content automates trust. But it's a deeper, it's a deeper level. It's a, there's a more intimate experience when you're, you're holding the book or you're listening, you're right in somebody's ear and you know, they're hard to sell and yet you pour years of your life into like, get it captured in the book. And so, and by the way, that's also how you, you, you speak is like people have either seen you speak or they've read something you've written. Those are the, the two reasons why you, two, two ways you get book to speak. So I think books continue to stand the test of time. Ironically, as it becomes easier to post social content and faster to just fling something up,

• 47:12Speaker 00

  it still takes muscle and hours and hours and hours to edit a book, you know, to write the book, edit it, pore over it. And so when you're reading a book, you're getting this concentrated, you know, this most concentrated bit of wisdom. And it demonstrates your credibility. It demonstrates your credibility. You go, you know, you want to know who I am? Read this.

• 47:34Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah.

• 47:34Speaker 00

  And some people will, will look at it and go, oh yeah, I'm not interested. Great. Other people will read it and you go, you cannot read that, this entire book and not want to do more, right? You cannot read Main Street Millionaire the whole way through and go, oh my gosh, like I, I, I want to work with these people.

• 47:51Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah.

• 47:51Speaker 00

  Um, so it's, it's still super, super powerful and, uh, you know, I love books. I hope they're around forever.

• 47:58Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah, me too. Um, I want to talk really quickly about some more of your frameworks and systems. You talked in the beginning about, you know, creating graphics and named frameworks. I think this is super underrated. We call it productization of services. So like when we buy a company, um, one of the first things that we do is we teach them about how do you turn even a service into something that is a product, because otherwise it's not repeatable. And so this weekend is our, our scaling workshop where we help people build companies. And one of the biggest things we take people through is like, everything that you do, that you think is a service is actually not in fact a service. It's a product. And if we can get you to think about how the fact that it would be really bad if every time I bought a coffee cup like this, it looked totally different and they didn't match

• 48:41Codie Sanchez?

  and they weren't the same and they had different quality levels, that would mean that I had a bad company. And yet we allow that in service businesses and we don't name and frame them. You have a lot of systems and ideas for how you get people to think in frameworks. Can you talk through some of your favorite systems and frameworks you train people through?

• 48:57Speaker 00

  To help them come up with frameworks?

• 49:00Codie Sanchez?

  Could be that and also what you take them through to create this personal brand because you're kind of the framework guy like you have one for everything. I feel like.

• 49:07Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, so we do believe in that. So, so one of this is actually from the my, my how to multiply time, the TED Talk. One of my favorite lines in that book is a concept that came to me while I was writing that says automation is to your time. What compounding interest is to your money. Automation is to your time. What compounding interest is to your money. Inside of commoditizing a service-based business is the way you automate it. You make it replicatable, duplicatable, scalable, repeatable, right? So for experts, we have to be able to do that. It's, it's if, if my expertise lives in my head, the only way

• 49:49Speaker 00

  you can get it is from me. If it lives in a book, it's scalable. It also, you know, we have strategists at Brand Builders Group, right? So we have about 50 employees and our strategists can teach and expand because they're, they're teaching a body of knowledge. So the, the, the biggest trick to this is very simple is you first have to clarify the idea. And we say, say it ugly first, always just say it ugly first. And you know, write, the, the first rule of writing is to write, then you edit and get clear on what you're trying to say. Once you then say it clearly, then you go say it with a picture. So say it ugly first, then say it clearly, then say it with a picture. So once you're saying it clearly, you go, how could I show this visually?

• 50:34Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah.

• 50:35Speaker 00

  And if you train your mind to, to, to think in that way, I mean, then all of a sudden it, it, it, it resonates with, with people and it becomes more transmittable, which is a part of virality, right? Is it's going in order for me, in order for it to transmit, someone has to be able to share that idea. So anything that makes that idea more shareable, either the way you package what you say, or the visual representation of what you say makes that idea more transmittable. And, you know, we're as concerned in going viral offline as we are in going viral online. And so if, if you can ask yourself that, the

• 51:17Speaker 00

  other question that we always ask is how can I forward the thinking of what's been done?

• 51:23Speaker 00

  So there might be an existing visual or framework that's out there and you go, okay, how can I add to this? That's what a thought leader does in the, in the true positive sense of the word is to forward the thinking that's been done. How can I add a layer of usefulness or utility on what else has been written in my space? And that's why it's like, we can all talk about topics that other people have talked about, but don't play cover tunes, right? Advance the thinking. Do the work for the people. This is another framework is we try to, we try to go, how can I do more of the thinking work for my customer? So

• 52:06Speaker 00

  if you use the revenue streams assessment, it's one thing that I'll say, hey, go think about your revenue streams and think about which ones are the ones you should focus on. But if I turn it into a tool and I, I do the thinking for them, I create a tool that forces them to think in the sequence in which I would think, or another successful client of mine would think, that's where great visuals and frameworks and tools come from.

• 52:29Codie Sanchez?

  It's so true. You know, it's, it's wild because it's personal brand, all of this personal brand is exactly related to building a business. I mean, if you want to be a leader in a business and you don't want to hate your business and hate your life, you have to name and frame everything so that you can automate things and then eventually delegate and outsource it. Otherwise, you don't have a business, you have a job. And so it's, it's actually kind of the same. You know, I think about it with some of our businesses. It's like, um, we have something called the rule of three. So every time you do a task that has more than three steps and you do it more than three times, it needs to become an SOP, right? And so rule of three. And so I don't have to say, hey, remember that you need to create an SOP on this XYZ thing. I just go rule of three and I go, yeah. And so then

• 53:13Codie Sanchez?

  you get to say less words and your, your people get to be an extension of your brain, which is, which is so smart. And I, it's funny because I never thought about it in that way. But if you could think about building your business the exact same way as building a brand, it would be so powerful. Like we have something called the Empire Builder Survey, which basically takes people who own a business through a series of about 13 questions to tell them what value their business has and what areas they could do to make their business more valuable. And the reason why is because we did all these consulting calls with people for like, okay, you want to come in, you might be a fit for us to help you by investing, you might be a fit for us to help you by coming to our workshops, but it was all this one-on-one consultation until originally, I was, until

• 53:58Codie Sanchez?

  finally, I was like, no, no, no, we can, here are the questions, here are the buckets of answers. If they answer this way, I want to talk to them about investing. If they answer this way, they need to build the business first, let's put them to, to our build. And so it's, it's really applicable, not just for a personal brand, but across just about everything. You also have like a survey or a, some tools and resources for them, don't you? Yeah.

• 54:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So, so we invested about over a hundred thousand dollars conducting a national research study called the Trends in Personal Branding National Research Study. So it's weighted to the US Census, right? It's statistically valid. You know, we followed all, you know, traditional academic rigor, it's PhD-led, to understand how much does this personal brand stuff matter to businesses? So it turns out 74% of Americans say they are more likely to trust you just because you have an established personal brand. 63% of Americans say they're more likely to buy from you because you have a personal brand. 58% of Americans say they're willing to spend more money on the products and services that come from founders where they know the personal brand and the values of the founder.

• 55:07Speaker 00

  I mean, this, and, and if you stratify the data by generations, like the age range of people who filled it out, all the trends show that in the next 10 to 30 years, it's going to matter even more, even more. Now, it's ironic where our worlds collide is to build a business that has value, you want it to be independent of a person. That's the whole thing that gives a business value. But ironically, what attracts people to a business often is a personality that they can attach to, right? We don't do business with. Companies, we do business with people.

• 55:40Codie Sanchez?

  Right.

• 55:41Speaker 00

  But the way that I think about it for small businesses is I think about it like a rocket is going. Your personal brand should be the sort of side boosters that you use to get the business off the ground. But then, once you get it launched out, out, out into space, then your personal brand falls off and the business can just sort of follow a trajectory and live on without you. But it takes, a, a, a, a personal brand can help tremendously early on. So, uh, there's a bunch of data. If you go to freebrandstudy.com slash Cody, freebrandstudy.com slash Cody. We actually give the whole, uh, research study away.

• 56:16Codie Sanchez?

  Um, that's cool. I want to say that.

• 56:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's powerful stuff.

• 56:20Codie Sanchez?

  You know, I, I didn't, I didn't start a personal brand to have business success. I think I just was curious about what's happening in the world and I wanted to write a newsletter and I like writing. And so that's sort of how it started and I thought we weren't talking very much to each other. And this was in 2020. So I was like, you know, she's just a way that we can maybe start having some conversations. But now that I think about it, it's, it's pretty pivotal to a lot of our portfolio companies. I don't think every human needs to have a personal brand, but I think there needs to be a brand that is associated with you. Because in the age of, of AI and in the age of mass commoditization of content creation, um, you gotta have something that feels human to your point. And you gotta have something that feels unique and high trust.

• 57:05Codie Sanchez?

  Because I think going forward, AI isn't going to make us have to do less work and for things to be easier. It's actually going to mean that everybody is able to be pretty good and you're going to have to be great to stand out. And one of the ways that you do that is, is by being, you know, weirdly authentically you. And your brand can be that too. Like we have a, we have a portfolio company, Pink's, um, that's a window cleaning company. And they're just, they're two young guys who, uh, they're uniquely them. They're kind of hipsters, you know, they're really faith-based, um, they're fun, they're energetic. And they, they attract all the rest of our, uh, franchise owners at, at Pink's are very similar to them. A lot of like ex vets, they're like these.

• 57:48Codie Sanchez?

  Like young, kinda clean-cut, wholesome, good-looking dudes. And they don't have a very big social following, but they have a pretty big social following for a cleaning company. And so if somebody wants to go start a window cleaning business and they want all the systems and processes, these guys have earned a lot of their trust. And so even for window cleaners, I think it's something relevant.

• 58:10Speaker 00

  It absolutely is. So let's talk about trust on a data point really quick.

• 58:13Codie Sanchez?

  Oh.

• 58:14Speaker 00

  So one of the things that we, one of the questions we asked in this study is which piece of marketing collateral matters the most in influencing a purchasing decision?

• 58:25Codie Sanchez?

  Okay.

• 58:26Speaker 00

  And we asked things like, they have a large, uh, social media following. They have a, a, a large YouTube channel. They have a polished, like a podcast. We said they have a blog. They have a nice website. They have a book, a bestselling book, a New York Times bestselling book. And we wanted to, we had people rank them. And none of those things were the top on the list. Sixty-two percent of Americans say the single most important piece of marketing collateral that will influence their purchasing decision? Testimonials from other customers.

• 59:01Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah.

• 59:02Speaker 00

  It costs nothing. You can have it by this afternoon. It costs nothing. What, what do they want? They want human validation.

• 59:10Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah.

• 59:11Speaker 00

  They want some, a human that they can trust to say, if a, if a human said it, then I can believe it. Not just it's pretty, not just there's lots of, lots of people saying this, but like, show me individual people and what they have to say about you. And I thought that was super powerful. The other, the other top, the other top ones are that they've been featured in media and that they've been paid, they've been paid for their expertise.

• 59:34Codie Sanchez?

  Interesting. You know, it, it actually tracks, cause I was just talking to one of the members of, of one of our companies and they have testimonials on the website, but they made a fatal error. And the error is, says this nice testimonial, no picture, no name. That could be, that's almost as bad as not having testimonials on your website. And now there's a lot of ways you gotta make sure compliantly you, you share them, which is a whole other issue, but, um, I, I, we have a, a segment that we do for our build group that is all about exactly that. We talk, we think about them as reviews because a lot of these are service businesses. But, um, you know, there's a lot of data that shows people won't buy from you if you have less than three and a half stars,

• 1:00:14Codie Sanchez?

  which is crazy, and they will pay more money for you if you have more than three and a half stars and more than a hundred reviews. And so, um, that's really interesting, probably a great way to get more testimonials and reviews is basically being online and having and sharing other people's.

• 1:00:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is. And, and there's, there's online and there's off, there's online and offline too, right? I mean, i- if you look, look, I believe that the best form of marketing in the world is a change to life.

• 1:00:42Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:43Speaker 00

  Right? You change someone's life, they'll tell people, you don't even have to ask them. You don't have to incentivize them, you don't have to send them a coupon. If you change someone's life, you know, they'll tell people about you. Now, when you're cleaning, you know, doing laundromat and you're washing windows, like, are we changing people's lives to them? Well, maybe, maybe there's ways that we can do that, but, uh, the, you've got to have your customers. You, you, you should strive to be so good that your customer force becomes your sales force.

• 1:01:09Codie Sanchez?

  Hmm.

• 1:01:10Speaker 00

  Um, right? It's one thing for me to go, hey, I know what I'm talking about. It's another when Codie Sanchez says, hey, Rory is someone that I've hired for time to time to help me. Like, that's freaking powerful, right?

• 1:01:22Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:22Speaker 00

  Because you trust that there's that tr- transfer of trust.

• 1:01:27Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:27Speaker 00

  Um, and it, and it's human and, and I think, I think it's gonna just continue to matter, to matter more. And I actually think video testimonials are gonna matter a lot. I mean, you know, you can already fake, you can already deep fake a video. So, you know, e- even as that happens, you go, what matters the most? What matters the most is someone in real life coming up to you and saying, have you read that book? Have you been to that restaurant? Have you watched that movie? You need someone to clean your house? I have the person. You need someone to fix your car? Like, you want, you, your HVAC broke? Like, I, I have the guy. Nothing will ever be more powerful than that. So, yes, online, yes, social, yes, AI. But don't forget, at the end of the day, this is about reputation. And reputation is about trust.

• 1:02:11Speaker 00

  And these concepts are as old as time. So the medium is changing, but the foundation is the same.

• 1:02:19Codie Sanchez?

  Rory, you're the man. Follow Rory on all... Where do you like people to follow you the most?

• 1:02:23Speaker 00

  Well, so the one place I would say, go to freebrandcall.com/Cody. So, if you're serious about building this and you really want to be an expert entrepreneur, build your brand, request a call with us, freebrandcall.com/Cody. If you're not so serious about it, but you want the data, just go to freebrandstudy.com/Cody and then we'll get connected from there.

• 1:02:45Codie Sanchez?

  I love it. Rory, I really appreciate you. You really did help me a lot. I'm not just saying that. So, I can't wait for the next book so I can put you again through more text as opposed to voice note misery. And I hope you guys listening out there take this to heart. I think there needs to be more good humans who are willing to share their expertise and actually do the thing that most won't, which is teach and not just take. And so, thanks Rory, you're the man.

• 1:03:08Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me.