How Losing Someone Can Completely Reshape You In Business, Chaos Is Always Present In Business. You Choose Who Absorbs It

In this episode #2984, Eric Siu and Neil Patel discuss how personal loss shapes leadership, highlighting the value of preparation, resilience, and hiring strong problem-solvers. They also explore how AI drives accountability and why tough times are often the best for making key hires. TIME-STAMPED SHOW NOTES (00:00) Navigating Loss and Business Transformation (02:58) The Importance of Preparation in Business (06:03) Chaos Management and Leadership (08:51) Hiring for Resilience and Problem-Solving (11:57) The Role of AI in Accountability and Growth (14:50) Cultivating a Growth Mindset in Employees (20:50) Hiring During Challenging Times To suggest a topic, go to https://www.marketingschool.io. For more content from Eric and Neil, check out Eric’s Leveling Up with Eric Siu YouTube channel and Neil’s Neil Patel YouTube channel. Connect with Us: Single Grain << Eric's ad agency NP Digital << Neil’s ad agency X @neilpatel, @ericosiu Instagram @neilpatel, @ericosiu Drop Us a Review If You Enjoyed the Episode!

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:35Speaker 00

  You know what I want to talk about, Neil? I want to talk about how losing someone can actually completely reshape you in business. And so, a tribute to my mom, because I lost my mom last week on a Thursday. The moment she went, there's two main things that happened. One, you can probably imagine, I was like, okay, fine, it's probably, it's probably time to start dating someone seriously. In honor of my mom, right? Because she's always wanted me to get married and have, you know, grandkids and all that for her. But two, the moment she passed, I was like, whoa, like, the way she's covered for everybody, like, you know how a parent like will do, they'll overdo the things that, for their kids, right? Meaning that they'll take care of things that they shouldn't be taking care of. They'll shield you from everything. They'll protect you to the very end, right? I realized that in the past, not so much anymore now.

• 1:20Speaker 00

  I've gotten a little better over the past few years, but I've always done that. Almost as if people in my company were my friends or my family, right? And I would shield them from these things. And what's interesting is, we have this leadership meeting each week. I didn't join these last two weeks, right? Because of all the things that were going on. And I kind of wanted to see how the team would deal with these things. And so, what happened was, I have a call recorder that joins those to look for compelling content ideas. And I saw a line in that that was actually very compelling. It said that chaos is always present in the business, but it's usually the leaders that absorb it. And I was like, oh, whoa, that like, that stuck with me. It's like, props to my team for observing that. But also, in my mind now, I'm like, you know, I'm just, I've gotten better over the years, but I'm even more, after she passed, I was just like, yeah,

• 2:03Speaker 00

  I'm not going to treat people the same way that I treat friends and family, where I'm going to protect them and coddle them at all costs. Sure, I'm going to protect them as if they're part of, we're part of the same team. But we're all here to perform at the end of the day. And so, I think what instantly clicked for me was, or reinforced for me is like, yes, I'm going to do everything it takes to grow this business, but I'm not going to do everything I can to just be at all places at once. Because at the end of the day, I'm just one person.

• 2:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I learned something interesting from your mom's passing as well because she did something that I've never seen before. I'm not saying it's not common or uncommon. I don't have any data on this, but your mom prepares. And she prepares for the worst case, which I thought was a very interesting concept. In business and in marketing, we have so much chaos. We don't know what's going to work, what's not. Some things are bad, some things are good. Without getting into details because it's your personal life, your mom prepared for her passing. She was also in a unique circumstance where she knew eventually her time was going to come. She planned everything out for you, your father, her husband, right?

• 3:12Speaker 01

  And herself to not burden anyone in your family with anything.

• 3:17Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 3:18Speaker 01

  And she prepared for even things like funeral arrangements. She even prepared, and you can edit this out, Noah, if you don't want to say it.

• 3:27Speaker 00

  No, we can leave it, yeah.

• 3:27Speaker 01

  She even prepared for the eventual passing of your dad.

• 3:32Speaker 00

  Yes, yes. And the way, the way that funeral was planned too.

• 3:36Speaker 01

  Yes, which is really admirable and amazing for someone to think. And she didn't want to not only burden you, her son, and the note you shared, I won't get into it, was truly heartfelt.

• 3:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:50Speaker 01

  But she also didn't want to burden her own husband.

• 3:52Speaker 00

  Yeah. You know, the thing is, that's actually very common in Eastern Asian cultures. So if you grew up Japanese, Chinese, or even Korean, like any of these, right? Like, you just don't want to burden other people, but there is a point where, and so you can do that when you run a company too. You don't want to burden your team, but at the same time, you hired your team. So you shouldn't think about it the same way. And so I've always looked at it as, I don't want to burden, like, if I, there's no extra work I need to add for Noah or yourself. Like, I don't want to burden you, right? Even you, when you said last week, like, hey, yo, like, and you being a friend, I'll take care of the podcast. I'm like, no, I can't burden him, right? I can't burden you in being alone. So I did, literally the day after she passed, like, we did a podcast together, right? And so that is a thing, but I think that's great for family.

• 4:33Speaker 00

  I think that can be very detrimental in running a business because at the end of the day, you're hiring people to perform. And if you're just going to be there helping all the time, then people are going to be over reliant on you. And they would love for you to do the job because. They're just here to make money anyway, for the most part, right? Some people are really bought into your mission, but a lot of people, it's a paycheck, which is fine. So.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  I don't look at it from a burden aspect. I look at it more for the point of mind is she thinks worst case scenario and she plans for worst case scenario. Right? Throughout the whole process, you know, there's exciting, good moments that give you hope. There's sad moments and she planned for the worst case and she tried to think, all right, well, if this is the worst case, anything better than that is a cherry on top. When you look at a company, the employees within an organization or even entrepreneurs, most of them tend to be super optimistic and you kind of need some optimism as an entrepreneur. Because the chances of succeeding are slim to none.

• 5:35Speaker 01

  But how many entrepreneurs do you meet and business owners and executives that are running companies? That plan for things not going the way they want? I don't really see it. I usually see them saying, here's what our goals for the year. This is what we're going to hit or try to achieve and let's plan for that. But they don't really have any contingencies on if the Fed doesn't reduce rates or there's tariffs or things get worse in the economy. This is how we're going to adapt and adjust and ready for, you know, a nuclear disaster, whatever that may be in business or marketing.

• 6:08Speaker 00

  I think it depends. So the reason, when we did that personality test, your practicality is very high. We're like high nineties, basically, right? You're like ninety seven, I'm like ninety seven, ninety eight or something like that. I got that from my mom and I'm realizing the number of people coming to this funeral, the first time you asked to come to the funeral, I'm like, why? Right? That was so weird to me. I didn't understand it, right? So I went to a Thomas, who you know as well. I'm like, why? Right? And he's like, no, that's like comment. And then like all these other people started, I'm like, this is not even a testament to me. This is a testament to my mom, which reinforces that a lot of how you are and how I am is really just looking at our parents.

• 6:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:40Speaker 00

  It's pattern recognition, right? So I think our practicality probably comes from my, your parents, my parents. And so I would just say from, for my mom, she does tend to think about what are the second and third order consequences? I know for a fact for you, you've thought about the contingencies with your business. You're very, you're very. About making sure that you don't lose your assets, right? Or lose your ass in general. I'm the same way, too. I might be a little more reckless sometimes, but I do think about the second and third order consequences. I would say the, a lot of people I look at with that personality test, when they're low on practical, they don't think about these things. And there's a lot of, there's crazy entrepreneurs we know. When we say, when I say crazy, I mean that they don't think about these things and they're high flying. They like, you know, they like the, they like the things more than the actual, like producing things for customers. And they're a little different.

• 7:24Speaker 00

  That's okay. It's just not how we are. So, yeah.

• 7:27Speaker 01

  I, I also talked to my CEO quite often at NP Digital, and he taught me something similar a while ago. Because when you're in the agency game, sometimes you get customers, sometimes you don't. You gotta hire, sometimes the economy's bad. And us being in 20 something countries, we're impacted by laws and regulations and governments from all over the world. And we can't control what people do or don't do. And he tells me probably once a quarter that when we're in some sort of situation and he's playing for it, he always assumes the worst. And it's usually never the outcome. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, this is so extreme. This is very unlikely. He's like, I run the ship.

• 8:12Speaker 01

  I have to assume the ship is always going to crash or hit something or engine's gonna break. And I have to be ready for whatever. And when it doesn't happen, great, that's a cherry on top. But I need to be prepared in case something bad happens, like an iceberg comes in our way and we don't see it.

• 8:28Speaker 00

  Yep. And that is why CEO is the worst job. Yes. You, everything rolls up to you that you don't want to roll up to you. And, and that's just what it is, right? So like I mentioned earlier, just to kind of tie the bow around this, the, the quote I mentioned, so chaos is always present in business. I think it's not even the leaders absorb it. You get to choose, if you're one of the owners of the business, you get to choose who absorbs the chaos. And you have to choose wisely. And if those people can't absorb the chaos and they try to kick the chaos back to you, those people unfortunately aren't the right fit and you have to move on from them quickly.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  I tend to hire executives who stress and are good at handling stress. They stress about what's happening, they stress about what isn't happening or what may happen. And they're really good at handling stress. The reason I hire people who are like that, I've noticed a trait and or a trend in which those kind of people in my organization are really good at dealing with problems and they don't put it on other people. They tend to be a little high strung, but I like working with executives who are kind of like that because like when things go wrong, like your mom passing away and then the organization has to pick up without you.

• 9:38Speaker 01

  When you have people who are high strung and worry about everything, they just deal with it and they tend not to come to you with problems. They tend to come to you with solutions and they come to you with the solutions after the problem happened and they tell you, oh, this problem happened, here was a solution already implemented and this is what happened. And they bring it to you after everything is pretty much done.

• 9:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  And it's like, those are the type of people that really help organizations.

• 10:02Speaker 00

  There's levels to that, right? So there's people that don't point out the problem, then you have people who just point out the problem. Then you have people who point out the problem, the solution. That's it. And then they do the, then you have the problem, the solution, and then they just do it. And then it's just like, oh, it's done, Neil. What else would you like? I plan on doing this next. Is this okay? Right? It's just one step after another. They're proactive. But to your point, the question I like asking people now to test their resilience and you can't test resilience that well during interview process, but I will, I'll be like, hey, Neil, tell me about a time when you worked your absolute hardest, right? And you might have someone that says, okay, yeah, I woke up at 5:00 AM and I'd work until, you know, probably 1:00 AM when we're doing these acquisitions and well, why did you work so hard? Well, because I really cared and I was really involved in integration, blah, blah, blah. How hard was it really? Like, how stressed were you? Oh, on a scale of one to 10?

• 10:46Speaker 00

  Okay, maybe like a 10 out of 10. Why was it so stressful? Why did you work so hard again? Right? And then I get to the question, I'm like, okay, well, how many hours were you working per week? And they'll be like, oh, yeah, you know, like in this case, it's like they're working 80, 90, 100 hours. Okay, that's hard work, right? And then the other question I'll ask right after is like, what season of work are you in right now? Right? So like, are you still looking to work 80, 90, 100 hour weeks? They might, sometimes they might say like, look, I just want to work 40, 50 hours a week, which is fine. But the worst is when I ask someone, what's the hardest you've ever worked? And they said, you know, probably 40 to 45 hours and

• 11:17Speaker 01

  It's not gonna cut it.

• 11:18Speaker 00

  It doesn't cut it, right? And so my point is resilience is everything in business. And the more resilient people you can hire, the more resilient their company will be. But then it's like, how do you test for these things? I don't know if you want to add anything to that.

• 11:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know how to test because I haven't been too involved in the interview process in my organization, or actually any of the organization.

• 11:36Speaker 00

  Like high level execs?

• 11:38Speaker 01

  I tend to interview them later on. I make sure they're player coaches. That's the big one. I make sure they're willing to work seven days a week.

• 11:44Speaker 00

  You're not a player coach.

• 11:45Speaker 01

  No, but I know my weakness is I can't coach. So I tend to not hire people like me. I try to hire people who are better.

• 11:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, to cover your weaknesses.

• 11:55Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 11:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:56Speaker 01

  And the reason I look for executives who are player and coaches, most executives are coaches, no problem. I don't want executives who not want to get their hands dirty.

• 12:05Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 12:06Speaker 01

  It sets a bad example for the rest of this company.

• 12:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, because they think they can do the same thing.

• 12:10Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 12:10Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 12:11Speaker 01

  When I interview them, I talk about problems that we're facing and I ask them on the spot how they would overcome it. And I would also give them real life scenarios of issues we've dealt with and how they would have solved it in the past. And I compare it to our decision making.

• 12:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:24Speaker 01

  Because we then learned of what worked, what didn't work.

• 12:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:27Speaker 01

  And we kind of see their thought process.

• 12:29Speaker 00

  You're looking for a lightbulb moment. It's like, oh, like that reaction, right?

• 12:32Speaker 01

  I'm looking for experience.

• 12:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:33Speaker 01

  And people, when they can give really high level or not, when they can give really granular details on how they actually solve something, usually they were involved in it. When they tell me more high level stuff and they can't get granular, that means they may have been the manager, but they don't know how to actually get it done without a good team.

• 12:52Speaker 00

  You know, we've been interviewing the COO candidates and the difference between the ones that are really good versus the ones that aren't, the ones that are good, they can whiteboard in real time. Like they can break down their thought process and go into the details, right? When we give them like a hypothetical campaign or like a scenario that we're dealing with, right? So similar to you. Now, the ones that struggle with the whiteboarding and then they tend to try to dance around it. It's like, man, they've had like so much experience, but when push came to shove, it just wasn't there. And you have to trust your gut in that situation. It's like on paper, they look really good, but you gotta trust your gut and just say it ain't gonna fly.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  Yes. But one mistake that I've made with this whole interviewing and hiring process and even telling my team how I want them to work. A great example of this is, you know, this people in an organization tend to come with problems. They very rarely come with solutions. So in marketing, when AI overviews first came out, I remember, you know, it came out, rolled out to a lot of traffic, then they rolled it back and it was barely any keywords that had it and then it started creeping up. It eventually really impacted the health industry. AI overviews were showing up all over for health-related keywords. And I remember we have a client specifically with the AI overviews in health. They didn't adapt and they weren't adapting fast enough, a lot of pages.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  We were helping them execute. They just couldn't put enough internal resources. So when I was talking to my team and they were coming with the problem. Eventually, you know, some of them started coming with solutions, but I learned something in which I used to push people. Hey, when you have a problem, you better come with a solution as well. It slowed down how many people came to me with problems, which was a bad thing. Because people were afraid to tell me a problem when they couldn't think of a solution. So then I wasn't always aware of the solutions, which is bad as well. I mean, I wasn't aware of the problems, which is bad as well. Ideally, I want people to come with a solution, but I'd rather know a problem than not know the problem.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  And some people were just afraid. So eventually I made it where people just come to me with the problems. They try to come up with a solution if they can. If they can't, I tell them it's okay, but just try. I always want to know the solution no matter what. I won't get mad if you don't have a potential solution. Just tell me the problem. And then eventually together we brainstormed a solution and I'm like, well, if you look at the AI overviews, they're telling me they summarize, but I'm like, it's hard. And I was like, you know what? Why not have AI help summarize the articles we have and come up with three bullet points for every single article and then have humans review and then we went in, made mass changes. With a lot of keywords within 24 hours, we were noticing the AI reviews were starting to pull us in because we were already ranking on page one for a lot of keywords.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  They just weren't pulling us in as much to AI reviews. And then we started seeing our traffic change to that site. But the point I'm getting at is when I was going through this learning, yeah, it's ideally great for people who plan and are player coaches and will just get things done. If you force that culture, there's always people within an organization that can't keep up. And you're going to have people on the lower levels and it's okay. But you want them to still come to you with problems because if they don't come to you with problems, you won't solve them. It's just they'll just be, you know, hidden and then you won't see as much growth.

• 16:15Speaker 00

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• 16:51Speaker 01

  I think one thing is, and these are people of all levels coming to you, I'm assuming, not just your executives. Yeah, okay. Yeah, because the one thing that we do on our end is we, everyone has at least, most people have one KPI they're tied to, right? Like to indicate if they're successful or not. And it's every week, it's your red, yellow or green on it's traffic lights, right?

• 17:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:13Speaker 01

  And so for us, it's like, okay, if someone's consistently red or yellow, but then they say things are going well, but they're not bringing any problems, then it's very easy for us to just call them out and be like, well, and these documents are public to everyone. So everyone can see if you're red or yellow, right? And it's just like, yeah, well, it seems like you've been red or yellow for a while. Like what's going on, right?

• 17:33Speaker 00

  And so how do you build building these mechanisms to to to just make sure that people are on track or off track? Here's a funny thing. I replied to a tweet from this guy Peter Yang earlier. He's like, I think he's just talking about agents not being there right now, right? And I'm like, you know, autonomous agents aren't there yet. So I replied. My reply got like a hundred thousand views on X and like there's a bunch of sub replies. So I was just saying, oh, we use AI to help coach people, right? Like if you're not working the right priority, it's going to coach in the right direction. If you're red or yellow on your thing, it's going to coach. It's basically an accountability coach, right?

• 18:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:04Speaker 00

  Same thing for sales, client service, whatever. So we deployed this and it's working well, like people have like they're moving in the right direction now. My point of saying all this is that, and we can move into this AI conversation too. A lot of the replies in there is like, like, who would want that? Who would want that? But the interesting thing is I had a lot of DMs from entrepreneurs like, dude, I want to implement this, right? How do we do this? I just had a call today with a guy who I think he has like a couple hundred employees. He DM me, he's like, we want to do this, right? My point of saying all this is that I think we're going to move into a world where it's like everyone's held accountable to one or two things. And I think they're going to be forced to bring their problems and solutions, especially because they have AI as a partner now. Because for me, I'm just like, it's constantly my thought partner. I can't like not have an answer now.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:42Speaker 00

  So, and I hope it's just going to make life easier for everybody, not even just the founders, so.

• 18:47Speaker 01

  But I also think some people have the wrong mentality when it comes to mindset as an employee. Because as an employee, you should want to improve.

• 18:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:58Speaker 01

  And you should want to become better.

• 19:01Speaker 00

  You would think so. Oh, you've never been an employee before. Okay, you say your piece and then let me tell you me as an employee. Go ahead.

• 19:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, so technically I have been an employee a few years ago.

• 19:12Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. Okay, okay, okay. That doesn't really, no, no, that doesn't count. That doesn't count.

• 19:16Speaker 01

  For a short period of time.

• 19:17Speaker 00

  But seriously, did you work anywhere in high school?

• 19:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, not very far.

• 19:20Speaker 00

  Okay, that counts.

• 19:20Speaker 01

  A protective trench and clean restrooms and vomit.

• 19:22Speaker 00

  Okay, that actually counts. Okay, go, go, go.

• 19:25Speaker 01

  I did door to door sales for vacuum.

• 19:26Speaker 00

  Okay, that counts too.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  I was a cashier.

• 19:29Speaker 00

  Okay, okay. Give your thought and then like I want to hear your your opinion too.

• 19:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I had an interesting question and I can tell where this person was going. I was at an event, I was talking about marketing. And I always get, every once in a while, I get really like oddball questions from left field. You know, like one time I got a question like, so with AI, how are you guys gonna work on, and how are you gonna work on emissions and what it's gonna do to the environment? And I was talking at a really big corporation, like what should we be doing? Was not related to anything to my talk. They're like-

• 20:03Speaker 00

  Emissions as in like ESG stuff, right?

• 20:05Speaker 01

  Yes, like pollution and all that kind of stuff, right? It was like left field. One of the other recent left field ones I got was, how do you deal with promoting people specifically in DEI? Right? And this is just random. I was talking about growing traffic and AI. This is a random question. And I don't want to get into people's preferences, but I know one employee that I work with for a long time, he's one of our longstanding team members, LGBT-

• 20:35Speaker 00

  Q plus?

• 20:36Speaker 01

  Q plus. I forgot the acronym, sorry about that. And he's been promoted a lot, right? Or I don't know what a lot is, but he's been promoted a few times. And he's done really well. And I was talking to him this morning about it. And he's just like, he was telling me, thank you. And I was like, dude, why are you thanking me? And I was talking about everything from when I saw him to now he's owning a home. And I'm like, look what you did by yourself financially. Look where you got in this company by yourself. You learned, you improved. He continually tries to improve himself with AI, learning, just getting better, reading books. I'm like, this is the individual, right? And when I was getting that question, I was just like,

• 21:20Speaker 01

  people shouldn't say, hey, the AI is coaching me so I have less yellows and reds in your scenario. This should be like, the AI is making me better so I can do my job better, perform better, learn more, get raises and promotions, make the company happy, make myself happy, have progress in my life. That's the attitude they should have. When I was talking about this individual, when I got the question, I'm like, I promoted him because he's good. And he's learning and he's doing better.

• 21:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  And I'm like, his personal life or preferences and that is none of my business. He's amazing rock star in our organization. He deserves to be promoted because he's a rock star.

• 21:59Speaker 00

  On merit.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  On merit.

• 22:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:01Speaker 01

  I don't judge him. I, I didn't hire him because of D E I. I hired him because he looked amazing on paper, interviewed really well, was amazing cultural fit. And I'm like, this guy has amazing personality to also be on sales calls as well. So it was like, we would be lucky to have him and we were lucky enough to convince him to join a, from a big company. We were small at the point. I don't even think we had like 20, 30 people at that point. But the point I'm getting at is like, you want to find people who want to improve. And when you see those comments on LinkedIn, and it's usually places like LinkedIn, where they're hating and it shouldn't be a requirement and they hate this kind of stuff.

• 22:40Speaker 01

  A lot of those people will struggle to do well in this world because they're pushing back anything that can potentially make their job, them better at their job and they more so want to coast in life.

• 22:51Speaker 00

  Yep. And that's the biggest problem. So, so I don't know about you, but like, did this click for you when you're, you know, at Knott's Berry Farm? Were you a very growth minded person at that point?

• 22:59Speaker 01

  I was.

• 23:00Speaker 00

  You were?

• 23:01Speaker 01

  I was 15 and a half.

• 23:03Speaker 00

  Oh, but you were selling CDs and stuff already.

• 23:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:06Speaker 00

  Okay. See, that's different.

• 23:07Speaker 01

  No, but dude, I remember when I was at Knott's Berry Farm, cleaning toilets.

• 23:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:12Speaker 01

  And picking up trash. I remember I was doing it right next to a small restaurant within Knott's Berry Farm. A lady was pissed off at her service for food. Now I was in the trash services. I forgot what it was called. They give it a fancy name. It wasn't called trash. Uh, cause then no one would take that job.

• 23:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:27Speaker 01

  Um, and she was really pissed off. So I tried helping her, even though I was not in the restaurant area. And I tried calling, I, when I couldn't help her and resolve the problem, she spent money, she didn't get what she got and people, the staff there was rude to her. I called my manager in the trash area and tried to get it solved. And eventually it did. She tipped me money. I gave it back to her. I said, no, you had a terrible experience. No one should get tipped for your terrible experience. I'm sorry about this. But my whole take was if people are unhappy and you don't try to fix it, how many of those people are going to tell bad things about the park? At that time, it was Knott's Berry Farm and not come back. I'm like, this is going to affect their numbers and this is going to affect people. I wasn't thinking about it from a growth aspect of, hey, I'll get a raise or promotion or I'll get acknowledgement.

• 24:13Speaker 01

  I was like, a business needs to keep people happy. You can't keep everyone happy, but you should try your best.

• 24:18Speaker 00

  Yeah. Let me, I'll, I'll share a few stories here and then, and then we can move on. But the, the phrase that comes to mind here is you help others get what you want and you'll get whatever you want. The, the way I was brought up though, and this is no fault. I, I think it's just, most people think that money should be the priority. It's, but like, it's the other way around. You help people first, then you make money. That, the money is a residual, it's residue from the value that you add. And so.

• 24:40Speaker 01

  Wait, and to go back on this really quickly, when you were young, you probably also tried to do things for money for the sake of it.

• 24:47Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 24:48Speaker 01

  How often did that work out for marketing campaigns, like your elderly care websites and a few of those?

• 24:53Speaker 00

  I mean, even, even before that, but the, okay, let's leave, let's use elderly care websites. So we had a, we had a website called Care Sprout. Okay. So we're trying to go after like a place for mom, right? Which is in hundreds of millions, let's go for a place for mom.

• 25:04Speaker 01

  And it was a marketing platform.

• 25:05Speaker 00

  You and I, we tried to start a poker site together, right? But that wasn't really what we're into. We still got on calls with executives from like, you know, big companies and all that.

• 25:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. You said it was a call with Zynga, the poker game.

• 25:15Speaker 00

  You're like, how do I set a call? I was like, I cold emailed them. But, but my point is, and by the way, when that call, I think I was still 24 years old, 25, you were 26, 26. So we're, we're still pretty young, right? We're still relatively young right now, but a little older. But my point is, when I did these things for money, I didn't feel fulfilled. And I kind of felt like I was lost, right? Whereas when I worked for that one startup, that education startup.

• 25:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:39Speaker 00

  I felt very bought into everything where I was happy to work seven days a week, even though we were working four days a week. And the reason for that was I felt like I was learning so much and I felt like it was like, like a drug, like the amount I was learning and implementing and seeing the results from it, it felt like a video game. And so that's where it made it fun. And I think at that point, I had like maybe, maybe a year or two before I started really getting into personal growth. And then from there it started to compound and where I started thinking about, okay, how can I add value first instead of making money? I think the problem for the majority of people is they don't. I'm not saying you need to do personal growth stuff because you've never you've never really done that. You've always looked within, but you, as long as you have a mindset of I'm just gonna keep trying to get better for the rest of my life, there's no way you can lose. But if you're like, oh, I'm just gonna try to hit a certain dollar amount.

• 26:23Speaker 00

  The problem with that is that's very limiting and that limits your entire mindset because you're tied to a dollar amount.

• 26:28Speaker 01

  Yes, but if you go back to the examples of like poker for us or the elderly care site. And Eric and I had the model of just get the traffic and the rankings and we'll figure out what to do.

• 26:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:38Speaker 01

  It never really did well because neither of us were passionate.

• 26:41Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 26:41Speaker 01

  When you're passionate, you put the time, like when you worked at Treehouse, the educational startup. They went from, if I'm not mistaken, five days a work week to four day work weeks.

• 26:49Speaker 00

  No, they had four day work weeks, then they tried to make it five days and it pissed everybody off.

• 26:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, but when it was four days, whatever the number was, I knew you guys were working four days.

• 26:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:57Speaker 01

  You, in many cases, were working six days, seven days a week.

• 27:00Speaker 00

  I always worked seven days a week.

• 27:01Speaker 01

  And you loved what you were doing and you're passionate and you didn't really care if they asked you, you said, eh, you don't have to work. You still did it because you loved it.

• 27:08Speaker 00

  I worked seven days a week even after the CEO have threatened to fire me a month into the job. I still work seven days a week.

• 27:13Speaker 01

  Wait, he threatened to fire you because you're working too many days?

• 27:15Speaker 00

  No, no, no. He, so a month into it, because we didn't have that much runway left. We had three months of runway left, right? But the previous marketer before me, we weren't hitting numbers, right? And so, but, so he ended up, that guy ended up rage quitting because I got promoted to head of growth at like that, at that age, right, at 25. The guy's like, what the fuck? Makes sense. Sorry for my language. Then I decided, I'm like, yo, like all our marketing is screwed up right now. I need to turn off ads and figure out what the heck is going on. So I turn everything off, right? And then a month into me being at the company, the CEO pulled me aside. He's like, hey, look, if you don't hit numbers this month, we're gonna have to unfortunately part ways. And so at that point, I can be a little crybaby and just quit, or I can do something about it, right? And so it's like, oh, okay, well, I get to do something about it. Okay, all in, YouTube ads. And then it worked out.

• 27:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:58Speaker 00

  Then we raised our series B, you know, things were happy for a little bit until they weren't again, so.

• 28:03Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 28:04Speaker 00

  Yeah. But to your point, it is it is passion. So I think those of you that are looking to work somewhere, you have to be passionate about it and you have to feel like you're learning and you're getting better. I would just say that I have a lot of great relationships with with ex-grainers, the ones that I'm I'm still friends with, like Noah, for example, right? These are all people who have tried to continue to get better the whole time. And they might come up to me like I was hanging out with a couple of them in Japan. They're like, Eric, you changed my life. And same thing for you. I'm like, I didn't change your life. It's because you continue to bust your ass and you decided to make something of yourself. And that's why we have to need to have a relationship. It's the ones that just keep pointing out problems. I don't really talk to them anymore, so.

• 28:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, no. And I think when it comes back to passion and marketing, I think a lot of marketers get it wrong. Like they're like, I'm passionate about marketing. Well, if you're passionate about marketing, but your marketing stuff you don't care about, it just doesn't work as well versus if you're actually passionate about marketing and you care about what you're involved in, like the projects, and you think it's cool and you enjoy it.

• 28:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, by the way, Neil and I will always hire amazing people who are growth oriented, who are resilient. So if you think you're that and you are smart about your cold email and your cold outreach, for sure, we will notice. There's I don't think there's any chance where I haven't noticed that before. Same for you.

• 29:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, but what's interesting about you and I is we hire really good people during bad times. And when it's not just bad globally, but it's also bad for us business wise. And the reason we do that is because during bad times, it's easier to get amazing rock stars. During good times, it's extremely hard to recruit them.

• 29:30Speaker 00

  Dude, 2021 was really hard for everything, right? It's like you would make an offer for someone and then they would join. They they're supposed to start, they they join another company.

• 29:38Speaker 01

  Dude, I had that.

• 29:39Speaker 00

  That happens so many times to us. I was just like, what?

• 29:42Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 29:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, that is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow.