Ryan Deiss | Scaling a Business Using Systems that Sets You Free - Radical Responsibility Podcast

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
I took this business, scaled it up, had not one,
not two, but three different companies on the INC Five
hundred and five thousand list in one year. From the
outside looking in, everybody's telling me how great I am.
You know, I'm on top of the world. I've got
the Midas touch. But I'm miserable and I'm burnt out.
I'm missing family dinners and I'm missing soccer games, and
I'm leaving for the office before anybody's awake, and I'm
getting home after everybody's asleep. You know, I've got my wife,

(00:22):
I've got four kids. Nobody knows who I am. They
I don't ever get to see them. And it wasn't
until I came home one night and there's my wife
sitting up in bed and she's you know, of now
fifteen plus years and she says, you know, look, I
know who I married. You can keep doing what you're doing,
but you can't pretend like you're doing it for us anymore.
That for me, was the breaking point when I realized, Okay,
I can have all the ego in the world, but

(00:42):
this ain't working.

Speaker 2 (00:45):
Welcome to the Radical Responsibility Podcast. I'm doctor fleet Mal
and I'm excited to guide you on a journey of
authentic transformation. In each episode, I'll bring you insights from
leading experts to explore trauma recovery, mindfulness practices, positive psychology,
and innovative breakthroughs in health, wellness, and life optimization. This

(01:06):
is a space for real conversations that inspire meaningful change,
helping you find alignment with the person you are always
meant to be. Let's get started. What if transformation isn't
just about thinking differently but feeling differently. Science shows us

(01:26):
that true change happens when we align not just our minds,
but also the neural networks in our hearts and guts.
This heart mind connection is the key to deeper healing, resilience,
and expanded awareness. That's why I created the Heart Mind
All access, membership and community, a space designed to help
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(01:49):
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(02:14):
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I invite you to join us. Clip the link to

(02:35):
learn more and start your journey today. What does it
really mean to scale the business, not just grow it,
but truly scale it, and what does it take to
build something that thrives without us at the center. In
this conversation with Ryan Dice, and innovator in digital marketing
and systems thinking, we go beyond the buzzwords to explore

(02:57):
what sustainable scaling really looks like. Ryan shares his journey
from college side hustle to running an influential portfolio of businesses,
and he breaks down the core shifts that every founder
must make to grow from scrappy entrepreneur to strategic leader.
We talk about why ego is often the biggest bottleneck
to delegation, and how to build operating systems that create

(03:19):
transferable value and the vital difference between making money and
building a business that lasts. Miam is Doctor Flee Mall
your co host for the session, and I'm thrilled to
be here today with none other than Ryan Dice.

Speaker 1 (03:32):
Welcome Ryan, Thanks so much, Rammy Fleet.

Speaker 2 (03:34):
We're so thrilled to have You've been a huge influence
on our own success at Hartmind Institute. And you know,
I hate to ask anybody to encapsulate their story at
a couple of minutes, but I'm going to ask you
to do it anyway, So you know, just get a
sense of how you got started, how did you end
up becoming an entrepreneur and getting into digital marketing, and
how did that happen, and what's the backstory behind that.

Speaker 1 (03:56):
Yeah, it's really simple. I met a girl. I was
a freshman in college and I I had no ambitions
of being an entrepreneur. I had no ambition ambitions of
doing marketing. I had no idea what I wanted to do.
I actually thought, I don't know I've ever told you this, Fleet.
I thought I was going to go into vocacial ministry.
That's what in my head. I thought I was going
to go and be a pastor and so but I
went to college. I met this girl. Within a couple
of weeks of dating, I knew, like, this is the

(04:18):
woman I'm probably going to marry. I didn't tell her that,
by the way, because I knew that was kind of creepy,
which as a marketing lesson, by the way, just in that,
but I did. I mean, I was like, whoa, okay,
And it was the first time in my life that
I wanted something and I knew I didn't have what
it took to get it, and specifically, like I knew
that I wasn't the kind of person who had the

(04:38):
means to be like an adult who could support another
human being, And specifically I knew that I didn't have
enough money to buy an engagement ring. I knew that
diamonds were expensive, and I was broke. So I decided
to start this little side hustle selling little ebooks and
things like that online, truly, just so that I could
make enough money to buy this woman an engage a ring.
That was it, and this was my freshman year. I
didn't tell her that, but I got to work. Well

(05:00):
fast forward a couple of years, I had made enough
money to buy the ring I got the ring, I
got the girl, and that little business eventually ballooned into,
you know, initially a digital publishing empire, mini empire, if
you can call it that. And along the way, all
I did was I talked about publicly what I was
doing privately. And this was kind of before blogging was

(05:22):
a thing, you know. I launched my first business in
nineteen ninety nine, you know, so you got to think
Google back then was a science Fair project. He didn't
have a lot of this stuff that we have. There
was no social media. But I had a little email
list and I invited people to subscribe to it, and
every week I would just tell him what I was doing.
And I did it as much for accountability as anything else.
And so I kind of got a reputation and I
gained a following as I guess, being an expert, not

(05:45):
because I actually knew what the heck I was doing,
just because I was talking about what I was doing,
and I was sharing the wins and the losses, the good,
the bad, and the ugly, and so that was really
where it all began. So I've always started businesses, I've
always run businesses, and I've always talked about what the heck,
it was that I was doing, and that's how Digital
Marketer came into being, It's how Scalable came into being.
But I've always had businesses and then I've always had

(06:07):
businesses that talked about what I was doing in business,
and so that's kind of how I've operated really for
the past twenty five plus years.

Speaker 2 (06:14):
Our focus today is scaling, and obviously you could share
so much about marketing. So your company, Scalable has really
helped so many companies and so many founders and entrepreneurs
figure out how to scale their business. You've got something
that's working, You're probably wearing all the hats. Maybe you're
a solorepreneur, maybe you have a small team, but basically
you got a small team of helpers. You're the expert,

(06:35):
you're doing most of it, you're directing everything, and then
where do you go from there? So I know you
have a whole system for scaling, and we're going to
go through some of those elements. But what kind of
needs to be in place before someone can even think
about scaling a business, before it would make sense to
start thinking about how do I scale my business effectively?

Speaker 1 (06:53):
Yeah, I think we first kind of need to find
the difference between growth and scale. Right. So growth is
increasing any particular unit of measurement.

Speaker 2 (07:03):
Right.

Speaker 1 (07:03):
So if you're saying I want to grow my sales, right,
then that's growth. What we're talking about with scale is
really talking about increasing the capacity, so the ability for
growth to occur. And that's important because early on growth
is all that matters, because your capacity is fundamentally you know, massive,
like it's limitless compared to what you have, because what

(07:24):
you have is nothing, right, And most people when they're
starting their business, they're high performance individuals. If you're watching this,
you know right now you're a high performance person. You
can do a lot of stuff. You know, you're a
bigger container than the average person that's out there. And
so that's plenty to get launched. That's enough to get started,
and that's enough to grow. The hard lesson that I

(07:45):
had to learn is that growth does not equal scale,
and that scale is not simply growth and then more
growth and more growth. So, long winded way of answering
your question, it's realizing the difference. What it takes to
scale is realizing number one, it's a fundamentally different playbook.
It requires very different tools, but most importantly, it requires
a different operating system. So to go basically from zero

(08:09):
to half a million, really up to about a million
dollars in revenue, just about anybody can do that. And
I don't say that to suggest that it's easy, because
it's not. Lots of people do hard things all the time,
but just about anybody who's motivated can do that without
having to go and figure out all the tricks of
the trade. But going from a million to let's say

(08:30):
ten million revenue, now you're talking about needing to scale
beyond yourself. You need to have an operating system that's
more than what we just refer to as a UoS
that you operating system, because you're still just one person
who only has twenty four hours and who probably needs
to sleep some of those times, and maybe has people
around you who want to hang out with you some
So the big thing that you must have if you

(08:51):
wanted to go from startup to scale up is you
have to upgrade that operating system. It can't just be
the UoS. It can't be about you. And it's a
hard staying in the world fleet because number one, nobody
told us that we needed to do it. Number two
nobody gives us a pleabook for how to do it.
And number three, we kind of have to die a
little bit to ourselves because we're so used to being
that person who does everything, so in our success we

(09:14):
wind up getting humbled. That's I think the hardest thing.

Speaker 2 (09:17):
Of all, absolutely, and with my own company, I've been
going through that and with your support. Unfortunately, your company
does provide a playbook for this. And so let's talk
about the operating system. We're going to talk about three
core components of scaling here today, and the idea is
to really get the company to where you have options
and you know you could exit if you wanted to,
or can exit from being an operator to a true CEO,

(09:38):
from a CEO to a board or an investor whatever,
or you want to sell your company someday. But it's
getting something that has real value, that's a marketable company.
And so part of that, I know you talk about
transferable value and the way you transfer that from just
yourself being you know you're the owner operator and the
value is all you. But if you leave, what company
is there? So it probably doesn't have a lot of

(09:58):
market value. You build that into the system and you
start building that operating system. So I wonder if you
could talk a bit about the concept of transferable value
and about some of the core elements of building that
system at it's more than we can cover all of
it today, but some of the key principles.

Speaker 1 (10:13):
So what it takes to scale scale does require the
three elements. And three elements are Number one, you have
to have leverage sales, so not just sales, but leverage sales.
I think everybody gets that, right, We need to have sales, okay, fine.
Number two is you need to have to have bankable profit,
so you have profit that is there to continue to
fuel the sales. Right. Those are the two that most

(10:33):
people think about. It's this third one that you brought
up that nobody thinks about. Most people don't know about,
and they certainly don't optimize, and that is what's known
as transferable value. And transferable value comes in two forms.
The first form of transferable value is transferring the value
creation process from you as the founder, to other people
in the organization. In other words, you're not the only

(10:56):
person who can do all the things. That's the first
type of transferable by the second type of transferable value
is transferring the value of the company to somebody else
in the event of the sale, at least being able
to do it. But it's that first type of transferable
value that must occur first. And this is where business
owners get trapped. It's where we get trapped in our
own businesses. When our businesses start owning us is when

(11:16):
we're the only ones who can actually create value in
the company. Now, this is going to come very often.
It manifests itself as you're the only person who can
do the marketing, nobody else does it as well as you,
or you're the only person who can close the sales,
or where I see the majority of time is you're
the only person who can deliver the service you know,
or who can deliver the product. Nobody else can do

(11:36):
it as well you know as you can. And what
we have to be able to do as business owners
if we truly want to own our business instead of
having our business own us, we need to have an
operating system that allows for the value creation process to
occur without us. So the question that we ask is
does the money still show up if you don't show up.
If the answer is no, then you don't own a

(11:59):
business yourself. You don't know a business, Your business owns you,
and so that's where the operating system comes into play.

Speaker 2 (12:05):
Let me interject just something there. So I think there's
two blocks you kind of reference. One of them that
I know I ran to and a lot of entrepreneurs
run into, is nobody can do it as well as
I can, and it's quicker to just do it than
train somebody to do it right. And those things will
just block you forever from appropriate delegating, getting smarter people
on the team, building, the systems, and so forth. So

(12:27):
I wonder, how do you see, how did you get
through those blocks? How do you see people get through
those blocks?

Speaker 1 (12:31):
Yeah, And the brutal thing is in the beginning, it's true, right,
I mean, so in the beginning, no one can do
it as well as you can, and it is faster
just for you to do it. And so that that's
what makes this so tough, is because everything that is
the exact right answer early on is the exact wrong answer.
It's like somebody who's very like, show me the things
that make you great, and I'll show you the things

(12:52):
that will ultimately destroy you. And this is true in business.
So how did I get through it? I mean I
got through it by frankly nearly imploating, you know, the
very relationship that was the thing that kicked this off.
You know, I brought myself and my family to the
point of you know break. I mean that I took
this business, scaled it up, had not one, not two,

(13:12):
but three different companies on the ink five hundred and
five thousand list in one year. From the outside looking in,
everybody's telling me how great I am. You know, I'm
on top of the world. I've got the minus touch.
But I'm miserable and I'm burnt out. I'm missing family dinners,
and I'm missing soccer games, and I'm leaving for the
office before anybody's awake, and I'm getting home after everybody's asleep.

(13:33):
You know, I've got my wife, I've got four kids.
Nobody knows who I am. They don't I don't ever
get to see them. And it wasn't until I came
home one night and there's my wife sitting up in
bed and she's, you know, of now fifteen plus years
and she says, you know, look, I know who I married.
You can keep doing what you're doing, but you can't
pretend like you're doing it. For us anymore. That for
me was the breaking point when I realized, Okay, I

(13:54):
can have all the ego in the world, but this
ain't working. And that was when I finally said a
cap got a figure something else out. And that is
to answer your question, like, that's honest answer to your question,
fleet how did I do it? I had to get
to an absolute breaking point where I, because I'm man,
I tried for years to do it all myself, and
I succeeded to a very big point because I'm a

(14:15):
high capacity, high performance individual. And I'll tell you, the
better you are at this stuff, the deeper grave you'll
dig for yourself is the reality. Like, show me somebody
who's a high performance, high capacity individual, and I'll show
you somebody who's dug a very deep hole for themselves.
I don't want people to get to that point. So
the reason that the Scalable Company exists is to let

(14:36):
people know you don't have to go there. It's two things.
One is mindset and the second is tactical. So the
first thing that I'll tell you is a mindset issue
is understand that number one, nobody will probably do everything
as well as you, but lots of people can do
one thing better than you. That's the first really important
mindset shift that needs to take place. You're not looking

(14:58):
for people who can do every thing as well or
better than you. They're not going to. It's your business,
you birth this thing. But you gotta know that there
are absolutely positively people out there who any one little
thing better than you. They exist, They're out there. We
just got to find them, especially if we can equipment
with the right tools. The second mindset shift is there's
freedom on the other side of that, right, there's freedom

(15:20):
on the other side of that if we can begin
handing these things off one at a time, not exiting
completely from everything, but doing it one at a time.
That's how the process occurs. So how do we do it,
like tactically, practically, how do we do it? Let me
tell you how you don't do it. Oftentimes it's easier
to know what not to do. So first and foremost,
it's not about you becoming more productive. So you don't
need another time management system or another productivity system or

(15:42):
another you know, timer, planner journal kind of thing. I'm
not saying there's anything inherently wrong with that, but your
goal should be to do less not more. Okay. Also,
we don't just want to hire a bunch of people
and throw human beings at it. When we do that,
what we're actually doing is trading menial tasks we're pretty
good at for a new job, a new role called management,

(16:04):
which most of us are pretty terrible at. Okay, So
we don't simply one of their human beings at the problems,
because what winds up happening is they don't know how
to do it any better than we do. We don't
have time to train them how to do it. We
believe going into it that they're probably not going to
do it as well as us. We kind of want
them to fail, if we're being honest, because that validates
who we are and our identity. And so when they fail,
we get to swoop in and be the savior. They

(16:26):
quit or we fire them, and we then begin this
cycle of like, well, I guess I'm the only one
who can do it. Don't try to make one magical
unicorn hire of the integrator who's going to run everything
for you that doesn't actually work, and don't just try
to grow your way through it, because that's not going
to work either. What you got to do is You've
got to get your business out of your brain. And
it starts with just taking a step back, getting up
to thirty thousand feet and asking yourself a really simple question, well,

(16:49):
two really simple questions. Question number one, how to customers happen?
It's one of the most basic and yet essential questions
that every business owner needs to ask. How to customers
or clients or pays happen? How do you get them?
Many people all ask a business owner this question and
they can describe it to me, But can you show
me when we work with clients, when we acquire a business,

(17:11):
when we're integrating a business, this is the first thing
that we do. We literally get sticky notes and we
go to a y board and we map it out
in visual flow chart form. Okay, what do you do first? Well,
we run Facebook ads? Great Facebook ads? What else? We're
also running Instagram out. Great Instagram day. You all get
sticky notes. Great, Then what happens and we visualize and

(17:32):
map out the flow that occurs from the point of
awareness until somebody buys something. This is not complicated rocket science,
you know, complex business process mapping stuff. Anybody can do this. Now,
once we've answered visually the question of how do customers happen?
Then we answer the second critical question, which is what
do we do once we've got them? How do we

(17:53):
fulfill on the promises made during the sales process? And
we do the same process. We visually map that and fleet.
I know you know this because you've gone through this
process with us. But once you visualize those two things,
you've got a visual process map of what we call
it growth engine, so the visual process flow of how
you attract and convert new leads and customers, and a

(18:15):
visual process map of your fulfillment engine how you fulfill
post sale and the promise is made. What you've done
is you've visualized the customer journey. You can now see
literally how value is created in the business. Then you
can look at step by step in stage by stage
and say, okay, which of these sticky notes can I
start handing off to other people? And the way that

(18:36):
you do it, the way that you delegate, tactically speaking,
is one sticky note at the time. And the mistake
that people make is they try to hand everything off,
They try to hand off unclear jobs. If you can
first visualize the value creation process, why your company exists,
how you add value. And then if you hand off
the tasks and the roles one or two little sticky
notes at a time, before long, everybody's doing everything and

(19:00):
you're just kind of monitoring, you're optimizing. That is the
first step in creating the operating system of a business.

Speaker 2 (19:06):
And I know you call these sticky notes eventually become
playbooks somebody owns, and that's the term used in your
company for SOPs or standard operating procedures. I like the
term playbook. I think it really gets to the point.
And I love what you said before about you know,
one indicator of to the extent that we have transferred
value from our head and our abilities into the company
into a system is whether if we don't show up,

(19:28):
do the sales keep showing up? And I love an
analogy use about the dancing bear. Like you're the dancing
bear in your business. If you stop dancing, what happens?
If you're not dancing on that ball, what happens.

Speaker 1 (19:38):
That's the circus bear, right. The circus bear is big
and powerful, a little bit scary. But at the end
of the day, bear stops dancing, Bear doesn't get paid.
And there's a lot of business owners out there who
they're big, and they're powerful, and they're respected and even
a little bit feared. But the second they stop dancing,
they stop getting paid. And so we don't want that.
We don't want to be that. We want to own
our business. We don't want our business to own, and

(20:00):
so we get the business out of our brain and
we put it in sticky notes on a whiteboard. Right, ben,
we do it here, I did this recently, right, if
people can see this, We do this all the time.
We think in terms of business process maps. Because yeah,
then every one of those sticky notes, which of these
sticky notes are really critical? Great, let's create playbooks of these.

(20:21):
We're going to assign names to each of those sticky notes.
In the beginning, every one of the states who does this?
One me? Okay, I don't want it to be me
on every one of these. So what's the person called
who does some of these things? And this is how
you begin hiring one sticky note at a time. How
do I know these things are working? What are the
metrics that I would need to track to know this
is working? This how we begin to build scorecards. Right,

(20:42):
and now, when we're meeting with our team, we're talking
about the metrics on the scorecard. That's how we can
begin optimizing the flow. And so this is how we
build operating systems within businesses. But it starts with just
the simplest question in the world. How do we add
value to the marketplace? And that's with how do we
get customers? How do they happen? How do we serve

(21:03):
them once we have them?

Speaker 2 (21:04):
So understanding these growth value engines and then the scorecards
that can really track the metrics to see how you're
succeeding with those all contributes to the next thing. We'd
like to talk about. Leverage sales or recurring revenue and
Lupilier recurring revenue they think of subscription membership programs or
as saass and that can be one kind of recurring revenue.
But also whatever reasons you had, if you know that

(21:25):
you just keep doing x, you're going to get x
amount of sales, right because you've got repeatable processes that
systematize you keep doing it. I mean, may be market
changes you got to adjust to, but in general, you've
got a business you keep run, the sales are going
to show up, right. So I wonder if you could
talk a little bit about how people shift from just
going after elephants all the time. I go, I do
this big problem brought but oh great, now what's next?

(21:46):
And I do another thing to mix of mine. Now
what's next to really building a system that's creating that
revenue even if you step off the circus ball for
a moment.

Speaker 1 (21:56):
One of the most terrifying days you know in the
month for business owners the first of the month, because
for most business owners, they start back over it again
in zero. And so, yes, there are certain tactical offer
based strategies, whether it's subscription revenue and membership and things
like that, that we can implement that may or may
not make sense for your business. But one of the
first things that every business needs to do is simply

(22:17):
again to visualize, well, how do we get sales in
the first place. And so one of the reasons that
businesses have to start over every month, and that they
practice these random acts of marketing and they're always flailing
around and trying something new and doing something new all
the time is because at the end of the day,
they have no idea how they get their customers in
the first place. They seem to just magically show up
from thin air. And when we pin them down and

(22:40):
we ask them, Okay, how do customers happen? Ninety nine
times out of one hundred, if it's a business of
any skill at all, they can tell me. And when
we lay it out, when it gets visualized in one
of those growth enders, they go, oh, that's it. And
there is surprised to see it, as anybody is. They
just never took the time to do it. So if
you want that leverage sales, the first thing that you

(23:01):
need to do is just to document how sales happen.
And in just about every business that we're in, it's one, two,
maybe three different ways. In general, it's not dozens, right,
it might be five or six and a really big company,
but for most businesses, there's gonna be two, three, four, five,
six ways that you generate new customers, clients, patients. That's

(23:24):
just it. And if you can visualize that, and then
you can do the next step, which is to measure it.
So now we're gonna build scorecards that measure each and
every step in stage in the process. Now we're gonna
look at those scorecards. We're gonna have goals for each
one of those metrics, or say are we on track
or are we behind? And our scorecards are really simple red, yellow, green.

(23:45):
If we're on track or ahead. It's green. If we're
behind but we got a plan to catch up, it's yellow.
If we're behind. If we don't have a plan to
catch up, it's red. And so my job as a
leader becomes very simple. Help my team execute the price
projects to turn red metrics yellow and yellow metrics screen.
As long as you're always turning red metrics yellow and
yellow metrics screen and executing only those projects, this is

(24:08):
how we avoid shiny object syndrome. This how we stay focused,
and this is how leverage sales begins to occur right,
And this is how we make sure that we're not
starting over at zero every month, because we know that
this works if we just execute this. We've got a
process in place, let's just do this. We know it's
going to work, we know it's going to be predictable,
and we know it's only going to get better and

(24:29):
our efforts are going to compound. We're not reinventing the
wheel every single month. But it starts again with the documentation,
the visualization, then with the tracking, then with the optimization
based on what are the metrics that are red, what
are the metrics that are yellow? And it is that
a continued repetition of it gets the flywheel spinning. That's
what makes this process go. And if you'll just implement that,

(24:51):
tactics can come and go, but that process of optimization
will always work. It'll always works no matter what business
you're in. It'll always work no matter the tactics that
you're seeking to execute.

Speaker 2 (25:02):
It makes management so much easier because it takes all
the vagueness and ambiguity out. Employee wants to know how
are they doing. We'll look at your scorecard. Right, the
whole thing has moved red, the yellow of the green. Right,
it's right there in black and white. And so you
get a metric driven business. It's so much easier to manage, right,
because otherwise there's all this perception and opinion and you know,
so getting it into these metrics. I've done a lot

(25:23):
of sales and management consulting in my past, and I
worked with a lot of organizations that we're still doing
belly to belly sales that they didn't even have a CRM,
that you know, and convincing them to get everything into
a CRM, have a visible sales funnel and get to
where you know x lead generating behaviors will create x
number of leads, X sales behaviors will create x number

(25:45):
of prospects and then closures and being able to manage
that whole thing and then you know, instead of managing
a salesforce of twenty people as a sales manager, managing
a funnel, right, and it's all visible and it's all metrics.
It makes it so much.

Speaker 1 (25:57):
Easier, and it removes it eliminates the power politics of it. Yeah,
like you said, somebody can't say, oh, you're being mean
to me. They must not like me. It's like, well, no,
your metrics are red, and I love you to death.
But like, if you're going to sit in this seat,
if you're going to occupy this role, if you're going
to keep cashing this check, it requires that you be
able to turn bees metrics yellow and then ultimately green.

(26:19):
And if you can't do that, it doesn't mean that
we don't like you, and it doesn't mean you're not
a wonderful person. It just means you can't occupy this seat,
you can't stay in this role. Similarly, what projects should
we do? Why do you always pick tenis project instead
of mine. Well, because the projects that she suggested turn
our red metrics yellow and the yellow metrics ren The
projects you suggested have nothing to do with any of

(26:40):
them red and yellow metrics on the scorecard. Right. This,
by the way, will also protect teams from the bosses.
So I'm talking now to all the usan's out there,
So the CEOs, the founders, the leaders, we oftentimes are
the worst offenders at throwing shiny objects at our people,
at going to an event, at coming to something frankly

(27:00):
like this and seeing getting all these like amazingly great
ideas and taking all of these notes. And I'm begging
you before you go back and you tell your people
to go and implement this stuff, I ask you what
metrics are red and yellow that what you're implementing are
going to turn green? And if you don't know the
answer to that, we got to get these other things
in place first before we jump into the tactics. Okay,

(27:23):
that's we always want to make sure that we have
this flywheel to plug the tactics into, not that we're
just practicing random acts of marketing and chasing shiny objects.
So it protects you from the politics. It protects you
from the shiny objects, and it just gets you operating
more strategically and objectively.

Speaker 2 (27:40):
I would just ask audience to just reflect for a moment.

Speaker 1 (27:43):
And you know, God, look at Mira.

Speaker 2 (27:44):
How many of us are practicing random acts of marketing
and chasing shiny objects? Right? I think a lot of us.

Speaker 1 (27:50):
Do that until we don't. Right, So only all of us,
by the way, all because again, all your high performance individuals,
we see opportunity everywhere. It's what makes us great. We
need sometimes to be protected from ourselves, and so these
processes are going to do that as well.

Speaker 2 (28:05):
So let's talk about the third dimension of creating a
really scalable, marketable, valuable company whether we want exit or not,
but bankable profit. So a lot of entrepreneurs, especially early on,
they forget about paying themselves, or we forget about paying ourselves.
Maybe we're just running the business out of our pocket.
And at the end of the day, I got some
money in my pocket. I'm okay, I paid all my bills,

(28:25):
I made payroll this month, and I still got some
money in my pocket. You know, that's not going to
create a sustainable or marketable company. So what do we
mean by really designing bankable profit into our business and
into the whole way we construct and operate our business.

Speaker 1 (28:41):
Now, I continue to believe that the ultimate sign of
a healthy business is not revenue, it's not valuation, it's
not NPS. It is that company's ability to distribute large,
fat chunks of cash. And people are going to fight
me on this, and they're going to say no, no,
It comes down to are you achieving your mission and
things like that. There, effectiveness as a leader is measured

(29:04):
in free cash flow, period because it is the measurement
of number one inflows, So are people actually paying for
the work that you're doing, while also simultaneously measuring your
ability to effectively allocate and be a good steward of
the resources that you've been given. Right, So, you have
to create enough value in the marketplace such that people

(29:25):
want to give you of their hard earned resources, and
then now that you have them, you need to steward
them effectively. And the outcome of that is there's profit leftover. Now,
what you choose to do with that profit is up
to you. But I'm simply saying that if you don't
have anything to distribute at the end of the day,
it either means that nobody's giving you money or you're

(29:46):
not a very particularly great steward of the money that
you're receiving. So bankable profit is essential. Now, there's seasons
in the business where we're going to have less and
seasons where we're going to have more. I get that,
But the goal should be bankable profit distri beatable cash.
So how do we get there? You said it, I
mean step number one is to make sure that you're
paying yourself. Got a buddy of mine, Mike mccallowits, wrote

(30:08):
a great book on this called Profits First, and that
is essential. I remember when I started my first business.
I mean I didn't know that I was supposed to
pay myself a salary. I kind of thought that paying
yourself a salary is what you did if you were
a wage earner. And I'm not a wage earner. I'm
a business owner. I don't pay myself a salary. I
take distributions. And so practically, what did that mean. Well,
it meant if we had a good month, I took

(30:29):
out too much, and if we had a bad month,
I was freaked out and starving to death. And thankfully
I had a good mentor who said Ryan you're an idiot.
Pay yourself a salary. You know you're doing the work
of a CEO. Pay yourself a salary at a bare minimum,
pay yourself enough to live on so you don't need
to worry about bills. I remember the first salary I
paid myself was ten thousand dollars a month. I remember
thinking at the time I could never imagine needing any

(30:51):
more than ten thousand dollars a month. Well guess what
for kids and embraces and private school and Disney vacations
and soccer camps. Suddenly ten thousand wasn't enough anymore. And
you know, and now on good months, we still had
distributions in addition to the salary, so it is fine.
But I didn't have a process in place for managing
cash flow for doing the distribution. So again I'm back
in the feast and famine mode. So it said like

(31:14):
you should give yourself pay raise. So one of the
first things that you could and should do as a
business owner to make sure that you have bankable profit
is simply to pay yourself first. It's amazing. If you
make that decision, the money has a way of showing up.
Because an optimistic entrepreneur's ability to spend will always outpace
their ability to earn. This again, we see opportunity everywhere.

(31:36):
When we expect all opportunity to have an ROI, oftentimes
we're right, oftentimes we're wrong. The way that you ensure
that there's some leftover for you is you pay yourself first.
So that's the very first thing that you need to do.
Beyond that, the other way that you increase your profitability
is you need either need to lower your expenses or
you need to increase your average client value. That's how
we do that. Most of the time people focus on

(31:57):
lowering of expenses. It obviously has a lot. You can
only ever lower expenses to zero, and you really can't
do that because you need some people going. So we
do some things. I can tell you a very tactical
thing that we do at least once a quarter that
I'll tell everybody to do. We sit out an email
to all of our leaders, anybody in the company who
has a credit card, and the subject line is this

(32:19):
stops now. I'll tell you if you send that subject
line to anybody in your company, they're going to open it,
all right, that's going to freak them out and What
it basically says is, Hey, as it stands right now,
we're currently spending too much money on stuff that we
don't use. And so I want everybody to evaluate their
credit card statement, you know, pull it out, sort it
from highest to lowest. I want you to make a

(32:41):
list of all the things that you know that you
can cut immediately, make a list of the things that
are a question mark, and make a list of the
things that you should keep. Let's have a meeting. I'll
buy the pizza, and let's add up everything that we
can cut. Every time we do this, we save about
five figures a minimum of five figures ten thousand dollars
a month, except when it's more.

Speaker 2 (32:57):
Yeah, well that's gotten all the more important because there
are so many sasses and AI tools out there you
don't and a lot of them don't cost that much
by themselves, but they started adding up and you try
it out, didn't work, but you're still paying for it
by the month. And this stuff can really build up
if you don't keep your eye on it.

Speaker 1 (33:12):
Yeah, and if you and as your team grows, a
lot of people are making their own decisions, which is good, right.
We want to empower people to make decisions, but very
often they make a decision that made sense in the moment,
and sometimes these people will then leave the company, but
their decisions linger.

Speaker 2 (33:26):
Right.

Speaker 1 (33:26):
So now we've got like these orphan tools in software
that it was like, I don't even know what that is,
and so yeah, every ninety days you just need to
do a quick audit, check it out, make sure that
it's there. But the most valuable thing that you can
do if you want to increase your bankable profit is
I mean, you can raise your prices, but looking to
add things like how do we add things to the

(33:47):
sales so that we can, you know, improve our average
client value. That's the thing that a lot of people
don't think to do. That's one of the easiest things
that you can do is just get the people you
already got to be worth more money. All of that
just dropts to the bottom line. The other thing that
we look to do, big question we ask is how
do we improve the customer experience? So we'll also do

(34:07):
an audit. I mentioned before the importance of documenting your
fulfillment engine, visualizing what you do with the customer after
they're done. If you will then go back and audit
that and go stage by stage and say, how do
we make sure that this is a seven star experience,
so not just a five star How do we make
sure it's a seven star experience. If you'll go step
by step, stage by stage, you'll always find opportunities to

(34:30):
wow your clients. Why your customers. When you do this,
you decrease the chance that they're going to refunder cancel,
which again that's going to drop straight to the bottom
line and increase bankable profit. And you increase the chance
that they're going to leave a positive review, which is
going to help create more customers and clients. And you
increase the chance that they're going to send you referrals,

(34:50):
which is ultimately the only way that any company is
going to be able to grow at scale. If we
can't get to the point where our customers are creating
more customers for us, and then our businesses will cap out.
We've got to get word of mouth going, because in
any business, the cost of acquisition just gets too dang high,
and we will never get word of mouth unless our

(35:11):
customer experience is remarkable, worthy of remark worthy of talking about,
unless we're producing amazing outcomes. So yes, cut your expenses. Yes,
look at raising your prices, but ultimately, if you want
to create bankable profit, create an amazing customer experience, and
you do that by auditing that fulfillment engine and asking

(35:31):
is this seven stars? And then lastly, but firstly, pay
yourself first.

Speaker 2 (35:36):
Yeah. I also want to follow up there on what
you said about increasing average customer value because I think
a lot of us when we you know, we know
we need more revenue, we're trying to control expense to
gets then we know so we I just need more
customers and that gets more and more expensive. And we've
got all the existing customers that could be if we
bring them value, they're going to be willing to transform

(35:56):
more value to us. So I mean that seems to
be the deeper view and the more we action ideal
is I just need more customers, So I'm just going
to go out and do more of X, and that's
not that sustainable in the long run.

Speaker 1 (36:06):
Yeah, here's two questions I would have you asked before
you go out there and try to get more customers.
Do this math? Number one, how big would my business
be and how much more profitable would it be if
every customer we had was worth twice as much. Just
run the numbers on that, right, So if you did
a million dollars last year top line, and let's say
you dropped two one hundred thousand of that to the

(36:26):
bottom line, so you had a twenty percent profit margin.
Well if now, all of a sudden, all of your
customers worth twice as much. Now, you did two million dollars,
but let's say you did it on basically the same expenses, right,
They're just were magically worth more. You didn't drop two million,
two hundred thousand, you drop one point two million, right,
I mean, and typically the now maybe the cost of
fulfill is more, but it's going to be marginal. Okay,

(36:47):
So how much bigger would your business be and how
much more cash would you have to distribute to yourself
and other stakeholders if every customer you had was worth
twice as much. Now, not every business can double their
average client value average customer value, but some can and
many can increase of fifty percent. So that's the first
question I'd ask. Second question, I would ask how much
larger would your business be if you had every single

(37:08):
customer that you had ever sold, if every single one
of them were still getting you money today, if nobody
had ever left, nobody had ever refunded, and everyone we're
still giving you money. How much bigger would your business be?
If you will ask those questions and you will run
that math, you will realize, Holy crap, I never need
to get another new customer again. I just need to
get the ones that I got given me more, and
I need to get the ones that I got to

(37:28):
never leave. Focus on those, and you're gonna have massive
bankabill profit because the single biggest expense you will ever
incur as a business owner is the cost of acquiring
another new customer.

Speaker 2 (37:38):
This focus on profit altogether, because I think it's easy
to get caught up in revenue. I've been guilty of
this myself, and I love but I think it was
Vern Harnish, in one of his book on the Rockabeller Principles,
said that revenue is just vanity. Revenue numbers are pure vannys.
Profit is at the end of the day, it's profit
that drives the business and grows the business, and that,
you know, gives you a reason to be in business,
right And I love what you said. Are looking at

(38:00):
internally to increase the bottom line rather than constantly thinking
I'm just going to reach out and get more, find
more and more customers, create more of this, you know,
chase all the shiny balls in the world and for
all the spaghetes. Well, instead of looking at my core business,
how can I increase average customer value and how can
I increase customer retention? That's so powerful. So I do
want to ask you a question about the whole world

(38:22):
of digital marketing. Obviously you're one of the leaders in
that field with Digital Marketer, and you originally founded the
Trafficking Convergence Conference, a very successful live conference in it today,
so that world is going through a lot of transformation.
AI is kind of changing everything as we watch and
participate in it. And I know your colleague and part
of Olden Frasier also one of our summit co sponsors

(38:45):
and interview guests. It's just amazing how he's out there,
you know, on the leading edge of developing integrating these
tools to do really interesting things. But we do need
to be pretty nimble and innovative today if we're going
to stay abreast to what's going on in digital marketing.
So I wonder if you could just talk about it,
because it could look to a new entrepreneur's just so
complex and changing themselves fast, and how do I possibly

(39:05):
learn this stuff and get a handle lot of it?

Speaker 1 (39:07):
So what I'm doing is I'm asking myself, how can
I use AI to make myself and my team more effective?
At from an output perspective, so at doing the work
that we do so that we can free up bandwidth
to leverage the other kind of AI from a customer
facing perspective, and the other kind of AI is actual intelligence.

(39:27):
I'm seeing a lot of brands looking to leverage AI
customer facing, like they want to leverage AI to make
it more efficient so that they don't have to talk
to their customers, they don't have to deal with their customers. Right,
we're doing the exact opposite. I want to get as
efficient as we can in all of the non customer
facing things so that I can take those efficiency gains

(39:49):
and pour them back into incredibly inefficient customer facing things.
And I think the combination of that is what's going
to work. Because I believe that we're in We're already
starting to see it. You know, there's a lot of
bots and stuff where everybody now can tell if you're
talking to an AI thing, and you know, stuff like that,
and you're starting to see the rejection of that. And

(40:09):
there's times when it makes sense and it's fine where
if I'm on a website, I'd rather just be able
to poke around and find it myself than talk to
another person. But if I want to talk to a person,
that I want to talk to a person, I don't
want to talk to a fake person that's a robot
pretended to be a person. So let's use AI as
the tool that it is. You're a lumberjack and you've
had an AX and somebody just handed you a chainsaw.
If you don't take the chainsaw because you're scared of

(40:32):
the chainsaw, and you just are like, no, the AX
is for me, you're a freaking idiot, all right, I'm sorry.
And that's where a lot of business owners they're like,
I'm scared of this new technology. I don't think it's
a tool. Just like if you were a graphic designer
in the past and Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator comes along,
if you don't use these tools, you're going to get
left behind. So for me as a marketer, for me,
as a writer, for me, I use AI all day,

(40:54):
every day, I'm having conversations with it. I'm using it
as the ultimate research assistant, the ultimate I don't want
to say person because it's not, but the ultimate kind
of buddy that I can bounce ideas off of, Hey,
how would you do this? What do you think about this?
So using it from that perspective, whereas in the past
you would have just had to google it or ask

(41:14):
somebody in your team to do it amazing. I'm using
it not to write, but to help me come up
with prompts and ideas for what to write about. So
I think it's great for the first ten percent, then
I want to make sure I'm doing the middle, and
then it's great at the end. So if like from
a ten eighty ten perspective, help me with a ten percent,
I'm going to do the a middle eighty thinking, and
then the last ten percent. I also think it can

(41:37):
be great on the inverse. I'm going to bring the
first ten percent of the idea, you do the middle,
and then I'm going to go clean it up. So
I think as long as you're operating with it that
way and it's never one hundred percent of anything, then
you're doing a really really good job.

Speaker 2 (41:52):
So I talk just a little bit about you know,
whether people are selling online products or you know some
kind of widgets, physical project or whatever business is not
online today, and so you know, in whatever format that takes,
we have some kind of funnel that's happening. Right We're
getting leads in some way, We're nurturing leads in some way,
we're presenting them with an offer. Hopefully we're getting convergence,

(42:14):
and then we're doing fulfillment, nurturing them and working on
customer attention and all of that. So, if you have
funnels and our audience out there, and I'm sure many
of times the funnel stops working or you learn everything
you couldn't build the funnel, it's not working. And so
if your funnels are out what are some of the
key things to look at? And from a digital marketing perspective,
what are the key things to look at?

Speaker 1 (42:35):
I think that the visual of the funnel is to
a certain degree broken right now. And so when most
of the time when we're thinking about the funnel, what
we're thinking about is we're going to bring people in
and we're going to kind of nurture them through until
they are ready to buy, and we're going to walk
them through a journey and through a process until they're
ready kind of in our you know, in our time.

(42:57):
And that's got a couple problems. Number one, the customer
journey is non linear. Prospects have auctions. They can learn
about you in so many different ways. They can bounce
all around. They could do their own Google searching that,
they can check you out on YouTube, they can ask around,
they can you know, ping people on social media. They're
moving in and out of your funnel, hopping all around.
It's way more like the old like shoot some ladders.
They'll get right up to the top, see something and

(43:18):
then go all the way back down, see something else,
and pop right back up to the top. So from
that perspective, the funnel is anything but linear. The other
issue is that the traditional classic funnel of let's bring
somebody in for something free, then let's offer them something
kind of inexpensive, and then a little bit more expensive,
and then a little bit more expensive. We're going to
march them up low to high up the value ladder.
That works, and it kind of mirrors normal human relationships

(43:41):
like of dating. Right, So it's kin nice to meet,
you want to go grab coffee go dinner. The problem
is that traffic costs are so freaking expensive we simply
can't wait until these leads are nurtured to be able
to pop the question. I mean, when traffic costs are
super cheap, you can afford to wait. Now we can't.
And so what a lot of marketers have done is

(44:01):
they flip the funnel and they've said, Okay, well, what
I'm gonna do is I'm gonna bring everybody in. I'm
gonna make my best offer, my most expensive thing, day one,
and I'll march them back down. Now. The problem with
that is you are gonna sell the people who are
ready now. The people who are ready to buy now,
you're gonna get them. Problem is that represents about three
to six percent of your audience at any given time,
and everybody else you're gonna piss off an alien eight

(44:22):
and that three to six percent, more times than not,
is not enough to completely offset all of your costs.
And because you've alienated everybody else, you're not gonna be
able to nurture them, and so you're gonna lose all
of that. So we can't go low to high. We
can't go high to low. So here's the key to
marketing today, and it's why funnels we need to think

(44:42):
about them a little bit differently. The key to marketing
today is we need mechanisms to determine who are the
three to six percent who are ready to buy now,
so that we can make our best offer to them today,
and we can nurture the ones who are qualified who
will likely buy later, but who are not ready. That
is the great game of marketing, and so in business
we really kind of need to have two funnels. We

(45:04):
need to have a ready now funnel that's going to
get the people ready now. We need to have a
later funnel that'll nurture the later people. And we need
to have mechanisms in place to get the ready now
people to raise their hand and say I'm ready now,
and have the later people not do that and not
get in funnel. So we don't think about it so
much as a funnel anymore. We think about it as
a popcorn popper. If you've ever pop popcorn, the kernels

(45:26):
go in the pot and they're popping at different times.
Heat is applied evenly right, and yet some of them
pop almost immediately at true now people. And what a
lot of marketers do is they get a couple of
pops and they turn off the heat and they wonder
why their funnel stopped working well? And you didn't nurture
other marketers when have done pop fast enuff. They crank
up the heat and they burn a bunch of them

(45:46):
and they wonder why their funnel didn't work right. What
we need to do is we need to figure out
who are those people that are ready to pop now?
And there's a tactically, there's a lot of ways to
do that. We can do hand raiser campaigns, we can
do better audience segmentation, but that's where marketing is today.
That's the game. Who is ready now, Let's make our
best offer to them. Who is not? Let's nurture them.

(46:09):
We can't treat everybody the same anymore. It just doesn't
work well.

Speaker 2 (46:13):
That is absolutely gold. And that's exactly the place and
attention and the confusion that where I've been sitting, my
team's been sitting, and you have a framework, but I
think you call it a raise your hand campaign, which is great.
How do you get those folks that are right now
to identify themselves? Absolutely? Because I was always terrified of
pissing everybody off to try to get an offer in
front of those people, right, yeah.

Speaker 1 (46:34):
Yeah, And I can give you a quick tip to
come up with that if you want me to.

Speaker 2 (46:37):
Sure, absolutely have time.

Speaker 1 (46:39):
All right, here's the question that you need to answer.
Under what circumstances will the right prospect always buy? This
is the question that you got to answer. There's two
elements to that number one right prospect. So you got
to know who your ideal client is. And when I
say ideal, I don't mean just somebody who you can
sell to. I'm talking about your TENX buyer. Who are
the people who are likely to spend ten times more

(46:59):
than the average, So not just your general avatar. Who
are the people that are going to go all the
way to the tip tip top of your value ladder.
You need to know who those people are. So a
digital marketer, it's marketing agencies and consultants. It's not just
your random one off marketers. It's not your startup people.
It's marketing agencies and consultants. At the scalable company, it's

(47:19):
companies that are in the two to eight million dollar range. Okay,
we just with like ten to I think forty employees,
Like we just know who that ideal client is, so
that's right client. So under what circumstances will the right
client always buy?

Speaker 2 (47:34):
So?

Speaker 1 (47:34):
Now what circumstances? That's the triggering event. Every business has
a triggering event that causes somebody to enter into that
I'm ready now moment. Everybody has it, right, Like, I'll
give you a very simple example that I really understand.
Let's say I sell very high end winter coats. Okay,
that's what I sell as a business, and I'm located

(47:57):
in Austin, Texas. Now, if you don't know much about Austin, Texas,
we have two seasons. We have scalding hot and we
have frickin freezing and almost nothing in the middle. It's
like the opposite of California, right where it's like always
seventy three, Like in Austin it's like one hundred and
fifty three, and it's like, you know, in the winter,
it's like two. Okay, So a triggering event could be, hey,

(48:17):
it's winter time, but what do you do when it ain't.
Now you have to ask ourselves, what are some other
reasons that somebody might buy? What could be somebody's taken
a trip to Australia in the summer, because it's winter there, right,
So asking that question under what circumstances and understanding the
triggering events. If you know the circumstances under which the
right person will always buy, now you can structure campaigns

(48:39):
and it could be an email campaign. Where again, if
I'm not company that I have those codes, Im'd send
an email campaign saying planning a trip to South America. Now,
the people who are will respond, the people who are
it will forget about and ignore it and not be
annoyed at all because it was just such a simple
short email. I could take that and apply that to
Facebook copy all in all, So, if you can answer
the question under what circumstance the right prospect always buy,

(49:02):
you put that messaging out there, the right prospects will
raise their hand, they will signal that they're ready. Now
you then filter them off, market to them separately everybody else.
You just leave them be, leave them alone until they
are ready. Now that's the secret to marketing today.

Speaker 2 (49:19):
More goals and more diamonds. I hope people are picking
up on this our audience and where can they find
out more access more as a scald from you? Where
should they go?

Speaker 1 (49:27):
Yeah, So, if you're really liking the marketing stuff. Digital
marketer dot com is where we talk about that. If
you're at the point where you know that growth is
not enough and you need help with scale, then scalable
dot co scalble dot co is the company. So we
kind of have you at both ends. You're ready to grow,
we get Digital Marketer, you're ready to scale, we got
We've got Scalable and my own YouTube if you want
to check me out Ryan Dice Official on YouTube. I

(49:50):
just post a lot of free videos there sharing the
stuff that's working in what I know, and so tons
of free content there as well.

Speaker 2 (49:57):
Well, well, thank you so much. So Ryan, I know
you have a a really amazing free gift that a
lot of what you've been sharing today is available in
this gift that people audience can share. So could you
tell us about that? Sure?

Speaker 1 (50:07):
So I wrote a book called Get Scalable that's available
on Amazon, and it costs what a book costs. That
one of the biggest benefits of the book is if
you buy the book, then I give you all the
tools and resources and stuff like that we use to
build out operating systems, plus a digital copy of the book.
But I don't want to tell everybody to go out
there and buy a book. If you don't know so,
if you'll just go to get scalable dot com forward

(50:28):
slash resources and we'll drop the link below. You don't
even have to buy the book. Just go there, into
your name and email address and you'll get access to
all the resources as well as a digital copy of
the book, no purchase or anything required.

Speaker 2 (50:40):
Was wonderful. Thank you so much. Yeah, this has just
been golden and you've added so much value to our
company and everything you've been talking about is the journey
that we've been on for a number of years now
and your guidance has just been incredibly valuable. So I
really encourage people I know our ideas to take advantage
of that free gift and it really check out your
work at Scalable and digital Marketers.

Speaker 1 (50:59):
Thank you appreciate that.

Speaker 2 (51:01):
Thank you, Roan be Well. Thank you for joining me
on the Radical Responsibility podcast. Remember, real change happens when
we commit to our growth, face our challenges with compassion,
and stay open to transformation. If you found this episode helpful,
I encourage you to subscribe and help us spread the
message of healing and personal empowerment. Stay grounded, stay present

(51:21):
and stay true to you. Take care

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Ryan Deiss | Scaling a Business Using Systems that Sets You Free

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Ryan Deiss | Scaling a Business Using Systems that Sets You Free