Learning From Others

Today's guest is a former engineer at Yahoo who understands search engines second to none.

We talk about all the ways to run an agency wrong, hoping to teach you how to be successful and do it right.

He founded BlitzMetrics, a digital marketing company that provides training and mentorship for aspiring entrepreneurs across the globe.

On a mission to create a million jobs internationally, please welcome Dennis Yu.

Dennis Yu, it's a pleasure. Welcome to the Learning from Others Show. How you doing, man? Good, Damon, and it's awesome hanging out with you again. I wish it was in person like we were driving race cars in Vegas. I. That was fun. You know, we got a couple stories we could probably hit. Um, you and I have engaged on mostly Facebook over the years and kinda got a little friendship going on and, um, yeah, I, I flew out and I, every time I fly out somewhere I try and kinda keep track of who's where and, um, I.

And meet up with somebody and establish a relationship a little bit better. So I appreciate the opportunity of you being willing to go hang out. And we did, we went and did a limo in race cars and um, I mean, you live in Vegas, but we, we did the tourist a little bit of the touristy thing. Yeah. Yeah. And, and thanks for taking the time.

That was such an honor. And you know, you're one of the few ss e o people out there. I know this is being recorded. You're one of the few ss, e o people out there that is legit and drives results. And I am not being compensated to say this. But I've been sharing this and I'm, I know people that are watching this and have seen my Facebook posts.

They're coming to you. Yeah, no, I appreciate that. It's, um, we'll probably talk 'cause you're legit about that today, you know? Yeah. Not, not about me, but about the industry. And, um, for, for me, that's been, uh, Good and bad to throw rocks at my own industry. Right? Like, it's unfortunate that that's such a valuable sales proposition to distinguish yourself as actually doing your job.

But, but it is. So why don't we, why don't we start there? So, um, actually before we get into it, um, let's, let's have you talk about yourself the most, uh, enjoyable, comfortable part of a podcast. Um, I, I actually like how you put it on the intake form when, uh, so I ask the guests, you know, what's your elevator pitch that we can use?

And Dennis just puts Google me. If we're talking about s e o and, and you don't have a knowledge panel show up when I Google you, you're a fat weight loss coach. Fat weight loss goes, where's, where's the analogy of a fat weight loss coach? Oh, fat, okay. Overweight weight, weight loss coach. That's overweight.

Got it. Yeah. Yeah. So Dennis, um, has been in marketing for how, how long have you been in marketing? 30 years. Yeah, how'd you get into it? And I was one of the original people, one of the first people at Yahoo. So I built the internal analytics at Yahoo. So I'm a search engine engineer, so I'm not an S E o. I am the person who's trying to protect the results from the SS e o people trying to trick us.

Yeah. Have you got jaded over the years knowing like how this works and being able to see the manipulation that's going on when it's not done for the right audience and the right users? Do you think that weight loss scams will ever go away? Every year there's a new scam, right? And people fall for it.

'cause they're just like, how do you not know that? It's a scam? Hey, if I take this one pill, you're gonna lose 30 pounds in 12 days. Like it's a scam, right? Mm-hmm. So the salespeople are always inventing new techniques. And I remember, this is like back in my day, we used to walk uphill both ways. I built websites by hand using Microsoft Front page.

It was engineers that were building websites, people like us that actually physically knew how to do the thing. It was before the marketing people and all that came in back then. You remember it was called web mastering. Mm-hmm. Before it became digital marketing and social media and influencer and all these other words that are now really just buzz words, new words for the same thing.

Mm-hmm. Right. And now I'm, I'm gonna blame the internet money Bross. Yeah. And the motivational speakers for now, all of them are ai. Experts and crypto experts and chat G P T experts and they're SS e o experts too. So all these people have come in in the last few years seeing easy money and now they're gonna start selling S E o.

I was a Josh Nelson seven figure agency conference and Josh Nelson's amazing. I love the guy. They're people that come into that program 'cause they think it's easy money. And in the program Josh teaches you should sell s e o, but he also says you should also deliver s e o too. You should also understand what it is.

Some agency owners, the guilty will be unnamed, are selling ss e o and they don't even know what it is, but they know that people want it and they need it. So they sell it for $2,000 a month and they're making all this money. This one company that I'm probably gonna release a full investigation later today is making three.

Well, they're, they were making last month, $320,000 a month off of 150 clients that are paying for s e o and Facebook ads and websites and things like that. It is a scam. There's no way to defend it. It's a scam, but it's a sales guy running it. He has no operations, he has no marketing. He's a sales guy and some of them even white label their stuff out.

So they have no idea what it is and someone else is doing it. They, the client doesn't know anymore. I mean, you know, they, but they're selling it 'cause they're salespeople. There's too many salespeople in the s e O space. Mm-hmm. We need more mechanics, not people in the car dealership wearing a tie. Slick hair saying all these things about the car.

We need more mechanics that actually have grease on their fingers, like you and me. Yeah. I mean, I often get asked what, um, what should I know as I shop s e o and, and I think that why people are so attracted to, to you know, you and your transparency is because it establishes trust when you're willing to go, Hey, you know, One example, s e o takes time, but here's why.

And then you explain it. Or, hey, not only here are the advantages of s e o, but here are the disadvantages because what they're getting pitched to you. You nailed it with the sales bros and not enough actual people doing the work is the majority of the time. These people that. Sounds smooth, are not the people that are actually doing any of the work.

So they're gonna tell you whatever they think that you want to hear. And so when, when I get asked, you know, what should I be, be looking out for? And I'd be curious, some of the things that are top of your mind is, is my first thing is transparency. Like, they should be able to communicate. You don't need to know, you know, the, the full granular details of, of everything that's going on, but you should be able to clearly communicate, you know, here's.

The intent behind why we're gonna focus on this thing in content, not just, we're gonna write stuff, you know? Mm-hmm. And what's, how, how are we gonna measure progress? Right. And how long is this gonna take and why? Yeah. But the majority of the people that are out there are just like, oh yeah, no, we'll get to it.

You know, we'll get there, you'll see. And it's just like these vague responses, and I think that's become a thing of, of. Beyond just ss e o, but you and I are, are in that space more so just marketing in general is these constant sales bros of it's yell loud or talk louder or be flashier. Mm-hmm. And the emotions overtake the sales process.

And then it doesn't matter, like right before we hit record, I was telling you about somebody that we're working with and they're killing it and the data shows they're killing it. But a, a sales bro got in their ear about, Hey, you need to be louder and flashier, and they're tearing it all down. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. The sales bross are focused on collecting the money. I. They'll make huge promises. They're, they don't even know whether they can hit those promises 'cause they're not operators. The fact that you are posting screenshots, of course you're masking out like the client name and the keywords and all that, but showing the increase in traffic and sales, not just ranking on more keywords.

'cause you can rank on a bunch of garbage keywords and claim victory. Yeah. We need more people doing what you're doing and actually teaching the techniques. Not that these clients wanna learn how to, you know, who wants to learn how to change a transmission or, but at least if you know that that guy who is an actual mechanic is posting videos of him as he's, you know, working on the transmission and got grease on his hands as he's working on the car.

There's a lot more trust there and especially if the mechanic shows what they're doing, right? I'd love to, you know when, when you go to a car or uh, you know the dealership and something's wrong with the car, they're gonna give you an itemized list. Of the things that are broken and what, and therefore the toll and you know, maybe the dealership will still overcharge you, but at least you know what they're doing, right?

Yeah. If you're buying a new car or not a new car. So Damon, let's say you're buying a, a car off of whatever, like Facebook marketplace and the guy says, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's always been in the garage the whole time and never been driven. And you see it's got 150,000 miles on it. I don't know if that's exactly true.

Oh, it's, it's never been in a crash, really. I don't know. It just looks like some of these. Here don't look like they were the original parts. Are you sure? Oh yeah. It's brand new. You know, it's, it, I don't trust, I just hate to be cynical. I don't trust what other people have to say. So if you're gonna buy a car, Damon from somebody, third party, are you just gonna take what that guy says or are you gonna have a mechanic check it out real quick?

Yeah. You, you're, you're doing the equivalent of an audit. Yeah. So I, you know, audits take two minutes. In two minutes we can spot all kinds of garbage. That you and I know, like buying a bunch of fake links or most commonly having done nothing. Yeah. And letting the, especially in a service-based business, letting the G M B and the reviews that are actually done by the client carry the weight and claiming credit for that.

Yeah. How dare you claim credit for something the client did? Yeah. And dressing it up as, oh well, Google's algorithm changes all the time and it takes a while and it's a mystery. And I can't tell you our methods 'cause they're proprietary, can't give you access to our systems. I hope you understand. It's such a big secret.

I'd have to kill you. Proprietary is one of, if the not top red flag for me, as soon as somebody says that in, in a marketing sales discussion, because we're all using the same dozen or two tools. Mm-hmm. It's just who knows how to use them most efficiently in which combination to deliver on the results.

Yeah. If any that you have mapped out into SOPs, Can you imagine if you ask a mechanic, so you're fixing my transmission. What tools are you using? Oh, it's prop tools. Using wrenches are secret. Yeah, yeah, I can understand if you're like Mrs. Field's chocolate chip cookies, but even they put their recipe out there as like a, a campaign to try to, you know, what was like a gorilla campaign?

'cause they, they planted that thing to try to make it popular. But I flew back from LA yesterday to Vegas and the pilot greeted me. I always liked to just have a quick chat with the pilot if I'm the last one on the plane. And can you imagine asking the pilot, so, um, How did you learn how to fly? A 7 27?

And he says, oh, it's a secret. I can't tell you. It's super proprietary. No, there's flight training manuals and all that kind of stuff out there. It's, it's public. In any field. If you're a doctor, hey, you're a heart surgeon and you're gonna do heart surgery on me, what scalpels are you using? Hell yeah.

Super proprietary, the scalpel and you know, it's the scalpel that I use. It's, you know what, you could be a heart surgeon too. If you pay me $10,000 and sign up for my weekend course. I'll teach you how you can be a heart surgeon just in a weekend, because I'm also gonna give you access to my proprietary scalpels.

It's the skill of who's using the scalpel. It's the, do you remember Mars Blackman and the Air Jordan campaigns? I think you're old enough to remember that. Uh, I never got in the shoes and think that, but that's No. Uh, but it, but so they had Air Jordan, you know, Michael Jordan, the most famous basketball player ever, and they were making fun.

It was, the commercials back in the eighties were hilarious. Mm-hmm. That Mars Blackman, who was Spike Lee would say, it's the shoes. It's the shoes. Got the shoes, Uhhuh. You could jump as high as Michael Jordan and hit your head on the rim, right? Yep. So do you think if I switched from Adidas to Nike that I'd all of a sudden be a better basketball player, do you think If like me doing ss e o, if I just switched from my primary tool to, you know, the proprietary ones or Majestic or Hfss or SEMrush, like, do you think that would matter?

No, it's all the same data. There's no proprietary, like you said. Yeah, it's, it's your skill. The other red flag for me is guarantees and, and my position on gu. Sure, they sound lovely. I get why they're attractive, uh, attractive to the consumer and attractive to sell. Um, and, and, and in some forms of marketing, maybe there's guarantees.

But in s e o there, there's so many abstract variables and, and wildcard that you should be able to communicate why they're variable in a wildcard and also communicate. Why you can't offer a guarantee on it. What you can do though, is you can communicate averages and expectations. Mm-hmm. You know, you can't guarantee you're gonna be on page one in 10 months, but you could say on average it's 12 months or whatever, give or take.

You can talk about the home runs that took four months. But to me it's a huge red flag. It it's a sales guy. Anytime I hear somebody saying there's a guarantee. As you talked earlier, it's the guy doing the sales and not the person actually doing the fulfillment and the guarantee in our space, what, what you and I are doing, it's competitive SS e o.

So for us to move from position five to position one, that means we have to get ahead of those other four guys. So we, we can't, we. Guarantee what those other four people are doing. Yeah, we can, we can guarantee our effort level, we can guarantee higher r o i because we can focus where there's less competition or where there's more bang for the buck by going, by changing our strategy.

Yeah. But we can't guarantee number one on Google for city name, you know, plumbing or whatever it is. Real estate city name. Yeah. Well, let's talk to, um, Let's talk to the aspiring agency owner and how they can avoid being part of our future discussions and how to approach. You do not want me writing an article about you in that I love writing articles about people, and they're either very positive, which is 99% of the time, like I love Uplifting You, Damon.

And then there's the 1% of the people that are outright scamming 'cause A, they're not delivering, and B, they know it. There's a lot of people that are unintentionally ignorant. And this is the advice that we're giving agency owners right now. You wanna take care of your clients. You recognize there's a lot of stuff that you'll never know as much as Damon Burton, but there's certain things you do need to know.

You've gotta learn the basic tools to see that rankings turn into traffic. That turn into sales. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And if you just generate, so there's one personal injury client that they were paying this guy. His name sounds like a whiskey. His first name is Jason. You can maybe figure out who it is. And he was charging this personal injury attorney $70,000 a month.

And what he did was upload a dictionary to the site on how do you get a commercial truck driving licenses. So they, you know, attorneys, they want truck driving cases. 'cause those are million dollar cases versus like fender-bender ones, right? They really want the truck driving cases. So, This guy was ranking on all these, these truck driving terms, but they're all like, how do, what are the, you know, how long does it take to get a commercial truck, uh, driving license?

And what is a C D L? And none of them had the intent of someone who got hit by a truck. Yeah. And this guy that was charging $70,000 a month, what he did was he was, he was creating 200 garbagey posts in a glossary every month. I told you about this one. Mm-hmm. We talked about this before. Yeah. And. The client who's wealthy and has made, you know, over a billion dollars, didn't know any better, but he suspect it's, you know, these guys are not dumb, but they don't know about s e o.

They're real smart and they, like, you don't wanna try to pull the wool over. Just because they don't know about SS e o doesn't mean they're dumb. Okay. They're, they can kind of, they're busy. Yeah. They're, they're good at the thing that they do, and you're good at the thing you do, and I get that, but, So this guy Jason was claiming, look at all the look we're driving, we're ranking on another 2000 keywords.

Yeah, but they're all garbage. And I looked inside the analytics and there is no more phone calls and no more cases being driven off of this s e o. All the cases from a search engine organic search standpoint, we're coming on. People searching for the client's name. This, this client is on TV, billboards.

He has more billboards in Kentucky than anyone else. He's all over the place, right? So they Google his name and, and then this s e o guy was claiming credit for this guy's TV ads and billboards. So my number one thing for people that your agency owners and your, you know, you need to offer, you can't just offer Facebook ads 'cause then you have a 90 day churn.

That's just unfortunate, right? Mm-hmm. You can't offer social media by itself unless you just wanna churn it out. You have to offer s e o, you have to offer some kind of P P C or whatnot to show that you can drive results. But the key is start with the results first. Yeah. Don't talk about all the s e o, whatever.

Start with you need more cases, you need more clients, you need more book jobs, you need more phone calls. And that comes from people that. Come to our website because they search on these certain keywords and here's the competition on those keywords. So most of these s e o people, they use the s e O tools that you and I know that generate that auto, generate these reports and put the agency's name on them, right?

Mm-hmm. Because why wouldn't, why wouldn't I wanna use these different tools that just send out reports to make it look like there's work being done? Mm-hmm. But that's not work that's being done. It's just showing rankings that go up and down. Hopefully the numbers are going up every month and if the business is doing well and they're taking care of their customers, even if you do nothing from an ss e o standpoint, those s e o numbers will go up, won't they?

Yeah. So don't rely upon rankings. Rankings are nothing compared to traffic. And traffic is nothing compared to sales. 'cause even if you drive more traffic, this one personal injury attorney was, was driving an extra, I forgot the number, but two or 3000 visits a month to their website. People that were looking to become truck drivers.

Yeah. And then that pollutes our remarketing audiences. 'cause we pay to remarket against people who come to the site. Right. 'cause all of those could be cases. So we're remarketing everywhere. 'cause of the pixels. Yeah. So s e o start, it sounds fundamental and it doesn't matter if you do Facebook ads or website building or email.

Start with the client's goal and what that's worth and then trace it back to what you do. Yeah. Like there's one client, they're a big personal injury. Firm for some reason. We got a lot of these PIs and they're spending 1.7 million a month on Google ads. Yeah. And they're also doing SS e o. They're using Ben Fisher for L S a I love Ben.

They're using Steve Wedeman for SS e o I love Steve. And there's more calls that are coming in. The firm has been growing, but they couldn't figure out where this. Cases were coming from because there's 10 different systems that have to be tied together. Hmm. And sometimes the in, in CallRail or, or RingCentral, we can automatically append where that call came from.

But sometimes we have to ask 'em. And a lot of what we call digital plumbing wasn't in place 'cause, you know, multiple LSAs and a different website for P P C versus one for the main firm for different reasons. So we had to tie all this stuff together and it was only last week. Outta this firm's 15, 20 years.

It's only last week that for the first time we're able to see Marketing Source. So if you're the agency, you've gotta be able to show that what you are doing goes all the way down to the bottom line where there's sales. And that means you often have to go into the call rail or into their C R M or whatnot.

What percent of the time Damon are SS e o agencies going all the way down to see that there was a sale that was occurring. And or do you think that's important? I think it's important, but not, you know, most people don't, uh, almost never. It's, it's mind boggling to me when I get on, uh, a lead call and they're with an agency already, and I ask them for basic stuff.

What, what are you currently targeting? What's been done today? And. I for, I'm 17 years into doing this and it still blows my mind like the first time. Every time when their reply is, I don't know what we're targeting. I'm like, okay, well what have they done to date? I don't know what we've done to date.

They just send me these flashy reports every month that said they did something. It is surprisingly, the majority of the time, and I can't wrap, you know, I have such a hard time with this because even though I see it so often, I can't put myself in that position to rationalize that approach. And so it's such a, it's like a twilight zone to me because I can't, I can't relate to it whatsoever.

Yeah. There's so many scams. I wrote an article like 15 years ago and I think it was something along the lines of, I mean we could Google it to find it, but you know how to, how to sell ss e o and I basically, it was a joke 'cause it was revealing the techniques and I said, you know, the best way. To win a client.

'cause these guys are all, all the sales bros are all about selling, selling, selling, right? They don't care about delivery. They just wanna sell. So I'm like, okay, you wanna sell? Here's the easiest way to sell. Before you go into that sales meeting, put up a blog post on a site that at least has a little bit of juice.

Like hopefully you have a blog that has some amount of trust and ha optimize it for a long tail keyword. So let's say that this is, uh, you're talking to a. Veterinarian. So then write a blog post that ranks for Boulder, Colorado, golden Retriever, toenail clipping tips. Mm. Right. How difficult do you think that would be?

Yeah, not at all. You were difficult to zero, right? Yeah. So write a blog post, make a video about it, rank for it, and then go in there. And say, yeah, you know, with S E O I even came prepared and I know you're a veterinarian. Go ahead and go into Google right now on your computer, on your phone and search Golden Retriever toenail clipping tips.

Boulder, Colorado, and like, oh look, we're number one. See? Yeah. Then if that doesn't work, 'cause sometimes it doesn't work, you know, sometimes whatever, sometimes your site has no power. Then buy that on Google. Buy that keyword on Google and Geotarget just to Boulder, Colorado on golden retriever, toenail clipping tips.

Exact match, right? And put a dollar a day on that campaign and say, go ahead and search. And then you could, ideally, they do a search on it and they see your ad and they see that you rank number one on that. That's fantastic. That's so funny. Yeah, because it's especially with local like you and I know with local, we're not talking about national golden retriever, toenail clipping tips.

We're saying in Boulder, Colorado. How many other people are writing articles about Golden retriever toenail clipping tips? No one. Yeah, no one. So with SS e o, I think so. To be clear, I know it's easy to rag on these ss e o people 'cause it like 95% of it's scam, unfortunately. But here's the good news. You and I know that ranking for local.

It's way easier 'cause you only have to beat the other people in Orange County, California that do whatever the thing is. You know, meds, liposuction, orange County and other Santa Ana and Newport Beach. Like that's, that's not competitive, but liposuction, if I like, how much effort would it be to rank on liposuction if I, you know, needed you to, to do that for some reason versus liposuction, small city name.

Yeah. Oh, it could, it could be a night and day difference depending on the location. Yeah. 'cause you, you also have to take into consideration the indirect competition. And I think this is something that, um, I don't, I don't really hear a lot of other SEOs talk about. I'm sure plenty of 'em know about it, but I.

What this goes into the transparency thing when you're explaining the realistic expectations to your client is you not only have to take into consideration the quantity of results that you're fighting against, but the quality of the big players that are in the way too. I mean, there's so many variables in in which you look at.

These results that, um, you know, I don't know where I'm going with this, but I think it's just, at the end of the day, it's, you can't outrun your reputation. Right? And so these, these people that say sells over service, right? And, and just like you said, where it's just, just sell more is, is the solution that won't last forever.

And then, and then what are you gonna do? Yeah. Reputation's everything I think. I'd be curious to see if you agree, but I believe that pro-level SS e o is indistinguishable from pr, reputation management, social media, whatever it is, because it's other people that are credible in that particular topic that are talking about you co-creating content like we're doing here.

And that's showing up on reputable industry specific websites, not like random websites that happen to be DR. 73. About websites that are authoritative and rank on those keywords in that industry. So if you build those relationships, if you have that expertise and you've done a great job, then your reputation's great and your SEO's great.

I don't know how, how someone could have great s e O in a competitive area and not have a great reputation as if me at Google, well, I was at Yahoo, but a lot of my people I trained went to Google as if we couldn't tell. Who is legit and what links were real or not, and if that content was generated by chat PT or you know, if it didn't have, maybe we can't tell if it was autogenerated, but we can certainly tell if it has pieces of experience in there as part of eat.

Yeah. You know, you know, maybe what you and I should do is create, um, an ss e o escrow validating company. Oh. I do that all day. Where it's like, you know, we don't want your business, we just want to, you know, we charge a consulting fee to protect you, help vet which your choices are, you know, bring us a three.

You're considering, and we'll tell you the pros and cons of all of 'em. There we go. Thanks everybody. I would love to do that. Yeah, that, I mean, I've been doing that for 20 plus years. How many friends have you had coming saying, you know, Hey, you know, can you just like look at my s e o real quick? I, I'm sort of suspicious every day.

That's like a, a dude saying, I think my, I think my wife's cheating on me. Do you think like, if they're ha if they're having to ask, I think you know what the answer is, right? Yeah. Every day I had, uh, co comes and goes, uh, in higher quantities, uh, on certain days, but it is nearly, I've had three, it's, we hit record at 1:00 PM today and by 1:00 PM I had three just today that asked me that.

Yeah. I've had 35 in the last 10 days. Yeah. Yeah. And it's consistent. Yeah. And I help most people for free. Like there's this one that hit me up literally just 15 minutes ago and I'm looking at their text. Hey Dennis, my name is Chris. I'm a friend of so-and-so. She gave me your number in regards to an SS e o audit I was hoping to get done on a site I'm working on.

And then there's some specifics there. I'd love to chat if you're free. Anytime. Yeah, I'll, when we're done, I'll call him back. I'll take a look at the site and in three minutes I'll tell him what's going on. Yeah. Yeah, because you and I are mechanics, we pop open the hood, we take a look, we hook up the diagnostics, and we're like, okay, here's what's actually going on with the car.

Why don't we talk about, you know, you, you just made the comment that you'll, you'll usually help 'em for free. Um, as do I. And a lot of times the, the industry will tell you to do otherwise. It's, it's charged. They're sales oriented, and yes, your time is valuable and like, I'm not gonna get on a whole hour call.

I'll just do a, a look at a couple quick things and because I think that, I know it's an unpopular opinion, but I think s e o is, is now verticalized. It's better to, if, if I know a lot about liposuction, I can do li, I can do ss e o for liposuction, doctors all over the place. I'll just have a competitive advantage over all the other people like.

Over people like you and me that are just like good generally, but we also know certain categories. You've been doing 17 years, you know, a number of categories by now. But I think that when people come in and I do a quick audit, like any of us can do this, looking at the basics. Mm-hmm. It's easy to do the analysis.

Doing the work is different. I'll pass them to someone that I know, like I'll pass 'em to you. Mm-hmm. Or I'll pass them to someone that's really good in that particular industry for real estate agents. For insurance brokers, for e-commerce, for like whatever, right? And the days when 25 years ago, you, you, you could be a generalist, but I feel like you have to be vertically specific if you really want to be world class.

It's, it's literally minutes. Yeah. I mean, yeah, why not? Why put the berry up? Yeah. Literally, you're right. Two minutes I can, I can audit someone at two. And I've done this like we did one last week for the city of San Francisco and the small Business development center, which is this nationwide thing, part of the S B A and people were signing up.

We had a whole bunch of people on Zoom and I just did audit after audit after audit. People love doing it. We've been doing it now for 18 months 'cause they started it up in the middle of Covid and we've been doing it every month. It's great. Yeah. Free audits. Why not? Not selling anything, but people say, oh, can you recommend someone to, you know, my website's on Wix.

Okay. Go to Upwork and use the job postings that we have on converting and, and here's the job posting. This is my website. It's on Wix. I wanna move to WordPress. Here's another guy's website. Don't copy it exactly. But can you make it like that and host it on WP Engine? And I wanted to meet this other criteria.

We have website, we have criteria. You can literally Google it, like website audit checklist, blitz metrics, you'll see. And, and it also has to fit this criteria. How much? $300. Okay, cool. This guy's 95% and has 200 ratings, and his earnings are $200,000. Like he's in Pakistan. Okay, fine. Sure. $300, let's do it.

Right? Yeah. And we teach people how to hire VAs and how to hire people in Upwork, in Fiverr. But the data that you get is, is infinitely, it's worth more, more than that. I mean, you're, you're buying so much wisdom in such a compressed amount of time to make a long-term decision. Yeah. And so if it's a, it's a Fortune 500 company, I'll say, okay, it's a power hour, go to blitz metrics.com/powerhour and we have an onboarding process because they don't want just three minutes of my time.

I'll give anybody three minutes of my time. 'cause it's just, it's too rude to say no and I'm important or whatever. I'll just give you three minutes of my time. Fine. Right? Mm-hmm. I'll prerecord it so it doesn't require being live. Yep. But if it's a, well, yeah, it's a well-known company, then I'm like, yeah, it's 15 hundreds, nothing for you.

Mm-hmm. So we'll do that. And we had one two weeks ago and they bought that and they said, yeah, you know, we really are struggling. Can you help us? The s e o agency is playing games and like, yep. I already know what they're saying. And now we have a large contract. Yeah. So the 1500 led to, it was basically like a paid sales call.

Yeah. If you're an agency, know that when you do, when you do it the right way, you just, you provide value, whether it's free or charged, or you know, you will drive more real clients because they trust you. Yep. And, and from my perspective, uh, I've talked about how there's only three types of content consumers.

So the, the, and this is why you should give away your, your content for free or, or give your time as as availability permits. So consumer number one is the person that takes your advice and runs. Okay. Well they were never a client anyway, so you didn't lose them, but now you increased your reputation and your reach.

Right? And then content consumer number two is somebody that may not need what you offer now, but knows somebody that does or they come back later, or three is they buy. Mm-hmm. So from my perspective, you have no losing reason to not just give away. All the answers for free, right? 'cause I want the person that values time more than money.

So if, if they can implement it, I'm happy they made progress with it. Otherwise, you know, we, we, we establish trust, we establish credibility, and then when it makes sense, it, it just eliminates the sales walls. They would've been a horrible client to begin with. So we call those free tarts, right? You're a D I Y, you're gonna try to do it yourself.

Save every penny. You know, you go and get your own groceries. I have the freaking ghost groceries delivered to me from Costco. I'm not gonna be a driver of like, I, you know, so those pe you give away your information for free because you don't want those kinds of clients to come to you. 'cause they're just gonna complain.

They're nightmare clients. They're gonna, they're cheap. You know, you all. But I can get that for way less from the Philippines. Yeah, you go do that. Yeah. Yeah. Well, um, I think you and I could talk indefinitely, um, about a variety of things, especially this in this, this topic of the industry. Um, now, now as we get kind of closer to wrapping up, let's, let's kinda take the opposite approach.

Um, so we've kind of, we've kind of beat up on our own industry a little bit. Um, let's, let's kinda help the aspiring, um, Agency owners with some, some wins, right? So we've said, don't do these things, which I guess imply the opposite of do these other things. But, um, you know, how did you start to build up your reputation?

How did you start to get your foot in the door? How did you start to earn the trust of people? So we can kind of maybe end with a couple little tips there on the high note. So I believe that, you know, when I was a, a young adult and I. I didn't even speak English, you know, until I was seven. I always felt that I wasn't good enough and I felt that all these other people were so much bigger and better than me.

And I remember going to Pubcon and Kevin Lee of did it was speaking. And this guy started analytics company. He's well known in the world of SS e o, and I thought, wow, this guy's like a God. I would love to be able to do SS e o and all this, but I don't think I'm like him. He's so well spoken and just everything about him.

I just worshiped this guy. Now, I was an engineer at Yahoo and I was a great engineer, but I didn't know how to communicate and. I didn't know if I could make promises to the client. 'cause you know, I wanted to make money as an agency 'cause on my way, you know, as I was about, about to leave Yahoo. And, but I didn't, you know, I knew I'd work really hard and I knew I was honest and ethical, but I, I, I didn't wanna go out there and just start making promises 'cause there's a chance I couldn't deliver.

So, you know, I would tend to not say anything or tend to not. I put myself out there 'cause I thought all these other people are out there just aggressive, fast talking salespeople didn't wanna be like that. 'cause I heard so much the garbage, like what we talked about. And then I realized, you know, there are clients, if you find the right clients that they will, it's like night and day.

So when we had Quiznos as a client, Hmm. They were a fantastic client. They weren't the nightmare where they're, every day they're like checking their rankings and asking what's going on. And they paid us a lot of money, and I find that if you're an aspiring s e o and you're growing, it's yes, obviously learn from people like Damon and keep improving and work hard and have great operations and all that stuff, but I think client selection is the most important part.

When you have the right client and you're transparent with them and you have a relationship with them, and you, you, you go out to dinner with them, maybe if you could meet them, right? It's just so much better and it results in retention and you feel good about what you're doing. And then you have 'em on your podcast as you start to have results and they love to talk about you.

Like we did this for the Golden State Warriors, the basketball team. And I loved working with the Golden State Warriors. They treated us so well. I got to meet Steph Curry and hang out in the locker room and go to the playoff games. They paid us a lot of money. And here's the, the thing that may seem too far away for most younger ss, e o people, I put them on stage.

I was given the opportunity to speak, to be a keynote speaker at one of the largest conferences in Europe. The last year's keynote was Richard Branson. And they wanted me to be keynote, and I said, no, no. Instead of me being the keynote, I wanna put the head of marketing from the Golden State Warriors, the very popular basketball team as the keynote, and I'll introduce 'em.

Right? And that worked wonders. There was a case study that was done by Facebook on us. So your reputation carries everything. The relationships that you have, interviewing your clients, interviewing other people that are competitors, you know, maybe Damon or I are competitors. Not really. 'cause there's plenty out there for all of us.

So by having the abundance mindset that enables us to be able to share what we've learned and elevate other people like, wow, Damon just wrote this great article. I'm gonna share it. I don't if he generates more clients because of that, that is fantastic. It doesn't have to come to me. Most of my posts that I put out there on Facebook are elevating other people and how awesome they are.

I think that's hard to do if you're small and you're not making money. You're like, oh, I want every dollar that comes my way 'cause I need every penny to pay rent and whatnot. I get it. But if you change your mindset, this is the last I'll say about this whole like motivational speaker walk on Kohl's, Tony Robbins kind of thing.

But I found if, and I wish I knew this 20 years ago, that. If I spent more effort honoring and elevating other people in the industry that will drive me more of the right kind of clients that I want, even without me talking about my expertise or what I know or how good I am. I closed five clients last week on SS e o pieces because I was elevating, you can go back to my Facebook mm-hmm.

And figure out what it was. But by elevating other people that are well-known. Industry. I interviewed yesterday on my podcast, one of the top content marketing experts, and she's a big deal at LinkedIn that's driving my reputation up. People buy based on your reputation. It's all based on your perceived authority.

That's why clients buy if you're a sales minded person. The perceived authority gives you the opportunity to get the right client. And then, like you said, Damon, those three, three categories, when you do the audit, figure out which one they are. Mm-hmm. And if they're great, then you have to deliver. As long as you can deliver, then you're great.

Right? And so I approached from the standpoint of I learned how to deliver first as a search engine engineer. So I feel like Damon, I'm credible to talk about ss e o 'cause I'm one of the few people that actually worked at the search engine and you know, like I have a good opinion about this thing. I have some credibility here.

And so now it's easy for me to audit. It's, I've done this enough times, I've learned from, from other people. So I would hang out in, in like London. Singapore with Rand Fishkin and his mom, Jillian, who's the one who's really running the show. Mm-hmm. And you know, we're putting together s e o presentations, we're hanging out with the conference organizers, and I realized these are these people that I thought were gods, were humans too.

Kevin Lee, who I told you was the guy I worshiped before he, he invited me on his podcast twice. And I said, I said to him on the podcast, I can't believe you can even Google it. And see, this is what I said. I can't believe I'm on, I'm hanging out with you, Kevin. I mean, this is a guy, like when you were done speaking on stage and then all the people would come up to you, I, and I'd never get a chance to talk to you like, oh, one day I'd love to talk to Kevin Lee.

And here I, here you are reaching out to me to be on your podcast. What the heck is going on here? He said, no, no, no, Dennis, I'm just honored to be spending time with you. And then he said all these great things about me. And I said, this is being recorded, isn't it? Yeah. But maybe, you know, if you're doing ss e o and, and you feel like you don't know as much as Damon or whatnot, you know, sometimes you, you have to step back and look at how much you know.

So when you interview someone or someone else interviews you, you realize like, oh wow. I actually have come a long way. I've actually learned a lot. That puts you in a, in a position of gratitude and you honor your clients and you're not worried about poaching, you're not worried about other people that do s e o I help other people that do s e o for a living.

I'm, you do that too, Damon. Mm-hmm. Does that hurt your business at all in any way? Not at all. It helps your business. So we have a lot of clients do that. We do s e o for, and still I'm talking about Damon and I'm sending people to Damon and it doesn't hurt me at all. Yeah. And, and it, it only, it only helps.

And, and when Dennis says he, 90% of his posts are about lifting other people up. He, he's very literal. It's. Probably 90% or, or plus. And it's just, you know, it's not necessarily contact creation, but documentation of Yeah. What you're doing and the engagements and the people that you're connecting with. Um, and, and I actually just made a post on LinkedIn this morning about, um, on the same topic, there's somebody who I've been mentoring and.

I send them business. Right? Yeah. Because then it helps the the person that I connected them with to finally get somebody that can support them morally and ethically, and then it helps a young aspiring entrepreneur to build their business up and then they're going to reciprocate the other way when, when it's a client that's a little bit outta their league.

Yeah, but it's a, it's amazing to watch for, for me, the, the part that I find most fascinating, obviously, yeah, sales is great. Um, growing is great, but the Wild Card is, is always what I find the most fascinating and rewarding, where you get a relationship that you didn't expect or an opportunity to, to meet or do a thing.

You know, just like you said, you, you got to go, um, in the locker room, meet Steph Curry, just like those things that. You, you didn't have on your to-do list. But then when it happened, it was such an amazing thing. That's what I find the most rewarding about serving and helping others and, and just being moral and transparent.

Yeah, serendipity. And you build these relationships over time and they start to unlock other things. And in finance, this is called a, a real option. So by having the Golden State Warriors as a client, we then were able to work with the N F L. Yeah, and the N B A and all these other sports teams came calling, and I never would've realized.

I guess in hindsight it's like, well, yeah, obviously you're promoting how awesome the Golden State Warriors are. Facebook wrote a case study. Mark Zuckerberg mentions you on stage, you know, and how we got a 39 r every dollar got $39 back of what we invested. Of course that would've happened, but you never at, in the moment, you're not thinking about that.

Mm-hmm. So really when you, when you have great relationships that for you young s e o people focus on the relationships, focus, make sure your communication is great. The ss e o people have a reputation for being geeks that don't communicate. Be personable. You, you sent me some cookies, Damon. Wow, that was so awesome that that was serendipitous.

I enjoyed that. And that that's just building relationship. Checking in on people, clicking like on their posts and delivering great work leads to so much more. The referrals that you get from your existing clients are worth more than any marketing you could ever do. You do a good job of that. You never need to do marketing.

Uh, I, I'm 17 years in and this is the first year I've considered spending a dollar on advertising. So the entirety of this multimillion dollar business has built, uh, purely on reputation and results because you've earned it. You have the perceived authority and you have the actual authority. Yeah. Well, Dennis, um, I appreciate, uh, that I, I just love talking to you.

You got a good vibe. Um, it's good to be in company with somebody else who's transparent and straightforward. Um, I did not pay Dennis to say kind things about me, but I greatly appreciate them. Are you giving me a commission at all? No, I, because 'cause I believe in you. Yeah. And you've, you've taken the effort and I've taken the effort to build the relationship over years and people can tell.

Yep. Yeah. And then once you get in, as you just started talking about with Golden State Warriors and then other professional sports teams, when you get in with somebody, you know, I'm not gonna refer anybody to somebody that I won't put my name behind. And I'm sure you feel the same way, right? Yep. And so when you get in and you establish these relationships with people at high level, they, they have a, a.

A, a circle of trust, right. That you get exposed to once you establish your authority and your ability to deliver. So, I mean, there's so many different, to kind of wrap this up on the, the thing of, you know, you can't outrun your reputation and you can't outsell your reputation. You can probably get pretty far in the beginning by focusing on sales and not reputation.

Yeah. Uh, but eventually you hit that. Amplifier of, of reputation where it begins to go tenfold times tenfold, times tenfold. That you couldn't spend, I mean, you couldn't have bought your way into a relationship with the Golden State Warriors. No. Because they get three calls a day from people that are offering ss, e o, and P p C and all kinds of magic promises.

Yeah. You know, funny. Um, I got to work with, uh, Utah Jazz on their retail division, team store. Same thing. Came from a relationship. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If you're, if you're a player in the game, you wanna be here long term, focus on relationships. If you just wanna make some quick money now focus on sales, but you'll, you'll be run out and then whatever the next new thing is, you'll do that in a year or two.

But if you wanna be like Damon relationships all day, I know like people say that all day, but I, I promise you that's the thing. It's not sales calls. It's not the cold email. Magic blasting using ai. That's not it. Yeah, Dennis, you blitz metrics. Uh, how can people get ahold of you, learn more about you? They can Google me and they can see a full knowledge panel and whatever your favorite channel is, and I respond to everybody.

It's not a va, it's me. It might take me a few days, but I, you know, LinkedIn's probably the best way to reach me from a business standpoint. Well, Dennis, you blitz metrics, Google m Dennis, last name, y u. It's been a pleasure looking forward to meeting up again and doing our thing wherever that is next time.

Awesome Damon. Appreciate you

Today's guest is an award-winning, internationally recognized personal investing and wealth management expert. This former electrical engineer is on a mission to help 1 million moms take control of their financial future with her movement called Invest Diva. Please welcome Kiana Danial.

• https://investdiva.com/
• https://www.instagram.com/investdiva/
• https://www.facebook.com/KianaDanial
• https://www.tiktok.com/@kianadanial
• https://www.youtube.com/@InvestDiva
• https://twitter.com/InvestDiva
• https://www.linkedin.com/company/investdiva-com/

Today's guest is the Senior Director of the Constellations Center for Equity in Computing at Georgia Tech and the Director of STEM Education Strategy at Google.

Hear his story when he witnessed someone with a broken arm screwed to a board to set it instead of a cast opened his perspective to the differences in economies and education, and that set him in motion to aim to make a difference where he could.

As the first generation in his family born in America, to Guyana immigrants, his work focuses on building an equitable approach to computing education as a cornerstone of modern citizenship, to support opportunities in education for all. Please welcome Kamau Bobb.

• https://www.kamaubobb.com
• https://twitter.com/kamaubobb
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/kbobb/

Today's guest had a massive success with his very first business. But opportunity can come at a cost. Listen as he shares with you the awesome journey of entrepreneurship with a realistic view of what to expect with rapid growth.

Please welcome Chris Michael Harris.

• 02.03.54 How Startup U Podcast Started
• 06.45.35 Entrepreneurial Journey
• 19.31.68 About the Learning Curve
• 32.35.59 Website's Name
• 33.10.78 A Favor: The Two Things You Must Do

Contact Info:

• https://chrismichaelharris.com
• https://instagram.com/heychm
• https://twitter.com/heycmh

Today's guest had a massive success with his very first business, but opportunity can come at a cost. Listen, as he shares with you, the awesome journey of entrepreneurship with a realistic view of what to expect with rapid growth, please welcome Chris Michael Harris, you are ready to grow your business, and I love helping entrepreneurs find success.

So let's do this. I'm Damon Burton, Forbes contributor, author of the search engine optimization book, outrank and president of SEO National. I've been featured on Forbes, entrepreneur and hundreds of websites and podcasts for helping big businesses grow bigger and make more money by showing up higher on search engines, including shark tank, featured businesses, NBA teams, and Inc 5,000 companies.

I'm bringing my successful network to you [email protected]. Whether success to you means financial freedom, freedom of time or freedom of the soul. We're in this together. Welcome to the learning from others podcast.

Ready to show up higher on search engines for words that you can monetize, but without paying for ads, download your free copy of my SEO book outrank. If you visit www.freeseobook.com today. Chris, Michael Harris, welcome learning from others. Good to meet you. Hey man. Great to meet you. Hey, so before we hit record, he said, uh, you know, you recognized a couple other people we've chatted with and, uh, I think that's kind of something interesting that you find when you kind of dive into the podcast world, regardless of which side of the mic you're on.

I think it's called that you can run into. there's so much opportunity and there's so many people out there, but you kind of realize it's, uh, it's its own little world too. Yeah. Especially when you like really niche down to entrepreneurship, you see a lot of the same names and faces kind of popping up.

It's interesting. Cause like we have our own little world, but yet we have the people that kind of continue to pop up in that world. So yeah, it was interesting to see a lot of the folks in there that I write. Yeah, I appreciate you jumping on. So, you know, the drill two questions, question number one is who are you and why are we listening to today?

All right, well, I am the founder of StartUpU, you and the host of StartUpU podcast started UTV, uh, and that all kind of came to be because I had early success with my first venture when my, uh, my brother and I decided to launch a little side hustle. And that evolved into a multi-million dollar company within the next 36 months.

By the time I was in my mid twenties and realized throughout that process, wow. They didn't teach me like how to do this. And despite the fact that I was at a very notable school university of Georgia go dogs by the way, national champions and right now, um, yeah, I just feel like there was so little application, both in life and formal education, not to disparage those, but that actually applied to running a business, especially when it was growing as quickly as we can.

From year one to year two 48,000 to $500,000. I mean, it's ramping growth, right? Not no funding whatsoever. And so I kind of had this vision of what I would do after that, that business. And it really revolved around education. It really evolved around, I can't build every single business, but I can help people and indirectly create a lot of businesses.

Uh, and so that's what we've kind of started to work on with startup you, and as we continue to serve people in the online space, both in all animals. Uh, that's the, there's a big vision as far as what we can accomplish doing that. Well, I want to dig into that entrepreneurial journey. Uh, but not until I ask you a question number two, which is why do you suck at dude?

I suck so bad at feeling like I don't have to insert myself into bloody everything. Uh, I, I I'm just so some of us are just so type a, we just can't freaking take a chill pill. And sometimes I get myself in trouble and get a little distracted, uh, probably is the best way to say it by just literally feeling like I have to like, not just do something, but like I joke with a buddy of mine this morning literally is why it's so relevant.

I'm like, I feel like I have to assemble the damn Avengers with everything, with everything I'm doing in my life. Like, I can't let anybody take the lead. Like I have to be, you know, the driving force of it and it drives me nuts. So I'm really bad about that. So it's in business. Business and business, personal family, everybody's health around me.

I mean, it's just like, don't take me to the grocery store. I'll tell you everything you want to know about human health and wellness and optimization and what you should eat. Shouldn't eat. And it's like, bro, some people just trying to eat and enjoy their food. They don't want you analyze their label for them.

And that's what I do. I'm I am a food Nazi for sure. Did you realize this? Was it? When did you become aware of this problem? My whole life. So, so you've known about it. There wasn't like a tipping point where you're like, oh, damn, I need that. I think, I think there's a more recent revelation in terms of how problematic it was.

Like. Like a more of a, this is actually a detriment it's not serving you kind of thing. Right. And I think also there was a lot of underlying frustrations that have been there for a long time, but not necessarily cognizant to me to address it as a real problem that it is right. It's kinda looked at it as like me being the overachiever and everything that I do.

And I kind of like staked my claim on that. Like, yeah. But then as you get older and wiser, and I think entrepreneurship really does that to you, you kind of realized that you need to pick and choose your spots a little bit more strategically and the best that's what they do, right? The best of the best.

That's what they do. And so I'm, I'm I always tell us, I have acquired a lot of knowledge now. I'm like, let's acquire some wisdom. Let's get that. Like John C. Maxwell wisdom going on, like that's my that's kind of the season of life that I'm in. Yeah. Let's I mean, I think this is where it's digging into a little bit more, um, you're right.

Like you learn, uh, you learn a lot, but then you also learn that not everybody cares and the part that's, the part that's frustrating for me is, um, is when people ask, you know, when, when they go, Chris, I know you've accomplished a lot of things. How did you do it? Or Chris? I know you've been through this, you know, gave me some pointers and then.

You feel compelled to help them because when you find success, if you want to bring other stuff with you, but the part for me that's frustrating is when you're in that scenario, when somebody asks for it and then they don't take action on it drives me insane. Yep. Totally agree. All right. So let's talk about the first venture.

Um, w what did you say? The figures where you do. Yeah. So we went from launch from college department to we at one point to within 36 months, no funding. It was a, it was a residential moving service for college students during the transitional summer months and evolved into doing furniture installation for college apartments.

So we kind of did a, we were kind of on both sides. We had a commercial on a residential division. And how long ago did this? Let's see, that was, I finished. So 11 was when it was a side hustle. 12 was full time. 13 was half mil, 14 was 1.2. So it was a good, yeah. Okay. Has that jaded you having success the first round of you run into, you know, cause I think that's where we're going to want to talk about next is like the entrepreneurial journey and um, I'm not, I'm not a big fan of saying that.

So entrepreneurial success was locked, right? Because I think the majority of people work really hard at it, but having such a great success, um, round number one, you know, did you walk into venture number 2, 3, 4, or whatever point, and then look back and go, this one wasn't as successful or as quickly successful.

So what's different this time question. Um, so it was definitely a fail forward situation. Let me be crystal clear about that because I think a lot of people here. Revenue numbers. And they immediately think like, oh man, like he's just a hot shot. Maverick business owner, entrepreneur, like just with kit.

And it's like, no, no, no. I got my ass kicked. I did, um, I got, I just, I accelerated the process and we were very blessed to be in the right place. Right time. But don't dismiss. We worked very hard to achieve what we did, right. There was just a, but to dismiss how hard I suffered, how much and how hard I struggled and suffered throughout that process, uh, there was a starvation period, but then there was like a keeping up with growth struggle.

And I was in really bad shape for a long time. Like my 2014 brutal. I spent 95% of my time managing cashflow because now we're working with big companies that installation work. I told you about those manufacturers that were giving us those. They're passing their, their revenue lag on to us, right? Like their cashflow management was we had to deal with because we're the last link in the chain, there was the actual manufacturer of the product.

And there was the furniture supplier who we worked with. And then there was us and all of them were trying to manage their cashflow. Well guess why? At one point I was at $443,000 in 2014, when I made one, two. It's kind of hard to make payroll when you don't have, when you're not that liquid at that point when you're still so young and the banks at that point, I think they've gone a little bit better now.

They won't give you a line of credit or even a credit card until you're, well-established in the world until you're a big boy and you've shown that you can manage things, but it's kinda like when you, when you first start driving a car, they don't trust you. Insurance companies don't trust you yet until you've got a proven track record.

It's no different than that. Even if you show rampant. And I've got some pretty funny stories around that with the banks and stuff like that. But I really sabotage my personal credit to get that business off the ground. So like getting even a credit card, two, three years later, even though I had the proven revenues, my, my personal credit hadn't recovered.

And so it was a really tough kind of situation to kind of get out of that or whatever. But, so I want to make sure that's known because I think a lot of people hear these stories and people don't, people don't tell you what it took to do that they just tell you the sunny day scenario in revenue is only one part of the growth equation.

So make sure people know. Um, not you, I'm not, I'm not getting the instruction by the way. I'm just saying people listening, please. Sorry. I'm not like I was I apologize. Um, but what I realized thereafter, there are a couple of things. One don't take growth for granted. It's it's it lightening sometimes as cotton a bottle.

However, the way that you maximize the probability to catch lightning in a bottle, there is a formulaic process you go through, not again. But there is a more formulaic process that you go through. Um, I think a lot of people lean into their business venture with a gut, feel about what they're doing. Maybe it's a cute and clever idea that they have, but they don't really analyze the market.

They don't analyze the, the, the need in the market. Who's underserved. And, and so what I've done is try to take a more scientific approach. I call it the science of. Um, and I already bought the URL to write the book by the way. So I was thinking about doing that. I already beat you to the punch, uh, but I, but I really have kind of tried to craft the science of startups, taking all the intangibles or as many as we possibly can.

Right. The failure rate in entrepreneurship is so high. I was just reading a statistic. They showed that 70% of businesses that are started will not be around in day. And I would presume that that number is actually quite higher because there's a lot of businesses that start, they never actually register as a business.

And so they're just kind of, there's no statistic around that per se. Um, but anyways, if we can somehow kind of massage a little bit further to increase the likelihood of success in relation to what it is right now, that's kind of what my goal has been and learning through. Having other ventures that I thought were just like amazing ideas.

Like I was involved with the neuro marketing company. Uh, we were actually using four different layers of biometric tools to actually sense a person's response to a marketing stimuli. So not that sounded like really complicated. It's really not basically we're, we're analyzing, we're analyzing brainwaves, we're analyzing what's called galvanic skin response.

So we can, we can sense like how you're actually responding to something with the intensity that you're responding to it. So we were testing this on McDonald's with their, where their kiosks. Yeah, it's all in person, right? So you have somebody go in and have all these gadgets attached to them. And what it's doing is we have, we can measure how much they, well, first, if they like something or if they did it, or if they were confused.

So if they went, try to order off a kiosk, McDonald's was concerned. People are not gonna to use this because it's going to be complicated, confusing versus ordering from an actual person when you go into a McDonald's. Right. So this would effectively allow you to come in order. They could cut down on that expense and like, they would just run more autonomously.

The store would, right. I was like, this is a home run is a slam. Completely flopped on his face. And there was a large clever flopped on his face. Um, and there was a reason for that because we didn't analyze the market. We didn't analyze that first. We ran into this cute idea. We didn't know. I was like, is this something people actually really want that's better than the current solution that's out there.

And the answer was no. And so we got nowhere with it, even though I thought it was like, this is a billion dollar idea. Oh my God. I'm so excited about it. Got it. So the, the research FOC or the kiosk as a whole flop, the kiosk is still a thing that's happening, which is actually kinda interesting, kind of a gross anecdote here, but they were testing it in Europe and they found that like every single one of them had fecal matter on it, which is disgusting.

It's okay. So this is funny conversation because. I agree with kiosk that they're going to continue to proceed. But even me, I would consider myself a relatively smart person. And especially where I go through the methodical internal dialogue where I'm like, oh, what's the marketing scenario behind them using kiosks.

And you know, what do the AB tests and things like that. And I still run into. User experience issues with those. And so it's interesting to see that such a, you know, cause I knew that, uh, somebody did some research and some process went behind it, but it's amazing something so simplistic in nature, which is just take your order.

Um, yeah, no. So decide now, but you know, this whole comment is definitely not to go down. Discussion of COVID, but what's interesting is with all these plexiglass things and all that everywhere, that's the first thing that I think of is now it just as this wall that captures everything and it just sits there.

Everything's now touch and do it yourself and walls. And I just, every time I see it, I just think of how much stuff is just there. It's great. Um, all right. Um, I want to talk about, go back to credit. So you talked about, um, you know, growth and managing payroll and things like that. And liquidity did you have to, because I think a lot of entrepreneurs don't realize how, just like you said, everybody looks at the sunny, the sunny side of growth and they don't realize the pain and managing cashflow.

And then specifically you mentioned in credit. You can grow too fast to where it shoots you in the foot. And then I'm curious if you had it, you had briefly commented in passing on personal credit. So did you have to personally guarantee a lot of the credit lines to support the business? Well, so that, that's what I'm, that's what I could not get even get approved for because I, so I went to bank of America when I was starting this business.

And we had like, uh, you know, we had done it as a summer kind of side gig in college and had proven think we made like $12,000 and, you know, whatever, like it was north of 10 grand, right. So we'd already proven we can make money. So I go to bank of America where I banked and the, the regional vice president of small business division at bank of America was like, Hey, Nobody's given out credit cards or loans to small businesses to startups, there's just not.

So go use your, your personal credit. And then when you're making some money, then come back and talk to us. So that's what I did. So I put all this stuff on credit cards. Growth took longer than I expected, which I know that sounds really counterintuitive. Cause they just say we grew so fast, but there was a period where like growth this when people realize growth requires.

Like just because you say you made $500,000 in revenue doesn't mean you took $500,000 home. I think some people have that. So bastardized this such a distorted view, it's like Elon Musk is worth blah, blah, blah. It's like Elon Musk company is valued at that, but he's not personally walking around with that kind of liquidity, nor is Jeff Bezos.

Right? Like, so there's a huge distortion between business revenue, generation, the amount of capital that that's required to continue growing that firm because every step, especially when you're growing. Now you're having to acquire all of the things quickly to facilitate and keep up with that growth.

Meaning you're bringing on things you're not taking affordable steps necessarily. So you have to keep up with this massive rampant growth revenue wise. Your profitability is going to suffer because of it more than likely because you're not going to be efficient because you don't have the resources you need yet.

Plus now you're bringing in resources like expanding your insurance. Well, guess what? I'm in the involuntary insurance market at that point. Cause I'm a brand new company. My rate for insurance just work comp alone was 33. Meaning every single a hundred dollars I spent in payroll, I'm spending $33 on top of that in work comp, I paid, I paid bloody Liberty mutual way more money than I ever paid myself in that business way more money.

So people don't know those things, they don't analyze it, which is why we have such a vanity metric around revenue. And by the time I got to the point where I wanted that credit card, a low margin business, they see that despite the rev. Now I assaulted my personal credit to try to get that business off the ground.

And you know, it, even, it took six, eight months to really get good traction, six, eight months of not paying your credit cards, maxed out, hurts your credit pretty bad. And that's exactly what happened so that there was a blemish and it was like, well, yeah, you got the revenues, man, but there's still not a lot to show that you're gonna be able to pay us back because you're not even paying, even pay yourself at this point.

So, you know, we really have to Daymond John Thomas when he came on into my show and he said, take affordable steps. And I, that had never resonated with me when he said that I was like, that's what I didn't do. That's what I did not do that. I wish that I had done, there were many times throughout his journey.

Um, him specifically in many others that they actually would take a quick pause. Yeah. But he closed down FUBU like three or four times. And because it just like it. Wasn't the race season, or need to go back to the drawing board or like you go, you know, make money elsewhere doing this, doing that. Now here's the deal.

Don't get it twisted. I'm not telling you be a habitual professional learner. I'm not telling you up. Shut down. I need to go read a book up, shut down. You need to go take this course, listen to this podcast. That's not what I'm telling you. What I'm telling you is this though, you have to understand the law and respect the learning curve because it is a massive.

And so if you've got to slow down and make sure that you've got good footing underneath you, or you've got to make sure that you've got good side hustles in place for, for a period of time, that you can always fall back on if you need to, or if you need to keep that job and do this business on the side, there's a period.

You can do that and you need to be full-time in the business. But I would focus on this and somebody told me this and it changed my life forever. Revenue is about vanity profitability is about sanity. I would rather see somebody make a hundred grand and be extremely profitable than fly out of the gates and make a hundred, make half a million dollars.

Like we. And have Lola low margins and very little to show for it. That's what I would rather see, like selling his name of the game. I'm not, I don't don't it don't get to, don't get it twisted. That's important, but make sure you're doing it in a healthy way that you can actually be. For a long period of time and it's not going to drive you insane and cause serious health complications like it did for me, like my health spiral, because I just, it was nonstop 20 hours a day, just stress, stress, stress, stress, stress.

Um, and, and you have to respect at 25, 26 years old, which I was, I didn't know what I was doing. I'm learning all stuff on the. So you can only drink through a firehouse so much before stuff starts to break. And you're just like, man, I can't like this is it's too much. It's just too much. Yeah. I think, um, there's a couple of things that I want to touch on that.

I agree with the, you know, the internet and social media as a whole, we all know it has its advantages and disadvantages. Um, and I think entrepreneurs should. Share their wins, but I think that they also don't properly expose their audience, their losses too. And so it just becomes as big highlight reel and.

Um, what I'm referring to is you talking about, you know, the vanity metrics of revenue because they can, there's people out there left and right. That I know are out there bragging, you know, I did seven figures. I did whatever figures. Right. You know, they may have met, they may have grossed a million dollars.

But they also spent $999,999 in ads to make that $1 in profit. So, um, and, and the other thing is about the learning curve and this is something I've been super passionate about. And, um, so I I've, I've had the same business for 15 years and I've intentionally. Not pushed myself aggressively and the way I kind kinda compare it is I I've dated the S the phase is right.

And if I was to generalize what those phases were, it was like, okay, the first year, it was just cool to be. Self-employed like, who doesn't want to just set their own hours and work when they want, or work early work late, whatever. So I enjoyed that part of it. I dated that moment in time and took away what I liked.

And didn't like, Business relationship. And then, then you move to the next phase. And for me, that was okay. Let's bring on some more team and start, um, delegating some of those responsibilities and do it so I can focus on the parts that I like. And then I grow to, you know, two to four people do that for a year or two.

And then, then it's like, okay, now I understand how to manage people. Now I understand how to balance cashflow for payroll. Now I understand the personal side of business where. I have to take care of those guys, but those guys have to take care of their family too. And so you'll learn those more intimate things.

And then after that, it's like, okay, let's grow. And then you go, you go from five people that 20, and that's a big difference actually going from five to 10 is a big difference than 10 to 20 is different than, than above 30 is that's a train wreck. And so then you have to go, okay, how do I manage this many people?

And then you finally date all those phases and go, okay, nothing scary anymore. So now let's shoot for the moon. And like you said, you can do that. Slow and steady, but sanely. And I think that so many people just are like, let's go from zero to a hundred now. Yep. No, I, I think that's the perfect way to approach it.

And something you said that I want to highlight is embracing that, dating that season, which I like you call it dating. Um, but, but embracing that season and learning what you need to learn for that. And I think that's a beautiful way to approach it. Um, and in some cases in that business in particular, we have one, two, I had to take a step back to do things that I should have been dating, as you would say.

And the previous season that I had just skipped over. Right. Because you just try and keep up with, you're trying to keep up with sales. You can sell yourself to death. So I think the general thing, and I don't want to do, I don't want to discourage people. Like, obviously people are like, well, what about this other birds?

And those guys that like, they were billionaire by 30 units, but I'm not, I'm not dismissing you from growth. There's a way to do it. Right. And there's a way to do it wrong. And it doesn't mean that you can't expedite the dating process. If you want to like consume everything you need for that. In a more rapid succession or more efficiently rather, there's probably a better way to say it.

I think that's possible. But the thing that you can just here's okay. Let me give you the contrary. My viewpoint was this. If I make a million dollars, I can afford everything that I need to like, just kill it. Right? Like, so it was kind of like a, not skipped a step mentality, but like money will be the. And money does not money.

Didn't give me knowledge money. Didn't give me no how money didn't give me systems and processes that could scale organically money. Didn't give me think there's so many things that money didn't give me that I needed to have as an entrepreneur, to be the best entrepreneur that I could be. Right. And so, so I think I love what you're saying and how long you decide to stay in that dating phase at each one of those seasons is totally up to you, but respect that they're there.

So I totally agree with that. Yeah. You couldn't pay me enough money to be in mark Zuckerberg's position. I would not, but he's got going on. Sure. A billion dollars sounds amazing, but don't want it. Oh, they've got to, to a degree. If we're being honest, where they're at now with their crazy rise, they're kind of in emergency fix PR mode.

Now, like the fact that Facebook is having to literally change their name to Metta after being what they've been, where at one point they had half of the population of the world on their planet. I think it's safe to say that's a dying platform. Now, fortunately for them they've acquired Instagram and WhatsApp and you know, basically their acquisition by, they can just buy where anything is social media they want to, but they're hedging, basically everything on metaverse they really are.

Uh, and it should be very indicative of what's going on behind the scenes that they're like. We're going to have Facebook as a two dimensional thing that we keep while we all also launched Metta. The fact that they're kind of merging and Facebook will be no more and its current iteration. At some point I don't expect to happen overnight.

That's very indicative. It's very indicative of where they're at and it's possible that they miss some things along that growth. For sure. Yeah. There's a lot more and you, and I don't know what those things are, but there's a lot more going on than just a, a PR position named James, for sure. Represent, um, you know, one of the things I wanna go back to the image was something about, um, the, the lifespan of a business and how many survived pests a certain amount of time.

Um, I can't remember the existed, the, the exact statistics, but. Um, a really interesting slide that Tony Robins gave at funnel hacking live last year. And it was something like one I'm going to be off a little bit, but it was along the lines of less than 1% of businesses last 10 years. And so he went through this thing and it was like, all right, raise your hand.

If you've been in business over a year and then stay or stand up, you know, and then stay standing if you've been two years, five years, 10 years. And it was just massive, 50% cuts. That's never, ever timeframe change. But what was interesting is then you layer that with another statistic, which was something like.

The less than 1% of businesses ever make $1 million now, 1 million a year, 1 million ever, ever humidity compounding. Yeah. And so you, you take the combination of most business owners, five, 10 years, and most businesses don't even ever make a cumulative million dollars. And you're like, you're like 1% of 1%.

And so back to you saying the unicorns of mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk and things like that. Go kill it. Go be an entrepreneurial success, but have realistic expectations. Right? What you're walking into. You're basically, you're basically saying like, Hey mark Zuckerberg went, won the lottery. I can go in the lottery too.

Um, in all of those situations, I'm not disparaging or taking anything away. Cause they're in a position they're in for a reason specifically somebody's Ilan. I mean, I have so much respect for that guy. It's unbelievable. Uh, but to think that that every, anybody that's just going to happen, there's so many things that have to go, right.

And there's so much, um, There's so much that that requires you look at a guy like jobs. I think even in his book, I think he talked about this. Um, I think there's a lot of things he missed out on in his human experience in pursuit of that thing. Now here's the deal. If that's your conviction, if that's a God-given conviction that you have to do, the thing you're doing, then maybe that's what your purpose was in this world and that you have to pursue that.

And that's what. You know, but, but don't, you have to do it for the right reasons. You can't do it because, Hey, I want to be rich, famous and have people talk about me, you know, in GQ magazine. Like that's not, you know, Forbes, that's not, that's not the reason you do it. I feel like the guys that do it, they have a deep conviction, a God-given conviction.

And once you find that alignment, then it, things kind of happen organically because you're following something. And I always tell people this, I don't know how entrepreneurs, uh, and this isn't gonna get too preachy here, but I don't know how entrepreneur. Do it without a faith or belief in something bigger than themselves.

I just don't, I don't like a purpose of some reason. Other like that vanity BS. It's not going to pick you up. It's not, when you find you're flat on your face and you're going to find your face all the time as an entrepreneur, like way more than you succeed, you're going to fail way more. Um, I don't know what picks you up cause the money right.

In my experience, the money is not what picks me up. Money's nice, but it's not, when I'm down the money, I'm not like, oh, but let's, you know, thirsty for that. It will, for a period of time, it will for a period of time. But like over time, that's why some people would just fade it. What they're doing in my opinion is because that's the sole focus.

Rich and having all the vanity stuff and stuff like that. But if it's a, if it's a conviction, if it's something that you feel like you were called to do that, you're serving people because you feel like that's the way that you were uniquely designed to serve people, those people being your customers.

That's where I see the longterm sustainability. That's when I see people serving and not focused on the numbers because. I will lose the quality of how I'm serving people if I just focused on revenue growth. So they have that very disciplined. That's kind of the north node as I've experienced it. And that's what I've used as my north node.

Am I serving to the degree that I can not staying stuck in a mat where that particular season of revenue, but like, how do I make sure that's the core of my equation? And that, that has always been, you know, this is, this is how I keep myself in line where I don't get scattered and lose sight of the sole focus of.

Yeah, there's, I'm going to be willing to bet that you agree that you go through an evolutionary process as an entrepreneur where in the beginning. There's a big part of us that are in it for material benefits. You know, especially when we're younger, it's like, I want to conquer the world. I want all the money in the world.

Uh, but then you go, but then as you said, you mature and then it, for me, it became, I no longer, I no longer want all the money in the world. I want just as little as, as much as possible to maintain a lifestyle. And then spend more time with my family, with my wife, with my kids. Right. You get those base needs.

Yes. You need, you know, you, you want the nice house. You want those things that support general stability. Right. But then you get wiser in, in how you can make a more positive impact on the world far beyond just accumulating financial ends. No, but I think it's good. I'm glad, I'm glad this came up. Cause I think it's actually a good thing.

And it's like the, the, the grand scheme of the beauty of. I'm glad that the younger folks, if you're in your twenties and that's what is driving you right now, go pursue it. We're not telling you to act wise for the sake of acting wise, you will learn, right? Just like I'm going to put my wise hat on today.

No, no, no. What wisdom is accumulated through experience, go pursue those things. Go get that nice car, go have those nice things and come back and be like, yeah, wasn't really what I thought I was going to be. It didn't feel like I thought it was. 'cause I feel like that's more of like the catalyst of leading to, right.

It's always, it's always a hindsight's 2020 thing. Like I can look back and say that now, but when I was in that same season, like you're talking about, it was like, yeah, I'm going to be feature, you know, 30, under 30. And like, I don't talk about it. Like I had all those aspirations and stuff like that, but it led me to having the wisdom that I have now that, that I feel like I'm, I'm a healthier human that can provide bigger contribution to the world because I arrived at that place faster.

Would that have happened if I didn't pursue the vanities? Maybe not as fast it's anybody's guess. So I think you just have to embrace the season you're in. If you're like you listen to this and you're in your twenties or something, and you're like, I don't care about any of this noise. I don't care about higher powers.

I just want to go make money, do, go for it, go for it. Cause you're going to end up here. I promise you and it's going to be, you're going to be better off for it. But, but then they learn. Yeah. I mean, cause we all know these things, but you don't embrace them until you experience it yourself. You know, my wife's nephew I've been mentoring him and he's he's 21 and mentoring him for about two years.

And so when he was 19, it was, it was that it was like, Hey, I want to get a new car here. Here's a picture of it. What do you think? And I said, I'm gonna answer it two ways. One is me at your age. Go by. And then the other is me at my age saying that still go buy it, but you're going to quickly learn. It's not what makes you happy?

Yeah, he had. Six months before he was like, I hate this car. I hate the gas behind it. I hate the insurance behind it. And what was funny is before he bought it, I said, who are you going to go race? Like, what are you, what are you getting this far? I go, it's not impressed women. You've had your high school sweetheart for years and you guys aren't going anywhere and they're still together.

And so he quickly learns, you know, it, it wasn't for him, but. But I'm proud of him for still buying it to learn that it wasn't for him. Exactly. There's an interesting Jim Carrey quote. He said something like, you know, I hope that everybody finds fortunate and fame so they can realize it's not what makes them happy.

And I think that says a lot, like we all know that, but there's a big difference between experiencing it and not, um, you know, maybe the last thing we'll talk about here is just a quick comment on there's a great book by Rand Fishkin called lost and founder. I have not, I know who he is though. I need to read that one.

Yeah. And so, you know, most, so if you're not familiar with the audience, you're not familiar through Rand Fishkin is he started a company called Moz, had wild success. It was like the, the VC, um, darling baby story got a bunch of funding. Um, and then he talks in this book though about why that whole thing sucks, everything that was in the limelight or behind the scenes that sucked.

And it talks about. He went to exit and how to buy an offer, I think was from HubSpot, offered the 28 million for the company. And he S and he held out for 40 and, um, they politely declined, and that was the peak of MAs. And it was just downhill from there. And so he gets, you know, he just, like you say, you paid Liberty mutual way more than you ever took.

Um, he was a very public. He sends kind of exited, um, Mazda is that he was, he was the face of Mars for a long time. And so I really thought he was rich and with his funny mustache. Yeah. And so he gets all this publicity and, but in the book, I wish I would have taken that payout. I wish I would've done this.

I wish I, would've not taken funding because I'm sorry, friends. I can't, I can barely, you know, I can barely afford my two bedroom studio in Seattle. I don't have money sitting around to lend you. I don't have all these things that everybody thinks I have everybody else made way more money than I did in that company then than myself.

And so it's a really transparent book. It's, it's much along the lines of what we've talked about, where it's like, Hey, go do those big things, but understand this is a more accurate perspective of what you're going to go through. Yeah. All right, Chris Michael Harris. Thanks for the therapy session. I'll give you that the last few moments to tell our listeners how they can find out.

Yeah. Everyone on social media ad. Hey CMH. Uh, obviously I mentioned StartUp U podcast started VTV so the podcasts have been around longer than YouTube. Uh, but definitely checked out there. We do. I think we have pretty similar audiences in terms of season of business that people are in. Um, so if you're interested in, in those kinds of discussions, very similar platform in a lot of senses.

So, uh, that'd be great. heycmh.com. Uh, a lot of awesome free resources there as well. And my last ask of your audience would be this. It takes literally 22 seconds to do this. I promise you 22 seconds, whatever platform you're listening, whatever, wherever you get your podcasts, whatever apps you listen to podcasts on.

Make sure you go and do my buddy here. A favor, do two things. I'll tell you why. And subscribe and leave a review. Those are the two most important things you can do to help a podcaster establish more reach because that tells the podcast platforms, wow, this is a show that's worth promoting. This is a show that people should know about.

So if those two things it's like leaving a tip for your waiter or your waitress. So please do that for my friend here today to help his show, continue to reach more people and help them through their entrepreneurial journey. I appreciate that Chris Michael Harris, thanks for jumping on learning from others.

heycmh.com. Damon Burton here. And thank you so much for listening to the learning from others podcast. I sincerely hope that today's guest helped you learn something since 2007, I've generated millions of dollars for businesses like yours. Ready to show up higher on search engines for words that you can monetize, but without paying for ads, download your free copy of my new SEO book outrank.

If you visit www.freeseobook.com today.

After the death of what would have been his future father-in-law, today's guest talks how that loss gave him a gift for life. Life hacker, podcast host and entrepreneur here to motivate you to make the most of life, please welcome CJ Finley.

Contact Info

• https://www.instagram.com/cj.finley/
• https://twitter.com/cjfinley7
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/cjfinley/
• https://www.cjfinley.com

Today's guest is a business consultant that was inspired to write his book "Don't Be Dumb" after the successful removal of a brain tumor. Here to discuss his leadership playbook that's intended to help people be smarter, overcome obstacles and rise rapidly in these challenging times, please welcome Robert Towle.

• https://dontbedumb.expert

Today's guest has had more careers than cats have lives. From Hollywood TV exec and game designer to manga rewriter, voice actor, animator, electrical engineer, studio head, and video game designer. He's the CEO of Founders Space, one of the world’s leading startup accelerators that was ranked the #1 incubator for overseas startups by Forbes and Entrepreneur Magazines.

Here to teach you the ins and outs of venture capital funds, please welcome Steve Hoffman.

Contact Info

• https://CaptainHoff.com
• https://FoundersSpace.com
• https://SurvivingAStartup.com
• https://www.facebook.com/groups/FoundersSpace
• https://www.linkedIn.com/in/FoundersSpace/
• https://instagram.com/FoundersSpace/
• https://twitter.com/FoundersSpace/

Today's guest was diagnosed with dyslexia at eight years old. After the initial overwhelm he learned how to use what others called a learning disability as a super power.

Then, after building up a successful real estate agency for five years he threw it all away after a chance phone call that lead him to talking on stage about being your best you.

This professional speaker and peak performance coach is here today to help you increase productivity, reduce stress and have more energy. Please welcome Christopher Dedeyan.

Contact

• https://www.christopherdedeyan.com
• https://www.youtube.com/c/ChristopherDedeyan/
• https://www.instagram.com/christopherdedeyan/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/christopherdedeyan/
• https://www.facebook.com/ChristopherDedeyan
• https://twitter.com/chrisdedeyan

From $75k in debt to a millionaire that's worked with Snoop Dogg, Nicki Minaj, Katy Perry and more, today's guest is one of the top music producers in the industry.

With his decades of experience in music he's converted those lessons-learned with the best artists to challenge others to achieve their goals in life.

Please welcome Mr. Bellringer, Marcus Bell.

• https://www.100dayzimpactchallenge.com

Today's guest is here to share that the quality of your brand will determine the quality of your clients and the quality of your clients will determine the quality of your life.

He went from a broke designer racing to the bottom on Fiverr to building a multi-million dollar business. Please welcome Henry Kaminski.

Contact Info

• https://uniquedesignz.net
• https://twitter.com/the_brand_dr
• https://www.instagram.com/thebranddr/
• https://www.facebook.com/HenryKaminskiJr/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/henry-kaminski-jr/