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Redefining Wealth and Success: Navigating Entrepreneurship with Taylor Welch
Get set to redefine wealth and success in entrepreneurship! We promise you valuable insights from Taylor Welch, co-founder of the nine-figure business Traffic and Funnels, in a discussion about client service, finance, team culture, and hiring A players. Taylor shares his take on wealth and success, urging us to focus on enjoying the journey and finding happiness within, instead of getting tangled in the social media comparison web.
Switch gears with us as we embark on a journey exploring the pursuit of pleasure and the resilience it takes for true success. This isn't about chasing easy wins but about embracing hard work and effort. We share our own experiences of the trials of letting go of one form of success to chase something more fulfilling, more aligned with our mission. Gear up to understand the intriguing concept of "mission, monster, and mountain" and how a clear mission can pave the way to conquer obstacles.
Finally, let's dive into scaling a business, the role of branding, and what it takes to build a sustainable training business. We emphasize the need for exponential growth, not just linear, and the pivotal role of branding in achieving business success. We wrap up with a discussion on diversifying your business for long-term success, the need for a mindset shift, and the importance of a strong team that can juggle multiple businesses effectively. So, come along on this insightful ride as we unravel the true essence of wealth, success, and entrepreneurial growth.
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Client service, your finance, your team culture and org chart. So there's eight different areas, like our brand now teaches, and if you can't make the leap to getting an A player, you just won't have anything. That's tellable. A players are expensive, they can be high maintenance, but they are worth it in their capacity to actually replace you as the founder.
Speaker 2:Welcome back to the Omni Channel podcast. Today, I have the one and only Taylor Welch with me on this episode. He went on building a nine figure business, co-funded a nine figure business I'm sure you guys heard of it traffic and funnels, and now he's onto helping entrepreneurs build their online businesses and scale and grow their online businesses. I really hope you guys are gonna enjoy this episode. We're gonna talk about his latest book, the Valkyrie Consultant Confessions of a Nine Figure Advisor. Enjoy, guys. Thanks so much for being here, taylor. Again, I wanna talk about your book, the Valkyrie Consultant, and the first thing I wanted to ask you about this is that what is your definition of wealthy and what is your definition of wealth?
Speaker 1:It's a great question and it has changed over the years. Right now, the actual tagline of this brand is redefining wealth. So wealthy consultant? Redefining wealth? Because I think that I fell into the trap that a lot of people fall into, which is just chasing the accrual of resources, rather than realizing that resources exist to help people and to enjoy time. And to enjoy time you have to have energy. So my best definition of wealth right now is being able to do what I would love to do with the people that I love to do it with and make the world a better place in the process, because if I can unlock one person's life, then they'll unlock another person's life, and that's the funnest game to play for me right now. And being rich is different. It's like we want to be rich and we want to be wealthy, but there are different definitions.
Speaker 2:How do you measure your success, like right now?
Speaker 1:Unlike a broad sense, because success is fractal, because we can go into the area of finance and there's a definition of success. We can go into the area of physicality, and there's a different definition. So to me, the most broad, sweeping definition of success that I can give is to just be happy with who I am and what I'm doing. If you get the thing and you don't love the journey of getting the thing, you're not very successful. So, like, if we define success on a number, then there's a lot of successful people who live in purgatory. They're unhappy, they don't love to live.
Speaker 1:So humans at the most basic sense, like we, actually are very hedonistic. We want to be alive. Obviously it's a biological, evolutionary thing. We want to perpetuate civilization and the species, but we want to have pleasure and enjoy the times. Social media has really warped our view of success because now success is coming from my, success is coming from you rather than my version of success coming from me. And so if we can unwind that clock, we can't get away from social media, but if we can unwind the clock back to the moment of divergence and we can begin to build a picture of success based on am I happy and do I like what I get to do and I wake up in the morning, then the byproduct of all of that is we'll have more stuff and we'll have more fun and we'll have more friends, and all of the good things come with that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but it takes time to untangle that though, because, especially you mentioned social media and comparing yourself, right, you see other people successful. We think that's what we want and they're like yeah, that's not what I want. So I guess just to comment on your point, it just takes time to figure out what makes you happy.
Speaker 1:Oh, it takes time and it takes effort, like it takes work. And the real crux of the issue is when people hear me speak or talk or interview like this and I'm like success is basically the pursuit of pleasure, they think that that automatically means easy. But the real pursuit of pleasure is strenuous and it's difficult and it has to be worked on. That doesn't mean you have to beat your head up against the wall, but it requires effort. And so if you go into a room of a thousand people and you say, raise your hand. If you know what you want, everyone will raise their hand.
Speaker 1:And then you'll start going down and asking people what they want and they'll tell you about their lives that they don't like right now, that they want to fix. It's like okay, well, our grids, nobody has spent enough time thinking about what you really want. So the default state is to think about what we don't like and what we don't want and their mind, the mind just perpetuates itself. And so it's a lot of work to your point and it can take a good amount of time to really get to the bottom of it. And then, once you do know, then you have to make the difficult decision to let go of anything that is not in alignment with what you want, and that's a different game and that's also hard and also takes time. So, yeah, it's fractal, it just goes down and down and down.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love when you said that you need to take time to decide what you don't want and I just go back to traffic and funnels and walking away from that. I know you talked about this in different podcasts. I don't want to go into that. You guys can listen to it if you want to. But I do notice that you walked away from a business with a certain income and now I imagine that it's not the same as you had before. You know, with the amount of success you have with the consulting business, with your business partner, how was that process for you, in not letting your ego come into play and say like, hey, what are you doing? I'm happy, but like, what are you doing?
Speaker 1:Yeah, 100%. Well, it was really hard. I think that's it should be a given, but sometimes I don't think people recognize just the emotional difficulty it can have to just let go of something. Once you do it, you feel amazing. There's a great book by Dr Hawkins called Letting Go and I recommend it to lots of people who feel like they have like an emotional stalemate. Have you ever felt like you have an emotional stalemate with yourself, like you know you should do something and you want to, but then you sort of don't want to at the same time?
Speaker 2:Yeah, 100% yeah.
Speaker 1:I figured it out and so I lived in that place for like a while where things were going really, really well, but I wasn't super happy and I was just kind of confused around like why am I not happy and where is the misalignment? And so, making the decision to walk away from something that was so big and, to be honest, that a lot of my identity, I kind of propped up a lot of my confidence from how successful that business was People don't know this, but like my first business ever was traffic and funnels. Like I didn't have the whole like heroes journey, go through failure, fail at everything and then finally something clicks. I had the opposite story where, like I came out of the gate swinging four months into like writing copy for a living, I found Kevin Rogers, who I think you want, you know Kevin and then I had a waiting list of like 11 months, 10 months it started at six and I got it big. Then I started refunding people because it was just too much. Then traffic and funnels took off, then sales mentor this is so. It's like bam bam, bam bam and I was, like you know, I felt guilty for not wanting something that had been so successful, and so that was one part of it.
Speaker 1:But then, walking away and moving on and you know, like letting that go, I found a tremendous amount of confidence in myself for being able to make that difficult decision. And this is how it always happens, by the way, like when you make a tough call and you finally muster the courage to like do the thing, was the quote do the thing and you will have the power. And so that power comes from the difficult moments and the difficult decisions. The worst thing that could happen to you is to just succeed at everything and not really have to try, because then you just you develop weakness, and so we're building something completely different and, to be honest, tf was great.
Speaker 1:The portfolio we had was great. You know, 150,000 customers and three or four, maybe 5,000 clients I don't know how many at this point and it was really big. But what I'm building now is going to be better and because it's better, it's going to be bigger. So like we're already back to the place that, from a customer standpoint, that we were many years into traffic and funnels. So it just goes to show, like when you let go of something old and you take hold of something new, there's a. There's a reward system that comes with that, and so I've worked through all of those issues in the last year, and now what we're building is I think it's going to be a lot bigger, but sustainable this time, which is the key sustainability.
Speaker 2:Is it because you finally have your, your monster and your mountain like figured out and clear?
Speaker 1:Yes, I'm glad, I'm so glad. So you've, like, listened to that mission monster mountain. Yeah, I didn't know. Okay, so let's go there here's. Here was the problem. My mission had become the we talked about this at the beginning my mission had become the accrual of resource. I had no real. I had no real mission. And when you don't have a mission, then any type of variable or obstacle in your way is always too big. So it's always going to be too big and eventually, if you're transactional with what you do, you will get fatigued or tired of the setbacks and the problems.
Speaker 1:So last summer what I really did is I started sitting down and putting together like why am I here? We're going through a series right now for clients on just the pursuit of meaning and purpose, and we're going through the lives of Holocaust survivors. And obviously Victor Frankel wrote, you know, logo therapy and the the meaning and purpose as a driver of fulfillment. And so last summer I sat down and I just started figuring out like why am I actually here? What's the point? Because I don't need a lot of money, I don't need a ton of clients, my ego doesn't actually need the constant like reinforcement and validation. So what's the point, and that question kicked me off on a like a tailspin, because I was like I can't find the purpose of my life, I don't know why I'm here. And then, through the process of working through it, I've discovered, like you know, I'm ultimately here to set people free, like it's not about getting clients, it's not about building even businesses, it's about freedom and the more people I can create, freedom for which, by the way. By the way, sometimes freedom, I found out, means that people will call you because they got their number from a friend who knew a friend who knew me. And they call me and I'm at the gym this happened to me several times and they're like my business is killing me, how did you let go of it? And I'm like, oh, this is the opposite of like making money. I'm like I'm teaching people how to basically like not make money but to have have freedom. And so now that I've got a mission locked in, and so every business has its own kind of purpose.
Speaker 1:So the wealthy consultant is to unlock and monetize human expertise. That's what we do. The arena is to erase suicide and deprogram victimhood that's what we do. Be me, the constant agency is to multiply messages that are worth hearing, and so every every business has its own type of thing, but it all comes back down to the same thing Like what is my purpose? Why was I born? To create freedom for people. And now, when you put a monster in my way or there's a difficult challenge, there's a thriving. That happens because I'm like of course there's a monster, like of course there are people that don't know what to do with me, there are people that don't want me to do this or to be successful, but it has nothing to do with me. It has everything to do with the people on the other side of it, and that changes the game. I don't know if I'm answering your question anymore because I just went off on a tangent, but hopefully.
Speaker 2:No, please continue. I'm like so drawn into whatever, you're just not eating it up like a pigeon the brush from specific.
Speaker 1:So one more thing, and since I'm not boring you, I also learned in this process that the heroes are always created because of the crisis. So there are no heroes born next to the fire, there are only heroes born in the fire. And so I got on the call, like with one of my mindset coaches at the beginning of all of this, last last year, last summer, later in kind of like late spring, and one of the things she said to me is she said you've forgotten how to take a hit to the face, and so the smallest shove or push, you're like falling over because you think that everything is about you. I was like, wow, okay, I'm a loser. That's crazy. Thank you for telling me that.
Speaker 1:But going through that, that and unraveling that, the realization for me was that if you want a big impact, you are going to have to sign up for a life that has resistance, and most people they want the impact, they do not want the resistance, and so they just won't pay the price. So any impact that you create without paying the price of resistance is theft. You will have to give it back. Go into a store, pick up a piece of clothing off the wall and walk out with it and you'll figure out that there is a payment process that has to be followed. The same is true and the same can be said for a person's influence and their success and their reach.
Speaker 1:And so I see a lot of entrepreneurs today who have hacked the system. They've jimmy-rigged the system, they've figured out here's how I can just do this for the least amount of money or effort or time possible. And what they don't realize is that they are accruing an interest payment, a balance that has to be paid, and this is what shows up in depression and insecurity and self-loathing and confusion. These are all accrued balances of a person who has cheated the system somewhere, and so what you have is you have this weird dichotomy where the solution to all of these things is a little bit of pressure and a little bit of pain and a little bit of having to work out the variables that are not in your favor. But, man, once you come through the other side with a good mission, you're unbeatable and you're unstoppable, and that's where I want everyone to get to.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love that. Thank you so much for sharing that. Do you think you cheated the system with traffic and funnels because that was so easy for you to grow that fast?
Speaker 1:I think I got a little bit of. I got some lucky cards for sure. I worked my tail off to become a good copywriter, so I paid the piper for that. But then you hit these variables where things kind of are just built for what you're doing. So I think that when you take a decade of an optimaler's life like, let's say, we live 150 years, we have 15 decades and at least half of that we can't build because we're children or babies or we're distracted or whatever. You have seven decades, 70 years, every 10 years cycle. I think you're going to have three really crazy good years and three really bad years, and then four are going to be just neutral. They're not good, they're not bad.
Speaker 1:What happened for me is that the first three years of my career were just like rocket ship and the variables were many on that. Like the market was ready for me. The market was like looking for ways like that. All you had was like you had two other people who were teaching what now is called high ticket, and back then I think high ticket was like a brand new word. This is 2014 till 2015. And me and Chris became one of the third pieces to the market.
Speaker 1:So it's not that we cheated, necessarily. It's more so of like I had my first three years be good, and then I had two or three neutral, and then I had my bad years clustered together as well. And this is actually like for a rookie entrepreneur, this is not what you want. This is not what you want at all, because this is why people get taken out of the game. But for a veteran, it's like me. On the other side, I'm like hell, yeah, give me the same stack again, because if I'm going to take the pain, cluster it together and send me through hell for three years and then I've got seven years of glory, like just get it out of the way.
Speaker 1:So I would rather cluster it together, but at the time, because you don't know what's coming, it almost killed me. I was like, why does everything that I touch now fail? Because for seven years everything I touched turned to gold and then I couldn't keep it all together and my character I don't think my character was moral and ethical and I didn't. I had all of those things in place but my staying power was too low because I had not been tested. Does that make sense?
Speaker 2:You know, about two years ago you had a podcast episode that I literally scripted and quoted you on a Facebook post and it started with the bigger the calling, the bigger the testing, I forget. Basically we're talking about how, with big impacts, the testing is equally as big, and how God is testing you to see if you're going to stick around or not, or quit, anyway. I just wanted to comment on that because I feel like that ties into that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think God plays a central role and I think at any point we can ring the bell and we can. I was talking with the guy whose name is Matt he was in my office just a couple of months ago who actually sort of got me into cold plunging, because he's a freak. He cold plunges at like 30 degrees with ice on the top of his cold plunger. I was like you're crazy. But he comes from the military and one of the things he was sharing was when somebody goes through boot camp or Navy Seal or training, you're going to have to depend on that person for your life once you're in the field. And so it's kind of our goal to get people to quit as fast as we can, because if you will quit in training, we don't have to risk our lives with you in the field.
Speaker 1:And this idea kind of stuck out to me because we have kind of a world that is not focused. People are focused on the stupidest, dumbest shit ever and when you think about it, the orators of civilization and the message carriers and the manifestors and the leaders and the champions and the heroes we have to be capable of handling intense blowback and pressure. We can't quit because we get tired, we can't be trusted with the mantle or mission or megaphone and then quit because we had a bad day. That would be catastrophic. And so if you're God and you're looking at that, I believe at any point me or you we can ring the bell and be like I don't want the mission anymore and I don't want that anymore and I think we can retreat and we can back down.
Speaker 1:But if we're going to actually fulfill on our real calling, then we have to be that person in training that just refuses to quit and because of that there's a level of trust that comes into our lives. You see this with people who they'll run strong for three years and then they'll get out of the game. And then you see the people who have been around for 50 years and the difference in most cases is the people who stand the test of time. They went through extreme testing at the beginning and because they were tested through that then they didn't have the same fatigue or the same grid later on when it got hard. That's my opinion.
Speaker 2:I love that. Thanks so much for sharing that, and I love that. We haven't got into the book just yet, but we're just like going so deep. But that's fine, that's cool. Yeah, I know I'm happy. I'm happy for this convo. It's really good. What is a good scaling versus a bad scaling in your opinion?
Speaker 1:Good, so there's a reputational effect in your market. So every business has a brand, every brand has a reputation. And the bad version of scale is when you are compromising future income and future goodwill and reputation for a payday today, like right now. And the good version of scale is really multiplicative, so it's compounding. It's when you taking more clients and more customers or having more business now actually builds your modes for the future rather than harvesting your mode for the from the future into today. Most businesses, I think, when they think of scale, they think like take more clients or scale ad spend. And scale has also a less linear approach, like you can grow something, but scaling something tends to be when there's a lever and you just push down a little bit more in one area and it's a exponential increase on the other side. So scale tends to have a geometric reputation rather than just a linear curve.
Speaker 1:And I think this is where it gets dangerous, because it's like trading the markets with leverage. If you're trading with no leverage, you win a little bit, you lose a little bit. If you're trading with leverage, you win a lot or you lose everything you've ever had. And so that multiplication in the middle makes scale dangerous If you don't have your other areas in order, such as your customer support, your client service, your finance, your team culture and org chart. So there's eight different areas. Like we are, our brand now teaches these eight different areas of actual enterprise drivers for your business, and one of those areas, for instance, is the balance and lifestyle of the founder or the entrepreneur. How big can you grow your business if you burn out and die? It's not ideal, right, but people don't think about what are the systems running my decision making? What are the decisions running my energy levels? And bad scale is anything that compromises the long term prospects of the business. That's bad scale.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I want to talk about a bit of the branding aspect as one of the deleverages in growing a business, especially in your case, because I don't know if you noticed, but I think you have a pretty strong branding. I don't know if that was intentional in your content creation journey. How do we build a strong brand and reputation with that Good reputation with?
Speaker 1:that I think delayed gratification will be the tactical answer to that. If there's a foundation in the infrastructure that everything tends to rise or fall on, it's your time horizons. So it's hard to build a great brand if you're chasing instant fame now. It's hard to build a great brand if you're chasing instant revenue records right now. When you look at the wealthy consultant brand, for instance, we're moving very slow. For me we're moving slow. Based on my timelines it's a multi-seven figure business. We'll probably do eight figures next year but for me I'm coming from this as we discussed almost nine figures into such a small version of that.
Speaker 1:But the reason is because we're building systems and we're tending to the client experience. We have a new book coming out in January called the Exceptional Experience. It's all about how do you actually make when somebody gives you money. How do you make the experience that they go through infinitely more valuable than the money they traded for the experience? And this comes down to client communication and support systems. Like there are people who are clients of ours who can call a phone number and talk to a human and get booked on a call. It's crazy when you think about how simple this is but nobody does it Bad. Branding comes from experience and chasing things too soon. I think branding also has all these connotations. But there's somebody incredible who we use for all of our brands. I'll connect you with her if you want to connect. But one of her big things is like what are the core behaviors of the brand? The wealthy consultant feels a little bit different than Taylor. It's not exactly the same.
Speaker 1:And then arena is pretty close right now, but we'll start moving that out as well, because we have the Taylor Welch brands, but then we have the Femis different brand, different mission. So trying to build different brands that aren't all centered around the founder is an important piece of the conversation as well. Did I answer your question or no?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you did, and I love that, by the way, because I was just about my next question would have been like because I think in the book there's a quote that if your business is, if your business success is your crucial for your business success, like, the lower the company, the value of your company is, and that what I wanted to go from there is you kind of answered my question already is like how do you build a business, a brand, that can go without you? If you were hit by a bus tomorrow it could steal all those businesses that you built could keep running.
Speaker 1:Essentially, yeah, I think this is the spectrum, so it's less linear and it's more of a spectrum, so we can call it like. We could just call it like the maybe the sellability or the enterprise spectrum of a business, because if you look at Tesla right now, tesla's obviously like. I've been obsessed with Tesla since a long time ago. So now people when I talk about Elon and Tesla, they're like, oh, bandwagon, no, dude. I was like. I bought my first Tesla in like 2016. I've been following this company for a while. If Elon would have died in 2016, I think the company would have broken. But now the company has a lot of key leaders and it would be fine, and that's the same as true when I was on an event last week. Can I answer this? The scenic route?
Speaker 2:I guess it's no journey.
Speaker 1:I was on a ship. There was an event a couple of weeks ago and I was talking to this person and he was this young entrepreneur who had built a service business, who was doing an agency, and he was like I wanna get into software. And I said why? And he's like because training isn't scalable. And blah, blah, blah. I was like, okay, we should not be changing models because we don't understand how to get what we want from the current model. This is what young entrepreneurs do. We just chase, chase, chase. I wanna get into that industry or that industry, but the truth is, every industry has these constraints to it. So software five years ago had a crazy multiplier. Now it doesn't Like. If you look at software evaluations right now, it's like the dot-com bubble they're all tanking. They're really struggling for financing. Venture capitalists don't want anything to do with them, and so we live in a world of cycles, Whereas the training business, the training model we had in the last couple of years we had a ton of people come through, rip off, a lot of the top dogs basically just piecemeal their version of stuff together and they're running it through personal brands.
Speaker 1:But now we have this cool ecosystem where training companies are becoming a thing again and you can build a training company that's completely decentralized. And here's how to do it. People, that's it. It's people. You have intellectual property that can be put into a company, licensed back to the brand, and you have people.
Speaker 1:So with our company right now we have Mike Walker, who's a genius. Gabriel Borman she's a genius. Dane Mormon freaking genius. These guys and girls are like just as talented as I am. So when we go into these events, people are like, oh, taylor, that's so good to meet you. I'm like awesome, but I don't really do that much. If we really think about it. What I do is podcasts and I go to events and I write books and I train clients. But when you look at the entire backend of the business, it's run by these key leaders. That's how you build enterprise value into a company. So with Elon, he's got 150 executives across multiple companies that could replace him at some point. This is just the classic visionary integrator debate and if you can't make the leap to getting an A player, you just won't have anything that's sellable. A players are expensive, they can be high maintenance, but they are worth it in their capacity to actually replace you as the founder. We can go as deep on this or as shallow, but that's the classic, just basic answer.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love that. And you know what Two questions I have to comment on this. The first one would be and it kind of answered that but what are the things that you're still doing in your business that only you can do? Because you talked about how we grow our businesses and find A players in every level and then, of course, find someone who replaces us, who can think, who is quick and make decisions for us. So what are the things you're still today? You're doing Podcast interviews, one of it, obviously.
Speaker 1:Writing. I put together a lot of our curriculum. So if you go into the backend of the business, one of the things I didn't like about trafficking funnels that I fixed was the business tended to have a lot of decision making that was based in the moment, in real time. Another word we could use for this is reactive.
Speaker 1:And so I actually built a list of words that I wanted the business to feel like, and reactive was not on that list. So I said, okay, well, how do I get my brain into models, so building decision making frameworks on the back end? This has to do with team and has to do with events how much we promote something versus not. A lot of that can still only be done by me at the moment, but I'm training two people on the team who can do that right now. Another thing would be just training and the caliber of training. We have an event coming up in November on belief architecture and I'm breaking down how your beliefs determine how you feel and how you function, and so we have this cyclical loop. Well, there's only a couple of people who I know who could train that, and there are gonna be areas in the business probably forever where I'm constantly bringing new intellectual property, new ideas, but that's not a problem.
Speaker 1:There's two types of when I think about this. My mind segments this into two categories, and there would be a third which we'll talk about as well, but we'll stick with the two. One is like replacement or duplication. So I wanna use team for the purposes of replicating, duplicating, replacing, like I want them to be me, or better in this area. So when you look at like our finances, our head of finance is smarter than me. I'm never going into that Like. I know how to do it. I can read the P&Ls, but I am completely replaced in that Our head of sales right now is just as good as I am at running sales, so I'm duplicated or replaced. The second, though, is leverage and buying, basically multiplication for my time, effort and thinking, and so it's not always good for an entrepreneur to completely try to replace everything. Some areas of your business should just be about multiplying and getting leverage, and so we can go deeper into that, but you'll burn out pretty quick if you replace yourself completely, cause burnout has nothing to do with having too much to do.
Speaker 1:Burnout is a different thing entirely.
Speaker 2:What is it? Is it overwhelmed?
Speaker 1:It's losing purpose, it's not doing too much, it's not knowing why you're doing it. So entrepreneurs who are chasing escape are going to burn out 100% of the time. Entrepreneurs who are looking for where do I engage? What's the best place for me to engage here? Then they have actual mission, power, energy. So the energy source we feel like. I'm not talking about biological energy. Just go to sleep, wake up, you have more energy. Talking about spirit, power like drive, excitement, enthusiasm the future belongs entirely to the enthusiastic. We own the future. Where does that enthusiasm come from? Well, it doesn't come from escaping and sitting on a beach and doing nothing. It comes from a worthy mission and being engaged in that mission. And so burnout happens anytime you feel you've become disconnected from your ultimate future. Well, you can do that by doing the wrong things. You can also do it by becoming bored.
Speaker 2:Wow, and in your case, it was just not feeling aligned with the mission anymore. Right or not having a mission, a clear mission.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I replaced myself from. I didn't have the mission, I replaced myself from too many things Like I didn't have any interaction with clients. I think I've told this story maybe once or twice somewhere, I don't remember where. But we'd Peyton, my brother, who ran sales for the longest time, convinced me and gave us. They both ganged up and they were like you should do this session with clients and I was like, ok, I'll do it and just make it like 45 minutes, because I had been out of client work for so long. And I did it and I was like this is the most fun time I've had in forever. It was two and a half hours long and I was filled with energy and that was my first indication of like oh wait, a minute. Like, at some point I have pursued escapism rather than engagement and I've lost a lot of energy because of it, which is why now there are areas I want replaced and then there are areas I just want leverage. I don't want to replace, I just want there to be leverage.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you so much for sharing that. My experience with your team has been exceptional. By the way, your executive assistance, even from the client supports emailing Jan, I think Sierra was her name. It was exceptional, like no matter if I had any issue, it was immediately solved, it was done, it was super effective. So what is your and obviously you kind of answered the enthusiasm part, but what is your kind of indicator in hiring good people in your team, awesome people in your team?
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, I appreciate that. I'm going to let them know for sure, today, um, the the only people that I hire are my um C-suite. I don't hire any of the. I'm not involved in the hiring discussions that happen outside of. You know, like when I was hiring Gabriel, I was involved in that. Kathy is runs all of our customer support. Mike's head of all client service.
Speaker 1:Um, so these, these are key team members that I'm involved in and what that looks like is, um, I want to know their personalities. So, like our team is, basically, we've um gotten licensed in a tool called culture index so we can see somebody's pretty much like everything that drives them. Because if you put the wrong, if you put the right person in a spot that doesn't fit their personality, or if you put the right person in a seat and then demand that they do it the way you would do it, you'll ruin great talent. So, for example, mike, who runs all of the client services, he's very different than me, like wildly different. He's a genius, but he's a lot slower. He's more methodical, he puts things together, he likes to write them down, um, and I'm like yo, like how fast can this car drive? Let's just see. And so if I make him try to run his department the way I would run it, I would ruin the relationship.
Speaker 1:So, um, that that's part of the process. We actually have an event in um in Colorado for the first time where we're dialoguing about all of this. Like, how does Gabriel go and hire people? Because, to be honest with you, like I don't know Actually, um, that's just what she does and, uh, that even shows you right there, like my commitment to like staying in my lane because I don't know what questions she asks, how she even finds them. That would have to ask her Awesome.
Speaker 2:I thought you're going to say because I think it was talent, enthusiasm and something else like a triangle in the book because I thought you're going to be elaborating on that, but it's cool. I'm going to gap Gabriel.
Speaker 1:Attitude, um, competency and experience. So that's what we use to rate like, but the team uses that all cross functionally. So the team will raise somebody's attitude, experience and competency to kind of like, look at whether they can be hired, whether they can stay where they need training. But that would be an example. It's perfect that you said that I created that model and I taught it to our team and our team uses it, and so you can tell even from the, from the gap of like me creating it and giving it to the team and then being like how do you hire people? There's a disconnect because I'm not actually using the model with them. They're using it. That's something that only I can do. Yeah, but it's awesome.
Speaker 2:I also saw um some of JA Abraham impact on the exponential way to grow the business. How's your relationship with him, by the way? How's your relationship with him, by the way? J?
Speaker 1:Yeah, why are you? Why are you laughing Is?
Speaker 2:he still pissed, is he? Because I think, I don't know, there was a time you made some comment about wanting to do some joint ventures and you said so you kind of pissed him off because you related some meeting or something. So I'm just wondering how is that going?
Speaker 1:Actually, gabe's pissed them off. Gabriel pissed them off because, um, this was, this was when we were writing. I was writing my first book, but this is the thing about JA, like J's, uh is such a genius and he's such a good person, um, but if you haven't pissed them off at least once or twice, you're not really close with JA. So, uh, it's a mark of, it's a mark of our friendship, but our relationship is good. You know, he's doing his own thing, like he, he really loves the, the mastermind approach, and he is his, he's old, but his brain is just still still cooking and still clocking. So our relationship, I think, is good. And, um, yeah, that was Gabriel's fault. Gabe, gabe's canceled a meeting.
Speaker 2:I'm going to get her on this call like a next you know podcast episode to talk about hiring. I'm going to check on this. You should totally do it.
Speaker 1:I have influence. I'll, uh, I'll have her sign up.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would love to. I'd love to honestly, um, I want to talk about some of the products, offers, like verticals, like how you structure your business. Um, because I think, um, in your book, you mentioned that if you have one product and you're in a one, take one trick pony and it's going to be it's going to be over very soon, and I just want to get your take on how do we build sustainability in our offerings products, services, yeah, so the monetization pathway is um products, programs, services and partnerships.
Speaker 1:So you can monetize a business through through products. So you can sell a book or you can sell a course. You can monetize a business through programs, which is like, if you think about, like wealthy consultants we'll just use them as an example because it's the scaling company right now they have a product called launch kit or a program called launch kit, which is like um, you know soup to nuts, how to actually refine offer. We have a we haven't done for you lead generation inside of that with outbound calls. That's a service. So we're we're actually taking the program and the service and we're wrapping them together. Then we have partnerships, which is like okay. So there's, there's a great person who does um, like financial, uh, set up and we'll do financial audits when people buy from him because we promote them. We get paid a referral fee or a JV fee. But then simple things like have you heard of the remarkable tablet? Like remarkables, we get paid off of those. People buy remarkables and one of our program, they pay us for it. So partnerships is like affiliate income, jvs, things like that. I think that what's best for starting out is programs. So you create a program or service. These are the highest types of um. They're going to have the most revenue attached to them. It's a program or service.
Speaker 1:I got started in services so I picked the service route. I was writing copy for clients and then from there I did some consulting, which consulting is usually programmatic Um. So it's like the services programs. Then you go into products, because products is a great way to drive interest in your market. These are books. I think you have four phases that I talk about in the book. Phase one is when you just have one piece of the codex working. So you have one traffic platform, one demonstration asset and one monetization piece. When you get to phase two, you have two. When you get to phase three, you have three. You get to phase four, you have four and you add the team as you go. So it's very scripted and how it's put together.
Speaker 1:So how do you create sustainability? You get to, you get to diversification and redundants at all three of those levels. So right now we have a dozen products. We have uh three main programs, we have uh a handful of partnerships and then we have services that are starting to get baked into the business as well. So it's very hard to kill this business Very hard because there's so much stuff, and I think the guru mindset today is like focus on one thing and only one thing.
Speaker 1:They're right, but only for phase one businesses. When you get to phase two, that that idea has to change Is imagine if Tesla only had one one product, or if Mac Apple only had one product. Or like none of the the devices that these guys use to tweet don't even follow their advice, and that doesn't mean they're wrong. It means actually it shows you who they're speaking to. Their audience is a phase one audience, whereas with me, I don't. I'm not, I will, I'll say some stuff for phase one, but most of my crew is like you want to build a bigger thing, you want to uh, you want to have like multi-generational kind of impacts, like you're serious, you're not just trying to pay some bills, like you're serious about what you do. So you need to, you need to branch off into multiple things once you get your base rolling. Yeah, I love that.
Speaker 2:And if I had to kind of summarize this book and who is it for, I would say, like this book is for you, if you are ready to go to fuck up and look at your business as an actual business, and you're you're doing it to build something that is like it's that generational wealth. It is, like you said, generational wealth. Um, because even like, obviously, there are so many topics and you guys need to get the book to, to read more on that. But there's so many topics when I felt like, dude, I need to look at what the fuck am I doing, like oh, my team, you know the KPIs. Like how do you perform? Or Like the products, the services that I'm offering in the marketplace, and there's so many. Like it's sometimes it's like hard to even look at those things and and just be like you need to go to fuck up too. It should be like that's yeah, that's part of like Growing a business, you know. So that's how I felt when I read the book.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Yes, somebody left a review yesterday of one star and Hilarious a basically said this book was so awful, I read it in one sitting, then I read it again, taking notes, and then I read it a couple of more times, taking notes, and I can't tell if he was joking, because it's like who reads a book that sucks four times. But I was like, dude, if you are joking, you left a one star on my Amazon like that's crazy.
Speaker 2:So anyways, I'm gonna go fix that and just like leave you guys a five-star, because I was like, as I was reading, it's like shoot, like because I read it months ago, right, because I was like, by the time I read it with a booking you and reading that was a couple of months passing, so I had to read again, which I did Couple of days ago.
Speaker 2:So I need to do my due diligence and give you the review, the five-star review, and like put this very headline like read this book if you want to go to fuck up and take your business seriously, just something, something there, I'm gonna do that for you. You know, I Was quite surprised to learn that you have all these businesses like you know the social media marketing business, the ads business. You know the fulfillment Facebook ads business. I was super surprised. I didn't know that. I thought you are in consulting and I'm like super shocked how many branches that you are, how many businesses are you're running, how many you are running at this point, like how many? Like not like CEO wing, but like somebody involved in five.
Speaker 2:Five, wow, yeah, so I may. I may mean the next question would be like how do you Juggle all that, or is it you have a focus on, or the team everywhere and it's just it's done, it's built, so you don't have to do much anymore?
Speaker 1:It's. It's just great players, like if, if you can. So like Lauren runs all of our events and we might at some point build an events company around that. Because if you've come to an event, especially in the last year, our events are just so Different than anything else out there that you won't be able to get it out of your head. And I speak a lot like I go to great people's stages and events and this is different. Like we have a recipe. It's phenomenal and part of it is integration. So when I host an event, we're running the event. I owned the company that's running the ABL. So like we have, like we have all this integration that makes the event easier. But when you have good people and you hang on to them, then you can build and branch into multiple areas, as long as they're integrated at some level.
Speaker 1:So the wealthy consultant is a client of Femis. I am a client of Femis. A Lot of our clients are a client of Femis. Femi also has its own clients, so there's a bridge the Event company. If that's something that we decide to do, femi will. It'll be a client of Femis because Femi is gonna run part of the ABO. I'll be a client of the event company, all of our clients will be. So you can see this like these, this vertical integration, happening. If you have that, it gives you crazy leverage because you don't have to start from zero every time you're you're building off of a base that already exists.
Speaker 2:All right. Thanks so much for your time. Thanks so much for being here. It was a pleasure having you here. Take care, bye, bye. Thank you so much, taylor, for coming to this show. You can pick up his book the Valkyrie consultant on Amazon. You can also join his Facebook community devout the consultant on Facebook. I'm gonna link all his socials. You can hit him up directly. His team is absolutely amazing. Again, if you find this useful, don't forget to share and I'll see you guys very soon.