Roland Frasier of DigitalMarketer on

InspiredInsider with Dr...

You came out on the beach in

100 grand.

You are listening to Inspired insider with your host Dr. Jeremy wise.

Dr. Jeremy Weiss here founder of inspired insider calm or I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and
leaders like the founders of p90x Baby Einstein, Atari and many more and how they overcome big
challenges in life and business. Our sponsor today is rise 20 five.com, which helps service
professionals, doctors, lawyers, accountants, coaches, anyone working one on one with clients who
don't want to just trade time for dollars and they will shift to more one from one on one work to one to
many work. And if you go to rise 20 five.com You can learn more we have what's called our free dream
product ladder, which basically is just a business plan on one sheet of paper, which helps you see gaps
and untapped revenue potential. You know, companies like Disney Apple sporting industry, they all use
versions of the product ladder. So today I'm very excited. We have someone who, you know, people
whisper up about behind closed doors and high level entrepreneur groups because they want his
advice. We have Roland Frasier he's founded scaled or sold almost two dozen different businesses
ranging from consumer products to industrial machine manufacturing companies with adjusted sales,
ranging from 3 million to 337 million. He's completed infomercial deals with Guffey ranker, and K tel
Direct Publishing deals with Simon and Schuster Random House negotiated shows with major hotels
on the Las Vegas Strip, and been involved in over 100 private and public offerings. And if you can
believe it much more than that, Roland currently is principal in idea incubator, which owns Digital
Marketer comm and native commerce calm and works in marketing businesses with Ryan deiss, Perry
Belcher, Frank Kern, and many other digital marketing thought leaders. Roland, thanks for joining me.

Hey, thanks for having me. I appreciate all those people that you had the beginning you're like, we have
people like this, this and this. And I was thinking, and then we couldn't have any of those today. So

not. Not true at all. You know, there's so much that you've done in your career. And, I mean, you went
from selling real estate when you're 18, to real estate development, business investments and
leveraged buyouts while you're in college and law school and after law school, started a practice and
grew to one of the top law firms in San Diego and began forming venture deals with clients. And your
practice eventually evolved to buying and selling companies or repositioning businesses, and direct
response marketing, I consider you, you know, one of the top direct response marketers out there with
what you do. So I'm just I want to go start early on, which is to you grew up in entrepreneurial
household.

1
Yeah, I did. My, my father was a tax attorney, he came from kind of nothing. And he worked his way
through college working at the Internal Revenue Service of all of the unpopular professions that you
could possibly imagine. And then he went up kind of climbed the ranks with the IRS and use that to
fund him his ability to go through law school as well. When he graduated law school he started since he
was already at the IRS, he was an attorney for the Internal Revenue Service as well. And then
ultimately realized that he could make a whole lot more money and have a lot more fun moving from
the dark side to the good side and leaving there and and so I had the benefit of him being a tax and
business attorney and listening to the deals and getting to be involved with with that, to some extent
that lights a fire you know, under yet really does.

What did you learn from your debt?

Gosh, the I learned so much I really did. Most of it was was how to negotiate and how important it is to
know the numbers behind deals to actually to really know how numbers work is a huge deal to know
how taxes work is actually also a big deal and has been really the difference in a whole lot of deals and
negotiations in my life both personally and in working with you know, clients when I was practicing law.
And, and in deals it's like just the simple. The simple difference of knowing what shows up on an
income statement or a balance sheet can can make or break a deal. I remember one in particular,
where I was sitting in a deal and I ended up with About ended up with about $5 million in in stock out of
this deal. And it was almost going to die because the CFO was concerned about the impact on
earnings per share of this particular acquisition of my company, by this company, it was a publicly held
company. And, and I'm sitting there talking to the CEO, and he's like, Well, no, we can't do this,
because the impact on NPS is going to be too significant, it's gonna look bad, and then this price is
gonna go down, and shareholders are gonna pitch a fit. And I was like, well, that's actually a balance
sheet transaction, that's not going to show up. It's not gonna hit your APS at all. It's not an income
statement. It's a balance sheet thing. And he's like, he's like, really? Like,

yeah, get

your CFO that said that in here. And, and I'm sitting there talking to the guy, and I know enough about it
to actually have the conversation and walk them through it. And he's like, Oh, you're right. I'm so sorry.
I didn't, I was like, Well, that was a $5 million. Right. And you're like making deals, it's a huge
advantage to to know your numbers. So what I got, I guess, I guess, probably the most valuable I think
I got, if I think about it that way, is I listen, I actually listened to him. And I went, and I got it, I got my
degree in accounting, you don't need a degree in accounting, you know, financial statements, but it you
know, it obviously helps. So I got a degree in accounting, I got a law degree. And those are invaluable
tools in all of the deals that I do.

So you the first thing that jumped out to you was how to negotiate.

Yes, right. So

talk about that for a second.

2
Yeah, it's, it's

what I, if I refine that down, I remember, this is this is going to date me. But when Richard Nixon was
going through the impeachment process, I think it was john Dean, and a couple of the other people
were saying really bad things about him. And I remember my dad saying, you know, people say things
when they're mad, or when they're stressed, that they really don't mean, because what those guys are
saying is coming from a place of fear. And, and that really stuck with me. And so it has helped me, both
professionally and personally. When times are tough, and things are not going well. And people get all
upset and excited to think about that. And to think that

not taking a person

this is coming from this is coming from a place of fear or a place of emotion. And I really need to
disregard it. Because it's probably not exactly the truth about how this person feels. And that helps me
give people the benefit of the doubt. Which is a wonderful thing to give people probably the best gift you
can ever give anyone is the benefit of the doubt.

I love that in for you. Did you know when you're going to law school that you were going to shift to
something different?

I didn't. I didn't really know what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I still don't know. So I I have, you
know, one of the I was thinking about, like a good book title would be the seven lives we live or
something like that. Because I have had a life as a musician, as a musician. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I played in
bands in clubs from age 15 to 42. So I played keyboards and bass. Okay. Yeah. So, so I did that,
because that basically allowed me to have money in high school. And then I sold real estate, and then I
developed real estate. And then I did leveraged buyouts, and then I practiced law. And then I became
a, you know, a kind of a marketing investor type person. And it's like, I think all of the most interesting
people I know, have had many lives. And it's kind of it's, it's kind of a cool thing. So that's,

how was the shift from a, you know, a lot of times people identify themselves from their profession, you
know, say, I'm a lawyer or I'm a doctor or whatever the case is, how was that shift from when you
completely stopped officially prep me You still use it, obviously daily, but stop practicing on a daily
basis.

Well, what you do is you can turn it into something funny. I tell people that I'm a recovering attorney that
a lot of people say is not fully recovered. But I think it's I I had a one of my closest friends. When I was
in high school. His father came and spoke at our school and His entire speech really impacted me in his
entire speech was, don't ever let people label you. And for God's sake, don't do it for them. And so I've
always been very careful to not say, I'm defining myself as an attorney or as and what's really funny is
my, my wife said that when she we met online on match.com, and she said, she didn't really ever
exactly know what to tell people I did, because I don't have a traditional job, like a turn here, whatever.
And so she told her father, her father was like, you know, what does he What does he do? And she
said,

3
Well,

I mean, and he was like, Oh, it's okay. You don't have to say, and he thought I was a drug dealer.

It's like, She's like,

well, I'm fine with that. Actually. Yeah.

If I can't say what someone does, they are clearly a drug dealer, because that's the default category.
Right?

entrepreneur, it's okay. I know.

Yeah. You know, it's really funny because entrepreneur is, is such a broad term, it's kind of, you know,
it's like, and, and I don't, I still don't know what to say, you know, I just, I basically say, I try to be, and
although I don't know that I succeed, always I try to be a smart money investor, right? I want to I want
to invest in companies where I can take an active role and bring value beyond money. And so that's
what I tell people now. But, you know, I don't know.

So I want to talk about maybe not all seven lives, but a few of the lives in the you when you were a
lawyer is that when you started working with Guffey? ranker.

It was Yeah, I represented Tony Robbins, in in infomercial deals and deals with Simon and Schuster
and United Artists when he was doing those things. And I met Bill Guthrie and Greg Rinker as a as a
part of doing that. And one of my one of my law partners, and I basically, were talking with them and
said, You know how these infomercials are kind of cool. And Tony's was obviously very successful.
How tell us more about this, because I'm always curious about that's my favorite thing about what I do
now. And what what I did practicing law was seeing all the different ways that people make money. And
so I was fascinated with this with the the infomercial world and was like, Okay, well, how does that
work? How many of those workout and then we're like, well, in the industry, it's typically one in 10, that
make money, but we're better at it than most people. And we, you know, kind of know what we're doing.
So it's usually one in five. And we said, well, gosh, who puts up that money? And they said we do and
said, Well, what if we put up the money? What if What if we went out and raised the money? And we
were the executive producers on these things, and you gave the ones that you thought had the best
shot of working out to us? And you got it, you're going to do that? You're going to raise that money
somewhere. Anyway, how about if we do that, and then we ended up doing 14 infomercials? together
and, and then I did a couple with some other companies. And that was a really interesting experience.
But that that was how that how that came about there. Tony,

what did you What do you think made them that successful with, you know, basically, the industry
standard and having such a higher success rate?

I think that I think that you can dramatically increase your odds of success by focusing on one thing
obsessive Li and I think that they they hired the best people and worked with the best people. And they

4
were they were in at the beginning, from a from a timing is everything standpoint as well. And, you
know, went from duplicating tapes in in their garage to, you know, having billion dollar companies.

I mean, they're arguably one of the best companies doing direct response in the world. I would
absolutely grant

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And they've and they've evolved as well, you know, they went from, they kind
of went from they went from a lot of informational stuff into physical products, which I think was really
smart. And they went to continuity, in the turn in form of proactive as opposed to sales like they were
getting when they were doing personal power and things like that. And they've used celebrity and
influencers very well they've been on trend really well. And they've done a great job of building an
upsells if you've ever tried to order anything through you, you go through an endless process of upsells
and so so like media capture, return on adspend all of that stuff, they're just they're just really, you
know, really dialed in on all that stuff and, and they also pick good products. So I think I think just an
obsessive Attention to detail with a kick ass team. And staying on trend is very, very helpful to them

rolling after you shifted from your own law firm, what did you do next?

I Well, I had the internet was kind of coming into being so I started a channel on compuserve.

Right?

Yeah, it had always been Yeah, right way back I had

cf.com Yeah,

exactly. So I, there was a, I was practicing law at the time, and I kind of saw that that was coming in. So
we had come across a kind of a relatively famous makeup artist who has since passed away and a
hairstylist named john Frieda who's gone on to have big lines and things like that. And so we did a thing
with them in the beauty space. And then America Online, came in and we had mail. So we did a thing
with other clients. I had Denis waitley, and Brian Tracy, and a lot of the reason with them, your Tony
legal work.

Oh, and then and then I everyone in the industry, you have

Yeah, the people. It's really funny. It's just all of the you know, all of like, when you start representing
athletes, we represented professional football players, and I got one person and then I had 20 within no
time, I get one motivational guru person, and then you have 20 within no time. It's it's really interesting if
you can infiltrate these little insular Yeah, niches of people you end up especially at the higher levels,
you end up plugged in with everyone, which is kind of what I ended up doing. On the digital marketing
side, too. It's just, I had one pretty significant success. And then people kind of wanted to get to know
me, and then I got brought into the, you know, to the inner circle. And now I know, you know, Ben talk
with a lot of the major players on a regular basis and their friends. Had you

5
heard of those guys before? I mean, obviously, Tony Robbins was big, but the other people before they
came to,

you know, what was really funny is that as I was when I was maybe 14 years old, or so, my dad had in
the back of his car when he was taking me to school one day, which was not a normal event, but he
had in the back of his car, and I really liked it when I got to spend time with them. This folded over weird
plasticky looking thing with a horrible graphic called called the psychology of winning by, by Denise
wastefully whateley I thought because it's D and is right. So, so I had heard of him and I at the time, I
had never heard of goal setting and all that kind of stuff. And I happened to listen, they were cassettes,
and I happened to listen to them, and was just blown away. I was like, holy crap.

Right now are asking what are cassette tapes? They're exactly were shaped things with two holes. You
put? I don't want to go anyway.

Think of think of an iPod basically. And even that's not current, right? Think of an audio file. But yeah,
so that. So it was really funny to have known of dentists, long, long, long ago. And I'll actually tell you a
couple of those things. And then the same thing about Tony, when I when I went to law school, my first
year of law school, I moved out to California from Virginia. And my father said, You've got to read this
book by this guy, Tony Robbins. It's called unlimited power. It's amazing, amazing, amazing. And I read
it and I thought it was amazing, amazing, amazing. And then I went and read all those things. It was
seven books by bandler and grinder because that was the NLP neuro linguistic programming and I so
I'm like, I go down into the footnotes of everything when I get into

something. Yeah, that's.

And then two years later, I graduated from law school. And a year after that, I was partnered with a guy
who, who knew Tony Robbins and represented him. And we ended up merging our law firm with this
guy, and I was actually represented as like, wow, this is such a weird world. And then a few a few years
later, I we hired William Shatner, to speak at one of our events. And because we wanted to do
something with him on the senior side, and we thought he'd be a good representative. And I remember
lying on the floor in my grandmother's house watching episodes of Star Trek as a really little kid being
scared out of my wits, because, you know, all those guys in the red shirts were dying and, and seeing
him on there. And then, you know, I the first time that he called me on my cell phone, I was driving
along with my wife, and he's like, rolling. This is Bill, how you doing? You know, I was like, I looked at
her and I was like, this is just surreal, and yet Those surreal moments happen again and again and
again. It's it's trippy, it really is.

That's cool. What you're on what do you learn from? Just I mean, because you're having interpersonal
conversations with with some of these people, what did you learn from Tony Robbins just not from his
program? Not from his book, but just from talking to him? Or even observing how he does business?
You know, firsthand.

What did I learn from him? I would say that, I'd say that I learned that. I don't, I don't know that, that it
crystallized with him. But one thing that I certainly noticed was that he really cares about the people that

6
he that are his market, he actually really does and that he's very sincere in it, and I run across a whole
lot of people who are not, and especially practicing law, because you kind of see the problems that
happen. And there there were people who represented themselves as being one thing, and had all
kinds of problems, because they weren't really that thing that they projected out to the world. But that
Tony was in integrity with what he put out there and sincerely wanting people in, you know, you have
people even when you are an integrity, that will attack you and that that they don't understand or
circumstances happen that it you know, might appear that you're not, they really cared and wanted to
do the right thing all the time. And I liked that. And I also liked that he researched the hell out of any
buddy, or any place or anything that he was doing and was prepared better than anybody I had ever
met. And, you know, not just like, don't don't do certain things when you're in India culturally signwise.
Because that might, you know, be offensive to somebody, but down to the weather and the, you know,
the challenges that they had and everything else. I mean, that guy's obsessed with which guy goes to
all the people, all the people that I know who are successful, like, like got the ringer, same thing is like,
if you're obsessed with being amazing, and providing incredible value and knowing what you're talking
about and who you're talking to. It makes a giant difference.

Yeah. So how did it come to be that you became partners with Ryan deiss and Perry Belcher so from
you our football players, and then you're the you know, really representing the top motivational
speakers, they probably don't like the term motivational speaker, but those that crowd and now you are
in the world of Ryan deiss and Perry Belcher.

Yeah, so so my two favorite things. my three favorite things about practicing law, were all the different
ways that people can make money. All the stories that you hear, the stories are fantastic, and selling, I
discovered that I liked selling more than I liked anything else. So I loved to go into the conference room
with prospective clients and close the deal and we were a fairly innovative law firm in that when I
started practicing there were 325 attorney there was like no one attorney for every 325 people in
California I read an article and it was like legal firms or there's too much you can't possibly succeed as
a lawyer I just hung my shingle right? It's like lawyers that are doomed to failure is like Okay,
interesting. So I've got to just I've got to distinguish myself I'm like yeah, so that's the first thing I think is
no not me. And and then I read an article in the American Bard journal that said it was a it was a guy at
a big company and he said, you know, you can hire someone for the for a flat fee to build the Taj
Mahal, but you can't hire an attorney for a flat fee to file a simple paper for you. And I hate that and
everybody hates that and I was like, haha, that's kind of cool. So I bought yellow page ads with the with
the money that I did not have and which were expensive at the time and that was kind of the main way
to advertise at the time right and and I put in big, big bold letters flat fee will do things on a flat fee. You
want to do a lawsuit flat fee, you want to do a well flat fee when doing and nobody was doing it and
people loved it. And so our practice just grew crazy. Crazy, crazy fast, because Because of that,

did that just light bulb clicked in your head when you heard just going against the grain? No one's doing
it.

Or I love I have always loved. I've always loved going against the grain I have always loved. If you tell
me you can't do that, I had a conversation until two in the morning last night with with my old law
partner, and my director of events. And one of my closest friends telling me that I couldn't scale this

7
thing that I was telling you about before we got on right and and I said, I absolutely can. And here's
examples of other people in similar things that have done it, even though they haven't done it here. And
I know it can happen. So I guess I absolutely start with an impossible to scale impossible to do thing
really turns me on. Right?

Yeah, maybe. Maybe we'll talk a little bit about that in a little bit. Because it's really fascinating. So So
what brings you to Ryan deiss and Perry melter How do you

Yes, so, so anyway, so what I was saying is, I like selling that was one of the things I like doing so I was
I was a student of sales and marketing, because that was my favorite thing to do. So I wanted to find
out how to get better at it. And as the internet came into existence, and and I was studying the people
who were doing things and I, I bought domains I owned, bet on it calm and make a bet and all these
other crazy domain names, and it used to cost me $50,000 to build a website, you got to love that now
you can go crazy. Yeah. And it's, but anyway, so I wanted to learn how to market and so I studied all of
the online marketing people. You know, like I learned SEO, I learned how to program and cold fusion
and HTTP, you know, HTML and everything else. Because I'm because I'm stupid and crazy. But they
were they were among some of the top people that seem to actually be doing stuff. And, and doing it
well. And not just teaching something that was was old. And I actually tried some of their stuff. And it
worked. So they held this event called traffic and conversion summit. And I was like, let's kinda, I
should go and see and I went, and it was the most disorganized, long, drawn out, no breaks thing that
you could ever imagine. And it was the best, most amazing, wonderful content, I took so many pages of
notes, my hand was cramped up, and they wouldn't ever take a frickin break. So I'd had I was like, I go
to the bathroom, but I don't want to go cuz I don't want to miss anything. And, and I was I was like,
these guys absolutely know what they're doing. I want to get to know them better. And one thing that I
have learned is that if there is a channel of access that someone has created, the way to get to know
them is the channel of access not to like to go up to the stage and be among the masses that are doing
that or cold call them or anything else. So they had this mastermind called the war room which which
now I run at the time and I was like okay, that's their channel of access. So I got to know I don't know if
you know Gary Halbert, famous copywriter from I

mean, I don't I know him, you know, from his work, but not personally. Yeah. I've interviewed almost all
of his disciples. Okay.

Yeah. So so you know, Gary, for example, I'll give you a couple examples, you know, Shatner, I want to
do a deal Shatner, I'm, I know, Shatner speaks, I'm gonna hire Shatner to speak, I'm gonna figure out
how I don't have to pay the fee. I think his fees 100 grand. But I don't want to pay 100 grand. So I know
my event can afford to pay 100 grand for a speaker. So I'm going to have my event hire him. And then
I'm going to build into the contract that he goes to lunch with me afterwards so that I can talk with him
and talk with them about the thing. I want to get to know Perry and Ryan, they have this thing called the
war room. I'm going to join the war room, because I know that then I'll be able to sit down with them.
And so and Gary Halbert, just to tie that, that end is Gary Halbert. I'm reading all of his stuff and like this
guy's amazing copywriter. And I read that he had a thing where you could pay 25 grand and go down to
Florida and he would coach you for two weeks or three weeks, some ridiculous period of time. So I
emailed him and I said, I said, Hey, I know you do this thing. I'd like to do it. And he's like, yeah, send

8
me the money. And you know, and we can talk. So I sent him the money. And he emailed me back, and
he's like, nobody ever sends me the money. You actually sent me the money. I want to I want to do
this. And I go down and then meet with him. And he's like, kind of grumpy curmudgeon. He's like, he's
like, so what do you want to write copy for? And I said, I said, I don't actually want to write copy, but I
wanted to meet you because I would like to do business with you. And I figured that the best way to do
that is to to go through a channel that allows us to sit down face to face and he said, that's really smart.
And we ended up doing a bunch of stuff together.

So Tony, we got Gary Halbert story I'm sorry that the people always seem to have good Gary Halbert
stores.

Oh, I just, I, he's just he was, you know, he passed away. Yeah, a few years after that, but

he was,

he was just a mess. But all of my best friends are a mess, right, that are super successful. And he had,
he was just, he was just this grumpy genius guy. I wish that I could have recorded how he described
writing copy, because it was this amazingly painful, agonizing process of He's like, you know, you dip
down into the lowest depths of the mucky is, you know, Dragon's slug through it, and, you know, pull up
out of it your copy, you know, leaving parts of your soul behind, it was like, amazing description of what
it was like, I was like, holy crap. That's, that's, that's why you're so fantastic at it.

So what is it anyway? So for?

Yeah, and I, I'm sorry, go,

go go. I was gonna say, what did you do for two or three weeks? If you were like, I'm just I'm not here to
write copy.

Yeah, so Okay, so So basically, I met him, and then I'm in a Denny's. That was where he wanted to
meet in Miami. And, and he said, I just kind of went with the flow for a site. And, you know, I said, I've
got I've got a business, you know, direct mail business I've had it for for a few years at the time. And so,
you know, I would love to, you know, to see how to do that better. Yeah. And I said, he said, Alright,
well, here, do this and write me some copy on this. And then, whenever you're done with it, give me a
call. It's like, Okay, that was it. That was our first meeting was like, 18 minutes. And so I go back to my
hotel room, and I, I wrote it, I wrote out the thing that we talked about, and I called him and he was like,
he's like, you don't already cuz like, I said, Yeah, he's like, Alright, I'm gonna come by. So he comes by
my hotel room. And he sits down and he reads it. Because I had to write it out longhand. That's the only
way he would do it. And, and he was like, he said, What the fuck do you hire me to teach you how to
write copy for you know how to write copy? And I told him then I said, I said, Well, actually, I did that.
And that was when he said that smart and and then we kind of the wall went down. And we actually got
to talk. Peer to Peer, I guess, and you know, obviously, he could write copy way better than I could. But
and, and we started talking about what we could do together. I just for some reason, the wall went
down. And, you know, he was telling me all these crazy stories. And you know, then I'm over at his

9
house and his buddy john Carlton called and I, he's the he, they were writing the next newsletter
together. And he's like, you know, he's like, I can't do it. And John's like, I can't type either. And I was
like, I can type really fast, I'll type it. So they're dictating the thing. And I'm adding my stuff in. And it was
like, and we're this, you know, little trio of and I'm, again, surreal, right on with this, you know, right?
This guy doing that. So it's just funny. So with Ryan and Perry,

I knew that I had to stand out at this mastermind. And I knew I found out that they had this thing called
wicked smart, and wicked smart was and still to this day is where you take your proven, super cool,
amazing marketing thing, marketing, trick, hack, whatever you want to call it. And it can no no ideas
allowed has to be proven. And you present it to the group and the group at the mastermind votes on it.
And whoever gets the most votes wins this wicked smart award, which at the time was like a Mac
computer or something, which they never gave you. And still to this day, I never got my prize, Ryan and
Barry. So So I was like, Okay, I gotta win this. And I had no idea what was going to do it. But at the
traffic and conversion summit I went to the big thing was how do you get the email addresses for your
Facebook friends off of Facebook, to be able to email them? And I was like, okay, and this girl had
gotten up and one wicked smart at the thing by saying, well, Yahoo actually allows you to suck 200 of
those names off, and then you've got them, but you can't get more than 200. And I was like, Okay, well,
if she won with 200, and I could get people to get 5000, then I can probably win wicked smart. And so I
just said about trying to figure out how to do that and ended up it's interesting that we're on Skype
ended up finding that if you imported your contacts from Facebook into Skype, there was a screen that
came up halfway through the process that showed all of the email addresses of your Facebook friends
as it was sucking in once it was done. You couldn't see them in Skype, but there was the screen. So I
was like, Well, if the screen shows up, there's bound to be a way to capture it. And so I figured out how
to capture it and I gave that as my wicked smart idea and along with two others because I was like I'm
play the odds and Both Ryan and Barry got really excited about it. And I, I got almost every single vote
in the room and then Perry came over, I was like, Hey, man, hey, hey, you got it, we got to go to dinner,
you got to get dinner with me and I want you to sit across from me cuz I'm gonna talk to you. I was like,
Alright, that's great. We end up hitting it off you Perry's kind of like my, my brother from another mother.
And we just really hit it off super well and ended up doing things socially together. And then I had the
opportunity when a CEO of their business left and I was giving them advice, I always give advice, by
the way, I always help people, I look for opportunities to give value, with no expectations, seriously,
sincerely no expectation of a benefit. And I just find that that's the most self interested thing you can do
is to is to be selfless, because it comes back to you so many times. And so I help them since I have the
background that I have, I was able to help them with a lot of things over a period of a few years. And
when this CEO left the opportunity to have equity in the company was available. And they said, you
know, hey, what would you think about doing this? And I was like, I think that'd be great. So that's how I
became part of that

room. I love that and that anyone who reads what you write watches your videos, here's you gets that
right away, that you just want to help you want to add value and no expectations. What what worked? I
mean, you've been at the traffic and conversion conferences since the beginning. What is worked to
grow? Because it's the go to event for marketing. I mean, I consider the go to event, you know, up until
when I went people like did you go to Target version? Did you go to travel gear version? Why haven't

10
you gone to driving version? So it's, you know, it attracts? You know, 567 1000 marketers, probably
more next year, and the more after that, and you'll fill a stadium at some point,

right? We're actually you have to plan when you get a bigger event, about three years in advance. So
you're making a bet three years from now? Yeah, based on where you are as to how many people
you'll need. And we are in the process now of, of moving three, four years from now into convention
centers, because the space isn't available if you don't book it in advance. So it's it's a big bet. But yeah,
we're we want you know, we want to be at 100,000 people.

Yeah. What is worked to grow it and what what did you think would work? That didn't work? Because
obviously even got the rank of the top direct response marketing company is still one on a five, right?
That's it's still crazy. It's, you're they're failing? I know, it's learning, you know, four out of five times.
Yeah. So yeah, what what has not worked that you thought this is a slam dunk? This is gonna work for
sure. It's,

it's a really, really great, great question. What? What has worked is an easier question than what is not
because there, there isn't anything that I can think of that I thought was gonna be a slam dunk, because
I truly know that you don't know. Ask the 20 year old version of me and I'd be like, everything was
gonna work. You know, now I'm like, Ah, so, so let me tell you the things that have made a difference.
How about that? Yeah, sure. What what i what i, you asked me what I learned from Tony and I actually
gave you a bad answer, because, because what I really learned from Tony was that was the three M's
mentoring, modeling and masterminding. I don't think he calls it the three M's, but that that was an easy
way for me to remember it. That, that if you can model other people's success, and that truly I learned
from him, if you can think like somebody else thinks who is successful and do the things that they did,
then that is a model that will likely work for you. Short of being you know, seven feet tall to play in the
NBA or something. Right. But then you got COVID. Right, hard

to model that right?

Yeah. So so I am a big fan and have have been ever since then, of how can I improve in? How can I
improve my odds of succeeding? It's to model how can I improve my odds of succeeding? It's to find a
single one on one relationship with one or more mentors, who have been where I want to be before
who can help me discern the models to follow and the thoughts to have and then how can I get with a
group of people who are like minded so that I will raise my thermostat to the level of success that they
have through some sort of mastermind. And so, in events, I looked at went to hundreds of events at
when I when I came in, I took over events, so I run The event side of that we have a genius in Richard
Linder, who's the president of digital marketer who excels at filling events. And I've been very fortunate
to bring on a lady named Deanna Rogers, who is our Director of events, who does all of the logistics,
but kind of the, the strategy, I guess, of it, I have had a big hand in so not, not at all without an amazing
team that helps making that happen. But so, I, I, when I took that over, I was like, there we had $40,000
in sponsorship revenue, and, and kind of a soso, production, quality production value of like,

content was off the charts. He said, there was some logistical thing. Yes, it Yeah,

11
yeah, the content,

the content is a huge deal, because the the USP of digital marketer is we actually do this stuff. Right,
right. We actually, we don't just teach it, we make more money doing it than we do teaching it. Right.
So and that is

probably fairly rare. I mean, you know, fairly uncommon, right? It is, yeah,

hugely uncommon. And so what has made it successful is that content, but it's also beyond that,
because it would not have grown, it didn't really take off the giant leap in I think making traffic and
conversion summit, what i what i absolutely consider to be a world class event, is you have to attract,
you have to look, the part, you have to entertain people, you have to take people out of the world of the
venue that that exists as a shell before you populate it with your brand and permeate it with your brand.
And they have to walk into a world that just takes them in and and they are truly part of it. And so I
proposed a dramatic increase in the quality and expense of AV, and branding. And the first year that I
really

got, which is a big deal, by the way, coming from someone who is all about direct response for you to
say that right? Yeah.

Yeah. It's, it's, it's important. But branding is hugely important to direct response, right? hugely
important that they're not, it's not like people think, well, there's Coca Cola that advertises for brand,
and they don't need people to respond. And then there's, you know, the, the infomercials that are like,
you know, hey, buy my stuff. And but they're, but they're really, they're really smart people do both.
Right. So I so the thing that made a huge difference was in 2014, we in 2013, we brought on a celebrity
Shatner was our first big celebrity. And people were like, I mean, I had a lot of people that gave a lot
gave me a lot of criticism, because it was like, What is William Shatner had to do with digital marketing?
And it turns out, who cares? I watched him

as a kid, I want to just leave me alone.

And but but that's actually true for most of the people in the audience. Right, right, that he was Denny
crane, or Captain Kirk or TJ hooker, God forbid, you know, he was these characters that, you know, the
guy had had a, you know, has had a long, long career. And he's an interesting guy. And, and it raised
the bar of, wow, these guys can pull an actual celebrity. And so bringing celebrity in was a big deal. And
then in 2014, I had the chance to raise the bar of that production quality, and we went round and round
about it, and my partners were supportive, but skeptical. And when we, when we finished 2014, it was
100% buy in, it was oh my gosh, this, this was a big deal. And I believe that was a big turning point for
us that raise the bar. And by the way, when you look good like that, you can attract more money. So we
went from $40,000 in sponsors the year before I came in to a few a few years later now. We will have I
think we're going to be a little over 2 million in sponsors that basically almost pays for the event in the
sponsors and our sponsors have gone from I wish I could think of some of the horrible sponsors we had
not horrible people but like as far as brand equity, you know, we'd have you know, I can't even think of
you know, Joe's Joe's CRM and you know, Mike's right business opportunity, complete with finger guns

12
and And now we have now we're talking to Google. And we have Uber and we have Barnes and Noble
and Infusionsoft and Mark has and all these iconic kinds of companies American Express, right. And
now my focus is in moving from what we call endemic sponsors, the sponsors that are industry specific
to the non endemic sponsors, so that we can get, you know, Callaway and Cadillac, and all these other
kinds of sponsors. And so that's

it all come up together, right? I mean, you have to have the peep, you have the brim, and you have to
have the experience, they V and all the you know, when someone gets there, and the top name, people
and everything has to come up the other before you It sounds like that you attract that.

Yeah. And then what you have to do, going back to all the other stuff that we talked about is you have
to be obsessed with serving your customer. And at an event, most people make the mistake of thinking
that the customer is the attendee, the customer is the attendee, but the customer is also the sponsor.
And the customer is also the hotel and the customer. I mean, you have multiple customers that you
have to be thinking about, right. And if you serve all of those people, well, everybody buzzes about it.
So for sponsorship, the reason that sponsors sponsorship is taken off is number one, I, I basically scan
to all of the industry websites, and created a list of 1800 sponsors that were sponsoring other events.
And then we made a spreadsheet and then Deanna and our team, basically just divide and conquer
grinded it out, you know, saying, Hey, we got this event. And now we have a pipeline of 1800 sponsors.
And one thing that I saw was that a lot of the booths when you go to these events, because I'm going to
the events to learn about it. A lot of the booths are empty. I was like, God, why are the booths empty?
And then as like if the booths are empty, because I actually wanted to talk to the people. And I was like,
the booster empty, these people aren't gonna sell that seems kind of crazy. And so I started talking to
them, and they're like, well, we have to go and get lunch. And we have to, you know, get drink water
and all this. So I looked at that challenge. And Deanna and I talked and we said, let's do a team of four
concierge, people whose job is to go and talk to all the sponsors, and ask them what they need or what
they want. Do you need lunch? Do you want drink, you want a beer at the end of the day? And we then
we put on a lunch for them. We have a sponsor VIP room, we get them anything they want, we don't
charge them for it. You want a beer, we're gonna we're gonna go get you a beer. And nobody does
that. Nobody. Nobody does that. So then when I when I, you know, social proof. Now I'm like, Okay,
take a video team, and interview all the sponsors about their experience, oh, my God, it's the best thing
ever. They took care of us and love us. And, you know, we can stay in the booth and sell and now that
reel goes out to all the future sponsors. And you know, it's just all of that. Yeah. You know, that, that

that's really important. You know, it was really impressive in the events. Impressive. You know, I you
know, john and i loved it last year. And but it was it was really impressive. You know, we we chatted
with you for maybe five minutes. And it really struck us, we talked about this, we still talk about it. And
what's really amazing is you're always learning because you didn't say this is great. Basically you you
came to us, you said how can we make this better? I mean, in the five minute conversation and like
holy cow, like the person who is heading this up, it really just comes out as just wanting to constantly
improve constantly get feedback, and that was, that was really amazing.

Yeah, you have to I try. I don't succeed always. But I try to walk every single booth and talk to every
single sponsor, everybody that's that's at the events and say, how's it going? What could we do better?

13
Actually, we had one. content. Commerce is another event that we've got. And there was a sponsor,
that the layout of the event didn't turn out to be exactly like the blueprint of it. And I had not had the
benefit of walking the hotel, and which I normally do. But I saw that there was a sponsor that was way
down on the end, and I felt I was like, how are you doing down here? And she's like, Oh, it's, you know,
it's it's good. I'm like, are you getting anybody down here? And she said, she said, Well, we're not
getting as many as we'd hoped. But blah, blah, blah. And so we went and talked to the fire marshal and
said, I talked to Deanna I said, let's let's talk the fire marshal. Can we get her booth moved down here,
where all the people are, because it's kind of stinks that she's stuck way down here. And we moved her
down there and she had more business than she'd ever had. And it didn't hurt any of the other
sponsors. It just she happened to have a really kind of lousy location, but I would have never known
that if I hadn't talked to her and then, you know, she might

have been very polite.

She was And she might have never said anything bad. But you know what she does? Now? She
doesn't have her back. I got I was down there. And they moved me because, you know, because we
care we actually do. So it you know, it's like I said, the most self interested thing you can do is to is to
be interested in other people.

What do you think Ron will take where you're at now, which is very impressive, you know, 567 1000 to
get into the stadium?

Yeah, it takes, I don't think that we get there, the way that we've gotten here. And and so what what we
identified was that, if we want to be like dreamforce, as my model, Dream forces, sales forces, yeah,
60,000 people, right, you're not going to, without a unifying theme, Beyond Marketing, you're not going
to, in my opinion, get 100 and some 1000 people to come out, you need to be a critical part of their
lives. And you're not going to be a critical part of their lives by simply providing courses and training. So
you have to provide a software solution, I believe, to do that, that provides an incredibly valuable
service. And so what we've done is we've, we have over the last two years, added a SM SaaS software
as a service. And we created a learning management system that we use for our products now, that is
positioned to roll out to provide a huge, huge, huge market of people with an LMS. And, and a couple of
other things. There's an analytics platform that we bought. So we're creating a suite of services,
modeling, modeling, Salesforce, because I think if we can become a significant player to SMBs, small,
medium sized businesses and enterprise, which we've now got Uber, and Harper Collins, and at the hot
airlines and all these enterprise people, now our clients, we've, we're moving towards a place where
our market can grow to hundreds and hundreds of 1000s of people. And I can get a percentage of
those into the room to learn more about that we can open our platform to third party developers. And so
that might be a more of a answer than you want. But it's like how

how it's all the same because you come out of that. Okay, here's some stuff we need to do right now
clean up, Davey get so celebrities, but like you said, it's gonna take something else to get to the next
level.

14
It is Yeah, it takes bigger partners, more team members and and that unifying thing, that that that real
community building thing. If you're a Salesforce person, or a HubSpot person, you're probably going to
be pretty loyal to that. And and, and they do both, they both do a good job of getting the the customers
on board and feeling a part of something just like, like a football team. I think about that, like a football
team. I'm not a sports guy. But I definitely love that people in a city. Think this commercial enterprise is
something that they care enough about to wear the colors of red, that's what I want. I want them
wearing our colors. Right? And so that's what we're trying to create.

I love that. Yeah.

Well, let me add one, let me add one more thing too. Yeah, we we leave, we made a decision.
trafficking, the, let's call it a seminar. But the seminar industry, the event industry, in in our online
marketing digital marketing world, typically has a format that I don't think serves the customer as well
as it should. And I experienced that as a consumer of those events. And what I what I saw was that big
corporate events are really about providing as much value as they can, I don't think the contents that
great, but they're not selling from the stage. When I started with traffic and conversion summit, the
income of the event came not just from ticket sales, but it came from selling from the stage. So
speakers would make an offer for a product, send people to the back of the room to buy. And that
would provide significant revenue. And we decided that that experience typically creates and we would
have speakers back in 2013 that you could pay to be on the stage, you could pay to pitch basically. But
what that did was it inhibited the quality of the content. Because the person who's on the stage
delivering that sales message is typically a person who is delivering a formula that they've been taught
and all Those pitches that are saying I grew up as a poor child on the Mississippi River and lived out of
a bathtub for 17 covered this amazing digital marketing drip that rains money on me with no effort at all
run to the bank for $2,000, I gave you absolutely no value, but please give me money. And we turned
that around and said, we're not selling anything from the stage. And we're going to sell anything that we
sell from a booth just like everybody else does. And that that's made a huge difference. And it's kind of
funny, because every year, I have somebody come up to me, Hey, hey, I can tell you how to make so
much more money from your event. Like I'm like, awesome, but tell me you get people in the back with
clipboards and order forms and then you send people to the back of the stage to buy you're gonna
make so much money. It's like, you know, we actually make millions of dollars in each of our booths at
our event. Our sister companies like the war room, which I also run Digital Marketer which Ryan deiss
and Richard Linder run and native commerce which Perry Belcher and Karen Kang run, they all make
millions of dollars for us, never selling anything, only having the booth no tables, no clipboards and the
experience and, and the professionalism and the quality of attendee that you get when you aren't
focused on the quick dollar. But it kind of ends up coming anyway, has been a huge difference. So I
think there was a decision to sacrifice for basically a year we had to sacrifice money. Yeah, that's the
long term versus short term. And well, you

know, I have to comment about the your booth that warm room. I'm not sure at what point you came up
with it. But it's really genius. Obviously, it's coming from three marketing geniuses where you have it
roped off, right? You have a I think all you can drink bar. And you can only really get into that roped off
area if you're a war room member. Now, did you come up with that concept, because it's not a typical
booth. It's just it's like your exclusive mini club within his area. And that's

15
exactly what we wanted, you know, we you've got like Bob Cialdini that wrote the the influence book
and Grand Prix finance, which is great, has all of the things that that basically make a successful
marketing message. And that booth has almost all of them, you know, and it has exclusivity, reciprocity,
I mean, pretty much all of that stuff. And and the booth was the graphic was designed by Perry Belcher
with a few tweaks from Ryan, me, the exclusive rope it off and put security guards in front of it was was
Perry Perry's, just just amazing at doing that stuff. And, and then by accident, I just happened to see
modeling. Excuse me, I happen to see that at other events where the people line up that booze, but
they might not be the people you want. But the booze would basically give away beer, or they would
give away coffee. And so I was like, Okay, let's get a barista in in the morning. And then let's do a bar in
the evening. And then a lot of people were like, and I actually my, my events coordinator, she was, she
was like, you know, I gotta keep, we have to keep all these warring people out because we're trying to
get people in here, we can explain them. And I'm like, No, no, I want we have 100 members in war
room, right? I want all those people in the booth because I want the booth buzzing at all times. And I'm
happy to pay the money to have them drink the coffee and have the liquor because our booth looks
incredibly busy. And you can't get in because you got security guards in front. And it's roped off. And
we have celebrities that are in there. And I mean, it's like it, it just for sure. Accidentally and intentionally
became something amazing. And and for a tiny little booth like that to do over a million dollars in a
couple of days. Is is pretty cool. You know, very

cool. You know what, when you talk it makes me think of a few things rolling, which is you have, you
know, other people, Richard,

you,

Ryan period are very, very smart individuals. And I would imagine when you're making decisions, not
everyone always agrees on the right path on the path. What was a time where people just had varying
opinions, how do you move forward with all these great track records smart minds? What do you do?
Are Russell I mean, what, what

that also is, is a good question. And the The answer is that it did not always work as well as it works
now. Because originally, when I came into the company, it was Ryan and Perry ran everything right and
the challenge Was that they have very different management styles. And neither one is completely
correct or completely wrong. But what you can't have is opposing management styles so that then and
they would literally say this that, that Ryan would come in and basically tell the team doing this, this,
this, this and this. And then it's Brian goes on vacation with his family. And Perry comes in and goes,
No, we're not doing that, that and that we're doing this, this and this, and people were like, okay, but
eventually, they're just like, I don't want to do anything. It's a tug of war,

right?

It is literally a push me pull you right? So. So we talked about it and decided, you

come and you're like, whatever they say, Don't listen to either them. This is what you're

16
that's what I should have done. Right? Yeah. The triple can, but know what I did. And the benefit of
long time practicing law and doing deals and negotiating and stuff as you can come in from the outside
with altitude. And say, it looks like the challenges this and this. And so we decided that what made
sense was because Ryan was the face at the time of digital marketer, which at the time was a
personality brand, we have moved it from a personality brand to a brand. But But anyway, it was like,
well, it makes sense for Ryan to be a digital marketer, because that's, you know, that's his face, and
you know, and everything, and Perry to be at native commerce, because his whole background is
physical products. And that that was a natural, easy split. And since we did that, it made a huge, huge
difference. The teams are happier. And we you know, we did make the decision that it was going to
double up our teams. So now we have, we have duplicate kinds of people at each of those companies.
But we also now have two companies that have two different valuations that are completely different
based on the niches that they're in, that can be sold separately that can be funded separately, we've
diversified our risk, we've diversified our team. So it it's worked out really well. So now to answer your
question about what happens now, even though that we've done that when people disagree, we have,
we are all fully capable of aggressively stating our positions. And, and we also all have tremendous
respect for each other, which is critical to any relationship. And we've never had a situation where,
where it came down to a vote, we do have the ability, since there's three of us to break a tie. Right. And
in digital marketer, there's actually four of us because Richard Linder is a partner there. Richard is
actually also a partner in the overall thing. But but but has somehow managed to stay out of the fray
which now that you said now that I think about that, I'm going to have to pull him into the break.

But sorry, Richard. But

yeah, so so it's it's truly when you have a group of people who who managed by consensus, and
respect the territory of someone else like Ryan, Ryan made a decision not long ago about expanding
and the company that that we were not completely certain of, and, and we defer to him on that, even
though we might not 100% agree with that particular thing. And Perry, same thing, Perry has a couple
of things that he's you know, said he wanted to do that they haven't agreed on and and I have to, and
we've all, most always lost money each time we didn't listen to the other one either. So I'm not gonna
say that doesn't help because it's in your mind that you don't want to take. You don't want to take crap
from the other people if your thing doesn't work out if they weren't supporting it, right, really get them on
board to support.

So Rebecca, yeah, it sounds like kind of people stay within a certain lane because they have a certain
territory and certain expertise. And those people tend to lead those things a little bit more, but get the
feedback from everyone else.

They do.

Yeah. Ron, first of all, thank you so much for your time. I have one last question. It's sort of two
questions in one. But where should we point people towards? Obviously, there's a lot of places that
they should check out. Digital Marketer raschig checkout traffic and conversion fantastic conference,

17
native commerce, you guys got content and commerce. What else have we missed that people should
go and check out?

There were a mastermind, because yeah, worm Yeah. is insanely valuable and has has really great
people. We have a new experiment that I was telling you about called the founders board, which has
been super fun and kind of has my attention right now. Is a

founders board for a second. So I'm sorry, three questions. Yeah. So talk about founders board for for a
second. That's your new cool experiment more than an experiment.

Really. It is it It's my background is, is very business oriented and lots of buying companies and selling
companies and things like that. And I have I've owned and built a lot of businesses and I wanted
something that I could focus more on that kind of stuff than just the marketing stuff, because a lot of the
stuff that we do is really focused on on marketing. And, and marketing is is a critical component as
sales. But business is too and it's a different game then, than those games. So I wanted to have
something where we could really help our our people both in war room and our other contacts and
connections by showing them how to 10x or 100x a business. And we have a great track record of that
there's, there's 24 of them. Thinking about our proof proof page. There's 24 businesses now that that
I've grown to a million dollars or more and many more with Perry and Ryan added. And I think there's
15 of them that have gone to 10,000,003 at 100. So that's a pretty good track record. Yeah. And, and
there's a system and a framework around that. And so founders board is, is four things really it is it is
war room for the mastermind, it is we're going to the three M's, right? It is it is for modeling, this thing
that we call the founders board intensive and founder board, it is mentoring through an advisory service
that we provide where we become your advisory board. So it has all three of the M's, and then it also
has an AI, maybe you can help me brainstorm the community side. But one of the challenges that I
have found as an entrepreneur is that I love this stuff so much that I would talk about it all the time. And
I tell people, I say if I had to work another job to be able to do this for free, I would it's just super
awesome that this pays well. But, but my family gets pretty sick of hearing, you know, this is amazing,
this is a cool thing. And these are our numbers and take a look at this dashboard in that role. So having
having a group of people that you can do social things with as well, right. So I'm looking for an M that
works for community, but having that group of people that you can do social things with as well, that
have those common interests. And you don't necessarily have to talk about business. I mean, you kind
of can't help it because it's it's part of your fiber. But But you don't, you don't want to talk about that all
the time. But you also want people that are your peers that can play on the level you play on that can
do the things that you want to do that can hang, you know, financially, intellectually, experientially, that
is that is a component. So those are that's really the place we want to go and and founders board is the
is the mentoring side of that quadrangle of things?

Where can people find out more about that?

Right now? It's it's any any horribly named page that has a story behind it, but it's on a horribly named
page called 1892? society? comm forward slash 8092. So that obviously, I thought

it was gonna be way worse than that. That's not that

18
bad. Okay, well, good. I think it's horrible right now,

but it's kind of, you know, the secret society type of situation.

So

we did by founders board calm.

So why use that

when you're at 92 says, I use that when you can do forward slash 1892. But yeah, so here, let me tell
you just briefly this. Yeah. So So when we're trying to think of what we're going to call this, I googled,
cuz at the time, it was kind of masterminding, and it's become more mentary. But anyway, I, I googled
the most successful masterminds in history. And I found that there were really seven of them. And I had
looked at some friends of mine who had different models, and some of them were in the $400 a month
range, and some of them were in the 18 $160 a month range, and I preferred the 1800 and some to the
400. And it turned out that some of the masterminds were in the four hundreds, and one of them in
particular was was founded in 1892. It was called the steel mill masterminds and it was Andrew
Carnegie. And out of the steel mill, masterminds came most of the managerial and technological
innovation of the industrial age. Yeah, it was like that's really cool. And it has the benefit of 1892 of
being 1892, which is kind of the price point that I was looking for.

So I didn't realize that okay, I was thinking year. Yeah,

yeah, well, it was the year but I needed a year that matched my price point that I wanted, so, so I was
like 1892 that's, that's it. It's perfect.

So what you know? Yeah, so 89 to society, comm slash 1892. People should check it out. And it's
really for larger scale companies, though, yeah,

we were that is really focused on people who are, we have six stages of business, you have startup,
then you have traction where your product market fit comes from your build, measure learn loop, right,
then you get the constraint phase where, you know, things were going awesome. And now, I need
talent, I need money, I have, you know, market size challenges, you know, that kind of stuff. And then
you get to growth after that, and maturity and decline. And we really want to not focus on the startups,
we really want to focus on helping people get traction, we want to help people get product market fit, we
want to help people through the constraint phase. And we want to help people who are in the growth
phase, see how important it is. And the benefit, which which is amazing, of selling your company. And,
and, and get past some of the challenges that stop you from thinking you can sell a company, that it's
not good enough, it's it's absolutely good enough, if it gets professionalized with the right kinds of
things, and that they're gonna leave it to their kids, or family, probably the worst decision you can make
only about 2% of businesses make it through a few generations, only about 30, I think it's 28%. past
one generation, and your kids and your family probably don't want your business, right, they want

19
money to do what they want to do. So, so it's really to, to kind of help people through those challenges.
And so you need a business that's actually operating, for us to be able to provide, you know, the 21
things that we do to to 10x 200x businesses,

what are your kids wanted to

my kids, one of them is 26. And though he will tell you that he absolutely positively does not follow in
my footsteps at all. He does, because he has, he has gone out and partnered with influencers with
YouTube influencers, and has several of them right now that he has created products with and markets.
But yesterday, we did a reception at the end of this summer, this this 1892 intensive thing and, and he's
there, and somebody said, Oh, you followed in his footsteps. And he's like, No, I didn't like that you did.
So anyway, he's doing that. But what's awesome is, and this is to me, like we were talking about this
the other day is, to me are my other My other son is 20. And he has just come to us and said he's tired
of being he was pizza delivery guy. He was he is currently a coffee barista. But he came in he said, You
know what, I really want to do something more. I want to make more money. I want to be able to be
responsible for a family. And we were just like, you know, this is he's only

20. I mean, you have some time. Yeah.

Fantastic. And well, he's in an environment of you know, hyper overachievers. Yeah. So. So what's cool
about that is I said, I'll tell you what, tell me what you're making doing this. And he said, I'm making 15
$100 a month, I said, fantastic. I said, I'll give you a paid internship with me. I want you to come to all
our meetings like your brother did. And I want you to I'm going to send you down to Austin and train
with our sponsorship sales team. And then we will come up with I want you to go through all the DM sir,
digital marketer certifications, and with that trio of training, you can't help but be successful. And I told
him and then my wife and I and several of our friends were talking about this afterwards in different
conversations is, is it's just such a gift to your child or a friend or an acquaintance to be able to help
them see that the freedom that you get when you can make money to do whatever you want to impact
whatever you want. Is, is life changing, game changing, liberating. euphoric, right? And that, that so
many people get stuck in an hourly job, like, like a barista, like, like, let's let's look at the all the people
who are arguing for a $15 minimum wage, right? Because they can't make it. And it's I don't know how
they make it. I don't know how you make it on $15 an hour. I don't know how you make it on $50 an
hour or even 100. But the cool thing is, is that there's this whole world that the listeners of your show
that you and I and Now my kids know about that is absolutely limitless, you can create a million dollars
in a month, you can create $10 million in a month. And you can do that or you can make $8 an hour.
And that, to me, is absolutely stunning. And a lot of the time, it's simply being lucky enough to be in
your dad's car and look back and see a torn up ugly cassette thing with Dennis Denise whateleys
named me for

I have that I have that cassette case exactly what you're talking about. Yeah.

Yeah. So that That, to me is, is just fascinating when you think about it, that that a life a human life is
really only limited by the exposure to the possibilities of what we know can be done. And the mindset of
taking the action to do it. That is the only thing you know, really separates the people who are free to do

20
whatever they want in their lives from the people who are slaves to an hourly wage. That's that's kind of
interesting.

So Ron, you've a book and you at

some point do I do? Yeah, I actually do. And I wrote one that was published in the legal field and in all
the bookstores A long time ago. And I saw

that and I'm like, it can't be the same one. It was. It was something I remember, it was very financial,
the financial title

for everyone, which is Yeah, I used to do, yeah, okay.

Yeah, asset protection, it was published in 97.

Yeah, which I wrote in five days, because the publisher came to me and said, We need a book on asset
protection, because it's hot. If you will write that book for us in five days, we will put it in all the
bookstores. And I said, I will absolutely write that book in five days. But I wrote another book called life
without limits, which I didn't ever publish. But I've given to a lot of my friends. That's kind of my my
legacy book, I read the Benjamin Franklin autobiography. And what really stuck with the two two huge
takeaways for me from that book were Benjamin Franklin was one of the most successful negotiators
have, because he planted in people's brains that whatever thing he wanted, whatever outcome he
wanted them to come to, was their idea. And that is something that has been amazingly good for me to
do to help people through kind of a Socratic method of asking questions, them to the conclusion that I
think will benefit both them and me. And the other thing was, is that he wrote that, as a legacy for his
kids of basically this is, this is kind of how I think you might want to consider the possibility of living your
life because I found these things to be good for me. And so I wrote the life without limits book, basically,
for my kids that I did not have at the time. But now what I have done is, a lot of my friends have written
books, and a lot of them are very well known. And so what I found that I wasn't doing, I told I would tell
people all the time, it's like, all these people with these stories. I don't have any stories. And my wife
and kids you said that? Yeah, my wife and kids because because they all have like Perry's Mr. Stories,
got all these amazing stories, and, and all these people that have written these books, I'm like, these
are great stories. And, and I was like, I just don't have any. And they're all like, You're an idiot, you
absolutely have stories. And so this was it this year, I think it was this year, they were like you're sitting
down with us. And we're going to tell you all of the stories that you tell us. And they did. And I made a
list of them. And now I'm like, that's awesome. I it turns out, I do have a couple of stories, I have
actually quite a few of them. And so I've written all those down and now I am tying the the kind of
lessons to the adventures of those. And I have, you know, I have lived, you know, probably 19 lives
instead of seven. But it's and I have a couple of things that I think are interesting to people to weave in.
You know, like I've visited 150 countries, that's that's an unusual thing. And, and tying those in so I'm
trying to I realized what I want is I don't want a book that is simply instructional 123 I want something
that Yeah, meaning and interesting as well. Yeah.

21
So when when is this book gonna come out? Is it gonna be the extended edition of life without limits?
Or is it gonna be from scratch? This is what's

here's an interesting exercise. However old you are right now. write a book that you think you want to
give to your kids that that tells them what you think about a whole bunch of things right now. And I did
that in 1995 and then read that 20 30 years later, and you will be like, I was just so stupid. I can't
believe I thought. I mean, there's lots of things that I still think about. But it's like, the evolution of those
ideas has been truly interesting. It actually would probably be an interesting book to say, this is, you
know, maybe you call it then in evolution, right, exactly.

Yeah.

But, but I do have a fantastic title that that Perry helped me with, and all my stories that my family
helped me with. And so it will definitely be out in 2018.

So I could feel like, I'm gonna, you're busy man, you have to have a lot of things to attend to. But what's
one of your favorite stories that you think will make it in the book.

One of my favorite stories, is in Africa, I love to take nature pictures. And so I'm an avid photographer.
And, and I love to travel. So traveling while taking pictures of animals is wonderful for me. And so I was
on a safari by myself in Africa, I was in Botswana on the Zambezi River. The leading cause of death on
the Zambezi River is Hippo attacks are ferocious. They're amazingly ferocious. And so I was, I was in a
boat, taking pictures of four elephants that were kind enough to be by the riverbank with their getting
water, they get water and put it on their backs and then wallow in the mud to provide protection from
the sun and things like that. So I got a family of elephants doing the spray thing, and I'm trying to get
them like all in unison, so it kind of has perfect thing. And these pictures take like, you'll sit there for an
hour and a half to just get no no, don't do that just do a little bit more. So but I do notice over about 200
yards away is I think they call it a pod of hippos. And, and the male was kind of eyeing us up. And you
know, the my guide said, you know, we got to watch that guy, you know, if it gets too close, we'll have
to take off in some taking the pictures, and I see him getting closer and closer. And I'm like, should we
go? And he's like, yeah, we go. I was like, okay, taking my pictures. And then he gets really significantly
closer. And he's about maybe 20 yards away. And the guy goes, Yeah, it's it's time for us to go. So he
goes and he pulls the motor the cord on the motor to start and the cord flies out of his hand and lands
in the water and sinks and the motor is not started. And the hippo is getting closer and closer. And I'm
like, this is not a good choice, I can jump out towards the hippo guaranteed death, I can jump out
towards the elephants where there's a baby elephant guaranteed charge death goring or I can swim
away in the opposite direction where all the crocodiles are, which is, you know, guaranteed, maiming,

you know, so, so maiming, certain death boring, you know, no, no good options. I'm truly thinking this
and I'm like, and then I'm going to be out.

Because my guide sure as hell isn't going to hang around. It's it's going to be you know, the, I don't
have to I don't have to outrun the elephants or the hippos. I just have to run faster than you. Yes. So I'm
like, Okay, I'm pretty much screwed if we can't get this started. And I'm looking around in the boat. And

22
the life preserver which I could not elect to wear has this white band on it. And so I rip the band off of
the life preserver and we coil it around the thing and pull it and the thing goes. And you know, now the
hippo is closer, and I'm kind of hanging out of the boat, looking at the hippo and wrap it around again,
pull it and the third time starts, I have a picture of the hippos mouth open like that, literally two feet from
me because I was taking that as my last picture before I literally jumped out of the boat. And it started
and we pulled away. And the hippo just kind of was like, you know, then their eyes are like, like here,
you know,

right? That

that was to me. Just a fantastic experience where there was, there was no way that you would survive if
you panicked. The only thing that you could do was try to rapidly innovate on a different way to make
this this one thing that could save your butt.

How was the guy freaking out?

He was I think he was confident that he could that he could outrun me. Really he was he was already
thinking that he was no he was really nervous. He was he was absolutely frantically pulling the thing
and wrapping it around this. Like if I collapsed all this that last little bit of how fast the the hippo came
and we took that off and wow It felt like it took 30 minutes, but it was probably just a couple of five
seconds. Right? Yeah. So so we were we were definitely very happy. Once we left that area saying a
big sigh of relief.

I'm saying relief. Ron, thank you so much for sharing the stories and for your time. Everyone should
check out all those sites we mentioned. And I just want to be the first one to thank you so much for
doing this.

Thank you. I really appreciate it.

23