#351: How To Figure It Out From The Beginning w/ High Level Marketing's Wesley Matthews
Wes Matthews, CEO of High Level Marketing, to drop knowledge about: Scaling his agency to $21M in a scant 12 years, How To Sell Services, How To Set Up Your Sales Team For Success, Producing 2,000+ client websites via process, Creating proprietary software and apps, Work / Life balance as an entrepreneur, husband and father of 4 by putting his iPhone in a timed lock box at 5pm
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Wesley Matthews
founder and CEO
Sales driven, visionary leader
High Level Marketing, a marketing agency focused on optimizing websites for B2C companies.
12 years old
45% average growth
2,000+ client websites
Inc. 5000 list 3 different times (2016, 2018, and 2019)
$21M in revenue
100+ employees
Website: www.highlevelmarketing.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/hlmweb/
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
customer business people website agencies cms reporting podcast sales wordpress talk work company client account management team test years build nice sweat equity
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They're ready, huh?
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Sweat equity podcast extremely show the number one business comedy comedy business podcast show. Yep. That's a lifestyle. That yeah, baby.
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This is a really good episode. We didn't know our guests. Wes Matthews is founder and CEO of high level marketing an agency that's made out 2000 websites under contract he said, yeah, there's a lot going on. Been around for 12 years figured out the process, doing 21 million in revenue last year. Got over 112 Always threw that out there too. Yeah, I shed it's like, I've got the highest been in college. I'd be wearing that on around my neck. If I made 21 million in revenue for my business. I started a dozen years ago. Yeah, gold chain. Answer another show. No, no, no. Well, I just I'm excited. He was good and was good.
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Hey, speaking of ball in 2020s best small medium enterprise business advisory podcast United States 2020. one's best podcast in streaming entertainment studio, eastern United States. And what's the other one we just one international podcast of the year boom, corporate Livewire, international xx xx. I don't remember. We're global. I sent it to my mom. She thought it was a real word.
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This episode of sweat equity is brought to you by viam gut biome intelligence test. You want to know the flora and fauna of your of your gut, gut intelligence test supplements. With our link it's 70% Off with for Health Insights, personal food recommendations, percision supplements formulated just for you hit the link in the episode description and get the hook up. Holler if you hear me. Let's go talk to Wes Matthews in Michigan. Hi,
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Bob my sweat equity.
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Sweat equity.
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Wesley Wes, can I call you Wes? Yeah, for sure. How you doing? Good. How are you? We're are we talking to you? Where do you? Where are you about right now? Yeah, so I'm in Michigan. So I'm in a suburb outside of Detroit about 40 miles from Detroit. Oh, nice. But you guys, were in Tampa?
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Awesome. Okay, Sarasota next week? Oh, yeah. Well, let us know if you make it out the hour drive up. We'll we'll get you a cigar over.
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Michigan a so
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now we we like to ask all our first guests that especially by way of Booker, if have you listened or watch this show before? I have not. Okay. I see. I was gonna I was like, No, you test them? Yeah. All right. And the suit and tie is not normal. But he told me he didn't wear it for that reason. He's wearing it just because we looked white trash in the last episode. So we're trying to step it up. Yeah, sometimes we'll just look trashy. Sometimes shirts off. And I said let's let's spend a while flip it. And Eric sat down with that mission today. So I said, I will wear it next time, and I'll be the one who looks like an idiot. Next time, that's fine. I'll wear a mesh tank top.
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So that we're this this show is about basically, we're about asking, like talking to people like yourself that have been successful and kind of passing that kind of information along to the listeners. Sure, but we also are in the comedy world. So we'd like to say we're the number one comedy business podcast because there's not anybody else in the genre. Nobody claims it right. So we all did we got did we might have a fair amount of dick jokes, but I know your your company may want to use some of this to clip out so we'll try to keep them you know, sporadically throughout. We'll get some clean, mighty mouth. I mean, what I mean look, that's the thing with LinkedIn. We like to say we want to be more anti LinkedIn like real talk because LinkedIn for sure, or just, it looks like
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you know, a publicist wrote everybody's posts, right right. I agree except ours. And then I get a lot of professional friends that are like why are you posting this joke on there and like you literally posted a video of you do a running the stairs and short shorts. Like this afternoon to this is becoming really self indulgent.
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More about ourselves. Oh, quick. Well, no, I try.
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I did write a joke I my
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business dad mentoree. Dean Akers, who's on the show a couple episodes ago, he goes, do you think you're doing anything with your stand up comedy career or not? By not putting content out and I was like, fuck, and so it got you there. So I'll try to if I'm doing a hard workout, I'll try to write the joke or try to think about chewed it while I'm doing it. And then I've got that runner's high, which should be called something else, because it's not a really good high. And then I'll do it before I can really think about it. And then that's it. So if you want to know if you wanted to know what we're about, I think that should show you
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that we we plan, we're very professional.
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I was I was looking at Can I throw some stats out for the list? Yes, for sure. Give me Give a little brief on who you are. Your founder and CEO of high level marketing. You're kind of a sales driven visionary leader. Is that fair to say? Yeah, the sales guy or no? Got a lot of questions about that.
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Just a humble brag your your business, your agency, your marketing agency for b2c companies. You're about eight years old. 45% growth on average? Is that Yes. Yeah. I mean, so we're actually a 12 years old, and I actually sold 80% of the business last year. Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah. So we need to consolidate. We, we consolidated roll up two agencies together. Now. We're 110 employees. Mm hmm. And about 21 million in revenue, I got that you're on the Inc 500. List three different times in 2016 2018 2019. And then I didn't get the number of websites you've cranked out. But I think it's in the 1000s. Yeah, well, I think today we're we manage about a little over 2020 100 websites. Wow. That's, I mean, with Eric and I thought when we were having when I my agency, we were we were working together, and we thought like, yeah, we've probably cranked out like 200 websites in like five years. Yeah. And thought that was pretty, pretty girthy. But this is like, you know, 2000 is insane. How? How's the model set up? Yeah. Is it? Are you a syndicated marketing agency, where you're doing syndicated content? You're doing templated? stuff? You're shaking your head? No. But so I'm even more impressed that you're you kind of do these bespoke? Can you tell us about that? Yeah, for sure. So, you know, early on, I set off to, you know, I worked with a web development company that did every thing, sort of like everything was custom. Every project that came through the door, they completely blew up every relationship right now as a sales guy. So I'm like, Look, to me, it was almost harder to do a shitty job than to just do a good job on a website on a project. Yeah. So kind of throughout that process, when I figured out I want to start my own company, my partner that now John Bowerman, CTO, he actually had his own platform that he had been working on and developed. So he was like this programmer technical guy selling websites, right, trying to do customer service, trying to onboard new customers, more of a technology guy. So when we came together, it was all about just, you know, getting getting the customer in putting him through our platform, getting them out. So the whole model early on, was charge a setup fee with a monthly recurring fee behind that. Yep. Like, that was my vision. That was my goal. That's how we started that's how we grew and scaled the business. So you know, I never really liked the work template. So I kind of call it a framework. So we kind of use you know, certain elements, right? Because at the end of the day, I mean a website today versus 10 years ago, you got logo, you got the heading, you got the navigation, you got the banner, I mean, it's it's very similar, right, and our target market has always been small to mid size, you know, b2c type businesses. We're talking plumbers, roofers, electricians. So a lot of it kind of the look and feel and just the overall architectures are very similar in terms of like, what actually gets people to click on a link or you know, can roll about ROI and converting leads. So it was always like, you know, do you want to do something completely custom or do something that we know is going to convert and get you more leads and more traction? See, you know, how we know he's not a hack. He's the only like, one of the few words where ROI right
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you know, how few web you know, web based marketing agencies website, producing marketing agencies, look how many clicks I got you though, right? Never go over it and they just talk about you spend this money with us, we'll get you x back, which I think is a fucking fool's errand, but it sounds nice in the sales pitch. So I did listen to an interview with you talking about how you had to make that process.
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High quality, like really streamlined it. So for people listening, like a website is difficult if you
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If you're working with a developer, if you ever have, you probably been frustrated, because a lot of them don't have process down. They don't have their operation people skill or people's skills to communicate if they have an issue or trying to get proactive with it. But I really break it down a lot for process. And that's, that's on the inbound when they're, you're doing a kickoff meeting. But what they also what people don't understand, it's like building a house. It's and I stole this metaphor from someone else. But it's basically you have the framework, which sounds like your, your, your partner had his own CMS of sorts, a content management system, for those don't know what that is. It's like WordPress, Squarespace, Wix Weebly. He had this packaged up, you're like, You got something great here. I can get it out there. Right. So you guys kind of had a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup of a partnership of strengths. But what people don't get is it's like, you have to build the frames, right? Yeah, the frame, the CMS is your foundation of the house, you got to build the, the walls, then you got to do the drywall, then you got to do you know, whatever, the fixtures, then, you know, it kind of zippers like that, to finish a website. And what people don't get is like, if they don't know their own business, it's good that you're starting off in a hole. Yeah.
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I'd like to hear more about the proprietary CMS that seems to be Yeah, so if you rewind back to like, 2008. You know, Joomla was probably like our biggest competitor, right? And Joomla, for nobody that knows what that is, the interface is difficult to work with, you have to be like a full stack developer to operate that platform. So my partner and I, it was like, you know, we, we had developed something that like my mom could use to update a website. So the actual platform is called mice, NYC, and the acronym is manage your content easily. So it was sort of like that open door, like, you know, we can build your website. And then also, if you want, you can manage it yourself. And we knew that customers, were not going to manage it themselves, but just giving them the ability to think that 24 hours a day, they can log into the website and make any edits, changes, modifications that they can however, I had a full staff back at the office, that would make any change for the customers like a value add or, you know, we could charge hourly if we wanted to. So it was sort of a win win, it was sort of like that, hey, like, you can kind of control your website, however, like you have this really great company behind. And you know, my vision early on was hire people that can support around that infrastructure. So whether it's an account manager, an SEO person, a content person, like we have experts in every facet of a web digital marketing package. So talking to a customer, it's not only are you getting into this nice CMS package, you know, we have every detail of the web, you know, the web process covered. So, you know, that was a that was a big key differentiator in the beginning was having their own our own content manager. Now, we still have that proprietary software. But I would say 30% of the projects that we deploy are built in WordPress. And the reason being is there still this stigma around like, we don't want our stuff on your proprietary, proprietary scary, right, that's a scary word for some type from some customers. So the customers that have somebody internally, whether it's a marketing person or their own developer, and they prefer WordPress, Watson's only building WordPress as well. Is it something you've thought about white labeling out? Or is it I mean, to me that,
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yeah, we did. But at the end of the day, it was like, you know, WordPress is an open source platform, and it's a pretty good, you know, piece of software, you know, we just figured that if we had our own internal team, so our, the platform itself, and what I really loved about it, and it kind of want to keep it close, it's almost like having our own iPhone. So when a customer has a website, as we push updates and new features, and things come out, we're just pushing that to our customers. So for us to have that kind of closed loop in I would say, early on building the company, and even till today, you know, there's a lot of learning curves around it, you know, I mean, it's a custom built platform that has to like, for a developer to get under the hood and just sort of go, you know, it's, they kind of have to come in HLM. And so we really haven't got there yet. We've been so focused on growing, it's like the cobbler shoe effect, right, like, so busy growing our customers and taking on new customers. And it'll be a very tight analogy. Yeah, so I mean, at the end of the day, like I thought about it, but in terms of prioritization and like from a revenue driver, like quite frankly, I don't want to, like hang out or play with other agencies, I want to get in front of customers, agencies are paying like we do things a certain way. Because that's how we feel we're passionate about it. And I don't want to prove ourselves to another agency. I just want to prove ourselves to customers or win more customers. Yeah, there's a lot of stank on that when you're having to, you're forced to collaborate via the client with another agency and you're like, Yeah, all right. How do you guys do things? So okay, we do things this way.
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And then it's it's like a weird, passive aggressive kind of collaborative working environment. Yeah, the cobblers children has no shoes dilemma. Yeah, I feel smart because Wes said it.
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Just for anybody is wondering, WordPress has 64.9% of market share for all the CMS is out there.
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Shopify is 5.6, which I guess some people would just use straight up as a site, instead of putting it into WordPress Joomla still rocking net 3.2, then Squarespace can still still be nuts. Yeah. And so the thing with WordPress, a lot of people get stuck there. And using it, it's because they're familiar with it. It's it was the leader back in the day, it was like the first like, kind of drag and drop be not kind of like, easy. Website maker for a lot of people. Yeah, I mean, I will say, I know you poo pooed. The idea of hanging out with other agencies, I could speak for law, when I say we're always looking for something that encompasses everything. And I didn't get a chance to look at the reporting side of things that you guys offer. But so that's Yeah, yeah, just having those all in one spot. And it's there for you know, what it is, is, unbelievably we're in. So that piece, that piece is really what's interesting is our reporting. It's our dashboard. So I think the CMS not so much, but the component of the dashboard. So I think what's kind of interesting with this whole story is like, I'm a very transparent guy, I'm a relationship guy. So when I talk to a customer, you know, I want to set the right expectations and really give them transparency around look, here's what we're going to do, here's what we're striving for. He was very communicative with the organization to say every customer that comes in through the door, we need to have a Northstar. So when we use Salesforce, there was a mission statement that every client, like what is the client trying to accomplish? We would do business with, say, 50 plumbers, they all want something different, right? Some want to be ranked on the front page, some need X amount of leads per month, it was all different. But I really challenged people to ask the question to understand like, why are we doing business? What makes sense? So I think one of the biggest challenges as an agency faces is, you know, as a sales individual, how do you know if this is going to work? Right? If you sell a plumber, you guys are in Florida, say Tampa, and you sell a plumber for SEO local service, and you're a sales guy, you have no idea if it's going to work, zero idea, right? You can get behind the product and understand that, hey, in the past, my company has done great work. So that was a challenge within our organization. Because you know, salespeople go out and preach the gospel of like, you're gonna just kill it, you're gonna have rankings everywhere. The reality is, it's like, it's not going to work for everybody, some blah, blah, blah, like, it depends, a lot of it has to depend on, you know, where the clients ranking what's been done up until that point. So long story short, we created a technology that can scan that URL to really spit out the outcome, to say, look, if you're looking to rank in these certain areas, or if you're looking for X amount of leads, or opportunities, you know, we can run this URL through the scanner, and it'll spit out the outcome. So what's nice about that it actually gave our salespeople tangible information to go out and now stand behind and say, Look, if we do business, this is what we can provide. And then upon sale, we then can take that and use that blueprint throughout production. So where I think there's an opportunity here with to work with additional other agencies is that component, because the reporting is just like unbelievable in terms of like clicking a button, and knowing all the all the details that that customer needs to know. Yeah, no, I love that objective. First method, right? So it's like, it's like how you get your car fixed now, right? You take it in, they just kind of a lot of them have just computers on it. You go in, you can get that diagnostic kind of in a snapshot. Yeah, except you pay for the extra stuff they throw at you. Well,
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I used to do before, right? The guy would lean against the car and say I get a transmission and you're like, oh, shit, how much that cost? Yeah, never was the transmission. Yeah. And, you know, you're saying,
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you know, the problem you're trying to solve there was,
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you know, these guys are going out. But they they're just making promises don't know they can keep necessarily, so you kind of designed a way to kind of give them confidence to talk about it. And I love that you can then use those numbers as your benchmarks throughout the project. The customer knows it, you know it and now exceed those great and they gave you the beauty of it. The beauty of it was my partner and I like we would sell projects and my production teams ripping their hair out because they're like, how are we going to fulfill this or we didn't charge enough or we overcharged? This really eliminated those challenges. But the beauty is like as my account management team, because one of the things that we really talk about is like the white glove service. So any customer of ours has a dedicated account manager. So let's say customer calls and there's a challenge or the
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help managers, you know, saying, hey, customers pissed off or whatever the case is, we're all speaking from the same sheet of music. So like we know exactly. It's like I could grab any report at any given time and talk to a customer and say, here's the data. And I can speak intelligently around the data, and then educate the entire company around the data points. So it was like this, because before we had that, it was like, he said, she said their ban about this, it was like a complete shit show. I mean, we know Eric, and I've been familiar with Yeah, we've been, we're looking at each other. Even though he's, he looks like he's a blind dude right now. But we've been, we were just staring at each other. Because we've been trying to, we've been talking about this for months. Because let's say he's got an account gets hit by a bus I need, I want to be able to see I want to see us coverage, exactly where he's at, if I have to just go talk to him and kind of handle anything, because we have a concierge ish kind of client service style as well. So it's one of those things where we'll have to get your info. I don't think we actually have your contact info. It's because it was through the Booker. But we might have to get it for this reporting. method, because we're reporting how to that was another thing is yeah, that was nice. It was almost like I mean, I'm a big analogy guy. But I imagine like, I'm the web doctor, right? And when there's a problem, I'll say, show me the report, like I want to see your blood work. You can make all these assumptions and say, I think this is going on that's going on. I'll listen to that. But give me the report. And I'll look at the data be like, fix this, spend time here, do this. There you go take two of these and call me in a week. Yep. And that's like how we operate. And it was it just really, that was like that catalyst that really helped us just spike and retain. Because I think at the end of the day, customers, whether you're selling a website, or any widget, it's just being having an honest conversation with the customer and saying, Look, we're looking at the same data, this is the goal we're trying to achieve. This is the work we've been doing. Let's just talk about it in review every 90 days, right, and we're either getting closer to the goal, or we're not but at least we're being transparent. And we're on the same page. And looking at the same things. I literally made that same analogy about about reporting, I was like, I want to have some kind of standardized report that we're working on where it's like a doctor making rounds, right? That first page is a snapshot tells you the vitals right tells you everything right there. And then if you need to dig deeper, be right behind him, it let's say print it out. But like, I totally agree with that. Because there's so many variables with digital that people don't understand. And so you can't touch any of it. You can't You're not making anything physical, I need to see it write a paper with some graphs on it.
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It's sort of what we've done in the company, it's kind of interesting, because now that we're 110, you know, strong, we have like, we have like five different segments of our account management team. So we have like our, you know, our accounts that spend, you know, over 5000 a month, right, and then certain buckets, right. And then I think as you scale up, it's just the account managers have deeper knowledge. And they can understand the vitals more meaning they identify a problem, but then can offer solutions and actually implement a strategy behind it. So it's like, you know, all this is a work in process. But I think we use this method as kind of like the North Star, it just really, it just helps kind of let everybody in the organization look at everything the same way. With no ambiguity. Well, we're getting that you figured it out? Because I don't think there's a lot of y'all around the world honest, no, I kind of joke, you know, I kind of joke like, you know, we did a deal. Last year we consolidated or this new company, I'm like, we have all these great clients, we have all this great stuff going. But I'm like, the real asset of what we have is some of the technology we have behind the curtain, you know, I mean, that's the real value. And we've kind of struggled with that. I mean, honestly, as a company, like, are we a web company? Are we a tech company, you know, I mean, it's all those things that we talked about, we have a website as a service product. Now, you know, we really, you know, we want to create a solution for a customer where, you know, if they're paying five to 15,000, up front, that's always a tough pill to swallow, right? I don't care how much money you do as a small business. So we just said, Screw it, we'll just do a monthly payment and lock a customer in for 24 months and just kind of throw everything at it. So we've introduced that we've had a lot of great success with it. Let me just give you like the perspective like I think we did about 1.6 million of new business last month, like new web projects coming in the door. Right. So like, we have to have these reports because I mean, it is a well oiled machine ramming into our you know, and I think that the beginning really helped us debate argue go through all these challenges to kind of create these really cool systems and processes that are sort of you know, if you do get hit by a bus, at least we have the data and then you can train somebody on that data. And again, you want
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it's speed Yeah, the
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that's the boat. No, remember speed boats? Yeah, you're gonna go
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On your cruise ship to a lot of work Fire Island.
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Yeah, so I totally agree. And it's that thing of like, that was figuring out this process with the reporting with with the production side is that that was a necessity breeds innovation thing internally Correct? Yeah, it was a it was a real entrepreneurial moment, right? I wish to say like your moment where you got Fred, I wish we were in a lab, and we're doing all these tests. But what it was my partner says, stop having sales, selling these fucking projects with these expectations. And I said, Fuck you. Why don't you build something to fix it? Yeah, he came back on Monday. We didn't turn it around. It took you 23 minutes, but we got you to curse.
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The first time. Oh, really? I mean, that was the beauty of it. I mean, it was like a real conversation around, you know, we both knew it was a problem. And how he reacts to things is he wants a challenge. And he was like, You know what, let me see if I can fix it through technology. And he did. And I said, Look, now when sales sales has to run through every every deal, they need to run this through the tool, and then we'll sell to the tool. Now we can use it as a guide. So it was a win win. I mean, it it just worked really, really well. Good template or framework for everything. Yeah, I think I told on it. I've told people here like, so. So why did like why what I used to talk about early on, so I'm from Detroit, Michigan. So what's here the manufacturing the big three, Chrysler, GM Ford. So what I was telling small businesses is look like, you have Ford Motor Company who builds the F 150. You can get the shitty bass one, you can get the luxury one or you can get the Raptor, right. And that's essentially what we're doing. You have the framework, right? All the trucks come down the same thing. It's the difference of the leather, the suspension, and I mean, you can buy a 40 Well, I don't know No trucks, everything is so damn expensive. But like, let's say you could buy a $40,000 truck or you can spend 110, what do you want to do? What are you trying to accomplish? Do you want to look cool in front of the chicks driving by a bar? Or do you want to get from point A to point B? I think that's where we would kind of take another step with a customer to say, what are you trying to accomplish? Right? And you've scaled with your clients it sounds like like at a good trajectory. So like, just like the car metaphor, you might be in high school and you have a Ford Fiesta. Absolutely. But now you're 12 years later, you might be able to get that lightning coming out that truck Yeah. Loose on that metaphor. It's pretty good way to get better job pretty solid. I just wanted to get for Fiesta in
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Yeah.
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Work life balance. You have four kids. Oh, yeah. for that. No. Yeah. Oh, boy, man. We both have got snipped for combined cauterized. Yeah, you want the guy number? Yeah. Dr. Stein yet so Dude, we got the Michael Jordan of snipping down here. He's the best. So I'm waiting to come see him. So half my friends. I do like the horror stories half are fine. I'm kind of like playing with fire right now. But you know, hey, you're gonna be in Sarasota next week. Just go see his billboard. It's yeah, it's his website. It probably needs your help because they're stuck in like geo cities. But we can negotiate a negotiate a little deal. I'm serious. This guy is the best. He's the Tom Brady of cauterized A B has like a scoreboard on the billboard that eats with over 99,000 balls on it. Yeah, he goes. They Dr. Stein goes to the Philippines on mission trips to give free vasectomies. It's wild. That's he's like, I'm so good. I'll do this on vacation.
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But for kids now, work life balance is always interesting to me. I think Eric as well with entrepreneurs, it's it's a delicate, how do you find your boundaries? What's your, what's your schedule? Like? If you can kind of summarize it? Yeah, for sure. So, you know, I think early on, when I set the company, I really came off, you know, running the organization, like family's important, like, I'm going to go to my son's hockey game, I'm going to go to the school thing like that was always like a non negotiable. I think I tracked it and kept a lot of team members, because they saw that they believed it. And they felt comfortable that when they have a kid or like they can kind of do whatever they need to do. So. I as an entrepreneur, like I see some people like kind of grind and banging their head against the wall working 24 hours, like I was always like, look, I'm gonna, from the hours of like, 730 to five like out grind, right? But what I've been doing lately is I kind of look at like work life integration, right? Especially like working from you know, I'm at my home COVID
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What I do is I try to shut everything off at five o'clock till nine o'clock. So what I actually did is I went to Amazon, and I bought a $30 lockbox for my cell phone, and it's on my desk and I stick it in this little machine and it locks my phone and I can't touch it. So what I do and I set it for four hours. So from five to nine Monday through Thursday, I try to be present with my family like my son at hockey tonight that I came here to do the podcast. Like I just tried to be
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Family is important to me. So I've actually looked at, you know, I sleep eight hours a night, there's like 5824 available hours in a year. And 50% of those hours, I'm allocating that to my family. And I'm allocating 30% of my time to business efforts and 20% to myself, like I try to work out, I try to just kind of do shit for myself. But, you know, that's, that's always a, you know, day to day it's touch and go, I use that as a framework it obviously day to day doesn't happen all the time. Yeah, but I think about it, right. I try to be intentional, I try to be present. It's hard, right? I mean, these things are good and bad, you know, because, you know, people get ahold of you or things happen, you get stuck in your email. But you know, I've just tried to work really hard just to focus and give them the time and attention because they're young, you know, they're 12, nine, nine and seven and goes by fast. Yeah, yeah, I, I've been trying to work on that as well. Even I was having trouble. Even if I put everything away, I'm still thinking about work. And I have to now do meaning in your mind. Right? Like, oh, well, I'll do that next. And that will be the next thing and what I like, and now I've really tried to hone in on just like cutting it off completely. If I got to get up a little earlier, to knock something out. You know, that's, that's what I'll do. But I wasn't being present. I was thinking about it in the same way. It's, it's one of those things where like, it's gonna go by in a flash, it's the you know, the days are long, and the years are short kind of thing. And so, it sounds like you took the same method of a problem that you were having, and really put almost your own scientific method to figuring out the the solve for it. Right. So, you know, it's interesting that you you had enough,
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you know, enough kind of self awareness to go, I'm not good enough, I got to put this in a lockbox. Right. What's crazy is I mean, honestly, like my wife, and I was kind of funny, and like, we're looking at each other. We're like, both on her phone, and we're like, man, all the kids want to do is play video games, their tests their devices. My wife and I are talking, we're both kind of like,
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a toddler. And I'm like, damn. And then when I actually got this box, it's the hardest thing to do. Like, I noticed myself wanting to grab my phone so much. It's like this kind of addiction, you know. And
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yeah, you know what I did to like, I, I just, you know, there's only so much time in the day, I think I turned 40 This past year, and like, kind of with this deal with the company, I just kind of said, you know, didn't like none of this shit matters. Like, I used to chase money early on, like, I want to make a bunch of money. Yeah, I had a certain number. In my mind, once I make this amount of money, I want to be so fucking happy. Well, I hit that number quickly. And I'm like, nothing happened. Like nothing changed. Yeah. And then they kind of kept going and kept going. I think once we started chasing money, stop chasing money as an organization. Like all this stuff just started happening. And I started to think about, like, from a family perspective, like, what what matters, you know, like, does it matter if I work harder to gain that extra client? Like, we've already hit this critical? You know what I mean? And what at what point does it be chasing this? Well, yeah, it's just like this, this oracle filled like, for glide for my family that I can't see. It. It's like I kind of you, I've been fortunate and blessed that I've been able to hit that. So I can provide for my family. It's like now, which is the only thing I can invest as myself in my time. Like, I can't delegate myself or my own time to my family. At least I don't want to do it anyway. I think Wes should be our life coach. Yeah, we we need you as a residency guest on this podcast. We will be respectful for time, we try to keep these to about 33 minutes. But if you can come back on, we have a lot more great. We'd love to thank you so much. I really appreciate this. You're one of the best guests we've ever had. I think there's a lot more to talk about. We didn't get to the sales stuff, your partnership stuff, you know, acquiring a company or partnership company that you just worked out. We ask every guest the first time they're on this podcast. What advice would you give your 13 year old self? Oh, man. Advice I'd give my 13 year old self. Yeah, deep. We know. It'd be shut the fuck up and listen, we're out. Okay, nice. Where are you? Where are you always trying to think of the next thing to say in conversations and just be you know, I felt like I always just thought like I had, I always thought I had it figured out myself. Yeah, you know, and I think like, I'm a big, I'm not a reader. I'm an audio book guy. Yeah, I'm listening to this book right now by Dan Sullivan. Called who not how I don't know if you've heard of it. It's an amazing book. I highly recommend it. But like his philosophy on just you know, how to build business and personal life and I think my 13 year old self, I just had these.
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I don't know, but what I've learned and experience, it's kind of interesting, just to be like, listen and take feedback from people and filter it the right way. Yeah, don't take it too personally. Sometimes, you know, actually just take it as criticism, right? Yeah, that's
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They're not coming at you. I don't think anybody's had that answer. I like that. I like that when you go into a time machine, you go back to get yourself by the lapels at 13 years old and go shut the fuck up.
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You get arrested in the past. Let me fill in my brain. I'm still like a, you know, 13 year old kid, right? Well, that that's why the perfect guest for this right, great.
35:22
We get into any of the filthy sound drops we've got or any of that. But I appreciate you coming on. We'll try to get your info through the Booker and yeah, we might need your reporting stuff. So we might need Devin. Thanks anytime. Love to appreciate it. Yeah, thanks for coming on. And we'll do better Sam. Thanks.
