The Brutal Reason Most Entrepreneurs Never Scale: Busywork, Sales, and Weak Offers | Tanner Chidester

 You guys are doing all these things to avoid the work that you know you need to do it.
 Sometimes they know they need to do it, but they try to do other things to feel they're being productive even though they know those are the wrong things to do.
 You can't avoid it. When I got back and I was looking inside my business, I just do. I have to cut all these reps.
 And it was the whole sales team for a division. I have to go out and find four new guys, not one, four.
 And I didn't want to do it, but I just knew that's what I had to do and I think a lot of people avoid that.
 You don't win by following the playbook. You win by rewriting it. 700 episodes deep with the people who actually built something real.
 No theory, no fluff, no shortcuts. This is right about now with Ryan Alford.
 Hey guys, what's up? I'm Ryan Alford your host. We save its radical. We cover it. We might cover it more than once.
 That's why we got Tanner. Did it start back? What's up Tanner?
 What's up, man? Thanks for having me, man.
 Yeah, man. Founder of Elite CEOs, author of Infinite Income. We need Infinite Wisdom from Tanner. Let's remind everybody a little bit Tanner about Elite CEOs and how you helped aspiring entrepreneurs.
 I started off in the fitness industry when I was younger. I wanted to play in the NFL. I took that LAD-1 level. I got hurt a bunch. I don't think I was good enough.
 I did play some first round draft picks so that was a blessing. I started a fitness business and it did super, super well.
 And it did so well that I had trainers start asking me for help, especially from the clickfunnels community.
 I had my little two-coma club award and they're like, oh, this guy, he got it not being a business coach.
 Ironically, all these people want me to business coach him. And I said, hey, man, I don't want to do that. I hate business coaches.
 After a while, they keep asking. You see the dollar signs. I was a young guy. I was 25, 26.
 I started doing it and then that did so well that I started helping people outside of fitness.
 In short, when people ask what we do or what Elite CEOs does is I just showed everyone what I did to become a multi-millionaire.
 From the messaging, the sales, the marketing, the ads, hiring, training, managing, all that stuff, back-end systems.
 And there's just a lot of people out there who don't know what to do. What we're trying to do is just shortcut that for them.
 That's really it. It seems like there's this oversaturation of coaches.
 Obviously, more, more people are tuning in and hiring coaches are doing that. I don't think that's going away.
 But what's going to separate or be the differentiator for the ones that stick around and the ones that end up back in fast food?
 You got to be good. When I first got in, it was newer or it seemed newer to me.
 And so when COVID hit, it just accelerated everything because everybody was looking for things online and stuff like that.
 Facebook was loving life and they were serving all kinds of those ads.
 Now what's happened is that trust has gone down because trust is so low.
 It's just taking an immense amount of marketing to get people through.
 The first reason it's getting harder is when you think about it.
 $100 million offers came out and I really hit on a lot of these things.
 Well, let's say you're a business consultant and there's 10 other business consultants.
 You're having to get people to understand, hey, I do similar things but I'm better.
 And that's a harder pitch than I do something completely different.
 I build flying cars and no one's doing it.
 So that's the number one thing to understand why it's gotten harder because now the trust is lower
 and they see all these different options and then a lot of people, what do they do?
 They pick the cheapest option versus the best option because pay values what you get.
 A lot of people make mistakes there.
 That means the marketing has to be really, really good and a lot of people just aren't going to market.
 That's why having $100 million offer makes it easier because the marketing doesn't have to be as good.
 The team doesn't have to be as good.
 The sales reps can mess up.
 You'll still make a lot of money.
 That's the first part.
 The second part is then thinking about what can you do differently?
 I'll give you one of my clients who has an amazing offer.
 He legally helps people get green cards and he can't guarantee it but it's essentially guaranteed.
 On his app, it's crazy.
 His Apple say, the price is 15K.
 Can you pay it?
 They get on the call and there's no sales call.
 It's just basically their customer service rep who just processes the payment.
 To me, I'm going, wow, that is a great offer.
 That is a really good offer.
 The final part is part of why I'm looking to do other things is not because I hate what I do
 and I love it and to be honest, it's helped a lot of people.
 I'm being back recently.
 I've been so out of the business for so long that it was kind of good to get back in the trenches
 to get reminded.
 It really helps some people.
 They'll send messages and say, I had a guy the other day.
 Hey man, I was doing zero dollars for three months and I hadn't told anyone.
 And then you helped me.
 We had a conversation and now I've done 70K in 30 days.
 I don't care.
 I don't need more money.
 I was like, wow, that really is cool because you kind of get really far away from that sometimes.
 But then the other part is I'm trying to do things that hit more of the criteria that
 billionaires seem to follow.
 And with all the conversations I've had, the reason a lot of them don't stay in the info space
 is not, there's a lot of good.
 There's a lot of bad.
 It's 80-20.
 80% is bad.
 20% is good.
 But it's because it's not a no-brainer.
 When the offer's not a no-brainer, it's very hard to scale because you have to spend
 so much money on marketing and sales teams and that cuts margin.
 A lot of these companies I've seen just scale to tremendous levels.
 They basically don't even have to market.
 If you get 60% of your expenses back,
 it's a lot easier to scale.
 It's interesting back to like the offer discussion.
 Her mosey's got the book out and all these things.
 Everyone's got guarantees now.
 It's funny.
 I remember when it came out, everyone started doing the guarantees.
 Then $100 million at least comes out.
 It's really funny.
 It's kind of like tidal wave of shifts.
 It's really funny.
 But it's like if people call in those bluffs,
 you've got to see some lawsuits flying around with some of these people
 that have making the offers is about making the offers about keeping the offer.
 Yeah, you have to be able to deliver.
 I think the best guarantee to usually make is performance-based.
 If the client has to do some work to hit the goal,
 you have to do performance-based.
 You can't just do unconditional.
 Get it whenever you want in my personal opinion.
 I own an ad agency and marketing agency.
 It's been in the industry for 20 years.
 Performance marketing has been both a great thing
 for marketing and a terrible thing because what it's done is
 it's made agencies certainly accountable outcomes,
 which is probably a little overdue.
 However, it's diminished the services that agencies do,
 the ideas that we create that take time to manifest outcomes,
 i.e. building a brand.
 It takes time for branding to seed
 and you don't see branding results overnight.
 Certainly, if you pay me $20 to run Facebook ads,
 I should deliver an R.O.A. eventually on that and that's reasonable.
 But the value and the things that I'm doing to elevate your brand value,
 your cachet, your authority, isn't paying dividends
 month one, two, or three, or even month six.
 That's the only thing I've hated about all this
 guarantee performance driven stuff.
 First off, the funny part is when everyone's given the guarantee,
 it means nothing.
 The other thing is a lot of people what they don't understand
 is they hear the word guarantee
 and they think it's like this amazing promise,
 but I'm going, look, think about it.
 Like if someone says, pay will work with you
 until you get the result.
 I go, well, if you haven't gotten in three months,
 why would you want to work with them for another three months for free?
 People don't think through.
 They're just so scared.
 They're so fear-based that they don't even think through the guarantee.
 And then like yesterday, one of my sales guys was talking to me about a combo.
 Some people don't even know what good looks like.
 And he'd spent 25k on ads and he's made 100k.
 And he's like, well, I think I should have made 10x.
 And I'm going 10x.
 Who told you that?
 Like 10x.
 Like four x is amazing.
 Yeah.
 Four x, you're crushing.
 And if you're collecting four x, two x to me is my goal.
 We can collect two x.
 The rest is payment plans.
 That's fine.
 They think that the media buying company is the issue
 when I'm thinking, well, what do you do for follow-ups?
 Do you have emails?
 Do you have setters?
 Do you have sales reps?
 Do you have text messages?
 Do you do retarget?
 No, we don't do any of that.
 Why are you changing media buying companies?
 The media buying company who's getting you a four x return
 is crushing it for you.
 You just don't have any systems or follow-up processes
 which is more important than the actual ad.
 There's a lot of stuff like that that makes me shake my head
 but people just don't know what they don't know.
 Just because you turn on something overnight
 does it mean you immediately have the authority to sell it?
 Brand is a big word or a small word depending on your position
 but it's credibility, it's time, it's authority,
 all those things.
 People forget you got to play that game too.
 I mean, I've been doing YouTube for forever not very well.
 I was just throwing stuff at the wall
 but recently we started doing these one-to-ones
 and it's been great because one, I feel it's more in alignment with my brand.
 I'm not really trying to be flashy.
 I just want to put out like the info.
 And then number two was that the videos
 I'm actually helping them build their business in a two-hour window
 and so what's been crazy is
 the videos are doing significantly better, way better.
 I might be honest something.
 It took me kind of years and years and years of sticking with it.
 I agree with you a lot of people.
 They're just short-term sided
 that they're not willing to play the long game.
 We all got to make sales and we got to live.
 There's two sides of that coin
 but if you're wanting to be an entrepreneur
 keep the day job while you build enough
 to turn that switch and then move over.
 Everybody wants to become the entrepreneur overnight.
 Let that be the only thing they do immediately
 when it's just not always that easy.
 Let's talk a little bit about your book, Infinite Income.
 What are some of the key takeaways from that?
 The first thing I learned from writing that book
 is I didn't do nearly a good enough job.
 I just wanted to get a book out.
 My intention was part of it was I wanted to use it for marketing.
 I wanted to get out my story.
 I remember I asked one of my buddies
 who had a book that's Crush
 and I said, why did your book do so well?
 He's like, well, I wrote it 10 times.
 I spent 5,000 hours wherever it was.
 I don't know the numbers.
 I'm sitting here going, huh, how long did it take me
 and it didn't take me nearly enough time?
 That was a hard lesson learned.
 It's a good book but it could have been way better.
 Going from good to great, even that book, good to great.
 You have to put in 200% more effort
 for 20% more reward.
 What was number one?
 But in terms of the book,
 I tried to make it very short.
 It was like 100 something pages.
 It's just exactly what I did to be successful.
 It's a little bit of my story.
 So it's like, hey, here's my backstory.
 Here's where I came from.
 And then here's what I did.
 And here's how you do it.
 If I could redo it,
 I would have spent more time just thinking through
 maybe the chapters and what I would teach.
 I would have put more links for videos or QR codes.
 Because I think that's something that I really wanted
 to help teach.
 For whatever reason you're going to laugh
 when I was writing the book,
 I didn't think to do that.
 I just thought, well, I got to try to describe it with words.
 But obviously there's something
 that way easier to describe in videos.
 I think I was a little short sign.
 I wanted to get the book out quick and stuff like that.
 A couple of mistakes.
 But overall, if someone reads the book,
 what they'll get is a little bit of my story.
 And then exactly what I did as I went.
 They're getting the story as they go.
 But then here's how I got my first client.
 Here's what I set on the calls.
 Here's what I did in that stuff like that.
 That was my intention.
 Was to try to help people know where to start.
 Because a lot of books I read, I hate them.
 Because they talk about a lot of mindset.
 Some people need that.
 Most people do.
 But for a guy like me,
 just tell me what to do and I'll do it.
 I don't need you to give me all this hard work stuff like
 I do that.
 I just need to know what to do.
 And that's what I tried to make
 for my book is make it very tactical.
 I get and appreciate that we all have to get
 the right place and create habits
 that make us work hard.
 I'm not perfect.
 Far from perfect.
 But I don't need motivation.
 I don't need the mind tricks.
 Just cut to the chase.
 I appreciate the hell out of you being transparent
 about your process with the book.
 A lot of people resonate with that
 on a state of authenticity.
 Maybe using that as an income
 and your own experience.
 What are maybe a couple of things
 from your experience and things in the book
 or just what you know now?
 They're the biggest shortfalls
 or things that people don't understand
 about that process
 and what it takes to make it happen.
 There's two clients I spoke to recently.
 I've been out for so long
 that it's fun to talk to you now
 because these are recent.
 So I had two clients.
 They were both struggling.
 So when I was doing 25K a month,
 they wanted to get to 100.
 They were breaking down crime
 because their family's going through stuff
 and their parents and stuff like that
 and the other one was kind of more
 in beginning stages, but similar spot.
 Girlfriend left them had to move home.
 It sucks.
 The first thing I do when that happens is
 tell me what you're doing.
 Just what do you do all day?
 And more times than not,
 what they're doing is things
 that do not produce sales whatsoever.
 It just mind boggles me.
 So I sit there and go,
 well, what do you do?
 How do you make sales?
 To make sales in a high ticket business,
 let's just assume a person has a high ticket business.
 You need to get sales calls.
 Well, how do you get sales calls?
 You need leads.
 How do you get leads?
 Messages are ads.
 If you're not making the money you want to make,
 why are you doing anything
 besides talking to people
 with cold DMs or running ads?
 There's really nothing else you should be doing.
 And what a lot of times they're doing is like,
 well, I'm taking a course
 or I'm reading a book
 or I'm making content.
 Who watches your content?
 You have 100 followers.
 It's more about what they need to stop doing
 more than what they need to do sometimes as well.
 What gets me kind of sad is a lot of people will say
 this doesn't work,
 but it's either A, they're not doing it or two,
 they're not doing enough volume.
 When people will ask me
 and I talk about in the book,
 how many cold DMs did you send the day
 when you were broke?
 I said, man, I would send at least 200 today.
 If not more.
 When I did that, I would make sales
 and people like, well, I can't do it.
 I'm like, you just don't want to do it for eight hours
 because that sucks.
 But I was willing to do it.
 That really is the biggest pitfall.
 As a scale, it turns more into team building.
 Lot of great solar producers,
 horrible with people,
 horrible at management,
 horrible at understanding that
 they need to think about them and not themselves.
 People don't work for you.
 They work for that.
 How can you make it advantageous
 for them to help your mission?
 Those will be the biggest three things.
 And that's what gets me frustrated
 because a lot of times,
 they're just doing the wrong stuff.
 It's so fixable and they feel hopeless,
 but it's really not.
 They just don't know what they're doing.
 You've experienced it first hand.
 I assume I don't know.
 I don't even have the guy's name
 to give him credit for.
 But he's well known
 in the sales and marketing industry.
 And he pretty much says leads are everything.
 Throw it all away.
 But leads are everything.
 Because if you don't have leads,
 you don't have the potential for closes.
 You have to get it back.
 It's volume.
 And you have to get in front of more people
 because the content all that matters,
 but none of it matters if you don't have leads.
 I ran a ad back on the day.
 It was called Rick's trainer,
 or his poor trainer.
 He's off.
 Robert Keats.
 He's rich at Port Ed.
 A lot of people get pissed off,
 but it worked really well.
 And the premise was,
 all of these trainers are so good
 at exercising and the cardio
 and the meal plans and you're broke.
 I'm like, well, why are you broke?
 Because you don't know how to get sales.
 You don't know how to get customers.
 You're not commensible enough.
 It was funny that
 I'm probably one of the highest paid trainers ever.
 I don't know.
 Maybe someone makes way more of that.
 But I mean, even when I was just only doing a fitness company,
 I was making a couple of million here.
 Best paid trainers in Miami.
 Probably $25,300 a year.
 Best paid.
 It wasn't because I was the best trainer,
 and I even said that I'm like,
 there's a lot of trainers
 who are probably more experienced and better than me,
 but I was better at sales and running a business.
 You do need to go proct eventually,
 but even marketing sales superseded products
 for beginners because they don't know
 your products is good or bad till they buy.
 If you can't even get them to buy,
 they're never even going to experience your products.
 It's a huge issue for most people.
 And honestly, the way they can fix it,
 they won't do it.
 But I tell people,
 go do door-door sales for three months.
 You'll never suck at sales again,
 but they don't want to do it.
 They don't want to.
 It takes some years and years and years
 and call and call and calls.
 I door-door sales was a blessing for me
 because I would do 100 doors of it.
 The feedback loop I got was significantly faster
 than doing high ticket sales
 where you might only get two to 10 calls of it.
 So your feedback loop takes probably 10 times longer
 than if you did door-door sales.
 And it's easier than door-door sales.
 I wish more people would do that.
 That should actually be required in high school.
 Instead of all the other nonsense
 that make you do, I mean door-door sales,
 you can do that, you can do anything.
 Well, people do what they want.
 They enjoy filming the content.
 They enjoy doing the exercises.
 They enjoy talking more than they should
 to people maybe about things that aren't sales.
 They enjoy checking boxes on the page.
 But it's not fun to cold DM 400 people in a day
 or to cold call 40 people in a day.
 We can make all of the excuses in the world
 but we do what we want to do.
 That's the thing that frustrates me.
 You guys are doing all these things
 to avoid the work that you know you need to do.
 Sometimes they know they need to do it.
 But they try to do other things to feel
 they're being productive
 even though they know those are the wrong things to do.
 You can't avoid it.
 When I got back and I was looking inside my business,
 I just knew I have to cut all these reps
 and it was the whole sales team for a division.
 I have to go out and find four new guys,
 not one four.
 And I didn't want to do it,
 but I just knew that's what I had to do
 and I think a lot of people avoid that.
 And they'll try to go, well, maybe I can fix it.
 Maybe I can just work with this person.
 And sometimes you just have to look
 reality in the face and just go out of it.
 And a lot of people, they don't want to do it.
 I guess other than just the hard reality truth
 that you get when you're working
 with people to get them over that hump
 or at the end of the day,
 it's just that person's got to decide to do it.
 Is there one trigger or another
 that's just so individual?
 It depends on the person.
 I'm a very logical, straight, no BS type guy.
 It does depend on maybe the person I'm talking to.
 I'll have mindset coaches and stuff on staff
 in case I miss the mark.
 Talk to them in case I'm being rude to you
 or you don't like how I'm saying it.
 But a lot of times I try to get people
 to think of the worst thing that can happen.
 I just say, what's the worst thing that can happen?
 Like lose everything.
 If you could lose everything
 and that should be strong enough motivation
 to send a couple of messages.
 Because for me, that's where I got,
 I got so low in life,
 I just was willing to do anything.
 And when I say anything,
 I'm talking probably some illegal things too.
 I was getting that desperate.
 I didn't want to go down that route,
 but I was so desperate where I finally said,
 I will do anything to be successful or I'll be homeless.
 And I was genuinely fine to be homeless.
 If that's what it takes, that's what I'll do.
 But it's very different saying it,
 and it's very different feeling it.
 A lot of people, they talk a lot of shit,
 but their actions say otherwise.
 And that's what's always been frustrating for me
 because the way my dad raised me
 is he just raised me that no one's coming to save you.
 People forget that.
 They think that it's going to magically happen
 and just won't.
 No one cares.
 The government's busy doing whatever they're doing.
 And no one's going to help you.
 And it's a hard reality for some people to face
 because it's kind of sad.
 It's kind of lonely.
 But I try to get people to understand that,
 whether it's through motivational words
 or using my own stories.
 There's nothing I haven't done
 that I ask people to do.
 I've spent three million on coaches.
 I've hired hundreds of staff members.
 I've got multiple businesses.
 I've had lawsuits.
 I've been in charge bags.
 Whenever someone's complaining,
 I'm like, yeah, I get it.
 But I really do get it because I've been there.
 And that gives you a lot of power
 as well coming from experience.
 What's the big plan you can talk about something?
 This last year, when I left the company,
 the whole point was to interview a bunch of billionaires
 or at least mega millionaires.
 People sold for the lowest was 40 million.
 Terrible, right?
 The highest was four billion.
 The thing that was the same across the board,
 typically bootstrap billionaires.
 No VC capital was they had internet marketing background,
 which I thought was very interesting
 because it gets a lot of shit.
 But they understand how to market.
 You mix that with a good product
 and good products that I typically saw scale
 was $1,500 plus easy to know fulfillment.
 Two examples, Justin Hartfield sold WeMaps
 at things 1.6 billion.
 And it was Yelp for Wheat.
 There's no fulfillment.
 And the other guy was, these are just two.
 Scott Cohen sold buy it for billion
 or something under two years.
 And it was just an invisible line competitor
 and he just stopped marketing them.
 And they're just throwing the braces.
 They're done.
 There's probably recurring somewhere.
 But that was pretty much it.
 I'm working on something behind the scenes.
 I was telling you, I like to make mistakes in private.
 It's kind of nice actually.
 It's been really nice.
 Just no one knows what's going on
 and I make mistakes.
 But it hits that criteria.
 And that's why I feel it's going to do really well.
 Because it's got all the key components
 I need to be successful.
 With it, I've gotten so good at sales and marketing.
 If I can just build out this product and service
 that I think is infinitely easier to deliver on
 and have something special.
 Because really, if you look at what I've done,
 I've probably built one of the hardest businesses you can build.
 30 million a year is pretty much top line
 for most consulting info space companies.
 Maybe if you get above that, but it's very rare.
 That's usually about the top line.
 And I've hit that on big numbers.
 So to me, I'm going, man, if I can do that,
 this will be a cake walk.
 At least that's where my head's at.
 And I could completely fail and it'd be an utter failure.
 That's also why I like I'm not saying what it is yet.
 Because I could completely bomb.
 And then you're going to be like,
 well, it's better how that worked out.
 And I can tell you that it didn't go well.
 But they will have you on.
 We'll have you on and you can write the book about the failure.
 See, that's the thing.
 Like that's part of the brand.
 Infinite income would be hilarious
 because I feel like infinite misery or something like that.
 But that's what I'm excited about now
 is I'm just trying to continue to push myself.
 I feel like I'm ready for the next step of my career.
 I'm just ready to do something big.
 Really big where people don't just say,
 oh, Tanner's just a coach.
 That's not how I want to die.
 Nothing wrong with it.
 But I just don't want to be known as a coach.
 I want people to look at me like, damn.
 God, it's impressive.
 And not for other people, but it's for myself.
 I want to prove to myself I can do it.
 You can't be legendary unless you take chances.
 It's been good catching up, brother.
 Working your way.
 Keep up with all the thing you got going on.
 Instagram has been the best.
 I'm putting out crazy amounts of free content right now.
 And it's been doing really well.
 And it's really been exciting for me.
 So if anyone's watching this, just shoot me a message on IG
 at tanner.chitester.
 I'll try to hook up with any resources that are helpful.
 I've really been enjoying life lately doing that.
 That'd be great.
 You guys can find all of Tanner's info
 in the show notes from today.
 And you know where to find us.
 Search for Tanner Chitester.
 You'll find a couple of his episodes.
 And more to come.
 It'll be either the biggest blow-up.
 One way or the other.
 Appreciate your brother.
 Thanks for having me, man.
 I'm Matt Ryan.
 I offered them all the platforms.
 We'll see you next time.
 Here's the truth.
 Information doesn't change your life.
 Execution does.
 So don't just listen to this episode and move on.
 Take the idea.
 Make the call.
 Launch the thing.
 Fix the problem.
 Build what you keep talking about building.
 For more, follow Ryan Alford on Instagram at RyanAlford.
 And watch or listen to every episode at RyanIsRight.com.
 This is right about now.
 Now quit waiting.
 Go win.