Speaker 1 (00:00):

In this episode, Alex, Charfen dives into how he scales podcast to getting 2.4 million downloads. Plus he opens up about his biggest mistake in the last 10 years of being an entrepreneur and how he lost over six figures on the four core investment. Plus he also talks about a financial principle that every marketer needs to hear in this space. And no it has nothing to do with pre-selling or MVPs and has everything to do with focusing on your delivery. First, it's an amazing episode. I actually love everything that Alex has put together and, uh, I think you're really gonna enjoy this. 

PROMO AUDIO

And as a result, we ended up moving into this space, paying for, build out, being there for 18 months of a five year lease and then

Speaker 2 (00:42):

Buying our way out of it.

TRANSCRIPT

Speaker 1 (00:53):

You're listening to the rich ad poor ad podcast, where we break down the financial principles that rich advertisers are deploying today to turn advertising into profit and get tons of traffic to their websites without killing their cash. These advertisers agencies, affiliates brands are responsible for managing over a billion dollars a year in ad spend. You'll hear about what's working for them today. They're rich ads and we'll roast their Epic failures and crappy ads on the internet with poor ads. Let's get into it. Welcome to another episode of the rich ed. Poor ed podcast is your host, Zach Johnson. I'm with the one and only  Dylan carpenter. You excited for today's guest still. Yeah, man, I'm pumped today. I'm going to be the little school girl today because of today's guest. So you got to be the school girl on yesterday is a guess, but I'm the reason why I have today's guests on the show is it actually goes back to the early days of funnel dash.

Speaker 1 (01:48):

And it was like right after I left lead pages and it lead pages and everything in my career up until that point was I wanted to be a part of a company that exited and it sold and Lee pages, we had this just ridiculous momentum. We were growing 20% month over month, raise $38 million, uh, from VC. And we were one of the fastest growing companies in the nation. And I felt like a rockstar. Like I was like, you know, the VP of growth and, and making all the decisions. And when I left and I started, um, my agency and, uh, which was the early days of, of a funnel dash, uh, everybody would ask me like, Hey, what did you learn? What did you learn there? What did you learn? What did you learn? Right. Cause like this was like right before ClickFunnels had kind of entered into the market.

Speaker 1 (02:38):

And the thing I would tell everybody on podcasts, you probably go like, look this up. It was like a momentum is the most underrated thing in entrepreneurship and the most difficult and like elusive thing to achieve. And I understood then kind of just sitting in the, I call it, sitting in the shit of like a startup for like the first like 12 where you're just trying to get momentum is so painful. And I was like, I completely understand now why like when people ultimately get those offers to sell their companies and they don't want to take it no matter what the number is because they work so damn hard to get momentum. And the reason why, uh, I've got today's guests on is because this is like the first guy in since then, that I've seen break down on a, how to systematically get momentum into your life, into your career, into your business.

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Speaker 1 (03:35):

And I thought it was this elusive thing. I was like, well, if you got it, you got it. And once you have it, like hold onto it forever. And so, yeah, I'm, I'm pumped, he's got an amazing podcast. He's the, uh, the host of the momentum podcast. It's literally like what it's called. And, um, he's also the creator of the billionaire code and, uh, the entrepreneur personality type, which I think we'll dive into a little bit. Um, and I think something new that he's up to that's, that's super relevant that I was literally just taking notes on like this week. I didn't even tell him this, but like the customer centric mission statement, uh, he's the creator of, and you'll guys all, hopefully get a little teaser of that, but, um, I've just totally apparently screwed that up for several years with funnel dash. So anyways, I'm excited.

Speaker 1 (04:22):

I'm so sorry for the long intro, but Alex, Charfen welcome to the show, man. Zach, so good to be here, man. Thank you for that personal intro. I appreciate it. Yes. Yes. So did I do it justice man, I'd like to, for those that, like haven't had that same level of experience in my own life. Like maybe give everybody a little bit about what you're up to and, and why you're up to it, uh, with what you're doing. Yeah. You got it, Zack. Um, you know, I, I, the company I run, we help visionary entrepreneurs grow and scale their businesses. And we work, we work with the specific visionary, the ones who can't turn it off, the ones who want to make a contribution, just as much as they want to make a living, the ones who are driven to do things every day to move the world forward.

Speaker 1 (05:04):

And we, we provide the systems, the tools, really the process, the structure, the routine that gets you into momentum and locks you in and stays there. And what we've found is that most visionary entrepreneurs have a really hard time getting help. You know, it's almost like the condition of being a visionary. We need far more help than the average person to get to where we want to go. But anytime we have to request help or support of any kind, it leaves us feeling vulnerable and exposed. We bridge that gap with structure and with systems. And the change we want to make in the world is that visionary, visionary entrepreneurs get the help they need and go out and change the world. And we'll know what we're successful. When visionaries around the world, they're using our systems to be the change they want to see in the world and make their greatest contribution. I feel like the word visionary. I know there was a lot said there, but the thing that really speaks to me is when you use the word visionary entrepreneurs, I identify with that so much because I'm surrounded by a of entrepreneurs that don't really care to be visionary. They've just like, want to make a profit. They want their lifestyle, they want their Lambo and they don't give a shit about their customers. Right.

Speaker 3 (06:07):

And like very well with those entrepreneurs,

Speaker 1 (06:11):

You know, like what, like, I feel like over at funnel dash, it's the most rewarding thing when people are like, Oh dude, ad card is a game changer, right? Like you're changing an industry. Like I can't believe that you offer free ad copy and creative just for using like a credit card. Right. That's like, Oh my gosh, like I'm a, I I'm officially a visionary and I feel significant. And you're like, uh, you know, you're one of the first people that like put a whole language around that and the whole theme around that with your, um, with your content. So

Speaker 3 (06:42):

Yeah, I'm pumped

Speaker 1 (06:44):

Get into it. And, uh, you know, the first, the first part, like I want to get right into, like, what's working now for you. Like, what's this, what's tell us about this rich ad. That's working for your own, uh, businesses. This,

Speaker 3 (06:58):

You got it, Zach. So we're in a unique position as a company. You know, if you look at what we do, we work with business owners. Most of the time who are already up and running, occasionally we get a startup entrepreneur. Usually somebody who's already been there and done something, but starting up something new. But most of the time we're working with somebody who's in the multi six figures up to tens of millions of dollars. We have three different coaching programs. The first one is usually the multi six figure. The second one's usually people heard around a million to 3 million, the third one, we have members anywhere from three to 50 million. And here's why that puts us in a unique situation. We're not dealing with business opportunity. We're not dealing with, um, like impulse buys and we're not dealing with an unsophisticated consumer. In fact, when you look at the average member that we have, they've already been through three or four coaching programs, not one or two everybody's meant for one or two, they've usually been through several different experiences.

Speaker 3 (07:53):

And when we talk to people coming towards us, most of the time they've had significant negative experiences with people over promising, under delivering and them not really getting what they want. I think that's kind of, unfortunately, that's a theme today in the online marketing world over promising and under delivering in fact it feels like the curriculum for a lot of online marketing products, but unfortunately, um, but before you build it, right, right. And you only have to be one week ahead of your clients. Every time somebody says that I want to brush the stage like, like a football player, just wipe them out at the knees. It's just such an unfair thing to say, you know, like you can have no expertise, no nothing. You don't even have to be able to talk. You can be an expert. Come on, dude. And the problem is, is that a lot of our members have been through that stuff.

Speaker 3 (08:39):

So, so for us, you know, when, when we were, when I was asked about coming on this show and I was told, what is our most successful ad to, to me, it's our podcast. You know, if I had to look at where do we get the most, um, qualified leads, where do we get the most prepared leads to come from to us? It's the podcast. Here's why let's get real about the marketing space today. Everybody has the BS, troubling, backstory, the story of overcoming everything, the reason why they're the best in what they do. And they have the perfect little package that they put out there for you. And that's how most people market, that's how most people market from the ad beyond the difference with us is with what we help people do. And with the consumer that we're addressing, they've already been there.

Speaker 3 (09:23):

They've done that. They know these strategies. We're not going to manipulate them, pressure them, or persuade them into doing something. They actually have to learn enough about us to trust us. So the way that my team and I approach our podcast is we put our absolute best content on the podcast. Um, you know, I've, we've had, I mean, dozens is an underestimation. We've had hundreds of people reach out to us and say, I just hit six figures. I learned everything on your podcast. You know, I was struggling for years, just hit a million dollars. I did it with these eight episodes of the podcast. I listened to the billionaire codes episodes. This is what we did with our company. And so when we hear from people that have made measurable, tactical changes in strategic changes in their business, and they're succeeding, we know the podcast is working because the goal is that every single episode can make a massive impact in an entrepreneur's business.

Speaker 3 (10:11):

And so it's not, it's not to make noise it's to build trust. And so the whole point of every episode I do, I think to myself, here's who I'm talking to, I'm building trust with them. I'm going to leave them better off than when they started this podcast. And then I hit record. And as a result, uh, this morning, I think we had 2.4 million downloads, um, cumulatively, which is really awesome, even better. Um, in all of the United States business reach we're number 58. And this is my favorite statistics statistic out of all 800,000 podcasts in the entire world, one of the top 1000. And so you look at those types of numbers and it's just like, you know, that's, that's by far the best thing that we're doing

Speaker 1 (10:54):

Marketed the podcast. Like he just like, cause it's, most of them are just you talking, right? Like I don't, I haven't even, I don't think I've seen a single guest on there.

Speaker 3 (11:02):

We brought on a, bring on a member when something really extraordinary brings on or happens with a member. We'll bring them on to share just that specific story. But, um, and we Mark it a little bit, you know, we, um, we've run some ads to it, not a lot, but most of it has been other people who have listened to the podcast, share it with their list because it cause they genuine, you genuinely feel like it's helping people, you know? Um, within the first year that we were out there, I would say, I don't know that it was probably shared with a half million people just through other people's lists based on listening to an episode. And then somebody taking the episode of Janet with everybody, they know

Speaker 1 (11:38):

That was amazing. That's so rewarding to, and people are like sharing your stuff around. I love it.

Speaker 3 (11:42):

Well, what's even more rewarding is when we get the messages, like some come through Facebook, sometimes they'll come through Instagram. Sometimes they'll send it to our support email. And then we get like, not short about how it's changed somebody's life. And those are some of the most emotional, amazing things in the world. The rate

Speaker 1 (12:00):

You've been at it for two years though. Like I was just looking at it before, like, as you talking, I'll pull it up on my phone. You got like 300 reviews and you did it. Has it been two years?

Speaker 3 (12:10):

It's actually been four years now, so,

Speaker 1 (12:13):

Oh, okay. So on the Apple, it says 2018.

Speaker 3 (12:17):

Here's why on Apple, you can only have 300 episodes. So we actually have three podcasts. We have momentum podcast archives, one momentum podcast, archive two, and then the current show. Oh,

Speaker 1 (12:30):

Oh man. So you've been doing it for four years. So what was it like in the first like year? What was it? Was it,

Speaker 3 (12:36):

Oh, you can go listen. It was shaky. It's funny. Like one of the here's what's funny. I get a lot of really positive feedback from the first 50 episodes because it was basically my origin story and kind of laying out the argument for the entrepreneurial personality type. You know, the first, first 10 or 15 episodes are basically the entrepreneurial personality type book. Um, but when I go back and listen to him, you know, I, my Russell Brunson encouraged me to do a podcast. He's like I said, who do I interview is like, dude, you should never interview anybody. You should just talk, you know, enough that you don't need other people on your show. So you go listen to the first few episodes. And it really it's. It's like, uh, you know, I listened to it. I'm like, man, my voice is kind of shaking. I'm not really confident when I was doing, I think I didn't really like dial it in until probably episode 20, but here's, what's funny. There's reviews on. If you go read the reviews on Apple, there's actually reviews that say, don't, don't be scared off by the first 10 episodes they were changing, but they've got great content and keep listening to gets so much better. And so, you know, I, I share that because I think that these days entrepreneurs don't want to hit go until everything's perfect. Screw that, man. Just get it out there.

Speaker 1 (13:49):

One of the things my old mentor used to say is focus on one funnel, one target audience, one offer, uh, with one, um, mechanism or conversion mechanism for one year. Like that was like his rule. And he's like the second you start adding one variable to any of that, just the complexities, just get so ridiculous. And what we see so much in this space is people trying that for one month. And so I just wanted to hear that the, this, this, the arc of the podcast, or you've been doing it for four years, man, like, that's like you put in your time, right? I'm starting to see people that hit this like two, three year Mark and their commitment to their marketing and their content and their publication. And it really starts to, it really starts to pay off. But was that for you, like in the first six months or 12 months of it, or did you just crush it from the get go?

Speaker 3 (14:44):

It's kind of kinda Zack. I mean, at the beginning we definitely got some attention just because I would go out and speak and I'd be in front of an audience of 5,000 people. And then I would always share the podcast and the URL. And sometimes I would read the manifesto, which got people pumped up. In fact, at one time I read it at funnel hacking live at the beginning. I'm like, does anybody mind if I do the manifesto? And everybody went crazy about halfway through the audience was doing it. I wasn't doing it. I was like holding the phone up to the audience. Everybody was yelling. I'm like, Holy crap, everybody knows the manifesto. So it, it, at the beginning, it definitely, wasn't like a huge rush of leads, but here's what it was when people called us. They're like, I just listened to podcast 17.

Speaker 3 (15:23):

I need to talk to you guys. I need that help. Or, you know, I just listened to your podcast on, um, overcoming challenges with your team and I've had that issue or I just listened to the podcast on, um, you know, vulnerability with your team creates momentum. And I have a really hard time with that. I want to know how to do it. And so by really solid content out there, people would call and they would almost order from us now. Here's what happens now. Um, we have people who get on our call and, and you know, one of our, we don't have salespeople. We have coaches. I don't like any type of high pressure persuasion in our sales process. I want it to just be consultative, but we'll have our coaches. One of our coaches will get on a column. They'll say, you know, that somebody will describe the problem and they'll say, Oh, it sounds like you're in transactional management. And then the person will say, yes, transactional management. I want to get to transformational leadership. I listened to the podcast on it sounds great. And so like they take over the sales call. And so we know we're reaching our members. Cause a lot of the time they jump on a call with us and they're convincing us. They need to work with us. It's so legit. So I love that dude,

Speaker 4 (16:28):

This episode is brought to you by FunnelDash's ad card, the only charge card exclusively for your digital ad spend. And if you're an ad agency that manages seven or even eight figures a year in media and ad spend for your clients, and you're looking to double your profits over the next six to 12 months, then check out ad card. See the typical agency model is this. You charge 10% of your spend. You make 10 to 20% margin at the end of the day. So that's really one to 2% of your clients spend that is profit in your business. The easiest way to double that is a really find a way to earn in that one to 2% cash back of the card that is on file of your clients as ad account. And before ad card we had to do was invoice all your clients for their ad spend up front.

Speaker 4 (17:16):

She's really difficult on a cash flow basis and very difficult ask. And then you had to put the card on your own Amex or whatever card of choice to get that level of value back into your business with ad card, it's entirely different in streamline. You simply get your clients on ad card and make yourself the agency of record and you'll get the cash back. As long as you're managing the ad spend, it's a great way to double your profit without doing any additional work. Check it out@funneldash.com. All right. So want to hear a, I want

Speaker 1 (17:50):

To know you're not perfect. Um,

Speaker 3 (17:53):

Dude, it's so not perfect.

Speaker 1 (17:56):

I want to hear about this poor ad. I know we're going to, we're going to deviate from, let me just queue this up here. We're going to deviate from the normal poor ad second year, because this is such an Epic failure story. We couldn't resist. Um, but I think a lot of people are paying for it right now. And so what's, uh, what's your, what's your poor at? Sorry.

Speaker 3 (18:20):

Okay. I want to share kind of the origin of this. So when, when I agreed to be on this podcast, I was told, you know, you need to share a success and a failure. And nobody said like we, my, my assistant didn't say just has to be an add failure. And I'm like, well, I actually think that there's a lot of nobility in sharing failure. I actually think there's a lot of grace in sharing failure because today, especially in the online marketing world, um, I'm extraordinarily challenged by all these entrepreneurs with perfect backstories and you know, the one mistake they made that got them to the place where they are now and nothing ever is anything wrong with them. And you know, I think, I think one of the biggest disservices we do to the entrepreneurial space is sharing only our successes and not the challenges we've created because we've all had them, you know, whenever an entrepreneur, whenever I hear an entrepreneur is backstory and they're perfect.

Speaker 3 (19:08):

I'm like, okay, well stay the hell away from me. Cause you're about to crash. Big time really are perfect. And you've never had a problem, man. The world is going to open up and swallow your ass because that's just not how it works as an entrepreneur. And so for me, I, you know, I, I, I would rather share the most colossal failures I've had so that people can understand how to avoid those things. I'm 47 years old, I'm independently wealthy. I've made tens of millions of dollars from my family, hundreds of millions of dollars from my members. I've also screwed stuff up royally. And then just the past few years, I think it was about five years ago, Katie and I, um, well actually I persuaded Katie, my wife that we needed to get this office space. Cause the office space was going to be this, this dry.

Speaker 3 (19:51):

And we were going to bring people to Austin and we were going to do big events in the space and it was going to be so cool. It's like this entrepreneurial hangout and it was all of those things, but I got emotional in that decision. You know, I didn't run projections. I did some, I ran the projections to confirm my opinions. I didn't want the projections to say like, is this real? I didn't do enough. I didn't really sit down and do enough searching of like, Hey, are we going to be able to fill this space? Is it gonna work for us? Is it something we really need? And as a result, we ended up moving into this space, paying for, build out, being there for 18 months of a five year lease and then buying our way out of it. And I see so many entrepreneurs right now today making this exact mistake and I made it and here's, and the reality is I just want to know

Speaker 1 (20:41):

How, how, how, like, how does that work when you're on a five year lease and you're 18 months in like how years did you have to buy out or like

Speaker 3 (20:49):

Zach. So here's what most people don't understand about office leases. So I've, I've been in business since I was in my teens, but I think the first office lease I ever signed was at 19. And since then, I've probably signed 70 of them. I used to have offices throughout Latin America. I've had several offices here in the U S um, the, the business that I had in my twenties, we had, we had an office in Mexico, Argentina, Paraguay, um, Brazil. And so I've, I've signed offices internationally. And nationally, what most people don't know is about 20 to 25% of office leases don't work out and there's a negotiation at the end. They don't actually finish because you're done. They finished. Cause you bought your way out. In fact, I think Pinterest just bought their way out of their office in San Francisco for like a hundred million dollars, which shows you just how bad that office space was hurting them.

Speaker 3 (21:36):

And so what we did in that case, um, I think we had about a $30,000 a month lease and we ended up, um, actually, you know what we did in that case, we have a really good asset protection structure. We did not have a personal guarantee on that space. We went to the landlord and said, Hey, this business isn't working out. We don't have a personal guarantee. There's nothing to come after here. We want to let you know that in the next two months, we're going to be winding down operations and we're going to turn the keys back over to you. And so we, we shut down the company and we walked away.

Speaker 1 (22:06):

Yeah. Oh dude, that's smart.

Speaker 3 (22:09):

Well, it's easy to get no personal guarantee, but when you've been doing this for a while, you can, you can do those things. And so we, we already had it built into the lease, how we exited, you know, they kept our security deposit and we moved on.

Speaker 1 (22:21):

Yeah, still, yeah. 18 months down the drain. So it's still a loss still. You still have to, you know, has your losses there a little bit,

Speaker 3 (22:31):

Several hundred thousand dollar loss, like let's get real between build-out and the part that we did furnish and the lease that we paid for that we didn't need to, I mean, it was a several hundred thousand dollar loss. That's why when I went, when I was told I was going to be on this podcast and I needed the biggest failure, I'm like, well, that's easy in the last time. That's probably it. And that's the only cause I was bankrupt in 2007 and that's 13 years ago, not 10.

Speaker 1 (22:57):

Oh my gosh. That's crazy. I, uh, I am curious. Yeah, we w we could go down a whole segment on offices here. Alright, let's start with this tech segment. Uh, so, you know, part of this show is where our enemy is marketing math, and we're trying to really educate the marketers on, you know, some financial principles, cash management strategies, and really how to incorporate this into their advertising, into their marketing. And, uh, just cause they got to 300% ROAS on a a hundred K a month span doesn't mean they should drain the bank and go, go crazy in Q4. So what, uh, what comes to mind, you know, for, for, uh, for you when we share this and particularly as you think about, you know, our audience is there, they're just addicts to Facebook ads. They're they're agencies that are, um, you know, one client away sometimes from just like being negative cashflow. And, uh, and they're all, um, just trying to unlock that one ad and that one funnel and, and, and just go for it. Right. And so they'll spend a million dollars in testing and then they'll spend like another million in ads just to get that, that million dollar, two comma club.

Speaker 3 (24:19):

Yeah. I think there's a lot of people who have attempted to comic level word with negative return on investment. And I don't mean that to rip on Russell, but I think there's a lot of marketers out there who probably spent more than a million dollars to get that award. And I, I don't think it's one or two, you know, and for me, when I look at the world of internet marketing, math, you know, guys, this is a space I've played in for about 15 years and I've seen it all. I've seen the guys who stand in front of the room and talk about all their gross numbers. And I'm the guy who sits in the eyes and goes, Hey, can we talk about net for a minute? And they get really mad. I think when I look at marketing, I've been in marketing my entire career.

Speaker 3 (25:02):

I'm not a marketer, but I've been in marketing my entire career. I make that distinction because I think these days marketers are like the people who make up stories. And, and like, I don't know. It's like marketer has become a position in the entrepreneurial world. So are you an entrepreneur? No, I'm a marketer. What does that even mean? In a lot of cases, it means. I mean, it's like in a lot of cases, it means all I do is market. I sell stuff. I don't really care about delivery. I don't care about product fulfillment. I don't care about customers. I just Mark it. And I think that's one of the biggest issues that we have in the space today. And so I'll share two things with you. One is I have this, this sincere belief marketing as measurement period, that's it. There's nothing else to it.

Speaker 3 (25:43):

If you're, if you have emotions involved in marketing, if you're, if you're looking at it and you're thinking, Oh, this is going to be cool. Or this is going to like, this is the right word, because it makes me feel good. Well, unless it measured to be the right word, then marketing's a hundred percent measurement. This is the most non-emotional data driven part of your business. And I think today, one of the biggest issues is that most people aren't treating it that way. So first and foremost, that's important. And it's important for all of us who are in marketing to understand that if we don't know the numbers behind what we're doing, if we don't have the metrics of the data, the understanding of what we're doing by spending money and having money come in, we should stop. And I think that's, that's like the key is to know that that marketing is measurement.

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