Hello and welcome to another episode of making it in Asheville podcast, where each week typically we sit down with an Asheville based entrepreneur, small business owner, community leader and ask them what they are making and how they are making it in Asheville. And once again, this week, solo episode, divergent episode from what is normal and what is coming back soon. I swear. This week's episode is a presentation that I just delivered to two groups this week. It is on the banana stand strategy. It is on all of the parts of it. It is an expanded version of what I alluded to or mentioned a week or two ago, and I think it's really powerful and worth sharing. So this particular version of the presentation was delivered to a venture Asheville group, Asheville Chamber of Commerce group called Elevate Asheville. There are about 20 something people in the room and it was fast paced. Would have loved more time. I have notes on how I might present it next time, but I think it does a really good job of demonstrating the value of using the banana sand strategy in your small business, in your big business, in your work. It is a lens through which to view the world, your your business, your strategy, your brand. It is a opinion that like infusing the DNA of what you're doing with something remarkable, something unique, something fun and playful is worth it. And I go into great detail as to why. I use a lot of examples of businesses that are doing a great job with what I would call banana stand strategies. So the one note is that I use all those high tech, high speed gear, and it failed. But Jeff Kaplan, the fearless leader of all these programs and venture Asheville projects, generally was kind enough, was smart enough, had the foresight and forethought to set up another camera and record. And so the audio quality of this presentation has been improved as best I could, but it's a little bit of a strain. And so what I'll attempt to do, just give you a moment, it's going to be a little bit quieter than what this sounds like, trying to pull this down and raise the rest of this up. But, you know, by the end of the episode, you might want to set a reminder to maybe turn down the volume because the next episode should be full speed. Anyway, please enjoy the banana sand strategy as presented to elevate Asheville. If you have any questions, if you want to get in contact, if you want to think about how to implement this or map this into your world, just reach out. I am here to serve. See you soon.
And so it's very exciting to be in this space. And I hope my only goal is that something in the next 40 minutes or so makes you go, holy shit, that sounds good and better and fun and easy and light and playful. The things that we want in our business. And so the banana stand system, three objectives are first. Can I get to a pen? I can. What? Why? It's working. Cool. And then I want to inspire. Holy shit. Action, right? So I want to define this thing, tell you why it's fun and cool and the thing to think about. And then I want to inspire some level of action. By the time, like, we leave, maybe during lunch, we start brainstorming. There will be some participation in this, but I want to honor everybody's time. Quick story. Jeff said. We showed up, started podcasting. So my wife and I decided at the time we were engaged, moving to Asheville. And our backgrounds. Hers is like content marketing, primarily. Mine was sales and marketing. In my early twenties, I started a business consulting thing. It didn't feel right at the time. I got into technology sales, got into sales, generally, that I've always done sales. And so she was applying for this marketing role in a business here. And then I was supporting her, and then I was like, so what is, like, the salary? Maybe we just do it ourselves. Maybe we just start a marketing business. We can do more than 22,000. We arrived at Asheville, and our big strategy, which is easy to point at in hindsight, was this podcast about making it in Asheville. We hit the ground running. That was our first client, making it in Asheville. If you go way back to the cheap seats and the content, you're going to see high quality stuff. We showed up and we were showing what it is. It was possible that we could do four or five years of that. We grew a great business, you know, multiple six figures. Clients, though, were all over the place. The common question was, what do you guys do? No, it's not just podcast. Behind the podcast is making it creative. Business consulting, marketing consulting agency thing. What do you do there? What do you need? Let's have a conversation. My obsession is like, value creation. How do we create value for you? It's not going to be the same for you as it is for you. So let's talk. We'd have long conversations, and we would do all sorts of different shit. We build websites, we'd write copy, we'd help with social campaigns. We helped the chop shop build a learning program, right? So they were doing classes, and we just, like, bolt on revenue and make stuff better for people. Based on what they needed. Fucking was hard, though. And it was different all the time, and there was no. And so my wife started QB Gucci nut during the pandemic, and it was so clear that she just was like, this is what she wants to do. She doesn't want to do other people's content. Let's do hers. And hell yeah. And, like, a bunch of other stuff come up and deprioritize. Deprioritize, deprioritized. Was this, like, agency thing because it was no longer serving us in the way that I wanted it to. I am obsessed with this view of the world, which is the five eyes of the quote unquote entire entrepreneur. This has been a belief for a long time. It is the impact we are creating, the income we are generating, the intimacy that we share with friends, family, our partners, the interests that fill our cups, and then, like, our integrity. How certain are you who you are? And every time you show up in a room, is it the same person? My. These three were guile guide. You've never seen a more calm, certain, confident person than me. The way I show up in my family, I am who I say. The income and impact stuff was, like, just slowly not doing what I wanted. I started playing bigger games. I got a real estate license and getting ready to buy all these buildings, all these properties. Start, like, in investment funds. And the first half of this year, I'm just watching bank accounts deplete. I think that wealth is a present tense, dealing based on cash flow. It's not an asset, it's not a balance sheet equation. It's a cash flow equation. My cash flow, for the first time in a while was going down, and I said, f. F. And it wasn't solved this with an agency. One of the things I asked myself is, what does ten out of ten feel like? What does it look like? Get buying ten out of ten income impact. And I would challenge you all to take a moment. No. Refresh the time quickly. If you have a way to write, what does ten out of ten feel like impact for you, the people that you're serving, your clients, your customers, whatever it is, what does it feel like? What does it look like, and what is ten out of ten on this income side for you? Different for everybody. And it's the height. 60 seconds on this, maybe just told I have about ten minutes, but it's hard to take extra ten minutes when lunch is behind you. So if it. If you give me your blessing at the top of the hour, we'll go. So let's just say we're operating seven or eight, which is normal or at least optimistic for most people who operate at seven or eight out of your impact or income scale. If those extra 30% of extra arbitrary three numbers can be orders of magnitude difference in who you are and how you're showing that. What came up for me was like, impact in this pursuit of bigger and better things, I stopped sharing. I stopped creating. I was not as publicly generous as I had been for five years. Part of the magic formula that made Jeff Kaplan know who I was in the first couple months of being an actual was like showing up and being generous much as possible, frequently as possible, as impactful as possible. And then income was just like, I want to rework the wheel, build better, mousetrap every single time. So I started thinking about my life. I started thinking about people. I started thinking about, well, how do I solve this thing, this cash flow thing, by creating maximum value for people and the highest velocity for me. Like, I wanted this to happen now I want this to happen in 2025 or 2021. And I'm like, what is the thing? What lives up here in this corner? Right? The thought, you know, Internet marketing, thought leadership stuff is like, build a course, write a book. That's months, that's hours. It's taking a camera into a studio that's paying people. Yuck. No, we're not doing that. A fast thing is, I don't know, getting busy creating, telling ChapgBT to write you an ebook and put it for $9 on your website and tell people to buy it. Dumb. That's not it. So what is this? What is this? Then? I said, what? Where is their leverage that I've already, like, this is physics. This is real, generally, where is their leverage? Where have I done things? What work has already existed that I could potentially pull together to make a thing? I don't want to work harder. I want to create a longer lever arm so that effort creates a larger output than it used to. And I found three dust piles, right? So work that's been done, aka problems that I've solved in the past, there have been problems around how businesses make money and help people make more money in their business. It's been personal productivity stuff, and I throw away productiveness. And I lean into now is effectiveness. Not just are you busy and doing stuff more and better and faster than ever before, but is it in alignment with what you say you want? It's not about being busy. It's about the effectiveness of the busyness. And then, like, personal stuff, identity stuff, are you who you say you are? Like, let's you know who's looking back at you in the mirror? And what this points to is there are three ways to think about value generally, or be able to price a thing as a business. From where I'm sitting, I don't think anyone in the room said this is legal. So we want to go from illegal to legal or maintain legality. An accountant keeps your books clean. That's a good thing. A lawyer make sure that your business is operating the way North Carolina needs it to work. That's a good thing. You can charge for those things. Then there's quality of life generally. This is all quality of life. So we have time. Can I buy you time there? Can I save you time? Can I give you more time with your kids? Can I give you more time fly fishing? Can I give you more time doing the things you want? Your value here, health, can I make you healthier? Make you like how you look in the mirror more? Can I make you able to pick up your grandkids when they come to play health, wellness. There's beauty, like art. There's a fourth missing in my brain. But the idea is these are all things that point to a quality of life. On this side, we have save money and then we have make money. If you can help somebody save some money, buy the clothes that they want at a lower price, not buy Dixie cups every time they want to buy Dixie cups, like Bernita cup, we can save money. There's value there. More valuable is help people make money. So I obsessed over what is value, followed by cash. And I built funny visual words that are in group words, words for me in the world that I'm creating around. We're going to build you an atm in your business. You're going to know that there's always money there. We're going to build you an operating system in your work. You're going to know what's next for you. You're going to know how to keep moving forward. And then this idea of this telephone booth, which calls to the idea that Clark Kent walks into a telephone booth, walks out Superman. We're going to be able to step into this new identity of who you need to be. Take your business to the next level. And it's about as far as I got before I start talking about it online. $0 spent, time spent, $0 spent. Start talking about it online. Two weeks later, there were 30 leads, 15 sales calls, strategy sessions, and eleven customers generated about $20,000. The point is that this is the highest form of what I call banana stand, which is a revenue run. I wanted cash to make my last six months feel less bad. And so I built something into my business out of thin air that generated a bunch of revenue. $20,000 is a good month. The last two full weeks, 3 hours of training, 3 hours of workshops, bunch of one on one calls. All I've talked about is banana stand stuff. I don't have enough time to go, like, fully into everything, follow every route. But what I've just demonstrated is the four main things that exist in what I call the banana standard, which is playful differentiation in your business. We're looking for playful. That's the word I like. You can use it however you want. But differentiation in your business, a sawdust system, is just a way find profitability simply. We'll talk about it. The rapid revenue roadmap is maximum value, vertical axis. Maximum velocity for you and the business on the horizontal axis. And then this last thought of just, like, public generosity, showing your work. This is the banana sim has four bullets. Click in 6 hours, plus a bunch of one on one calls. There's a lot here. Did anyone catch where the name came from? Always money. Always money in the bonanza. So playfulness is important to me. My wife tells me I'm a seven in the enneagram, which means you need to have fun. You need to be playful. This tv show is fun and playful. I haven't watched a ton of it, but I watched enough to hear this and never be able to forget this. Always money in the banana stand. Jason Bateman hears that and goes, the banana stand hardly makes any money, dad. So the dad's in jail for, like, security fraud or something. Dad, do you have any idea how much money our family spends? We need more than that. And the dad goes, there's always money in the banana stand. He winks, and always money in the banana stand. And he winks. And Jason Bateman finally gets aggravated, burns down the banana stand, and the dad goes, what are you doing? There was $250,000 of cash in the walls of the banana stand. The reason why I'm calling it the banana stand is because there's money in your business hiding in plain sight. We need to simplify. We need to make it lighter. We need to make it more. We need to be of service and just obsess over what value actually is. I hope it's the next slide. Okay, so what's the best marketing or sales strategy advice? Maybe we jump to you that you've heard and like maybe you're actively thinking about for your business right now, what's the best stuff, practical stuff? Here's a bad answer. TikTok dances, right? TikTok dances is not going to value your way into growing a business. It's a thing you can do and does work arise? It doesn't necessarily grow your business. We got to talk about value, right? We have to talk to this. Is that why Jason Bateson moved out to running away from this? Here's a weird thing. My college, I went to a college, small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania. So supply and demand graphs generally look like that. And they argue that when you drop in prices and increase in demand, the college I went to ten years before I went there cost like $15,000. Whatever they got for applications was whatever they had. 1000 applicants, small class, 500 kids, they raised their price to just above market, which was like 49,000. By the time I got there, they were getting seven times more applicants. Supply and demand in like traditional sense. Economics in the traditional sense kind of falls apart. What we need to think about is value. And once you think people value, sometimes what they value is that the thing is valuable. The gift of running a business or running that school is that they just turned around and gave people a bunch of financial aid. And people who could afford it at this elevated price paid more. More money in the treasury. More people feel like they're winning. Parents win. Price is about the same. Campus exploded with higher quality students. What an interesting, weird truth. So here's a real fire. How would you in your business two x and then we'll make it even harder. We'll say ten x the greatest revenue month you've ever had. How might you. Ten X the greatest revenue month you've ever had. This September, less than ten days. And I'll make it harder. You can't increase your ad spend by ten X. How much you do? Take a second, write some stuff down. No wrong answers. More productivity than we're going to solve it today. So here is my gotcha. If you're headed down this direction, the answer rarely is that. Taylor Swift tweets about you. Oprah mentioned you typically increase top of funnel by ten X or 100 x and the whole thing breaks. You can't handle ten x growth in your total audience right now there is no way you have unlikely some software companies maybe, maybe actually could if they've built the scalability. But that's, you know, that's zeros and ones attack atoms most of the fork with like physical things and people, some software companies maybe could handle attacks and supply or demand change. Typically it still breaks because they haven't been able to scale that fast. That's it. Everyone else, it absolutely breaks. So the answer is not making the top of your funnel wider, right, going from this to a wider top of funnel. The answer is in value creation in the funnel. Whatever customers are already. See you. How do we move multiple standard deviations away from whatever it used to be so that they go, that's cool. Yeah, that's exactly me. That's exactly what I like. That is perfect. It's the perfect thing. And what I'm pointing at once again is that idea of a long lever arm. If we're pushing here to do this much work, not a physics major, but I do know that if we just change where we're pushing, push the same way, we can do more work. Then if you want to work harder, you can too. But like, don't get it twisted, don't believe that, like hustle porn. You need to just work harder to ten x the business. It's not true. There's levers, we're going to find them. And then the last thing is not everyone is money motivated. And that's a beautiful thing. I don't even know if I'm exactly money motivated. Let's just think about it in terms of impact. If you wanted to add 10,000 to your business and maybe it's 100, I don't. The scale is not the question. 10,000 is not the thing. The illustration of 500 people paying 20 or ten people paying 1000, which creates the most impact for the customer. For the customer, I'd say about 100 more people. So here's my thing. How many ebooks have you purchased that you've never read at $9, how many gym memberships to Planet Fitness go unused? Zero. Zero is not the right. So there are no, there's no wrong way, I'll say this, to build a business that works if it's working success. Planet Fitness is one of the biggest gyms in the US. They have like an astronomical amount of members and it's like Zero, it's single digit percentages of how many actually show up. The price is so low that it doesn't hurt you to not go. I would argue they are not in the business of creating meaningful life change for their customers. Is being equinox. It's building a house culture cult thing the right answer? I don't know, but it's upmarket and those people are bought in. Bought in to the vision of health is what life is about. Who's making a bigger impact? I don't know, but I would argue going up market is the better strategy, always. And we can debate it, but upmarket is a better strategy. Fewer customers who are truly bought in is a better strategy. All day capacity too. That's less competitive 100%. And it doesn't break the system. The issue in sales, let's say in banking, is, you know, you only have so much time with one person, but you have to figure out where you don't spend your time and focus. And so I jumped the gun. This is my supply and demand crap. But you get better customers, you get more customers, you get like economics 101. There's complexity once you get into it. But like 101 says, the price drops, demand increases. It's not freaking true. And if it is, you're playing a game that you're going to lose to Walmart, to Amazon, to people who can lose money on the widget because they have a better system built, and that's not us, typically. So what is the business that's using the banana strategy look like a hello. This thing that I'm building is a representation of the banana strategy. Oh, okay. These are supposed to be different slides. All good. Calphalon makes perfectly good kitchenware. How many people go, that's my fucking grand. That's what I'm putting in my kitchen. Not many, but Inannistan, it's just color sometimes. So all of this stuff is going to be baked into the ethos of the business. But great. Jones is white hot. They have not made a better mousetrap. They've made a colorful mousetrap and it speaks to people. Finally they go, yes, this is my kitchen. And I think Calphalon's fantastic. We have it. But like, literally the website is all you need to know about. The homepage is all you need to know about what these two businesses stand for. Fantasy strategy is that simple. Sometimes it's just like, that's not the middle of the road. Think about iPhone. They'll come out with colors. White earbuds, right? Early version. Right? White wired earbuds. In a world of black headphones where it was just a function, how do we put the sound into people's heads? Just in a white wire to get you to upgrade the phone because you want paint. Same as that phone over here. These are different slides. That is Columbia. Perfectly good outdoor brand, perfectly good. There's nothing broken about that system. It works. Outdoor vitals, which no one might have heard of. Anyone heard of outdoor vitals? What fun. So they have this membership model. You pay whatever the membership is. You get a meaningful discount on everything you buy. Monthly store credit accrues to your account. At a certain point, you're like, I have to buy something. Half you have Community of, like, these ultra Light. First of all, anytime you can create or just tap into an in group, create one would be cool. Tap into an in group, you're doing something ultra light. Backpackers like golfers. It's just the expenses on these things is crazy. So you're upmarket to begin with, and then you build a community. Free, upgraded shipping. This is par for the course, but now it's a feature. It's a benefit of being in the zoom group and more. Who knows what more is? But it sounds fun, right? So they've taken this product business that is old as can be. People have been vending since the beginning of time, but they built in a membership engine. Their cash flows are guaranteed better and I more forecastful than 99.9% of product things just because they thought about it differently. This is jansport. We've all had jansport bags. Jansport bags are perfectly good. Perfectly good bags. Do you need a backpack that costs $335? You don't need one. You don't need one. But people pay for it all the freaking time because it's overbuilt, over engineered, over designed, over everything. Military grade, bond proof. But what they've done to sell this thing is they've built their own version of spartan races. The Goruck challenge was this huge driving force of what ended up building Goruk into what it is today, which was a pay $300 and walk 20 miles with a backpack that has stones in it. What? People ate it up. So it's this entire side business. Entire side business to build in the habit that will make people spend dollar 300 on a backpack. Michelin. The Michelin guide as to restaurants being good and getting stars is a side product to Michelin Tires, which said, how the hell do we get people to drive further? Well, we got to tell them at the restaurant, 2 hours outside of Paris. This is not new. We've been doing it forever. But let's just, like, point at it. That's a good strategy. Get people to do the thing that you want to do. You know, Williams Sonoma sells kitchen stuff. Cubica, my wife's business, sells italian kitchen stuff. She also has the best italian cookbook club on the Internet. She said there's like, you know, supply and demand graph. There are customers that are willing to pay this much $50 to buy the average widget that she sells. Costa pool cutter. But there are also people that exist up here that would pay 300, $400 a year for something. What is this something? Didn't take long. We said some of the dorks like cookbooks as much as you do. Let's make a home for the dorks that like italian cookbooks. And it's unbelievable. We were just in Chicago. She had 20 people fly into Chicago to spend the weekend eating italian food in a bunch of different neighborhoods in Chicago. And they, Nika, my son and I were there for the first of the dinners. They acted like they've known each other their whole lives. Built this online community which generates like $40,000 right now of recurring revenue that helps her business be able to do things like buy inventory when they need it, because they know next month big hundred members are going to renew. It's cool. It's different. Been instant. The idea. This guy's Rory Sutherlandhouse. He is the vice chairman of Olive UK, Olive England, whatever it is. He's fantastic. His content is wonderful. I hear him go and I go, this is me when I'm british and in my late fifties, right? He's fantastic. One of my favorite things I've heard him say is that people don't value what is inherently valuable. They value what their paying attention to. You are not valuing what is inherently valuable about what you do. You're valuing what you pay attention to right now. So what I'm hoping to do is just show you that you're looking at the world through lenses that have served you so far, which is beautiful. Nothing wrong with what you're doing right now. My metaphor is that you are. Your business is a song, and it's just right. Perfect. It's great. It's great. But what if you were to play it like it was jazz? What if you were to play it like you were in a punk rock band? Same song. Can be fundamentally different. Can be fundamentally different if you want to. And it's just a thought, activity. Nothing needs to change. But maybe something, if something did change, maybe something, all of it would change. So we'll play with some of these systems just quickly. I'm ripping through this. I hope it's not feeling too fast. Okay, so some of the systems. Sawdust system. Why is it called the sawdust system? Early 19 hundreds. It was like 1913. Henry Ford is building this model t and ribbon, right? They're going to build this new production plant, and to do it, they're buying a however many million acres of forests to cut down the trees, to send them to the factory so that they can have enough heat, I guess, to melt metal, to smelt whatever they're doing. But they gotta go through a ton of trees. So he sets his brother in law, let's say, on a mission. What are we gonna do with the trees, period. Answer was, these guys just came over the same. You like, pack the sawdust together, burn it, and it, like, it's cold. It's like another version of cold. The guy's last name was Kings. Something you might have jumped to the conclusion, which is Kingsford brand is the brother in law. And Henry Ford built Briquette as a side business to building cars. And it immediately exploded. They took over 90 something percent of market share of all coal in the US World War one. World War two was in large part like supported by Kingsford. It's still the biggest by order of magnitude. Biggest coal brand, charcot brand, maybe on earth, but definitely in the US. Sawdust. We're looking at work that's already been done on trying to figure out how to make it profitable, more profitable. We're looking at. There's a million things in the back. What it all boils back to is we're finding leverage inside of the business. Sarah, my wife, to make content for this cookbook club she was reading, or, sorry, to make content for QB Kuchina, this pasta tool for business. She was reading a ton of cookbooks. Cooking out of cookbooks to, like, make content. It's not a meaningful step from there to say, who else wants to read these books and what is a benefit. It's like people are paying for it to begin with. But not only are they paying for it, they're also posting all of the food that they make in the cookbook club, which is a built in viral engine for audience growth. We're looking for leverage. Great example. This artist, Paul Gregg, makes these nostalgic paintings. There's no more perfect example of how to use past work. Then make prints of your originals, dude. He had already done it, but it wasn't so clear that they were high quality, they were valuable. So he's changed some things about how he looks at prints. And he's gone from, you know, a USP's $19 an hour, 60 hours a week job. He's no longer at the post office. He's about to do his $14,000.06 weeks. We've looked at what he's already done. He's also raised the price of this so just changing your prices, that's all that stuff, you're already doing it. Everything exists. Increase your price. Changing prices. And he's increased quality of his prints. White hot rapid revenue roadmap to me, if there's a sound bite that I'm obsessed with, is that bite. Wealth is a cash flow equation. The feeling of wealth, you can say now objectively, that guy has more money than me, he's wealthier. If those accounts are moving down, my accounts are moving up. I feel safer in my skin and in my world. I've already done all the work and personal development stuff, so I felt safe to begin with. Start looking at cash flow. It's a different thing. So how do we solve for this in the business? It is also, as a counterpoint, true that if you're willing to lose now, this is a classic startup software play, we're going to lose money now, so that in the future, we've out competed all these people who needed to make money today. I don't like to model as much. I'd rather make money today. That's where I'm at. So I'm thinking about two things, about quality of life. Thinking of helping people make money or save money, not thinking about getting people legal, right. And then moving as far as I can into those value corners. When I talk about the work that I'm doing in my business, the work that you're doing in your business, how drastic, how valuable can we make it? And then talk about it in equivalent language so that people go, but you can't, like, make it up, it has to be that valuable. So how do we obsess over that? And then when it comes into implementation, right, so this is all this value, and now we have it here. We're trying to move up in the value equation. How do we deliver? How do we start, how do we sell now? Capture cash flows today so that the work that we do in the future is prepaid in some ways. A good example, and, you know, history tells a slightly different story. Example is that American Airlines was once in a cash crunch. The CEO, infinite wisdom, as far as I'm concerned, said lifetime first class travel for a quarter million dollars. They had the next day all the money they needed. They then spent the decade trying to get out of that situation. Right, but it is a way of saying, hey, how do I solve it today? The delivery of the value will be in the future payments today. But don't over commit. Perhaps don't over commit. So David Pennington, outward Creative has built all these online products over the years. He's worked so hard, his stuff is so good. His voice is so different than everyone else's voice. I'm saying this, he won't say this, and I don't know if it's actually true. No one has bought his courses. Rounds to no. The amount of effort he's put into the courses. How about this? This is fair effort he's put into his courses is not equal to the value received from them in an absolute term. The impact is not where he wants it to be. So what we've worked on is you're not building anything. You've built it all in the past. What we're talking about now is how do we point at the value and say, I'm going with you on this journey together over time. You're paying today, but we're going to do this together. It's going to take some time, and nothing needs to be built. It just needs to be expressed, communicated. Sarah is launching another membership type community product that's going to be about pasta making instead of cookbooks. She's like, what do we do? You don't do anything. You write an email. It's an email. That's the first step. It costs $0 to create this entire new world for her 1% customer who fits the bill. And it's going to be a beautiful thing for her business. And then this last bit, which people get backwards, they do this first, and we are at twelve, so less than ten minutes. So good. The cart before the horse is, in my opinion, social media strategy. I have spent five years or so doing a podcast that's on again, off again, based on what's going on in the world. The launch of this community happened cold with no, I mean, Jeff pays attention. Two other people have ever listened to the podcast in the room, and it is number one podcast in western North Carolina. Right? So take that, whatever that's worth. Cold launch. 30 leads. Most of them were outbound, or 14 of 31 were outbound. I reached out to people. Hand raises from email. Seven. It's on the spreadsheet. Hand raises from social. Seven. Six. Right. So 25. Three referrals. 25%. 25%. 50% out. You, as an entrepreneur, as a leader in your business, you are constantly sharing your tea, right? Tea is going to be the metaphor we want, and it's why interest is, is part of the five eyes we want that we are constantly filling our own cups, overflowing our cups, and sharing from abundance. The businesses. Tea that you share with the world is the thing that you do. The leaves are the things that you do. Audience stuff is just having water boiling, having the pot on, you know, on a board. It helps accelerate sometimes the process of sharing your tea, but your tea is a different thing than the audience. There is absolutely no downside in building a personal brand, in having a brand for your business and having a bigger audience. Absolutely. We want those things to grow, but it is not. We've already talked about ten x. Audience does not change your business's world. Well, this week breaks it. You have a panic attack. That's not the problem. The problem is where is the value created? And so we haven't solved this yet in the community, but what we talked about thus far is making the top of our triangle taller. So we want more value. This is value. This is generosity. Public generosity. Social storytelling, email marketing is public generosity. This is a good thing. Having a hundred thousand dollar coaching business, that is entirely word of mouth. My coach does millions of dollars a year and has had almost no social media. It's possible to have a perfectly fine business with enough value delivered in what you do. You don't need social media to build a robust and resilient and something that isn't likely to topple over business. It makes sense to build some base into the triangle, right? The total volume. So this is all value in here. Like, we can do different things. And what I'll argue is that value eventually becomes a time and access access equation. When we're doing it right, the highest value you can deliver to someone is your time and access to you. Every minute that you spend in your business with customers is exceptionally valuable. So, like, you know, public generosity is a part of it. Part of it. It's not the whole thing. It is the cart. The horse is the value. Let's make sure we're building value. So this is like the last of the signs. We're doing this right. When the work that we're doing feels light, it feels light. Playful is the word. I like it to be playful when we're unattached to outcomes. You might absolutely have to pay rent, have to pay your mortgage. Absolutely. Yes. But this sales call, this investor, call this whatever, doesn't need to be a hit because you know that the math, Max, you have enough of these conversations, it's going to work. You have enough of these client conversations, there's going to be a buyer. You're confident in the value that you're creating, that this particular thing doesn't need to work, this particular person doesn't need to say, yes, you're unattached. You're paying attention to value in an absolute sense, not just in what is in front of you right now that feels important. I have the Eisenhower matrix that I like to talk about. Important, unimportant, urgent, unearthly. Right. People think they need to spend time here. Important and urgent. I disagree. This is area one. It is the important and not important here. Sorry, I wrote it down. Important and unurgent strategic value creation work. That is our job as the leaders in the business building a brand, urgent and important also needs to get done. Arguably. But the work we do today that unlocks the future potential is the valuable work. It's not necessarily order fulfillment, though. That's important, too. Our marketing, our business is obsessed with our clients. What they feel, what they think, what they're going through. And when we do that, they create more customers for you. And it's not because you have some software referral engine baked into your product where they get $5 for telling a friend and the friend gets $20. That's fine. A little yucky and a little bit devalues you. In my opinion, creating a service that is so remarkable that they can't help but remark about it is the best referral engine possible. How do we make it so absurd when people work with you that they can't help but tell people? And then the last bit is that the hard parts become fun. If you're feeling yucky in sales conversations, you need to address the way you're viewing your services, your business, your product. It should feel like an active service. It should feel like generosity. You should feel like everyone needs to know about this. And if we can get back to unattached outcomes, all of the hard works, bookkeeping becomes fun because the accounts are getting bigger. Who wants to look at accounts when they're getting smaller? Not me. Is that fun? I'm seven. Okay, so how do you get there? Anyone know these spaces? Maybe just miss Jessica Alba. Alba. So this is lBmh. Daphne Arnot, daughter of founder. Whatever. Arno of lvmh. By all accounts, doing a world class job at being an executive at a conglomerate. Billions of dollar business. Jessica Alba launched honest, wonderful business, wonderful brand. This guy named Tom something. No one remembers him. Tony say hesh of zappos. Zappos. Everyone knows him. Right? So he was the one who was obsessed with customer satisfaction. He built a billion dollar business. Loosely. We have four ways to build a banana stand into our business. One, you can inherit a luxury brand and then be gregarious, be thoughtful, and then do philanthropic actions. You can think about all of these important, worthy things. If a business that throws off buckets of cash is handed to you and sharing machines, fantastic. If you're a celebrity that shows up with millions of customers waiting, you can start to play fun games and do remarkable things. I don't think anybody in that group in the room is that. And the last is like, you can get lucky. You can hire the right person. You can kind of, like, stumble your way into this some amount of years in the future, or we can build backwards from the target. The best example that I've seen in recent times that also uses the word banana in their name is the Savannah bananas. By show of hands, who's seen them or heard of them? Okay. Way more than people have seen or heard the name of natural podcast. I won't take offense. These guys are white hot husband and wife duo. They have built the most electric 2 hours in sports, and they did it. The founder, Jesse yellow banana. Whatever. Yellow tucks. Jesse yellow Tucks is his Instagram account. His content's remarkable, fantastic. Their obsession has done one thing. The fans. And so they asked, what are all the things that suck about going to a baseball game as a parent, as just a fan, as an onlooker, and they fixed it. They said, oh, you go to a baseball game, you got three kids, and you got to, like, sneak snacks in, because there's no way that you can buy enough hot dogs or sodas. It's an all you can eat buffet. It is. It is a resort experience. You go, tickets are what they are. You can't, you can't take too much popcorn. You can't have too many credit cards. Games take 2 hours. Foul balls are outs. You can't walk batters. Like, it's all of these things that are just playful and fun. Every inning. There's like, performances. Social media is unbelievable. It's best in class. It's done intentionally. 2016, they bought this company. They played to a total audience size, like 50,000 people over 50 games, 30 games. Last year, they played 250 games in the calendar year. So that's like 55 times the amount of game played to 2.3 million people. They have a waiting list of people to just in line to buy tickets. They started three other teams. They're going international. Their social media accounts are bigger than almost every professional team's social media accounts. It's intentional. They are truly the greatest show in baseball, arguably the greatest show in sports. So that is impact. That is, or that is impact. This is income. It's a whole thing. It's one thing to know that this is absolutely true, that we need to be differentiated and playful. It's another thing, like do the work during lunch, we can talk about doing after.