SPS 241: Get Scalable: Scaling Your Company Using A Book with Ryan Deiss

You know , way back before I knew who digital marketer was , I was meeting Ryan dice and learning from Ryan dice all the way back in the this might come up at some point the number one book system days . We're talking about books , select , the OG , og , og Business that you guys had , but it and just super . You probably heard of them .

You've probably heard of digital marketer or traffic and conversion summit . It was like the first marketing conference I ever went to and then I'm actually speaking this year in January . So grab a ticket for traffic and conversion summit . But he's also the founder and CEO of his new company is called the scalable company .

All right , he's the author of multiple books . He's been on the podcast in the past . You can check out the past episode . We talked about the invisible selling machine . We also talked about his book , digital marketing for dummies . But he's got a book coming up that we're going to talk about .

It's called get scalable the operating system for your business , or sorry , the operating system your business needs to run and scale without you . So Lot that we can learn from Ryan on the digital marketing side , on the scaling of business side of things . Way more than we'll have time to fit in and 30 or 30 or seven minutes , but we're gonna try .

So , ryan , welcome , great to have you .

You know , you have something to say and and I've written about marketing I'm known as a marketer and so to most of the people , if they , if they know my name , if they , then then usually they know me as a marketer . The reality is Is that I've kind of been playing a marketer on TV for the past decade or so .

Most of my life , most of my , my , my working life , is spent running companies , and so I don't have a login to our , you know , meta account or Google account or even our CRM or , you know , I don't have long is any of the stuff .

Like we've got teams that do these kinds of things and well , you know , I like to think I've still got some good stuff to say on the on the marketing front , on the copywriting , for you know , like I'm not in the trenches anymore .

I'm running businesses and I'm running companies and so this is my life , but I hadn't really taught or shared a whole lot about that side of the business . And yet , you know , for running digital marketer for 13 plus years teaching people how to grow , what I realized is that growth creates a new problem in .

That problem is called scale , and so one I was excited to do it because it's all I've ever wanted to do is talk about what I was doing . That's all I've ever done . You know , in the early days of digital marketer , all I was doing was sharing what we were doing . That was actually working .

I've never been about , you know , researching or theorizing or , you know , running academic studies . All I ever done is say is do stuff and then talk about it . But I hadn't talked about this because I felt like , ah , but I'm a marketer , so it was kind of tough . I mean , it really took the pandemic .

It's a COVID for me to be like you know what , screw it . Like it's time to kind of share to the world what I've been working on for really the past decade or so and all the stuff that I wish I knew and and and the things that we get asked you know the questions that we get asked because growth creates a new problem .

So that was kind of the first reason for the book . The second reason is , you know , in 2016 and I'm only just now talking about this in 2016 I had not one , not two , but three different companies hit the ink Five hundred and five thousand lists in the same year . So not one company multiple years in a row , but three different companies in our portfolio .

Another one of the business partner that we had , the founder , the operator of the company , was the founder of the company , was the founder of the company , the business partner that we had , the founder , the operator of that business , couldn't get out of their own way and that company was sold in twenty twenty one , basically for scraps , to our number one

competitor Now as a software , as a service business in the real estate space . So you're talking about a massive opportunity squandered because we didn't know how to scale when you had to grow , but we didn't know how to scale .

And then the third business , the business that was actually ranked higher than any of the other companies on the ink five hundred list out of all of our businesses within some of the other companies , within six months of appearing on the list , we had lost two million dollars and we had had to lay off 180 people because we didn't know how to scale and so

realizing that growth is not scale and scale is not growth . I knew it was an important topic to talk about , and in doing some research , I found out that two thirds of the companies that make the Inc 5000 list fail within five years . Two thirds , man , that's a worse failure rate than non-inc 5000 companies .

So , for all of those reasons why I'm a growth guy , I'm a marketing guy , I'm a sales guy , I knew that growth wasn't enough . We had to address the problems of scale , and so that's what I wanted to do with this book .

It's like the classic 10-year overnight success and he always told me it's like the longer it takes to build it , the longer it'll last , cause your foundation is just so much deeper and stronger and all that stuff . What ? Let's zoom out for just a second , ryan .

What for those people who don't know , what's the cliff note like big picture version of the scalable company and how long have you been working on this company ?

You know so many of these business books that are out there , like you know , like , oh , you need to have systems in your business . So it's like , oh , so I need to have a couple of checklists , set some goals and do some meetings .

That's a part of it , but , my God , it's not close to most of it and anybody who's tried , who's read some of these books and tried to do some of these things , know that it just doesn't work like they say it does .

So we want to work with entrepreneurs directly to install these operating systems in the business so that the founder can achieve , like I said , what we refer to as their ideal exit . That could be exiting kind of the staff role in becoming a true CEO , because a lot of entrepreneurs have the CEO title but they function like a manager .

They are not functioning like a CEO , not like a CEO should . It could be exiting the org chart completely , bringing in a president , a general manager , a CEO , to run the day to day and you only have your one direct report .

It could be exiting the business completely , and so that's what the scalable company does , and we work really closely with our clients , I mean . So it's kind of a pain in the butt because it's a pure services-based business , like it's not just a course business , it's not a group coaching business , it is a more kind of one-on-one .

But to tell a dirty little secret , the whole reason we launched the scalable company it's basically a front for private equity investments . At this stage in the game , I'm kind of done doing new startups and things like that .

We want to identify business owners and entrepreneurs that we can partner with , invest in , and so a lot of this is just our opportunity to kind of get paid to do due diligence . So that's the CliffsNote version of what scalable is .

You're too big to be small , too small to be big and you kind of have a choice to make . You either need to kind of punt a little bit , retreat a little bit , systemize some things and just have you in a very small core team and sort of stay in the million to $3 million range , have a boutique style business . Some would call it a lifestyle business .

That term is used very pejoratively . I think it's great . I think as an entrepreneur , the perk is you can decide , Like , what do you want your business to be ? It's up to you .

The mistake that a lot of entrepreneurs make is we set about the journey that is scale without having a map on that and we assume that everything that we had to go from zero to one or zero to 10 , that that same stuff is gonna take us up farther . We assume that it's one ever ascending mountain and in reality it's two mountains .

There's the first mountain , which is loosely zero to a million , $2 million , but then what it takes if you want to basically go from seven to eight figures . And then , by the way , it happens again , we find it happens on the ones in the threes .

So you got a million and about 3 million , you got 10 million and about 30 million shows up again , kind of between 80 and 100 million . There are certain areas where the thing that got you here ain't gonna get you there .

So what I want you to do right now is go to selfpublishingcom forward , slash schedule book a publishing consultation with one of the experts on my team . We'll talk about your goals for your book , your dreams , your challenges , your next steps and we'll start putting together a plan . All right , so go to selfpublishingcom forward .

Slash schedule book a call with the team . Let's see how we can help with your book . It's time to implement .

is somebody who is in that messy middle , in that swamp of scale . And I say there are ideal client because they're feeling the pain . And usually you start to sense this when you get to like 10-ish employees , because that's when you kind of can't just manage through individual conversations . You know what I mean You're like Sheerwill and charisma .

Yeah , it's exactly Like it's kind of starting to become a mess , what we would rather do . So that's our ideal from like a sales and marketing perspective , because they're in pain , in reality at between half a million to a million . If people would start to address some of these issues , then they would actually be able to scale much faster without the pain .

But nobody does that Right . Nobody does that . It's very hard to convince somebody at that stage that this is what they need . They're just like grow , grow , grow , grow , grow .

It's not who I am , so I enjoy building holding companies and stuff like that . I always have and so we had a portfolio of businesses that a lot of them were in consumer e-commerce , consumer media . We had events companies . So we had a number of different businesses in our portfolio and we began to exit a lot of these businesses in 2018 and 2019 .

So , like you mentioned , traffic and conversion summit , we sold a majority stake in traffic and conversion summit to an events company that's owned by Blackstone , right Along with a number of other ones .

So we were sitting there at the end of 2019 , thinking to ourselves , okay , all we really had left was digital marketer , and I didn't want to sell digital marketer and people are like , oh , that's your baby . No , it's a good platform business . Out of digital marketer , many other businesses can be launched .

So most of what we do it's a goose and eggs model , so I will sell the eggs . I don't want to sell the goose . And so digital marketer was a goose . These media publishing companies , the brand companies , have a lot of value beyond what they might be valued in the marketplace . So we had this business and it was OK . Now what do we want to do ?

What do we want to do next ? What's the next big thing ? And what I wanted to do was build what we had at digital marketer for those next level entrepreneurs at Scalable . So I remember announcing to the entire team in December of 2019 , 2020 , we're going to be coming out there , we're launching this new business , the Scalable Company .

It's going to be a new holding company and we're going to be basically doing what we did before in this , but in B2B it's going to be amazing and I'll see you all next year . And we got started on some stuff . Obviously , the pandemic happened and , I think , a lot of people . I sort of panicked , I hit the freak out button .

I didn't know what it meant , but I knew . But in retrospect , had we just continued doing what we were doing , it would have been fine . But I was like , ok , now is not the time to do something new . Now is the time to focus , to make sure that the team is going to be OK , and so , technically , it launched in 2020 .

We sort of rolled it out at the end of 2020 . Really , we didn't get it going in any real form or fashion until 2021 . And then I made the stupidest mistake ever . I didn't follow my own advice or my own frickin' book .

I decided that I got to skip steps because I'm smart and I've done this before , and so I basically spent 2021 and the first quarter of 2022 treating this startup like it was a scale-up and over-operationalizing and overdoing all this stuff when I should have just been running the playbooks that I know to run . So that was kind of a good lesson .

It's now nice to be on the other side of that and actually building operating systems for the operating system company .

What makes a platform business versus not ? How do you look at that ?

So at the center we have our holding company and our holding company think about that like the sun . And so the holding company it basically just holds our interest in these other businesses . There's not really a lot of assets sitting there except for our kind of general awesomeness .

Right , mine and my business partners , like the knowledge that we do , I guess to a certain extent rests in that holding company . But the holding company doesn't have brands , it doesn't have IP , it doesn't have any of that traditional . It's just an entity that holds other entities .

Now we've got a management company that's connected to it , that handles all of the payroll and finance and accounting across all of our other companies , but in general it's not building and creating a lot of unique value .

The value creation happens at the planet level , and so at the planet , that's what we're thinking about one of these platform companies that can very easily birth other brands . So think about those as moons . So let me give you an example of digital marketer .

So digital marketer was a planet and orbiting around digital marketer was a moon called Traffic and Conversion Summit . There are also certifications , which is a separate thing , and there's a licensed practitioner .

Any one of these moons could , if they got big enough , eventually spin out and kind of become their own planet , and so what we're happy to do is to sell off the moons .

But the planets themselves , if they have the ability to create new moons because they're media and they're publishing , we don't necessarily want to sell that , and so the scalable company is another platform business . But not only do we have the ability to create additional moons , but we can also acquire them in Private equity spin-offs yeah . Thanks guys .

A lot of people think I mean , I've got to come up with a product or something to sell . You do , and certainly you need to know that you can deliver value . But if you can aggregate attention , then you can monetize that attention . If you never create a product or service , you can monetize that attention in simplest form through advertising , right ?

So the most critical business challenge that must be solved is the aggregation of attention , and you're either going to do that in the form of advertising , where you're basically paying somebody else who's aggregated the attention , or you're going to aggregate your own attention , or a combination of both , and so platform companies that are both aggregating attention and

monetizing attention . They just become this like I mean , truly , there's a lot of mass there and it can suck other things into it , and so if you think about Procter Gamble , for example , p&g , basically , if you look at just about any consumer brand that's on any shelf in any grocery store . It's probably owned by Procter Gamble .

So what is the attention that they've aggregated ? They've aggregated the attention of the buyer reps at all the major retailers . So P&G comes out with another product and , yeah , they've got great advertising relationships and things like that .

But what they can do is call up all the largest grocery stores in Walmart and say , hey , so this right next to the dial soap , we want you to take the two inches next to it and put slot this product in as well . Boom , instant distribution . So now is P&G a media company ? No , that's why I'm using that as an example of one that doesn't .

It doesn't have to . But a platform business is any business that is effectively aggregating and monetizing attention such that it is becoming its own kind of self-fulfilling engine . But more times than not . It looks like media . Most of the brands that you see out there , like the Rock and people like that , they're that have a lot .

And George Clooney , right , who've launched , whether it's like liquor brands . Ryan Reynolds , right with men like he's , the planet Got it . That's kind of the cool thing that you're seeing happening with a lot of celebrities . They're realizing holy crap , I've aggregated all this attention . Why monetize my attention through movie deals exclusively ?

You know I can have that company , that my management company , that does that . Why not also have my own brands and create multiple planets swirling around ?

Then it became digital marketer and digital marketer was very front and center , and then obviously now building a brand on as scalable , like it's been cool to see that evolution , and now it feels like that's catching very mainstream with all the influences you're talking about .

Like these platform businesses , they're realizing like , okay , I don't need to create this under my name . In fact , it's going to be way more valuable if I don't and I can use my name and my influence to create this , this moon or whatever , but you know it's not actually tied to to them . I want to , you know , maybe finally circle back to this book .

This is really fun . They're not on the business side , do you see ? This is almost like a reinvention , like something you keep . You mentioned at the very beginning of this . Our chat was people still talk to , talk to me like are referring to me as like the digital marketer guy or the marketing guy .

Is this book almost like a public coming out party of like hey , scalable , like almost like a , something that you're using to reinvent and change the narrative , or is that a misread ?

you know , am I ashamed of you ? Know my marketing pass , right , Marketing is basically my favorite people I'm finding so . So it's not , it's not one of these things . Like you know , you got Matthew McConaughey that had to completely slough off his like romcom image .

I'm happy to still do the romcoms , and so what it is , it's more trying to expose people who already know me as saying like I can do this now too , like I can help you in this area as well , and so the people who already know , like and trust me , the people who've gotten benefit from you , know my , my , my teaching , and , and you know models and

frameworks on the digital marketer side , they're going like oh , holy crap , like you can help with this too . Yeah , I can't . Great .

What it is really doing , though , is opening us up to a new audience that we didn't have before , and so the majority of the leads , the majority of like the conversations that our team is having with people they don't know who Ryan Dice is and I'm throwing up the air quotes because , speaking for those of you who are just listening because , speaking of yourself ,

they don't know who Ryan Dice is . They don't , they don't necessarily know or care about digital marketer , and so I think that we're accomplishing a bit of a of a broadening of the audience for the people who do know the Ryan Dice and the digital marketer brand , while , at the same time , bringing in and attracting a totally new audience .

But yeah , I mean to you and I'll have to tell you this man , you're the master of this . The best way to plan a flag is with a book . There's almost no better way to do it than with a book . So so , yes , it is serving that purpose .

We talked about it was really interesting the invisible selling machine , like when we talked about how you created that book and I still talk about that interview how you did the multiple webinars and you catered to what worked well for you , which was creating webinars and then using that to create chapters and stuff like that .

But I mean , that's been an anchor point and then maybe less so . But to some extent , digital marketing for dummies is probably more of a brand play . But I guess , when it comes to launching the scalable book , like , how are you launching this and what are you changing , kind of based on what you've learned from previous books ?

We don't have results yet , but when I was going back and doing research on the business books that have performed the best , the ones that make the list , and it goes back to what you said , your brother's comment , right , building that foundation .

There are so many people I know who have come out and have launched their book into a group of people that nobody knew who they were and they got a bunch of sales and then it was done . I remember back again , this helps like the Godfather thing .

So I remember when Tim Ferriss first launched the four hour work week , right , I was one of the people who Tim cold emailed and was like , oh , I would love for you to , you know , talk about my book and do this kind of stuff . And I'm , you know , I'm yeah , he held like a special event and invited me and a bunch of folks out , you know , out for it .

Like again , it's a hundred years ago . But the magic of that launch and you've seen this with some other books that have come around Hormozie with this , alex Hormozie with this first book a hundred million dollars offers . It was the same thing with that . It was the kind of book that had a unique hook how do you need twist ?

And people were excited to share it because we knew about something that nobody else knew about . And I think that's the kind of book that I'm going to talk about what nobody else knew about and it was kind of everybody's dirty little secret that we then got to share . So it actually increased the status to know about this book when other people don't .

And when I've seen books come out that have done well , it was more of a grass roots type thing . It was because not everybody knew about it . At the same time , the recommendation of the book was an increase of status on the part of the person who was recommending it . Now , compare that to when Tim came out and launched , I think , for our body .

Well , that was this massive campaign and this whole big production which made sense . He had the audience to support it . But at that point if I was gonna recommend the four hour body to somebody , I'd seem like a freaking idiot . Like , of course , I've heard of that book , it was everywhere .

So there's no social benefit in recommendation and I wanted to write a book that would be recommended . I wanted to write a book that would be referred .

I wanted to write a book that , if somebody said , yeah , I mean I'm kind of struggling , we're sort of stuck in need to improve my operating system Somebody say , oh well , get Scalable , is the book , if you want to get scalable , right .

It was why the title like I can write sexier titles than that , but I wanted it to speak to the end result and I wanted the entire marketing strategy is how do we drive referrals , how do we drive references ? And you should check this out . And so this launch is gonna take place over the next 12 to 18 months .

I wanted to be everybody's dirty little secret for a good long while .

I've got a big email list , many of them , but I don't wanna do massive email blasts about this book . I would much rather people find out about it through somebody else and then they get kind of reintroduced to me , even the people on my own list . So , yeah , so it's going out , man , it's blocking and tackling . It's a lot of freaking work .

I mean I wanted to be doing a hundred different podcasts and interviews over the next 12 months . It's gonna be a lot of work , but that's what I believe will allow it to gain traction within different audiences .

If the book is worthy and I believe it's why I've worked , tried , really , really hard to write a great book that somebody , when they recommend it to somebody else , the person is gonna be like thank you so much . This is amazing . This is exactly what I needed . This is better than even what I thought it was going to be .

So , step one , like you said yeah , it's to write a great book , because that's the kind of book that somebody feels like enthusiastic about recommending . And I wanted to write a book that was designed to be recommended , which I think is a good strategy when you're creating your first book in a new market .

Can you change behavior in a meaningful way ? Obviously , with the American Morning it's through a morning routine , and then that is such an anchor point that when people talk about or reference or whatever , they point back to that thing . And then he builds virality into the book itself by saying , hey

, the best way to implement your American Morning is to have somebody else do it with you for 30 days and make sure they get a copy of the book , right ?

So it's like how do you turn one book into three purchases or whatever else , which I think is why I really like this category of book that you're writing , because this is the perfect type of book that a CEO reads and then buys for their whole company . Like I can't tell you how it's like we've seen businesses get built on the back end of these books .

It's like scaling up traction profit first , like teach a methodology and then you market to the CEO and then market to the CEO through kind of grassroots what you're saying like CEO to CEO , like , hey , I want to increase my status . Hey , ryan , have you heard of this ? Get Scalable book , Wink , wink , don't tell anyone . I think you're going to really like it .

And then you buy it , read it , buy it for your whole team . Is there anything that you embedded in the book or in the market grassroots blocking and tackling marketing that you feel like will grease the wheels of that sure ability ?

So much of this book is built around our tool set and literally like what is in this book , in the flap of the book , like inside here it's like , okay , here's all of our tools , right , the tools that are in that book . And this book is what I would have sold in the past for $2,000 .

If this were another one like that tool set and the videos around it , no joke , as a course , couldn't , you know someone say should be sold for you know , a $2,000 thing ?

I'm giving it away in the book because what we want to generate is inbound lead flow from book readers , because I know the book readers are the most likely to implement , the people are the most likely to implement , because what we want , man first of all , is deals , so we want deal flow .

I'm not trying to turn this book into an international bestseller because , going back to the other ideal client profile , there's , you know , 5.91 million businesses in the US that have more than one employee but less than 100 . So that's kind of the TAM for this book . It's the total addressable market for this book .

It's a lot , but compared to , like , a diet book where the total addressable market is about 8 billion people , it's less . So I'm mostly interested in getting the right people reading it in their own time , and so the way to accomplish that is sort of to hold back and have it be the right person's dirty little secret . But what you said is dead on .

We're already getting people buying . You know who pre-bought because it doesn't come out until December 5th . But people who have kind of pre-bought it are coming in and saying can I buy a case of books ? I want to . You know , hand these out to the team we want to execute this whole thing as well as our .

We're building an army of licensed practitioners , so people who we've licensed on this methodology , who are going to go out and take it into different businesses , and you know they're buying multiple copies of the book to hand out as well .

But I didn't want any friction between the people reading the concept and then getting it and starting to use it . Right , because , to your point , habit changes everything , right ? And if we can get people to start utilizing the tools and getting results , that's when they'll talk , that's when they'll share .

So I guess that's I mean I guess we did , maybe that that maybe is where the shareability comes into play . Hey , you should check out this tool . I got it from the book the tools and the worksheets , right .

It's like they've got the worksheets and I start doing them and I start embedding , and then you put it in your team rhythms and even to this day that I'd have CEO is like hey , what's that ?

You turn that thing into like a Google doc , can you send me that and just , and then they get it , and then they read the book and then they buy the two , and so it just like it really creates that grassroots virality which I think is kind of what you're going for here . I want to go a couple of quick questions and then we'll wrap up .

Next one would be we got a question from one of our listeners . Rob says do you have any advice on promoting a book when you may not have a huge existing platform or following ? So I'm not Ryan Dice , and you've kind of already talked about this . You may have already answered this , but yeah , what's your ?

I have a big audience and a big list because we spend a lot of money on advertising and and then figure out how to , you'll figure out how to monetize it . You spend the money , you'll figure out how to monetize it . So so that is , that is the first thing I would do .

And then also , yeah , doing everything that you can to get on , to get on podcasts with the right type of people . Like , so I'm not , I'm not trying to get on , you know , do interviews with people who maybe have the biggest audiences .

I want the right kind of people who who , I think , will actually read the book and you know , and consume it and try to be intentional about where do I start and where do you know , where do we , we finish up . But I think you know I am not the playbook on booksells , that you know you got the thing for that .

But I just everybody underrates advertising and I would advertise the bejesus out of the book and then just I think the decision to make is do you want to advertise it and sell it yourself so you get the lead and you can do a book funnel and all that other stuff , or do you want to advertise it to drive sales on a platform like Amazon ?

We're choosing to drive the , you know . We're choosing to do both because we have the resources to do both . But if I had to pick , I would probably pick trying to drive , you know , doing some basic Amazon ad spend and getting on those , getting on those podcasts . But if I were just getting started I needed to make some money to put back in .

I'd sell the book direct from my own site , get them in my funnel , sell them higher ticket services and use that to fuel kind of more the brand play in the expansion .

So you have the ability to do book funnels around it , to sell on Amazon , to kind of do whatever you want .

Well , guys , if you want to submit a question or a guest idea for the future , just comment on this video on the YouTube channel or submit a review on the podcast on Spotify or Apple podcast with your question or guests that you want to see on the podcast .

Ryan closing question what would be your parting piece of advice for someone who's thinking about writing a book , kind of knowing what you know now , doing it to start a platform or to scale your platform company ? What would be kind of your parting piece of advice ?

I think it's important to get ideas out there into the world and to let those ideas get kind of beat up . Let them get slapped around a little bit . Have people disagree with you and see how you can defend them . Have people express uncertainty or confusion and come and talk to them and follow them . They're like , oh , I can see their eyes line up .

So I believe that , certainly if we're talking about nonfiction books , I think that every book should begin as a talk , as a webinar . It's the idea . The power of the book is in the power of the idea , and the idea is only as good as the feedback that you've received by putting it out there into the world .

So please don't hold it back like it's something Uber , ultra precious . Nobody remembers . The world doesn't . Don't just have this as like some precious artifact that you want to put out there . Just writing is creating and there's nothing I've done that's harder than writing a freaking book . It's just like I'm a perfectionist and I've pain over everything .

I cannot imagine if I was trying to just sit there and start from a blank page . It wouldn't get done . So no blank pages . Start getting your ideas out there , let the world smack them around . Don't take it personally . Be appreciative of the feedback , get better from it and then , when you still don't think you're ready , write the book anyway .

the operating system your business needs to run and scale without you . By the time you're watching or listening to this , it's just came out or maybe you're listening this way after this podcast was released and it's definitely out . Then Grab a copy , ryan .

Where can people go to get a copy of the book or to find out more about the scalable company or whatever would be most helpful .

But if you want help actually implementing the stuff in the book I mean there's links inside the book about that but the main corporate site for the company itself is Scalableco . Wish we could have got thecom , but Scalableco is where you can go to learn , see more about what we're doing on the Scalable front .