429. The Unexpected Guide to Digital Marketing with Ryan Deiss [Encore Edition]

Marketing is not going to fix a bad business. All right, great marketing will only accelerate the demise of a bad business. That's Ryan Dice, CEO of DigitalMarketer and one of the most dynamic speakers on marketing today. It is an amplifier, it is a fuel, it is an accelerant, it's like alcohol, right? If you're a jerk, alcohol is going to make you a bigger jerk. I'm Michael Mogul, founder and CEO of Crisp, the nation's number one law from growth company. I've built my business through practice, not theory. Crisp started which is $500 to my name and has grown to over eight figures in revenue over the last few years. Earning a spot on the ink 500 lists of the fastest growing private companies in America. Our approach has been to take everything we've learned about generating massive growth within our own organization and help the country's most ambitious and committed law firm owners do the same for theirs. In each episode of this podcast, I sit down with innovative market leaders from the legal industry and beyond to learn from those who thrive in the face of adversity, challenge the status quo and define what it means to be a true game changer. Today, we're revisiting one of our most popular episodes from the podcast where I sat down with Ryan Dice to discuss what all successful business leaders have in common and marketing strategies that actually work. Great marketing must get people to not just notice, but to stare. It's coming up on the Game Changing Attorney podcast. Before we begin today's episode, I want to remind you that we aren't beholden to any sponsors or run any ads on this podcast. This allows us to present all of our episodes raw and unfiltered. I'm not going to push any made-to-order meal services on you or try to save you any money on your car insurance. That being said, I have one small request. If you receive any value from this podcast, please give it a five-star review. Pay the fee so we can keep this podcast free. Ryan Dice is the CEO of Digital Marketer, one of the largest and most highly regarded authorities in marketing today. He's not only an expert at what works when it comes to marketing, he's also a seasoned entrepreneur who took the stairs on his way to success. I didn't start off as a marketer. I just wanted money. I launched my first business from my freshman college dorm room because I just literally was broke. It was 1999. The internet was new. I was like, maybe I could sell some stuff here. Originally, I marketed myself as a web designer. That was how I got my start. I was terrible, by the way, but I believe we're past the statute of limitations, which your audience would appreciate. But I had a pirated version of Adobe Go Live that my roommate had gotten for me. I could figure out how to design some really, really, really ugly websites. I tried so-and-off in services at a hard time getting clients. The only client I could get, not kidding, was a lactation consultant. Here I am 19 years old building a website for one with like, you know, post and like, breast pumps and all this other kind of. It was a little bit awkward for a 19-year-old kid. I know I have four kids, by the way, very thankful for those people. Very long story short, she wasn't able to pay me. Her husband lost his job. She had to go back to work. She wasn't able to pay me, but she had written this little ebook on how to make your own baby food. Brilliant woman, like really looking back on it so, so, so, so smart and thoughtful because what she realized is, okay, I'm going to help these women, you know, these new moms nurse. Like I'm going to show them how to breastfeed. That's what lactation consultants do for those of you who don't know. But once I've shown them how to do that, they're kind of done with me. So I want to get into childhood nutrition. She was thinking beyond the initial sale, which just that right there, there's a lesson, right? She was thinking beyond that initial sale. So she wanted to get into childhood nutrition and teach these moms also how to make their own baby food. Well, I didn't know anything about this, but, you know, she basically said here, hopefully you can sell this, you know, little ebook and make some money. I'm really sorry I can't pay you. So the very first website that I ever built was an ebook on how to make your own baby food. And charge 14 bucks. It made, you know, a few hundred dollars in the first like month I was selling. I was like, this is kind of what I want to do. And a few years later, that's all that's what I was doing. I graduated from a college had about a hundred of these little websites. And next thing, you know, people started asking me how I was doing it. And that's kind of how I got into talking about marketing. But it was definitely a circuitous route to where we are today. And it's always interesting. This is when I speak to people who are entrepreneurial from an early age and, you know, it's like, you're just doing what seems natural to you that you don't really think about yourself like entrepreneur. Like, you know, this is an early day. Shark tank not exist. Entrepreneurs not a very like, let's say a cool topic. But it's interesting kind of the naivete that many of us had. I know I had when you're doing something entrepreneurial, but then when it starts to really build and grow, you start to realize you might be a bit ill equipped to actually run a business and grow an organization. Oh, yeah. I mean, entrepreneurs to me, they've got to have this perfect combination of being naive but overconfident, right? Because if somebody would have said, which a lot of people did later, you can never sell an ebook, you know, you're a downloadable PDF. That's like 20 something pages. You can't sell that for $14. That's what real book sell for. I might have believed him. You know, thankfully, I wasn't asking anybody their opinion. Who would I have talked to? My roommate, you know, he didn't know anything either. So, you know, I was just ignorant enough to try it and just overconfident enough to think it might work to put in the effort. But then what's interesting because we are someone ignorant because if we did take the full ad everything up and get crystal clear on it before we move forward, you know, we might not do it. We get out on the skinny branches sometimes. And so I think a lot of entrepreneurs, yeah, that's why a lot of entrepreneurs have that imposter syndrome. I know I did. And I do think that it's this constant battle between being overconfident and then being omniposter. I'm overconfident and imposter. And that's called my entire adult life, like waffling between those two. We all have, or at least for many not to be sure that I speak with it, it seems like we have like these catalyst moments, or almost like refiki moments. You know, like refiki even the Lion King and symbols running through the jungle and you kind of looks up at the star sees his father and kind of realizes who he's meant to be. But those moments often come when we're experiencing a great deal of diversity and probably a turning point where there's also a lot of pain. And I know that there's a moment that you referenced when you experienced this moment, you even kind of, I think you framed the napkin as well. But if you could speak to what that experience was, well, there's been a couple. I'll tell the specific story. You're talking about, but you're right. Every time I've experienced a real significant kind of leveling up, it wasn't because of some great discovery while I just like went and took a, you know, one week, you know, or two week offsite and just was there with my thoughts. It's like, no, back against the wall, nowhere to go before it and punching was when I've done it. And I've gotten better at not putting myself in that situation. Like I've gotten better at being a bit more certain. Like how do we have a strategic crisis, I guess? But yeah, I know. First time I launched that website was back in 1999 because I couldn't pay rent. Like literally rent was coming due. I was on full grant scholarships and I had a part time job and my grant check, I didn't know if it was going to arrive. So it's like, I got to do something to make some money and just fast forward like everything that I did. Like I don't think I would have done that had it not been for that moment. You reference the napkin, which yeah, it is framed. I mean, I was, it was 2006. So now you figure I made my first sale online in 1999, graduated from college in 2003, got married the weekend after. At this point, I think I'm, you know, God's gift to marketing in the business world, right? I'm doing pretty well. Well, a lot of the stuff that I was doing was relying upon the Google algorithms and it was SEO based and I woke up one morning and literally all my websites were gone, gone, wiped from the face of the Google universe. I went from making really, really good, predictable income without having to do anything to make nothing. And I've battled for a year to try to figure out how to make it work. Well, here I am in 2006 at the Hilton Anatole in Dallas, Texas and I am about a quarter million dollars in debt from trying to make this work, not telling my wife because we just had a brand new baby. I didn't want her to know that I was, you know, racking up so much debt and utterly failing. I figured I would get it fixed, but I'm sitting there at this bar and I'm like, I'm done. I can't. I don't have any more, I can't get any more money, you know, like this was pre-crash, right, pre-financial crisis. So if you could fog a mirror, you could get a line of credit. Well, I had two lines of credit from two different banks and had maxed out all the credit cards. I was done a quarter million dollars in consumer debt. I was, there was no more to be had. And I remember sitting there at this bar, it was funny. And I just recalled this conversation I had with a buddy months prior and we were just the casual conversation like, isn't it amazing how many business ideas are started on the back of an napkin, right, whether it's Southwest Airlines or, you know, you hear all the stories, right? And I don't know why, but that, that, that, the memory of that conversation popped into my head at that moment and I looked up and sure enough, there was a stack of napkins sitting there on the bar. And so I just looked at it and I stared at it and I went, okay, if I can't write on a napkin, how my business works, how it makes money, then if I can't do this, I'm going to give myself, you know, basically until I finish this next drink, if I can't write how, how my business works and how I make money on this napkin, then I'm just going to go to bed, wake up in the morning and ask for my whole job back and probably declare bankruptcy. That was, that was basically my plan. And if I can, then I'm going to work this plan until I'm completely out of money and, and that's that. And so I did a bar, I depend from the bartender. I scribbled a very, very simple sales funnel on a napkin and I said, you know what, I should just do this. And that was, you know, a jokingly call in my mind. million dollar napkin because that was the first year that I wanted generating million dollars in revenue work in that napkin. But yeah, it's been in my back spin against the wall. I wish it weren't that way. I wish I could get better, but that's when we level up. It's interesting in that simplification because I think one of the tenants of digital marketing is that, you know, when you're teaching and training people that, you're only going to focus on teaching them what's proven, you know, so that it's always that your team is investing a lot of marketing dollars and a lot of energy on marketing tests and determining what works, what doesn't work. And I think over the years, you guys invested over 15 million dollars on various marketing tests. So I'm sure you have no shortage of data and insights. But when you boil it down, if you look at all the 15 million dollars with the test, what are the key trends and takeaways? Like what, what works? What you just said there, I think it's important. I kind of want to, you know, maybe put a pin in that because I think that's important. I used to, and the way I got myself in so much trouble was chasing all the tricks, all the tactics, all the shiny objects. And it wasn't until I sat down, I said, okay, what am I doing that actually works? I don't care if it isn't cool. I don't care if it isn't hip. I don't care if it isn't like a TikTok strategy, whatever. Like what am I doing that just actually works? Okay, I'm just going to do this. And so to your point, like that's what I did when I wrote that napkin. Like when I, when I scribbled it out, there was nothing cool, nothing sexy about it. Nobody would have been overly impressed by it, but it worked and it was proven. And I tried a bunch of stuff that didn't work. And I narrowed it down to only the things that did and digital marketers the same way, right? We're rarely the first to talk about something because we want to go out and do it and make sure that it actually, that it actually works. But at the end of the day, it's amazing. Tactics come and tactics go. And these little things that will work for a moment, these little tricks, these little hacks, those are inefficiencies in the market that close up and they go fast. At the end of the day, the only thing that matters is who's the person who's able and willing to spend the most to get a customer. I mean, that's it. That is what marketing at the end of the day comes down to marketers like to brag about their conversion rates, screw your conversion rates. I don't care how high you compare to what? Like, you know, what are you selling? What's your price point? But they like to brag about their high conversion rates. They like to brag about, you know, their ROI. They like to brag about the cheapest clicks. Don't brag about that. Bragg about how much you're able to spend to acquire a customer because you've engineered your business in such a way that that customer is worth more. Right. I'm more impressed than the people that are able to spend more than me, not the people that are able to figure out some trick or hack to spend less. There's a lot to unpack there. And right, I feel like we just upset a lot of listeners because there's something probably let out like a collective like grown, if you will, because they're going to learn some, like some tactic or some trick or just something to give them an edge. Like, you know, Ryan, where's the edge? And I'm curious to what your thoughts are because it seems like a lot of the marketing community and even, you know, many entrepreneurs, they almost seem like obsessed with chasing that next trick, whatever that next trend is or whatever it might be. Why do you think that is? I think different people chase it for different reasons. Some people chase it because it's this blind hope. The same reason people buy lottery tickets. Right. I think some people chase it because it's fun. Like truly, like I know people who are independently wealthy, they've got great businesses and they still are calling me like, oh, would you hear about this new thing? Like, why do I care and why do you care? So I think if I don't want to suggest that everybody who's chasing these things are doing it for because of basically, like, delusional unicorn chasers, but unfortunately, I think way too many people looking for a shortcut. Right. And that only never works. And I get it. Like, I know that it's not that trick, but if you can spend more time saying like, how can I make a customer worth more to me? And by the way, usually the way that that happens is by figuring out new and better ways to serve them by starting with the customer working backwards. Right. By starting with what is a customer worth normally? Right. Because this is just let's get really, really simple with math. All right. If your customer is worth half of what my customer is worth, then I can spend twice as much as you to acquire that customer and still make the same margin. Right. That's just very, very basic math. Well, let's talk about something else. It's just kind of a known a click cost would a click costs. I get it. Somebody's got some trick. Somebody's got some hack where they're going to be able to get Facebook clicks or Instagram or clicks or YouTube or Google or whatever for way cheaper than anybody else. Even if that's true and it usually isn't, but even if it's true, it'll go away. Other people will find out that is a momentary inefficiency in the market that will close. It will close. So here's the deal. A click costs would a click costs. It just does. All right. And depending on the market that you're in, that click can be 600 bucks. Right. I mean, personal injury, misothelial, like some of these clicks are going to be incredibly expensive. Why? Because those customers are worth a lot. Those clients are worth a lot. If you're selling some type of like consumer apparel, a click may only be, you know, a buck 48. Right. The point is a click costs would a click costs. It's a commodity now. It's milk. It's eggs. It's bread. It's cheese. So let's simplify marketing. If you want eyeballs, if you want awareness, if you want traffic, whatever you call it, right. You go to the traffic store and you buy it. It's just as simple as that. Right now, the traffic store is called Google and the traffic store is called Facebook. Google and Facebook combined represent about 83% of all digital ad spend. Google and Facebook and Google includes Google search, Google content and work. It also includes YouTube, right. Which I know you know a thing or two about. And then Facebook, right. Facebook also includes Instagram. So between Google, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, that's 83% of all digital ad spend. Digital ad spend is more than 50% of all ad spend. So that's where you go right now. It's been consolidated. So the idea that I'm going to have some inefficiency, I'm going to have some gain. I'm going to get an edge on the buy side. You're not. There's no more edge to be had on the buy side. It just doesn't happen. Where do you get an edge? You get an edge by once you got them as a lead by following up better and gain more of those people to convert from a lead and do a prospect and do a client, right. But the big edge comes from how can I engineer the economics? How can I invest more people think that? Oh, marketing is done because I got the lead. No, it isn't. No, no more than like then you're done from a marriage perspective. Like you're done dating just because you're now married. I've been happily married for almost 20 years. If I just was like, yeah, honey, we're married now. I'm not going to take you out to dinner. That would not be good. But people do that to their clients and, you know, prospects all the time. I wonder why they don't ascend. So that's where as a marketer from a marketing perspective, that's where you need to focus. So click cost would click costs, focus on ascending the that traffic into prospects. And then by all means focus on getting those, those clients into becoming bigger and better clients and referring clients. So I'm glad you went there. Yeah. And I didn't know that you would. But you know, when you're kind of reading between the lines, a lot of what you're describing is at its core, you really should be focusing on a really strong business foundation because if you've got the right, let's say ascension lighter internally, you've got the right customer service, the right product, the right client experience, the strong brand, you will attract the best clients. But if you're trying to solve the marketing problem first and then the business is not fundamentally strong, then you're kind of approaching it backwards. Well, marketing is amplification, right? And so what are you amplifying? If you are just let's just, okay, can I, can I be mildly PG 13? Please? Okay. If you're an asshole, let's just say you're just a total prick, just a douchebag of the highest order. The worst thing in the world that you could do is talk to more women if you're trying to meet your bride, right? Let's say you're sincere, like I want to get married. I got, I want to meet the one. This is the year I want to meet the one. I'm trying to run around, but you're still a total freaking clown. All right. The worst thing you could do is talk to more people. You don't want to amplify what you are right now. You want to improve what you are right now. Then go out there and talk. Another analogy would just be plug the holes in the bucket before you keep filling it with water. So you have marketing, marketing is not going to fix a bad business. All right. Great marketing will only accelerate the demise of a bad business. It is an amplifier. It is, it is a fuel. It is an accelerant. All right. And so it's like alcohol, right? It's like money, frankly, money's an accelerant, right? We all know people who got rich and got became worse versions of themselves. You know, people got rich and became better versions of themselves. Marketing is an accelerant. It is an amplifier. You make sure that what you have is worthy of amplification before you ask marketing to fix it. And conversely on the other side, if you do have something, you know, I'd say that you have confidence in, you have confidence in your product, the service, you have confidence in your team, then it seems like there wouldn't be a limit to the amount you'd be willing to, to invest in it. And actually this is interesting because, you know, when you're in any periods of, of scary times, when people are pulling back on, on ad span and pulling back on marketing, and, you know, we were looking at it from the standpoint of I'm looking to save money right now. This is, you know, this is a scary time. And yet the ones that seem to get ahead and kind of make the greatest leaps during those moments are the ones that double down the most. And I know like with digital marketer, I mean, you guys are relentless in sending emails like all day long, but I'm never, I'm never annoyed by the emails. I'm never bothered by them. In fact, I'm always sharing them with the team because I'm like, look, these guys, literally I said before emails today and I'm not bothered by any of it because they're all great emails. Yeah. Well, so there's two things there. There's that you mentioned that I think are both, I think you're right on both. I think they're worthy of addressing separately because they're important. The first is investing and doubling down even when times are scary and rough. That's one thing. The second though that I think is an easier one is, yeah, look, if you believe in what you're doing, why wouldn't you market that kind of it? Right. This idea that, oh, I'm going to be so good that they'll find me. That's never happened. That has never happened. That is a myth that artists tell other poor artists literally the best kept secret. Yeah. Oh, oh, yeah. you know, it's so good. It speaks for itself. No, it doesn't. It lays their motionless. Yes, people, marketing, advertising, that is the only thing that is going to speak. Most people know who Vincent Van Gogh is. Right? He heard Vincent Van Gogh, right? What people don't realize is that there would be no Van Gogh if there was no Theo or Johnna. Like Theo was his brother and he was his vamp. He was the person who was out there. You know, while he was alive, he was trying and after their death, the only reason anybody knows who they are is because they're like, this guy is great. The great artist had somebody trumpeting them, Picasso. Picasso was a marketer who was an amazing artist and it is the same for your business. Nobody else is going to talk about you. Nobody's going to talk about you. They're only ever going to talk about themselves. So if you're not going to talk about you, you're not going to hire somebody to talk about you, you know, agency or PR or whatever, nobody's going to talk about you. I don't care how great you are. The best product. It's maybe it should. Right? You could talk about whether or not this is an injustice, but if you truly believe the best product should win, then create the best product and market the crap out of it. But living in some delusional law, where it's like, oh, all I have to do is create the best product and it'll win. That's just not how life works. And hopefully with this audience, you know, they get that, right? I think we're dealing with a pretty pragmatic crowd here, but I often talk to people who are a little bit more, you know, artistic and there's like, oh, I just, but it works so hard. It doesn't matter. People have lives. So yeah, if you believe in something, you got to market the heck out of it. I don't get offended when marketers market, you know, I think I think they should when business people talk about their business and they, you know, you should, if you believe in it, you'll market it. And the people who say, oh, I shouldn't do that. Those are just people who have their own fears about rejection and they're trying to and basically impose them on you. And I, by the way, I understand why somebody would be nervous to do that. I'm the worst marketer of my own stuff, but at least I know it. Like, at least I know I'm wrong. It's when people take some type of like moral high ground like you shouldn't do it that it pisses me off. So that was kind of the first thing that the other thing about marketing hard, you know, in scary times, I have lots of friends who were like, well, what do you think? Like, you know, when kind of COVID hit and something else, I'm like, well, I think we're going to pull our ad budget. I said the same thing to all of them. I said, were you live in 2008? I wish you'd bought some real estate. Yeah. Like before everything or right afterwards, yeah, right after I wish I would have done it. Okay. Well, we're increasing our ad budget. So you do you, again, it's easy to say, I'm sympathetic. I understand why people are fearful. I understand why when things get scary, whether it's an external event or an internal event. But if your economics makes sense, if people buy and that's the only way that you're going to grow, I've never seen a business just grow without, you know, investing in that growth in some form of advertising. And when we talk about marketing, and I say it's just for clarity because we don't just mean digital marketing and someone, you know, here's they do radio advertising, TV, billboards and so on. I mean, I had a guest on the podcast that he said that what he does, he really doesn't consider it marketing, but he's given a presentation to his audience of lawyers one a week every week for 10 years straight. Yeah, that sounds like marketing to me. Yeah. Now, all these things. So, you know, advertising, I see advertising as being kind of a subset of the broader category of marketing, marketing's job is to move customers through the customer journey, right? From that initial point of awareness through that engagement and that nurturing to getting them to take that first step, to getting them to actually kind of, you know, complete and become a client, to making sure that they're served and that the promises are delivered. Like, a lot of times, marketing is like cool, hot potato. I'm out. You take it sales, you know, or you take it product. No, no, no, no, marketing needs to stay engaged throughout that to make sure that the promises that were made are delivered upon and then marketing is come around at the end to get customer stories to get those testimonials. It's hopefully get some referrals. So, marketing's job is to own the entirety of the customer journey. I see advertising and sales actually as subsets of marketing sales people hate, hate it when I say that. People who consider themselves to be like admin, you know, and radio, they hate it when I say that. I think it's right. That advertising is that first stage of amplification, right? It's a specific lever that you can pull. Same with sales. You know, a lot of sales right now is certainly when you think about e-commerce is being reset completely. People are just going on and buying. That won't happen in every field, but marketing is the field that remains because marketing owns the entirety of that of that customer journey. I think it's important. I think it's here and I don't think that it's constrained by any, any particular medium. But right now the whole world is digital, especially in a world where people are kind of scared to go out and hug each other and meet face to face and stuff like that. And even when everybody is like, "Yeah, let's go do it." I think everybody's going to have a preference for, "I don't have to leave my house. Now, if I don't have to talk to somebody on the phone, then yeah, let's just chat here." So, we see ourselves as digital marketers, but if I'm being honest, I even think the term itself is going to be a bit pesse. What is in digital these days? Right? So, I want to go back to something you mentioned earlier. And you mentioned that, "Here she is able to spend the most to acquire a customer will win." And I agree wholeheartedly. And I think that when you think about that, to be able to spend the most to acquire a customer client, you have to have clients that have a strong lifetime value or high value clients, if you will. But with that comes perhaps different messaging. And I think it's very important when you're marketing the brand or how you're positioning that. And I think that's what I think is very important. businesses are necessarily noble. But boy, it sure is nice to be able to provide a living for other people. It's nice to be able to create a product or a service from scratch and deliver it to somebody who needs it. That's a really, really good thing. And so I think at the end of the day, there are inventors and there are entrepreneurs. And the difference is I think inventors, very often they just want to make stuff because they just like the idea of making things and they want to see if it can happen. And I think that with entrepreneurs, they want to make it. They want to bring it to market because they got to know does anybody else agree with them? Does anybody else think that this should be here? And that just constant, okay, they knew that one. Now, now what about the next one? That's the thing that I see with entrepreneurs, the ones that are true entrepreneurs who people call it a serial entrepreneur. I don't like that term. It's like, no, I think you're just an entrepreneur. It just is what you are. - And on the other side of that, what have you seen as some of the commonalities behind some of the least successful entrepreneurs? - You know, when I think about the people that are not a successful, usually it's all about me and I want this thing. So they're coming at it, seeing it purely as a way that they can get something that they want. And so they don't think about their customers at all. And they're essentially choosing business because they're afraid of robbing a bank. And I have seen people that are just flat out larceness in that way and because they don't serve the clients, because they don't serve their customers, they do get found out. That's one end of the spectrum. Because we're all gonna have a little bit of selfishness in us, because we want the thing that we want. That's what drives us. But at some point it's gotta switch and you gotta actually care, genuinely and sincerely care about your customer. The other big thing that I've seen in the, you know, least successful entrepreneurs is they're just so afraid of failure. They're so afraid of looking foolish that they never get out of the starting blocks. And those to me are kind of more the inventors. Those are the two extremes. You've got a lot of entrepreneurs who, I think they just haven't found their thing yet. And so I wouldn't say that they're not successful as long as they're still in the fight, then to me they're successful. It just hasn't happened yet. It hasn't clicked yet, but it's a matter of time, it's a matter of reps, it's a matter of sets, you know, they're going to get there. Really the ones that I see who are that I would define as an unsuccessful entrepreneur are the ones that just never, they never do anything because they're so afraid of failure or the ones that just are so unbelievably selfish. And interestingly enough, the seeds of both of those are selfishness just manifesting in two very different ways. - It's interesting, both the types of entrepreneurs that you've described. So it's interesting in the sense that if you were someone who's, let's say, primarily selfish or just solely motivated by money, I actually find that those entrepreneurs don't get as far because they can get to a certain point and they let their foot off the gas versus the entrepreneur that's just always thinking about what's next in the future. And so on, there's no amount of money that they will ever stop, they will ever tire. And then they're always thinking long game, they're thinking five, 10, 20 years out and then they also make different decisions as a result of that. So I think one, that's incredibly fascinating. But I'd also like to kind of look at it from the standpoint of almost like where passion plays a role or more so, I think we're alignment. I think that's probably a better word for it in the sense that if you have to ask, is this for me? It seems like that's probably not it. But I don't want to like also skirt away from the fact that there's going to be really tough days and difficult times and days that you won't enjoy getting out of bed. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, I mean, look, I'm a dad, father of four kids. I love my kids. There's days I don't enjoy being a dad. Right, it's like, so I mean, I think that goes with anything and it doesn't mean I don't love them, it doesn't mean I'm not a good dad. But it's like, I don't want to go to that soccer game today. Or they were just little punks, right? Like they split, so that's a part of it. That comes with anything. Like anything is going to have that aspect of it. But I do think like what's tough about business is when we first start, it's because there's something that we want. And so I visualize it as like this big circle and that's us and the business is kind of a smaller circle within the bigger circle, right? But then something happens if it's successful, that big circle gets bigger and bigger and bigger and eventually consumes what is now the smaller circle that is us. And so that can be tough, really, because then you are your business and your business is you. And I think that can also be really, really, really dangerous where you don't really have an identity separate from your business. I've seen this happen with a lot of entrepreneurs. And so what you have to do is we get to really pull these things apart and allow them to become a bit of a Venn diagram, right? With there's overlap, there's got to be overlap. I think one of the hardest things in the world for entrepreneurs to do is to have their own life and their own identity outside of their business. Because if you don't, then that's when I think you can really get burned out. That's when a failure in business, you know, isn't just a financial hardship, but it now becomes this personal failure. And so that's where sometimes passion is anything, right? Anything taken to the extreme. If you ever want to know the thing that will ultimately destroy you, it's the thing that currently you're the best at, right? The thing that makes you special is the thing that will ultimately destroy you. And the better you are at something that more extreme, those things will be, right? Normal, ordinary, boring people. They don't have anything that will destroy them because they don't have anything that makes them particularly great. But if you got something that makes you great, the inverse of that is likely the thing that will destroy you. And I think for entrepreneurs, it is that passion, right? Is that passion? It's that thing that keeps them going. But if you're not careful, that passion can result in a loss of identity. I think Victor Frankl called it an existential void, where we don't know. And I've been in that place too. I've been in that place too, or it's like, why am I doing this anymore? I do have everything. I'm tired. And I don't understand. I remember my wife one time coming to me because I started all this for her. The whole reason I really started my first business was to buy her an engagement ring. Literally. I met her and I was like, I don't have any money. I first did it because I need to make some, I was broke and just need to make some money. And then I was only going to do this couple of projects. Pay the rent. It's like, now I need to keep doing this thing because I'm at this girl and I want to buy an engagement ring. That was a reason behind it. It's like, okay, we're going to have kids and I want to be able to get them house and all the stuff that they want, you know, and provide this lifestyle, right? That's what was driving me. So that was my why. And then we had all that, but I was still going. I was still going, going, going, going, going. I remember she came to me one night and she said, you can keep working like you're working. That's fine. I know who I'm married, but you can no longer say that you're doing it for us because we're good. We just want more of you. And oh man, that was crushing because I realized like, I'm not doing this for them. And I don't know if I'm really even doing it for me. I don't know why I'm doing it. And what had happened is the business had consumed me and I had to separate the two. And that's a painful process. It really, really is. But I do think I do think that that's something that's successful entrepreneurs, particularly I need to be careful of. Man, we could do a whole podcast on that, on that very topic because it's like, how do you balance this commitment to excellence? Because I feel like you need these people in the world, but you need these amazing entrepreneurs that like not only just push forward innovation, but create great things and great impacts and great communities and just, and so on. And really just allow everyone to move forward, but at the same time, not allow it to work against you and not really destroy you. How do you balance the two? So for me, it's having a partner in life who calls me on it. And look as humans, we're going to show commitment in two ways. I teach this in marketing, right? We're going to show commitment in our wallets and we show commitment in our calendars. So from a business, from a marketing perspective, right? I want to get my prospects, my clients. I want to be in their calendars, right? I want them blocking off time, you know, to listen to my podcast, you know, to come into the office, right? I want them paying me, even if it's a little bit of money, right? If I'm in their wallet and I'm in their calendar, then there's a commitment there, you know, we got a relationship. That applies to our personal things too. So, you know, one of the things that I do is I, my wife and I, we basically do an off-site, right? We go away from the kids and, and twice a year at the end of the year and then around in the summer. And we plan out our year. And it's, okay, you got first dibs of the calendar. When do we want to take the family vacations? Let's block it out. We don't have to know where we're going. But like, when are we going to take it? Let's, let's block these times off. And, yeah, I mean, you know, she knows, like, you know, trapping the person in our big event is scheduled years in advance. So she's not going to ask me to move that. We can go around that. But in general, like, I want to make sure that family, if I'm going to say that that's my first priority, I got to give it my first priority in my calendar, you know, in terms of, you know, money and investment. If she's saying, like, we don't need anymore, then I'm spending more time than I can say, like, well, I'm trying to put more money in the business bank account, you know, and less time here. Like, I got to check that. So having somebody in your life who can call you on your own, yes, I think is really important. Because especially as business leaders, you know, we're going to be surrounded by people who just nod their heads and say, yes, we're going to be surrounded by people who very often are aligned, you know, if it's your company and you've got junior partners, they're going to want to go, go, go, too, because they're not yet where you are and they want to be where you are. And so you're getting this kind of upward push, you know, from the, from the people on your team and in-inverse. And so you just kind of kind of have to have open conversations and acknowledge that there is some conflict there. And you're not going to get it right all the time. I still definitely don't balance. Looks like a whole lot of whips saw back and forth, but the average is somewhere in the middle. What makes it special is we play at the edges. We're not afraid to dance on the skinny branches, but you can't stay out of the skinny branches the whole time. And Ryan, how do you define success? To be success is all about optionality, right? If I've got options that I'm successful, when I think about the people who are in like war-torn countries, right, who are in these really just awful situations, they don't have options, they don't have the internet, they don't have running water, you know, they're in a survival state. That's terrible. What technology has given us? us is options. You think about the entertainment options that you have, the communication options that you have, the travel options that we have. Options. That is what an abundant life looks like is having options. And maybe with that is having the option to do nothing at all that give a day. You know, the option for leisure, which I think is critically important. But I know that I am in a really good place when it doesn't mean that I'm not doing things that don't want to do. Because what I've done is I've chosen the things that I'm going to be a slave to. Like I've chosen that I'm going to allow my children to dictate my schedule. I have made that choice and I'm happy with the choices. It doesn't mean that every little morsel of it is ideal. But I've chosen that. So even the things that I don't like, there are lines choices that I've made that are greater in the whole, even if in a particular moment, I don't like it as much. Same with the business, right? There's times when you got to make tough choices and do hard things and it sucks. But I'll take that because I got the option not to. I can opt out. I could do something else. So for me, success is all about optionality. It's all about maintain and keeping your options open, being able to do and really the option to decide who and what am I going to be committed to. It's not a life devoid of commitments. It's not a life devoid of obligations. That sounds kind of miserable. But it's that I get to choose what I'm going to be enslaved to. And I will say when I look back at every single guest that we've had on this podcast, I will say that one commonality in nearly every single one of them, it's not all of them. It's just been the fact that they do not have to be doing the things that they are doing. They choose to be doing them. And I will say dangerous adversary because if you don't have to do any of it, but you choose to do it because you just truly love it. You're committed to making an impact. Then not only do you approach it differently, you know, you're more body and you're more sold on what it is that you were doing. You're sold on the future that you're kind of setting out for yourself and those around you, but I think you just make better decisions. Yeah, you're not as emotionally tied to it. When you have only one option and it has to work, you're going to be that kind of emotional thing, which can be beneficial in the moment, but it can also be very, very, very reckless. And there's something to just having a calmness about life that I think is going to help you make, like you said, make better decisions. Now, there's always people out there. Everyone is giving advice. Everyone's giving people a lot of sheds, things that they should do. Here's how they approach things. I mean, there's always people in the audience or even people around you that they have their own feelings about how you should be either approaching your business or your life or what have you. And especially as a business grows, you get even more advice. But what's been some of the worst advice that you've received? I was hate it when somebody says follow your heart. And it's I'm not like that sounds very cynical, but I think there's something to be said for I'm going to gather data and make decisions based on talking to people and doing all this stuff because my heart has been wrong lots of times. Like sometimes I'm just an asshole. Sometimes I'm just being selfish. Sometimes I'm just being scared. And so following kind of that reptilian, because that's very often what we talk about, we talk about the heart, what we're really almost talking about is that reptilian part of our brain that is instinctive. And it's like, no, like I do think at the end of the day, you got to do a gut check. But you know, same with like preserving optionality, I also like to strategically procrastinate. How long can I push out that decision? Like if I can push out the decision and live in ambiguity, especially if it's an important one, it doesn't mean that I won't be decisive if I need to. But if I don't need to make the decision right now, I'm creating options, that's what you mean. We talk about a long game. Just this idea of like, oh, just like just follow your heart and it'll lead you where you want to go, I've seen that not work so many times. Like, yeah, you know what I'm going to do. I'm going to talk to other people. You know, it's not maybe not the best advice that I've received. But like somebody told me one time, old, rich, happy find old, rich, happy people and ask them what they did. There's a lot of like poor, unhappy people. Like there's a lot of old, rich, pissed off people, bitter people. Like you find somebody with all three of those, asking what they did. You'll get some wisdom. And I'm in complete agreement. I think the fall your heart, you know, the first thing they came to mind that's like, you talk about hiring, right? And hiring people, falling your heart might be like the worst piece of advice ever, because I used to believe that I was good at hiring people that I could be like, just, you know, I would know in my gut. And when we ran the data and you look back over over the years, before we actually implemented a formalized hiring process and assessments and so on, before we had all that, I thought I was pretty good. I was about 50% right and 50% wrong. I might as well flip the coin with every candidate. And it's the same with same. So same with people, same with a lot of the marketing tests we've run. I can't tell you how many times I've been just absolute convinced that something was going to work and I was wrong. I can't tell you, you know, how many different business model shifts and we remember this stuff and tell stories about the times you're right. We quickly forget, generally those who love us don't remind us of all of our failings, right? And so, you know, we get this kind of selective, you know, cognitive biases that enter in. And so you got to, you got to build a process around this stuff. You really do. And if you got right, you got, we got to know that success teaches us almost nothing because it's a good chance you got lucky. Failures, we can actually learn something from scientists know this, right? We don't learn anything. If our experiment works, we learned very little that it failed. We can actually learn some stuff. And, and Rod, as we come to a close, you know, this being the game changing attorney podcast, you're certainly a game changer. But what does being a game changer mean to you? To me, it's about playing by your own rules. I, I remember some of my youngest son, he asked me, asked him like, what do you want to be for Halloween? He said, I can't decide. I'm trying to choose if I want to be a firefighter or if I want to be Batman. I'm okay. Well, what do you think? And he thought about it. It was really quite like, I mean, when, you know what, I think I'm going to be both. And by God, this kid win his firefighter Batman. He had Batman thing with the firefighter had on people like, what are you? Firefighter Batman. Like, oh, you didn't want to pick one. He's like, no, I wanted to be both. And I'm like, this is a kid that's playing by his own rules. And anytime and so many of us are, we don't like the game that we're playing. And, you know, we don't realize like you can opt out of that game. You can completely create a new game that you can win. I think so often we accept the rules. We accept the game that other people in that life have given us. And I think if there's one thing that entrepreneurs do, whether you're an entrepreneurial programmer and you write software or you're an entrepreneurial attorney, right? Is we do make up our own rules. We don't, we don't accept the default settings that others have placed on our lives. And I think that's what it means to be a game changer. I hope you enjoyed revisiting this episode of the Game Changing Attorney podcast with our guest Brian Dice and have gained new insights from our timeless conversation. If you found this episode valuable, here are three free ways that I can help you grow your law firm. Number one, download the first chapter of my book, absolutely free at gamechangingatourney.com. Number two, you can shoot me a text at 404-531-7691 and I'll answer any question that you've got for me. And finally, number three, if you can lead this podcast a five-star review, it'll help us gain access to more influential thought leaders and bring their lessons learned here to you. For more information on our interview with Brian Dice, see the show notes for this episode in your podcast app or visit legalpodcast.com. (upbeat music)