Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan - #45: Phillip Stutts: Creating A Win or Die Mentality

Episode Date: March 10, 2020

What does it take to make the choice to live your life BIG? Philliip Stutts was faced with circumstances that caused him to arrive at this decision and make a choice: lean in positively or lean out passively. Find out how he came to be lauded as a “marketing genius” by FOX BUSINESS, “the political guru” by ESPN, and “The Michael Jordan of Political Marketing…” by Mike Dillard. About the Guest: Phillip Stutts comes from the cutthroat world of political marketing. Among his victories, has over two decades of experience working on campaigns with billions of dollars in political ad spend, and contributed to 1,273 election victories, including hundreds of U.S. House campaigns, dozens of U.S. Senate campaigns, and even three U.S. Presidential victories. Phillip plays the game of political marketing on the highest level, battling it out with fierce competition, multi-billion-dollar budgets, and a win or die mentality. More From Phillip Stutts: Buy his book Fire Them Now: The 7 Lies Digital Marketers Sell…And the Truth about Political Strategies that Help Businesses Win Visit his website: www.phillipstutts.com  Also visit Win Big Media and Go Big Media Check out his "Free 5-Minute Marketing Audit To Grow Your Business" Finding Phillip Stutts: Twitter & Instagram: @phillipstutts Rejuvenate: To receive your discount to try Rejuvenate go to www.rejuvenatemuscle.com  Use CODE: CONFIDENCE for 15% off. Review this podcast on Apple Podcast using this LINK and when you DM me the screen shot, I buy you my $299 video course as a thank you!  My book Confidence Creator is available now! get it right HERE If you are looking for more tips you can download my free E-book at my website and thank you! https://heathermonahan.com *If you'd like to ask a question and be featured during the wrap up segment of Creating Confidence, contact Heather Monahan directly through her website and don’t forget to subscribe to the mailing list so you don’t skip a beat to all things Confidence Creating!     See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I'm on this journey with me. Each week when you join me, we are going to chase down our goals. We'll overcome adversity and set you up for a better tomorrow. I'm ready for my close-up. Hi, and welcome back. I'm so glad you're here, so excited to be with you. I really am. I get so excited.

It's crazy. So it's interesting what's occurred in the last week with the coronavirus. And I don't know, depending on who you speak to, it seems very different. But as a mother, as a parent, my son's school is taking this incredibly seriously and has talked about closing school down and having the kids work remotely for a month if there are cases of the coronavirus found in Miami, which inevitably it seems that there will be. So I'm preparing for possibly not being able to travel for a month, which is a real problem. When your primary business is the speaking business, you have to go places.

to speak, right? So I started getting, you know, a little bit of a downward spiral. So here's the things that I did. Number one, when things seem out of control, I take action. That always helps me feel in control. So the first thing I did was, okay, what supplies do I need here? If I'm going to be locked up in my house with my son for a month, what should I do? And I literally went on Amazon and bought every cleaning supply, every alcohol-based soaps and hand sanitizers and anything I could find, which there wasn't much water. I bought a ton of water. I raided Publix and got non-perishable goods so that we would have food.

And I see that some people think that's nuts. Some of my friends do. The other thing I did was I finally pulled the trigger and ordered the Peloton. Because if, you know, again, if we're not supposed to be out in areas where there's lots of people to minimize interaction with germs, then you know what? maybe I will work out in my house where I'm the only person touching it. And I had been wanting to get it anyway since this summer, since I had used it at a girlfriend's house. I loved it.

And just for ease of execution. And when my son's sleeping, I could work out at home. So pull the trigger, ordered that. That's coming this weekend. So I felt better that I was taking control of the things I could. Again, I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know if anyone does. But I figured I don't want to regret, right?

You know, moving quick and taking action seems like a much better response than saying, oh my gosh, I wish I had done something a couple weeks ago. So that's sort of how I approach business. I approach my life. And sometimes I make mistakes, but I just don't ever want to have to live with that regret that I could have done something and I didn't do it. So I took action. I've been a busy little bee. I have not been working out much in the past two weeks. As you know, I was sick.

I was really sick for a week. I wonder if that was even the coronavirus. Who flipping knows? Because that was the most sick that I've been in a really long time. And I didn't work out. I'm feeling so out of shape this week. Now it's catching up with me. So I'm so excited.

The Peloton bike actually is coming. But this week has been crazy intense. And yes, we have the fear of the coronavirus looming over us. And I keep waiting from hearing updates from my son's school. And that completely will shift my travel trajectory. I'm supposed to be in New York next year. week so I'm considering canceling that. I don't know if I'm going to have my son or not. So one of the things that I reminded myself is when the recession came years ago, it was a horribly

dark time for me. And part of the reason is the way that I sought. I had never been through a recession before. I had no experience with it. So I started thinking worst case scenario. I went to, oh my gosh, what if I lose my home? What if my company that I was working for closes? What if I can't find another job. What if I have to go back to bartending? I mean, I was thinking I was an executive in media at a publicly traded company. I had to lay off almost a third of my staff at the time because the company made massive cutbacks in order, you know, the line was in order to survive that we had to do that. And everyone took pay cuts, myself included. So it was this really negative time. I had just gotten divorced. So it was a really bad time. Anyhow, I approached it like that. I didn't

approach it looking for opportunity. Here's what I've learned from that. Now that I look back on history is that, you know, those moments are the moments where people become exceptionally wealthy, people become exceptionally successful. I was one of the people just became fear focused, I guess, right? I just was petrified and thinking of worst case scenario and feeling grateful to have a job to go to instead of picking my head up and saying, okay, what opportunity is being created right now as a domino effect of this recession? Had I done that, I would. I would. I would, would have seen that there was unbelievable pricing on real estate. And instead of thinking about losing my place, I could have been thinking about, hey, maybe I want to invest and buy some

property right now. I wasn't thinking that way. Right. But the people that became incredibly wealthy from the recession were the ones that acquired a lot of real estate at that time. And then afterwards flipped it and made quite a bit of money. So I now looking at this coronavirus and then hearing that, you know, I might have to be grounded and not travel for a bit. which is going to drastically impact my income. And then hearing simultaneously that a lot of conferences have been canceled, massive conferences, nothing that I'm speaking at yet has been canceled, but I'm actually speaking tonight, and we'll get to that in a minute.

And that's on. It is not being canceled. But there are so many conferences being canceled. And actually, the Ultra Festival in Miami was just announced in March that that's being canceled. So a lot of decisions are being made and a lot of things are being canceled. of this. So my mind wants to go to this negative place, right, to say, oh my gosh, I'm going to lose income. How am I going to pay my bills, et cetera? What I've learned is these are the moments, you know, look back at history and the recession and what I could have done better. So I know that

this time. So this time instead I say, okay, what could be the positive out of this? How can I pick my head up and realize the opportunity I might not have identified yet? So I started thinking, okay, if they're canceling all these conferences, they're probably going to reschedule them. And there's going to be a ton of conferences back to back to back. So I may get speaking opportunities that I wouldn't have already gotten. And then I started thinking, maybe this is a time where people need to hear positive messaging more. They need more inspiration and motivation and speakers addressing how to overcome uncertainty, how to overcome adversity. Well, ding, ding, ding, I'm your girl. So I started thinking maybe my message is going to be more relevant and timely right now. Maybe I'll be more in need,

you know, so maybe this is actually going to turn out to be a positive for me and I want to approach it that way instead of approaching it, oh my gosh, the world is ending, right? So that was a great lesson that I learned having gone through the last recession and I am pivoting and looking at things through a different lens now. And of course, ultimately hoping that this thing just passes and it doesn't hit us as badly as it may. Okay. So trying to move forward with optimism. A couple of things that occurred this week that are really exciting. I did not know a week ago and I'm super excited to share with you. So as you know, I've been working on my book proposal.

This is the first time I've ever written a book proposal. I'm now at almost eight months in working with this agent on getting this book proposal approved. For those of you that don't know, I googled last year, Rachel Hollis, and I found out because she was the best selling personal development author in the country, selling millions of books. And I figured if I could get to her agent, her agent would be able to get me the best deal because they know all the people in the space. and they got her a great deal and helped her write a great book. So I got to her agent. I pitched myself. And she said, while you're not the right fit for me, you lean more to the business side. My partner leans more to women in business. Why don't you work with my partner? So I headed off her partner. And for the past eight months, we've been working on a book proposal. I submitted

the 15th version, 15 iterations of my book proposal. It's insane. And eight months in. And it was approved Monday. So I'm so excited. And I was totally doubting myself. I started thinking maybe I need a different agent. Maybe my book just isn't good enough. Maybe my book proposal is not good enough. But I didn't give up and I definitely doubted myself. But the good news is it was accepted on the 15th time. Thank goodness I didn't give up. And she was really excited about it. And she sent it out to 10 different publishing houses. So far, we've heard back from eight. All eight are interested right now. One was really excited. And I don't, I'm a rookie here. I don't really know what I'm walking into. So I have to keep asking a lot of questions. Okay, well, what's the timeline? Like, when do we find out if they're

offering us something? You know, I have no idea what I'm doing. And I'm relying on her expertise and her direction to move this forward. But it is super exciting because it's all new to me. And I'm so happy they see value in it so far. Keeping my fingers crossed, we get some good offers here in the next couple of weeks and I will keep you updated on this crazy ride trying to go the professional publishing route this time. Okay, simultaneously I was booked through a speaker agency that had never booked me. So one of the interesting things with speaking is you can sign up with as many speaker agencies as you want, as many speaker bureaus as you want. And then the ones that choose to book you, book you, and the ones that just keep you up in their site, just keep you up on the site. It's not,

you don't have to be exclusive with anyone. You can be with as many people as you want. What I've learned is, you know, they're typically not outpitching you. It's you outpitching you and it's up to you to drive the business. And I do that primarily through LinkedIn, which I've shared with you before. LinkedIn has been the hub of my speaking business and my book sales and my core sales and my podcast downloads. It's really, LinkedIn's just been a phenomenal platform for me to promote my products. So I was really excited when a speaker agency reached, out to me and said we'd like to book you for a speech. And so this is the first, I had never worked with them before. My profiles up on their site, but this was the first time they came to me

wanting to book me. So some of the things I thought about is, okay, they don't have trust with me yet because they haven't worked with me. So I really need to handle this very delicately. And I want to over-communicate because I want to establish trust in a really high regard of respect so that they know it means the world to me that they chose me. They have hundreds of speakers they could have picked and they picked me. So, well, maybe they didn't, maybe the client did. I don't know. But anyhow, I'm treating it that way in that regard. And I want them to pick me again. I want them to pitch me all the time. So in order to do that, I want this experience to be flawless. So I am so overdoing it and so doubling down on these guys and asking, what else can I do for you?

And how can I make this any easier? And no problem. And we'll get it done. And yes, yes, and yes. And so it's so interesting is I'm doing a keynote. They wanted a 90. minute keynote, which I haven't done a 90 minute keynote in a few months. So anytime you go back to do something that you haven't done in a while, it gets a little nerve-wracking, right? So I'm not going to lie, definitely was a little bit nervous when they told me about it. And I had to remind myself, okay, let's take some pressure off of you because you perform better when you just show up as you, right? So I remembered my TEDx talk and how I was freaking out and how I removed the pressure and just said, you know, walking out there was all I wanted for me. Even if I blew it, I was going to be a

okay. Well, I know I'm not going to blow it today, but I know it might not go flawlessly either. My goal is to connect with the audience, bring some value, bring some entertainment, and allow them to walk away, feeling inspired and with some new tools to create confidence in their life and advance themselves in their career. I know I can do that, right? I just have to remind myself that I can. And then I have all these other things that I do, right? I'll get totally dolled up. I'll go all in so that I feel that I look my best, which makes me feel more confident. I'll write notes on the bottom of my shoes. I'll fire up my playlist that I listen to every time before I'm going to speak because it's

like Pavlov's dog. Like I start when the dog hears the bell, they know the food's coming. As soon as I hear that music, I know I'm about to kill it on stage. I start really seeing myself, visualizing myself to it. So I have this whole routine I go through. I'm going to do that today. I, yesterday and today I've been reading through all my notes. Mind you, I give this keynote a lot.

So I want to really tailor it for the financial industry because that's who I'm doing the keynote for today. And I've never done a keynote specifically as the keynote speaker for a financial conference. So it's sort of interesting and a little different for me, which can be intimidating, right, because everyone has MBAs and licensing around finance. But then I remembered something. You know, I was married to someone in this business. And I do know this business, you know, in a really interesting way because I've observed it

from the outside. And so I started seeing that through this lens and thinking I can immediately connect with the audience through that, that while I may be divorced from someone in this industry, I actually have some knowledge around it and I've seen it from the inside and I have a lot of empathy and understanding for how high pressure this industry and job is. So I thought about leading with that connection point because people like to connect with you immediately and know that you feel their pain and you understand their pain point. So I was really excited when I had that realization. And it also allowed. allowed me to take some pressure off myself to say, hey, you do know this business better than

you think. You don't need to be, you know, putting it on a pedestal because it's something different than that I have never done. So that was an exciting realization. So I'm really now, you know, I always say there's a fine line between fear and excitement. And today I'm leaning into the excitement and the opportunity. And my goal is for the speaker agency to get phenomenal feedback, have a flawless exchange with me from day one when this started until, you know, everything is finalized tonight. I want to be able to call. And so, you know, them after the event, give them the feedback, and then ask for the feedback from the client. And praying all goes well because if we have this really positive loop and we get the positive

feedback, then that agent's going to start booking me. And then I have another spin-up, another person out there other than me, always aggressively pitching me, but I'll have another person on my team that's an advocate and has proof and trust me. And that's really, really important in business. So I'm super, super excited for that. Okay. So I will let you know how I'll all this goes next week. But for today, I'm so excited for our guest. You're going to absolutely love him. He and I have a lot of friends in common, and he's such a smart and real guy. I know you're going to love him. He's got a freaking phenomenal story. Besides, this is so relevant and timely right now with a presidential debates going on and a presidential primaries going on. This is crazy. So let me tell you a

little bit about my guest today. Philip Stutz comes from the cutthroat world of political marketing. Among his victories has over two decades of experience working on campaigns with billions of dollars in political ad spend. He's contributed to 1,273 election victories, yes, that's right, including hundreds of U.S. House campaigns, dozens of U.S. Senate campaigns, and three U.S. presidential victories. This is the man they hire. Philip plays the game of political marketing on the highest level possible, battling it out with fierce competition, multi-billion dollar budgets and a win-or-dye mentality. And just so you understand, these presidential elections are won through the digital marketing, social analytics.

You know, Philip and the people he competes against, they are the brains and analytics behind these operations that test the ads, know who to serve the ads to, and know how to win campaigns. It's amazing and really impressing. I'm so impressed. I'm so excited for you to learn from him. and I'm so excited to change my business as a result of the things that I learn from his data and analytics. Okay, Philip is also a bestselling author. His book is called Fire Them Now, The Seven Lies Digital Marketer Sell.

He's founder of Go Big Media and founder and CEO of Win Big Media. He's also a professional speaker with Vayner Speakers. There you go, Gary Vaynerchuk always showing up. So I'm really excited for you to meet him. Hang tight. We're going to be right back with Philip. So welcome back. I'm so excited for everyone to get this opportunity to meet you, Philip.

Thank you for being here today. It's so honored to be here. Love the vibe you put out in the world and the people you serve. It's really amazing. Ah, okay, so there's so much to get into, and we have limited time. So I'm hoping that, and just to tee this up a little bit for everybody, there's a couple of really big topics I'd like to discuss. One, your personal story, overcoming adversity from the health aspect with your family.

I mean, massive, massive challenges that you have faced and are facing your business story. And it's so interesting with the behind the scenes political as well as you as an entrepreneur and evolving your business, diversifying your business, your losses, your wins. There's so much to discuss there. Also in regards to this being a presidential political year, I'm so interested to hear your perspective on all of this. And with me coming from the traditional side of broadcasting. and media, and you're literally, you know, on the polar opposite, innovative side that I am just now learning about. I have so much to ask you about there. So I'm so grateful for you to be here, and I'm hoping you can start off with giving us that background, your background story,

in case my audience isn't familiar with you yet. I was an idiot until I was 40. I mean, that's just the bottom line. I'm about to turn 46. Listen, I was one of those solo entrepreneurs, but not in a good way. I probably, I modeled a lot of bad behavior. I was a poor leader in business. I was probably, not probably. I was an awful leader at home with my family, not in any kind of bad way, but I just was self-centered. I'm more narcissistic than anything, felt the world owed me. So I was actually, Heather, I was a worst kind of narcissistic for a long time. I was the narcissist that blamed everyone for everything that didn't go my way. And then I took credit for the good thing. So at 40, I'd worked in politics. running political campaigns, running political marketing campaigns, for presidential campaigns, for U.S. Senate races, government races. And it's kind of ironic. My wife says this to me all the time. Like, you chose the exact industry that you were,

sort of personality was designed around, sort of that narcissistic. It's, you know, politics and political marketing has nothing to do with making money. It's all ego-based. It's all about the ego and power, right? And I followed that for a long time until I realized, that midlife crisis that a lot of us go through. And it's, you know, my parents' generation probably bought Harley Davidson's or, you know, the men in that generation.

The women probably just sucked it up and lived and didn't do anything. And like people in my generation now, they have a voice and they're going to, you know, go one way or another. Women have a bigger and broader voice, which is amazing. And I'm seeing this through friends of ours and people we work with that are going to this where they're saying, no, I want more in life. And it just hit me in my late 30s. And really the foundation of that,

was I was diagnosed with a rare incurable esophageal disease. My esophagus is called acalasia. My esophagus doesn't work. It'll never work. Again, the nerves and the muscles that push food down into your stomach every time you eat, they're dead for me. And they've been dead since about 2011. And so eating is a huge chore for me.

And so you already have a personality with me that's like not the most ideal to work for. And then you get this disease. And like, it sounds weird, but probably a lot of shame came into my life through the disease, even though I can't control the disease. You know, I wouldn't go out to eat with people. It's not like I caused a big scene when people eat. I just didn't want to deal with it. And I kind of went into my whole sort of my psychology just grew worse and worse and worse. And then at a certain point, about six years ago, I just said, enough's enough.

I don't want to live this way anymore. And that was sort of my entrepreneurial journey. But it kind of all started through the disease because I realized I have a finite. amount of time in this world. And I can live it one way or the other. And, you know, I can go down a negative road or I can go down a positive road. And I didn't know what that meant at the time. I just knew I had to take a step in the right direction. And so the solopreneur, I just decided, I was driving down the road one day and I said, I got to go big. And that's what I ended up naming the company with one of my market, two marketing agencies. One of them is called Go Big Media.

And that's really the name of it. I was just driving down the road and it hit me. I couldn't sit in my pain. I couldn't sit and be paralyzed by the fear of everything going on in my life that I needed to take an active role in that. And so that started my entrepreneurial journey. I built two marketing agencies. I think we'll surpass $50 million this year in revenue. And I did that in less than six years. And that has not been easy either. It's been a hard road to hoe. I have taken no outside investment money and I have no debt. So it's consumed a lot of time to try to navigate and optimize to grow that. But at the same time, I have this health thing. And so a couple years ago, I'm being treated the Mayo Clinic for this disease. I had had my 18th surgery on my

esophagus. And my esophagus looks like an upside down cheerleader's pom-pom. It's just been shredded by the surgeons to make sure that food can get into my stomach. And the doctor basically looked at me and said, Philip, you know, this is an incurable disease. I said, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. But like, what am I expecting over the rest of my life? And he said, well, there is no cure and you've had too many surgeries. And the next thing we're going to do is remove your esophagus. It's called an esopojectomy. And you'll be on a feeding tube the rest of your life.

And this should occur sometime in the next 10, 15 years. And I went, what? And he went, yeah. And it's so weird, Heather, I had this disease for five years and I never Googled the name Achalasia, the name of the disease. I mean, think about that. Think about how much fear was going through my body to not even Google the disease. Think about how paralyzed I was in fear and how I stuck my head in the sand and did nothing about it.

A lot of men do that. I find that it's more common than not specifically with men. And here I am, you know, cheerleading this, you know, starting businesses and doing all this stuff. And here I am neglecting my own health. And I understand how it feels when people. either, you know, get paralyzed by the fear of anything in their life because I did it myself. You know, I was probably the worst at it. And so I remember driving home from the Mayo Clinic and saying, something's got to change. Again, I met another point where I said the pain was too much.

Things had to change. What I realized was I had two paths I had to go down. One was to get my diet in order. I was eating poorly. I'm not overweight, but I was eating foods that weren't helping me. and actually probably caused, the doctors had decided they probably cause some kind of autoimmune disease into my body and attacked my esophics and killed it. And so there's a guy, I don't know if you've ever had him on your show named Stephen Gundry, Dr. Gundry of the Plant Paradox.

Remind me, I'll do an intro if you ever want to talk to him. He's amazing. Four-time New York Times bestseller in the last three years alone, wrote this book about this diet called The Plant Paradox Diet. I got on it. It completely changed my. life. So here's the deal. I was taking medication for this disease three years ago. This medication while it helped in the short run, it caused dementia in the long run. But the doctors at the Mayo Clinic

said, you need to take it because short term is more important than long term. When I got on this diet, Dr. Gundy, who I subsequently stalked and who became my doctor because I stalked him so hard, I had no longer take any prescription medication. I have an incurable disease. And, And the diet is so powerful and effective for me. So that was one path. And then the other path was, my guide, I have got to, I've got to figure out how to deal with this disease. I don't want to be on a feeding to the rest of my life.

I'm young. I don't want to deal with it. I went to a conference guy named Peter Diamandis. He has the Abundance 360 conference out in Beverly Hills. He's the founder of the XPRIZE, he's business partners with Elon Musk. And he gets on stage and he tells everybody at this business conference, pull out your notebook and write down a moonshot. A moonshot, something that people say is impossible, that you'll make possible in your business.

So I say, well, I don't want to do it in my business. My moonshot was that I would find a cure to an incurable rare disease that affects about one out of 100,000 people. So there's no research dollars behind it. But I would find a cure to this disease in five years. That was three years ago. I wrote an article in Inc magazine. A researcher saw the article, called me, said, what are you talking about? There is no cure.

The ignorance of an entrepreneur is a beautiful thing, Heather, because I'm an idiot. And so they basically, I said, I don't know, I'm going to figure this out. I said, I read and when I finally Google the disease, I read that stem cells were a pathway to a cure. This article was written in the 1990s. We're talking to over 20 years ago. There's been no research on the disease since then. And the researcher that called me, you know, they had started a foundation for this disease, reaches out to a bunch of doctors, finds this one doctor at John's Hopkins, who's worked on this disease for 25 years.

He said he taught to me, we got on the phone. He's like, I'm interested in helping you. Let's figure this out together. That was three years ago yesterday. We decided we put a team around me. We had to get FDA approval for trying to start a clinical trial, which was a one-man clinical trial, the first one ever. They've never attempted what I'm about to explain.

They've never even attempted this on animals. They've never attempted on humans. There's no precedent for it. But they basically decided they were going to extract stem cells out of my thigh muscle, grow them in a lab for months on end, and then insert them into my esophagus to try to regrow the muscles and the nerves that are dead. And that was the plan. And that started three years ago.

And two weeks ago, I went to Johns Hopkins, and they inserted 225 million stem cells into my esophagus that they had been growing for about six months. And we'll find out in the next. three to four weeks, the muscles should finally start growing if it works. It should grow for about a three-month period. And the hope is that I'll have some functionality back into my esophagus so that I can eat normally and do not have to have the esophagus removed. And the doctors in the Mayo Clinic three years ago, the Mayo Clinic told me, you can't do this. That's impossible. There's no, take your medicine and we'll see it in six months. And I'm an entrepreneur. And so I just

decided, no, I'd take this into my own hands and I'd try to figure out a solutionist. Man, I've way over-talked this, so I apologize. When you want more, start your business with Northwest Registered Agent and get access to thousands of free guides, tools, and legal forms to help you launch and protect your business. All in one place. Build your complete business identity with Northwest today. Northwest Registered Agents has been helping small business owners and entrepreneurs launch and grow businesses for nearly 30 years. They are the largest registered agent and LLC service in the U.S.

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build a personalized treatment plan, and can prescribe medication when it's right for you. Your care stays consistent and evidence-based. Head to tachiatry.com slash confidence and complete the short assessment to get matched with an in-network psychiatrist in just a few minutes. that's talkiety.com slash confidence to get matched in minutes. It's so exciting. I mean, this is so exciting. You're the first person I've actually discussed this with too.

Oh, thank you. What just happened. Because, you know, not only is it exciting and life-changing for you, but the potential for other people that are suffering from us, as well as other medical issues. I mean, obviously, this is huge. Yeah, if it doesn't work, that's okay. I'll go to plan B.

I've been figured out plan B. I've been all in on plan A. But here's the thing. If it doesn't work, I have the love of my family. I have a seven-year-old little girl, my wife. I'm good. If they remove my esophagus, I'm good down the road, right? But right now, we're in a wait-and-see mode, and hopefully it takes.

So how were you running a successful business while dealing with this massive personal health adversity. Really, this sounds so stupid and cliche, but it's really just mindset. I mean, if I wanted to make it a big deal, then it would take over my life. Or it could just be something that's just a part of my life. I have a higher purpose to, you know, the mantra or whatever I'm focused on sort of my purpose in life is to give and grow. That's a give more than I take and always be growing.

And whether that's in my health or my business or my life, that's sort of, that's my path. And that's sort of my compass. So it kind of makes everything else easier as long as I know that I'm doing my best. I fail a lot. But as long as I'm doing my best to give more than I'm taking and to grow and whether that's growing my business, growing my relationships, growing and improving my health, that's sort of the path I'm on.

So it makes it kind of easy when you have that. You know, it's really purpose. I mean, again, I go through this like midlife crisis. I think a lot of us go through. And it's a weird cliche term. So I'm not even sure that's what it is. I think people are, it's like a roller coaster. They're going up this roller coaster their whole life.

And in some time in their late 30s or late 40s, they go, oh, shit. Like the roller coasters hit the top and it's going down. And this is all there is. And I was there. Like, I'm totally understanding of that mindset because that's where it was. And I realized that going down on that roller coaster has to be driven by purpose more than anything else. And I had to figure out my purpose.

And then I had to put all my chips on the table towards that. And I think that's why I've been able to progress as fast as I have. That really resonates with me what you just described around that late 30s. Because that's, I mean, so similarly, thankfully, I did not have a physical situation, a health situation like you did. But mine definitely was more mental where I started questioning everything. You know, I'm at the top of my gaming corporate America and I'm not happy and I don't feel fulfilled. Where do I go from here?

Is this all there is? Right. I'll never forget. I was chief revenue office. and I'm saying, okay, so the next move is CEO. But will that move make me happy? Because I'm not happy. And every night at home, I'm saying, oh, I have to go back again tomorrow,

create more value for the shareholders. And you start questioning, is that what I was put on this earth to do? Yes, I'm a parent, and I'm so proud of being a good parent to my son. So he's the only person in the world that should benefit from what I've learned. And I really had this inner battle going on that eventually led me to launch my own personal brand, which ultimately led me to getting fired from my job in corporate America, which started me down a completely different path. And none of it has been easy, none of it has been clear. I didn't have some vision one day I woke up and said, oh, this is how it's all going to play out.

I didn't even know there was a speaking business, much less a year ago, that that would be my number one revenue stream. And I know that you're a speaker. So I'm so interested to hear for you how that evolved from you in the digital marketing arena. Well, can I ask you one real quick question on your path. Of course you can't. Thank you. I'm sure there's been a lot of bumps along the way, but what is the freedom for you've been like

to carve your own path without the bureaucracy of a big corporation that you're working for? The biggest thing, my biggest issue back in corporate America, I like to move fast and break things. I always have a million ideas. Every day, it's crazy how my mind works and how I envision things. Sometimes they work out.

Sometimes they do. don't, but in corporate America, I felt handcuffed all the time. Everyone would say, oh, here she goes again. And, you know, today we're not going to listen to your ideas, Heather. And I would be so frustrated. It was a visceral effect on me that I was being stifled and that I knew something would work and no one would listen. And I'm supposed to be, you know, respected with 20 years experience and this, you know, an expertise. And it didn't make sense to me. So that feeling was so negative and frustrating to me. That part I love about working for myself. I wake up in the morning and I want to launch a clothing line. I will freaking develop that product. I will develop that pitch. I will get

to the ultimate decision maker. Doesn't mean they're saying yes. They've said no three times. But, you know, on the flip side of that, I wrote and self-published my first book because I needed to market. I have been through 15 iterations of my book proposal with my agent on my second book. And I got a yes this morning after six months of going back, you know, Brown Zero, do it again, Heather. It's not good enough. So I'm learning on my own that, yes, sometimes my ideas are crazy and sometimes they don't pan out. But sometimes they do.

And that feeling is so rewarding to at least know I'm giving it a shot and giving it life. Oh, thanks for sharing. That's awesome. You sound like a good employee. I was a terrible employee. I realized that like I, that my calling was the last thing it was ever going to do was going to be working for somebody. Like, it's exactly what you explained.

It's like I would come up with, I would spend a lot of time coming up with ideas and they would be ignored. And I went, what am I doing? These are good ideas. Like, I can implement that. And I think that's why I'm a bull in a China shop on the business, the entrepreneurial side, because, man, you know, when I started a corporate marketing agency, so I had this political marketing agency.

And then I wrote my book and then it launched the corporate marketing agency. and I just thought, oh, clients are going to rain from the sky now, right? We're so delusional. I call it hopeful. But and how fast it will go, right? We think it's all going to be like tomorrow, right? And I just had to grind. I remember the first 35 corporate pitches I had all said no.

I was 0 for 35, but I'm not going to quit. Like, no, it motivates me to even get more. And now, you know, obviously we built this. the corporate marketing agency should surpass eight figures by the end of next year. And we started it in the fall of 2018. So, you know, the root of failure is kind of what causes all the success. And thanks for sharing your story. I kind of wanted to know it a little bit more.

Well, I was on your website before we were talking, and I love how you have these two different options for people to sign up for free to get, you know, an assessment of your digital footprint, et cetera. Talk to me a little bit about that portion of the business because a lot of my listeners are entrepreneurs, people that own their own business. And I don't know at what level of understanding or expertise they have around digital marketing conversion and really what your expertise is. So I come from politics.

And what I realized was that our industry and politics gets disrupted every two years. And the reason it gets disrupted is because we have this unbreakable deadline called Election Day. And so if we're not innovating everything we do for marketing our clients, our candidates, every two years we're out of business. I often say I've worked with 293 startups in the last four years and 246 became number one in their market. And that's because they're politicians. And so what is the formula that we use to get presidents elected? And what I realized was that that formula business marketers will never are not using it.

if you want to play an infinite game, if you want to be an outlier in your business, this particular formula, every client, corporate client we have right now has grown their bottom line. Everyone that has followed it. Now, I have plenty of clients that come in and say, I want to follow this five-step process you have. And I'm like, great, we get working. And then about halfway through, they go, hmm, I'm actually want to get rich quick till. This is hard work to do it the proper way to build real relationships with your customers and clients. to evoke emotion and figure those things out and using data to really drive everything you do.

It's hard, right? It's hard work. And they, oh, I want the get rich quick pill. And I'm here to tell you that doesn't exist. There are a lot of digital marketers out there selling the get rich quick pill. In fact, Seth Godin had this great blog, I think yesterday about that people want the magic wand. Well, there is no such thing as a magic wand. And it's all a lie.

But there is a purple cow. That's a great book, too. But yeah, so you got to stand out in the crowd. Well, my standout in the crowd is I've helped get presidents elected and I can take those principles and strategies and help businesses grow. And we have done that. And I've got a thousand case studies that we can go through. But the key to the whole thing, and I'm going to walk through how we do it in politics, but I want you as a business owner out there to think about it's sort of metaphorical, right? So think about how it works for you.

So the first thing we do with a politician is we say, I sit down with a politician. and I say, you know, I look down, we'll sit down at the table and I'll ask her, what do you care about the most? What do you want to run for office on? And they always give me 10 issues, right? It could be taxes, environment, social issues, whatever it is, they'll give me 10 issues. And I'll say, amazing, that's awesome. I'm glad you're passionate about those 10 things. Let me go poll the district. Now, it's a lot more sophisticated now. But the bottom line is, I want to figure out what the voters in the state feel about those issues. typically we find two issues where there's absolute alignment between what the politician wants to talk about and where the voters have this insane, like they're so motivated by those issues that they're going to vote for that candidate if they educate them, right? Because you must be relevant in the eyes of the voter rather than in the politician just talking about what they want to talk about.

That'll never work, right? If you're a business owner, you must find out what the consumer wants out of your project. product or service and what they care about. And your message should not be about how great your business is or your product is. It should be about what the customer wants. It's the whole premise. And we do that by finding data. Now, I've taken this to crazy level.

So I went out and partnered with the largest data collection company in America. They can literally overlay a customer base or voter base. And we can track the movements online of that customer base or that voter base for 90 to 120, days in the past and 30 days in the future and then we can continue doing it forever. Basically, we track what they do, not what they say. And then I can develop a profile of their customer or the voter that basically lays out the things they care about in life, the social media platforms they're on in a chronological order. So if you're spending money on Facebook ads right now and your customers or your followers or whatever it is are on Pinterest, you shouldn't

be spending money on Facebook. Like I can tell you that. The data is clear. It'll tell us that. It'll tell us what they care about in life. So let me give you a great example of what I'm talking about. And I'll give you this a corporate example, not a political example. We just undertook this data report for a title company. They do a billion dollars a year in revenue. And we overlaid all of the real estate, their target market, they're a B2B company, but their target market real estate agents. So they gave us their file of all their real estate agents. We overlaid that. We tracked their movements for 30 days and we got their movements for the last 90 days before we tracked them. And we found out something crazy. 72% of the real estate agents owned

dogs. Now, this is a title company that's been out there saying, use us as your title company. And what I found out was their target market, the people that they needed to get business from, 72% of them own dogs. Because what we've tracked was their movements online. They were buying dog food online. They were buying collars and toys and all stuff. We could find that out. So we are now in the process of redesigning their whole marketing campaign. Well, the owner of this title company adopted a dog that served in Iraq. He's a war dog. He's a big German shepherd, right?

And now we have a great story to tell, right? So the dog's going to get a profile page on the website. We're going to make a ton of videos about the family and the dog's going to be in all the videos. The dog is going to be featured in every kind of sales pitch that their sales team will do. Oh, do you have a dog? oh, have you told us story about our dog at our company? And now the dog is the centerpiece because it's not what the business owner wanted to talk about, excuse me, the title, how he was a great title company.

The data said that his target market all own dogs. So you can use, you can say you're a great title company, but lead with the fact that you have a common element between, with the people you're trying to get business from, and build a relationship. And some people, you know, I come from politics. So the one thing I always get was, oh, you guys are manipulating. And I tell you this, I'm not manipulating.

I think we live in a world right now where everybody is putting their phone in front of their face. And every marketer is saying, you got to run digital ads. And I go, no, it's the complete opposite. You've got to build a relationship with your customers. That's the only way to succeed. I built my company. I told you this without any debt, without any outside funding. And we've grown it to, we're halfway to nine figures.

And I did it. through no marketing. I just did it through referrals. I built relationships. And those relationships create other relationships. And this is my story. But what I'm telling you is what we do in politics is we are, that's all I've ever done. It's understand the voter and tried to build an emotional connection between the politician and the voter based on what the two care about in alignment.

And so we have this five-step process. So once we find out all that data, we rebrands. the politician or we brand the politician around those two issues, nothing else. The voters don't want to hear about anything else. And then we, you know, so that means the website is focused on those two issues, the videos we create, the content we create. The fourth step of what we do with all our politicians is we now know those two issues are important. And now we're going to go test those messages, but we'll test them a hundred different ways. So in political campaigns and the presidential campaigns right now, they will take one Facebook ad on one message.

and they will test it 162 ways, different colored backgrounds, different fonts, different placements of the message. Could it be in the right corner, the left corner, whatever it is? And they will find what, you know, voter clicks on that the most. And then they know, know where they put their money. Oh, we now test 162 concepts. 30 of them were crushing. The rest of them didn't work that well. We're not running the ones that didn't work well.

We're going to, you know, which I call step five is you launch the real marketing campaign at that point. Because that's what the evidence says. It's what the data says. My job is to eliminate all the risk of the business owner and get them to a point though they want to launch their marketing campaign with as little risk as humanly possible. Now, I will tell you, the backlash on this is that business owners come in and go, yeah, I like to do all that for free. So I always say, like, I can't give you a world-class experience on a Walmart budget.

It just doesn't work that way. But the fact is that the testing phase is low-cost. the data doesn't actually cost you much money. We did this for a national pest control company, and they invested in the first four steps. They invested probably around $35,000. But here's the deal. The reason they came to us is because they had spent $2 million in marketing dollars

over the previous two years and lost $1.8 million in market share. Wow. They couldn't figure out why. Their whole message, their whole marketing message, was based on discounts. Hey, 50% off. Sign us up. 50, 25% off everything.

Well, the economy has changed. People see discounts as cheap. And by the way, we ran a data report on their hundreds of thousands of customers in a particular region. And we found out discounts were viewed as cheap, that their customer wanted green products so they knew their families were safe. So we redesigned the entire marketing plan. We rebranded them around a family-owned business, even though they're a 35-year-old chain.

They never marketed that they had a green product. So we remarketed them to have green products, family-owned business, safe for your family, all this stuff. In the fall of 2019, they had the greatest month in the history of their company because they invested on the front end instead of losing on the back end. 99% of business owners are never going to do that, unfortunately. They just can't wrap their brain around that they need to invest a little money to get it right and never have, you know, like I call it the undefeated marketing system. That's this five-step process. It's undefeated because he works across the board. But the bonuses owner has to have skin in the game, too.

I can't do it for them. And so that's how we do it across the board. That's how we do it for politicians. That's how when I worked on a presidential campaign, George W. Bush's presidential campaign in 2004, I was the national get out the vote director, basically the marketing director for the campaign. That is what we use to win the election.

And now we're using it. Now we're doing it with NASDAQ companies. We're doing it with Fortune 200 companies. By the way, this is the same guy who was over 35 on his first 35 pitches. And now people are seeing that, oh my God, no marketer is out there following a step-by-step, data-backed, elimination of risk process to grow their bottom line. And that's what we're doing. So this is so interesting to me because, you know, a little bit of knowledge can be scary.

And I do have a little bit of knowledge from my 20-plus years in media. It's sad, truly sad, how many brands are operating blindly. And you're using some examples here, not only with millions, but oftentimes billions of dollars in just traditional ad spend based upon this is how we've always done it. This is how we built a company thus far. This is how we need to continue doing it. And truly ignorance is bliss. However, you know, as you mentioned, the world is changing so drastically, especially right now with the amount of uncertainty from the stock market to the political year to the coronavirus and how many other factors that are out there. We are going through another pivotal time in history right now, which does impact social media,

your marketing, your advertising, and how you move your business forward. One of the things that comes to mind for me is, yes, I see how this all makes sense for any established brand and company with a specific marketing and advertising budget. How can people who are personal branding themselves, how can people who are startups, entrepreneurs who are a one-man show like you had been too. Like I am, how can those people who aren't at that next level yet make that leap? They know they need to make it. They know they need the data. They don't want to operate blindly. What can that bridge plan be for them? Yeah. You got, far as I got to be resourceful, right? And so, you know, you can do survey monkey with your own

customer base. You can offer some kind of incentive to take a survey and try to get data. We've done this. I have a crazy case study. We just finished out. Walked in a minute if you want me to, but with an apparel company, they were going to their brick and mortars and asking their customers outside that were coming into the brick and mortar a few questions. And then they were aggregating that data. Now, that's the first step, right? I'm trying to get you to elimination of all. So I'm playing this game of, okay, good, you can take first steps. That's going to improve what you're doing. Trust me on this. If you follow these five steps, And the five steps are on my website.

You can walk through it. But if you follow the five steps, you can do it on your own. You don't need a marketing company to do it. This is a path. Now, you're going to have to do the work to go through in-depth in each step and what it means to you and how you can evolve that. Right. So with this apparel company, too, I'll give you, this is it crazy. So we found in the data that there were huge differences in their customer base between men and women.

right this company had marketed one message to everyone and what we found is men and women just bought for different reasons shocking right so there's so much common sense but until you look at the data you'd never know like 72 percent of real estate he's own dogs like it's crazy right and so what we found was that women and i'm just going to walk through women women needed proof before they bought the apparel lineup for this company men were spontaneous buyers across the board They would buy, you know, you could run an ad and you could get a click through and then they'd buy within four, you know, views of the ad you're serving them. Women were purchasing at a rate of nine views per serving, right? So why is that?

Well, women wanted validation in this way. The Wharton School business has a new statistic out right now. It says 50% of all purchasing decisions right now come from looking at third-party reviews and validation. Totally makes sense. I do this. I'm sure, Heather, you do this. And so we decided to take their best five-star reviews on Amazon. And we contacted these people.

We got their permission. And then we not only put a five-star review across the ads that we ran, like five, you know, literally five-star red stars. But then we put their message that they had written in the five-star review, the most, you know, like my wife was stealing these clothes from me. It was so comfortable, like all this kind of stuff, right? they crushed for women. But what we realized was women needed to, we needed to create strong video.

They needed not just one ad to make a purchase. They weren't impulsive. They were thoughtful. Our marketing had to be more thoughtful when it targeted women. And so when we ran this ad, we went from a $55 first purchase average to a $92 first purchase average. The lifetime value of the client was 2X. So basically, we took them from $110 lifetime value of that target market to almost $200 or $184. Wow.

All because the data said you've got to build a stronger relationship with women than men. Now, men, we ran, so I come from political advertising. So, you know, the negative political ads. Like, everybody hates them. But the reason we do them is that they work, right? So I'm not encouraging any business owner to run a political-style negative. But I do know that, you know, according to Forbes, we are being served up to 10,000 ads per day right now. So how is your company and your brand going to break through?

Like, there's just so much noise. So one of the ways that we've done it is I've coined the term. It's called comparitizing. So it's the principle of political negative advertising, but done in a way that offends no customer and draws a distinction with your competition. So in this particular company, we ran an ad because we said, we found in the data that the customer wanted high quality. clothing. Well, they were competitors with Nike and Under Armour and all that. So we created an ad and we ran it and it was called, don't buy your clothes from a shoe company. Just don't do it.

So obviously a playoff that just do it, ad campaign of Nike. Right. You laughed. So I'm already breaking through the clutter because you read that and laughed, right? Right. And are you offended by that? No. No, it's funny. It's funny. It's funny. Right. They were where they were going to get sued. I'm like, you're not going to get sued. Like, don't worry about it. that. So we ran the ad. The ad performed average with women, but it crushed with men. We were getting men into sort of what we call it retargeting pool. Like we want them, you know, no one's going to click and buy stuff by saying one ad. You want to build the relationship. That's what we build everything towards. So we were getting men into our retargeting pool at one cent per click. So the

first time they were seeing the ad, we were getting people to click at a one cent click rate, which is total insanity because that is not even close to average, but it resonated with men. They laughed more than women did. But that's what the data told us. So we said, oh, good. In this testing phase, we knew let's don't run these ads to women because they weren't buying at the rate men were. They were buying at the five-star review ad.

And so we had two completely different marketing campaigns where we had two massively successful results. Starting the year with a wardrobe refresh, Quince has you covered with luxe essentials that feel effortless and look polished. They're perfect for layering, mixing, and building a wardrobe that lasts. Their versatile styles make it easy to reach for them day after day. Quince has all the staples covered, from soft Mongolian cashmere sweaters that feel like designer pieces without the markup to 100% silk tops and skirts for easy dressing up to perfectly cut denim for everyday wear. Their wardrobe essentials are crafted to last season after season. Their

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I mean, from the bags to the denim, to the sweaters, to the jackets, they're all incredible luxury high-end products without the high-end price. Refresh your wardrobe with quince. Don't wait. Go to quince.com slash confidence for free shipping on your order and 3.16. day returns, now available in Canada, too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com slash confidence to get free shipping and 365-day returns. Quince.com slash confidence. Wow, that is so interesting, and it makes all the sense in the world that you're using that analogy of the negative advertising and what cuts through the clutter for the political arena

and how you can soften it up. still be effective and maybe pivot towards humor to be equally as effective in the CPG world. Totally. It's really, I have to tell you. So I just mentioned, this is what came into my mind. Of course, I'm thinking about myself back to our narcissism topic. So when you're talking about that, I thought about my business while I'm listening to you. And I just, as I mentioned, I just got approval on my second book.

And immediately, I thought the number one book in the personal development arena by a female author in the past two years has been Rachel Hollis, and her book is called Girl Wash Your Face. All I could think to myself, and I just wrote down, just don't wash your face, right? Like, how can you, you know, market that to get people's attention and, you know, have a play on words? It's so interesting, and that really resonates with me, and no one is doing business like that. No, I am in a lane that no one else is playing on. Here's the other thing. With my corporate marketing agency, it's called Windig Media, we've never,

filled out an RFP. I won't fill out RFPs. You have to, no, you have to follow our system. And the reason I do that is because I know it works. And if I want your success more than you do, even if you're a Fortune 200 company, then it's not a good fit for us. I know it works. I know how to get a business there. What I don't know is when a business says, oh, no, you've filled our RFP and go this convoluted way and guess a bunch of things and we hope it works. So we do have Fortune 200 companies that we work with. We do have NASDAQ traded companies that we work with. We have a billion dollar companies that we work with. They all have had to acquiesce to our system because it works. And that's why we built it the way we have. What is the range that you will work with?

If somebody's listening right now wants to know if they could qualify and know if they could afford you and or they would be a good candidate. First of all, you mentioned this earlier. I'll mention again. If you go to my website, philipstuts.com, I'm sure you'll put it in the show notes. We have a tab where you can get free content. You can learn more about how you can use data. You can take a free data assessment. My team will do a phone call with you for free and give you some ideas and walk through all that stuff. If you want to undertake the data, it's $4,950 for the data report on your customer base. We can build a look-alike. We can also put a pixel on your website so we can track anybody that comes to your website because that's an ideal customer, right? People go,

all that's expensive. Actually, it's not. We found out that some of the companies we were working with the Fortune 200,000 were spending 500,000 on the same data. They were segmenting it out until 100 different segments, right, from people with 55 to 60, women, age groups, all that stuff. I went to the data company and I said, I want to bring this to small businesses because I think it's so unbelievably valuable. What do I need to do? And they said, good, you need to write us a six-figure licensing agreement check,

and then you can sell it in whatever way you want. And so that's what I did. I risked it all and wrote this check and agreed, and I'm the exclusive marketing partner for them on that. So that's why we charge that. But you're literally getting this at 1% of the cost of what the big boys or the big girls pay. All right. So that's number one.

Number two is you can take a marketing audit, a free marketing audit on my website. That entails it. It's called a five-minute free marketing audit. You fill this five-minute form out. My team pours over your publicly available digital footprint. We will produce a 25-point checklist on what you're doing right and what you can improve. and we will deliver that checklist, like a seven to nine page report, we'll deliver that to you and do a 30-minute consultation call to answer into your questions. You don't have to hire us.

If you think, oh my God, I can't live without you. Cool. We can talk about what that looks like, right? And then the worst thing, I have another free giveaway, which is the secrets you should know before you hire a marketing agency. And so I wrote this article and you can download that there. So there's some content on that. If to work with me, I would tell you this. I have learned a big lesson in the course. corporate marketing space. And I love to get your feedback on this, Heather. So get ready because I want your answer on this. It's committed versus interested. I have a lot of people that are interested, but ultimately people that are interested become disinterested over time because they chase shiny objects. I'm extremely focused. I am all about commitment. So I like to work with businesses

that are committed to their marketing success, not interested, committed. For example, that pest control company, if they aren't advertising a lot of money every month, they're out of business. They're out of business. Their SEO game better be number one, or they're out of business. Because when people want to call a pest control company, they're not calling them for green products, like I said earlier. They're not calling them primarily because they're family-owned business. They're calling them because they want the damn bugs dead. That's the reason. Now, when they go on to Google and they search, who are the top three that they click through? And then what's the story between the three?

And do you win that game? What's the difference that makes the difference? That's what we're trying to figure out. So I love companies that are committed. If you're a tire kicker, I'm not your guy. I'm really not. If you're like, oh, no, I'm all in. We're going to do what it takes.

And I want to do this with you. I'm not, you're not a vendor. You're my partner, not in an equity stake, but my partner in building this business. I'm your guy. I love it. I'm all in and you'll see. I'm just as enthusiastic with every client we have. So that's what it is. I don't know if that. So I'm kind of interested from you. You've seen this committed versus interested, right? Tell me, do you have an experience in this? What are your thoughts on that? I mean, this is how I live my, I'm an all in or not interested person. The idea of kicking tires on something makes zero sense to me. And anyone that knows me, that's the good, the bad, the

ugly about me because I'm so passionate about things that I could not be bothered by something or I will haunt people about it because I become obsessed. It's sort of like what we were talking about before with corporate America. When you have these great ideas, you've got to find ways to see them through because they can literally change the world. And back to your examples and analogies around political, we know there's proof that this works. We all are living it. We see it. We're consuming it. And we've all seen the behind the scenes, how this shaped, you know, the different campaigns and wins. And we understand as a population,

there is fact here and data doesn't lie. So why not apply what we know works to your business, especially where for me, what you've done is you got rid of that barrier to entry by lowering that initial investment to $5,000. I'm a one-man company. I can afford that, right? Sure.

So that's something that, wow, a green light went on for me. If it's only $5,000, yeah, I'm worth that. My company is worth that to have data and analytics to spell out for me who my actual customer is. Because none of us, if you're like me and you don't have, you know, a big digital agency. And sometimes you could have the wrong one, as you pointed out. You don't have that intel and information. And I constantly go back to this. The data doesn't lie.

I'm using apps to analyze my LinkedIn audience to analyze my Instagram. You know, I have so many different apps that I'm using because I'm, I don't have a one-place solution, a holistic approach. That would simplify my life and allow me to increase conversions rapidly if I had that opportunity, which now it sounds like I'm going to. So, yeah, $5,000 is zero barrier to entry for anyone who's not a tire kicker. Yeah, we did this for an Instagram influencer about a year ago. She had about 750,000 followers.

And she sold a product. She did conferences as well. And I'm not big on working with influencers because I believe right now that there's a war in the influencer game. And the people that are fighting the war, I think Mike Dillard recently called it war, so I'm stealing his term, or the people that are spending millions of dollars a month to win the game. And so most people are going, I'll spend $500 a month, and I'm going to blow this thing up. And it just, you're already out of the game. You're going to lose, right?

I can give you insights, but playing the influencer game is something I've sort of. avoid it, but we did this because she wanted to know what the data said about her audience, right, about the people that were buying products that were going to her conferences. And she said, Philip, I want to expand my platform off Instagram and go into Facebook. So I said, well, before you do, let's go see what the data sets. So we overlaid all of her product purchasers and conference attendees. And we were able to ascertain that Facebook was the number four performing platform for all the people that bought from her.

So she was with, before she came to us, she was about to go invest all this money into a platform that was the number four performing platform amongst the people that were paying her already. The number two performing platform was Instagram where she had built this following. It wasn't even number one. Number one, you know what I did you? LinkedIn. LinkedIn. No, no, Pinterest. Get out of here.

I'm shocked to hear that. So now she said, I good. Now I know where to go. And she took the data. And like I said, you can take the data and go implement it yourself, right? I know how to interpret the data. I can give you all these insights. And that's what as part of that.

I don't just throw a data report down on you. I have a 45 to 60 page report that we this $5,000 report. It's a 45 to 60 page report. And I spend two hours with you going over all of it and explaining and interpreting it. And then you can go and take it and implement it and put a strategy together and do all that. So that's what we did for that. particular influencer and that brand. Wow, this is so eye-opening to me, and it's really exciting when you start to realize that you can access this information to elevate your business. And

when we're clear on who our audience is and who we're engaging with, we can tailor better messaging. We can, you know, we can offer conclusions readily. So this has to be very excited. But all right, so I didn't even say that. So listen, this Instagram influencer, she had a highly religious following. And she had this incredible story of her faith and where she came from. She adopted kids and all this stuff. And she had never told that story on stage. So it didn't cost her any money when she got the data to understand that sharing her story of faith was going to connect at a deeper level with her audience.

Now again, again, this is what I keep getting back to. That's not manipulation. I am so obsessed with the fact that, like, I'm, again, about to turn 46, I didn't grow up with cell movies. I didn't grow up with iPads. I grew up talking to people. My wife and I met because we had long conversation. There were no dating platforms that we were going through, and we didn't text all day long. Like, no, like, we built real relationships and real connections with people, and that's what I'm trying to get through in my marketing more than anything else. Ultimately, I'm trying to to find customers that go, I will never go anywhere other than with the product and service that

this person's selling. So are you optimizing your own speeches by digging into your data so that you can continuously figure out what people are connecting with? So this is brilliant, right? I mean, I'm like, as a speaker, and I know a lot of my audience are speakers and or want to speak to to all their businesses. This is really interesting. I've never gotten anything other, you know if you get a standing, oh, you know when people laugh at a joke, but that's like on the fly. kind of processing while you're speaking is really challenging to do sometimes. So I'm really interested to get that insight too. That's pretty. So I found in my own, so I did it to myself. And what I found was my audience is business owners. They're decision makers. Decision makers

aren't tire kickers. So when I tell you that I want to work with those people, that's because we took all of my, you know, the people I have a, I have a certain number of followers and I can get the date on them. And we were able to track putting a website pixel on my website. We ended up tracking. And it was entrepreneurs and business owners, not salespeople, not marketers. My audience is not marketing CMOs. It's just not. My market is business owners because business owners say, in order to follow a path in my marketing that's completely different than everybody else is utilizing, to know that I am going to be an outlier with a bunch of followers in this marketplace, the only people that go that path are business owners, not marketers.

Wow. And that's eye opening. And that's what the data told me. Isn't that crazy? That is crazy. So like, you know, Gary Vee's team has just booked me. And I'm speaking to, I don't know, 3,000 massage owner businesses out in San Diego in a couple weeks, right? I'm speaking to 2,000 automobile dealerships in Orlando in a couple weeks.

By the way, car dealerships, although that is a very, disruptable market right now with autonomous cars and everything, those people are committed to their marketing. I mean, they are no tire kickers in the automotive industry. So I'm super excited to talk to all these people. Oh my gosh, prime for disruption. That's going to be, I'm so excited for you to talk to them too. All right. So I've got to wrap this up, Philp. Thank you so much for being here. How can everybody get a hold of you? You can email me. PS at philipstuts.com or you can go to philipstuds. either way i'm good well i'm going to email you because i am so excited to gain this insight and to advance my business so i couldn't thank you anymore for coming on today and i'm definitely having

you back because i need to hear about your trials i want to hear how you're doing and i'm really excited for you so thanks for bringing all this power and impact us today i'd like to say one thing yes okay i always talk about i talked about this earlier you know i had this purpose in life which is to give and grow that's like my total purpose I believe with a podcast like this, it's not like you are just reigning dollars for a podcast, right? This is not a moneymaker for you. This is an ability to serve others and you've built a following that serves others. And I've learned from your podcast because I listen to it.

And so I just honor you and grateful the opportunity to speak to your audience today because you serve them every day. And I think people forget how much others give sometimes when, especially in the podcast industry, because people, it's a lot of time. You're a busy woman. You're raising your son. You've got this business you're running. You're doing speeches, right? And you're doing this podcast to serve others.

So I honor you, and I'm really grateful for the opportunity. Oh, thank you, Philip. You're so sweet. All right. So we're staying connected. Everyone else. Stay with me right now. Hang tight because I'm going to be right back.

Okay, welcome back. I hope that you love meeting Philip as much as I love talking and learning from him. I'm so excited about working with him and really getting to better understand who my audience is, how I can better serve you. And knowing that he has that data and analytics to provide that insight is flipping mind-blowing. It's also very mind-blowing how political races are now won. Wow. Kind of shocking.

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Okay, so I got a couple of questions that I want to dive into and give you some feedback on. If you ever want to submit a question to me, you can go to my website, Heathermonahan.com. You can leave the question there. you can hit me up on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, any social media platform, and DM me the question and I will answer it on the show. Okay, so here's the first one. I wanted your advice. I know your time is valuable. Oh, thank you. So I deeply appreciate it. Briefly, I'm a mom of two who was laid off from a bank 10 years ago after being an employee there for 10 years

that hurts. I was seven months pregnant at the time. They had a reduction staff and my boss was the first to go. I have been home since life happens. Parents were ill. Two young kids. I truly devoted myself to all this. I feel so lost now because I've lost my way. I don't want to go back to banking and I've been in search of my passion, my dream, if you will. I cannot seem to grasp what that is. I'm a very hard worker. I'm dedicated. I'm loyal. I would press hard if I only knew what it is that I should be doing. And what fulfills me what I could be good at. Just can't seem to find it. I cry and pray all the time. my gosh, my heart is breaking. Okay, here's the thing. First of all, it sounds like a confidence issue first and foremost. So I would make the commitment to create confidence in your life, just like losing weight, right? Like I need to do right now. If you want to say, I'm going to lose five pounds, then we need to get on the scale. We need to give ourselves a timeline. We need to lay out a 30-day plan. Do that with your confidence. I walk you through how to do that on my free e-book on my website, Heather Monaghan.com, or in my actual book confidence creator. So, you know, sign up for

my free accountability partner program for 30 days you'll get an email from me directing you on how to create confidence in your life. Let's get going on that one first and foremost. Next thing, this is interesting. I won an award a couple years ago and it was called unique value proposition award or I don't know, something like that. And I thought, what is unique about me? I don't know. And I was serious. I didn't know. So I decided to send an email to 10 people in my life, some personal friends, some work friends and ask them, hey, I just won this award and I'm trying to figure something out. What is unique or valuable about me that's different that you can help me to understand to see through your eyes?

And I got back the most beautiful emails from people telling me what was special and different about me. And I didn't know people saw me that way. So I would say, reach out to 10 special people in your life, get their feedback, see yourself through their lens, and you're going to learn real quickly some superpowers that you have that you didn't see because it happens to all of us. I remember a woman I worked with didn't see any value in herself. And she called me and said, I just, there's no special anything in me. There's no unique anything. And I said, wait a minute. Is this the person that I send any type of communication that I have

to first? And it looks like trash when I send it to you and you make it beautiful and gorgeous and fantastic in minutes. She's an editor and she was so talented. And she said, oh yeah, that's me. But anyone can do that. No, not anyone can do that. I can't do that. That's why. you are priceless to me and your superpowers are so different than mine. And I can't go out to market into the world without your help. Just like I can't write my book without the editor, right? So you need to ask other people sometimes how they see your value because you just might be taking it for granted.

I certainly was. And I'm sure you probably are too. So definitely get some of that feedback, tap some people in your life, ask them what's valuable and special and unique about you because we should all be celebrating what that special trade is. Another quick story for you. A good friend of mine spent a lawyer for a long time, wasn't finding joy and passion in her life, but needs to pay her bills. We all know the drill. And she started doing pro bono work in the fashion industry because that was her calling. That's what she loved and she wanted to incorporate passion in her job somehow. She went all in on that

three years ago and working for free. Again, pro bono work. But that led her to meet a lot of people in the fashion industry, which led her to opportunities, which ultimately led her to leaving that law firm that she was at and jumping to a new law firm and launching a fashion law business, which has directly incorporated her passion with her mission, with her income, with her livelihood. She's living her dream now. Was it easy? No. She had to go through that time where she was doing it for free, and it was a lot of hard work and a lot of naysayers. But to find your passion, sometimes you have to create it. And oftentimes people will tell you it's not possible. It's on you to focus on the solutions and move through and over the obstacles.

If success was easy, everybody would have it. So get committed to creating your confidence. Get committed to finding your purpose and passion. Remember what it was that you loved to do when you were a little kid and start chasing that now. The more you spend time doing it, the stronger you will get. Okay, that's my feedback there. Okay, then I got this question. I want to try fitness modeling, but I also want to continue speaking.

I've been told the fitness part would throw roadblocks up for me because the more traditional people that are currently hiring me for speaking engagements don't see the fitness modeling part as part of my brand. Do you have any thoughts about this and about helping me to get hired to speak? Okay, so this is interesting to me. First of all, look at the bigger picture. What is your ultimate goal? Right?

You don't want to tackle just this one little time. tiny question, what's the bigger picture? And maybe the bigger picture is that is your passion. Fitness modeling is it for you. Well, then go all in on that. Don't let the speaking portion jam you up. If this is something you just want to try because you think it's interesting and fun, I don't know that, you know, bigger picture of your primary revenue source is speaking if that's worth, you know, jumping into if you're going to potentially lose. Now, there are ways to win, right? So bigger picture, if your speaking engagements are for sales, kickoff meetings and for, you know, multi-level marketing companies. Well, maybe there is a way to

incorporate the fitness modeling into that. And maybe that helps expand your reach and elevate you in this in your speaking career. So it's all in how you position it in who you're servicing and have a bigger vision for yourself moving forward than just these simple, small questions, look down the road further and say, how is this helping to expand my brand? How is this helping to support my revenue streams. How can I have all of these things work together? I remember a couple years ago, I mapped out on a piece of paper what my business would look like, which revenue streams would feed one another, what businesses could circle back and expand one another. And I started thinking about, you know, the more reach I can have, the more books I can sell. Well, a way to expand your reach is

to launch a podcast and a way to expand your reach is to have speaking engagements. And then a way to expand your reach is to be a guest on other podcasts. You know, so I started each thing started feeding something else, but they're all under that same umbrella. And it's really important to view your business in that regard. Don't look at it as broken off pieces. Map it out on a piece of paper, how one vehicle can feed the next, how they're all under that same umbrella and discipline.

For me, that's around confidence, authenticity, business, growth, entrepreneurship, whatever yours may be. figure out how can they all be under that same umbrella and feed one another, not cannibalize one another. That's the direction I would give. Don't look at it as, should I do this fitness modeling job, or is that going to cabosh my speaking, find a way to feed one another, increase your reach, increase your audience, and sharpen and direct your message. Because when you find the way to do that, the momentum really picks up and you'll start to take off. So I hope that answers your questions today. again, please shoot me your questions at my website on any social media platform. I can't wait to hear

from you. And when you post about my show, I will retweet, repost. I appreciate it so much. And when you leave me your review, send me a DM and a screenshot of that review. And I buy you my $299 confidence video course as a big thank you. So until next week, keep creating confident.