KGCI: Real Estate on Air - Marketing for Real Impact with Nathan Yeung

Episode Date: October 18, 2025

Friday Focus is your weekly mini-series from KGCI Real Estate On Air—a deep dive into one theme, broken into tactical, easy-to-implement episodes. Every Friday and Saturday, we unpack the strategies, scripts, and systems agents use to win more business—without the fluff.Catch every episode in the series to get the full picture, and put these moves into play by Monday.Summary:In this dynamic episode, we sit down with marketing strategist Nathan Yeung, who shares his philosophy on shifting from surface-level marketing tactics to creating campaigns with real, measurable impact. Nathan reveals his blueprint for building a purpose-driven brand that resonates deeply with clients, focusing on authenticity, consistency, and providing genuine value. Learn how to transform your marketing from an expense into a powerful engine for business growth and meaningful client relationships.Key TakeawaysShift from Volume to Value: Nathan advocates for moving away from generic, high-volume marketing towards highly targeted content that provides immense value to a niche audience.The Power of Consistency: Marketing success isn't about one viral post; it's about showing up consistently and building an enduring brand presence that clients can rely on.Measure Real Impact: Learn how to track metrics that truly matter—like client engagement and lifetime value—rather than vanity metrics like likes and follows.Lead with Purpose: Nathan emphasizes that authentic marketing starts with clearly defining your "why" and letting that purpose drive every piece of content and every client interaction.Keywords/PhrasesNathan Yeung, Real Estate Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Purpose-Driven Brand, Real Estate Lead Generation, Content MarketingCall-to-ActionReady to transform your marketing from an expense to an asset? Listen to the full episode on your favorite podcast platform and learn Nathan Yeung's blueprint for creating real impact! Ready for more? Subscribe to KGCI Real Estate On Air and grab the Always Free Real Estate On Air Mobile App for iPhone and Android. Inside, you’ll find our complete archive, 24/7 stream, and every Friday Focus mini-series—ready when you are.

Real estate strategy without the spin. Here's what you missed from this week's Friday Focus on KGCI, Real Estate on Air. Welcome to the Return on Life podcast where we discuss all things financial and freedom through the game of real estate, focusing on building a fulfilling and purpose-driven life. Welcome back, everyone, to the Return on Life podcast. My name is Randy Dick. And if you've been listening or not listening, I'm going to remind you that this is not about, the R-O-I. I mean, R-O-I is important, but it's really about the return on life or the ROL that's so important. And today's guest is really going to help us understand that. I've got an amazing, great guest that I'm really excited about. I've got Nathan Young with us, and Nathan is the founder

of Find Your Audience. Find Your Audience. Think about that. Find your audience. Tons of experience, decades of experience working in the business to business part of the world in marketing. He's worked some incredible companies across Canada, the United States, and he's even worked with a shark. So he's worked with Robert Herzegovac, and he's got 18 years of SEO, which, I mean, SEO is a mystery in itself. And then 18 years, oh, my goodness. So we've got lots of fun stuff happening here.

And one more piece, I think it's really important, is that he's been a guest lecturer at many universities, including Berkeley. So welcome here, Nathan. Thanks so much for having me on today. So, so good. Hey, well, let's just tear right into that concept of return on life. And maybe you've got an idea what return on life means for you personally, but you're in the game of business and helping other business owners.

And I like this. You've said you're a fractional CMO, which is really cool. So you may touch on return on life with that context. I think, you know, if we want to talk about return on life and return on investment, you know, you know what's a poor investment is hiring a full-time CMO for a business that just doesn't need it. I think a lot of the times then the whole reason I started this business was I recognize that having a full-time CMO for a lot of organizations just doesn't make sense, especially if you're sub $5 million, like you really don't need it because you're likely, you don't even have the human capital or the financial capital for you to fully maximize

some of the opportunities or tactics that you're currently utilizing. So you don't really need to reassess or constantly have someone who is reviewing your strategy all the time. So you're paying this six-figure salary for someone who's not going to be utilized. And it really doesn't make any sense. If you're breaking five to 10, then yeah, maybe you need a CMO. But until then, you know, you do need direction though, right? And I think that's really the whole point of being a fractional CMO.

I'm trying to provide a valuable service at a reasonable cost because you don't need me full time. And more importantly, actually, you need actually a team to help execute that. And I think that's the more important part. So not only do you need someone who will give you the guidance on what I call the highest probability bets in marketing, because I'm sure everyone has. here is listening, you've been inundated with potential tactics, right? Every, every shiny object happens to, you know, fly onto your TikTok to teach you something new. But do they really work? And is it the

right time for you to invest your energy into that? That's my job to tell you yes or no. But then after I leave and I say, hey, yes, do all these things, you still need to execute. And that's really what we do. So providing just good ROI to our clients is, you know, paramount to our business. And, also what I enjoy. You know, if you want to talk about return on life, I love this business. I've worked with 50 plus different clients across so many different industries. You know, I'll be honest, the marketing service business isn't the most profitable business.

But in terms of intellectual return, absolutely amazing. The amount I learned from this business is incredible. The amount I learned from all the experts that I get to work with is incredible. And I can't replace it. There's no value to that. You know, there's this saying possibility or possibility. probability, possibility or probability. Of course, we always want the probability, knowing what's going to happen, not just guessing at what's going to happen. And I like that

you shared that. The cool thing I think with you is that you're working with multiple different companies in multiple different industries that you can bring ideas from another business, another industry to somebody. They would never, never see it if they had their own in-house marketing team. That's 100% correct. And I think that's also why it's hard to find marketing talent. A lot of the times the marketing talent that you'll see, they'll either come from agencies or they'll come from corporate.

And inside of an agency, depending how long they've been working there, they still might be only technical people. So they might be one person who has a technical aptitude in one area of marketing, but works across multiple clients. So they're very good, but they don't necessarily know anything else. So that means you have to be hiring them knowing that's the technical talent that you need. Or you're working with a manager who has really good exposure, but there's a few and far between. There's not a lot of manager roles in these agencies and they don't really turn over all that much.

And then you have corporate. And then corporate is a person who's a generalist, but they're a generalist in a very specific industry. So a lot of the times in the talent pool, you get these people that have great experience, but they have great experience within a limited scope in terms of the world of things, in terms of industries and categories that business can operate in. And what I can tell you is, and this is a saying that I've told to a lot of companies, and they kind of give me a weird look when I say it to them, I say every single channel, every single tactic actually works for every single business.

But that's not the point. The point is, when is it right for you to enter that channel for growth? And a lot of the times they don't understand that because, One, they might not even have a single channel that's working, but there's a reason why enterprises, there's a reason why $100 million revenue companies are utilizing literally every single channel and tactic. It's because every single channel and tactic have a limited amount of inventory of which will convert into a sale.

So once you maximize one channel, you have to move to another channel to find more people. And so that's the reason why there's quote unquote Omni Channel. That's why so many enterprise companies are Omni Channel. is because, you know, the amount of people you can reach saturates at a certain point, but most companies can't even saturate one channel. And this is the one thing that I really emphasize to a lot of companies. It's like you probably aren't even saturating the current channel you're doing well in. So true, so true.

You know, I do a lot of coaching on prospecting and where to find your avatar, your perfect clients, which is really what you're talking about. And I find that many solo entrepreneurs, they are trying to do too many channels and they're not touching any of them well or doing any of them well and I say listen you got to start with with two maybe three channels of marketing and then hone your scale and get those one or two channels going well and then you can start looking at others but shiny object syndrome happens all the time and here's the other piece maybe you can touch on that and just even touch on maybe the subjectivity of marking, you know, you, it's hard sometimes to see the ROI on some of these marketing pieces, but maybe touch on both of those. I think, I think what sucks about marketing is two things.

Is one, I think we inherently think that we're all great marketers because marketers do such a great job in doing marketing that you think marketing is easy, right? because my whole job is to have whatever I do memorable. And if I do a good enough job, you remember it. So therefore, when you remember it, you think it's easy for it to be reproduced. But that's not the case. It's like, how do I get to that point? So a lot of entrepreneurs will go, yeah, marketing is easy.

I can do three or four channels. And typically they're wrong. And the second thing is that marketing often gets hyper-analysed. And what I mean by that is for some reason, when you're doing outreach with your own time, you never sit down and calculate how much time you have spent. So, for example, I know that a lot of the listeners here are solar entrepreneurs or sole business owners. You never calculate your hourly rate. So if you're a real estate agent or a mortgage broker, you have a salary, you can break it out.

You know, and you might be earning $200, $300 an hour based on a $4. or the hour at work week. If you were to break that out and you were to say, hey, Nathan, you know what? You know, I am not liking this because I can close a deal. And, you know, that's going to cost me, you know, one hour of my time and, you know, a dinner and that's, you know, 400 bucks.

And I go, well, let's hold up for a second here. How long did it take for you to find that individual? How many times did you cope for coffees with them or meet up with them? How long did it take you to drive to dinner? how much was that dinner? How many dinners did you have? Let's calculate all those hours before you make the generous assumption that that was the cost to acquire that one customer. And it was really easy for you.

It wasn't. It took a lot of time, but you've never broken it out like that to actually calculate. Oh, it actually cost me like $2,000 worth to actually get that. But then when it comes to marketing, they'll go, oh, Nathan, you're getting me a lead for $20. bucks and that's really expensive because we got to get like a hundred of them and only like two of them converts and you know that just doesn't work for me it's like well you spent two thousand dollars on a single person you're not allowing me to even send you two thousand dollars worth of leads because it's too expensive and it's this this hyper fixation that marketing is this golden tool that

just produces things from a tree you know like a tree like a you know just literally a money tree and it and it will and it will so I am saying everyone here it will but you hyper analyzing it and not being honest with yourself and measuring it against any other funnel that's working for you and being honest with how much money you're spending there, whether it be intrinsic or explicit, hard dollars or just your time, you have to match it with that. And when you do, you will see the benefit through time. But trying to make it seem like you'll get leads for a dollar and it's magically going to turn into $5,000 with the sales, you're kidding yourself. And all you're going to do is piss off your marketer.

And they're just going to be mad and they're not going to do a good job. So I think that's why, you know, we see marketing fail a lot of the time. So then what are the keys? What are the keys for or how do you help people see what the key pieces are to building out marketing that works, that is sustainable, that is consistent? because, you know, we see people that kind of get a flash in the pan opportunity of response and then it falls flat. What are some of the keys?

I think the first key is exactly what I just said is be honest with yourself and be honest with the failures you have with whatever first sales initiatives you've ever started and be honest with yourself of how many times you had to iterate before you hit it home because it was likely not the first network. dinner, it was likely not the first, you know, one-on-one dinner that turned into a sale, it probably took you some time to hone your pitch and hone your skills to identify who's actually going to be worth your time. And when marketing starts, you have to be honest with yourself that you're going to have to spend that same amount of time, but it's going to come

in a different way. And that's going to be through optimizing that funnel. And choosing that one funnel and working on that funnel until it works, I think is really important. You brought up a great point there about sustainability. The number one thing that I tell clients is just look at yourself and be, again, just say, hey, I'm not comfortable meeting people. I'm actually better on the phone. Okay, so you're going to be a dialer. That's fine.

That's sustainable. So let's go figure out how we can support your dialing campaigns. another person might go, hey, you know what, I hate really being on the phone, but I love doing coffees. Okay, let's go figure out a map of potential ICPs, ideal customer profiles, and let's figure out if we can logistically and efficiently plan a way for you to scale being outbound in coffees and creating meetings and email canyances to get those meetings so that you're efficient with those time, because that's, again, sustainable and practical for you because you can do it well and you can

do it for a long period of time because it doesn't burn you out. Where you're going to see a ton of failures is you're going to get someone who has never done a TikTok video openly admit to all their friends that they say they hate being on video, watching a TikTok video, being convinced by a guy like me saying TikTok's the greatest thing since sliced bread and it's going to make or break your business if you do a TikTok video and you going home and buying a tripod, buying a ring light, getting my setup back here and doing videos, but you hate it. you hate it and every time you do it you hate it so all you're going to do is you're going to drive down one the outcome so it's not practical for you and then two you're going to drive down

your own personal ROI right if you think about it it's return on life you're draining yourself of life because you're doing something you hate and it's not going to be sustainable so I really tell people it's really quite simple find what is practical and sustainable for you and saturate it so if that's emailing then do emailing if If that's cold calling, do cold calling. If that's going for coffees and pounding pavement, then do that. If that's going to every single networking event because you love being social, then do that. And until you don't have any more social events to go to, that's when you go, maybe I'll do those TikTok videos now.

Yeah, that's awesome. I always say this to anybody that I'm working with, too. First of all, I want to find out what their passions are. What do you love doing? What makes you get exciting, makes you jump out of bed in the morning? because if I can find that, then I can start to build a marketing channel or a prospecting channel or a way that they can build their business. And it's so important because if you hate it, you ain't going to do it.

You're just not going to do it. 100%. Does your work and what you teach and what you help people do, does it translate from business to business industry to industry, or is it very, very specialized? That's a great question. Our framework and our approach is industry agnostic, and I can explain it. So our approach is three-pronged. It's trust, operations, and strategy.

And if you break those three out, trust is broken out by authenticity, empathy, and logic. So how is your business demonstrating that? Operations is broken out by what is practical and sustainable. And strategy is where do you want to play and how do you want to win? And if I were to really nail down the most, you know, tactile takeaway is let's focus on not the trust part or the strategy part right now, But if we focus on the sustainable and practical part, there are three major constraints for you to define what is practical and sustainable. And it's really, really simple. One is, what is your human capital constraint?

So if you were by yourself, you got to analyze yourself. What are your constraints? Two is what is your financial constraint? How much money are you willing to put into the business or into yourself to do this marketing? And then the third part is time. And I know that sounds silly, but you know what, you're an entrepreneur. You should give yourself some timelines. You have to ask yourself, when is the latest time that you can potentially find a lead before you give up or before your business dies, one or the other?

And I say that because I work with some companies that have been backed by VC. I don't have timelines, right? it's hey make it or break it you need to hit break even or you need to hit a target number of acquisitions sometimes I don't have time and when you look at those three constraints and then you and then you match it with what is sustainable and practical for you you'll recognize these are very limited pool of tactics you can actually go into and I think that is the main approach that actually works for every single company. Any business B2C or B2B can use that framework to go, what are we going to do today? If you look at it on the three constraints and then you match it with what's practical and

sustainable for the business, you'll realize there's not a whole lot of options. So those are the ones you're going to execute on. And if you want to execute on anything outside of that, you're probably going to have a financial constraint. I would think that one of the biggest challenges for, you is to keep people going. Many will give up. We'll give up way too early. At least I see that. Would you agree with that? Absolutely. And I think that's, again, something where I think marketing just gets shafted on all the time. People will hire agencies expecting results within three months.

And if you really look at it and if you talk to any sales, you know, senior sales member of any large organization, you're not going to see a sales member produce results probably until the sixth month, right? Because usually within the first two months, it's training and onboarding. So why is it that for some reason, most business owners would go to a marketing person and just assume that they have this golden key and they turn that golden key in three months, they start building results? And you're often just putting your marketing firm in a position for failure. and you're also not allowing a professional to optimize a funnel. Like people have to recognize there's a couple things that are happening when you hire an agency,

especially if your marketing function is what I call immature or very young. You are essentially not only building, you're building a brand new process from scratch. They're collecting data from scratch. And the goal of that marketing person is to do that as prudently as possible and hopefully as fast as possible for you. but if you don't have a lot of money, then that takes time and you just have to be patient. So I would say if you're looking at, you know, a lot of the times our companies will push for returns within six months. I'll say that's fair, but I'll preface that in the sense of, hey, we're going to get

you a result in six months. For sure, absolutely. There's no way I'm not going to get you a result. Now the question is, is that result going to be good enough for you? that's a different story. But the point here is that if I don't get you a result, then I fail at my job. Because my job is to deliver you high probabilities.

That's my experience. That's what you're paying for. If I can't give you that result, then you should fire me. But you can't fire me because I gave you a result that you did not like in the sense of cost. Let me show you how you can decrease cost. But if I get you that result,

that's only the first step. You have to get that result before you can figure out what to optimize. And I think that's also another layer of expectation that needs to be educated to a lot of people. That was, you've got to rewind that everybody because that was magic. What Nathan just shared there about that process and so forth. So rewind it, re-listen to that. That was really, really good.

Nathan, if there's so many different marketing channels, lanes, whatever we want to call it. And they're always changing, and there's new ones entering the program. But could you name the top three, four, five channels that everybody, no matter what business, what industry they should be in these channels? So I think the first three that I can say hands down in every business I've ever been in works. I am going to heavily preface this in the sense that the order of which you invest in these are very different. Okay. So I'm going to say search, paid search works, but I will tell you it is seldomly the first place you start. I will say events work, period.

and if I were a solopreneur today, that is where I will start. I will not start in ads. I will start in events. The third thing is SEO, search engine optimization and organic rankings, works for every industry, but it takes time. So you're looking at results anywhere between six to 12 months. And by the way, when I say that, I mean, that's just for you to get traffic. That's not even for you to optimize your own.

funnel. Now, the reason why that's so important is because organic plays is basically like a dividend. It is a money tree. In the long term, it will just give you money. So it's a long term play that definitely pays if you invest into it today. The fourth thing, which I think people will question me on, is direct mail. And direct mail works for a lot of companies, but I will say it doesn't work for every single company, especially if we think that their target market is typically not in a fixed location. So a good example of this are people that work in restaurants. They're in fixed locations. People that work in government typically are relatively fixed locations. You know, any public serving job, you know, people in fire stations, police officers, things like

that, they're in a fixed location. So sending them direct mail actually works. when you're looking at really, really fancy async remote technology businesses, direct mail is not going to work. And it would be very suspect if you were able to get the residential addresses. So, you know, I do think direct mail is an amazing channel.

And probably actually one of the channels I would start on on a local level. So I wouldn't, you know, if I was a SaaS, company, I wouldn't say, hey, do a direct mailer across Canada. I would do it in your backyard. And that plays into one of the other important things that I really stress to people is network effects play a major role in your marketing. And not utilizing or strategically planning around network effects will hinder your gains and your return on investment for marketing. So that's why

direct mail in your local neighborhood and really saturating your local neighborhood. And really saturating your local neighborhood, you know, your backyard plays a major role in I think you winning in your market. Okay, so page search, events, SEO, direct mail, the four that you've named. I wasn't thinking of events. I really, and I do events too, and I see the value of them. It's just I wasn't thinking that was. I thought you'd be hitting socials.

So the reason I don't hit social is because social, social, is a strategic play. And I literally just had a conversation with a client yesterday who's an insurance broker and building a large insurance team. And every single agency he's talked to said, do social. And I looked at him and I was like, do you even like being on video? He's like, no. I was like, so what are you doing?

I'm not going to give you that as a recommendation. This is a poor recommendation. I said, but actually, you know what? You want to be different. You're building your company. how about you make hiring and a part of that hiring process that those people are content creators? And maybe you become the first firm that actually has multiple content creators and you assign them different specialties for them to create content.

So now you don't have just yourself being the face. You have now your entire team being the face. So I think that then becomes a very sustainable strategy. But I don't say social because a lot of people go, well, social is everything. I was like, yeah, but do you know how many people are trying to be influencers? So the problem is that you have selection bias. You have availability bias in the success of being an influencer. So of course it's going to be like, yes, didn't you see so-and-so?

So-and-so is doing an amazing job. It's like, yeah, there's also like 10,000 people who also aren't and are doing very similar things. Yeah. So social works. but I'm not going to put that in high probability. You want high probability. I gave you four that were high probability. Yeah.

You know, old school often becomes new school. And one that you didn't mention is email. I'm not sure where you rank that, but it's interesting. Yeah, social, I mean, that pond, it's not a pond. It's an ocean. And you are a minnow in that ocean where you can be a big fish in a smaller pond that is getting a lot more attention. from your audience, from your perfect client, from your avatar.

So really, really interesting stuff. Anything you want to finish off and add to that before we move on? Yeah, the only reason I don't talk about email right now is because I do a lot of email and email and email is getting more and more and more and more difficult. And the reason is because generative AI is making it more and more difficult for the noise to come through. So I think email plays a role. I don't look at email as a competitive advantage anymore.

Interesting. And how does AI fit into all of this? A lot. The ability to personal emails at scale is grotesque. You know, it would be impossible in the olden days, you know, I say olden days like three years ago, for you to do one-to-one campaigns at scale. And for those that don't know, you know, there's usually one-to-men. which means you send one email to many people or you do one-to-one campaign

means essentially you're personalizing it's you know right now I could personalize emails based on someone's LinkedIn feed tomorrow for a thousand people and send out 200 emails a day that was not possible before so the receivers of this information this email are going to get desensitized and they already are they already are so if we think forward as everything keeps progressing and it seems like everything's speeding up. Are these channels still the channels or is there something new that's in the horizon you're going, oh, maybe this is going to take off?

I think, so it's not a new channel and it's not a new method, but I think product-led growth, which is just a fancy word for having product marketing as a core pillar of your business or, you know, your. being a marketer and creating videos is really going to be the future because what's going to happen is people are going to get to the point where they're going to ignore outbound and they will simply search for the solution and they will simply educate themselves in their own free time in order for them to come to conclusions. And I think if you have more marketing assets that are educational that educate them when they want to be educated, you are more likely to win that deal.

And I think that's been the direction for a long time, but I think it's going to get more that way, especially as we start to get so inundated with emails and outbound. We're going to get to the point where it's like, I just want to do this on my own time. And that's really where being innovative in how you leave your assets with your potential customer is going to become more important. that's why the you know I guess they say the typical marketing cut sheets that you leave your mortgage sheet your your real estate book all those things your business card are actually going to become more important because those are the things that they're going to pick up randomly when they need it and they're going to read it or they're going to go on your website and they're going to watch a video or they're going to use a calculator or they're going to do something that they want to do in their own time

and you just don't know when that time is going to be it could be between making dinner. It could be when they're on the Peloton in the morning. You don't know when that's going to be, but I can give you this much. It's not going to be when you're going to be on a call with them. Right. Yeah, and I believe that people will be able to cut through the noise and get to the exact answer a lot quicker and easier. You know, we've always been relying on Google. And Google, of course, is putting all kinds of things in front of you to get paid. I simply don't use Google anymore. I just go to chat GPT. And that's my new search. engine. And I quickly and efficiently get to where I want to go without going through, you know,

scads and scads of information. Yeah, absolutely. And I think if you do enough testing, you'll, you'll see that chat GPT doesn't always give the best answers or the exact ones that you want. And you do have to invest some time with it to get the answer you want. So I think you're right. I think chat GPT is definitely useful. But I do. But I do. think, as you said, you know, getting to that answer and getting it served to you the way that you want is really the core theme here. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Hey, let's shift gears a little bit. Let's go away from business a little bit more into personal philosophy, maybe some mindset.

You know, you're a brilliant guy. I've been really enjoying this. What honed your mindset, your skill, your gifts, because you're a gifted individual. were there some crucibles in life that brought you here? How did that all come about for you? I have a weird professional career, to say the least. I went to school for marketing and entrepreneurship, but my first job was the VP of finance. And then for four or five years,

I was a management slash operational consultants. And then I was a CEO for an ad technology company. So my background is not a marketer. per se. But on the side of doing all these roles, I always had a marketing business or some sort of marketing activity that I was doing, such as affiliate marketing or doing publishing stuff in search engine optimization. And I think maybe to my own fault, the reason why I have gone to where I am is I like a challenge. I feel like when it's easy, I don't like it. It's, you know, it's not for me.

And the reason why I gravitated towards marketing was because I recognized, man, like, there are so many companies that are so jaded for marketing. There are so many companies that are doing well, but still have a very broken function. There is no single solution for marketing. There are approaches and there is a way to build it well. But more often than not, you'll see it not being built well. And that's because you can spend so much time wasting time doing marketing because of the gold, you know, shining object syndrome and overconfidence. And so I've, I've really just been in this role because I find it so challenging.

It's so challenging, especially when I get to work in so many different industries. And it just drives my curiosity. And that makes me happy. So you want to talk about, again, your core theme of this podcast, Return on Life. You know, I don't do this job because I think it makes me millions of dollars. I do this job because I've learned so much across so many industries that I am thankful for that and I'm privileged for that. And I get to talk about really random things like jet fuel pipeline infrastructure and how that

business works and learning about how some planes are so poorly maintained in terms of gas and supply inventory that sometimes they use their own commercial planes to bring gas to another place because they can't get enough. I was like, I was wilded out by that. because I was like, how does that even work? Like, are you telling me an airport doesn't have enough fuel for a plane? So they have to use their own planes to truck fuel to another airport? And he's like, yes.

I was like, wow, the world is actually inefficient. And, you know, getting those insights and learning, it's amazing. It's so great. To have that opportunity to talk to these experts every day of my life is, you know, again, it just drives me wanting to learn more. and it just creates more and more knowledge for me to build them. You know, you vibrated a very high level. I'm just telling you.

You just got this vibration happening up, you know, a great, great energy. And I find it really interesting. You went from finance to marketing, like, you know, very structured, objective, all the way to this, whoa, very subjective. And we'll just give it a go and see where it goes. I know you're not, you know, do that. You know, like a lot of people think marketing is just, well, let's give it a go. Let's see what happens.

So it's really, really interesting that you've shifted so much. And, you know, I think you're so well suited for what you're doing just because you vibrate such a high frequency. What do you think your greatest gift is? Is it a gift or a curse? Or maybe it's both. Oh, I'm definitely an overthinker. I'm an overthinker. and that's a gift and a curse.

I think overthinking can ruin conversations, but at the same time when it comes to problem solving, it typically helps. And I think I'm an overthinker generally because I'm relatively open in the sense of perspectives and challenges. And I think that's one of the reasons why clients are happy working with us because I think when they call us and they have a discovery meeting with us, they start to realize, oh, Nathan and this firm is not a typical agency.

And I got that literally just yesterday. He's like, you're the only one that gave me this idea. I was like, yeah, because I don't want to screw you over and give you an idea that I don't think that's actually going to work. Here's what I think is going to work. And that's because fundamentally when I provide marketing strategies or marketing ideas, it comes with this holistic view of, okay, operationally, yes or no. financially, yes or no, marketing, yes or no.

And if it doesn't align with all yesos, then I go, I don't think I want to suggest that. And I think, you know, that comes from my overthinking. If I was just a marketer, yeah, I probably would be like everyone else. Yeah, we should start a TikTok channel. We should really jump on this new trend. Have you seen threads? Yeah, threads is not doing anything. It hasn't done very well.

It's barely caught on, right? It's so easy to be a marketer and just jump on trends and tell people that's what they're supposed to be doing. And maybe one out of ten times they'll hit it out of the park. You know, like if you, if you want to, if I went on TikTok six years ago, then I would be a huge influencer. But again, uh, so did all the people that jumped on threads and that's really not going anywhere. So people are like thinking their savants, um, because they chose to bandwagon hop early. That's no, it's just a bet, right? Threads had every foundational thing required to do well. and it didn't do well compared to Twitter or X.

And TikTok, which was really just a pseudo version of Snapchat meets Instagram Reels, has done far better than anyone expected. So, you know, it's easy just to jump on trends, but it's much harder to be prudent and safe like I am with most of my customers. And I think that's why, you know, a gift and a curse, this overthinking. You know, first adopters usually are, big, big winners. Yet when you're the first adopter,

you often doubt everything that's going on because it's not catching. So, like, you're talking about threads. You doubt that it's going to succeed, is what I'm hearing. Yeah, I'm not seeing the level of, you know, like, you're still seeing a ton of people

being sticky on X, even though that platform has dwindled and hasn't done much. You know, threads might be interesting in another 10 years as new user bases and people grow up and they download threads instead of X and therefore the user base changes and therefore it does it's not a success because it was able to steal the market share it was a success due to the fact that the user acquisition is better and that's that's two different things doing something better and

stealing market share that's a success to me marketing to a better being a better job marketing and just user acquisition I think it's just doing a good job on a marketing perspective in terms of user acquisition. So I don't think it's going to be that great. I could be wrong, but that's fine. But I have to be mindful of your time, right? If you were my client, go on threads. Well, I don't know if it's going to be successful.

So I'd much for to tell you, why don't you go own every single event in your backyard before we worry about threats? Yeah, you know, we all want to have the, you know, the magic bullet, the bulletproof this, to bulletproof that, but it just, it can't be. I think it's more easy to kind of build a bulletproof life than bulletproof business because we can control most aspects

within ourselves, but we can't control everything around us. And it seems like you're pretty structured in what you do. What's your personal life look like in comparison to your business world? Do you translate them both back? It's pretty darn structured. It's pretty darn structured. I usually wake up between 4.30 or 5. I work out twice a day. I have set times a day where I take care of my daughter. I'm very regimented on my food. I'm very regimented on my supplements. I'm very regimented on the time I spent outside of those core activities. Some people go, oh my God, you live such a regimented life. And I always argue with people, I wouldn't say argue, but I didn't debate with people, I go, yes, I live a regimented life, but, you know, I'm doing it in such a way where it's being very impactful and very beneficial to me. So it's not that I'm rigid. It's I know what I want and I know what I want to do. And so therefore, I make time for that. And if you don't

make time for that, how do you plan? Right. And so, you know, for example, I'm going on vacation next week. And I very rarely go on vacation. Well, what does that mean? Well, all the time between now and when I leave is going to be focused on my daughter and my business and my health. So I'm not socializing. I'm not going out. Why? Because those are the most important things to me. Yes, my friends are important, but I'll see them when I come back, right?

You know, people that don't have a structured day, life, week, whatever, they don't understand how it gives you so much flexibility and freedom in so many other areas of your life. So if you don't get it, you don't get it. And when you get there, you get it. You can't understand why they don't get it. So I really get that. I was up today at 440. I usually get up around 440, quarter to 5 every day as well.

And I don't work out twice a day, though. Yeah, that's just my, I have a very regimented where I do cut in bulk cycles every year, maybe once or twice. People say, oh, my God, why do you torture yourself? like that. And I've said this now in multiple podcasts. I challenge anyone to do this. The first time you do a cut and bulk cycle, you feel like it's a fluke. The second time you do it, you still kind of doubt yourself. The third time you do it, all your anxiety from eating everything that you like goes away. Because at the third time you do it, you recognize controlling my weight is actually not that hard.

And if I put my mind to it, not only can I enjoy all the foods I want, but I can always enjoy all the foods I want, but I can also feel good about myself. So the first time, you won't feel like that way. The second time, maybe if you're a very confident person, you might. But then the third time, you know, now I go into winter enjoying every dessert I want. And without feeling the guilt. And that's great because I challenge you to think about it. You can tell me you enjoy it, but I can guarantee there's a part of your little brain that goes,

and this isn't good for you, and that doesn't feel good. Right. Guilt. Guilt takes over as well. Hey, if you can sit down with yourself and move the clock back 10 years, so 2014, not 2024, what would you do differently? What would you tell yourself? So we'll start there.

And then once you've shared that, maybe we'll go 10 years out, where do you want to be? I think I would have focused a bit more. And I think that's just because I don't think anyone who says to focus does a great job. And I'm not going to, like a great job explaining what focus really does. I think they, I think they know that it's a practical piece of advice that generally you can't go wrong saying. And I will explain it for everyone on this call. my version of why focus is important.

Focus is important not only because you don't have a lot of time in your day, especially as you grow up and you have more responsibilities, but focus allows you to be more efficient. So you actually do more. And I think that's the part where people kind of skim over. Focus isn't just on the fact that you have one thing and you focus on it. It actually allows you to be more efficient. And when you're more efficient, you actually have more time.

And when you have more time, you have more time to be better at something. that you're doing. And trying to be a generalist, and you'll see this in a lot of people who are very good at their job, you know, like good CTOs of technology companies, they will buy software because they go, that's a waste of my time, right? And I wish I was more focused not only in my own pursuits. You know, I really became focused in health only in the last four years. I really only became focused in this business seven years ago. I, I searched six, six years ago. We started seven and a half, but I really only focused a year into it. I really think in terms of some of my skill sets, I could have been more focused I was younger. I think in terms of the

business, we could have focused who we targeted better earlier. I think I could have focused the tactical services we were providing earlier. So I will challenge anyone listening that focus in all parts of your life drives an enormous amount of value. And you'll see that not because you're better at doing something, but because it actually makes time. Love that. And you can't get time back. I often say it's about bending time.

And focus is really about bending time, creating more time, even though there is no more time, but you're bending it in such a way. And love that. Bend time, three things I wrote down, bend time. You get to pick your avatar.

You should have picked your avatar a little bit earlier in your tribe and just got more value out of that. So that's great. How about 10 years from now? I do not want to be working in 10 years from now. I do not want to be working in 10 years. Are you sure?

Are you sure? Listen, I'm 61 in a week. And that is a question I get asked all the time. When are you going to retire, Randy? You can retire. Go ahead. Retire. And I go, ooh, I think this is what keeps me young.

This is what keeps me energized. Now, I mean, you pick and choose that a little bit and you get to kind of maybe make more decisions. But gosh, I love being engaged and creating and doing shit, man. I just love it. Yeah, I think for me, so I think the definition for work is I don't want to have a dependency on me needing to work. It's not that I don't want to work. I think I will always work. And I literally spoke to one of my founder friends last night.

And I said, I think once I'm done this business and we sell and we get big enough and I build the systems and everything, I just want to start a technology company and just build it by myself. And I think for me, the reason I want to do that is not because I don't enjoy the camaraderie of it. I just know what's so much more important to me. and that's being able to help my mom pick up groceries or be there for a friend in need or be there for my daughter. And these moments that I think are fleeting and so important to people's lives align with what's most important to me. It's not that I don't want to be intellectually challenged for the rest of my life,

but I think money is one thing. And I think the second thing is what's going to make me feel fulfilled. What's going to make me feel fulfilled is I am healthy. I have a healthy relationship. My daughter is healthy. And I am not tied to work. And I have the ability to make choice. And I think that's that's really important.

We've got a lot of real estate agents on this podcast, but entrepreneurs in general. So one last question before we go into speed. round. What's the future of an entrepreneur, a real estate agent, a mortgage broker, somebody that is a solo entrepreneur? What's the future? You better start using AI or someone's going to be doing deals faster than you. There it is. Period. Yeah, mic drop. Love that. Okay. Let's hit, go ahead. Anything else? No, no, that's it. I hear some people who are just reluctant to touch it and they go, I don't know what you're doing. You're just asking for it. Oh, that's awesome. Hey, speed round. A few questions here. Are you ready?

Yep. Awesome. Fine dining, Uber eats, takeout, or home-cooked meal? Can I, am I allowed to choose water? Is it only one? Just one. Home-cooked. Home-cooked. Okay. This is not very speedy. I was a hard one for me. what do you do to let your hair down oh geez you know what watching my baby just play oh sorry it's definitely it's definitely one of the things that i think allows me just to let loose i like i zone out and it's great and i'm just very present hmm love that love that do you like music? I love music. Favorite band? Okay, good one. I'm going to say a toss-up between Radiohead and Coldplay. Love it, love it. Do you prefer text, phone call, email, or in person? Phone call.

Phone call. Why phone call? I would love more in person. I just feel like phone call is just more accessible. More efficient, yeah? Yeah. Okay. Audible or hardcover? I was going to say e-reader, but audible. Okay, audible or e-reader. That's good too. Last question. If you were a scratch and sniff sticker, scratch and sniff sticker, and I rubbed your shoulder, what would I smell? To be honest, it's going to be meat because that's how much I eat. That's probably what it would be. I would say some sort of meat because I eat so much of that.

Are you a carnivore? I'm a huge carnivore diet, yes. So majority of my diet is carnivore. Okay. Makes sense. Makes sense. Well, Nathan, you've been an absolute privilege to have on the Return of Life podcast. I really appreciate you being here.

And thank you for being such a great guest. Thank you for having me. Hey, thank you for joining me on the Return of Life podcast. I'm excited that you're here. I need you to hit the. subscribe button on the YouTube channel and follow us on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, comments, reviews, guests that you think should be on this would be so important for us. So we want to hear from you as well.

And of course, we're on all the social platforms where we are always discussing everything that is above.org.R.O.R.L. Return on life.