Leap Academy with Ilana Golan - Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire | EP62

Starting point is 00:00:00 Wow, this show is going to be incredible. So buckle up and I'm sure you're going to enjoy it. But before we get started, I want to ask you for a favor. See, it's really, really important for me to help millions of people elevate their career. Fast-track to leadership, land dream rules, jump to entrepreneurship or create portfolio careers. And this podcast is all about enabling this for millions of people to see a map of what it actually takes for big leaders to reach success. So subscribe and download.

Starting point is 00:00:30 never missed it. Plus, it really, really helps me continue to bring amazing guests. Okay? So, let's dive in. A lot of people say like, oh, you need to go to Harvard to do well or you need to grow up with money. Well, I think it's just as powerful to not have those things. Neil Fattel, entrepreneur, marketing guru, been recognized by the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, even President Obama and the United Nations. Like, come on. My first job was cleaning restrooms and picking up trash because that was the circumstances I was dealt. You've helped companies like Amazon, NBC, HP, and more in marketing and growth. I honestly believe entrepreneurship is one of the hardest things to do.

Starting point is 00:01:08 I've done marketing for so many businesses and so many different verticals, you kind of figure out what works. I'm not saying because I'm smart or anything like that. I'm not saying because I'm a better marketer. You just learn what works and what doesn't by just doing something long enough and making enough mistakes. You can be in the biggest industry ever, and if you suck at whatever you're doing and you don't enjoy it,

Starting point is 00:01:25 it's going to be hard to make money. What do you think is something that built you to, what we're saying today. I think one of the things that's built me is... Neil Patel, entrepreneur, marketing guru, been recognized by the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, even President Obama and the United Nations. Like, come on.

Starting point is 00:01:57 You've helped companies like Amazon, NBC, HP, and more in marketing and growth, and you've seen yourself 10 million visitors a month from 180 countries on your site, and you're helping others, do the same through your agency and Uber suggests. But in your book, Hustle, you want to show that success is for everyone. Not just the rich club, not just the Harvard graduates.

Starting point is 00:02:23 Why is this important for you, Neil? A lot of people believe that you need to start from a certain area to do well, like going to a good college or having parents who have money. And don't get me wrong, going to Stanford or Harvard, does help because it opens up networking, even potential money. I have a friend who created a hedge fund right out of graduating from Harvard Law School because his buddies went to Harvard as well and a lot of them had rich parents and were in finance. And his fund did extremely well.

Starting point is 00:02:56 This was before the dot-com boom. He cashed out right before the dot-com crash and he retired. And if having rich parents also helps because you can end up getting cash to start a business or maybe they open up their network. But you don't have to have any of that to do well. A lot of the entrepreneurs out there has started from very little and have done well. A great example of this, Steve Jobs didn't come from much.

Starting point is 00:03:22 Elon Musk, don't get me wrong, smart kid, but it's not like he grew up with a dad who has hundreds and millions of dollars or anything like that. A lot of it was self-earned. And you have countless examples of this Mark and Driesen, right? the creator of the internet or Netscape, not really the internet, but he was early on when it came to browsing. AOL, I believe, was the one who bought his company back in the day. It's not like he went to Harvard or Stanford and grew up with really wealthy parents. Now, for all of those examples,

Starting point is 00:03:53 I have countless examples of people who have also done well who went to Harvard or Stanford, and funny enough, Elon did go to Stanford. But I also have examples on both sides. And it doesn't make or break you. My mom was a teacher. My dad worked for a bank, not as executive as a bank. He worked as a loan processor and started at the bottom and never really got anywhere to the top, never even to middle management. And I did okay. You know, I'm living in Los Angeles, California in a nice, affluent neighborhood. And my first job was cleaning restrooms and picking up trash because that was the circumstances I was dealt. To me, that's really important. Like you said, there's going to be people that ticked all the boxes and studied in every university possible, and they're stuck. And there's

Starting point is 00:04:38 going to be people that came from nothing and look what they built. So there's both. But for me, I love what you said in your book hustle that is you can do whatever you want. And it's really more about the hustle. Yes, some people, it will be a little easier for them. But guess what? It's going to be hard for them too. So now the only question is, are you willing to continue when other people stuck. So for me, that is the big thing. But take us to your young age. Yes, you didn't grow up necessarily with this, but you were also entrepreneurial from a very young age. Take me there for a second, Neil. When I was around 15, I shouldn't have been doing this, but I was selling music to kids, music CDs. I was helping people with televisions. I was helping people with cable boxes. I was

Starting point is 00:05:29 selling stereo equipment that are car parts. I was selling whatever I could to make money. And I had a reseller's permit from the State Board of Equalization in Southern California. I would buy things from stores for a cheaper price because a business buying as a business, a lot of times they'll give you discounts. And then I would sell it to people for a more expensive price. And it worked out really well. And I made some money from that combined with working nine to five jobs, although they weren't really nine to five. They're more so like four to seven p.m. jobs, like working after school and weekends, combination of both of them gave me enough capital to really get a kickstart into whatever

Starting point is 00:06:12 I really wanted to do. I need my kids to listen to that. But tell me a little bit, so you decided to start your own venture, but you also realized then how important is marketing, right? Yeah, so when I started my first website, I was looking for actually a job. My sister at this time, I was young in high school, 16. She worked for an Oracle financial consultant. So to give you an idea, imagine a grocery store.

Starting point is 00:06:37 This was quite a while ago. This was more than 20 years ago, 23, 24-ish years ago, somewhere around there. And he would end up telling him what to place where to maximize the revenue. And at that time, he was getting paid a few hundred bucks an hour. Imagine getting paid 250 bucks an hour. In today's world, that's a lot of money. but 23, 24 years ago, that was definitely a lot of money. So I was like, huh, I don't want to be this Oracle Financial Consultant.

Starting point is 00:07:05 I started going online and I started searching for these jobs on sites like Monster.com. Keep in mind back then, I don't even know if LinkedIn existed. But when I was searching, there were requirements. There were no kids who were just graduating high school and making tons of money. Most of them had college degrees, which were prerequisite for most jobs. and to be an Oracle financial consultant, you need all these Oracle certifications. Keep mind, I didn't even know what Oracle was

Starting point is 00:07:30 other than there was this rich guy named Larry Ellison. So once I realized I didn't qualify for any of the jobs, browsing these jobs, I realized they're making millions of dollars. I'm like, you know what? I can create a job site like Monster.com or CareerBuilder or Hot Jobs. And if I make 1% of what they make, I'm going to be a millionaire, right? Because if they're making hundreds of millions a year, take 1%, that's rich. Little kid doesn't understand the concept,

Starting point is 00:07:53 of there's revenue and profit. I just look at it as I'm collecting money if I can make 1%. And I paid someone to help me create a website and I launched it, got little to no traffic, and I learned you need to do something called marketing. And that's how I got into it and I realized you can build whatever you want. But if you can't market, you can't convince people to come to your site, you're not going to make any money. For the listeners, I wanted to realize the level of curiosity that is needed here. Sometimes we let life pass us by, right? And you just see these opportunities and you're just not going to jump on them, but that curiosity of saying, wait, what is that? Can I get it? It's actually really fundamental. So you jump on this. You do try to find some marketing agencies. They don't know

Starting point is 00:08:41 what they're doing. So take us, Daniel. Yeah, so then I found a marketing agency, one in Canada, one in California, paid both of them, didn't get any results, lost my money, and I didn't have a ton of money. Maybe I wasn't paying the right marketing agencies. Got little to no results, had no choice but to learn it on my own, got decent at it. My site started getting really good traffic within six months. I still wasn't making any money. But I was like, huh, I can do this marketing part. I'm terrible at this revenue generation part.

Starting point is 00:09:15 And at that time, I really wasn't thinking about honest. entrepreneurship. I was like, you know what? I was a little bit of a book nerd. I'm like, I'm just going to go to college, get a degree and go get a job at Microsoft or something. But I started college early with nighttime classes while I was in high school. So I did a class on speech 101 when I was around 16 at a local community college. And my first speech was on how Google's algorithm works. And someone in that class worked for a power supply manufacturer. None of us we really think power supplies, big industry, but there's power supplies in everything,

Starting point is 00:09:48 heart resuscitators, Boeing airplanes, and the company I was working with provided the power supply to sell a lot of these corporations. And through digital marketing or SEO, I was able to drive them around $20 to $25 million worth of additional revenue. And it wasn't all me because you had the sales team who had to close the revenue, product, had to fulfill. But they were just paying me $5 grand a month.

Starting point is 00:10:10 We were barely spending money on ads. It was mainly SEO. And they were just like, we're really happy with you. The owner of the company, his son owned an ad agency called Tonic L.A. at that time. I don't think they exist anymore.

Starting point is 00:10:23 And he introduced me to Blue Cross Blue Shield, Countrywide, and I&G direct. What he was doing is closing the clients on his end and just being like, hey, my dad pays you five grand a month a month. We'll just give you five grand per month for a client, right? And I was like, sure. So being 16, making 20 grand,

Starting point is 00:10:40 not having tons of overhead. I was happy. And that's how I really got started. Wow. So you're 16. I mean, you're already getting these opportunities, which is incredible. Tell us about college. What did you decide to do?

Starting point is 00:10:57 And what's your thoughts around college overall? My parents told me, if I don't get a college degree, no good Indian girls ever going to marry me. So I went to college because they wanted me to. I didn't want to myself. And my parents weren't making much. And I'm not saying I was making a lot of money or anything either. I'm not saying I'm well off. But at that time, I was making more money than they were on a monthly basis combined.

Starting point is 00:11:21 So I didn't want to go to college. I went to the local college called Cal State Fullerton because just didn't care to do anything. I didn't even take my SAT tubes, which were required for a lot of colleges. And I was like, I don't care. I don't want to go to school. So I was making it hard to get into any college that was somewhat decent. Got into Cal State Fullerton, of course, it wasn't hard. I had good grades until I started making money, good SAT scores.

Starting point is 00:11:46 And what ended up happening was I didn't want to finish graduating. My sister did a lot of my online classes because my parents wanted me to get a degree. And going into school, I took enough AP and IB classes where I should have been able to graduate in two and a half years. But it took me five and a half years, if I'm not mistaken. And my sister did quite a bit of my classes. I know I shouldn't be saying that, but it's just the reality. Fast forward to the future, didn't get married to the Indian girl. The college degree didn't help with marriage because over time people didn't care.

Starting point is 00:12:18 And my parents eventually were like, we don't care who you get married to, just get married. And eventually I had to get married and had kids. And my parents were happy. I love that story. And I think there's something that you talk a lot about in terms of the practical work will actually eventually, and the experience will eventually be so much more important, which is exactly what, you know, eventually you prove that you are a marketing genius and it has nothing to do with what you actually study. So take us there a little bit because there's a 10,000 hour rule that usually going to say, hey, you're going to need to work on 10,000

Starting point is 00:12:57 da-da-da. But actually, that really scares most people because they don't even know if they can afford 10,000 hours. So how do we shorten the cycle? Doing something long enough really helps I'm not saying college is bad or good, but sometimes doing certain things helps kick people in the butt. You mentioned you were in the Air Force. I don't know if that was here or overseas. Being in the Air Force gives you regimen. You're going to have to wake up. You're going to have to do certain things at certain times you have no choice.

Starting point is 00:13:31 It makes people understand how hard life can be and how you have to do things whether you like them or not. So I think that's really good for people. But spending 10,000 hours on something, I think is a little excessive, especially at the beginning, because most people don't know what they want to do in life. And what I recommend to people is just go try a lot of things. Spend an hour, spend five hours. What you'll find is a lot of the stuff you suck at, you won't like. A lot of the stuff you're naturally decent at or good at, you'll like, and you'll be willing

Starting point is 00:14:01 to spend more time on. And you'll naturally spend 1,000 hours and get better and 5,000 and 10,000 over many, many years. but you'll spend the time and energy you needed because you want to because you're enjoying it and you'll get really good at it and it makes it easier to monetize. But you can be in the biggest industry ever and if you suck at whatever you're doing and you don't enjoy it, it's going to be hard to make money. You really want to try a lot of things. You use process of elimination and double down on the stuff that you're naturally good at

Starting point is 00:14:29 and you love. And they tend to go hand in hand on what you love and what you're naturally good at. I'm very big on an experimentation and you're right. A lot of it is coming either from the Air Force or Star. of ways, right? But you want to experiment because at the end of the day, the clarity comes from action, not just thinking about it, dreaming about it. You need to get the momentum. And then guess what? The hours somehow add up when you are in the momentum. But so you co-founded multiple companies since Crazy Egg and Kiss Metrics and now you have Uber suggests and you have your own agency.

Starting point is 00:15:02 Walk us through a little bit of how this all started and some of maybe the hard moments, but also the learning. Started one too many companies when I was younger, had ADD and most of them did not work out. The venture funded one kiss metrics didn't work out. We had bad luck with class action lawsuits and FTC investigation. We passed the FTC investigation with flying colors. The class action lawsuit,

Starting point is 00:15:26 I learned a little dirty secret about the U.S. and how U.S. laws work. Sometimes it's cheaper to settle because the insurance company pays it versus fighting it in court and winning, but you're out so much in legal fees that you've lost more than if you just settled and leverage insurance dollars. So for me, the Kiss metrics would have been sold. We had a few people circling to buy the company if it wasn't for those two things, but eventually the company didn't work out because it really derailed the trajectory and the growth with the lawsuit and the FTC investigation. Let me stop you for a second because what you're sharing right now is

Starting point is 00:16:03 one of the scariest things for every founder. How do you get up in the morning? How do you continue taking the steps forward? How do you not just put a blanket on anything entrepreneurship after that? We were really lucky in which we had good investors for that business. There was a gentleman named Phil Black who was on her board and he was with the venture fund. He still is, I believe, with true ventures. And they've done some really cool companies like Peloton, their stock boom, early in the day. There were early investors. They probably made a killing or blue bottle coffee, automatic, which is WordPress. And when you have investors who have just been through so many of these things before, they're just like, oh, don't worry, you should talk to this lawyer as part of this law firm.

Starting point is 00:16:50 One of their partners was the ex-deputy director of the FTC. They'll help guide us through it. And they just make things much more easier to deal with. So it's a lot less stressful. It's much more stressful in the heat of it, but looking back on it, it's not bad at all. I remember I probably smoked a cigarette for the first time when I was going through that, just to try it out my phone. I'm like, give me that. Let's see how that tastes. And I'm not saying cigarettes, people should or shouldn't smoke. It was just more so. That was my first experience. Yeah, you just get used to over time of dealing with the stress and the ups and downs. Funny enough at our ad agency, NP Digital, I don't remember when we weren't in a lawsuit. And like, it's over little things, right? Like,

Starting point is 00:17:31 Once you have a scale, we're in, I think, 19 or 20 countries. We have a good amount of employees. We're small considered to like a Microsoft, but based on the classification of the U.S. government, we're considered a large business, although I still look at it as small compared to like a Microsoft. You're going to run into silly little lawsuits. And a lot of them aren't to say lawsuits. They're just legal issues.

Starting point is 00:17:53 I've had people, they show up to the office one day, we're mainly remote now these days. And after one day, they have some. health scare so they're not in the business, but we're still paying them. They have their time off based on their condition. And then three months later, when they have to start coming back and working, they'll be like, I had sexual harassment. I'm going to see him. I'm like, whoa, you're only in the office for one day for like six hours. What was harassment? Oh, people were really mean to me on Slack. And I'm like, we keep all the logs. I'm like, where is it? We have in-house counsel. And of course, we pay law firms. But like, sometimes it's just cheaper to be like,

Starting point is 00:18:31 here's $1,000, goodbye, then it is to like fight things because fighting it, whether you have in-house resources or external, it still costs money. Everything costs money. So it's an equation. And you're dealing with a balance and it's nonstop. The horror stories that must come out of a Microsoft or Apple, when you have 300,000 employees, I don't know what companies go through. It must be crazy and not necessarily painful because a lot of the people, at the top are not dealing with it. But like even this example, I didn't know about it until six months later. And they were just like, yeah, the person could improve anything. They said they had screenshots. When we asked them for the screenshots, they came up with nothing. And when we went back, because you can see

Starting point is 00:19:16 history and like Slack and stuff. We found nothing. We showed them all their conversations. They couldn't point out anything. They still said they were going to sue. They had a contingency-based lawyer. And they're just like, look, it was cheaper to give a $1,000 check than it is to deal with anything. And yes, sometimes it's principal, but do you want to spend 10 grand fighting anything, or do you rather just pay the thousand bucks and move on? If you're feeling stuck, underpaid, or unappreciated, or you're simply ready to take your career in life to the next level, I have the perfect solution for you. We have a program that helps you fast track and leap your reputation and career. Become the best version of yourself. Get the dream role you deserve,

Starting point is 00:19:55 move up to leadership, jump to entrepreneurship, or even build a business. the portfolio career. This program helps hundreds a year, and it will help you gain the income, influence, and impact that will transform the second part of your life. Watch our free training today at leapacademy.com slash free hyphen training. The link is in the show notes. Now back to the show. And I think it's really important, and I appreciate your sharing that, because I think it's really important for the listeners to see the journeys and see the real truth. It's really fun and exciting when things happen and it's growing and oh my god and i'm hiring and oh this is so cool but in the day to day there's also a lot of crap that we need to go through as you're growing something okay so kiss

Starting point is 00:20:40 metric had a lot of issues and then tell me more because crazy egg went actually really well so talk to me about how do you decide to continue going to the next entrepreneurship versus saying okay never mind, let me just hang on something safe. What made you continue? Kiss Metrics was a spin out of Crazy Egg. And Crazy Egg is a much older company. I don't know how old it is now, maybe 16-ish years, I'm guessing, maybe more. What I ended up learning over the years is if you do something long enough in a decent enough market, like a big enough market, you can grow. Just most people don't pick a big enough tam. Crazy Egg has a okay Tam, but it's not the biggest tam. And people don't do it long enough. And when I say, okay, Tam, I'm not

Starting point is 00:21:28 saying crazy is really tiny, but it's not a big Tam like CRM or operating systems or mobile phones or electric cars. Those are like really, really massive tabs. Even my ad agency, NP Digital, it's in a big tab, but it's not as big of a tam as housing. You know what I mean? Everyone needs a house or electricity, natural resources is a much bigger market. And what I found is if you just do something long enough and decent enough, you can actually create a big enough business. You look at most large corporations, they don't do everything perfectly. Microsoft, for the longest time, had the blue screen of death with their Windows operating system. The younger generation doesn't realize it, but that's older generation, you're young, but I'm old, and we realize the blue

Starting point is 00:22:12 screen at death because that was just ingrained in our head. Salesforce, great product, but you got to pay consultants to help you use it and developers to help make it work, right? And it's not the most usable product. But it's just a big enough market. And you end up learning that not everything has to be perfect. You look at Tesla, the company's worth our arm and a leg. Go sit in a Tesla car. We have one. So I'm not trying to knock everything about Tesla. I think Elon's an amazing job with technology. but go sit in that car driving from Los Angeles to San Francisco. The seats are extremely uncomfortable. If you sit in a Mercedes seat, it's five, ten times more comfortable,

Starting point is 00:22:49 and your back is less likely to hurt on the journey. Well, in a Tesla, it's almost guaranteed to hurt for most people it's going to hurt in that six-hour journey. But in a Mercedes, you're usually good. And it doesn't mean you have to do everything perfectly to build a big company. Does it mean Tesla's bad? No. Does it mean Mercedes bad?

Starting point is 00:23:07 No. There's different products. different people. And that to me is really interesting. We do have two Teslas and I love them, but maybe I don't drive so much. I admit everything is over Zoom now. What's the longest journey you've done in a Tesla? Probably four hours to Tahoe, but not much.

Starting point is 00:23:26 I probably done it like twice ever. And you're usually going to need to charge anyway on the way. So at that point, by the time you go get coffee and dinner, it's like I'm okay now. but nothing is perfect. Even, you know, we were just moving to HuppSpot. That's been a nightmare. So it doesn't matter what the size of. There's always going to be issues.

Starting point is 00:23:46 And I think that is really important to not be hard on yourself as well. So you're continuing this entrepreneurship endeavor. Your agency is growing like fire. But I think one of the interesting things for me, Neil, is that you had that intention from the get-go and the realization how important it is to build that personal brand for yourself and how that will be a big portion of what's actually going to create marketing for yourself, for the business

Starting point is 00:24:17 that you are in. And unfortunately for me, I did not realize it until about a few years ago. And now I teach it in Leap Academy, but it took me a few decades to learn that. First of all, what made you realize it? And how do you continue to cultivate that personal brand? that you build for yourself. Funny enough, when I first started out, I had no intentions of building a personal brand. I just created content. And I did that because I didn't have the money

Starting point is 00:24:45 to spend on advertising. So it was my way of marketing without having the big budgets of the larger corporations. And over the years, my personal brand started building because I was speaking at events, creating content online,

Starting point is 00:24:56 then leveraging social media. Social media wasn't as popular when I started. And it just all started adding up, sending out email newsletters, doing in-person networking events and the list went on and on. What I found over the years is you can build a company through a personal brand. It helps.

Starting point is 00:25:12 But it's hard to build a really large corporation from a personal brand. The biggest companies are not personal brands. You look at Kylie Cosmetics, I'm not trying to knock her. Kylie Jenner did an amazing job, but it's nowhere near the size of L'Oreal or Estee Lauder. Again, she did an amazing job with a personal brand way better than I did. Not trying to knock her. I'm just trying to compare the size of a personal brand versus a corporate brand. I think Nike's done it the best.

Starting point is 00:25:37 We're going to leverage Jordan. We're going to leverage Kobe Bryant, you know, who sadly passed away a while ago. We're going to leverage LeBron, James, and all these athletes to help them promote our corporate brand. And that's been extremely well for them. Heck, even Salesforce, you know, I watch CNBC every once in a while when AI started really coming out, U.S.S. Salesforce commercials with Matthew McCona, hey, talking about Salesforce and AI. And these corporations leverage personal brands all the time. But the key is if you want to build something big, build a corporate brand.

Starting point is 00:26:10 It just makes more than personal brands. But there's no reason why you can't have both. And I think the best combination is both versus one. And if you don't have the time and energy to build a personal brand, leverage a lot of them to promote your corporate brand. And that works as well. Incredible. Because I think it did help in the beginning for sure.

Starting point is 00:26:28 I think when you don't have a lot of budget, it does help. And then once you have the snowball and you, you have the employees and you have the marketing, now you can start creating and delegating and bringing in people. So when you continued and now you have Uber suggests in your own agency, how do you see the difference of what you're building now versus what you built earlier on with Crazy Egg and Kiss metric? Honestly, at this point, we don't really build anything. We just buy. The team does continue to add features and maintain the companies and try to grow them, but we spend more of our money on M&A and just buying up competitors than anything else

Starting point is 00:27:11 because it just tends to be more efficient and a better use of money than trying to create things from scratch. I honestly believe entrepreneurship is one of the hardest things to do. Going from zero to 10 million is really hard. It's much easier to go from 10 to 100 in a big organization or $100 to a billion. And I think starting it up and getting to the first 10, most people don't hit those milestones. So what we just like doing is we just like finding the companies that have built something we want, buy it, and then we approve upon it and scale it. And that's the model we've been leveraging for quite a few years and we like it. There's no right or wrong playbook. People like Apple, like building things from scratch, creating even new markets or

Starting point is 00:27:58 reinventing existing markets, I believe entrepreneurs and owners and leaders need to play on their strengths. I'm really good with finance. I'm really good with marketing. It's easier and more efficient for my co-founder and I who's really good at sales and recruiting to just go buy something that is great, but they haven't got enough traction and just give it the traction it needs with sales and marketing. That's such an interesting model. Do you know how you got this? which one was the first time you bought a company and you just realized, you know what, there's something here. Yeah, we bought many companies over the year, but like UberSest, never created it. Bought it for 120,000. I think we put maybe $3 million into the product.

Starting point is 00:28:41 I'm taking a rough guess. And we made our money back fairly quickly. It makes more than that and profit a year of whatever we spent. Another one that we did was we bought a tool called Answer the Public for 8.6. they said it was doing around $120,000 a month in profit. It wasn't because it said $120,000 in profit are only expenses service. Well, what about employees for support? What about people to refund unhappy customers?

Starting point is 00:29:06 Like, oh, we don't have any of that. You don't really need to do that. I'm like, yes, you do. So the true profit was probably, call it $600,000,000 a year. So we probably paid closer to 12-ish times, 12-13-ish-time profit on the business. but when we took it over, we were able to provide really quick growth.

Starting point is 00:29:29 And within six months of spending time on it, we bought it and we let us sit there because we didn't have time for our integration team and some of our development team. But just in the first six months, we've owned it for quite a bit longer now and we've seen good growth even after. But in the first six months, we were able to take it from call it 60 a month in profit to 200 plus grand a month in profit, literally in just a six month time. and then we were able to see more growth after that. But a lot of times, there's just little things

Starting point is 00:29:58 that you need to adjust and tweak to get more growth. And one of the biggest problems with answer the public was, they had a $99 plan, and we already knew the market for their product with the features they had. People would love it at $9 a month. So we created a $9 plan and that changed the business. Literally that one change. And instead of saying you got to pay up front,

Starting point is 00:30:20 we did a free trial because we knew free trials in this space convert better, and just do seven days. And we knew if they took more payment options like PayPal, they would see another 16 to 18% lift for new revenue on a monthly basis. So there's just a lot of small things that they were doing wrong that we knew were easy fixes. And when I said the first six months, it was really only like two and a half months of change, but it took six months to really see all the results from those change.

Starting point is 00:30:46 And then after that, we were able to see a lot more progress, but it required much more work to see the future growth. But we knew going into the business, okay, we can get it to a real 200 a month in profit really, really fast. And if you're buying something for 8.6 and you're doing 2.4, you're paying less than four times profit. It's not hard to arbitrage it. And we knew there was a path to getting to 3, 4, 5, 600 grand a month in profit and the steps we needed to take to get the product there. So it was a really easy math equation for us. Amazing.

Starting point is 00:31:24 You know, and I think I'm hearing a pattern, Neil, of when you needed to find the right mentors, you knew how to ask the right questions. And now you become that expert in your field and you can move the needle on a company because you've seen so many of these patterns of what's going to actually make it work. And that's an incredible shortcut for people. I've just done it long enough. I've done marketing for so many businesses and so many different verticals. You kind of figure out what works.

Starting point is 00:31:57 I'm not saying because I'm smart or anything like that. I'm not saying because I'm a better marketer. And none of those are true. The only reason I'm saying it works is I just have done it for so many years and so many industries, not being smart. You know, Elon Musk is considered smart in my booker or Bill Gates, me on the other end of not knowing much and having a low IQ, you just learn what works and what doesn't by just doing something long enough

Starting point is 00:32:20 and making enough mistakes. Well, I would challenge you on that one, but it sounds like you're doing phenomenally well. And you talk a little bit about, and I love the phrase, I think you call it renting your dreams. And sometimes you say to people that it's okay sometimes to compromise or to decide that you want to do corporate

Starting point is 00:32:43 or you want to go to a specific role or you want to do something specific, as long as you have a plan, And it's all about being intentional about what it is that you want to do. And if you need, we call it a mini leap. If you need a mini leap right now in order to stabilize, great. But as long as you understand what you're doing, talk to us a little bit about this concept for you. Jack Ma said it best. He would recommend someone who's young to go work for someone else. Learn from all the mistakes, build the network, learn on their dime. And then once you have the

Starting point is 00:33:17 experience maybe seven, eight, ten years later, go start your own business. And a lot of times, just going and doing something on your own right away isn't necessarily the best choice. Reason being is there's a lot that we can learn over the years. There's a lot of things that other people have done right that can help us in our future. There's a lot of networking opportunities that you can use in your future from the relationships you build from working for others. And if you have this end goal, the quickest path to getting that end goal is, isn't necessarily to go from where you are to just try to do that. Sometimes you need to go in between and take a few extra steps to really accomplish what you're

Starting point is 00:33:55 looking to do. That's exactly it. But again, as long as you know why you're doing, why you're saying yes to things, why you're saying no to things, which I unfortunately had my eyes shut for about two decades because I was just, all I knew is to work harder and harder and to hope that that's going to be it. That's going to be the thing that will take you to the next level. and as long as you're more intentional and strategic about every move you make, all good. Just know why you're doing what you're doing.

Starting point is 00:34:24 And I think that's a big lesson here. You hit the nail on the head, right? In which you have to be intentional with your decisions. You're going to have opportunities that arise in between. But if that opportunity can make you more money in the short run, but it's going to derail you from your goal, a lot of times you're going to have to learn to say no and it can be painful, but you've got to think very long term. Now, there's a lot of people that will get various awards, but awards from Obama, the United Nation, like you've got some things that nobody else does, or at least it's very, very rare.

Starting point is 00:34:58 How do you create your own luck or create that to even be a thing? You work hard for a long time, and you continue to network and put yourself in a lot of different rooms and places, and you'll get lucky. people think luck happens from just people randomly, but what they don't realize is they're trying and they're in so many different places that good things just happen because of hard work. And what ends up happening is a lot of people

Starting point is 00:35:26 are just stuck in their ways and feeling like they're unlucky so they don't do much. Well, if you don't do much, you're not giving yourself the opportunity to get lucky. But if you keep going to meetings and you keep speaking at events and you keep creating content and marketing your business and you keep trying to sell, eventually get lucky and things will start going your way,

Starting point is 00:35:45 assuming you're learning from your mistakes and continually improving. Absolutely true. What do you think is something that you went through, maybe the people don't necessarily know about, that you went through the build you to the Neil that we're saying that is willing to hustle, getting out there. What do you think is something that built you to what we're saying today? I think one of the things that's built me is not great. growing up with a ton. My parents provided as much as they can, amazing parents. But when you want

Starting point is 00:36:16 more and your parents can't provide it, it gives you a drive. And that's when people say like, oh, you need to go to Harvard to do well or you need to grow up with money. Well, I think it's just as powerful to not have those things because it really gives you that drive that some of those other people may have or they may not have. And usually in many cases from MC, they usually don't have that drive compared to that person who has come from very little and they want it really badly. Now, I have seen people who are super successful and went to Harvard, X. Mark Zuckerberg, or Bill Gates, who have that drive as well. So it doesn't mean that having a great degree or having well-off parents means you won't have a drive. It's just usually you see a lot of hunger

Starting point is 00:37:01 from people who don't have it yet. What are some decisions that maybe you may be made recently that you feel like they completely changed something in your life or changed a big aspect of your life? The latest big decision that I made, it was a few years ago, but it took me a long time in my career to be okay with this. I was just starting growing in headcount, you know, get to 100 people, get to 1,000 plus people. You can't always do everything your way. It's not about micromanaging, but sometimes entrepreneurs have this notion that their way is the right way. If people have KPIs and goals and they're hitting it for the business, it's okay if they do it in their way. Like if it's not going to harm the business in the long run, there's many ways to skin a cat.

Starting point is 00:37:48 And your way, in your eyes may be the best way. And someone else's eyes, their way may be way better than yours. And if they both hit the goal in similar manners and similar efficiencies and cost structures, it's okay if someone chooses a different route. As long as they hit the goal, they hit the goal. They're not breaking laws. being ethical, not hurting the company in the long run, you're okay with that. And that's helped a lot because you're empowering people to do it their way versus not necessarily micromanaging, but feeling

Starting point is 00:38:15 that things should be in a certain way and trying to persuade people to do it your way, waste a lot of hours. To give them the independence to think the way that is right to the company, and that keeps them more motivated and more all-end, basically. Not just the independence to think the way they want, but to more so hold people to the fire on the KPI, their feet to the fire, and not try to tell people how to do it. If they need help or they need guidance by all means, but don't try to critique someone's way if it's possible for them to hit the goals in a different way or manner than you would choose. Which makes so much sense. So now that you're looking at everything that you achieved, Neil, what would be?

Starting point is 00:39:02 some advice that you would give to younger self, but also to our audience who are all very driven, usually high achievers, just trying to figure out what do I want to do, how do I create more for myself, for my family, for impact in the world. What would be some advice that you would give them? The best piece of a business advice I ever got was from a guy named Phil Black. He was one of my investors at Kiss Metrics. And it took me six plus years to realize this after he told me the advice. And he says, Neil, as a founder, or co-founder, as an entrepreneur, your only real job that you got to do is hire the right people who you have been successful, accomplishing that one thing that you're trying to solve. And if you're trying to solve 10 things, you go find the 10

Starting point is 00:39:49 people that you know can solve it and have a proven track record, and you let them go do their thing. So it took me six plus years to really understand this. And in my ad agency, NP Digital, when we got it started, we hired people who have done it before successfully. So for example, our CEO, Mike Gullickson, was a president of our competitor called I Prospect. And globally, I think, I don't know how many people they have now. My guess is 15 plus thousand people, but maybe at the time around 7,000 people. So he's ran an agency successfully. And not just once. Before that, he was the CEO of Cabario, did well, sold that. He was head of sales and then a CEO of I-crossing, which sold to Hearst.

Starting point is 00:40:32 So he's done it three times in our space for companies that aren't identical, but do exactly what we do, and they're close enough to identical. So having him do it the fourth time reduces risk. Having someone who headed up sales for Europe for eye prospect, which is one of our competitors, head-up sales for us in Europe is usually low risk. Oh, what did you do before this? I head-up sales for this other competitor, and I did great there. when they work for your competition or multiple competitors and they continually got promoted within

Starting point is 00:41:04 those organizations, it means that the organization found them valuable. When you interview someone, everyone says they're the reason that things happen great and the business boom, but you don't really know. But if someone keeps getting promoted within an organization, it usually means a company found them valuable. So if someone stayed at a company for a while, kept getting promoted and they worked at a few of your competitors and they got promoted at both of them, the chances are when they come to you, they're going to do well, assuming they're a cultural fit. And how do you afford them? Like if you're the small and the underdog,

Starting point is 00:41:35 how do you afford the big shot? How do you afford the ones that you really want? You work your way up to them. So there's a person who worked for your competitors who was great at growing them from zero to a million or two million of revenue or even five million. There was another person who's great at growing them from five to ten. And another person from 10 to 100,

Starting point is 00:41:54 another person from 100 to a billion. Go find the people in, different roles that helped them throughout different stages and get them for that stage at your end. The people at the earlier stages are much more affordable. Sometimes they're going to be expensive, but you can compensate them through equity or you can raise money. There's many ways to convince people. If our listeners here are curious about what Neil is doing, all this SDO secrets that he has, first of all, I will just say, just go to his site, we'll have it all there. and you have all these like really cool funnels and things for SEO.

Starting point is 00:42:30 But what would you say to people that are debating? What does Neil provide? We provide anything when it comes to digital marketing. We teach people how to just get more traffic and grow faster. Our ad agency, NP Digital just does it for companies on a global scale. But if you want free advice, you know, Neil Patel.com. All my social handles are Neil Patel and teach marketing every single day. Or if you just want us to do it for you, check out NPR.

Starting point is 00:42:55 digital. Thank you so much for the time, for just being so humble and honest with our audience, and I'm sure it's just incredible to watch you grow. Thank you. Thanks for having me. I hope you enjoyed this as much as I did. If you did, please share it with friends. Now also, if you're feeling stuck or simply want more from your own career, watch this 30-minute free training at leapacademy.com slash training. That's Leapacadet Academy.com. That's Leap Academy. dot com slash training. See you in the next episode of the Leap Academy

Starting point is 00:43:39 with the Ilan and Godin show.

Leap Academy with Ilana Golan - Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire | EP62

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