The Entrepreneur DNA - How a $50M Lawsuit Reshaped Taylor’s Entrepreneurial Journey | Taylor Welch | EP10

Episode Date: March 4, 2024

Follow Taylor on Instragram @taylorawelch Listen to 'Daily Mind Medicine' on all listening platforms or go to dailymindmedicine.tv Watch this episode on Youtube at justincolby.tv   In today's episode, Taylor Welch, a renowned figure in the consulting industry, shares his tumultuous journey from establishing a consulting business with annual revenues surpassing $30 million to facing a government lawsuit and ultimately rebuilding his empire. Welch and I delve into personal stories of parenting, contrasting their children's distinct personalities and discussing the impact of fatherhood on their lives. The conversation transitions into Welch's professional setbacks, including a significant legal battle with the government over a scam within his company, which led to a comprehensive investigation by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Despite these challenges, Welch highlights the importance of resilience, the value of learning from failures, and the crucial role of retention and strategic pivoting in business growth. He emphasizes the significance of embracing failure as a stepping stone to success, underscoring his journey of rebranding and providing insights into his innovative approaches to entrepreneurship, marketing, and building sustainable business models through retention and valuable relationships.     Taylor is the founder of Welch Equities and the Wealthy Consultant. He consults & manages a portfolio of brands and clients making the world smarter, happier & healthier. His first brand reached a combined value appraisal of 78 million dollars and today services nearly 10,000 customers and clients yearly. Tune into his content and projects at taylorawelch.com/links and enjoy. 

What is up, entrepreneur DNA family? As always, I have an incredible guest. Now, this guest is telling me that two plus two equals four, and I wanna make sure that I don't believe him emphatically. I don't know if that's scientific math yet. I rely on Bubba Maths, first of all. So, you know, you can already see our dynamics, incredible. One of my closest friends someone

who i look up to as a mentor and advisor in the space but also someone i can rely on as a close friend to be an ear and a shoulder but also you guys need to know he built the industry standard when it comes to a consulting business well north of 30 million dollars a year and lost it all and got sued by the government and has now rebuilt it mr taylor welch is here what's up dog dude that sounds really bad when you say it that way uh and it was worse but yeah nice and triggering dude we both became dads in like the same season as well that's why we're kindred spirits because when you have uh when you have kids your whole life changes you have to run everything different in fact that's why we're 30 minutes late on this podcast because because you have kids that is 100 percent uh and i have a pregnant wife and i had

no veto power this morning i said honey our boy taylor is is and she says i love taylor you wish him all my love but you are going to take your child to school today. I'm not going to battle your pregnant wife at all. Um, I would have done whatever she asked. That's pretty much what I did. I said, yes, honey, I will. And I will stop by Starbucks and get you your sausage, egg and cheddar. Good husband. Not a big deal, but yes, you know, to keep on the family thing, you have a little boy now, obviously your beautiful girl has been, uh, in our presence now for years, but now you have a beautiful uh boy who is a uh a machine he's a dink he is they're so different even from like early age so kate was kate's five she's you know this like delicate drama princess and so she plays with her toys like a like a normal human

uh harrison plays with his toys by breaking them aha he doesn't think that they're fun if he can't break them and he's just hitting everything all the time so the other day um i think i'm telling you the story like he jumped out of my lap and just hit the hardwood floor. And I was like, oh, no, he's about to start screaming. And he climbed up and then did it again. And I was like, this is definitely a boy. Very different. Very.

And you're someone I come to because I have a girl, the princess, the drama, the feelings. And I'm having a boy coming up. And so I talk to you a lot about that because it'll be a different, different parenting. Do you feel like you're different father to Kate than you are to Harrison? Do you feel like the, the, because if I say, if I just, and I think part of this is personality, but with Kate, probably like your daughter, if I just am like, no, we don't do that.

That's pretty much enough. She kind of is like of is like oh i daddy's upset with me um harrison you have to haul out like slap him his hand like he just doesn't feel the same he thinks saying no is like a game joke it's a joke yeah and like he doesn't you know he's one so you can't like spank him per se or like he's a baby he doesn't understand but he thinks it's funny when you slap his hand so if you're slapping his hand to like don't touch the oven he laughs and wants to touch it again and it's like okay we gotta we gotta work on it like you know i just i firmly believe and you have definitely been you've progressed more than most men but i i don't know if we change a whole lot and no matter how many years we have call it four call it 40

yeah you know what what happens though is society programs us to uh behave in our little box but it never really goes away like that drive to explore it. It's always there. But I do think men have become pretty emasculated, especially in our society where it's like, man, why are you, you're so afraid of losing. You're just weak at this point. Um, and I've, I want to be that dad. That's like, I want my kids to know them when you mess up or when you fail, that just teaches you how to do it better the next time and so even with my daughter we're trying to program that right now because she's in school and she's like I didn't know how to spell something and I can't spell and it's like well that's good that's awesome

and she kind of is confused by that and it's like it's awesome when you don't know how to do something because that's when you get to learn how to do it that's right cool like opportunity as a dad to train our kids how to grow up and be entrepreneurs and take risks and not be afraid to lose and we've lost that as a society i think for the most part i would tend to agree i mean i think we have mutual friends that kind of speak to that point uh that many have followed and will be on this podcast. But I think there's a tendency to just play even, play mediocre. You know, our friend Kent, who was just on this podcast, right? Mediocrity is the enemy. Kent Clothier?

Yep. And that's it. It's because everyone kind of is just okay. They don't want to be judged. They don't want to fail. And this whole thing goes back, in my opinion, especially in the last decade or so just the fear of the judgment from friends families the ridicule and it's just nonsense and it's

unfortunate it is true the reality is here now that social media and all the other things but you're right I mean if we can empower our kids to be excited to fail to some extent, right. Within reason, then it gives them the opportunity to learn. And listen, you as a friend have come to me years ago, just about, Hey dude, this, this loss that you just took was a blessing, right? Cause now you're able to pivot and learn from it. Um, then the same thing is true as an adult, right? Like if you're not playing all out and you're not going for it, I'm going to make the argument you're really not trying hard enough.

And a lot of that is because you're scared of X, Y, and Z. And you're just going to play mediocre. There's this really interesting, I flew out to speak at an event last summer. And they wanted me to talk about failure so there's this interesting idea in biology called mythodatism m-i-t-h-r-a-d-a-t-i-s-m i think that's how you spell it big one um m-i-t-h-r-i-d-a-t-i-s-m but it's this idea that the number one hedge against decline is actually decline in small doses the number one hedge against decline is actually decline in small doses the number one hedge against failure is is failure in small doses this is how vaccines

work this is how the immune system works but it's the same in business and in life when we are um if you want to be not in not insecure anymore you have to actually have exposure to situations that make you feel insecure to beat it so it's actually a form of exposure therapy and one of the things happened to me is i got the um i got the unfortunate experience of everything i touched worked for like 10 years and when like that doesn't sound unfortunate that sounds great that's like oh yeah Midas touch but when I experienced failure for the first time I had no data for how to deal with failure my first business hit eight figures my second business hit eight figures my third business hit eight figures my fourth business was about to hit eight figures and then it didn't and I was like whoa like the economy must have collapsed like I must be losing my my marbles and I've hired a

mindset coach I'll never forget this conversation she was like she spoke to me for like five five minutes and she works with head funds and real estate gurus and big people. And she was like, you know, your problem is that you forgot what it's like to fail. And now you have no idea how to deal with failure. And so I think that you look at an entrepreneur's life every 10 years ish, like 10 to 12 years, you're going to have,

you have three to four years that are really, really good. And you're going to have three to four years that are really really good and you're gonna have three to four years that are sort of average they're just okay and then you're gonna have like two to four years that are like legitimately trying to physically kill you mind body soul and spirit the whole thing it's just a clock and it just rotates and what happened to me was the worst case scenario where it's like the front load, the first front four years were amazing. And then there was some mediocrity, but then my failures were clustered in like a two to

three year period. And so I had two personal black swan cataclysmic events. I had one macro, like obviously COVID with how that affected all of our businesses. And so when you look at the last two or three years, it's been three black swan events, bam, bam, bam. And yeah, I learned how to fight the last three years. It was really, really insane. The analogy is great for life. But what I like about that is the understanding of like, if you don't have the minor failures, you're not going to have resiliency. And you personally personally knowing you you could have went under for the big black swan event like you could easily checked out and said i'm out i'm gonna go

cut hair with my wife i have beautiful hair i'll cut some and you could just you could have easily i mean easily and and no one would have blamed you because that's how big of a like oh fuck scenario you were in right um and what i credit you is not just not doing that but taking some time and i remember you know me and your dad would talk about you were um what what would you call it when you were on like reprieve or whatever like you'd have a 30, like I'm just not going to talk to anybody. Oh yeah. Sabbatical sabbaticals. And I credit you for that because that type of personal time,

that ability to kind of recharge. And I know you and look at your library behind you. I know you just sat there reading and thinking people don't do that enough. When they kick, they hit a little failure a little one like not on levels that you and i have achieved or nor near your what you've achieved in terms of getting hit it like breaks them because they're just not used to it even the littlest ones and they don't sit and breathe and think and and accept it, and say, okay, how can I do better next time?

They just crumble, and they think it's over, and they quit on the little ones, right? And again, in my world of real estate, you go lose 10 grand on a flip. I get the 10 grand is a lot of money. It's not like I make so much, I don't want 10 grand. But relative to losses like you're seeing in some of the news now with these commercial buildings defaulting on 400 million dollars worth of loans i mean what is 10 grand right but it gives you perspective to say if you are going and having these minor failures it gives you a time to reset each and every one of those failures so god bless the day you ever have really a hit uh you have some shielding against it inability to like rebound just like you said the immune system right if you get little sicknesses over time your immune system builds off of it

same thing with failure and so i love what you i think it was even today you posted something since I was up at 430 hitting the gym, whatever. Hey, boy. Come on. I think you posted something about this, about these minor failures. And it hits, dude. It is what people need to hear is take some of these L's and don't make them big L's, but take some along the way. Dude, there's a podcast's a the podcast that we do called daily mind medicine and we release it every day it's like five minutes a day what's

funny is we stopped this and we started it up again because i wanted to test it on a new feed it's like in in marketing like with especially digital like we're like tracking everything um and i was like i i want to see if people actually want this so we stopped the main show we just started it sort of in secret on another podcast line which is about the stupidest thing you can do if you're trying to grow a podcast um and what happened is like the the market just followed the new feed i think i only posted about it one time so it's i was telling you about this like you know the main show is like 100,000 downloads a month well now this secondary small feed did like 40,000 downloads last month and it's its second month and and just for my curiosity when you mean feed are you talking like

libsyn versus simplecast or or what do you mean by that it's like a brand new podcast so we use for it but it's like libsyn um but what what it shows me is that the market is sharing it, so they're just following it around. Yep. But we're releasing an episode, I think, in two or three days. And it's kind of interesting because I was reading one of my favorite books called The Bible. And the Bible is basically just like – it's a business book. It's how the human existence is supposed to work. And there's this verse in Matthew where it basically said like,

Jesus was led into the wilderness to reveal his strength to the enemy. And I was like, hold up a minute. That doesn't make any sense. So first of all, you don't want to be in a wilderness. There's no water. There's no food. There's no business out there like you're just by yourself but then why would he say that he was led to the wilderness to reveal his strength

and i had to think about it and i had this aha moment like this sort of revelation people like to flex at the top but the real flex is at the bottom that's when you flex is when it's easier to quit than it is to keep going that's when your flexes and this has a revealing function to the universe the worlds of the resistance whatever people call it and i was like you know the what i've trained myself is actually to to enjoy that dan martell calls it the pain cave and as you feel it in the gym you feel it in business you feel it in the gym, you feel it in business, you feel it in investing. If you can learn that the, the moment of flex is when there is massive resistance and no one around to save you. That's when you flex and your greatest flex is just not quitting, not quitting at the bottom.

So there was a period of three or four months where i was like talking to my wife i'm like babe let's just sell everything we have more than enough assets and let's just move to the country buy a thousand acres put a solar roof up on that thing and just disappear and my wife was actually like is that what you're called to do and i was like shit you're right no he's great we're not gonna we're not gonna play that game you know it's playing small playing meager and then when you play small once it's harder to play big the next time yeah you know well and this is you know why i made the intro i made that maybe you didn't love but it's true and it's honest and i give you the credit to be able to not just bounce back in the way you

have. And we can get into the story for, for everyone who's like, what the hell happened to this guy, Taylor? But, uh, I mean, you, you know, you have a, the King is back, I think daily or weekly or monthly thing you do. The wealthy consultant book is top of the charge consistently day in weekend month in all the time you have another book coming out but you've repurposed yourself to some extent you've rebranded yourself to some extent you've rebuilt yourself to some extent and that is really what it becomes about is making pivots, adjusting in different iterations of what has worked and strip away the stuff that didn't work.

Yeah. And I give you a whole lot of credit to be man enough and listen to your wife, by the way, which is, that's good. Oh, yeah. Because she's dead on. Is that really what you were called to do? And you specifically were not, my friend. You are a light when it is dark and you have the ability to lead a lot of people in business, but also in thought and in spirit. And so, you know, I give you the credit because, you know, kind of diving into the story, you built this 30, 40, 50 million dollar a year company and the FTC came a knocking. Yeah.

So we started, this is a company called Traffic and the FTC came a knocking. Yeah. So we, we started to, this is a company called traffic and funnels. People can look it up. It doesn't exist anymore, but we, at one point we had 200 staff inside the portfolio. I mean, you would, you saw our offices, you come in, it's just sprawling and packed. And I started in 2015, we started taking clients and it just grew and it was a good product we started doing consulting uh me and my old business partner so yeah we we got to the peak of this this organization and um we were acquisition kings like

we could buy customers for cheap a couple hundred thousand customers these are a couple hundred thousand credit cards not leads millions of leads were coming in the organization on a yearly basis and um it became at at a certain level it became fatiguing for me because when you like when you don't exactly know what you want to build and you're just chasing scale if that scale is not put into a bucket, so to speak, of like, what does this actually do for my next thing? I think Cormosi calls, before he started his podcast, we were talking about this, and he was like, the game, behind the game, that's what entrepreneurs are actually chasing. The main game is not the business. The main game is what does the business do for you? And I didn't know what that game was, so I was just growing for the sake of growing.

We had such a large pool of customers and clients that someone started building a multi-level marketing pyramid thing inside of one of our client groups. Wow. I haven't told you all the details. You have not. Let's let it act for a minute. Hey, by the way, if you're an entrepreneur, if you do hard things, big things, a friend of mine, Taylor Welch has one of the best podcasts out called daily mind medicine. If you want to supercharge your thinking, your resilience, your problem solving, everything from how you do more and get more done to how you handle failure. You know this, but your number one asset is your mind.

Bar none, nothing else compares. The reason I love this podcast is because it's only three to four minutes long, so I grab my cup of coffee and I get my mind right every morning. You should absolutely check this out. Go to dailymindmedicine.tv or just look on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. It's like a nootropic for your brain. Enjoy. So we had a sales training organization. There were about 50,000 to 60,000 clients in that sales organization and just for a purpose of everyone understanding how massive that is what was the price point they came in for like 100 to

200 bucks and then they would escalate all the way up to like 10 or 12k so just do the numbers everybody you can see what he built right if you just do those simple numbers on that one silo that's one of his silos yeah so go ahead one of four and it grew really fast and when something grows really fast like out of control fast you struggle sometimes with like hanging on to it so it's not just the building the thing it's like you got to sort of be able to hang on to it so it doesn't run away from you. And we were struggling really to hang on to it because there were so many clients coming in that keeping track of everyone and delivering the service was a challenge. So we fixed the operations, but then we started noticing people were emailing in and they were like, hey, I bought this thing from you guys and then you disappeared. And we're like, okay, well, that's not like us.

What did you buy? They're like, oh, it's this 5K thing. We're like, we don't have anything for 5K. What did you buy? Send us everything that you bought. And it was some random dude in Facebook Messenger being like, hey, I work for Salesman Thor and I have a guaranteed job for you, and it's 5K.

And so we would find this person, we would ban them and eliminate them, but then it kept happening. And then there were like dozens of these people that were all in our client groups selling this fake product that had no affiliation with our company. And so we had to basically go on lockdown with the groups.

And then we got a letter from an attorney general from Washington State. That is fun. That was a great day. And they were investigating this pyramid scheme inside of the company. And so we had to send a bunch of data. We won that case because it wasn't us

and it just kind of kept kept happening and i'm not going to share once they kind of crack the door open then it gives them an opportunity to say okay what if this is happening what else is there is that kind of how that all transpires the ag poked a hole in it and then there's a hole so everyone starts to look through the hole that and clients of ours had bought this thing and so they were in there because the way that this guaranteed job worked is they would pay five grand and then the way they made money is they would sell that 5k package to other clients of ours so it's like a multi-level like legit multi-level in our own group we had clients coming in who were like well how do we get rid of it we have to refund the clients get rid of them

they didn't know that it was us and um we finally got it under control and we ended up moving on like i ended up transitioning out i felt like god wanted me to do something different and so i moved on parted ways. And about a month after I moved on, we got a letter from the Federal Trade Commission. And they wanted to know who this person was. And there were probably hundreds of complaints that it made its way up to the FTC from this guy. I was just going to say, for those that don't know, the Federal Trade Commission, otherwise known as the FTC. They're the big dogs.

Yeah. Yeah, they're not who you want to tangle with. So at the very beginning when that first started, I was like, this is just a misunderstanding like the AG. And we'll just be able to put it to bed. And so we spent the first 60 days like proving that we weren't this person. They didn't work for us we had nothing to do with it um and they were like cool well we're gonna subpoena everything you've ever done and you're like well cool all right i was like i don't even own these businesses

anymore um and they were like it doesn't matter you were involved and so we did right so we we they originally subpoenaed like 700 000 sales goals and 30 000 individual ads all the data in the businesses and you got to understand like we're we're not we weren't just some like put a random offer together business like Like we kept data on clients. We had data on millions of people. And they wanted all of it. And I learned in hindsight too, sometimes the way that their investigations work, they're tracking other targets and they know where they came from.

And so they'll subpoena the source to kind of get the information on the other target. Almost like in a drug thing where they go after low-hanging fruit to try to make them turn on the higher – Yeah. So we were the gatekeepers. You're the low-hanging fruit because they wanted something bigger or different that came through your world, right? 100%. So we were like, look, we can't – At one point, this was in like the the early 2023 we were like look

we figured out a solution to get you 700 000 calls we'll put two vas full-time on our crm and all they'll do 40 hours a week is they'll download calls and they'll send them to you and we'll be done in 12 years, full time. That is wild. That's how many calls we had. And they were like, no, just send us, I think 30,000. Like, randomize it. We sent them 30,000 calls. And we had to prove everything.

We had to prove every claim that I ever made. We had to prove they had Facebook posts and social media content, and they had everything. And once they got into it, it then became about how much money do you have? What are your assets? What can we pull out of this? And we finally kind of had to get to a place where we just settled to move on.

Well, from my understanding, because of you and a couple other people that we are both aware of that have gone through it or going through it, I mean, there's a real agenda for they want money. They're coming to collect it, period. They do good things, so they do go after legit scammers. But sometimes that line is like,

they're in this investigation now and they've spent resources to subpoena everything. And now it's like, like well we have to get something from this and at least make a statement so we got to the table and uh we started negotiating settlement and they were like we would like everything your business has ever generated in revenue. You said, no, I would like everything my business has ever generated in revenue too. Yeah, I was like, that's not really how it works. Like you, they're like, where'd the money go?

We're like, people, humans? Yeah, operations. They're running a business and even with like so i got really into estate protection and trusts and permanent insurance and all this stuff like pretty much locked down but with the government they're the ones that create all of that so they're like yeah we'll just undo it you're like sweet so i was like i called my attorneys this is like the summer of 2023 i was like what's the worst case scenario here uh because we didn't do anything wrong and i've spent at that point you know three hundred thousand dollars on attorney fees just not even defending myself just hiring an attorney to explain a cruel finance

to the government like basic stuff and they're like worst case scenario by the way never ask an attorney worst case scenario because they'll give it to you that's like looking you have a scratch in your throat you look up on google what does a scratch in my throat mean oh i have brain cancer perfect got it exactly great i'm gonna die so just give everything away yeah and um that attorney was like you know well real worst case scenario is like they want your house so they take it and they want your cars and they take it and then they ban you from um ever doing business again and i was like whoa this is bad this is like really really bad so we go back to the table to negotiate and we're like we can't do that we don't have 70 million dollars sitting around uh we don't have 17 million dollars sitting around like our ass we have

assets that are liquid and all this stuff and they're like cool well we're just gonna sue you we'll see what you got in court and i had to kind of get to that place mentally where i was like even if they take everything away i have to trust my ability to start over and be okay and my wife one, one day she was like, I don't really care. Like if we have to live in an apartment, we're going to be fine. And that was a moment for me where I was like, all right, we'll be fine. Let's go. Well, I had a, not quite as extreme as yours, but my big loss, me and my wife had the same conversation. And there's something about a woman who will sit there and look you dead in the eye and say we're gonna be fine you know

go get a studio apartment for us and we're gonna be fine i'm gonna support you and we'll make it happen and for me just so you know it triggered something inside me of a hunger in a you know i always talk about like being a lion and being able to provide for your pride and your tribe and hunt and you know provide like that moment really kind of triggered that thing because i knew i had her support it was just it really became like now there really is no limit i can go as big and as far as i want because i have the support of her to say the alternative is live in a studio apartment for eight hundred dollars a month and she's into that well let's just go fucking win then and go for it yeah yeah yeah so that was like a good turning point for me and then they finally

they came back and they were like okay no we're gonna settle we're not gonna see you um and we worked out the math and the math was like not based on uh anything that we did or didn't do it was based on my net worth that they could, that, you know, they, they basically poured over everything.

There are some things that you can't touch. Like permanent insurance is never going to be cracked open. If, if you crack open permanent insurance, every politician goes bankrupt tomorrow. You're talking about life insurance. Yep. Like whole life,

things like that. So there are things that, that are like really well hedged trusts make it difficult but they're not like 100 full proof so they finally got to the to the settlement table and then my attorneys were like okay so here's what you need to be prepared for next they're going to drag you they're going to drag your name through the mud because if they can't win a uh if they can't get like a monetary type of thing then it's gonna be like a a moral victory like oh we we saved the market from these horrible scammers sure then the next phase started where i was like dude you have one reputation and i'm about to lose mine yep it's like and i'm about to lose mine unfairly

it's not even it's not even fair if you do something you didn't do the things that are yeah yeah for sure like you look at stories of jordan belford's um and people that have just you know they made they made mistakes they made errors and they paid for it and they came back yeah that's one thing. But then to like have to come back from something that you didn't even do, that was another hurdle for me to get over. And, um,

yeah, that was intense, man. Because if you go look up, I think everyone should look up the press releases. It's like, it reads like a, it reads like a child pop-up fiction book where it's just like,

not even, it's just like not even... It's insane. It's crazy. So I had to go through that and make my own press release and all this stuff. But what's interesting is that the thing I was afraid of from a reputation standpoint, it did the opposite. People were like, whoa, dude, you've been through this shit. Teach me how to avoid that it almost

created um battle scars that made my reputation stronger and what i learned from everything at the end of the day is that everything that comes from life is actually a benefit for us if we look at it the right way it's that it's a cliche saying like things don't happen to you they happen for you you can't see that in the moment but in hindsight when you look back i was like yo this if we look at it the right way. It's a cliche saying things don't happen to you, they happen for you. You can't see that in the moment, but in hindsight, when you look back, I was like, yo, this was great, this was awesome. This is actually exactly what kind of set me apart,

so to speak, inside of my space. And it just happened two months ago. Yeah, but there's so much to unpack, and just for the sake of time we can't because i know you so well but like you weren't built wrong by any means but i think you were built in a way that wasn't best for you like there's no right is what i'm trying to say but there's right for you and the way you are currently built ultimately in the big picture in the macro was not right for Taylor Welch, right? It was right and did a lot of good, but right for you is what you've now rebuilt and continue to produce

with what you have going on. And you and I have talked at length about it. And I'd tell you one of the things that you said to me six months ago, if that is, it is all about your reputation, your brand, making sure you are branded. So that reputation thing that you just talked about is really, really important. I don't want people to lose sight of that, but then to be able to create an ecosystem of branding and there's just a flywheel in your words that everyone everywhere on all platforms is seeing you and it just takes one little thing and you're back at it and so let's just talk quickly about like how did you you know you got knocked down you did not get knocked out you got back up it was a very heavy financial cost

it was a very heavy emotional cost heavy spiritual spiritual cost. But when getting back up, what do you think you rely on? Oh, not think. What did you rely on? What did you go build? And what do you say? Okay, if I'm doing this again, here's how I'm going to do it differently. I wanted to not be in the acquisition business because when you look at what can be broken, if you have a concentration risk on any one thing,

it's very easy for anybody to come in and disrupt you. So like, if you look at any of the big businesses who are like actually world-class, they usually have multiple sources of enterprise value or moats as like Warren Buffett would call them. And one of the things I realized is that if you scale on the acquisition side, you could die on the acquisition side.

And so I started pivoting my approach to like, okay, dude, if I'm blocked from the ability to get new customers, what would I do? If I couldn't get new customers, if I couldn't acquire new clients how would I monetize this brand and I kind of settled on this idea of like you know retention is actually superior to acquisition uh Elon selling one Tesla doesn't make a difference not not not a difference like what makes the difference for Tesla's enterprise value is the fact that people buy multiple Teslas. You can't

compete with the supercharger network. You can't compete with the training that's going into the AI. There's so many different equalizing functions inside of that brand that protect the value of the brand. So how do I take something like that and put it into consulting or coaching or info? And historically, the way you build an info business is you just write a book and you try to sell as many of them as you can, or you get as many clients in a month as you can. But the way that I'm building our portfolio right now is we've actually created feedback loops inside of the system so that we can see how long people stay and why they leave. And so this, this, this company is that I'm running, the wealthy consultant is growing really slow for me. I'm the guy that historically we'll go

from zero to seven figures and in two months, and then we'll go from seven figures to eight figures inside of a year. And this business is, you is $4 to $5 million a year and growing, but it's on its second year. And so it feels slower, but our retention on the back end is about 90%. It's 87%. And we've built everything so that it's very easy to leave based on a choice. So there's not like long-term contracts, but it's very difficult to replace. So think about what I just said. If it's easy to leave and difficult to replace,

you have the cleanest set of data that you could possibly get. When it's hard to leave, you have faulty retention data. So the stickiness of a product is not the contracts that lock you into 12 months, 24, 36 months. The stickiness of a product is actually the replacement cost of the product. And so for consulting, when you can engineer a system where people are paying to be a part of

an ongoing relationship, and that relationship is valuable enough that it's difficult to compete with or replace. You have a really clean set of data. We're doing the same thing on service. So the content agency, the web design agency, basically we've engineered the economics so that when someone comes in, they're buying an asset. So think about a car. When you buy a car, you put a down payment, and then you pay monthly for it, right? We're used to paying both and. It's not just upfront. It's not just MRR.

It's both and. So we have this new book that just released called Revolving Price, which kind of explains this thinking. And it teaches you how to put an onboarding and a revolving price component onto a consulting offer, and you build a book of business. And when you build a book of business, there's recurring revenue that comes in,

and that multiple goes from 2x to 6x to 8x to 10x. Because when somebody's buying a book of business, you're buying a retention business, not an acquisition business. If you lose the marketer of an acquisition business, the business dies. If you lose the marketer in a retention business, nothing happens. It stays the same.

So it's a safer, more dependable type of approach, even in the engineering of the pricing. But in the ecosystem approach on the front end, we have all of these different, and this plays into the economy as well, when liquidity is sucked out of the economy, which is happening right now, people take longer to make decisions.

It's not that the money goes away. It's that if you spend $5 on $50,000 of liquidity, you can do that really quickly. If you spend $5 on $500 of liquidity, you're going to slow down that decision. And so conversion cycles go from, you know, 24 hours to six months.

Yeah. And so we need to give people things to do during that decision making period. So we kind of pivoted around to like marketing's job is not to acquire the client. Marketing's job is to help the prospect do their own due diligence on the product. Love that. And so we have books for $3, books for $10.

We have courses for $100, $200. We have events. We're an events business right now. So we're running 15 to 18 events a year. And it's not more work per se, but we're offering more things at lower prices so that the market can effectively compare. They're comparing a $1,000 event, which is cheap, to a $20,000 program, which seems do or die. It's very risky for them. So the more you can front load that cheaper front end of the funnel or of the ecosystem then the faster the decisions happen

on the back end let's pause to make sure that that comes through okay dude that came through brilliantly in fact it was something i just introduced you to jason because he is kind of the guy right now to to help consultants like myself or yourself. Now, you are your own beast, but others that don't have the skill set you have, right? Because low ticket to what you're saying, I'm fully bought in. As of the end of last year, I've spent some time with Grant and his whole thing. Everyone thinks he's some high ticket master. Bro, he is a high ticket master bro he's a low ticket master his hats his books his 97 weekend course his it's all low ticket and that's the ecosystem and into your point

giving the the the market time to decide while making the decision but getting them enough homework if you will or whatever the decision becomes but getting them enough homework, if you will, or whatever, the decision becomes infinitely easier and having more than one or two different things. It is clear as day. Um, what, what books do you have out right now that people can go get and worth working? They go get them. I'm actually forwarding this to you right now, dude, because I don't think I've sent this to you. the new Revolving Price book. I just texted it to you. You have not. Yeah, I just texted it to you. So I just bought you a $3 book because we're real friends. Real friends. Look at us. Real friends. I'll get you a $7 Starbucks. Thank you. Look, you returned it double plus interest. Real estate. I love that.

We have the Wealthy Consultant. consultant that's on Amazon and we launched that last July. It's been on, it's been on the number one bestseller list for three different categories on Amazon. Since we launched it, we have a revolving price. That's not on Amazon.

That's a direct. So like 80 years ago, there was a big, big market for pamphlets, like small little books. In fact, like the American revolution was started because of pamphlets if you think about it uh the federalists like these are small like ongoing types of newsletters but they weren't newsletters they were books they were like pamphlets they were quite dense and the the publishing arena killed this model because if you're going to go through

the effort of putting together a bookstore you don't want to sell a $3 thing. You want the book to be meaty, 200 pages. And so now we have this weird unintended consequence of a book that should be 10 pages and it's 200 pages. It's like 190 pages of bullshit and 10 pages of good. So we're actually, when you go through a time like this, the things that were working four years ago are not going to work right now. But the things that worked 50 years ago are working because this is just, we're in a macro correction,

a micro correction that has turned into a macro correction. So we're publishing these small books. They're like 50 pages. We've got another one coming out in April, an offer building. This one that just came out is on revolving price. so how do you build a book of business rather than an acquisition chain we're launching a new full-length book today called the um the exceptional experience this is on client retention and our metrics so nps client effort scores uh how to actually

onboard in a 90-day kind of running quarterly roadmap. And so it's a full-length book on how do you handle 100-plus clients at a time without them leaving. We've got a sales book that comes out in July. It's basically all my sales models. And so we have all this stuff that people can access. And if you go to Amazon, you can just search Taylor Welch and pull up The Wealthy Consultant. But inside of that, there's a lot of gifts, bonuses, there's an offer building training. So if people buy it,

they can scan the QR code, it'll take you to a private link, put your email in, and you can download a lot of goodies from that. But the key here is that when you talk about flywheels, it's never just one thing. So momentum is like a wave. So when a wave goes up, it goes up and it crests and then it comes down. And that's like pretty basic. Like we're explaining just how basic things work. When you want to force the momentum of a business up, what you have to do is the wave goes up. But before it comes down, you've got another thing that's creating another wave. And then before that comes up, you've got another thing that's coming up.

And if you plan right, what you get is you get the wealthy consultant. This month is February when we're recording it. Record month in February. If we don't sell anything in March, we'll have a record month in March. Like no sales. Just on the continuity?

Just on the continuity and collections. That's where you want to be as a business. And where a lot of people are as a business is like i've got to go sell x amount of clients to pay the burn it's our burn for like the next 12 months is already covered yeah based on the way we've set the business up and part of that is this forcing function of like there's so much stuff to pay attention to that the the market is like a head on us on a swivel there's looking for wherever the thing is like right now your podcasts theivel. There's looking for wherever the thing is.

Like right now, your podcasts, the market's looking at you because you've got momentum. And there's like, I can't stop looking at Justin because he's got momentum. You can force that through this continuous wave of launches. And so there's like a book every two months that people can buy until the end of the year. And in between all of that, we've got events that people can come to. And it's just forces like gravity inside the middle of the market where everyone's like, yo, what's Taylor Welch doing? Like, well, he seems like he's doing something all the time and I'm not busy. You know, my working hours right now for the, the wealthy consultants, 25 ish hours a week. It's not crazy. But because it's planned the right way,

there's all of these waves of momentum that people are getting in. And as long as the quality of the product is good, people just go, yo, I spent $3 for this. What the hell? Yeah, for sure. And you over deliver. And when you over deliver,

they just keep wanting the other stuff and essentially they get to the point where you have the high ticket and it's because they bought 10 of your $3 books. And they're like, wow, if I can get this much out of $3 books, imagine what I can get working with actually Taylor. Right. And that's everything. I mean, it's something you really preach to me. And even this talking right now kind of reedifies like I i need seven you know lower ticket super high value things to be offering my world um not three yeah and there's there's different schools of thought

some people are like yo just do one thing and push everything else out if you're a beginner like if you don't know anything about what you're doing i agree with that like do one thing and figure out how to do it well before you do the next thing. But for pros, especially pros who are like, yo, I was doing really good three years ago and now I'm not. What's going on? This is part of the key. You have to fractionalize your offerings

to match the market. So pricing in a down market, I don't know how much time we have. Just cut me off when you're bored. It's not bored. The listeners get bored that's my bill pricing does three things pricing has a has an information function so the price of something tells you the surplus of the good or service you're selling pricing has an incentivization

function so pricing incentivizes other people to come into the market this is like is is this is taking like a very advanced macroeconomic concept and turning it into like a three minutes clip information incentivization and rationing so pricing will ration the supply of a good when you ration the supply you're actually propping up the demand so what happens what's going on in real estate right now is actually the rationing function of pricing so real estate can't exactly single family can't crash because there's no houses right who are rationed because permits are hard to get and it's it's difficult to build these things quick enough

for the increase of demand and when you look at a business that's selling information you have to meet all three of these criteria yeah and it's not a one, two, three. It's a loop. So it's a circle. And they all feed because when you ration something, what do you do? You kick back into the information. It's telling you something about the market. When that is done, you go and incentivize new builders to come into the market and make money. We're taking the same concepts.

We're putting it in information. The most valuable asset you have is your time so you can't just lower the prices of your programs because then your rationing is removed what you have to do is you have to build programs that sit inside the other two categories and make them available for cheaper so that the market can do their own due diligence. I love that. I love that. I think that's a, I think people need to rewind that. Go rewatch that.

If not watching this, go to justincolby.tv and rewatch this. But if you like even just a little bit of what Taylor just said, this is like a daily function for him. This is how he thinks, how how he talks how he educates so i tell you go find taylor welch on instagram um i believe it's just straight up taylor welch right or is it the taylor welch really yeah taylor a welch and then taylor a welch on facebook and then the podcast right now is um there's two of them but daily my medicine is kind of like a daily really fast dose it's's on podcast, Spotify.

You can pull it up anywhere. I love that, dude. Brother, thank you very much for coming on. I'm excited to see the king is back, if you will. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Go find this man.

Anything he puts out. If you are in business, regardless of what vertical, you need to be digesting his information, whether it's books, pamphlets, podcasts. This man is an incredible business owner, incredible mind. Make sure you're following Taylor Welch. Appreciate it, bro. Love you. Love you too.