The Entrepreneur DNA - Why This 33-Year-Old Built an $80M Business Without Social Media | Chandler Bolt

Episode Date: August 28, 2026

Want help turning your story into a book? Book a free call with Chandler's team to map out your book: selfpublishing.com/justin I sat down with my friend Chandler Bolt, who built self-publishing.com into an 8-figure company (north of $80 million in sales) by his early thirties, and we got into exactly how he did it. We talked about the mindset that separated him from guys like me in our twenties, why he scaled almost entirely without social media by leaning into SEO, content, and business development partnerships instead, and the "thank you card challenge" and guerrilla marketing tactics that got his first webinars off the ground with zero budget. Chandler broke down the real profit bridge from seven figures to eight, why hiring to your weaknesses eventually stops working, and his "win the day" philosophy for pushing through the brutal stretches every founder hits. We also got into why he thinks a book is the single most powerful lever for a personal brand, and yes, the story of betting Jay Shetty $10K on a pickleball game to get a podcast spot. If you're building anything right now, this one is packed with tactics you can use today. Chandler Bolt is the Founder and CEO of selfpublishing.com (formerly Self-Publishing School), which he built after dropping out of college to over $80 million in sales. He's a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree and the author of multiple bestselling books, most recently Published. Over the past decade, his company has helped publish more than 7,000 books and works with clients ranging from first-time authors to names like Dean Graziosi, Tony Robbins, and Pace Morby. Chandler also hosts the 7 Figure Principles Podcast and the Self Publishing School Podcast, and is based in Austin, Texas. Social Links: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chandler.bolt Website / booking link: https://selfpublishing.com/justin About Justin: Justin Colby is the host of The Entrepreneur DNA and The M.O.R.E Show podcasts and a best-selling author. He is a serial entrepreneur and a seasoned real estate investor with over 20 years of experience. Driven by a passion to help entrepreneurs thrive, Justin created the Entrepreneur DNA community to support business owners in building wealth, systems, and long-term freedom. Through his podcasts, books, education platforms, and hands-on mentorship, he continues to help entrepreneurs scale with clarity and confidence. Connect with Justin: Instagram: @thejustincolby YouTube: Justin Colby TikTok: @justincolbytsof LinkedIn: Justin Colby Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What is up? The entrepreneur, DNA family. We are back with another incredible guest. Now, this guest is a personal friend of mine, but he has the privilege to be able to scale his business, and I call it a privilege, to over eight figures in his 20s. He's done north of $80 million in sales. He's only 33 now, and he is leading the charge about personal brands and books, owning and creating self-publishing.com. We have Chandler Bolt here. How are you? Justin, great to be here. Thanks for having me. Yeah, excited to have you back on. I think we can go a lot of different route.

But I really want to start about in your 20s. In my 20s, I was not the business man you are. In my 20s, I was much more of the playboy, if you will. I wanted to make a bunch of money and live large and have that stereotypical life. How did you treat business in your 20s? I was so fundamentally different than someone even like myself in my 20s. Hmm. Well, I dropped out of school, so I kind of had a two-year head start.

There you go. Where, you know, by the time my friends were graduating, my business, I want to say hit seven figures the year that my friends were graduating. So, I mean, it was just working really hard and iterating. I mean, I ran businesses in high school and then in college. And that was my first six-figure business in college, running a house painting business. I was number one in the country and number one in the company for that company that I was working for as kind of like a franchisee slash internship and then just took the skills and confidence

that I gained from that to launch my own business when I dropped out of school and then took a bunch of lumps, worked really hard, and kept scaling. I don't think there's anyone out here that isn't taking lumps at some point in their career and to some extent taking lumps even while they're growing, right? I mean, we'll be. building a business in any you know the age old saying of new levels new devils right you just when you hit a new benchmark you actually don't know what's around that corner because you've never been there before um and so that's great so you just had the work ethic at the end of the day a simple way of doing this is you just kept your head down you kept working yeah i mean i mean

i grew up in a blue collar family my parents met working night shifted a factory so i think sometimes being dumb is a competitive advantage in business because you just, you don't ever think it. Maybe you're a little bit naive, but you were smart, my friend. Yeah, but I mean, it's street smarts, not book smarts. I mean, that's where I think I always, pride of myself on is I was never the most educated. I was never the smartest, highest IQ, best test scores, and that stuff. But smart people are so smart that they talk themselves out of doing just about anything. And when you're just street smart or dumb and just implement, I mean, that was me where I didn't have some master plan.

I hadn't, I didn't have the five year thing. It was just how can we win? Or honestly, when I dropped out of school, it was how do I pay rent next month or two months from now, three months from now? And so I just kept kind of scaling and kept investing in myself. And I think eventually you look up and you see, okay, hey, this is, we just executed and we just outworked and you get so many shots on goal that eventually when I'm, going to go in. Yeah, listen, it's the, if you, I say it like this, stay in the game long enough to win the game.

Yeah. You're going to miss a lot of shots to your point, right? You're going to swing the bat. You're going to miss the ball. You're going to make mistakes. You're going to stumble. You're going to have challenges. But if you just keep going, time is on your side.

I mean, Gary V is kind of the probably loudest voice of this, right? Like, you just have so much time to keep going. Now, you were able to do this in the age of social media. I was not. I started business back in 2007. It was not a big thing. But has social media played a big role in your ability to, in your 20s and now very early 30s to build a business that does $80 million?

How, how heavy do you live on lean on social media? Very little, which I think is kind of counterculture to most people that have scaled eight figures. If you look at any eight figure businesses in our industry, they're either good at one of two things. They're really, really good at ads. And so they just scale ads. And a lot of those people don't actually make any money because they're spending all their money on ads or they're really good at social media.

Now, those people make a ton of money because your cost of acquire customers basically zero. We scaled eight figures with neither of those things. Now, we did some of them in a small way, but it was, I mean, I'm talking sub 10% of our revenue. And so, but we we leaned into SEO. We leaned into content. We leaned into business development and partnerships. And we just, we kind of zigged when everyone else zagged. And so was it a major revenue driver?

No, but maybe was it a, I kind of used, I'm pretty old school. I use Facebook and LinkedIn and that's all I had for a long time. I didn't even have an Instagram till nine months ago maybe. I remember when you came to Miami. You're like, you got to tag me. I'll tag you. Like I got to get this thing going. I need this going.

Yeah, now we're investing a lot more into it. Now we're building out the media company, Bolt Media. We're scaling content and stuff on sellpublishing.com, on Chandler-Bowl's side of things. We're investing heavily into it. It's still a negligible amount of our revenue. But I would say the way that it helped me early on is I just built in public. And I wasn't afraid to look dumb and ask a bunch of questions. So the most revenue that I drove from it was actually just the connections or the asking people,

hey, how are you guys doing this? Or I'm running in this problem in my business. And I would have people tell me, oh, yeah, I go to the. the comment section on your posts because I've got the same problem that you do and I just end up learning a lot. So it wasn't kind of in the traditional way that a lot of people is, I'm going to post about my thing, and then people are going to see that, and then they're going to book a call with me, and they're going to sign up to work with us and, you know, kind of how we do a lot of our other traditional marketing. It was a little bit more indirect, but it was wildly, wildly valuable

while being simultaneously a negligible amount of our revenue. It's so amazing. I wrote this down as you were talking, because you and I believe, you and I believe in this emphatically to the point where you and I are both exchanging text messages about, hey, anyone else while I'm in Miami that you can connect me with? And I'm hitting you up. Hey, anyone else that should be on my podcast or any interducky, you know, hey, I'm coming to Austin. Literally, I will be. So we'll talk about this. Come into Austin. Who do I need to go sit down with while I'm in Austin, right? The network and in, you know, the relationships. I think you even use the word partnerships I wrote down. Lean into this for a little bit.

Again, it's so impressive what you built, right? I want everyone to be aware. He's 33. years old he's done over 80 million in sales he's in the eight figures at 33 lean into what you did to cultivate the relationships how you started the relationships what you did to be intentional with keeping the relationships yeah i'd say you know we've done let's start with one thing yeah how do you just find and start these relationships if you're going hand-to-hand combat like you said you're bootstrapping you were just going where do you find them how do you find them how do you start them. Yeah, well, I'd say we've done 30 million, maybe 40 million at this point from business development and partnerships. And it is not reliant on or dependent on me. And that's the

part where I think when I talk to a lot of entrepreneurs, they can't believe that. And I would say the reason we've been able to do that is because we have really great people and we have really great process. And so even when I zoom out to anything in my business, it comes down to those two things. I spend a lot of time, money and energy, hiring the best people, and then pouring into them, developing them, all that stuff. And then there's really good process behind it. So even business development and partnerships, I mean, in a world where everything is founder-driven and it really comes down to the founder, I think that's where people are really, kind of raise their eyebrows that they say, hold up, you guys speak at 60, 80 events a year. And you speak at 10 of them, 15 of them. You got a speaking team.

None of your partnership stuff really goes through you. but that's because I have right-hand people on my team. And so I think that's a very macro answer to how we've scaled is just great people, great team and great process. And then the micro answer is just dig your well before you're thirsty. I mean, early on when I first got started in business, I did a thank you card challenge for a year straight. And I wrote a thank you card every single day for a year.

And I volunteered for conferences that I couldn't afford to go to. and I got in the room and I met people. And so it was just all of the compound effect of all those little things like that. When I hit up the first couple people when we were just starting self-publishing.com to say, hey, I know this is weird and I'm kind of a nobody and this might not even work, but would you put me in front of your audience to do a webinar? They said yes, because I dug my well before I was thirsty and they knew that I was going to come into their audience and I was going to add a ton of value.

And so even fast forwarding to what we do now is really, just those type of things. It's adding value. It's investing into relationships and getting in the right rooms. It's all those things. But now it's me teaching my team to do that so that it's not relying on me. So, so powerful, right? Because you brought up the part where you would even volunteer your time when you didn't have the money to pay for the event. I need people to rehear that. You and I both come across so many people that money is tight, right? But they want more. They they know they're worthy of more, that they just don't understand some of the fundamentals

of what got Chandler to be Chandler. Why are you? Well, you know what he did? He wrote a thank you card every day for a year straight, 365. How many of you listening? It's basically zero dollars, by the way. Basically, it's a stamp, right?

Nowadays, a stamp is like $17. I don't even know what's the answer at right now. But, you know, you're exactly right. Here's the funny thing. When you said that, I wrote it down again, because I can't tell you the last time I was given a handwritten anything. Even to the point when people say thank you, so I'll go speak at an event. I just got one of these Friday or Saturday whenever I opened my mail.

I went and spoke this great event, 300 entrepreneurs. Awesome. I got a typed out templated thank you card for speaking. I appreciate it nonetheless. Take your time and money in it. And yeah. If that would have been handwritten, yeah,

talking about something specific to my speech or something, the meaning that would have come from that would have been so heightened. Does that make sense? And I want people to hear that because what you did, and I would encourage you, and I don't know if you're still doing it, I'm going to probably start doing this now because I believe in this specific part of business so heavily

that it's why I started the podcast. It's because I want to be able to be able to, to keep relationships. I want to start relationships and be intentional about keeping them and deepening them, right? And I'm sure the reason why you're so well known in our space of coaches, gurus, influencers, business owners is because you actually are good at keeping relationships. I think it's never been easier to stand out in business. And the funny thing is, almost all the ways that you stand out are free, are super cheap. So all the people who are complaining, oh, yeah, that must be nice for you. I'm broke.

I don't have the money to do that. This isn't the same boat. I mean, a thank you card is free. Volunteering at a conference is free. And most of the, you know, most of the best things that are best opportunities that opened up to me early on especially were just, it was just elbow grease. It didn't cost any money because I didn't have any money. And now, sure, then I started making a little bit of money, but then I started throwing some of that back in there. And so say, okay, now instead of sending a thank you card, I'm going to send them $100.

gift that they're never going to forget and that their kids are going to play with or their spouses going to use or it's going to be some custom cutting board that they put in their kitchen and every time they see that they think of me and they think of self-publishing.com. And so now we just level it up a little bit, right? And so it was just doing the same fundamental things. But now that you got a little change in your pocket, you know, maybe you can spend a little bit more or invest a little bit more on those. And you know that long term, those relationships are worth so much. So much. And so much, right?

And I love the volunteer. There's so many people that would love to be in your world, my world, Grant Cardone's world as a bigger example of like big, big stages, et cetera. And they don't even realize you can call them or us and volunteer and say, hey, and by the way, now you get to network, you get to meet people, you get to be in the ecosystem that you want to be in. All free, all free. Well, that's incredible.

And so when you started self-publishing.com, and by the way, I'm going to self-promote you right now. I will do it for you. Selfpublishing.com is the place to go if you want to have a book come out. Now, he does a whole bunch of different type of stuff, whether you want to make it a book about you or your business or teach from it. But make sure you're not just reaching out to Chandler Bolt, but also selfpublishing.com. Because I can tell you, after becoming a bestselling author and using this format, my name expanded, the attention I was getting expanded, the awareness of Justin Colby, the brand expanded because I became. a best selling author.

And so please, if you guys are listening or watching this, I will promote Chandler and self-publishing.com because I believe in him. I believe in his company. It is where you need to at least start getting the data points from them to understand how can it affect your business. So there's my own pitch for you because I just believe in you and your company and your culture, the whole thing. When you were launching it, what was your, what was your scrappy,

guerrilla marketing style that you just said, You know what? I got this thing. I know it's going to win. Let's go. There's this powerful question that I love, which is what's the fastest way to the cash or the fastest path to the cash? And I remember going to a conference early on.

And three days, it was one of my first conferences. I was just absolutely flooded with information. And I was so overwhelmed. I had no idea of where to start. I had, you know, 50 different action items. And then this country cowboy guy just comes up on stage and he says, you know what,

I always ask is what's the fastest path to the cash? He's like, I'm writing it down. And it was very clarifying for me because at the time, I think, I want to say it was a few months later, all of my bank accounts were negative. I borrowed $15,000 and what I call Tripweth financing, which is friends, family, and fools, the only people stupid enough to give you money at this stage of your business. So there was no other option but to just take the fastest path. to the cash. And so

what sprung out of that is all of the guerrilla marketing stuff that you're talking about. It's, we were doing webinars. We were getting in front of other people's audiences and getting them to email their list. We were, we found this bot that messaged every single Facebook friend that we had

about this webinar. And so we did a webinar a week for three weeks straight and we would just message every single friend asking them to share because we realized if we asked them to share, well, obviously they're going to register if they're interested but if we asked them to do five different things, they're going to do none of them. So let's just ask them to share because that kind of builds in some virality.

And then, of course, if they're interested, they'll register. And so the next thing we knew, you know, we had, I don't know, hundreds of people sign up for these first few webinars that led to 84 applicants to join our program, I want to say, something like that. And then 44 people joined it at 86 grand before we'd even built the product. And so it was just that type of guerrilla marketing and then selling. then building it, then working in the trenches. It was, oh, when we did that launch and then a bunch of people didn't buy, we said, hey, we'd love to hear why didn't you buy? So we did whining you buy calls. And I remember I was in Australia at the time because my brother's band was on tour and I just, I couldn't miss it.

And so I had to go. But simultaneously we were launching this business. And so I just remember waking up at two or three in the morning because of the time change and taking these 15 or 20 minute whining you buy calls back to back to back to back. And it was just people telling us all their objections. Some of them, we would just sign up on the call. Of course. It's like free objection handling. And then, but then others, I'm taking notes in a spreadsheet so that we can improve our marketing for the next launch because I'm hearing from the mouth of our customers, or in this case, I guess, not customers yet.

Why they didn't buy what they thought? How did they hear about us? What did they think about the price? Why were they interested? All this stuff. And then took all of what they said and then just regurgitated that back to people in the next. lunch and then that lunch went way better and people felt like hey you're talking to me well yeah I am because I did talk to you in fact I talked to dozens of people just

like you so it's just all of those things like that that are the unsexy things that people won't do because they feel like they don't scale but a lot of times the fastest path to the cash is just getting on the phone with someone who can pay to do business with you and asking them to do business with you it's so simple it's it you know so the reason why I ask that. My coach taught me this years ago. I've reframed it in my head, but I like how he does it. So my coach calls it unexpected intentional outreaches. And so he said, Justin, as you go through your business and I'm very intentional with relationships, right? Like you and I have random ping pack back and forth here we get right. When people aren't expecting for you to reach out

and you say, hey, Chandler, what's up, dude? We'd love to hear about how self-publishing is going. Let's jump on a quick call. I got cool things going to. I just haven't talked to you in a while. People love that. And you know what happens from those unexpected, intentional outreaches? So it's unexpected by Chandler.

It's intentional by me, and it's an outreach, right? Self-explanatory. Business happens. Opportunity happens. Fastest path to cash happens. And it's not a sales call. It's, hey, Chandler, I got. got cool stuff going on. We haven't talked a while. We'd love to hear about self-publishing what

you got cooking. Let's chat. And that's it. Nothing beyond that. And then the organic stuff happens. And what you're saying right now and even the outreach, how many people did you say, did you have a number? How many people showed up to those webinars? Did you know how many people? It was a few hundred. I mean, in hindsight, negligible. But it didn't matter. It still drove close to six figures when we had no revenue. Eighty-four thousand. dollars in sales ladies and gentlemen like there shouldn't be anybody out there in these days and times that don't utilize what we channeler and myself would call grassroots guerrilla marketing right it's just not being afraid of looking so you said that before um you know and in funny enough

i saw you recently go all in on trying to get j sheddy on your podcast yeah all in to the point where some of it was like, wow, you're putting yourself out there. Like, you're out there just like, no matter what, I'm getting Jay Shed like all over social media. And I love it. Because I would, if I'm a betting man, I guarantee Jay Shetty at some point, it might be in five years. We'll jump on your, you know. There's a lesson there, I think, which is, it's interesting. There's multiple ways to go with it.

But there's power in building in public and posting your goals publicly. One of the things that still gets mentioned to this day is when I was first starting, I would, I have these monthly goal sheets. And I would literally just post a picture every single month of my goal sheet and whether or not I hit it. And the lessons that I learned in that month. And people still reference those posts because I think most people aren't bold enough to share their goals publicly for fear of what happens if I don't hit them. So we teach this with authors all the time. As soon as you commit to writing your book, host about it. Post, hey, I'm trying to finish my draft by X date.

I'm trying to launch by X date. There's power in public accountability. And so I've had to be reminded of that as we've scaled because I think the bigger your business, the bigger your ego probably gets. And then the more the perceived consequence is a failure. So I've just had to dust the rest off of some things and just say, hey, screw it. Right now we're, I'm publishing videos daily. Hey, I'm trying to get on the 100 biggest podcast that exists.

exist. And here, here they are. Do you guys have an intro? I might fail. I might, you know, totally fall on my face or I might succeed, but I'm going to post about it publicly. Same with Jay Shetty, uh,

posting about it and going up to him and betting him 10 grand on a pickleball game. And I honestly should have went bigger. I regret it that work out. So you bet him 10 grand. Did he take you up on the bed or did you say, dude, I'll just play you. He didn't take the vet.

We just ended up playing. Yeah. I mean, it was, that's one of the big podcasts that I want to be on. And so I found an event. We're doing some partnership stuff with him. So we're doing a couple webinars to his audience and stuff. So there was already a little bit of context there. He, I don't think, had any idea about that or who.

I just used that to kind of grease the wheels of the conversation. But I found an event that he was doing locally here in Austin. And I found a way to get invited to that event. It was a super small bio optimizers event. with it was around pickleball. So I said, all right, I'm going to show up and I'm going to bet him. So I said, hey, I'll bet you 10 grand, one-on-one game of pickleball. And if I win, you got to have me on your podcast.

If you win, I'll give you 10 grand, either for you or a charity of your choice. That's a big one by saying charity or choice, right? Because then it gives them the opportunity. Kind of just feel like, okay, this guy's serious about getting my attention. Yeah, I should have went a lot. In hindsight, I wish I would have went at least. least 20 or 30 grand just to make it a I mean that's a scary amount but my hypothesis is that even if I would have we would have played and we would have bet and I would have lost that

he would have had me on the podcast just because he kind of feel you like I would also agree he's a good dude right and he he respects hustlers right he puts out there all the time his first event had like six people in a little circle right now his events have thousands of people I think he would have had you for sure right um I want to move on now into the self-publishing growth, right? You've, again, 80 million in sales, eight-figure business, that journey, take us on that journey of like, okay, grassroots marketing, $85,000 in sales, oh, my God, I have something. This is incredible.

What's that next level, right? So I'm sure there's probably 10 levels to get to where you are today, but you go from zero to one. How do we get from one to two? What did that one to two or maybe one, two, and three look like in that journey? And I think entrepreneurship is repeatedly getting punched in the face and kicked in the nuts simultaneously. And so, I mean, that definitely happened from zero to one a lot. But then it happened again from, you know, we hit seven figures in our first year of business.

So that was just because we were good at affiliate marketing and we were good at launches. And so we did a couple launches. Boom, it popped off. Now we got some momentum. But I quickly realized there's a difference between revenue and revenue. profit. Hell yeah. Most seven figure entrepreneurs are broke.

They don't make any money because they spend it all on marketing or customer acquisition. And so then we realized we had to figure out, A, how to get profitable. That was step one. But then B, how do we get profitable and scale? Which most people would tell you it's one of the other. Hey, you need to raise venture funding, which I think is a total sham and not the right move for so many people.

And so we didn't do that. We bootstrapped on 100% of the company. and but there were a bunch of setbacks. I mean, I had to buy out my business partner and go multiple six figures in debt. I borrowed money from my parents' retirement to buy him out. And then now I'm starting basically from zero because I'm still not making any money. But we just kept, kept going. I mean, that's.

I'd say just keep going. And this is where I always say, like everyone has this vision again, even mentioning your resume. eight figures, 80 million, people would just go, oh, Chandler's rolling in it, right? This guy's just got

the Midas touch. Ladies and gentlemen, hear what he's saying, right? He had to borrow from his parents' life insurance or HELOC or something in that it. He had to go six figures in debt

because he didn't realize he had the wrong business partner. These are everyday stories. This happens to all of them. We included Chandler, name the name. You will hear this story. Right?

And so you take these setbacks. Now, how do you, Chandler Bolt, when those setbacks occur, how do you mentally get through them? I think it's interesting looking back because my biggest breakthroughs are where everybody else gives up. So when the chips are down, that's where 99.9% of people give up. And I think early on, I realized it was when I was running my painting business. It was my first six-figure business, as well, I was a sophomore and freshman and sophomore in college. and there was this time where my whole crew quit in the middle of the summer. On my singular vacation that I'd taken all year.

And so then I realized this might not happen. And it was this horrible load. But then I literally came back from vacation, threw my bags down. I drove all night through my bags down, went on the job site, painted for 13 hours, got home that night and just said, oh, my gosh, how am I going to ever get through this? But then I went on to become the number one in the company, number one in the company, number one in the country, they took us on this fancy rewards crews and they gave gave me the entrepreneur of the year award. And then they asked, what was the best moment of your summer? And I said, it was when all my crew quit. Because that's when I learned what I was really made of. And that's when I actually

learned. And so I think early on, that was ingrained in me toward now when those setbacks hit, I say, oh, perfect. This is growth season. We're about to grow a lot. Now, It doesn't mean that I'm always operating in that way. Like, you know, we just came off of a stretch of really hard 12 to 18 months. When you're in it, it sucks. But at least you can remind yourself that this is the moment when everybody else gives up. And so by default, if I don't give up, if I just stay in the game, eventually I will win. You can't lose if you don't quit.

So just keep going. And eventually you're going to win. And so I think that's kind of the talk track that I repeat to. to myself every time we get through or get into some really difficult times. Yeah, listen, you're right about all of that. I think the thing that I would add to it, if anything, is you're connected to knowing that you're committed to the outcome. You're not going to give up.

You decided what you want and you said, I'm going to go commit to what I want. So when you have, like you said, you just got over this 12 to 18 month hump. And by the way, I saw that my. I had the same thing in 2024. We all go through it. It doesn't matter to the status and income. None of that matters. You go through these humps.

There's no world you give up because you committed to it. You decided what you want and you commit to it. And then you say, okay, how my, like what's the next step? Here's the other thing. Did you get down on yourself or get frustrated when all your crew quit back when you're doing the painting business? Big time. Yeah.

How did you feel about that? How long did it take you to get over it? I mean, a couple weeks, which, which, you know, doesn't seem like long, but you got to remember in the context of that business, you're painting all of your jobs in two months, three months. And so a couple weeks, you know, 20% of your summer. And so, I mean, it took a couple weeks, but the thing that I was reminded of in that is just win the day.

Just win the day, when the day, when the day. And so now we have this whole thing of green days and red days, which, it seems so obvious to me, but I don't know anybody else who does it. And so we for almost every metric and especially the most important one, which is, you know, revenue growth, which leads to profit growth, which is the ultimate, you know, most important metric in the business. But we have green days and right days. And so literally in our HQ here in Austin, we hit a green day. You say, you go over there and say, hey, Alexa, go green.

All the lights start going green. It starts playing music because that means we won the day. And so I think it was a reminder for me that if you win enough days, you'll win the week. Then next thing you know, you win the month. Then next thing you know, you win the quarter, the next thing you know, you win the year. But you can't do that if you don't win the day. And so I think sometimes when you're so behind the eight ball that you see no light at the end of the tunnel, you try to start figuring out how to win the year or the quarter or whatever else.

And you're so overwhelmed that you don't win the day. And so then that just keeps happening. And then next thing you know, you look up and like, well, crap, I haven't won the day. a month. Well, yeah, I just lost the month because I didn't figure out how to just win the day. And so for me, that was how I got through those tough times with the painting business. And since then, it's, okay, we just got to figure out a way to win the day. The New York Knicks just won. And I don't know if you're huge in a basketball or not. But Jalen Brunson, the point guard for the Knicks, has become one of my favorite players,

not because necessarily he's the star. It's the things he says in his interviews. they're so enlightened. One of them is very similar to what you just said. They just lost the game. Something happened and they shouldn't have lost. They made a massive mistake. And the interview, the guy asked a question, something about like, how do you react when something goes that bad?

And he says, I think about it. I feel it. And then I go do something about it. And that, still, I just said that and it gives me shivers. Like, that's it. That is, if you want to sum up entrepreneurship and the challenges, that is the whole thing. Think about it, feel it, then go do something about it. Win the day.

You have a new day tomorrow. Go win it. So let me ask you personally, what is your, I posted this last week on my own Instagram, what's your win the day for you personally for Chandler Bolt? How do you go win the day? What does that look like? I think there's the controllables and there's the outcomes. And so we have a mantra that we say all the time is control the controllables.

And so for me, the controllables are, I mean, it's my morning routine. So I will win the debt. I will have a more productive day than most people by 8 a.m. just by consistently hitting my morning routine. Then it is, am I doing the highest leverage things to move the business for as a CEO? I think the three things are rainmaking, our strategy and sharpening your strategic. vision for the company and then it's talent. So are you bringing in developing the best? So am I spending my time on one or one or all three of those buckets and in my highest and best use?

And a question that I ask a lot that I'm asking my team too is, hey, what are the two to three things that you do that disproportionately add value? Disproportional. So when you spend an hour on that thing, it's as Perry Marshall would call it, it's a $1,000 an hour task. It's a $10,000 an hour task. Okay, what are those things? And then how How do I make sure that I do more of them? So for me, winning the day looks like spending time on those things and controlling the controllables. And then the other question that I'm always asking is, hey, what's the bottleneck? It's kind of the theory of constraints.

So in the business, right now, what's the bottleneck? And am I hammering that bottleneck or making sure that my team is hammering that bottleneck? And if so, then we'll grow faster. And then there's the outcomes, right? So did we hit grain on some revenue benchmark or profit benchmark or whatever else? Because that's kind of, you know, ultimately your scoreboard as an entrepreneur is the financial scoreboard is what's your take home. And so that would be kind of the outcomes of winning the day.

Yeah. You mentioned the morning. I'm a big morning guy because if we don't have our own time to fill up our own cup and understand how to go attack the day, it's very hard to win the day personally. as you're running a company and you're a husband and your father and you're this and you're that and you're a leader and you're you know very hard and i try to lean into most people to say hey i wake up personally at 430 like not saying that everyone has to wake up that early but if you don't have time for yourself in the morning you don't have a cup that's full and you can only win the day by making sure that you have enough energy and and you know enjoyment throughout the day to give to others and be a leader and etc um I want to lean into what you actually do, right? Self-publishing.com is an incredible business. You help people like myself and so many other business owners and so many athletes and so many everything.

Self-publish a book, pretty self-explanatory. But I want to lean into the power of this right now. I think, you know, we talked about this previously when you were here in Miami. I believe there's really two segments of the world that will really hyper-succeed, hyper-sceed over the next couple decades. personal brand, and AI. I know what side you sit on to some extent. Why should everyone be writing a book that has a story to tell,

has experience to share? Why does everyone need to be looking at self-publishing.com? A book is the ultimate lever and leverage that you can create for your personal brand and your business, even to protect yourself in a world of AI. It's dedicated IP that you, own. By the way, you can plug in to all of your internal AI stuff. You can use it to create content. You can use it to do all this stuff. But you do work once. You create this asset that goes on

to impact thousands, tens of thousands, maybe even millions of people. And if you do it well, it's a massive revenue driver in your business. I mean, this book here has brought in roughly $7 million in sales over the last 12 months because people read it. They book a call with my team or they grab a copy of the book. They don't even read it. They book a call with my team. up to work with us. And so if you intentionally do it, it is the most powerful asset that you can create in your business. And I mean, if you look at all of the biggest names in the space, whether it's Tony Robbins or whether it's Cody Sanchez or Alex Hermose or Dan Martel or Dean Grisiosi or whoever, they have a book. And plenty of them are clients, by the way,

but they are using a book to scale their company. And so I just think it's the ultimate lever. Yeah. Even, even I would make the argument, right? And this is why I say everyone should go to self-publishing. Even if you're trying to launch your business, this is one of those levers that, depending upon how you frame your book and this is where Chandler, I know your team helps all that. But this is where you bring in all your potential prospects.

Because you know what you can do is, and I've done this, and I'm sure you do, I can go give away my book in PDF format for free. I don't have to sell it. Yes. And you know what people want to be able to do is they can want to get free stuff and they want to learn more about me and my story and what I taught in flipping to wealth, right? How do I flip homes and then I turn wealth in from flipping those? It is the best way to get prospects for you to start to, you know, like we say, bootstrap your business all the way up. I don't think there's anyone out there that is a business and that shouldn't have. have this, right? I mean, I really believe that with all my heart. When it comes to what you're

serving in the space of business, I want to give them a little insight of what you guys actually do and how you guys could help business owners or someone who might have some interest. Let's give a little time to talk about what you're actually doing. Yeah. So I mean, our, I like to say kind of what we do and how we help people is kind of like a mix between Indiana Jones and Jillian Michaels. So in Indiana Jones, we blaze the trail. I mean, we've published over 7,000 books over the last decade. We published two to five books every single day. So we know how to do this at the highest level with exactly what's working right now,

especially if you're using a book to career business. So we blaze the trail. We coach people, we walk into the process. We hold them accountable. So kind of Jillian Michael's style, we hold them accountable to actually do the work. And to get the book done, we do the final mile of public. So we've got really high quality services and stuff where we come alongside them. But then where we really shine, I think, is in teaching people to leverage the book to grow their business.

And so that's where there's a bunch of videos on the self-publishing.com YouTube channel as well about, hey, how do you turn your business into a book? How do you do a seven-figure launch or turn your book into a seven-figure business car? I mean, it's all of the stuff that we teach. And then that we're doing at the highest level with clients like Dean, Gazziosi and Tony Robbins, with Carlton Dennis, with Pace Morby, with Bejaro's Kulian, with a bunch of people. So whether it's someone early on in their business journey or at the highest level, that's where we're really good is helping them grow their business using a book. Yeah, that's, we help publish that book. That's it. So this book is

thick of legal advice, but Chandler and self-publishing, I spoke at his event. down in California and obviously he had a bunch of copies and so Carlton's great by the way. Big shout out to Carlton for everyone who knows Carlton. Legend. Legend. Legend. Anything that we want to share about, you know, this last phase of entrepreneurship that you think is worthy of like, you know, people like you just said this, you make your first

million you have no money. Because you're still going after client acquisition. You're spending money on marketing. The marketing's failing. This one's one's one. working, right? You're starting to grow, so you need more people. You have more open it. How do you get over this hump? Like, what was your experience to get from the one to two million, which the first million is the hardest by far. The second million is still very hard.

But how do you break into going from a single digit seven figure operator into an eight digit operator? Hmm. There's a lot of things. Yeah, it's a big question. But if we can find one or two. There's a quote that I love, which is the stuff that it takes to get to the top is not the same stuff that it takes to stay on top or go differently. It's easier to get on top than it is to stay on top. And so I think now it depends on where do you define top. Like for me, it's not a figure. It's that's a small business.

Now, sure, that's bigger than, you know, 96% or whatever, maybe 99% of businesses, but it's still a super small business in the grand scheme. of things. Now, what it takes is, I did a whole series on this on the Chandler Boy YouTube channel. We call it the five, it's the eight figure profit bridge. It takes paying customers at the start, then product market fit. Product market fit will probably coming around seven figures. Then it takes getting profitable. So how do you scalably and profitably acquire customers and run your business? Then it takes process and people. Or actually, that's in reverse order. People then process. Because if you got really great people, they'll build process. But if you get process first and you have a bunch of C players,

well, then who cares how good the process is your people suck. So in order to scale, you've got to kind of incrementally do those things. And then overarching of all that stuff is you've got to be able to acquire the customers, right? So unless you have some crazy retention or recurring revenue business or, you know, you're selling insurance or something where people never cancel, well, then chances are you've got to keep going out and getting new customers. So that means you're your fact LTV has got to be really solid and you've got to be able to scalably acquire customers. You've got to have channels that you can invest in that you can actually turn the dial, which is not word of mouth,

which is not referrals. You've got to be able to pay money to scale. So that's either on ads, that's on affiliates, that's on SEO and content. Whatever your channel is, you've got to be able to invest money, just like an investor,

and into that channel and have it grow. And so I think when we were trying to bust through to eight figures, because I just felt like we were just right there for years. And one of the early milestones is having your first million dollar month, which we had plenty of those before, but there were launches, which I just don't count because it's like, yeah, well, you work for three months, six months on that launch.

Didn't you did a million bucks? Well, then you didn't have a million dollar months. You had a million dollars six months. Right. Because for me, it was like, yeah, screw all of those months. I'm not counting any of those. Do we have an evergreen, nothing big,

happening. We just put up a million on the scoreboard because obviously it hit eight figures. You got to do, you know, $833,000 a month, basically. And so if you can start hitting some million dollar months here or there, you're probably on track. But I just remember, we were just trying to break through and it's really freaking hard and just realizing that we had to turn the dials of those scalable customer acquisition channels. But even then, I mean, you're only as good as your weakest link. So it's like, we're, oh, my gosh, our marketing is firing up and everything's going, oh crap, our sales team sucks. And if we don't fix that, well, then we're never going to.

And so then you go over here and fix that and you got so distracted on that, that now your marketing is not as good as it used to be. And so it's just like, that's the game of business, though. There's constantly a bottleneck. There's constantly something keeping you from the next level. And it's your job as the CEO to figure out where that is, either to fix it yourself or install good process and people so that they can fix it and you can keep scaling.

Yeah, you know, you just said one thing that I've, would only challenge you because I think you're brilliant. The only thing I would challenge is the CEO's job really isn't to fix those things is to find the right C-O-O, the second-in-charge, to go fix those things. So that would be the only thing I would challenge you on is like you're, you know, you myself, like, I need to go grow and scale the company and create the relationships and hang out with Chandler and hang out with, you know, I'm going in New York with Gary V. Like that's my role now, right?

Yeah. My C-O needs to make sure the processes are in place. the people are doing what they need to be doing, that nothing's breaking. And when it does, not if it does. And when the stuff breaks, they're responsible to hold that up. That is their responsibility. But it took me a long time to let go of that control. Do you have any of that where you just feel like I still need to fuck?

I got to do that. That's me. I'm the CEO. I'm the founder. I got to make sure that X, Y, Z. Do you still have any of that? Because it took me a long time. There's a mantra of higher to your weaknesses, not to your strengths, which I think is

smart until it isn't. There's a certain point where your biggest strength becomes your company's biggest weakness because you never hired to that strength because it's your strength. So if you do that, then you can never extricate yourself from that stuff. And so even the call-out that you made just a second ago is a byproduct of my biggest strength is operations. And so naturally, my inclination is to get into the operations and just, oh, yeah, okay, let's see this problem.

Let's go fix it. But in order to scale, you've got to pull yourself out of that stuff. And so I think the takeaway for every founder or CEO is you've got to map your strengths. And early on, you've got to hire for all your weaknesses so that you can just live in your strength zone. And then eventually, you've got to hire to your strength as well so that you can replicate yourself. And then that doesn't mean you can't keep doing what you're doing. Like for you, it's sales and business development and relationships. That's your strength.

For somebody else, it might be operations. For somebody else, it might be technical product stuff. And they actually just need to do that and hire all the other stuff so that they can do the thing that they're best at. But eventually, your biggest strength will become your company's biggest weakness if you don't hire for it. And hiring for it doesn't mean you can't keep doing it. It just means it's not dependent on you and anything that you do is gravy on top of what your team's driving. Amen, brother. Amen.

I love all that. Chandler Bolt everybody make sure you go follow him to Instagram he's trying to grow his Instagram make sure you're following Chandler Bull is that the handle what's your Instagram handle? Chandler dot Bolt Chandler dot Bolt make sure you're following him for sure self-publishing.com is the company I highly encourage all of you to go to that website get a hold of his team and look at building a book any last words for the listening and viewing audience my friend yeah we're building up the media stuff. So if you want to check out the content, YouTube, long form, that's a lot of

where we're at. So you can subscribe to self-publishing.com or the Chandler Bolt channel. And if you want to check out what we're doing, we create a link for you guys. So self-publishing.com forward slash Justin. You can go to that link. You can book a call with a team. We'll map out a plan for your book, all that good stuff. Yeah. The best in the business, my man, Chandlerbill, Chandler dopple on Instagram. I appreciate that. Thank you, Justin. If you like this or think you know someone that needs to write a book,

if you think you know some people, make sure you share this with at least two of your friends that need to write a book and make sure you give us a five-star review on Apple and Spotify. We'll talk to you guys soon. Peace.