...I'm Selling Tickets To My Wedding

Speaker A: Finally, after five years of product failures, my 35th offer actually worked. And my next 55 products generated over $11 million in sales in just four years. But after seeing the flaws in my baby business, I decided to shut it all down and restart from scratch as entrepreneurs do. Follow me and the other capitalist pig loving entrepreneurs as I continue my journey to 100 million in sales. I'm your host, Steve J. Larson, and welcome to season two of Sales Funnel Radio. What's going on, everyone? Welcome to another driving episod episode of Whatever this Is. I am, uh, excited, though, to share with you, which I've got. I just had the most frustrating meeting on the planet. I almost walked out, which is not like me. Let me tell you real quick. Marley and I are selling tickets to our wedding. That's right. And we are doing it because we're in this spot right now where, you know, we've got close friends and family. We're like, yeah, come to the wedding. And obviously they're coming to the wedding. But, you know, Marley and I have really big followings on the Internet. And, um, we have all these people who are like, I want to come to the wedding. There's a big lesson in this. Stick with me in a second, okay? And so we're like, sure, we'd love, you know, hey, big party. That'd be awesome. But obviously, every single person that comes also adds to the cost. And so we're entrepreneurs, and we're like, all right, well, why don't we go ahead and let's try to figure out. Let's come up. Let's come up with a creative way that we could go and pay for the expense of this wedding without it being us, right? Because I think it's stupid how much debt, like, new couples will take on. You know, you start your career off with all this debt, and then you go and you get married and you start this relationship with all this debt. It's like, this is stupid. Like, what can we do to make this so that it's going to be not normal to do this? And why don't we just get entrepreneurial about it? How can we go do that? And so we have all these awesome vendors who have seen the vision of what we're doing, who understand what we're doing, and they're like, yeah, this is awesome. This is exciting. When we say sell tickets, like, we're having people cover the cost of their meal. That's it. It's literally because Marley and I have a big following. And so, to us, we're like, yeah. And to 80% of people, they're like, oh, that's unique, but why not? And most people have been fine with it. But that last 20%, they're either ticked or excited. There's no middle ground. They're like, there's like the hyper people. Like, you know, I'm going over, you know? And then 80% of people are like, all right, yeah, that's unique, but, you know, we'll go for it. And then there's that last 10% that just, like, freaking hate it. That's true for selling anything, right? And it just happens. It's like, whatever. We had this person come out to the studio because we're like, maybe there's some kind of trade that we could do, and you could drop your fee like crazy, you know? And that's kind of what we're doing with a lot of people. We're not trying to rip them off. In fact, one of the vendors that we're doing this with, he was like, yeah, I'd love to be able to do some kind of trade, because I don't know how to do any kind of marketing. And so, like, in two days, Marley's getting this guy phone calls by just changing how he sells and how he posts content on the Internet, because that's what we do for a living, you know? So we're like, we know this. You know, that you'll make more money than if we just paid your normal fee. And sure enough, he's getting calls, he's getting clients, right? And it's creative collaboration, which is really the heart of all capitalism. And this lady just could not see it. And for 45 minutes, kind of ripped us a new one for even going down this path. Marley and I had to, like, recover emotionally for, like, another 45 minutes after. I mean, it was, like, it took us a while. We closed the door after she left, and we were just like, what? What the heck was that? Holy smokes. I mean, it's funny because she's like, some of these vendors don't even make any money anyway. And I just told her. I was like, then that means they're doing it wrong, right? If you are not making profit in your business, why are you in business? Hello. It's so funny. There was this dude who dropped Marley off once, uh, at the studio. The name of our student is Pursuit of Profit. Says it in big massive sign right across the top of the building. And he's like, well, that doesn't sound ethical. And Marley. Marley turned to the dude and goes, wait, so you do this for free? I was like. So I was like crying out of joy that she said that. It's like, well, no, I do it to make money. Oh, so you do it for profit as well, numb nuts. You know, uh, my gosh. Like, so why I wanted to shoot this video is if you're not making money, you're doing it wrong. And it's kind of funny that you have to, like, remind entrepreneurs that I said it to this lady. She's like, we do this for 20 years. And I was like, we're not telling you to go in the hole. We're saying maybe there's some cool shared services that we could do. And let's get creative on this because we don't want to pay your fat fee, which is a big fat. Is a huge fee, actually shockingly massive. And I was like, well, what if you bring it down to a little bit above cost? We'll do things for you for exposure. You'll get a ton of clients out of it. We're already doing that with these other vendors. And I don't know if she's triggered. I don't know if she just had a bad night and took it out on us. But, you know, after we closed the door, Marlee and I looked at each other and we're like, you know, uh, at the heart of all market disruption is a little bit of discomfort. And someone almost always doesn't like it, but that doesn't mean that we don't do it. And certain people are willing to shape and shift industries and do things differently. And other people are like, well, that's the way it's been. And therefore, that's the way it's always done. And that's the way. You know, it's so funny. 20 years ago, the Internet was only around publicly for 10. Like, think about that. We're only 30 years into using the Internet as a humanity and all of human history. Is it safe to say and assume that all platforms are going to continue to change and develop and learn as we learn as a humanity to use this thing called the Internet? Like, come on. So stuff changes, right? And you gotta be moldable and adaptable. You know, it's so funny. Like, even where, you know, I'm wearing my capitalist pig hoodie right now, 30% of people that look at it go, woo. That is awesome. That's so cool. On the exact opposite side of the spectrum is people going, oh my gosh, I can't believe that person's for profit. Or like, if money's so evil. Turn down your next paycheck. Turn it down. Prove me wrong, Money matters. Now that there's great ways to do it and bad ways to do it. I always like, uh, to give the example in the analogy of kind of like a car, a car in and of itself. It's an inanimate object. It has no brain. It's got no morals or ethics. You know, it's an inanimate object. I can drive this car like a moron, not follow any nuanced or even just general rules of something. Like, I could swerve like an animal right now while driving this car. I could be all over the place. And is it the car's fault? No. But I can also follow the laws. I can follow the rules. I can do good things with this car. This car becomes a tool. Capitalism is no different. And it's so funny that people get so flustered with it. It's like, no, uh, it's just an inanimate piece of power. That's all it is. And I can use that power like a moron. And half of it is my mindset, half of it is my skill set. Or I could use it for good things, and I could change my mindset, I could change my skill set. But I can't blame the car itself. Oh, uh, someone got in a car crash. It means someone got in a car crash with their car. It's the same thing with capitalism. It is a true amazing piece of power. And you can remain ignorant. Ignorance is not bliss. It's being stupid. And spend no time learning the rules of money. I didn't say laws for a reason. Money has rules. Making money is not hard when you have the right mindset and the right skill set. I've been a professional funnel builder since 2015. Now I started it in 2014. I wasn't that good at it, but I practiced my face off, gave up a lot of sleep. Good enough to be hired by the funnel guy himself. And I was good when I came in the front door. Of course, I got better working for a guy, but I was going to hire someone that was bad. I was good at it. And, you know, it's funny that I notice a lot of times that people will get really frustrated about the rules of money thinking that their funnel's bad when I can just tell they have the wrong mentality. And in 10 years, 11 years of doing this, now how many people throw the baby out with the bathwater just because they're not making profit? So what should you do if you are in a disruptive industry. If you are trying to do things different than others have seen before, you're trying to do things that no one's seen before, you're ruffling feathers. What do you do? The first thing you gotta do. And it's exactly what Marley and I talked about as soon as this lady closed the door. You gotta get clearer on your customer and who you're collaborating with. So whenever you're shaking an industry or putting out a, uh, disruptive product or offer, not everybody's gonna like it. So what did we do? Marlee and I decided that we would go and make a list of the other vendors of that category. I'm not going to say who it was, and I'm not trying to bash this lady either. It's just I could probably count on one hand in the last 10 years running across someone with that many false beliefs around cash. And the thing that really blew my mind is I was like, this person is not an entrepreneur. They're a business owner. They're not thinking entrepreneurially. Just because you're a business owner doesn't mean you're an entrepreneur. Just because you're an entrepreneur doesn't mean you're a business owner. They're two totally different things. Let me get back to the main point here. The main point being, if you have a disruptive product, you have a disruptive idea and it's going to ruffle some feathers, first and foremost, put on that thick skin. Because it doesn't mean you're wrong. Just because people still don't like it doesn't mean you're wrong. We like to use the example of, like, Uber. I remember the first time I heard of Uber, I was like, you mean, I'm going to get in a stranger's car and I'm going to go, you know me. It was weird. The concept is weird. And now we're just like, oh, Uber. I don't even think about it. Same thing with Airbnb. The first time I've heard Airbnb, I'm not going to lie, I kind of scoffed at it. I was like, this is what, I'm going to go stay in somebody else's house, you know, or I'm going to buy a house and let. Let random people repeat it, you know, it was weird. Any disruptive, brand new technology or offer or, uh, something that really does shift how people change, there's always resistance with it. It's, it's one of the reasons it's disruptive in the first place, to disrupt Means to disrupt means to take calm waters and excite them a bit, make some waves. And that's not the reason that I do it. But I also am not surprised when it happens. And you might get pushed back from other businesses. You might get pushback from other people. It doesn't mean you're wrong. It does mean you need to be a little more strategic and maybe take a little bit more time to find the people that are okay with what you're doing. So what we did, as soon as it closed the doors, we're like, all right, here's the other 10 vendors that we can probably go after and see if they're willing to do this right. So relationship building very much as a foundational piece of creating anything disruptive, because some people are going to hate it. So that's kind of what we're going through right now, is that we've had people say no to it. But it wasn't like that. I mean, she was straight up triggered. I mean, it was. It was crazy. And then she just started dumping all this trauma on us that was personal. It's so funny. Marley and I were very. She and I are very good at negotiation and we're very good at, uh, tactically asking someone to question their beliefs. We were kind of like we were sitting side by side, and it's like I could hear her start to tee it up, and I was like, oh, I know where she's going with this. And I'm so glad because this lady is clearly freaking out. You know, I guess the lesson I'm just trying to say here in this video right now is whenever you create anything that's disruptive, be prepared for people to not like it. But it doesn't mean don't move forward. It means you gotta get a little more strategic on who you choose to collaborate with. Another example, there was an industry I went in. I absolutely just. In fact, a lot of people credit me with upgrading and at least popularizing the concept of this brand new way to acquire leads inside of kind of an old sleepy market. And these old sleepy, gigantic markets that no one has really questioned for a while are my favorite markets. They're the richest, they're the easiest to disrupt. They're easily the ones that, you know, people get a little hot and bothered also because, like, well, things are the way they are and that's the way they're always going to be. And why should we question? You know what I mean? They get a little bit like that. I've run into this several times not Just with the capitalist pig brand. I'm pretty good at disruptive brand. It's one of the things I do for my clients and that's one of the things we do with them one on one whenever they join my, my mastermind is like, all right, let's go upgrade your brand. You got a good offer, but offer is not brand. So we got to create a brand. The first time I ever went and did this, I didn't realize what I would be stepping into and the fact that I was going to get all this pushback and all these haters. So I started trying to collaborate with business owners in the industry that I was trying to disrupt. And I went in there kind of bright eyed, wide eyed and bushy tailed. I was like, um, come on, let's go shake up the industry, baby. This is going to be awesome. Let's go change it on up. And I was shocked at the level of uh, I mean what we just had. What I'm talking about was the thing that I put out eight years ago. It was the end of 2017, it was my first multimillion dollar webinar. And before millions came in, I was trying to collaborate with the business owners in that industry. And as I kept trying to do it, I figured that all of them were like, yeah, let's go mix it up, let's change it up. And not everybody's mentality is cut out for that. And I accidentally created this scenario I think I was threatening, which I can't blame them. I was new to the concept and I was new to the reality that not everyone wants to change things up sometimes. And so these companies really started badmouthing me. And I've never had companies do that. I've had people do that. I'd never had like companies do that. And it wasn't all of them. But I started realizing is that if I was going to affect change in this particular industry, then what I needed to do is instead of influencing it from the companies from the top down, I needed to learn to effect change from the bottom up. Who were the small influencers? Who were the tiny YouTube and podcast channels and email list owners and bloggers and how could I do collaboration work with them? And we could affect it from a grassroots movement up. That actually was far more effective. And it's really interesting to notice of what just happened right here. This lady in the market for 20 years, she's the one that had the hardest time with this concept. But everybody else, it's not that they haven't been in the chair as long as she has. But I don't know that they're as big as she is. And I don't know. I think they're. They're more willing to be creative in the way that they gather customers because they are a little bit smaller. I think it's one of the coolest principles of disruption. I love studying disruption, market disruption. I call them tools of disruption, or, uh, rather tools of market disruption. And I am absolutely writing a book on this, and I'm very excited about it because over the last 10 years, there's things that I do to cut a market in half, cause a question to ripple across that marketplace and effectively split it. And the way that really split markets is similar to how cells grow in a body. You know, when you're a baby and you're. The fetus is growing, right. We all know how it happens. The cell gets so big that it has to split in two. And those have to split literally. Red ocean markets behave the exact same way. And so when you start to see these big, fat red oceans that have been around for a decade that no one has really touched or disrupted, those are honestly some of the easiest marketing moves and positioning moves that I go make. And it's one of the reasons why Marley and I looked at it. We're like, nobody's really kind of done a shakeup with the wedding industry. Uh, this lady thought that we were saying to go gouge ve vendors and that's how we were going to go disrupt the market. I was like, that's not what we're saying. What we're saying is, let's get creative so that we don't have to pass all this cost off to the brand new married couple. We're going to disrupt the cash flow model of the industry. It's one of my favorite favorite moves ever. We were beginning to do it in the event space. I have my event studio. Cost me a million bucks to build it. And now someone doesn't have to go spend $200,000 doing an event. They can spend 5% of that, and we make our money with them on the back. We changed the cash flow model. We made it so that someone more people can afford doing it. I was doing an event. If you guys know who a guy named Roger Love is, he's like the Hollywood voice actor coach. They paid for me to come do a day of consulting, I don't know, back in 2019. So they flew me out to Hollywood. I was sitting in there with, uh, you know, Hollywood people. It was fun and as they were driving me out to the studio to do a day of consulting and how we use the Internet to sell and storytelling, all that stuff, they were like, hey, do you know why Netflix has made Hollywood stand on its heels? I said, no. And they said, it's because they changed the cash flow model. Instead of an actor being paid primarily off of the royalties that the movie makes, companies like Netflix, they've changed the entire way actors get paid, and the actor now gets paid a bigger amount up front and nothing on the back. And that's exactly what I'm talking about right here, is we're not going out and saying vendors don't get paid anything. Were creatively coming up with ways that they're actually going to make more because of it. But in so doing, I shouldn't have been so surprised that we've had people who are like, I would never buy a ticket to a wedding. We're like, all right, we'll just come cover the cost of your meal. It's the same price. And they're like, oh, okay, that's fine. That's all we're trying to do. We're not charging a ton of money to come to, uh, an event. That's our wedding. We are saying, don't buy us a toaster. Please just pay, like, 50 bucks to just cover your meal and the cost of us doing this. And we're happy to have you at the party, and it's going to be amazing. That's all we're doing. But it's so funny to see how we've had a lot of people who are buying tickets not love it. That's okay. It's disruption. We're having more and more vendors who are, like, interesting, and then 10% of them are like, you're the devil. This is great. This is how it's always been. Like, you're literally describing why we're doing this. Anyway, hopefully you guys enjoyed it. See you guys in the next one. One of the most conflicting feelings I've ever experienced in business is, uh, oh, it worked. Now what? So much of our early entrepreneurial journey is focused on skills to build and launch our business. But what do we actually do when it actually starts working? It's a completely different set of skills required to grow or even maintain a business compared to simply building and launching, uh, a product. If you think about it, our Internet business industry is loaded with help, advice, courses, and coaching meant for the beginning of the business journey. But there's a lot less help when it works. That's why I created the Titans of Industry Consulting and Mastermind Group Group. It's for elite entrepreneurs who have a unique offer. Creative entrepreneurs need a lot of structure to support their unnatural genius and Titans of Industry is not a normal mastermind. We do not celebrate burnout. We do not hope for profits. We design them. We don't design business systems with ourselves at the center either. Typically when someone joins, I get someone who's creative but almost trapped by their creation because it works. So our job is to help them build simple business structures, allowing them to return to their creative cave, which the world needs from true innovators. That's why the first focus we have for each new member is to double their daily lead flow, but do it while removing themselves. To learn more about Titans of Industry and get a quick glimpse of the structures we help innovators build, join us@titansofindustry.com just remember that if you don't have any documented business systems, it actually means that you are the business system. Join the Titans of Industry to remove the golden handcuffs that are probably around you right now and keep your innovation thriving. We're a tight knit group with a high standard and we'd love to have you learn more at titansofindustry. Com.