Unlocking Growth: Proven Tactics for Building a Predictable Customer Pipeline

Intro: Broadcasting live from our flagship studio in Atlanta, Georgia. This is scaling in public. The next 100 Business RadioX markets, featuring founders Lee Kantor and Stone Payton, along with some of America’s top coaches, helping them grow the network with real strategy, real lessons, and real accountability, all shared in public. To learn more about the proven system that turns podcast interviews into a perpetual prospecting pipeline through generosity, not gimmicks, go to Berk’s HQ and download the free Business RadioX playbook. Now here’s your host.

Stone Payton: Welcome to another exciting and informative edition of of scaling in public. Stone Payton, Lee Kantor here with you. Please join me in welcoming to the broadcast, Coach Young Han. How are you, man?

Young Han: I’m very well. Thank you for having me, guys. This is great.

Stone Payton: It’s a delight to have you join us. Really looking forward to your insight and your perspective. I’m going to hand you the ball and let you run with it, man.

Young Han: Yeah. I just love to know more about the, uh, the business problem. And just curious if I can just dive in a little bit and just keep probing some more so I can get a better grasp of what’s going on.

Lee Kantor: Sure. So, um, Business RadioX has been in business for 20 years. We started locally in Atlanta, Georgia. And um, just by doing the work that we do as interviewing business leaders in all, uh, all industries in our studio in Atlanta, some folks have gone through and they lived in the exurbs of Atlanta and they said, hey, can I have a business radio X in my suburb or Exurb that’s, you know, outside of the metro Atlanta area or the kind of the outskirts of the metro Atlanta area. And we said, sure. And then we grew the network. And how many people do we have in the excerpts?

Stone Payton: So we have well, we have nine altogether. You and I are two of them. And then one of them is Tricia out in, uh, in Houston, and one of them is in, uh, Arizona.

Lee Kantor: Right? So the rest are in the kind of the exurbs of Atlanta. And they came to us just because they physically came into a studio or they knew somebody went into one of the other people’s studios and had the experience and they said, this would be cool in my where I live. And so we’ve been doing this for a long time, and we’ve been frustrated by having a difficult time of getting people who hadn’t physically experienced what it’s like to be in a studio and understood the power of that, and how you can use that to meet people that are important to you. And then, um, so we met Tricia virtually and then we were able to help her in Houston and she and I and Stone said, hey, you know what? Why don’t we try to use a podcast platform as a way to help us grow the network? And so that’s where this show came about, where we’re kind of sharing our challenge of scaling. And then we’re working with coaches like yourself to help us kind of take what we have and to see if we can, um, get that escape velocity to get to 100 and eventually get to a thousand.

Young Han: Yeah. And so right now you have a little less than a dozen, uh, licensees, right? And, um, the licensee, can you share the cost of this and what it exactly includes?

Lee Kantor: Sure.

Stone Payton: So yeah, it’s 1250 a month, no contract, cancel anytime. Some of those have been with us a long time. So they’re paying less than 1250 a month. But that’s the current the current model.

Lee Kantor: Right. And the way that we’ve been doing the money is that, um, whenever somebody comes in, That’s the price they pay for the service we deliver. And now the price has gone up. But the services we deliver has gone up for that group.

Young Han: And so that’s $1,250 a month, right? Right. And then that includes all the production and publishing. Correct.

Lee Kantor: It includes the production and publishing for four episodes a month per show.

Young Han: Okay. Got it. So it’s a weekly show or is you guys actually skip one week a quarter?

Lee Kantor: It’s up to the we don’t there’s not a lot of rules for the licensee. The rules are the rules are they can’t charge a guest and it has to be related to business in some form. Like it can’t be sports talk or, you know.

Young Han: Crypto and they can’t charge a guest, right? Can they, can they get sponsors for the show?

Lee Kantor: Yes. We encourage sponsors. So we just want to have transparency that if money is being exchanged, then everybody knows money’s being exchanged.

Young Han: Got it. Yeah, that’s that’s good. That creates a good authenticity. And then, um, and then you had good traction and. Oh, sorry, one more question about the, the services. Do you then build out the studio with them or do you guys give them like a punch list to say, go buy these things and here’s how you set up a studio.

Stone Payton: So the, um, the equipment, which is getting a lot easier. When Lee and I started, it was big stacks of stuff, but, uh, that’s part of the, the package. We help them with that. We preset their equipment and all that. It’s their responsibility to find a space. It’s funny, I think Lee and I may be the only two in the whole system that are paying rent. Everybody else is like trading out a show, you know, for because they’re glad to have them in the, uh, in, in the space. But yeah, that equipment is included in that.

Young Han: Oh, so the whole podcast equipment is included in the monthly.

Lee Kantor: It is.

Stone Payton: Right. And they keep all the money, they keep all the revenue and.

Lee Kantor: There’s no royalty.

Stone Payton: We believe that our best avatar at the moment actually is coaches, consultants, fractional execs use the platform like a client, use it to grow their existing business. But then it can be very lucrative. Like my little studio down here. You know, I got like nine clients and I’m helping them design custom shows, helping them execute. And, you know, they’re paying me a handsome a lot more than 1250 a month, by the way. Each one of them.

Young Han: That’s right. And then, um, how much do you help with the distribution?

Stone Payton: That’s a big part of what we do. I think we, we, uh, syndicate all the major podcasting platforms and then we publish on our website. We’ve been doing this for 20 years. I had black hair when we started, you know? Awesome. Uh, so, you know, pretty well trafficked site, all that kind of stuff. And then perhaps more importantly, in my view, we teach them methodology to make sure that the content gets to the people that really matter to them. And we put a lot of energy into, okay, how are we going to use this platform to build real relationships real fast and convert that those trusted relationships into people writing you checks or teeing you up with people who will write you checks.

Young Han: Who? And then the way these people would make money is through relationships turning into business for them and or sponsorships through their engagement and distribution.

Lee Kantor: And there’s, and there’s other ways too, like we’re, um, we’re working with a group that’s sending Stone and I to Las Vegas for a weekend to be in the trade show booth because they like what we’re doing. So there’s, there’s a lot of ways to monetize because you’re now the media. So you have all the ways the media monetizes on top of whatever you’re doing, as we call it, your day job work. Like if you’re a coach, you can obviously use it to meet the people you need to meet to grow your coaching practice and serve your coaching clients. But now you’re also the media. So in some studios, they sell studio sponsorship. One of our, um, partners has a sponsorship from the local car dealer where his studio is called Subaru of Gwinnett Studio, and they pay him like five grand a month to be called that.

Young Han: That’s awesome. And then, um, and then they just have to find their guests, get them scheduled. Do they do the four interviews a month and then you guys take care of the rest.

Lee Kantor: Right?

Young Han: That’s amazing. It’s awesome. And then it’s also a video show because it sounds like you guys are doing this all in person in a live studio setup.

Lee Kantor: We’re doing it. Our methodology is audio first, but if they want to do video, that’s on them. That’s all there. They can do whatever they they can do. Again, we don’t have a lot of rules. They can do whatever they want to do in their kind of in their space, as long as they’re not charging gas and they’re not, you know, it’s a business focused show.

Young Han: Okay. And then I think I’m ready to start offering some, some advice and coaching. All right. I obviously have a million more questions here, but we don’t have 1,000,000 hours here. So there’s there’s two ways I’m going to answer this. Um, one way is the pragmatic way. Um, and kind of is the default system that I use to operate any of my businesses. Um, you guys have a, uh, customer predictability, uh, problem in my, in my operating system, it’s called system one. And it’s the fundamentals to a business. It’s the bloodline. You don’t have a predictable way that if you do X amount of hours and this thing, you know, ten leads comes out and two converts, right? Like you don’t have a consistent, consistent way that that converts into a lead. You don’t have a tactic that does that. I call it the X, Y, Z. And so, uh, you need to start there. You need to start by basically outlining a lot of different ideas to figure out how to generate more leads. And I don’t, I, again, I’ll ask you the second option. I’ll ask more questions about how many leads you have. And then I’ll give you my personal opinion because I think you have a great idea here. Uh, and you probably just positioning it wrong. Uh, I spend five times more than that on my podcast. Um, and, uh, yeah, so I’m spending a lot more than you guys are charging for the same, almost the same value.

Young Han: So, um, yeah, so it sounds like you guys have a lot of value to provide. And so it might just be as simple as like doing more volume or positioning it better. But let me tell you the first part of it. My recommendation would be, and again, this is again, I’m not I don’t know what you tried and how much you tried, but just understand the concept and philosophy behind it. There’s really five ways to make money. There’s ads, there’s content, there’s affiliates, there’s referrals, and then there’s cold outreach. That’s really it. I mean, there’s a lot of subsets of those things, right? There’s people that are really good at ads doing this with the geo lock, and there’s ads that do a funnel, and then they have like a VSL, like there’s a million ideas under each one of those five. But realistically speaking, just take those five channels and just start brainstorming a ton of different ideas and start getting your family involved. Start getting your mom. You can get my mom involved. She thinks she’s a better business person than everybody. Uh, she’ll give you a ton of ideas on how to run your business better. And don’t take any judgment. Just take them all down and literally get get like 20 ideas on each one of these five ways that you can make money.

Young Han: And this is where the art comes in. You’re going to take those 20 plus ideas and literally go, which one of these things do I think has the highest level of impact? And which ones do I think have the highest level of effort? And you’re going to rank them by effort and impact one through five. You’re just going to go down this list based on your skill set, what you think about yourself. You’re going to rank them by impact and effort at the end of it. You’re going to go force rank them by the ones that are low effort, high impact all the way, cascading down to high effort, low impact. Those are your priorities. Okay. Then you’re going to go to those ideas and literally force them into an X, Y, Z. What am I going to do for why I’m out of time? For Z result. Does that make sense? What am I going to do for Y amount of time for z result? And you need to do that because you need to be able to test these things at scale. And then my recommendation is you get it all listed out like this, and you start testing 3 to 4 things at a time. And this is the brute force way I make.

Young Han: I make I make a lot of money. But basically what you do is you do these ideas for six months, three months, one year. It doesn’t matter. It takes whatever, whatever works for you. I typically look at it every three months, and I look at it every six months. And then at the six month mark, typically out of those, I’ve now tested 18 or 19 ideas. 1 or 2 of those is outperforming the others. It’s just math. 1 or 2 of those will have a higher cocktail TV, um, better Roas, better conversion rate. 1 or 2 of them will perform better than the others. They’re not going to ever be equal. It’s just the way, the way it works. And then guess what I’m gonna have you do do those two as your top ideas. Hire someone junior to you and say, hey, I’m a shitty marketer and salesperson. I do these ten hours and I get ten leads a month. You have two months to beat me or I have to fire you. And then you outsource that and you move on to the next problem. It’s a very pragmatic, brute force way of solving your method of getting leads and conversion rates. And, um, this is the process that I call customer predictability. And it’s a very systematic way to generate a business, uh, business revenue. Um, I use the same system on all my businesses.

Young Han: I start five businesses a year. Um, I have, I started doing this four years ago and the system works. It’s just math. So it’s just a lot of work, but it works. Um, then if you don’t want to do the hard work and you want just some pure business advice based on my experience, uh, the second part of me would recommend, uh, practice positioning this better, uh, and building testimonials and finding people that make money doing this, uh, saying like, hey, like Coach young has a podcast, does he does business X and he within a year, he was able to generate quarter million dollars and coaching services. So the cost for him was $25,000, but he got $250,000 in coaching services. Like you need to find someone that is literally a raving lunatic about you guys. You have ten clients. Make one of them an absolute raving lunatic. Discount the product, give them over value. Do whatever you need to do. Make them an absolute fanatic of you guys so that they can literally share their testimonial. And you can as a case study. But if a coach is telling another coach, hey, this is actually generating me revenue and here’s how it’s working, you’re going to have a lot more validation and an ability to convert someone that’s skeptical about doing this. Just so you know.

Young Han: I also have a podcast and it generates me a lot of revenue. It generates me over millions of dollars. Yeah, multiple millions a year. Yeah. So I totally believe in the concept. So I, that’s what I’m trying to say is I think you have the right product and concept. I think you guys are doing enough volume, which I think is most likely the case. And again, I’m assuming a lot because I’ve only asked you like 15 minutes worth of questions, but I’m assuming you guys don’t do enough volume because that’s typically the number one problem I see with business owners, they’ll say, oh yeah, I did email 20 people. I’m like 20, 20 people a day, right? And they’re like, no, a week. And I’m like, oh my gosh, I don’t even need money. And I email 50 people a week. And they’re just, it just blows people’s minds how much volume you need to do to get your word out there, the name out there, get on top of people’s minds. You have to you have to increase the volume. And I don’t know, maybe you guys are doing a ton of volume. I don’t know, but I feel like you guys need to do more of what you’re trying to do and then get more programmatic about the tests that you’re doing and then work through a lot more tactics.

Stone Payton: What’s your instinct on our fee structure? Do you think that that’s really not good positioning as well? Or do you know? That 1250 a month?

Young Han: I think it’s I mean, it depends on the quality. I mean, I got to see the quality and the service and experience, but I feel like it’s high value. I pay five times that. Yeah. For the exact same server. Obviously feature checking, right. If I don’t know the, I don’t know the level of like copy you’re creating for my social, I don’t know. Like, I don’t know what you’re doing, right? Like, I don’t know what that experience feels like for me because my team literally handholds me, you know, and I just, I just show up and I just interview six people in one day and then I don’t talk to, I don’t interview for 3 or 4 months. And then I’m not, I’m not podcasting for a living. I just do it to generate leads and revenue, you know? And so it’s nice to just be able to like, have my studio set up and I interview on one day and then, and, but my team just works around me to make it incredibly easy for me to do it. And if, if that’s the case, you’re providing a ton of value for that price. Maybe you need to raise the price, I don’t know.

Stone Payton: Well, that’s why I was wondering. That’s why I was asking. Mhm.

Young Han: Well, I will tell you this, I would I wouldn’t worry about the price elasticity until you figure out customer predictability, until you can show me you can get 20 leads consistently a month. Focus on just getting leads. Once you can get consistent leads, then I would say play with price elasticity. And this is system two where you go. You start playing with the conversion rate. So you start raising your price to the 70 over 30 rule. So raise your price until you only close 30% of your deals. And at that stage, in that moment in your company, that’s the high end of your price bracket that’s still profitable for you. That makes you good money. And, uh, you’re not, uh, pissing too many people off. And then you lower your price until you start converting 70%. This is where you are actually losing a lot more margins, but you’re getting more volume, and then you’re able to still like, encompass more clients and get a bigger, a bigger stream of customers right in your network. My recommendation is once you figure out the 30, 70. Play with that 3070 test once a year because the market changes and you always want to adapt to the market. You don’t want to leave money on the table. So stay at 50% conversion rate. And then once a year, play with your prices again with a small subset of people and then figure out what your new 50% is. But I would try to play with 30% 70% price elasticity testing. After you get customer predictability, the first thing you need is blood. You need blood flow. The business will not work if you don’t have consistent leads.

Lee Kantor: Now, how do you feel about our premise that business coaches, consultants, people that are trying to, um, build a local network is the, um, ideal client profile.

Young Han: I think it’s a great idea. It’s a great idea. I think it works like a charm. That was my, my, excuse me, my podcast has really opened up so many doors for me. I’ve been able to meet so many cool entrepreneurs and founders and owners, and it’s such a soft sell, you know? And I don’t really have to even hard sell anybody because I’m not literally, I’m literally not selling them. And it kind of throws people off because I’m like, no, no, no, I’m not selling anything. I just want to know. You seem really cool. I just want to know if I could know more about you on my show the conversion rate is a lot higher than you saying. Hey, I do coaching and fractional finance. You should buy my services now. And then once you have that emotional connection and that double tap, third tap or fourth contact tap, the relationship deepens and all you have to do is be likable. And again, I don’t even sell. Then even once I’m liked and we’re friends with this person, I still don’t sell them. But eventually everyone needs something. They have a problem. And then if I can suss out what their problem is, I just provide them value. You need a marketing person. Okay, let me introduce you to someone that I know. Hopefully they can help you. Doesn’t even benefit me, right? Just provide value and then, and then eventually, um, they’ll need what you need and you can offer your services.

Lee Kantor: So, I mean, that’s the premise in a nutshell of what we do for our people locally, just to get a person in a local market to kind of connect those dots that you just did has been a challenge for them to understand that they’re no longer they don’t lead with, hey, I’m a coach. They lead with, hey, I’m trying to help. Come on. On my show to tell your story. And let’s get to know each other. Like, that has been a challenge for us to communicate that patience and value that comes with just, hey, I’m just going to interview you. I’m going to cast a wide net and I’m going to be interviewing folks. And that eventually is going to lead to something good for you down the road. That that’s been one of our challenges in having them kind of get that aha moment that you got instantly. But it’s been harder for some coaches to really kind of get.

Young Han: Yeah, I can see that. I mean, there’s a lot of coaches now. There’s a lot of coaches out there and I don’t know the demographic split, but I do some research on it. But I think coaching is a lot like real estate. There’s a lot of coaches out there and only 10% of them make money. And so you got to think that like, sure, there’s a ton of Tam, but if none of them want, none of them have money to spend on, you know, a long term solution that that’s still a gamble. Um, it’s going to be hard to convince them. And then the ones that are making a lot of money probably already have, you know, content for their own brand and name. They don’t, they’re not going to want to license someone else’s name. Um, I don’t know, I’m just, I’m just showing, I’m just sharing some thoughts that I have on what could be the prohibitive nature of it. But I would do a deep customer surveys, like I would try to see if you can get access to a bunch of coaches, offer some free free services or free six months and do a raffle, all they have to do is fill out a questionnaire and then try to get like thousands of coaches to respond and say what they would pay, see what say, what kind of client, what they charge, like get get an exhaustive or comprehensive list of like your demographic and your ICP.

Young Han: And I don’t know, maybe you have done that already, but I would get to know your ICP really, really well. There’s one thing I always tell people, which I know it really bums people out, but because I start a lot of businesses and people always ask me, they’re like, oh yeah, I want to. I want to start a business too. So you help me. And there’s always my friends and family. They’re the worst. They’re always the ones that are always the ones that sucked everything out for free. But I’m like, my first thing is, before you ask me for help, go interview 100 people and the thing you want to do first. And I never have to help anybody because no one will do it. And it blows people’s minds because I’m like, before I start a tattoo cosmetics company, before I start a wall climbing gym, I interview 100 people in that industry. I interview people even, and then I then I figure out if I want to do it or not.

Young Han: But you need to have that level of tenacity if you’re going to make something grow. Um, you need that network, you need that nuance, you need that understanding of your product and customer. I know it’s expensive, but I think for me, it’s really important because it tests my resilience and if I want to do this or not, because business is hard, you’re going to get your key and you’re gonna get your teeth kicked in. And if you can’t, you can’t deal with a thousand no’s to get to a hundred yeses. You should just stop right now because it’s not going to get any easier. And so that’s kind of how I screen people from asking for my coaching is like, go, start, go start by interviewing 100 people and tell me what they all said and give me like an analysis, put it in AI, give me a word cloud like show me that you actually did that work and I’ll take I’ll take you seriously. And but my point being is, um, that level of customer discovery may not be needed for you guys, but I would highly recommend you do that work to do that, get at least 50.

Lee Kantor: Well, what we’ve been doing and just I’d like your take on if you don’t mind. Um, so we, we have shows obviously, because we, we can make as many shows as we want. So we have a show where we’re inviting coaches to come on the show as part of, as part of our, the way that we’re meeting them is we’re inviting them to come on the show to, to explain what they do, what makes them special. Then when they do. But before they do a, we call them for. There’s for relationship building moments in our process. The first one is the invitation. The second one is the Pre-call, where we discuss what’s going to happen. Then the third thing is the interview, and the fourth thing is a follow up call after to debrief and to show them how to leverage the content. So those are the four kind of touch points in our methodology. So during the pre-call, um, stone explains well, stone taken through the Pre-call to get to the test drive point where we ask, this is our kind of bridge from going from the interview to a way to sell them something. But so Stone explained it.

Stone Payton: Yeah, the pre-call, when we do one in a local market is always I’ve always been much more stealth. I’ve got plenty of time. I’m seeing these people in person. Yeah. That whole. So don’t worry about it. But now with the benefit of some coaching, I’m being far more frontal, I guess, or transparent. And I’ll, uh, I will share with them what’s going to happen. I’ll ask them about their experience that they’ve had on their experience, and we’ll go through all of that. But I’ll also just share with them straight up. Look, this is Lee and I. We’ve been doing this for 21 years. This is Lee and I eating our own cooking. We really want to build more relationships with coaches around the country because we’re trying to expand and and then I’ll give them just not a lot. It’s like, um, I say it’s like explaining sex to a four year old. Like I give them like the little, you know, the really short version of how we’re out there trying to help people. And then I let them know, hey, when we have that call after, if that’s something you want to explore, I’m happy to have that conversation with you, but I’ll let I go ahead and let them know I plant that seed with what we’re trying to do. And almost without exception, they want to know more right then. And, and they, and they definitely want to know more in the post call. Now, what I’m sharing with you, that approach and that kind of response is very new because we’ve only done it in response to coaching that we’ve gotten through this process. And we’ve only been doing this a handful of weeks. But that is very encouraging to me that just tell them up front, let them let them know what we’re doing. So, um, that’s what’s happening in, in this particular effort.

Lee Kantor: And then we have, they, we have a test drive where if somebody raises their hand and says, hey, um, you know, I am struggling with kind of my prospecting locally, that we have a path for them to try our system and our system is basically here. Send this email or this LinkedIn note to a dozen people in your market and see if any of them you can sponsor one of our shows. We’re not going to charge you. You try it out and then say, hey, I’m sponsoring a show on Business RadioX. I’d love to have you as a guest, send it out to ten people. And, um, and then you invite them on, you do all of the four steps. So you did the invitation, you do the pre-call, we’ll do the interview on your behalf, and then you do the follow up. So we’re giving them kind of a taste of what it would be like if they did it. And, um, so we’ve done that. The first three people, the first person was all over it. She sent the note out right away. Within an hour, she got responses back. Hey, I’ll be on the show. Thank you so much for thinking of me. The other two have been hesitant to pull the trigger like they’re not doing even that. It’s just send ten. Here’s the temp. Like we give them the template like. It’s yeah, like just put it in your. Thing and hit, you know, send ten times and it’s done. And. They’re, they’re hesitant. So should we just kind of say, okay, thanks, bye and just move on. And that’s to your point of, hey, this is a numbers game. And if they’re in those 90% of the people who don’t make money, they probably won’t pursue this and just keep just going for volume.

Young Han: I think it’s both. Right. So, I mean, I don’t want to be, um, straddling both sides of the fence here, but I think that it depends on what you think your effort and impact is. Is it, is it better effort and impact to optimize that and figure out how to tweak that? Or is it better effort and impact given your current state to test a new tactic and come back to it later to optimize? Like you just got to do that analysis for yourself because sounds like you have a good way of generating leads and interest now, but you’re not able to convert them into action or get them to do stuff. And so now you’re just like working down that funnel and you’re optimizing it, and you could do that. And that’s a great way to build a business. Keep optimizing, keep optimizing, keep optimizing, keep optimizing until you get there. It just depends on how long you think that’ll take. And this is where you get a little more artistic than scientific. But if you’re tracking all your tactics, um, you can always go back to it if you want to skip it and go somewhere else and say, hey, this is not worth my time. I feel like it’s going to take six months for me to optimize this.

Young Han: I feel like this tactic I want to try in the next two months first and see if that turns better, and then I’ll come back to this if this works out better. But that’s how I would look at it. Because if you’re saying there’s no, there’s no right way to do customer predictability, and I know every marketer and salesperson is going to want to massacre me after this, but I, I’m not a good marketer or salesperson, but I’m, I have a 70% ability after helping like 69 businesses of getting them to $1 million in annual revenue in less than a year, uh, just through pragmatic testing. And so I know it’s kind of boring, but if you mathematically approach this, you have a very high chance of solving this problem. You don’t have to be artistic. You don’t have to be a marketing guru or sales guru. You either say, hey, I think this is going to help me or I think it’s not, or I’m going to hold this. I’m going to go to the next one and then just keep working down tactics, just X, Y, Z, everything. So everything is quantifiable and binary.

Lee Kantor: Now I’d like to ask you about, um, this is going at it one at a time, coach wise. What if we were trying to go because we’re trying to get to scale? Because in my mind, there’s, there’s 8000 chambers of commerce in America, and I think there should be a Business RadioX in a thousand of them. Yeah. At least 15% of the most, um, kind of robust markets should have a Business RadioX telling the stories in that local market. So I think the kind of 1000 is possible, but to get to even 100, we we can’t do it one at a time, I don’t think. And we were thinking of going after kind of groups like coaching groups or places where there’s lots of, um, potential clients and then coming up with an offer that allows them to try us. Kind of like Sirius XM is built into your car where it’s in there and you can try it. And then if you want to keep doing it, you can keep doing it. So do you have kind of a take on how to get to a higher number faster?

Young Han: I think it’s a great idea. Um, and again, like, I don’t know if you’re missing the point I’m trying to make here, but again, I’m not going to be the guy that gives you the ideas that are going to win. I can give you my advice and my opinions, but you should also solicit opinions from everybody. I can almost guarantee you the ideas out of the out of the 26 businesses I started in the last four years, I’ve been 0% right on what is actually the right one that works the best for my businesses. 0%. I’m like, oh, that’ll work for sure on that business. It’s never the one that I chose, so I wouldn’t bet on my my opinion. I would just pragmatically approach it and figure out what the math tells you is best for your business because depending on the business partner, depending on the business, depending on the geo depending on these things, the different tactics work different places. So when someone says to you, oh, this is the way to do it, you do this and this and this, and then it works well for my business. It’ll work well for yours. It’s it’s most likely not going to work. Just the fact that you look different than me. People will buy our product differently. It’s just the way it is. So for me, I mean, I’m happy to give you my opinion. We can opine on it, but I wouldn’t recommend that you take that idea and say it’s a good idea.

Young Han: Just list them all out, list them as many, list as many as you can. I got a maybe offline. I’ll show you some of my dashboards that I have for my companies. Some of these have hundreds of ideas and I’ve tested like 80 or 90 things. So it’s not like I’m not like joking when I say I test, I’m constantly testing. I have a pool cleaning company and I’ve been running now for four years, and it’s been testing every single, every single marketing tactic, every single sales tactic, every single customer retention tactic, every single employee retention and recruiting tactic, every single SOP that I’ve built, every single finance tactic. Everything’s X, y, Z. It’s all it’s all managed by math. No emotions, just whatever makes me the most amount of money for the least amount of time. I still don’t know how to clean a pool, and my pool cleaning company will do 6 million this year and four years of business. If you just let the math guide your business, it will succeed. What stops businesses from succeeding is our emotions as humans. We’re looking for that one little thing, that one silver bullet. Just lower your expectations on failure. It’s okay to fail. Just fail as fast as humanly possible. Get the data you need to go do the one thing that works for you.

Lee Kantor: And then from a time standpoint, if we’re going to do this testing in the relentless pursuit of just kind of ideas and testing them. So what’s a window of time that you find is kind of the minimum amount of time to determine if something is going to work or not?

Young Han: I think that three months, you can get a good couple of tests in three months, you should be able to get 3 to 4 tests in to get some data. My recommendation is six months because you can at least get like 8 or 9, ten, ten tests, and then one of those will perform better. The other, it might not be the most efficient, but at least, you know, if you put a, you know, you do an ad and this and like you put 100 bucks in, you know, a thousand bucks comes out like, okay, cool. That works for now. Great. And then now you have something to beat, you know what I mean? Like you’re trying to beat that thing that’s working the best.

Lee Kantor: But when you have kind of a testing mentality, how do you like everything can be tested? Like how do you decide which is the test to do?

Young Han: That’s right. And so you got to you got this is where the art comes in. You got to force rank it into effort and impact. You need to make a call and say, hey, I think based on my skills and my business partner skills, this is a high effort, low impact tactic. And again, there’s no, there’s no like science. That’s your judgment. That’s your own personal inflection point. But it’s a good starting point to help you prioritize it. And then don’t do more than 3 or 4 at a time.

Lee Kantor: And so they’re all happening simultaneously. And then you’re just 3.

Young Han: Or 4 at a time.

Lee Kantor: Right? 3 or 4 at a time.

Young Han: Yeah. Not not all 24.

Lee Kantor: At a time are happening simultaneously. And then your, um, checking, are you tweaking it on a weekly or monthly basis or are you just kind of letting it go?

Young Han: I just let it go. Um, but if it’s high pressure and you don’t have the revenue to let it go or the cash flow to let it go, um, and it’s not working to your liking, just stop it and then go to the next tactic.

Lee Kantor: And what would be, where would you, how quickly would you stop something if you, um, were, if you had a resource issue that’s.

Young Han: That’s dependent on your risk aversion and tolerance. So if you are uncomfortable with the six week test that’s going sourly by three weeks, I mean, that’s your call. Just, just write that down that you got scared and it surpassed your risk tolerance and you stopped it because of those reasons. It’s good data to have. But have you.

Lee Kantor: Have you seen things like have you gone five weeks and it not working? Then all of a sudden it worked. You have data to support like patients is can work over time.

Young Han: I have and um, more often than not it ends up being volume not patients, but volume. Yeah.

Lee Kantor: So you need a certain number of people to experience whatever the tactic is in order to ascertain if it’s going to work or not.

Young Han: Yeah.

Lee Kantor: And is there a number volume wise or that’s dependent on every.

Young Han: It’s dependent on the tactic. You got to test it and then come back to it and say, if you want to do a bigger volume next time.

Lee Kantor: Is there like, is ten too little or is 100 too little? Like, is there any number that is kind of a, you got to get to this number before you can even make a guess?

Young Han: I it depends on the tactic, but, um, I’m, I would say like definitely more than ten, like, let’s say if you’re trying to do that thing you’re talking about where you’re asking people to, uh, invite ten people and write your, um, you’re testing to see how you can optimize for that, right? I would try to do more than ten.

Lee Kantor: Is it 100 or is it 11?

Young Han: Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, I would start with ten and then see how well you feel about it. And then I would it just depends on how much time you think you’re spending. If it’s a flat, if you’re falling flat on your face. Move on to the next one. It just depends on what your risk profile is. If you’re documenting it, you can always pick back up where you left off. Like when I exhaust my ideas, I just go back and I find the ones that I’m like, oh, maybe I should have gone to 50 or should have gone to 100. I’ll do that. Or I’ll just change my X, Y, Z and do another test on it.

Lee Kantor: Um, but so that that um, process of X, Y, Z is kind of at the heart of what you’re doing. You’re just doing it relentlessly across multiple businesses.

Young Han: Brute forcing it mathematically, brute forcing it. It’s not, it’s not, it’s not a, um, it’s not. I know it’s not ideal for most people to hear this and I’m not very popular with clients, but I also, um, don’t care. That’s kind of a funny thing to like. You don’t need to use my services. You don’t. You don’t need to like my opinion. I’m busy building my own businesses using my exact system and, um, right. 14 companies. Yep. And two of them make over 5,000,008 of them will make over a million. And I did this the last four years, so I’m not concerned. You don’t have to hire me. I’ll just keep building businesses and making money myself. Uh, but if you want to, I’d love to help you make $1 million business. Because $1 million business, you can afford to have an opinion. Which is what I like to tell clients. Get your business to $1 million. This is a service business. You can get your business to $1 million. Now you are part of the 10% of American businesses that are now in that $1 million annual revenue mark. And if you take the average profit margin of like 12% on a business that’s $120,000 of free cash flow, you are now entering into the middle class and building actual equity. You have earned the right to have an opinion and not be so mathematical. Now you can afford to be dumb and do things that are emotionally driven. You can say, no, I really want that to be blue. No, I really want that to be up and down. Until then, just be unemotional and get it to that point where you’re part of the 10% of American businesses that are at the million dollar mark.

Lee Kantor: Stone. Anything else?

Stone Payton: No. I wrote down real big letters. Math. That’s what I’m taking away. Get get the emotion out of it. And I think we have made some strides in this direction. Lisa. I’m encouraged by that. But I think we got to double down on just doing the math, doing the testing. I think we go through that force ranking exercise. This has been incredibly helpful to me. Young I’ve got to tell you.

Young Han: It’s a different way to think about it. And I know it’s a little shocking, but I promise you, when you let it marinate, it’ll, it’ll it’ll be obvious. You’ll be like, why didn’t I think of that? And, uh, yeah, you just it’s like so simple and it’s so obvious, but you got to let it process a little bit and it’ll make a lot of sense.

Stone Payton: Well, thank you so much for. I knew that we would get.

Lee Kantor: In touch with you young. Um, check out your podcast or, um, you know, hire your agency. That’s one of your businesses is your agency.

Young Han: I have a small business coaching company. Yeah. It’s called owners club. Uh, that’s the website owners dot club. Uh, and, um, we, uh, coach. Well, I shouldn’t say coach. We, we, we guide people through this operating system. Uh, we call it coaching because nobody understands what we’re not really nice. We’re kind of, we kind of tell you what to do until you make $1 million and then you can have an opinion. So it’s not really coaching, but people don’t understand. Um, if we don’t say we’re coaches, people don’t understand it. Um, but that’s owners dot club. If you’re a small business trying to get to your $2 million annual revenue mark and then, uh, if you want to check out my podcast, it’s called the Girldad Show.com. I’m the girl dad. It’s my show. I interview, um, successful entrepreneurs that are also parents and I questioned them on their values and ethics because it takes a lot of time to do both of those. Well. And, uh, and then it’s a fun show in that sense because I learned from successful people and how they navigate that time constraint. And then, um, if you, if you are bigger and you’re like post $2 million and you need a fractional CFO thesis dot inc and I have an outsource finance firm where I go in and actually be your CFO and COO and I help you scale to 100 million.

Stone Payton: Li this was good, wasn’t it?

Lee Kantor: Yep. Great.

Stone Payton: All right, buddy, thank you again.

Young Han: Thank you guys. Appreciate you having me.

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