GUEST INTERVIEWSTHE ELEVATE PODCAST

Perry Marshall – The network effect and how to build a business that lasts

The Leadership Diaries

Perry Marshall is one of the most expensive business strategists in the world. He’s guided clients like FanDuel and InfusionSoft from startups to hundreds of millions of dollars.

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Not only that, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Labs uses his 80/20 Curve as a productivity tool. His reinvention of the Pareto Principle is published in Harvard Business Review.

His Google book laid the foundations for the $100 billion Pay Per Click industry, and Ultimate Guide to Google Ads is one of the world’s best selling book on digital advertising.

Ahead of his Rosetta Stone seminar coming to Sydney in November, we get to do a session of “The Leadership Diaries” like no other as he discusses the 80/20 rule, leveraging time, and the Espresso Machine Principle as it applies to real estate businesses. He also talks about the Tactical Triangle of business and the Network Effect where we can see plenty of applications in real estate.



Episode Transcript

As some of you know, we’ve been doing a series for some time called The Leadership Diaries. In that series, I always ask whoever I’m interviewing the question, who are you learning from? If anyone has asked me that question in the last several months, the name at the top of my list has been Perry Marshall. A couple of years ago, I had no idea who he even was, but it was a chance conversation with one of our suppliers that led me to read two of Perry’s books. The first one is 80/20 Sales and Marketing and the second one is The Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords, both of which have helped me greatly in various ways in our business.

I’d recommend those books to anyone. I would say without hesitation, they’ve inspired me to think outside the box and probably do some of my best creative work. For me, there have been some massive lessons in productivity, discernment, asking better questions, thinking more strategically plus much more. For those of you that have heard of Perry Marshall, you’ll know he has a massive following from all entrepreneurs in something that they called Planet Perry. With small and large businesses, he attracts some incredible entrepreneurs and is known for inspiring great clarity in amongst all of the leaders that he coaches.

Ahead of Perry bringing his Rosetta Stone event to Sydney, which he is doing in November 2019, it’s for all types of businesses. I invited him to the show and I was delighted that he accepted. In this show, we’re doing The Leadership Diaries, but we will also discuss the 80/20 Rule, leveraging time, the Espresso Machine Principle as it applies to real estate agents. His Tactical Triangle of business and how that applies to real estate, how the Network Effect might work for you and against you in real estate and reasons some people are good at selling one way and perhaps not others. Grab a cuppa, sit back, relax and enjoy the chat with Perry Marshall.

Welcome to the show, Perry Marshall.

Thank you for having me. It’s an honour. I’m delighted to be here. I’m delighted to be coming to Australia in November.

When was the last time you were in Australia?

It was 2004. I’m a little embarrassed. I’ve got lots of Australians that have come to my seminars and everything. Maybe my only excuse is I have been to 40 different countries and Australia is one of them and it’s a great place. I love Australia, but it’s a hard place to get to often. I’m looking forward to it. I’m bringing two of my sons and one of my daughters with me. We’re going to make sure we have some fun and everybody will meet them. They will be at the seminar and they will be helping out and everything. I can’t wait.

I’ve done a few of your courses. I’ve done 30 Day Reboot. I’ve done Advanced Lead Generation and as soon as you said you were coming to Australia, I signed up immediately for Rosetta Stone. First of all, I can probably guess where the name Rosetta Stone comes from, but can you tell us a little bit about Rosetta Stone and what we’re going to learn there?

[bctt tweet=”Everything in marketing comes down to four things: traffic, conversion, economics, and 80/20.” username=””]

The original Rosetta Stone, which is in the British Museum, was this big stone tablet that had three different languages: Egyptian, Coptic and maybe it was Greek or something. They figured it out. They used the fact that they were all identical messages in three languages to figure out all three languages. It was a giant breakthrough in understanding hieroglyphs and all of that stuff. I realized that there was a similarity. In 80/20 Sales and Marketing, I teach that. Everything in marketing comes down to four things: traffic, conversion, economics and 80/20. In fact, it is true that we have this thing called the Tactical Triangle and we map every single thing. It’s a cycle and you go around the circle. It starts with traffic, you convert the traffic, you get money from the traffic, then you reinvest the money.

That could be a whole seminar all by itself, but that’s one part of the Rosetta Stone. The next part is that there’s a whole set of layers of 80/20 strategies that are above marketing. This is important because a lot of people, what they’re experiencing is, “It is used to be enough. I could write a headline, I could create a Facebook ad, or I can do a Google ad, I’m good to go. I’m getting leads. I’m getting sales. Everything is great.” What people are finding now is that necessary, but absolutely not sufficient. There is a whole level of sophistication. You can spend yourself into oblivion or educate yourself into oblivion mastering marketing techniques and wonder like, “Why am I spinning my wheels?”

There’s a whole higher level of strategies which, when you zoom into the Tactical Triangle, especially the 80/20 part of it, you will find, “This business was doomed from the beginning.” My friend, John Mendocha, has a brilliant saying. He says, “Most businesses fail in the first five minutes. It takes three years for most people to find out.” It’s true. There’s this whole other set of strategies of is this a star business? Is this a business that even has the potential to get there? The third layer is the Network Effect. Nobody even used to think about this, but what is Network Effect? The Network Effect is Uber gets more riders, which attracts more drivers, which lowers the wait time, which attracts more riders, which attracts more drivers, which lowers the wait time.

You have this virtuous circle where I don’t know about where you live, but where I live, it takes three to eight minutes for an Uber to show up. I go anywhere I want and that’s amazing. Let’s rewind several years ago, two times in the same year I called a taxi. The taxi came to my house. I said, “Midway Airport,” two different times the taxi driver said, “Where’s that?” Midway Airport is six miles from here and it’s one of the biggest airports in the United States and the taxi driver doesn’t know where it is. You got to be kidding. Not so with Uber anymore. They completely elevated. The point is that they’re competition-proof. Other than Lyft, imagine Uber is already in a city, good luck with starting another taxi.

ELV 107 | 80/20 Sales And Marketing
80/20 Sales and Marketing: The Definitive Guide to Working Less and Making More

When you’re in Sydney, get an Uber, that would be my advice. It’s the same here, but you’ve said many times that the taxi industry was ripe for disruption because the service was terrible. The experience was terrible. It was waiting for someone to come along. Often, people say that about the real estate industry too. I’ve been thinking about your Tactical Triangle and different real estate companies. The traffic conversion economics seeing Purplebricks, who were big in the UK, made a big splash in Australia. They try doing it to the US.

They paid a lot of money for traffic, but they didn’t have the conversion and economics. Number one, it’s interesting that the Tactical Triangle applies to all businesses, not only to one or the other. Number two is with real estate being one of these industries where consumers are basically dissatisfied with the length of time it takes them to get a loan or to make an offer or to go and look at a property. If some people are saying the real estate industry is ripe for disruption, what are your thoughts on that?

It’s going to get disrupted. Somebody’s going to do it. It’s not going to stay the way it is. As you said, think about the taxis. What happened with taxis? It was an awful experience. I’ve done some research. I’ve found out that the general Uber idea was attempted a number of times and Uber was finally the company that got it to go. It wasn’t exactly an original idea, but most people in the taxi industry were asleep at the wheel. They were completely unaware. I realized that people are going to be at the seminar from all kinds of industries but you’re in real estate, and what’s going to happen is somebody’s going to figure out how to make a loan happen in two hours instead of two weeks.

I’ve got a client who did that. In fact, this was one of the reasons I did Rosetta Stone. It was one of the sparks that made this happen. I got this client for a long time, Ed Harycki. He has a company called Swift Capital. In 2011, he came to my house and we did a workshop. I helped him with his Google Ads and stuff. They were making small business loans online and they morphed into, “Let’s do it through your merchant account. You got money coming into your merchant account. Let’s give you a loan through your merchant account then we pay back through the merchant account.” It’s a factoring thing through a merchant account. He came to a seminar I did in 2014.

[bctt tweet=”Most businesses get more vulnerable to competition the larger they get.” username=””]

At that seminar, he clarified the idea that he has to simplify the loan process ruthlessly. He went to work on that and he said, “I don’t know how we’re going to do this, but when somebody applies for a loan, we’re checking their credit score and we’re having them fax in all this stuff. We’ve got to get this down to being approved within 30 minutes or an hour. We want to tell you what your rate is online within a few minutes, either wait for the screen to refresh or an email comes a few minutes later.” It’s a totally automated system that will say, “This is your rate. This is your monthly payment.” He chiselled away at this. He dialled it in.

He figured that out. He thought, “This part takes too long, but I can replace it with this other method. It’s close enough. It’s not perfect, but the risk is acceptable.” PayPal came and bought them out for a huge ungodly sum of money. It is like FU money. I started seeing that in Planet Perry, these things were happening. WordStream, I knew Larry a long time ago. He built up that company. It’s simplified Google advertising and he sold it to Gannett for $150 million. It’s the company that owns USA Today. This is how Rosetta Stone was born. I realized it was either you own the network or the network owns you. Whether you’re Samantha McClane or John Smith or whoever, you need to own something. What started to emerge was what I called the Network Effect for Mere Mortals.

Being Uber is not too realistic for most of us. I’m using it to illustrate the Principle of Network Effect. It’s when you bring buyers and sellers together and it’s exponential when you can do that. I have this term Network Effect for Mere Mortals and what a lot of my students are doing is they are Google ad agencies, they are Facebook ads ad agencies, and they are lead generation consultants. What they are doing is they’re using the fact that their lead generation brings buyers and sellers together and they’re building a network. Finn Peacock in Australia has done this. His company is called SolarQuotes.com.au.

Network Effect for Mere Mortals can be obvious. Sometimes it’s not obvious that it’s going on but basically, somewhere in your business there is a virtuous cycle that it gets faster and faster and more effective the bigger your business gets. What happens is most businesses get more vulnerable the larger they get. They get more vulnerable to competition. In Network Effect, you get less vulnerable to competition. I’m the guy who wrote the book on Google advertising. There was a period of about several years where if you could figure out Google Ads, you could totally dominate your industry. Knowing Google Ads could make you the number one real estate agent in Sydney. That era passed because eventually, everybody started figuring out, “This is how these online ads work.” It is no longer an advantage.

What happened was I watched a whole bunch of businesses made tons of money and then all of a sudden, they crashed because they didn’t have any barriers to entry. I became uninterested in quick and dirty businesses that could make a lot of money really fast. I became interested in businesses that could last a long time. That’s why I’m doing the Rosetta Stone seminar. We did a similar seminar in Chicago. It was a smashing success, standing ovation, record attendance, and success stories are coming out of that seminar. I’ve never done it in Australia. I’ve learned a lot of things in the last time that I didn’t know then. I’m updating all the material. I’m incorporating some other things and I got a couple of guests. I’ve got Jack Born, who used to work for me. He has a software company called Deadline Funnel. I have Mike Rhodes, who’s my co-author on The Ultimate Guide to Google Adwords. He’s going to be talking about traffic and strategy. It’s important to understand either you own the network or the network owns you and there’s not anything in between. It’s binary.

That’s something that will resonate with our audience because real estate agents do feel that way with a couple of Network Effects there. I’m sure that they wish they played their cards differently in the beginning. Speaking of books, I own most of your books. The Ultimate Guide to Google Adwords was the first one, then the 80/20 Sales and Marketing, which everyone should buy it, read it, put it down and then read it again. I go back and I pick up something new each and every time. In 80/20, you mentioned that when you were talking about the Tactical Triangle a little while ago, 80/20 is something that I tried to resist for the longest time. I have since learned the error of my ways and I’m definitely looking at 80/20 in all sorts of things. As an entrepreneur, where do you think the most important leverage points are in 80/20 if you’re in any small business?

I would say there are two things. One of them is what I call the Espresso Machine Principle and the other one is the way that you use your time. The Espresso Machine Principle says that for every 1,000 people who will buy a $5 latte, one person will buy a $2,700 gleaming espresso machine. It’s almost like a Law of Physics. It’s ridiculously reliable how this is. In fact, it gives you a whole different view of human behaviour of being ridiculously predictable on a grand scale. What it says is that money is burning a hole in people’s pockets. People have different itches. They have an itch to buy shoes. They have the itch to drink caffeine. They have an itch to buy a house and whatever it is, and those itches obey very predictable numerical patterns.

In the 80/20 Sales and Marketing, I give you tools for saying, “We rented 100 apartments for $1,000 a month. How many units can we rent for $50,000 a month?” If you go look, you’ll find people are renting space for $50,000 a month. It might not be apartments, but it might be commercial space and all the proportions are there. It gives you the ability to say, “There’s this big giant hole. We don’t have a product that costs $700. If we had a product that costs $700, we would sell many of them. If we don’t, it means we’re doing something wrong or we got the wrong sales pitch because that money is there. It wants to jump out of somebody’s wallet into yours.”

[bctt tweet=”It’s important to understand how you either own the network or the network owns you and there’s not anything in between.” username=””]

That’s the first thing. The second thing is the time. There’s $10 an hour tasks, $100 an hour, $1,000 an hour, $10,000 an hour. If I talked to regular, ordinary people, if I float the idea of making $1,000 an hour, most people are like, “That’s impossible. I don’t have any idea. I make $17 an hour as a waitress. I can’t fathom.” Let’s say that you have a real estate office. Somebody calls and you have a receptionist, Helen. She makes $20 an hour. Helen is busy at the moment and she says, “Can you hold, please?” She puts somebody on hold. They were going to buy a $200,000 house and there was going to be $12,000 of commission. After two minutes of being on hold, they hang up. They call somebody else. Helen just lost $12,000 in two minutes. How many dollars an hour is that?

It’s over $1,000.

It’s hundreds of thousands of dollars an hour. This happens all the time. This doesn’t happen once a year. It happens every day. A dentist’s office, the dentist spends money on advertising and newspapers and Google Ads and Facebook ads. A phone call comes in and it doesn’t get handled right. What that means is that devising a system for making sure that nobody ever gets put on hold, nobody ever gets transferred to the wrong person ends up in a dead-end, that a properly qualified salesperson always intercepts that call. Even if they were doing something else, you devising that system could easily be worth $10,000 an hour.

When Ed Harycki designed that system. It took him years to get loan approval from two days down to 60 seconds, but he got it to where you could sit there and go, “There’s your rate and you don’t have to talk to anybody.” PayPal buys it for probably nine figures, I’m guessing. Those meetings where he worked with his team that was $100,000 an hour’s work. Even if that’s way out of your league and you can’t imagine $100,000 an hour. You should make $100,000 an hour for one hour every day, then you can take the rest of the day off. That’s how you should think about your time.

ELV 107 | 80/20 Sales And Marketing
80/20 Sales And Marketing: Every single person is a vector. There’s an arrow of what you should point them at and there’s a backend of what they should be pointed away from.

It’s interesting and if I could maybe summarize that for some of the real estate entrepreneurs. I took both of those pieces of advice, the one on leverage. I think about real estate businesses in Australia at the moment, everyone’s worried about their margins and costs being squeezed and consumers wanting more for less. I think what you are saying there is that not enough people are thinking on the right-hand side of the curve, where you could be offering a better service and charging more for it because 20% of your customers will pay for that.

The Espresso Machine Principle says that there is a super-deluxe version that a certain percentage of people will easily pay much more money for. Often, it’s the concierge-level service. If you can make this simple and easy, and that’s always a lot of work. One thing about my seminars is I am not attracting the starry-eyed, “I think I’m going to start a business someday,” people. That is not who’s going to come to this. If you’re going to disrupt your industry, it’s going to take some serious effort and some serious focus and concentration. There’s one thing it’s not okay. You may have to hustle your buns, you may have to bust your ass, or you may not. It depends, but you’re going to have to bring fresh thinking and questions that you’re not used to asking and you’re going to have to start asking new questions. That’s the important part. Getting better at production, is it going to do it? A few years from now, you’ll be doing the same thing you’re doing. Your industry may have been disrupted by somebody else and your job that might not even exist.

It is about leveraging time and having the time to think. That thinking time, if you’re doing it, which is what we were doing. If you are spending all your time doing and not enough time thinking, not enough time asking the right questions. Gary Keller, a big real estate agent wrote a whole book on The ONE Thing, which was thinking more and doing less. The answer should come to you when you give yourself the time and space to think. That’s what I’m looking forward to most about Rosetta Stone. All of the courses that I’ve done with you make me think.

November 11th and 12th, then we have an optional day on the 13th. We’re a much smaller group of people. We’re going to take their businesses apart and put it back together.

[bctt tweet=”Money is burning a hole in people’s pockets.” username=””]

I have got some questions to ask you that we call The Leadership Diaries. It’s a series of questions that we ask industry leaders about their businesses so that other aspiring leaders can learn from the experienced guys. What was your first job? What did it teach you?

My first job was a janitor job. I’ve done the paper route and stuff like that before, but I was sweeping floors in a fire alarm factory. What I learned was I absolutely hated that job. It was lonely. It was 4:30 to 7:00 in the evening every night after school. It killed my social life. What I did, I saved my money. I only made about $3.50 an hour at best, but I saved my money. I started a business building stereo equipment and I bought equipment, inventory and advertising. I got this other little tiny business off the ground. I remember sweeping floors thinking about my business. Every entrepreneur has done that. You’re punching the clock, you’re driving a forklift, whatever you’re doing and thinking. You might not even know what you should be thinking about, but you’re obsessing.

Can you name someone that has had a big impact on you as a leader?

There are a lot of people, but I’ll pick a guy named Dr Robert Knoll. He was an English professor that I had in college. Those of you familiar with Jordan Peterson, the guy is a lot like Jordan Peterson, except he wasn’t a psychologist, he was an English professor. I remember on the first day of class he said, “A community is a group of people who share the same stories,” and what he proceeded to do, it was called English Authors before 1800. It started with Beowulf, which was written in 780 and then we went to about 1800. We read all of this classic English literature. I came to understand in that class that human beings have been asking the same fundamental questions for thousands of years. There aren’t any new questions and there aren’t any new answers either. I still read a lot of that old literature. I think it’s what makes you wise. He had a huge effect on me. I’m channelling Dr Knoll every time I get on a stage. I hope to be the most provocative person that has talked to you since you can remember that because that’s what he was like.

What’s your favourite question to ask somebody in a job interview? What does their answer tell you about the person?

I want to know what their strengths and weaknesses are. I have an exercise if you go to PerryMarshall.com/pink-koolaid, I have this set of questions that you email ten of your friends and you ask them, “What do you think is my unique capability?” You combine that with, “What are you not good at?” When I hire somebody, I want to know what they’re good at. I also want to know what they’re not good at so that I give them something different. I think of every single person as a vector. There’s an arrow of what you should point them at and there’s a backend, the tail feathers, of what they should be pointed away from. That’s the key to hiring anybody.

I did your Marketing DNA test. It’s a relevant thing for real estate agents to have a look at. I was a nine, six, seven, six and it basically confirmed that I should stay away from numbers and put together pretty pictures, which is in fact what I do. A lot of agents will say, “I hate getting on the phone,” but there are other ways to go about sales and marketing, which are much more in your lane. I can vouch for that as well. What advice would you give someone going into a leadership position for the first time?

Know thyself. That speaks to everything we said, like the marketing DNA test for example, you should know how you persuade and also the way everybody masters anything. Let’s say that you’re learning to play the guitar. Most people, if they get serious about guitar, got inspired by somebody. They got inspired by Jimmy Page or Jimi Hendrix or Eric Clapton or somebody. Here’s how the progression works. First, you do a bad rendition of Jimi Hendrix. That’s awful. You then get to a surprisingly respectable imitation of Jimi Hendrix, except that it doesn’t sound like him. You did play the notes, but you still don’t sound like him. The third step is you finally start to sound like yourself and you find your own voice. That is when the real leadership kicks in. When you discover your own voice and you’re confident about who and what that voice is and what it speaks about and who it speaks to. It’s okay to be in that imitation phase. That’s fine. Go ahead and do that, but understand eventually you’re going to detach from that and you’re going to be yourself.

[bctt tweet=”If you’re going to disrupt your industry, it’s going to take some serious effort, focus, and concentration.” username=””]

Where do good ideas in your business come from? How do you work out what ideas are in and what ideas get tossed?

My client, Mark McShurley, has a great saying. He says, “There are few principles, many ideas and few decisions.” I find that the best ideas that I get come from me putting myself in inspiring situations or having space. I get a lot of great ideas when I’m in a high energy room with high energy people. It’s why we do seminars and masterminds because if you have a good enough atmosphere, it will raise up the level of people in their thinking. I also do a surprising amount of travel like riding my bike. I’m doing my hobbies. I’ve had to in the last few years give myself explicit permission, “Perry, if you’re getting excited about one of your hobby projects, you do not need to justify it. You don’t need to rationalize it. Order the parts and build the stuff or buy the plane tickets and put them on the calendar. You don’t need to rationalize the creative space.” A lot of people are like, “Someday when I’m finally successful, then I’ll take that bike ride or I’ll go on a vacation with my family.” It’s almost like they’re punishing themselves. Inspiration never comes when your fists are clenched. You have to relax. I realize that doesn’t even sound right. It’s like, “Please, take a chill pill, do something fun in your life.” That’s where the breakthrough comes from.

I’ve got a question here. What does the first hour of your day look like? Are you a 5:00 AM Clubber? The real estate industry is notorious for The 5AM Club. Robin Sharma started it. There are a couple of coaches in the industry that believe in it.

I don’t know that term. What is that?

ELV 107 | 80/20 Sales And Marketing
80/20 Sales And Marketing: To learn how to make things that age well is to surround yourself with things that age well.

The 5:00 AM Club is you get up at 5:00 AM, you go to the gym, you make 25 calls before 10:00 or 100 calls before 10:00 and hustle. When I started in the real estate industry, I caught that thinking that I had to get up at 5:00, be on the phone, going to the gym and all that stuff. Until I thought about, “What works for me?” I get up at 5:00 AM now and I think the single best habit I picked up from you on is picking up a pen and paper first thing in the morning rather than picking up my phone. I don’t think I’ll ask you that question.

I do that. I get up at 5:45 and I journal for a minimum of one hour and sometimes two hours. I do my highest level of creative thinking and creating time. I usually engage with the outside world at 11:30. Most people can’t imagine that. It seems very backward, but what I’m doing is I’m moving the $10,000 an hour work immediately after I’ve had space with my notebook, my thoughts and my cup of tea. That works so much better. I think hustling is very often not most people’s highest value skill. True for some, but not for most entrepreneurs I know.

You get into a bit of a vicious circle. You’re thinking, “If I’m not hustling, then I’m not performing.”

That is very destructive because it tears apart your relationships, but what it also does is it starts requiring you to hustle more and more. It’s dreadful. Do not start your day on the phone, in an email box, social media or news. Go take a shower, get yourself a cup of coffee, sit down with your notebook and be alone with your thoughts in the morning. “I had a dream. I had an idea in the shower. This is what I’m thinking about doing today. This is what I’m grateful for from yesterday.” You get in that space first, it’s like putting armor on. I can’t explain it. When you do that, your whole day goes so much better. Your energy is different. It’s way better.

[bctt tweet=”Life is too short to do the same things over and over again.” username=””]

What does leadership at home look like?

I’m going to have to confess to some hypocrisy probably, but it’s being present for one thing. I am the classic, believe me. I’m a classic absent-minded professor. I live in my head and I have all of these ideas, but one of the best habits or rituals that I picked up in the last couple of years is I take my kids places when I go. I’m taking my kids to Australia. I can’t bring all of them, but I’m bringing three of them. We will have so much fun. I take them on business trips and whatever. Sometimes it mostly works but we’re in hotels, we’re in restaurants, we’re in cabs, we’re in aeroplanes, we’re talking to each other. That is so cool. Everybody’s different. My kids are getting a little bit older now. They’re teenagers and early twenties and I love adult kids. It is so wonderful. It is so much fun. I hope that’s helpful.

We’ve talked about a whole bunch of stuff in terms of things that are going to happen at Rosetta Stone. We’ve talked about Tactical Triangles, 80/20, how to start your day and all of that, which is amazing. You guys that are thinking about coming to Rosetta Stone, please do because it will be amazing. What is one thing that you’d like to leave everyone who’s reading this?

Most people are way too overstimulated with too much stuff that’s only important for five seconds. Everybody should read something written before Gutenberg every day. That is the antidote to Twitter. It’s the antidote to Facebook. If something was written before the printing press, it means it was copied by hand, by scribes and hidden in urns, in caves so that when they burned Rome or Alexandria that it still survived. The only stuff we have is the stuff that did survive all that, which means somebody must have thought it was important. Almost anything that old, whatever it’s talking about, it’s important, valuable and relevant. What your friend had sushi for once yesterday isn’t relevant to anybody. Nobody’s going to save that for thousands of years. What does that do for you? That gives you a clear sense of what is going to come and go and what is going to last a long time. I’m into music and there is a lot of music that has not aged well. There is other music that ages very well.

The only way I know of to learn how to make things that age well is to surround yourself with things that age well because it’s not like there’s a formula exactly. If you listen to music that ages well, you’ll make music that ages well. If you read literature that ages well, you’ll write blog posts that age well. I have ten-year-old blog posts that are as fresh as the day that they were written. I think all this comes down to a point. Here’s the point, are you going to build things that you have to rebuild next month and rebuild next year and start over? Are you going to build things that last? That is what I’m about. What if you built a business that lasted several years? What if you built a business that lasted many years? What if the way that you do your business by engineering it the right way was very little needed to change in the next several years? You could let that business run and then you can step outside of that business and be a creative person and do whatever is important to you. That’s how I want you to think about your business and about your life because life is too short to do the same over and over again.

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Samantha McLean

Samantha McLean is the Co-Founder and Managing Editor of Elite Agent and Host of the Elevate Podcast.