Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera, your unscripted SEO and small business podcast host. I'm here with Louis Swart of Iron Ridge.
It is ridiculously early in Australia, where he's based out of, so I'm grateful for him coming on on American time. I don't think that I would wake up that early to record a podcast, so. Mad respect.
Why don't we kick off by you giving us a taste of your history, a bit of your expertise, and as I always say, why should we trust you as an SEO and marketing expert?
[00:00:38] Speaker B: Excellent. Thank you very much. So, well, Jeremy, first of all, really happy to be here. You know, I think it's. I think it's incredible what podcasters are doing for the community. You know, people can just tune in now and they can listen to you, and they can get years of experience just condensed down into, like, a little episode. So, you know, kudos to you.
I remember I was 30, I just turned 30. I sold a business for 5 million. And I remember sitting in the bank and there was a big, big bank table, you know, big boardroom table, and they had one of those. The money counters on the table, you know, the ones that go grrr. And then that gives the money and then they put it. Put a elastic band on it and put it in the briefcase. Amazing feeling.
And I remember thinking back to a plumbing business that I had just five years before. I had a plumbing business, and I had 10 plumbers working for me. And then I went to sell the business, and I went to a broker, and, you know, I was 25. I was probably a bit cocky, and I went to a broker, and I was like, hey, man, how much can I get for my business? And he said to me, louis, like, who does your accounts? And I said, well, like, I do. And who does your quality control? Well, like, I do. And who does the, you know, hiring the stop. Well, like, I do, because I'd been taught, you know, if you want something done right, you need to do it yourself.
Yeah. So I'd been taught that. So I did it all myself. So obviously it must be worth more because, I mean, like, I did it, I did it, I did it.
And he said those. He said those, you know, couple of words that just devastated me. He said, louis, your business is worth nothing.
And I remember that sinking feeling in my stomach, and I'm like, you've got to be wrong, mate. You must be wrong. I mean, I've got 10 plumbers. I'm doing all this work. You know, I built this empire. And he's like, Louis, you. I need to find another Louis who knows how to do plumbing, knows how to do accounting, knows how to do all these things. And he goes, they just don't exist. And if they did exist, they'd have their own business.
And I was like, wow, I remember that. I remember that feeling. Such a sick feeling.
Any case, fast forward five years, went to sell that business, and the broker said, who does accounts? Who does quality control? Who does this? Who does that? Because I'd learned to delegate amazingly well. Okay? So I had delegated everything in the business. I'd found somebody to do everything.
And so we were able to sell it for 5 million because five investors came in, each put a million in, and basically they just took over the business. Which was, which was, which was a real eye opener, because on the one side, the business was worth nothing, and on the other side, it was worth really good money. You know, granted, we had. I had 200 staff by then, but it just showed me how important delegation is. And lots of us, when we little, when we solopreneurs, we go, oh, I can't really delegate. I can't really afford to delegate yet, right? Or how do I trust somebody? You know, I'm doing everything myself and I want it to be right. How do I trust somebody?
And yeah, so that was my big introduction into delegation.
[00:03:56] Speaker A: I think that's a great origin story because I ran into this in another conversation in SEO, that if you can't take a vacation and your business still earns money, you don't actually have a business.
You have a. You own your job.
Which, don't get me wrong, deserves a step because there I started in the corporate world. I was working, you know, hourly or was working salary, but I was making $40,000 and I thought I was doing great.
I remember being in my 20s and like, oh, my gosh, I'm making $40,000 a year. It's amazing.
And just sl. Realizing just how little money that was and slowly realizing, like, I. I have to commute one to two hours each way. You know, I was in Southern California, so that was two to four hours out of my day to get there for a $40,000 annual salary.
And they, I made them, you know, I took over their digital marketing team, and I know that I turned their $1 million a year SEO service into a $3 million A.
And they refused to pay me a $3,000 bonus that I even had the manager's signature on. They sent the owner of homes.com out who had bought the company. Their parent company. And they said, Jeremy, we, you know, we just can't pay this bonus. Nobody in the company makes this much as a bonus. I'm like, I am at the wrong company. If I, you know, tripled your million dollar revenue for this service.
And I was pretty much pure profit by how I did it. Didn't add any additional staff, very little software overhead. Just completely revamped our process. And you won't shell out 3,3k extra shekels. Like I'm at the wrong company.
So don't get me wrong on the. There is a step there of owning your own job is definitely a thing. But you're right. Taking it to the next level and delegation, um, that's a, that's a jump that those are some processes. I'd love your wisdom if you could speak on some of the lessons and pitfalls that happen when you are in that growth phase.
Proper delegation, mapping things out. How does that work?
[00:06:29] Speaker B: Look, I think there's, you know, in business there's, there's a saying and it says different levels, different devils.
And it's so true. You know, if you turn, if you've got a business and you're doing, you know, even if you've got a job, if you've got a job and you're doing 40,000 years old, there's a whole lot of devils attached with that. There's a whole lot of stuff that you haven't thought of. And then you start a business, okay, and now maybe you've just working on your own. There's a whole lot of devils that you haven't thought of. Now you hire your first staff. There's a whole lot of devils you haven't thought of. And as you go up, you know, even you can imagine, even somebody like Elon Musk, I'm sure he's discovering new devils as he goes up with the levels. You know, it's just so many things that you do. But I found that one really important thing is find somebody that's already gone to that level. So find somebody that's really gone to that level and they know what most of the devils are and they can help you. You don't have to find the, you know, I've found some really expensive.
Sometimes it's really expensive, you know, finding those things.
But, you know, lots of times, lots of times with the, with the, you know, finding new, finding new devils is. It's something that comes completely out of the blue. You just don't even expect it, you know, so you may, you may find Suddenly that you, you know, cash flow is a problem.
Right? And cash flow might become a problem because the business might be going really well, and cashflow might become a problem, or cash flow might become a problem because business is going really badly. So it can go either way. You know, if your business does really well and you've got some staff, suddenly you're having to pay these staff, but you haven't invoiced for them yet.
And so then you've got an issue with that, you know, so that's causing you a whole lot of problems.
[00:08:30] Speaker A: Talking about expertise in looking towards others, you know, and the devils of that next level. I'm curious because I came across this as I was working on SEO for a company. They were in the transition phase. They'd grown up in Florida doing concrete wall installation in Florida, and they were looking to expand and not be known for being a Florida company anymore, but they were nationwide.
So that's obviously another, you know, learning about devils. Have you had any experience in that, you know, nationalization level? Coming out of a smaller business with a smaller footprint and trying to go bigger?
[00:09:15] Speaker B: Yeah, look, I.
As soon as you go bigger, you have, you know, we're running an office and we've got everybody. We know where everybody is, so that's easy, okay? And you go to work, you arrive at work and you can see all the people. And it's quite easy, you know, if Bob's not working because he's just not at his desk, okay?
And then as you grow now you start having remote offices, and now you've got staff in some random place or even if you've offshored, you know, you've got some people in the Philippines or Nepal or Egypt or whatever. And now those systems of you actually seeing Bob at his desk and knowing that he's working, they just don't work anymore. They just don't work anymore, okay? Because it's not like you're going to be on Zoom all day, and I'm going to be like, hey, I'm checking on Jeremy. I'm making sure Jeremy's at his desk, okay? That's the least productive way to do it.
So now you. Now it becomes more important that your systems are better. Now it becomes really important that I've got a way that I can actually track the projects that I've given you and what your progress is on those projects.
And if you're doing the projects according to some sort of sop, you know, some sort of operating procedure, or if you've got some sort of checklist that you're using for each project? Because as I'm growing, so I'm giving this project to, I might give it to a person in Australia, and then I might give it to a person in America, and then I might give it to a person in the Philippines. And I want to make sure that all of them come back to me with the same, the same result.
And so in order to be able to do that, it really becomes important to do that, to do procedures, to have procedures. And I found like checklists, you know, like if you take in on a new client, do you have a checklist that you tick off? Do you say, okay, so I've got the, I've got the identity, you know, I've got the id, I've got there this, I've got there this, I've got there this.
And then, you know, some of us do that.
But then when we, when we offboarding that client, when we, when that client's no longer outlined, do we have a checklist that we do, do we say, okay, we gave them access to this, these files. We now need to rescind the access to those files.
So the more you create those. And I mean, it's never been as easy as it is now. I mean, it is incredibly easy. You can go on something like loom, okay, you can go on loom, and I can explain a process to you and go, hey, Jerem, this is how you do da da da, da, da da da. And then I just go, create an sop. And then it just creates an SOP for you. And then I look through it and I say, oh, yes, I like it or I don't like that step.
And I think that the systems make such a massive difference no matter what we're doing. Because for lots of us, the information's in our head.
So we've got all this information in our mind.
And once we can get that information down onto a piece of paper, then we can start getting people to work off that piece of paper. And then somebody comes to me and they go, oh, this client. We didn't do this process. We didn't get the hundred points of ID for this client. We didn't get the identification.
And then I look at the process and I go, okay, what does the process say? It says you need to get their driver's license and their passport.
And they go, yeah, but this person didn't have a passport, so we just did it. And then I go, well, okay, that's a mistake that I've made. That's A mistake that I've made on the procedure.
So on the procedure, I now need to say, well, if they don't have a passport, you can use a driver's license and a passport. You can use credit cards or utility bills or whatever.
That allows me to say, did you check this? Did you follow this? And where are there holes in that? And then once we fix those holes, every time there's a problem, we go back and look at the procedure first and see where the holes are.
And if the procedure said, you've got to do this and they didn't do it, that's a bigger problem.
That's a problem. That's a staff problem, okay? Where you go like, hey, Jeremy, it said here, you've got to get 100 points of ID. You've ticked it, but you've got no ID, what's going on there, you know? So that allows you to be able to start managing much bigger teams and also being able to work out if your people are doing the right thing or not.
Because really, you can't punish somebody if they don't really know what to do.
You can't penalize them in any sort of way. You can't grouse at them and say, hey, you didn't do this, right? If they don't actually know how you want exactly how you want it done, and they don't have some sort of checklist, because we all learn different ways. Some of us learn by watching somebody else do it. Some of us learn by hearing and asking questions.
Some of us learn by actually physically doing it ourselves.
And a lot of us go in and we assume that everybody learns like we do. We assume that, like, you know, you just show me a document and I'm going to be able to do it, no problem.
Okay? So then I create all my documents like that. But somebody else wants to actually physically do it to learn how do you allow for those in your business? You know, so you've got to allow for all these different learning styles.
And so I think it's. I think as you're growing, that's sort of one of the biggest things is get your SOPs, get your operating procedures, pretty cool. Get your checklists. Pretty cool. Okay? And AI is incredible, the stuff we can do now with that, you know, I mean, creating Claude skills, you know, creating workflows, creating agents going in N8N, creating agents in N8N.
All that is unbelievable.
[00:14:57] Speaker A: I. I use an SOP framework that's included after every podcast. I conclude I have a skill that checks for specific concrete Steps that can be turned into an SOP document and it gets added to a library on unscripted SEO to reference, cross reference.
So if people want to learn how to execute the things that the folk on my podcast do, I extract it.
Always looking for that tactic or strategy. So when I'm talking to a guest and I'm asking them, hey, what's your favorite tactic? It's pulling out that sop, not just for me, but for my guests as well. But it's, wow, you're right that the capability of Claude ChatGPT and LLM tools to make those workflows so much easier. Because, you know, SOPs aren't new. You know, I used them, you know, in 2015, you know, in 2010 when I was working with that digital marketing team where I started out.
Yeah, it was, there was a lot of, A lot of hard learning, a lot of things figuring out. But you're right that putting, putting it down on paper of what, what would you say you do here is mandatory.
I do have a little bit of a pushback on that. And I say it's. It ties into marketing, it ties into execution is.
And the, the changeover from being a solopreneur to a business owner.
How do you keep the authenticity alive that is so required right now because of LLMs? You know, I just interviewed Sonia Rukio, you know, SEO by Sonia, and, and she's like, you know, people are revolting. They're, they're rebelling against the LLMs that are coming in with the soulless stuff. And this slop, AI slop out there and human to human conversation is more important than ever. So how do you maintain, you know, that authenticity when you are building SOPs? And how do you not become a micromanager when their existence is defined by a checklist?
[00:17:20] Speaker B: Excellent question, excellent question for me personally, you know, if a mistake is made, then I get involved.
So, you know, how it would work is I would actually tell you how to do something and then from that we would do a loom video and then you would create an sop.
You would create the sop, not me. And then you'd send me the sop, I'd have a quick look at it and I'd see if the SOP was okay, and then we'd run with the sop. So that whole process, I'm not spending very much time on that.
And then we run the process and then as soon as there's a problem, we go back to the SOP and go, okay, what happened was SOP not right.
Okay. And then we build up on the sop. And the reason we do this is the primary reason is because when we want to put on that next stuff, you know. Did you ever play that game at school? Did you ever play a game when you were kids? I don't know. We used to call it Chinese Whispers. I don't know why, but you'd start off and you'd say something, and then you'd say to the person next to you, and they'd say to the person next to them, what did you call that game when you were a kid?
[00:18:27] Speaker A: We called it Telephone here.
[00:18:29] Speaker B: Oh, okay. I don't know. We used to call it Chinese Whispers, which is a weird name, but that's what we called it. Okay. And. And it would go around, and then we come back to you in a bit, like, horribly different now in business. In business, my last company, I, you know, grew to 35 million 450 staff.
And I can tell you, I had to train all these people. I had to train thousands of people.
And I initially started off, and I was like, I'll train everybody. I'll train them, okay? Because I was only little and, you know, I had one or two staff come in, and. And the first person got an amazing training. The second person got a reasonable training. The third person got an average training by, like, the fifth person. You're like, listen, man, this is what we do. You kind of just. You've got it. Yeah, off you go. Go and do it yourself, right? Because you just didn't have time. You didn't have time to do it. And I'm like, okay, well, that didn't work, right? That didn't. I can tell you, that does not work, right?
So then I went into the second one, and I was like, you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna tell somebody, and then I'm gonna get them to tell the next person.
And it didn't even think about the telephone, you know, Chinese Whispers. It didn't even think about that, Right. And so I went in. Did it bang exactly the same as when you played the game as a kid at school?
And I went out in the field. I remember going out in the field and going, what are you doing? And the guy said, oh, this is what I was told to do. And I'm like, what? Any case, when I traced it back, what had happened is each person had actually gone, hey, you know what? Jeremy told me that I've got to do this, but I found a shortcut. Okay, this is my shortcut. That does it quicker. And then they would refer it to the next person and go, this is a shortcut. And so you'd end up with these.
The person at the end pretty much had all the shortcuts possible condensed into one and it was only doing like a tenth of what you actually wanted them to do, you know.
And so, you know, we do have to have the, you know, we do have to give people that authenticity. But there's got to be parameters that they work in. We always want some sort of parameters.
You know, like if you, if you're going to get a hundred points of id, there's no real creativity in that.
There's no real, you know, I don't want you to have your own flair and come up with, you know, your own documents.
Right. But if you find something new, then obviously that's amazing.
And so in business, as it gets bigger, there's a fine line between, you know, that's why as small businesses we can move so fast.
We just go, hey, I can do this. Bang. We can do it.
[00:21:20] Speaker A: The, the bureaucratic inertia does begin to build.
So yeah, I think proper sops is a cure for that.
And also I think you mentioned it there of recognizing in positions what are some aspects where we can allow for creativity or build creativity into the role, you know, and just recognize this aspect of it. Yeah, like you need these three IDs, that's, you're not going to be creative with it. But you know, website design, marketing, branding, you know, there's art.
There's so many aspects of things that need to get done that does take some degree of creativity.
[00:22:12] Speaker B: Absolutely, absolutely.
Well, I have a creative team.
My guys meet once a week where they just play.
They pretty much just watch, they just watch, they just watch YouTube videos, they watch adverts, they just watch stuff. Okay. And they go, hey, I've seen this cool technique and I have seen this and I've seen that. And that really helps heaps with creativity.
I used to run once every Friday. I would do a stand up meeting on a Friday and I'd bring the whole team together and each one of them had to come to the meeting with an AI tool that they'd learned.
And so we'd go and I didn't care what the AI tool was. Didn't matter, didn't matter if it was a game or if it was something they could use in their role. And what it allowed everybody to do was we started doing this two years ago, allowed everybody to come with something and go, hey, this is what I can do with AI, you know, this is how I can edit a video. And then, you know, three months later somebody else would come and say, hey, this is how I'm editing videos. And we'd be like, wow, that's amazing. You know, or people would come and say, you know, they'd come and say, hey, do you know that on ChatGPT we can now create song lyrics?
And you'd be like, wow, that's incredible. And then somebody else would come down the track and they'd go, hey, do you know on suno we can actually put music to song lyrics? And I'd be like, hang on, we spoke about the song lyrics on GPT.
Why don't we create some song lyrics on GPT, put it into suno and then get a song, like a company song, you know? So we did all that kind of stuff because it allowed us because it was everybody's little inputs into it, which was pretty cool. Which was pretty cool, you know, because we're moving into an era now where AI literally, like you said, AI, people do produce AI slop, you know, And I do this AI training and I tell people, okay, I want you to write. I want you to write, ask you, ask your AI to write you the story of Little Red Riding Hood, okay? And people go, write me the story of Little Red Riding Hood. And then it goes and gives them a story and they go, oh, yeah, it's very generic. And I'm like, of course it's generic. You didn't tell it anything. Okay, okay, now what I want you to do is I want you to tell it, I want you to over exaggerate anything that you like, okay? So let's say you like unicorns and fairies and Disney movies. And I want you to say, I love unicorns, fairies, Disney movies, like, you know, all that type of stuff.
Write me the Little Red Riding Hood. Or I want you to say, I love horror movies. I love horror movies. I love, like Saw, you know, when he shows him the X ray and he's actually got a key behind his eye and he's got a scalpel and he's got to cut his eye out to get to the key to open up the door. Otherwise he's, you know, the walls are going to crush him.
Write me the Little Red Riding Hood story.
And then we read a couple of the stories in the room.
And it's fascinating what AI can actually do if you put in creativity in the beginning.
So no creativity in, no creativity out.
Creativity in, creativity out. And that's the thing, you know, people say, oh, AI is going to take all, you know, it's going to take all the creativity. I think it's a tool like anything else, you know, it's a tool that's going to give you this ability to be able to amplify whatever you do.
So if you're a creative person viewed as a tool, amplify your creativity.
[00:25:51] Speaker A: I agree.
Andrei Nikolak, who I interviewed, he said, for SEO, AI has really been the steroids into the system that's allowed us to grow beyond just these checklists. Oh, did we edit the meta title? Did we edit the meta description? Like, like, you know, they, they were things that were on a checklist on a, on a 200 point SEO audit that I did in 2012.
And if I went back, honestly, now there's maybe like 10 of those that are things that I as an SEO now still need to do. The rest can should be done either through plugins, infrastructure, AI tools, workflow, flow, you know, but that, you know, I got paid several thousand dollars to edit somebody's meta titles and descriptions by hand over the course of a week. You know, it was hours where I spent resisting the urge to copy and paste.
You know, I had to write each sentence fresh. I was not allowed to use copy and paste. And, you know, that's exactly what LLMs are best at.
So with the steroids in the system, we can kind of be freed from some of the minutia and the drudgery of these systems if we allow it.
That's my takeaway.
[00:27:21] Speaker B: Look, I always say, imagine if you've got the chance, you've got a factory and you need to pack boxes, okay? And you got the chance to hire two people.
And the first guy is a muscular big guy, right? He's a really muscular big guy and he can pick up like two or three boxes at a time, right? The second guy is a skinny little guy, but he's got an Iron man suit, okay? And he can pick up 20 boxes at a time, right? And then you go, well, which one would you hire?
You know, and you go, well, did I have the guy that can pick up 20 boxes a time and fly through the air and put it to the top shelf without even using a forklift. He's the guy that I would hire, right?
And this is exactly the same with AI. AI is allowing us to do that.
So like you say, we can get AI to do all the basic work. And it's exactly the same. If you're using a virtual assistant, you get them to do the basic work so you can focus on the important work.
The one caveat with AI that I have is that we are getting more and more reliant on AI, which is amazing. AI does incredible things.
But, you know, AI is. They are still raising hundreds of millions of dollars to actually subsidize what we're doing.
So at some point, they've gonna. They've got to say, hey, listen, we need to make this thing profitable. We're gonna have to charge Jeremy more for the service that we're giving him. Okay?
And then at that point, you're gonna be like, well, AI does everything for me.
It doesn't matter what you charge me. I have to use it. What am I going to do?
And so I think that there's still a blend. We need a blend of human and AI, Right?
And one of the other things is that there's incredibly smart people like yourself who have got clawed and gone, hey, you know what? I do SEO, and I'm going to create an agent that does or a skilled Claude that does this specific thing for SEO.
And then somebody like me comes along and I don't really know SEO, and I go, hey, you know what I'm going to do? I read online that I can use Claude to do my SEO, right? Then I'm going to go in, and now I'm going to spend the next three months actually studying how to create an agent or how to create a skill in Claude. Okay? I'm going to study as much as I possibly can about SEO. And it's actually such a waste of time because somebody like you is a professional. Somebody like you could come in and ramp my business up three times, or I can spend the next six months learning how to do it, in which case, somebody like you is actually six months, you know, like years ahead of that already.
And so it's super important because now people think they can do it on themselves.
And that's one of the reasons why we get so much rubbish out there, is because people go, oh, I got a skill. And they put into claudgpt and they say, hey, do this. And it goes, what a great idea. Nobody's ever thought of that idea before. You are a genius. This is going to be amazing.
Definitely do this.
And we go, it's got to be right. I mean, it's got to be right telling me how good I am. Okay?
We don't go, maybe it's hallucinating.
Maybe it's just trying to make us feel good, you know?
And then we go, Ahead with it. And then we don't have any result. And we go, what the hell? You know, because we haven't put the principles in that you've spent like, you know, years actually learning. We don't know what those principles are, you know, and, you know, you can write, you can read in a book. You need to put meta text, and you go, okay, okay, I need to do that. And you gotta put them in. But you've learned a whole different level of that.
You've learned like, okay, when do you use them? How do you word them? What sort of stuff are you putting into them? You know, that's the stuff that it's not telling you.
[00:31:26] Speaker A: Yeah, 100%.
I ran into that, my friend Matt Brooks at Seoteric, we were talking about how he got like this massive, like 35 PDF download from their client. Say it. Saying what they need to do. And you know, it was just like so much volume. It was a replacement of thought with like volume. But you could tell that the person that sent it was just so proud of what they had made with Claude or made with GPT.
But it, like on the professional review of it, it's like, okay, this could have been one PDF. And really, as an action item, it's like these five things. And not like that, it's not all of that, but why don't we take this, this and this, execute on it.
So if there's.
It's like, I had coined a term, a phrase, word of like, getting that massive email from a client that obviously they'd just gone, gone all clawed on you. Like clod hopping. That was it. I called it clod hopping.
Just like from idea to idea and then, oh, yeah, give me a PDF and send it over. And, you know, it was a delicate operation to unwind the expectations that came from that. Because at the end of the day, these tools, they're.
They're really yes men, you know, they. They don't. It's very difficult. You can do it. You can. I suggest this methodology and this will be an sop for you of create a Council of Five and ascribe five different personality types who will argue with each other. So it. When you come up with a new concept, then you have a skill that's, you know, Council of Five. You already defined the personalities in conflict with each other. One's very generous, once a miser, another is philanthropic, the other is.
So you got like your five factors of humanity right? You know, is it profitable, is it ethical, is it moral, is it effective?
And then just Make a cool guy like.
Like your chillest bro Persona. And if you put that, your idea into that, it. You get so much more out of it because you're seeing the same problem sliced and diced differently.
Another SOP that I heard on another podcast I did was that you ask it to come up with a solution to a problem.
Then the next prompt is dissect and break down and argue and prevent and. And destroy what you just came up with. And then a third prompt of.
With those two previous, you know, the initial and the response, analyze both and come up with a path, a new opinion that doesn't repeat either of those and yet reflects the thinking behind those. And you'll get a much more nuanced, structured LLM output that can help you in your business case a little bit more.
[00:34:54] Speaker B: Incredible. Incredible. I mean, it is. That's what we do in humanity. Hey, you know, we don't just take one option. And on that. On that point, you know what my guys do? My guys would send me the. You know, when I first came out, they'd send me. I'd get. I'd get an email. Like, literally an email this long. And the email would be, can I have next Tuesday off? You know? And it would be like, I really appreciate my job. And I da, da da, da, da, da da da. And I'd read through it, and eventually I was like a bando. I'm like, you don't send me that. If you send me that, I'm not even reading it. If it looks like it's AI, I'm not even reading it. Okay, just reject it. Just accept that it's rejected. If you send me and say, can I have next Friday off approved? If it starts off with, I appreciate working at the company, like, literally, unless it's your resignation letter, like, it's not even looking at it, okay?
Because. Because that's what we do, you know? And I don't know. I don't know about you, but I mean, like, I go, okay, I'm going to write a letter. And I want to sound smart, so I go into AI and I'm like, make me sound smart.
I come up with this whole long letter and I send it to you, and then you get this long letter and you go, this is too long to read. So you just chuck it into GPT and you go, revise, and then it does a revision. And then you go, write me a response. And then it goes. And then it writes me this whole wrong response. Then I chuck that into my GPT and they Go. Okay, revise. All right. What is this guy actually wanting? Send him a response. I mean, we literally.
We used to. People used to send emails. Now they're just sending you tons of information, like, I mean, ridiculous amounts of information.
So how do we stop that?
[00:36:35] Speaker A: Sounds like Dr. Seuss.
[00:36:38] Speaker B: Yeah. One thing that I found is like, have you used the thing. Make it Spartan. Have you used that? You know.
You know, make this. You know, make your response Spartan and concise.
[00:36:49] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:36:50] Speaker B: And it actually cuts it down. It cuts it down substantially.
I don't know. It's.
But it's really about trying to. It's about us trying to get that message across, because otherwise it's just waffle. I mean, the AI is waffling, which we all. All of us humans do. But, yeah.
[00:37:12] Speaker A: Curious as we kind of wrap up. If you tell me about your book, it looks like the bee myth.
Tell me about that. And what inspired.
[00:37:23] Speaker B: So. So the bee myth is the busy. The busyness myth.
Okay. And it's all about, you know, now we live in an age where people tell you how busy they are.
So you meet somebody and you go, how are you going? And they go, I'm so busy. I'm so busy. I'm so busy. I'm so busy.
Did you do the. Did you do the something. Oh, I was too busy. I was too busy. And we wear busyness as a badge of honor. So we wear it like I'm busy.
And we're not saying I'm busy. What we're saying is, I must be loved.
Everybody wants to use me.
That's why I'm busy. I must be worthy.
Everybody needs a bit of my time.
I must be safe because I'm, like, so busy. Who else could take my job?
So we've associated worthy with those other base needs.
And the book is about a guy that starts off and it literally goes through a lot of my life. Stuff that's happened to me in my world, you can imagine. I've been in business for a very long time, you know, and I've done, you know, I've run teams and done solopreneur, and I've had all the things. Hey, I've had the burnout. I've had the, you know, staff running random, doing all sorts of weird things.
I've had times when I've been doing, you know, $10 tasks and actually hoping to get a, you know, $200,000 at the end of the year. And I've religiously done that, and I've done it really hard, and I've made no money, and I've gone, what the hell? What am I doing wrong? And in the book, I got a whole lot of really cool tips. So I'll tell you one of the cool ones. I'll show you this. This is off my computer, okay? So this is. This is a post it note, right?
So the first thing you want to do is you want to work out, okay? How much do you want to earn in the next year?
So let's say in the next year, I want to earn $200,000, right?
So you want to earn $200,000. So now if you went and you got that job again and working for a boss, you'd be working probably 40 hours a week. Okay, maybe 40 hours a week. Maybe, maybe, maybe 50 weeks a year. Like, that's about the max hours that you could work for a boss. So it's about 2000 hours.
So it's 50 times 42,000 hours.
Now what you want to do is I want to earn $200,000.
I divided by 2,000 hours, and that gives me a figure of $100 an hour. Okay?
Now I take my hundred dollars an hour and I write it on a post it note and I stick it somewhere, stick it on my monitor, stick it on my wall, stick it on my computer. And during the day, every time I'm doing something, I look up and I'll ask myself, and would I pay somebody $100 an hour to do this task? And it's the most visual thing. It's such a basic tool. It is so super, super, ridiculously, simply basic. Right? But it is such a powerful tool because you'll find yourself doing something in Canva, and you're like, oh, I mean, I can't get this to work. And then I look up and I go, would I pay somebody 200 bucks to move this picture in Canva? And then I go, okay, you know what? This is ridiculous. This is ridiculous. I'm not doing this. And then I refer it on to my. To my team, and my team charges me $10 an hour.
Now, let's say you've got your base marks, and I've got my base mark of 100 bucks an hour, right? I need to earn $100 every hour, eight hours a day. So it's generally not $100. It's probably double that, right? Because I don't want to work 20. I don't want to work 40 hours a week. But. But let's say it's $100.
Okay?
Now a task comes along, and it's it's this book. You see the book up here? I've got to move the book in, like, it's not quite. Like it needs to be moved a bit. Okay. So I'd go, well, I'll just quickly do it. That's a $10 an hour task. I could get a VA to do that for 10 bucks.
But I go, I'll just quickly do it myself. Because you know what? I actually saved $10. I saved $10.
Right.
The reality is that I've actually lost $90 because I need to make 100 bucks.
So I've actually lost $90 in that hour. Now how do I make up for that? To be able to get to my goal the next hour, I need to do $100 plus $90 that I lost the hour before.
So every time you do a $10 task, you just make your work like ridiculously difficult.
Like ridiculously difficult.
And you're just never going to reach that goal. So people do this. They have this $100 an hour. They do 10, 10, 10, 10, 10,. 10, 10. And then they do a couple of hundred dollars and then they get to the end of the year and they go, well, look, I was aiming for, I was aiming for, you know, 200,000 and I only got to like 50,000. I don't know what happened.
Obviously what happened was you were doing $10 tasks all the way through.
What did you think was going to happen?
You know, so literally that's one of the most powerful things that I can tell you is a post it note. And it's so super simple. You get a post it note or a sticker or a piece of paper mate, that will change, I promise you. That will change your life, I promise you. It's going to change your life. You're going to put it up on the wall. And how it works is it's super simple to calculate. Every hundred thousand is worth is $50. So every 100,000 is $50. Ideally, what you want to do is start off with that figure and then you want to double that figure. When you get comfortable with that figure, then you double that figure. Okay.
And you'll see that your income will just stay on par with it.
So that's, that's tool number one. Okay, I've got a second tool. You're interested in a second tool.
[00:43:15] Speaker A: Write down.
[00:43:16] Speaker B: Okay, I've got a second productivity tool. So this one is called the Post. I call it the Post Time, the Post Time planner. Okay. And how that works is you plan what you're going to do tomorrow. So you've got kind of got your tomorrow planned out, but the reality is that sometimes you get to the end of the day and you go, hang on, I didn't accomplish all the stuff I wanted to do. I was, I was so busy today. But I haven't actually done this stuff and lots of times it's because we've actually done other stuff or we've done stuff for longer than what we thought it was going to do. Right.
So I normally get up at 7. The other morning I got up at 5 and I was like, okay, I'm awake. So I got my phone out and I started playing on TikTok. And I played on TikTok for about 20 minutes and then I was like, I better get up. Got up, had a shower, I came and sat at my computer and I was like, man, it's off past seven. I was almost late for my meeting. I was like, where did I lose the time?
And I had thought that I'd played on TikTok for 20 minutes, but I'd actually been on TikTok for over two hours, which I mean is quite easy to do.
But if I didn't actually monitor that time after the fact, I would have got to the end of the day and gone, man. I got up at 5 this morning and I don't think I've accomplished anything more than what I normally do. Like where did the extra hours go?
So what we do is we just write down and you know, I've got some on my site, louiswatt.com or you can just make one yourself, just get a piece of paper and you just write down every half an hour on a piece of paper.
So if you start work at seven in the morning, you write down seven to half by seven, help us seven to eight. Eight to help us eight.
And then every hour you can set a time on your phone.
Every hour you go back and say, hey, what did I do in the last two half hour blocks? And you'll see if you do that for, I promise, you do that for two weeks, you are not going to recognize yourself because you're going to start seeing.
Man, I think she spent a heap of time in the morning on socials. All right, hey, I'm not actually spending any time doing this thing.
And so you're going to then start being able to work out where you actually spending your time, which is super important because it brings me to the third thing. Would you like to know the third thing?
[00:45:40] Speaker A: Always.
[00:45:42] Speaker B: Okay, cool. So the third thing is, you know it's along the lines of that Brian Tracy, eat that, you know, eat that frog.
What's the one thing that you know you need to do today?
You don't really want to do it, but if you did it, it would change your business.
You know, what's that one thing?
So every day, as my business grew, initially I would have like a whole heap of to do's. But as my business grew, I realized that I'd need to do less and less. I need to have less and less absolute to do's.
To the point where I was doing between one and three a day, I got to a point where I was only doing one to do a day. I'd walk into the office and I'd say, this is the one thing I have to accomplish today.
Irrespective of everything else, this one thing is going to move the business now for me.
I do. I don't. Me and my credit card, we have got a love and hate relationship, okay?
When it comes to reconciling it, I hate it. I hate it because I leave it forever, then it's three months into it, and I'm like, oh, man, you know, I spent XYZ three months ago. I spent XYZ on a Tuesday night. It.
What was it? My bookkeeper saying to me, you know, you need to reconcile it. We've got to do the.
We've got to do the taxes. And it's like, okay.
So I get to my desk and I'm like, sweet, I'm gonna do my. I'm gonna do my reconciliation. I'm all ready, okay? And then I go, hey, my desk's a bit messy. I'm just gonna quickly tidy up my desk. So I tidy up my desk.
I can see the smile. You've done this.
So quickly tidy up my desk. And then I go like, oh, I got some books and I put them back in my bookshelf. And then I go, oh, you know what? I should just do the bookshelf. I mean, I'm here now. Hey, I should just.
So I do the bookshelf. And then I go, oh, you know, there's some stuff on the floor. I just quickly vacuum the floor, right? And then I get to the end of the day and I go, oh, man, I didn't get to do my reconciliation. I was so busy today, and I still haven't got to do my reconciliation.
But the reconciliation is actually the only thing that I should have done that day.
Okay? And I call that productive procrastination, because you're productive.
But you're procrastinating from what you really should be doing.
And we all do it. We all do it and it's super productive, but it's procrastinating from something else.
And I think a lot of times, you know, with us, we're not implementing stuff. So, you know, even learning, even learning can be productive. Procrastination.
So you've, you know, you've come to this podcast, you've listened to it for an hour, you know, thank you, super appreciate you.
But what is one thing that you're going to implement from this podcast? You know, if you walk away from this podcast and you don't do anything and you just say, oh, that was cool, and you move on, literally, you've been entertained for an hour and that's amazing. Loved entertaining you. Right. But if you walk away from this podcast and you've got a post it note on your computer with a figure, if you walk away from this podcast and you've got a post time planner, your life is going to change. Things are actually physically going to change for you. So those are the three tools that we kind of talk about in the Behemoth. And the book is written, it's written as a parable, so it's super easy to read. And then it's got all this stuff in the back. It's got a heap of free resources in there.
Yeah, just, you know, a whole lot of extra stuff for you to do.
[00:49:18] Speaker A: Well, I absolutely love what you've been sharing. I'll make sure that the link to get the book, the behemoth link to your site is listed in the show notes. For anybody that's listening and waiting for that action item that it you must scratch.
If you want other itches to scratch, check out unscripted SEO.com I have a hub of previous interviews sorted by topic so you can find previous guests who have spoken on this particular subject so you can gather that information.
Check out seoarcade.com I've been working on articleizing some of these threads across multiple authors, gathering snippets from different interviews, lacing them together with SEO lessons, digital marketing lessons, small business lessons, and check out unscripted small business.com for all of the details of this particular recap. Um, and appreciate you as a listener and appreciate you coming on as a guest.
[00:50:16] Speaker B: Louis, thank you so much. The information that you're providing to people is incredible. And I mean, I think literally you are the future of podcasting. You know, the way that you're doing really is the future having keeping this human interaction and then putting in as much AI in the. In the back end as possible. Incredible. Thank you so much. It's been a real privilege.
[00:50:41] Speaker A: Well, it doesn't work very well without the humans, so I appreciate you coming on. Thank you.
[00:50:47] Speaker B: Thanks, mate.
