The Mindset Of Scaling To 1 Million A Month With Andrew Stickel

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Are you struggling to grow your business?

From tackling day-to-day operations, handling employees, and overcoming unexpected or unforeseen issues…

It can be difficult to find the time to work on your business instead of working in it!

You may already know entrepreneurship can be challenging, especially if you're striving to grow your business alone. 

If you have been struggling to grow your business, this is for you!

In this episode, I talk with Andrew Stickel about the mindset and skill required to build and scale a successful business. He shares his insight into investing in yourself and your business through coaches and mentors, and he shares the mindset that has allowed him to grow his business to a massive 6-figure company that is projected to do 24 million this year! 

In this episode, Andrew and I are going to cover:

• How To Approach Done For You Services
• What No One Tells You About Coaching Clients
• How Selling High Ticket Is Easier
• What Can Happen When You Accept An Unexpected Opportunity
• How To Go From 300K to 3 Million
• What Is The Biggest Challenge With Employees
• How To Deal With Piracy and Competition

If you got value from what you heard here, please be sure to subscribe and rate this podcast! Bonus points for you if you write a review! ;) 

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Click Here To Get Daily Success Mentoring By Becoming A Member At How To Think

— TRANSCRIPT — 

Dan Henry: (00:00)

In this episode of the, How To Think podcast. We had Andy Stickel on, who is the founder of Social Fire Starter. He does marketing for lawyers and he was able to go from a 1 million a year business to a 4 million a year business to now a million dollars a month and projected 24 million this year. And we sat for about two hours and we talked about a lot of things. We talked about growing businesses. We talked about mindset. We talked about managing and dealing with employees and just everything in between as well as how he got started. And we told a lot of awesome stories about growing and leveling up. And I really think that you're going to enjoy this sit down interview. So with that said, let's jump right in.

Dan Henry: (00:57)

Andy Stickel.

Andrew Stickel: (00:58)

How's it going, man, been a while.

Dan Henry: (01:00)

And it has been a while. Yeah. Yeah. I'm really excited you came on because you were my client for like years.

Andrew Stickel: (01:09)

I take, I take pride in being your number one client.

Dan Henry: (01:11)

You are like, you are, You are. So, it's really cool because I recall like when we started working together, you know, you were very ground floor and now you're just, you're just absolutely crushing it. I mean, you did, I know that you did. What did you do last year with your, cause you have a software. You have a coaching company, you have it done for you agency, and last year was good, but this year's like ridiculous. Like what'd you do last year?

Andrew Stickel: (01:40)

Yeah, so we did, we did 4 million last year. When I started with you. We were at about a million, I think. And that was 2000... When was Ad Con? It was Ad Con.

Dan Henry: (01:49)

Oh that's ancient history.

Andrew Stickel: (01:49)

I hired you a, you know. Okay. So you know, the whole story about how I saw, I knew who Dan Henry was, and I was like, this guy's a douch bag. Like I don't. And then, so, and then I bought, and then I went to Ad Con cuz I live in Lakeland, which is, I don't know, like an hour from here. And I'm the type of person. And this is one of the secrets of my success, is that I understand that I can learn something from everybody and Ad Con was gonna be there. And I was like, all right, it's cool. I think you were doing like a Black Friday deal or something on Ad Con. So I got, I got a ticket for it. And I went to Ad Con and I was watching you. And I was like, this guy actually does just know what he's talking about. Like, it's pretty clear this guy actually knows a thing or two here.

Dan Henry: (02:27)

So, you know, what's funny about that is I talked to Tai Lopez once. And he said that when he was starting out, cuz he's very different now, just like I'm very different now

Andrew Stickel: (02:37)

When he was starting out, he was like Peer 1 and like,

Dan Henry: (02:40)

Yeah, like ridiculous what he is doing now.

Andrew Stickel: (02:42)

So smart. Yeah.

Dan Henry: (02:42)

So when he started out with what he was doing, he said that he knew his market, his market was like 18 to 25 year old males. And that basically, if he was to act all smart, they would get turned off. So he kind of had to act, I mean,

Andrew Stickel: (02:57)

He played dumb.

Dan Henry: (02:58)

He played dumb. He kind of acted like a douch because he was, I hate to sell this, but he was selling to douches. So, that was his strategy. And I always thought like, wow, to put your ego aside, and be able to do that. And do it because you know, that that's what, how you're attacking your market. And you know, you're smarter, you know, you're more, you know you can articulate yourself in a more intelligent way, but you suppress that cuz you know your market. I think that like that's a lot of discipline there. And so, but like I think anybody, you kind of get sick of that market, you grow out of it. And when I started realizing that I could attract, you know, better people, not that there's anything wrong with being, I mean, I was male in 18 to 25 at one point. But you know, when you I didn't want to work with people that just wanted like Lamborghinis and stuff. You know, I wanted to work with people who wanted to create great products. And so I changed my whole thing a bit and, just like he did and a lot of people do so. But yeah, yeah. I was, I've heard that a lot. Like

Andrew Stickel: (04:02)

Yeah. I mean, I just didn't yeah. I mean, you know what, you know, it's like, you know, and you even talked about this even more recently on your social media about you don't know somebody, you really just don't know somebody from basically their onscreen persona. Whether they're an actor or athlete or an entrepreneur or whatever, you know, so, but I went to Ad Con and I was like, oh, this guy really actually knows what he's talking about. And I'm the type of person where like, if I wanna learn something, you know, there's that Tony Robbins quote, where if you want to be successful, find somebody who's already done exactly what you wanna do and just copy what they've done. Right. So, or maybe hire them and tell them whatever it was.

Dan Henry: (04:38)

It's copy them. I, and then I say, Dan Henry says, if you really want to be good at it, just pay whatever they want.

Andrew Stickel: (04:43)

Yeah. So I don't know what the actual quote is. I think the quote is copied. I don't, I don't like, I don't like the, I don't like the copy in there because you get in, like, I think a lot of people think that like funnel hacking is literally just copying and I've, I know you've had that. I've had that happen where it's copying,

Dan Henry: (04:57)

That's what it turned into.

Andrew Stickel: (04:58)

That's what it turned into. But I don't think that was ever the intention. I think it was basically look and see.You know, it's like, and I still funnel hack. I'll look and see like, you know, this market is like, somebody's doing this cool thing in this market. That's neat. I'm not gonna steal or copy word for word. I'm not gonna steal their landing page, but I'll take that idea. And I'm like, okay, that's really cool. How can I apply that to what I'm trying to do? And it just, you know, it's like that book, Steal Like An Artist, you know what I mean?

Dan Henry: (05:24)

That's sort of like, if you ever go to the gym, and you see people doing like flies and instead of doing them properly, they're like this. You know, that's the equivalent to properly, like that's what I see in the online business industry is everybody's pretty much like, no, no, I'm do, I'm marketing and it's like, no, you're just making crappy products. And stealing other people's stuff. And you just, you kind of suck. So,

Andrew Stickel: (05:48)

And what I found is that typically, typically when you're just copying, when you're not actually doing the work, then you end up, you don't have any more moves. You know what I mean? Like so,

Dan Henry: (05:59)

Right. Exactly. you, dude, that's exactly right.

Andrew Stickel: (06:01)

That's what happens to me all the time. People steal my stuff, people steal your, I'm sure people steal your stuff all the time you know.

Dan Henry: (06:06)

Yeah. I'm definitely, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, I guess it's flattering at this point. But let's, so you did 4 million in last year, but you're on track to do what 24 million this year?

Andrew Stickel: (06:19)

So we're gonna, yeah. Well, we'll do, I mean, barring a yeah, we're gonna do 24 million this year, you know? Now that's few things have happened. I mean, you know, my company's being acquired. I now own a piece of a bigger company, but, yeah. We're on pace to do 24 million by the end of this year. Yeah, that's gone from doing a million a year to out doing 2 million a month. You know.

Dan Henry: (06:40)

We spoke before this started, you said the, if you were to separate that out, you got software, coaching and you got, done for you. The majority of that is done for you?

Andrew Stickel: (06:51)

Yeah. The majority. Well, the majority, I would say 60% is done for you. I'd say 30% is gonna be coaching and then 10% is going to be software. But we're, you know,

Dan Henry: (07:03)

What do you charge for your software?

Andrew Stickel: (07:04)

So the software right now, we're making some transitions because what we were doing is we were charging $3,000 a year. And basically I was just like, I learned really marketing from you. So what I did was I was doing, I did, ad, webinar, phone call, right. So, we were selling it at $3000. Well, we started at thousand and we started, 20 then went to 2,500. Then we went to 3000. Eventually, my plan was to get it up to 10,000 a year and we're still gonna get to that point. But what we're trying to do right now is we're actually gonna probably drop the price to like $249 a month right now, and just get on a reoccurring revenue model.

Andrew Stickel: (07:37)

Cause we wanna get as many users as possible. And it's easier. What we found is when we're doing it at $249 for the market that we're in, we're able to sell it a lot more at $249 than 3K up front, you know, so.

Dan Henry: (07:49)

$249 per month?

Andrew Stickel: (07:50)

$249 per month. Yeah. Which is basically the same thing. It's still $3,000 a year. It's just a monthly revenue model. But what we're trying to do and you know, we're trying to make it that we're looking at how can we make our clients stickier. Cuz that's the biggest problem with monthly recurring revenues, how do you keep the clients? You know, so we have contracts and everything, but what we're really trying to do is we're trying to figure out what kind of software can we do so that, you know, we can provide lots of software for them that they really use so that they're not going to want to leave. And that's the software that we have is like, it's like revolutionary in terms of getting reviews for law firms, because it's, that's what we do. We figure out the problem is that lawyers can't get reviews on.

Dan Henry: (08:29)

You should probably mention who you market.

Andrew Stickel: (08:32)

Yeah. I mentioned for, I've work for lawyers. Yeah.

Dan Henry: (08:33)

You do marketing for lawyers. Yeah. So, that, so for like for my app, How To Think, you know, I think about it and I'm like, you know, I think Calm, the app Calm did like 200 million last year.

Andrew Stickel: (08:47)

Oh, did it really?

Dan Henry: (08:47)

It's ridiculous.

Andrew Stickel: (08:47)

What is Calm? I don't even know what that is.

Dan Henry: (08:49)

So it's like an app you download and they have, and it just has like meditations and stuff. And there's other apps like it. Ours is a little bit more like your daily dose of wisdom where, and we're still on the ground floor of it building it up. We, we actually had, we launched it and we got over a thousand members and we did really, really well. And then the Amazon servers crashed and it corrupted cuz like with apps and stuff, a lot of 'em, most of 'em are based on the Amazon, like S3 and Amazon servers.

Andrew Stickel: (09:23)

Yeah. AWS, all that.

Dan Henry: (09:24)

AWS. And so, there was this, this massive crash. It was like literally like a, a dooms day event and it just thousands of companies or logistics departments, apps, it just crushed them. It like fried them, you know?

Andrew Stickel: (09:39)

Interesting.

Dan Henry: (09:39)

Like, think about like, the Terminator, what's a Sky Net, you know, just right? And so of course we're like a small company. We don't have like 20 developers sitting in a room, you know, with star wars on, you know, know coding and being plugged in. So it just, it hit us like crazy. So we had to, we had to like rebuild the whole app from the ground up, which is what we're doing now. And we're redoing it a little bit, but the reason I mentioned that is because like the app game, the software game is hard. Like I had a software before and that was hard because it had to connect to all these other softwares, and if they change something, then you gotta change something in yours.

Dan Henry: (10:22)

You know? And so it's a very tough game. But if you think about it, there's a lot of apps out there that do like a hundred million, 200 million a year. So to me I'm thinking like, man, if my app can just do 10 million a year, that would be amazing. But our angle is like a daily dose of wisdom. So you, you get, maybe there's a quote or there's a piece of wisdom from anyone all the way from Aristotle to Steve Jobs that in history have talked about something, maybe something from books and every day there's a five minute audio that sort of dives into that explains it and how to apply it to your life. And you get that five minute audio every day. And it just helps you with your mindset, helps you become more successful. We have a ton of, like the people love it, but we did have to put it on a separate app temporarily while we fixed this one. It's been, I'm not gonna lie. It's been a nightmare. I'm sure you've dealt with software stuff. But we're, we're looking to when we relaunch it, looking to be a lot better. So yeah.

Andrew Stickel: (11:14)

It's different. It's so different. Like, and you know, I know you got into physical products, I've gotten into physical products. It's different because like, like you and I are used to having an idea, getting a whiteboard out, drawing, like turning, going on Facebook live and then selling it and then there's money. And then like fulfilling. It is just going on to like teaching a course. Right. That's like the easiest thing, but then with software now, okay. I can sell this thing. I can do the sales, I can get all the sales, but now I'm dependent on all these other people and all these other companies and all this technology to actually make it work. And, you know, and, fulfillment or, e-com is even worse,

Dan Henry: (11:54)

Dude. E-com is terrible.

Andrew Stickel: (11:55)

It's it's terrible. Yeah. We're dealing with that right now.

Dan Henry: (11:57)

Like we, we had, that's been, oh, that, so we developed this planner that, you know, and people love the planner. The product's great. But like, when we first had it, we had like 10,000 copies, they got stuck on a ship in California because there was something about China and the U.S having whatever their issues are. And it was stuck there and it was stuck there for like a month and a half. And I was just like, this is insane. Like, and we're like, Brandon was like calling all these logistics companies and just having to do all this crazy stuff. And Brandon, how much of a nightmare was dealing with that?

Brandon: (12:37)

Never put me in charge of a physical product company ever again.

Dan Henry: (12:42)

Yeah. He said never put him in front of, in charge of a physical product company again. Dude. It it's horrible.

Andrew Stickel: (12:47)

It's terrible. Yeah.

Dan Henry: (12:48)

Yeah. So that's why, like I always say, when you teach, when you do consulting, or when you do information products, or you do events, or you do like a mastermind, I mean, that money can be used to cuz it's it's easy money. Right. Like, I mean, million make millions of dollars at like 80% margins or even more sometimes. And even if you're terrible at it, it's still like 50% margins if you suck. And then you can take that and you can put it into investments, you can put it into real estate or cryptocurrency or building a real company as I put it. You know, so it's an interesting, it's an interesting thing for sure. But I want, you know, what I'd like to pick your brain on a little bit here is the done for you. So you do what at least, did you say you were at 2 million a month?

Andrew Stickel: (13:40)

We are at, well, let's see we're at 13 million right now, so that's a little more than a million a month right now.

Dan Henry: (13:44)

Okay. So you're at atleast 600 grand,

Andrew Stickel: (13:47)

13 million a year. Yeah. So we're yeah. We're yeah.

Dan Henry: (13:49)

You're at over 600 grand a month in done for you services?

Andrew Stickel: (13:51)

Yeah. So we do a lot of bundling, right? Like we have found part of the coaching that we do, like, what we found is that leads... So, we work with lawyers. Right. And we found that a lot of times lawyers think that leads are their problem. Same thing with a lot of business, they think that leads is the problem. Right.

Dan Henry: (14:10)

They're the problem.

Andrew Stickel: (14:11)

Yeah. Well, but, but, so, okay, here's a great example. We had a client, we got 'em 300 lead leads in a single month and he got zero cases out of it because he didn't have his intake system handled. He didn't have a, he's not good at sales, you know, like there's all these different things that we can bring them the lead. Right. But if they don't have their business and their infrastructure set up behind that, then they're not gonna get cases.

Andrew Stickel: (14:31)

And at the end of the day, they're still gonna look at it like it's our fault, right? Because, oh, I paid you all this money and I didn't get any, I didn't get any cases. Right. So I read a long time ago, I read the book, Extreme Ownership, one of the it's I think it's essential reading for just anyone in life. And it's basically like, you know, I can complain that the clients are not actually doing their part or I can figure out a way to fix it. You know? So one of the things we do is now every client that we have gets an answering service, that, that is included in the cost of their monthly fee. And now somebody answers the phone. So at least their calls aren't going to voicemail. Right. But then we start doing coaching...

Dan Henry: (15:08)

Do you recall years ago when everybody was complaining about that, and I...

Andrew Stickel: (15:13)

Answering service?

Dan Henry: (15:14)

No, no. They were complaining about clients not calling. So they would run whatever, some, you know, paid media yeah. For, for clients. And they say, well, they don't answer the phone. And I was like, why don't you just charge 'em more money, and hire a VA to answer the phone. Everybody's like, no, that won't work.

Andrew Stickel: (15:30)

So we knew that. And actually, but here's, he did, but here's the thing, is that not only that, but we also include it as part of the offer. We're like, not only that, but you get an answering service. So now you can fire your answering service that you pay $300 a month for, and you can do that. So it makes our offer better. Right. But we were realizing that they still don't know how to do sales. They still don't know how to run their business. So that's when we started saying, okay, so what we're gonna start doing is not on only are we gonna do all this stuff for you? But what we're gonna do is we're also gonna teach you how to run the business. We're gonna teach you the marketing principle. We're gonna teach you the business strategies, teach you all that type of stuff.

Andrew Stickel: (16:00)

And at the end of the day, it it's good because it allows us to increase what we sell. Cuz now we can charge them for that. But really it actually makes the done for you service more sticky, cuz they're actually getting results. Because like I said, I mean, if you get 300 leads and you don't, don't get like we've done our part objectively, we've done our part by getting 'em in 300 leads. They're still mad because they didn't get any clients out of it. And ultimately they still blame us because, personal responsibility, and we can have a whole other conversation about that.

Dan Henry: (16:28)

Yeah. Or lack there of. Yeah, yeah. Well, so I actually had a, I saw a comment, in our client group recently where, and you know, keep in mind, we teach people how to, you know, get clients so, they were saying, you know, I just, I just, I don't, I just, I don't wanna do sales calls. I don't wanna hire people. And I'm like, well then why are you here? Yeah. Like what do you mean? It's like a fireman saying, I don't wanna go into a burning building. It's like, well, I get that. But then why are you a fireman? You know? And, and it's it's, it would be when people try to teach people how to start businesses, they, they don't mention this stuff, right. Like, guess what? Your clients are gonna have expectations that are just insane.

Dan Henry: (17:17)

They're gonna be like, I want you to help me grow my law firm. I want you to help me grow my coaching business. I want you to help me grow my salon, but I don't wanna do any work. I don't wanna be a business owner. I don't wanna act like or behave like a business owner. I just want magic to happen and whatever. And it's just not realistic and nobody talks about that. They just say, oh yeah, get clients and da, da, da. And so you, you know, taking that responsibility to do that is huge because most other companies are not gonna do that. Most other people in your position, they're not gonna do that. They're just gonna bitch and moan about their clients and don't get me wrong.

Andrew Stickel: (17:50)

I still, man. I still bitch about my clients. But at the end of the day, I still do something about it. You know?

Dan Henry: (17:55)

Exactly right. Exactly. It doesn't make you feel better to go, "You realize you're insane. Right. You're just insane." But, so what do you do for the lawyers? Like, tell me exactly like you, so lawyer wants more cases, so you get them leads, and then you help book those leads to what come into the office?

Andrew Stickel: (18:13)

No, we don't actually do. So what we do is we, we're kind of a full service, so you can't just hire us just to do a website, right. Or just to do blogging or just do SEO when you hire us. Basically what happens is we take over all of your internet marketing. So we handle their, we completely build them a new website. We rewrite all the content. We do all the search engine optimization. We do their Google business and Google my business profile or Google. They change the name all the time. I don't know what it's called now, but basically when someone searches personal injury lawyer, we make it so that they show up. Right. Then we also do their pay perclick advertising. We do their Facebook advertising and we do remarketing and retargeting and all stuff. And then we also do coaching.

Andrew Stickel: (18:51)

So I do, I have a weekly coaching call that I do every Wednesday where I'm teaching, you know, I'm teaching the marketing side of it. And then my partner does a call on Thursday. He does basically the business strategy, you know, how to hire, how to handle, you know, all that type of stuff, you know? So it's the full package. But at the end of the day, that's what we're, we're essentially making their phone. Now, how many employees do you have? Uh, we're 35 right now. 35 W2 plus we've got probably another 40 overseas.

Dan Henry: (19:17)

I'm not okay. I'm not, I'm just, I'm not gonna, I can hear Brandon. I that makes me just makes my skin crawl, 32 employees. Oh, I just cause you know, man, it's hard to manage employees. It's a hard thing. You know, I, personally went so deep into like selling information and teaching people that, you know, cuz I've had the million dollar month and sometimes they're hard to maintain you know, because you do go up and down. You definitely go up and down. Yeah. but you know, I've always maintained a handful of staff. I'm completely removed from the business and it's I think it's, but here's the caveat, right? Because here's the thing like I do have a lot of people that ask me that to say, Dan, how do you produce that much revenue?

Dan Henry: (20:08)

You're basically not involved. You have a handful of employees, and everybody else, cuz this is what I see. I see a lot of people out there doing other things. Like they're they got like a boiler room where they're like calling leads, you know they'll and they'll make these massive marketing systems where they're selling tons of different products. And then they're calling everybody to make pretty much the same revenue where we're just like, now we just sell one thing, one coaching program. Here you go. Boom. And you just watch a video and if you wanna book a call, you book simple. Right. But at the same time, there's a caveat to that because your company is sellable you know, your company is acquirable. When you're the personal brand, even if you're not involved, even if you're not doing the coaching anymore and you have a team, it's difficult to sell that company.You know, if you own an e-com company, we, I mean,

Andrew Stickel: (20:59)

Nobody knows who the owner is.

Dan Henry: (21:02)

Nobody knows who the owner is and when you sell it, you get this insane multiple, right? Or supplement company you get this insane multiple. So that's why I've always viewed a coaching company as like, Hey, I'm gonna make a bunch of cash. I'm not gonna be able to sell it, but my life's gonna be super simple and I'm gonna be able to invest that into something else. That's how I've always lived it. But what you're doing, I think, I think it's awesome that you're doing this much revenue from done for you because dude, if you ever wanted to sell that, you can sell done for you. I mean that's like,

Andrew Stickel: (21:29)

Yeah. And that's, and that's why we're, that's why we pivoted. Cause this isn't how I've always done it. I started as the, basically the flat fee, you know, we're gonna do this coaching program. It's $25,000, just wire us the money. And then we do the work and we do the coaching, but we never have anything else to sell them. And then I started looking at it, like you said, I was at this point where we got so big, I mean, you know, look 4 million, isn't that big in the grand scheme of some businesses. But for me at the size I was at it, wasn't worth it for me to continue pushing harder, to get to 5 million or 6 million because of the added, like I was having to do so much work and actually running the business rather than doing the stuff that I wanna do, which is the marketing and the creative stuff and the offers and presentations and everything. And I was finding that all day long, I was doing the CEO stuff.

Dan Henry: (22:17)

You still wanna do that though?

Andrew Stickel: (22:18)

Yeah. I love doing that.

Dan Henry: (22:19)

See, I don't wanna do anything. I just wanna sit in my condo and read philosophy books and

Andrew Stickel: (22:24)

I mean, I like, you know what it is though? I like reading, I like marketing and then I'll read something and I'm like, oh man. That's like I've been, you know, cuz I've been getting into Dan Kennedy stuff, like Dan Kennedy and J Abraham stuff. Like crazy lately.

Dan Henry: (22:37)

I thought about doing the day with him, where you go out.

Andrew Stickel: (22:40)

Is he still doing that?

Dan Henry: (22:41)

He is. And I think I'm gonna do it.

Andrew Stickel: (22:44)

Is he doing, I didn't know he was doing that.

Dan Henry: (22:45)

Yeah, he's doing it. I think it's like 18 grand. And you spend like six hours.

Andrew Stickel: (22:49)

18 grand?

Dan Henry: (22:50)

Yeah. I don't care.

Andrew Stickel: (22:50)

I mean, no I'm saying that's nothing.

Dan Henry: (22:52)

Oh I know. Yeah, no.

Andrew Stickel: (22:53)

I would do that in a second.

Dan Henry: (22:54)

Yeah. It's like 18 grand and you spend like six hours with him.

Andrew Stickel: (22:58)

Damn, dude. I didn't even know that.

Dan Henry: (22:58)

And he probably just tells you how stupid you are.

Andrew Stickel: (23:00)

Probably. Yeah.

Dan Henry: (23:01)

But that's fine. We need that. Like, so then some

Andrew Stickel: (23:04)

I don't know what we were talking about. I'm blown away. Cause I'm gonna do that. Yeah.

Dan Henry: (23:07)

Yeah. I was actually hanging out with Jason Capital in Puerto Rico. We were at the gym and he was telling me about, he did the castle day with Dan Pena or whatever. And

Andrew Stickel: (23:18)

He just yells at you in a castle. Is that what it is?

Dan Henry: (23:20)

Well, I don't, you know who Dan Pena is, right? Like you see his stuff and you're like, this guy's insane. Right. and he's just like so insulting and all that. But like everybody that I know that's gone and done, whatever the day is with him, they come back and they make like a billion dollars or something like, and I'm like, all right, something's going on at that castle?

Andrew Stickel: (23:41)

There's something to be said about going somewhere and having somebody, having an outside fresh set of eyes look at your stuff. Like, look, I, you and I like you remember the pivotal point in my business is when you had me switch from low ticket to high ticket. You remember what happened?

Dan Henry: (23:56)

You were the first person that I actually, cuz that that's like a big thing. Like people don't charge enough. And I was trying to like, cuz I started charging more and it was working out really well. And I was trying to take all the clients, you included, and I was like, you guys need to raise your prices. You were one of the first that actually listened to me.

Andrew Stickel: (24:16)

Yeah. But, but see that's the thing is that if you notice there's a theme here is that I always listen to you.

Dan Henry: (24:21)

I know you did. Here's the funny part. Right? Here's the, and I'm not, this is gonna make me sound so pretentious but you literally did every single thing I ever said and you grew the fastest of anyone. You know? And then like people started going, oh, maybe there's a thing there. And don't get me wrong. People have paid me a lot of money and I'm not saying I know everything. I'm not saying I'm always right, cause I'm not, but I've been doing this so long and I've heard so many, I've been on so many coaching calls cuz I, I know I removed myself from the business, but I was more involved for longer than most people. You know, most of people that have those similar businesses that are up there, you know, they get out way sooner. And I didn't, I stayed in for a while.

Dan Henry: (25:03)

So I just had that opportunity to speak with so many people so many times that I was just like, I haven't heard anything new in a long time. Like you give me a problem. And then I teach my staff. I'm like, all right. If somebody gives you this problem, this is what you tell 'em because it's not that their unique. People think that. They think, oh I have this unique problem and I need unique help. No, you don't. You don't have a unique problems. No, you don't. It's the same problem that a thousand other people have. And you're making the same mistake that a thousand other people have and that's that, and that's just the reality of it. And that's, that's not my opinion. That's just what I've seen because we've have thousands and thousands and thousands of clients and you, you know, well, even,

Andrew Stickel: (25:40)

Even deeper than that though, I mean like marketing is marketing. Like have you ever read, A Customer Is Born, oh wait, A Customer Is Born Every Second, it's by Joe Vitale. But it's about, PT Barnham have you ever read that book?

Dan Henry: (25:52)

No, but now it's on my list.

Andrew Stickel: (25:52)

It's amazing and what's cool about that. Cuz PT Barnham lived like, I don't know. He ran that museum back in like the 1840s. Right. And what it is is the entire book is talking about the factors that led to his success. They call them like the rings of, it was like rings of greatness or something. I can't remember what it was called. It's the same crap that we do today. It's exactly the same. You know what I mean? The only difference is is that it's like the strategy versus the tactic.

Andrew Stickel: (26:17)

The strategy is exactly the same, you know, give more value show what the benefit is to them. I mean, it's all the same, you know? And the difference is, is that now we use Facebook ads and Instagram and back then he used like the news paper in like the town crier or whatever it is, you know what I mean? Like, but using scarcity, using urgency, using like he had that thing where it was like the mermaid. Have you ever heard about the mermaid that he had on display at his museum? He had this like Ripley's, Believe It Or Not museum. That's how actually how he got so rich and it was just all curiosity. That's all it was, was just triggering curiosity in people. And that's the same crap we do today, you know? So that's the thing is that not even have you seen it thousands, thousands of times, but it hasn't changed for 200 years, you know? Like marketing is marketing, you know? And, can't remember where I was going with that. I had something else to say about that, but go ahead.

Dan Henry: (27:05)

Well, let me ask a question. So you went, so a million dollars a year, then you get to 4 million a year. And then, you're at 13 now, but you, because million a month but you mentioned earlier that you expected 24. So what, where are we, how are we getting from 13 to 24?

Andrew Stickel: (27:23)

Well, okay. So basically what happened in that period where we went from 4 million to, you know, we, I'm actually, my current company is merging with another company. So my company does, did 4 million last year. This other company we're merging with did 4.8 million last year. So last year I also joined Myron Golden's mastermind, who you're also in, Myron's awesome. And Myron teaches how to have a million dollar day and how to make money from live events. Right. So I did a live event in, when was it? It was May and we made $1,041,000 on that live event. It was. And by live, I mean,

Dan Henry: (28:01)

You beat me by 11,000.

Andrew Stickel: (28:02)

Yeah, I know.

Dan Henry: (28:02)

But I did. What did I do? $1,034,000?

Andrew Stickel: (28:07)

The student becomes, the student becomes the teacher.

Dan Henry: (28:09)

It was, I didn't have to sell done for you.

Andrew Stickel: (28:11)

That's true. That's true. Yeah, that's a good point. But, so then what happened was, and the, my partner now, we've been working together for a year now cuz he's also in the legal industry and he has like complementary services to me. So like I do websites, SEO, Facebook ads. He does Pay Per Click advertising on Google. So it's, we're not competing with that. And then also I teach more of the marketing strategies and like creativity stuff and he teaches more like how to handle how to hire people, how to acquire other law firms. Like all it's like left brain, right brain type of stuff. You know what I mean? Where I'm bringing the creative side and he's bringing more of the structure and all that type of stuff and actually the logistics and everything.

Andrew Stickel: (28:49)

So it's a really good team. So we've been friends for a while. We worked together, we've had a lot of success together, like, and it was all on a handshake deal. Right, so, but we've been trying to figure out how do we work together? And I had this problem where I just didn't wanna be the CEO anymore. Cause my company was getting to the point, which I think you would experienced also at some point where it was getting so big that I had to be the CEO more than I could be the marketing person and I couldn't be creative. Right. I couldn't do what I actually wanted to do and I couldn't do what I was actually good at. So what happened was we teamed up and we decided, okay, we're gonna merge our companies. We finally figured out, came together on the terms and all that stuff. We did one of event in November. And on that event we did, we made over $2 million in annual reoccurring revenue. And then we did another event in December. We had Jordan Belfort on there. I know you're on his podcast. We had Damon John from Shark Tank on there and we did over 2 million and added reoccurring revenue. So we basically added another company worth of revenue just from these two events. So our plan this year,

Dan Henry: (29:49)

When you say 2 million in recurring revenue, you mean yearly or monthly?

Andrew Stickel: (29:53)

Yearly. Yeah. Annual. Yeah. Yeah. So when you look at what our companies were doing, it was 4 million plus 4.8. So that's 8.8. Plus we added another 4 million, you know, or yeah. Plus another 2 million, another 2 million.

Dan Henry: (30:05)

And what was the service? Just your normal agency stuff.

Andrew Stickel: (30:06)

Yeah. It is done for you website, SEO pay per click, Facebook ads, plus his coaching and my coaching. So it's a $72,000 a year service that we, that we're selling. Which is, and you know what's funny is it's easier to sell. The one thing I've learned, every time you raise the price, the easier it gets to sell. It's crazy.

Dan Henry: (30:27)

Dude, do you know how insanely difficult it is for people to wrap their brain around that?

Andrew Stickel: (30:30)

Yeah, it's nuts. And the margin for error is so much less.

Dan Henry: (30:35)

It is, you know, because you're taking, that's the thing is people say, oh, well, I can't figure out how my stuff can be worth that much or whatever. It's like, but think about this, right? If you just sold somebody a video, if you got somebody a video and you said, do this thing. But if you said, Hey, we'll do it for you. Or, Hey, we'll walk you through it or, Hey, you can talk to us once or twice or three times a week or whatever. Now it, it's not that you're necessarily changing what you sell, but you're changing the probability that they'll be successful. And I always say, you know, if you took 10 of your clients, your ideal clients and they're on a beach and they come across a genie lamp and they rub the genie lamp, the genie pops out and the genie is a capitalist. And he's like, listen, I'm only giving away one wish today, and I'm only giving it to one of you and I'm gonna start a bidding war. Right. Everybody bids on the most, they would pay to get that wish. What, and that wish is the solution that your company solves. What would the highest bid be? People always come up with the number that's far more.

Andrew Stickel: (31:40)

That's a really good analogy, I like that.

Dan Henry: (31:42)

Thank you. That's far more than what they charge. Now you say, so number one, that shows you that they're not charging enough because if you don't believe in yourself and if, and like, how can you expect your customer to think you're worth this, if you don't think you're worth it, right? But at the same time, what is the difference? The difference is certainty. The genie is a genie, so you're, they can solve your problem. Yeah. So think about this. The more certain a client is that you can solve their problem. The more they're willing to pay, you don't have to add a bunch of crazy stuff, or you don't have to like, do more. You just have to change things to where they're more certain that they'll get the result and they'll pay more.

Andrew Stickel: (32:23)

Exactly. It's like, I have this analogy and I don't know where I heard this from, but it's like, so you take a stack of $10,000, right. A hundred dollars bills in a stack of $10,000, and you put it inside of a paper bag and you say to someone, how much would you pay for this bag? Right. And they'd be like, I don't know. You know, and then you take it out and you put it in a Ziploc bag. Say, how much would you pay for this bag? You know what I mean? It's, it's, it's the same thing. It's allowing them to see the actual value. Like what Myron says that, wealth create, wealth is the wealth is the result of value, value, clearly conveyed. You know what I mean? When you actually can show how much your stuff is worth, you know?

Andrew Stickel: (32:58)

And that's a big part of it. I think another really big thing that helps guys like you and I is that we actually give so much away for free that we, you know, it's definitely easier when you do the work and you actually create content and you, I, my favorite quote from Frank Kern is prove you can help people by actually helping them, you know, just create all that good will. And then you become part of the offer. You say, oh yeah, not only that, but you get to talk to me three times a week or not three times a week. It'd be insane. You get to talk to me, you know, once a week or once a month or whatever it is. And that makes that offer so much more valuable also, you know, it's just, and that's something, I think that's something that's, that's so valuable that people miss is that everybody has a camera in their pocket and just upload videos to YouTube.

Andrew Stickel: (33:42)

And that makes your offer 10 times more valuable. And it also makes you able to charge more and not even think about it. You know, it's just, there's so many, there's so many little nuances to it. But back to the price, you know, I've tried selling stuff at $6 at $49 at $1,997, at $24.95. And every single time I raise the price, it's easier to sell and you get better buyers at that price. That's the that's really actually, even if it was the same difficulty to sell, I'll take the buyers that pay a higher price anyway, cuz you know, it's just so much easier you did that. Raise Your Prices Challenge. And you know, it's so much easier to sell high ticket than it is to sell low ticket, you know?

Dan Henry: (34:24)

Yeah. And, and it is harder to convince somebody that they can raise their prices than for them to actually raise them and actually get, again, it is, I mean, and everybody thinks that, oh nope, I'm special. That won't work for me. I have a client, it's my favorite client to mention, his name is Vaughn. He charges, I believe it's $6,000 for his offer and he's, you know, super happy. I mean, he told me one time, he's like, I just sit around and drink Hennessy and smoke cigars and I make tons of money and they, you know, this is insane. He used to charge like, I think like $47 or something. You know what he sells? How to play authentic gospel piano. And he charges $6,000. Right. And, and the thing is, is like, if you said to me like I'm a guitar player, right. Now you can sit here all day long and create limiting beliefs and say, well, you musicians are broke, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. They're broke because they spend money on music. Okay.

Andrew Stickel: (35:24)

They're broke, but they got a Mesa Boogie Amplifier and yeah. A $3,000 Less Paul.

Dan Henry: (35:29)

Exactly. Now if I sat down and I said to myself, I want to be like an amazing guitar player. I wanna be able to play guitar like Joe Satriani or whatever. Right. And you said, okay, you're gonna pay $9 a month for this app. And you're gonna log into this app and it's gonna teach you to play guitar, or you're gonna pay three or four or even $5,000 for this program here. And this program that you're gonna go through, that you're gonna to people, whatever, this has actually produced this many people or that have done this or like, and I was certain that I would get to become in a certain amount of time, that high level guitar player, even if that didn't make me any money, even if I just knew that any point I could pick up a guitar and be like a God yeah. On guitar, I would rather pay the 5,000 and know I'd get the result than pay the $9 for something that I don't have any idea if I'm gonna get the result. And I'll probably never log into anyway.

Andrew Stickel: (36:27)

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Have you, have you read Alex Hormozis new book? Oh, it's so good. But he's got a formula in there that breaks down the value of an offer better than anything I've ever heard before. So, it's okay. So basically you have to picture an equation. So it's dream outcome times the pro or the, the prob probably yeah. Probability of achievement, right. Divided by time, delay, time, the effort and sacrifice that actually that you need to achieve it and that's value. Right. So I don't know if that's, I dunno if that's clear or not, how I just explained that it might be kind of confusing.

Dan Henry: (37:02)

I remember it in the book, I gotta go back and

Andrew Stickel: (37:04)

It's basically this four factors that determine what you can charge it's what is the dream outcome? So first of all, is it a, like, if you're doing dating, right. Are you trying to find someone their soulmate or are you just trying to get 'em a date? Right. And then the prob the, the likelihood of actually achieving the dream outcome. So do you have five? You know, you say, I'm gonna find you, your soulmate, you're gonna get married. You're gonna have all these kids. You're gonna be so happy. And not only that I've got all the social proof where I've done this 5,000 times for people,

Dan Henry: (37:31)

Or imagine if you said, like, let's just say you got, you're working with guys that, that wanna that they really, really suck at talking with of it. Like they, they just melt down, right. or whatever. And you say, all right, let's say it costs 10. Let's say it costs $10,000. But you're gonna come to an event. Maybe there's an event once every six months or once every three months, or maybe it's just one event, right? Like, like, you'll say maybe you get a course, you get some coaching, whatever. Or even if it's just a three day event or a five day event, I mean, you could charge 10 grand, three to five day event. It doesn't have to be a course, you know, and you go there and you learn all this stuff and they take you out to restaurants, the bars.

Dan Henry: (38:06)

And they work with you. Right. And they say, all right, you're gonna go up and talk to that girl. And then you, and they work, dude, you're gonna get, you're gonna come outta that experience literally a thousand times more likely to be able to talk to women and, and whatever. Then if you bought a course for a thousand dollars or 500 bucks and went through the videos, like, so the thing is, is like, how do you increase the likelihood that they're gonna succeed and to bring it back to done for you? Because that's, I mean, if you're doing it for 'em that's. Yeah. That's like, so, so let me ask you this, when you, when you work with a, a lawyer, right. Cause I, I wanna pick your brain on some best practices for done for you, since we're not just talking about coaching what's the average client pay you per year?

Andrew Stickel: (38:54)

So it used to be $42,000. Now we've gotten up to $72,000. All right.

Dan Henry: (38:59)

So $72,000

Andrew Stickel: (39:01)

Company wide, our average monthly, our average client pays us $3,100 a month average.

Dan Henry: (39:05)

Okay. So $3,100 a month. Right? So for something that's what are some of the things you've learned? Cause my biggest thing with done for you is that there's you could say, oh, well you're gonna pay me X and I'm gonna do this job and that's it. Right? Well what a lot of people forget is there's a lot of other stuff that goes into that. Like is the client happy, communicating with the client? The client not getting you the materials that you need to actually fulfill. There's all these like little logistic things that pop in that make it so much more difficult than just, oh, I'm gonna sell you this thing. Right. Whereas with coaching or information based products, none of that exists they log in, they attend the coaching calls. They watch the videos.

Andrew Stickel: (39:49)

It's on them. It's that's that's it's the thing. Yeah.

Dan Henry: (39:50)

Right. So what are some things that you've learned from creating a, not just a successful done for you and how to sell it, but like how to actually manage that so that you're not pulling your hair out?

Andrew Stickel: (40:07)

Well, the most important thing to remember is that they're paying you for a result. They're not paying you. And I have to, you know, I have to talk to my staff about this and my staff is fantastic. Right. But this was something that, you know, it, it really took a little while to get this through, through to them, is that they're not paying us to build them a website. They're not paying us to do their SEO or run pay per click ads or anything. That's not what they're paying us for. They're paying us to bring them clients they're paying us so that they will get clients right at the end of the day. So we can do a great job. We can build the best web upside out there and we can do the best SEO and all that type of stuff. But they're still not getting clients for some reason.

Andrew Stickel: (40:42)

Then ultimately they're going to blame us and we're gonna get fired. Right. So the biggest thing that I've learned is that the more ownership that you can take over the entire process from a to Z of them getting clients, you know, so we can bring them the lead, right? Like up to, up to us getting, getting them the lead, you know, we deliver the lead to them either. You know, we make it so that someone finds them in Google and then picks up the phone and calls them. But then after that it was cut off. It was basically like, well, okay, you're on your own. And hopefully you get clients, you know? So what we figured out is that one of the most important things is figuring out how do we take matters into our own own hands where it's kind of like after the lead calls, how can we make sure it's getting handled?

Andrew Stickel: (41:24)

So that's why we give them like free sales training. So I've done a ton of sales training. A lot of stuff I learned from you actually, and I apply it to law firms. So I give them sales training. We give them access to our funding resources. We tell them even the correct way to use PayPal funding or PayPal. What's called PayPal credit. You know, we teach 'em different things about that. So they can actually, so that if clients don't say they don't have money, now we can solve that problem. We can help them make it more likely they're gonna get a client. So the biggest thing that I've learned is every single step that you can take out of the client's hands, makes it more likely that you're going to retain the client. Because the reality is that when you're looking at valuation of a business, if you have a lot of done for your clients, but your churn rate is massive.

Andrew Stickel: (42:05)

Like every year you lose all your clients, then your company's not worth anything. Where it's worth money is where you keep clients year after year after year. Right? And the only way you're gonna keep clients is if you're actually getting them results. So our average client sticks with us for 3.9 years. And that includes people that have not been with us for 3.9 years. Right? So we've got clients like the very first client that ever hired us. He hired us in 2012, he's still a client, you know, so that's almost 10 years. So you know, our clients stick with us because we really focus on understanding that they need to get the result. And then what I've realized is that the more work that we put, the more we work, we can take off of them and put on us that's when they get the better results.

Andrew Stickel: (42:47)

So I've also done, done with you programs. And that was, that was a, a coaching program that I did for a long time. And what it as was we sold them the coaching program. And initially it's actually the thing that you helped me raise the price on. I did it for $5,000 and they got a weekly coaching call with me. And then they also got access to the course. But the biggest objection we always had in our sales call is this sounds great. I just don't wanna set it all up. It sounds it's a lot of work to set up. So I was like, okay, well we'll charge 'em an extra 10 grand, we'll charge $15,000. And then we eventually went to 25,000. And we'll just set it up for them. Right. But the problem was what happened was they looked at it as a done for you program.

Andrew Stickel: (43:26)

They didn't look at it as they done with you. So what they stopped doing is they stopped coming in the coaching calls. They stopped going through the course, and then we turned it over to them and it's like, we built them this Lamborgini, but they don't know how to drive a car. You know what I mean? So, and then they're mad at us and then, you know, they're mad at us and they're leaving us bad feedback because they didn't get the result. Right. So once again, that's what I'm saying. When you have so many, when you can do everything, you can to take it out of their hands and put it on your shoulders. That's when you get the better results, because look at the end of the day and we got some fantastic results, but at the end of the day, there's a human nature where people want to put in the least amount of effort possible.

Andrew Stickel: (44:03)

Not everyone, some people do, right. And they also wanna blame everyone but themselves. So it's like going to the gym and hiring a personal trainer and eating like crap and only attending a quarter of your workouts and being mad at the personal trainer that you don't have a six pack. It's, it's insane to me anyway, but some people don't see it that way. You know? So that's the biggest thing that I've learned is that if you're doing a done for you service, the, the most valuable thing you can do is keep the clients renewing year after year after year. And the only way you can do that is to remember that they only hired you for one thing, that's to get a result, right? They didn't hire for your website or whatever. So the way that you're more likely to get a result is the more that you take on the more ownership that you take, even if it's not your problem, you know what I mean?

Andrew Stickel: (44:47)

Even it's like, oh, the client's just letting their calls go to voicemail. Or, client's not getting me approval on the website, or they're not getting me the assets that I need or whatever. Like, you've gotta figure out a way, like you hire a VA to call them every single day and say, Hey, you got those pictures, Hey, you got that video. You're, you know, like, like make sure it happens, cuz at the end of the day, it's gonna hurt the client, but it's also gonna hurt you cuz they're gonna fire you. You know? And that's the biggest thing with done for you is it's keeping the clients and keeping 'em happy.

Dan Henry: (45:11)

I remember back way early when I used to teach agency owners and I always used to say, don't even ask your clients to get you pictures, just go on their Facebook profiles and pages and just grab 'em. Screw it. Exactly.

Andrew Stickel: (45:25)

You know, exactly. Just do it yourself, you know? And you'll be happier also cuz you won't be pulling your hair out, you know? Yeah.

Dan Henry: (45:30)

So, so the, the, the overall like idea I heard from that is that if you make, if you identify a result, let me see if I can download this into one thing. If you can find people that are reachable, meaning you can mark, you can find them, right. You can identify them and you can, you can find them. And they own a business that has a higher. And so when a lawyer gets a case, it's probably worth a lot of money when a.

Andrew Stickel: (45:56)

Yeah. Millions sometimes. you know?

Dan Henry: (45:58)

Right, exactly. So they can get a high result. Like when you get them a client it's worth a lot. And you can take over pretty much the entire aspect, because if you take over the entire process of them getting clients or of whatever the process is, then you have ultimate control and you don't have to deal with a lot of the logistics of working with them because that's the hardest thing to do is they they're hiring you cuz they don't know what they're doing. so if you have to work with them, you're working with someone that doesn't know what they're doing. It's never a good experience. So if you do all of it, you don't have to deal with that. Is that sort of the overall yeah. Kind of idea?

Andrew Stickel: (46:33)

Absolutely. And also you don't have to deal with egos and stuff because like, so we will not like, like when, like when a client comes in, if they say, oh no, I wanna keep my website and I want my it guy to manage my website. We say, that's cool, but we're not the company for you because inevitably stick to your, stick to your guns. Exactly. Yeah, because we, I, I know ultimately we are not going it the best result because sometimes there's things that we need to do and we need to, you know, there's just, we need control so that we can do the things that we need to do. Right. I understand like websites, you know, we do WordPress and everything and there's PHP, but every website is, is if you go through different websites, it's different language, they're written different ways.

Andrew Stickel: (47:10)

They have different, you know, designers in the backend and everything. So what we need to do is we know that we use, we know how we know like the builders that we use and all that type of stuff. So we just, we have very, very strict things because I understand that every single time we've made this exception, it's burnt us because, and what ends up happening is we don't get the result for the client. So I would rather not take a client's money than take a client's money, knowing that we're basically starting with our hand tied behind our back, you know? And um, the other thing that, that drives me crazy, this might be a controversial opinion, but whenever we work with a marketing manager, from, from a law firm it's and especially one that has like a master's in advertising or,

Dan Henry: (47:55)

You know how, you know how I know that you don't know how to do advertising.

Andrew Stickel: (47:58)

Huh?

Dan Henry: (47:58)

If you have a master's in advertising.

Andrew Stickel: (48:00)

Yeah, exactly. I'm like, you know, cause cause yeah, cause they're like, oh, you gotta focus on branding and all that type of stuff. I'm like, no, just do what I'm saying. Like, I mean like it's like I, and, and I don't have, I mean, I have a, I have a degree in criminal justice, right. So I don't have a marketing degree, but I've spent more than a college worth education. I've spent more than what I, I spent on my college education, working with people like you and like my, and with Myron and like, you know, just all these people who have actually done things in the real world and understand marketing.

Dan Henry: (48:30)

Cause college is not the real world. No, it's not college is this theoretical metaverse of ideas that don't work. Exactly. I mean, unless you're like a lawyer or a doctor that aside when it comes to actual business or things like that, I would say that, you know, college would be the place you would go if you really wanted to be bad at it. You know, because the world has moved on. You gotta think in college and I'll hammer on this for a second. How long does it take to update concepts and to, it takes decades and then it has to get approved. And by the time it's been updated, it's already changed. The world has evolved actual marketers, actual salespeople, actual business owners, actual entrepreneurs. They're evolving the game at a pace that is 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 times what college can keep up with, you know, and the other thing is I hate to say this, but what does a college professor make like 50 grand a year? 80 grand a year?

Andrew Stickel: (49:27)

Maybe a hundred. If it's a good, if it's a prestigious school, maybe 120

Dan Henry: (49:32)

Okay. So you're gonna take business advice from somebody that makes 120 grand a year.

Andrew Stickel: (49:37)

Exactly. Well, number one, don't take advice from broke people.

Dan Henry: (49:41)

Right. Don't take advice. College professors and your parents. Okay. Top two. You know.

Andrew Stickel: (49:47)

Let me ask you this. What are you gonna tell your son about college? If he, if he says, I wanna go to college? What, cuz people ask me this all the time. And I've got my own opinion on this, but what are you gonna tell him?

Dan Henry: (49:57)

So I'm gonna tell him the same thing. I would tell anybody, what is your goal? What, what is the output? What is the end result? If you say to me, if he says to me, well, I want to save people's lives by being a brain surgeon, I'll be like, all right, what college you wanna go to? I'll write a check. But if he says, I want to be an entrepreneur, or if he says, I, whatever, if he says, I wanna be an entrepreneur, I'll say son, listen, the last place you

Andrew Stickel: (50:20)

Take that money and start a business.

Dan Henry: (50:22)

The last place you need to be is college. Right. Cause here's the other thing. And I don't wanna say this. I do wanna say this, but I don't wanna say this, but college or just at least the American educational system has turned into really an indoctrination process to turn, to spread these radical ideas and turn people into turn society into something that it really shouldn't be. You know, like some of the stuff, not all the stuff, but some of the stuff they teach in college and just in school is so radical. It's so insane. And it's getting more insane that I just don't want my kid to be a part of it. You know, like my kid does not need that type of toxic stuff. Like there again, I'm not saying everything, but dude, I've seen some stuff that is just absolutely insane.

Dan Henry: (51:11)

What they're teaching. And the thing is, you know, the world moves on from, from traditional education. You know, it has, I mean, look, look at all the people who have created programs and, and the things for, for people that teaches 'em how to do something, because they've actually done it. They didn't learn. My father said he, my father was in broadcasting for 30 years. He's won like seven Adi awards. He's helped break, The Alman brothers records. He, you know, he's, he's really like, has a lot of accolades in broadcasting and I'll never forget what he said to me. He said, when I got outta college, he went to school for broadcasting. He said, when I got outta college and I started working in broadcasting, I learned one thing. And that is it. I didn't learn anything in college. Right. Everything I learned about broadcasting, I learned in broadcasting and I said, well, did you learn anything like that helped you? He's like, not really.

Andrew Stickel: (52:06)

Well, you know, it's funny. So I graduated cause that was originally gonna be a lawyer. And it's completely coincidental that I actually work with lawyers right now. Like one thing has nothing to, I mean, gimme a lawyer, you gotta go to college. Yeah. It was gonna be a lawyer. But, so what's funny is that I graduated from law school or no graduated law. I graduated from UCF and I my first job, what do you think my first job was?

Dan Henry: (52:25)

You?

Andrew Stickel: (52:25)

Yeah.

Dan Henry: (52:25)

Ah,

Andrew Stickel: (52:27)

Immediately outtacollege for the first like eight months.

Dan Henry: (52:31)

Wow. Okay. Now, now I feel like pressured to get this right.

Andrew Stickel: (52:34)

Alright. I'll just tell you.

Dan Henry: (52:35)

You were, you were a, you were a Salesperson.

Andrew Stickel: (52:40)

I was a line cook cuz I couldn't find a job.

Dan Henry: (52:44)

See, I was gonna go for that. But I thought that was too obvious.

Andrew Stickel: (52:44)

I know. I couldn't find a job. And you know how I found a job is that it's funny cuz like, even back then, I didn't realize what I, I was, I was, I've been a go getter my entire life. One day I got sick of it. So I was trying to find a job at a law firm. So I printed out a stack of resumes and I got in my car and I put on a freaking suit and tie and everything. And I went into every single law firm. I was like, Hey, I'm trying to find a job. Here's my resume. Here's my, and that's how I got a job. You know what I mean? And mean that's something that very few people would even do, but that's how I got my first job working at a private law firm.

Andrew Stickel: (53:16)

And you know, I worked, I worked at the us attorney's office. I worked at the private law firm. I got fired from every job that I had because I'm a terrible employee, but that also taught me that I didn't want to go to law school. And that's actually a very, very valuable lesson that I'm gonna tell my kids is that, look, if you wanna be a doctor, if you wanna be a lawyer, if you wanna be like an accountant or something or like a CPA, you have to have, you have to have the degree. Right. But go work in the field that you think you're gonna go into instead of, you know, investing $250,000, uh, you know, getting, coming out in debt, coming out in debt 250 K or whatever it is. And, probably not even enjoying what you're doing, you know, and the thing is is that nowadays, like I do not need a degree for anything that I do right now. I spend a lot of money on coaches and everything like that. But I'm actually learning from people that are actually doing the things, you know, but

Dan Henry: (54:05)

Let's think about that. Like you got in my mastermind years ago

Andrew Stickel: (54:10)

When it was, this is when it

Dan Henry: (54:11)

It was only like 30 grand or something.

Andrew Stickel: (54:13)

It was 30 grand. And not only that, so per year, yeah. The 30 grand was, was whatever. But the best part is it was in your living room with, it was like the original one was, it was Gina Arnie Giske, and like JR Rivas and it was the, like the four of us that was it. And like, I mean that, those were the good old days where like you would just basically like yell at us until our, you were basically gave us the, the Dan Kennedy treatment where, you know, we go home with our tails behind, between our legs and then go and make a million dollars, you know.

Dan Henry: (54:45)

So, you know, what's funny is, is that always worked.You know, and,

Andrew Stickel: (54:49)

Oh, it's fantastic. I would, if you offered something like that again, like that's, it was, it was awesome. Those are, those are my favorite.

Dan Henry: (54:55)

I thought about doing this. Remember when I used to shoot people with the Nerf guns and stuff like if you had a stupid idea during the event. I, you know, and then I got all because the whole world changed. Everybody got all sensitive, everybody got all like, oh my God. Yeah, dude. Like it got so sensitive that like religions started changing their views on things that for thousands of years they didn't change it. I was like, you guys are that scared? You know, and I just, that's why I don't, I don't know I'm out. Like I don't need, I don't need is crap no more like, you know, but, if I ever do it again, man, I probably would just be super blunt. Cause I can't world is just too sensitive these days.

Andrew Stickel: (55:40)

Yeah. But you know what the thing is is that at the end of the day we got results, you know what I mean? Like that's, that's the thing is that like, I think that what you miss out, when, when, when you're censoring things, like when you're censoring yourself, then you can't say what you really think. And sometimes you just need to say, stop being an idiot and do this thing. You know, where instead you have to say, well, that's a really good idea, but maybe, and maybe that's not you anyway. But like, No, but I'm saying, but if you're censoring yourself or if you're even changing the approach, like, I, I don't know. I mean, it's like...

Dan Henry: (56:09)

Do you remember the time, do you remember the time? I forget who it was, but they had this really good, like their business was doing great, everything was great. Andthey said, Hey Dan, I'm thinking about doing something else instead. I'm like, why, what, what are you talking about? And they're like, well, and they gave me this idea and it was this horrible, horrible idea. I was like, here's what I'd like you to do. I'd like you to take that idea. I'd like you to take it out back. No, no. But I said, I'd like you to take it out back and I'd like you to ask it, like, what's its favorite meal. Like what, what is it like to what it favorite meal? And then I want you to prepare meal. I want to do a really good job, you know, really making, I want you to serve that meal to this idea.

Dan Henry: (56:47)

Let them enjoy it. And then I want you to shoot it in the head. Okay. Execute it right there in your backyard. And, and the guy was like , but I was like, I tell you this, not to shock. I do tell it to you to shock you. Because I would rather, you leave you're and, and need like trauma therapy, then go and do that idea. And then your mortgage company calls you and says, we have to possess your house cuz you did this stupid idea and you're broke. Yeah. You know, to me that's, you know, so I,

Andrew Stickel: (57:18)

I think at that point that's when you're actually being a coach and like, it's not always telling everybody what they want to hear.

Dan Henry: (57:23)

Oh, not anymore. Not anymore. You gotta sugarcoat everything. Everything's all. All, you know, vanilla.

Andrew Stickel: (57:28)

Well, you know, what's funny is that I got that. I mean, I don't know that I ever got that. I don't know. I don't know that I ever came up with ideas that bad. Cuz I stayed. I stayed pretty focused.

Dan Henry: (57:36)

But no, you didn't come up that, but you did. You stayed focused. Yeah. You didn't get, never had to really yell at you.

Andrew Stickel: (57:41)

I definitely came well, no, no, no. I definitely got distracted. My problem was I would get distracted with stupid things that I shouldn't be doing. You know what I mean? Like yeah. I mean, well,

Dan Henry: (57:49)

Oh hey, how did the one thing go that? Can we talk about that?

Andrew Stickel: (57:52)

The pills?

Dan Henry: (57:53)

Yeah.

Andrew Stickel: (57:53)

What are you talking about, oh yeah, no, that's great. We sold. Yeah.

Dan Henry: (57:56)

The, so you, hold on, dude. So you had, you started this company for wasn't it like hemorrhoids pills?

Andrew Stickel: (58:04)

So a buddy of mine called me and he's like, I've been friends with the guy for like 15 years. He's like, there's something you don't know about me. I've had hemorrhoids for the last 15 years and I finally got over 'em I'm like, okay, congratulations, mazel tov. You know? And he's like, he's like, the way I did is I invented a cure for hemorrhoids and I was like, what? So I, he's like, he's like, I wanna, I want you to help me sell them. So I started doing some research and I started realize. I, I did some research and I saw that there's nothing out there that cures hemorrhoids. And the market, like, like 70% of people in their lifetime will get hemorrhoids 50% over the age of 50 have them like women who've had abs have them like it's nuts. Right? Wow. So I was like, this is an insane market.

Dan Henry: (58:49)

Never had a hemorrhoid, it doesn't sound pleasant

Andrew Stickel: (58:51)

Luckily I haven't either. But it's funny because we actually have some celebrities that have ordered our stuff. I can't say who it is, but like we look at, I look at the thing I'm like interesting that's who has hemorrhoids.

Dan Henry: (59:01)

Oh my gosh, dude.

Andrew Stickel: (59:03)

But, yeah, I can't say who it is, but so he contacts me and he's like, you know, do you wanna help me sell these things? And I was like, and I started looking at it and I was like, this is like an insane opportunity. Like I have to jump on this. So, I was like, before we do this, and here's the funny part, is that everything that you taught me about marketing, and this goes back to the PT Barnum thing, everything you taught me about marketing is literally the exact same strategy that we're using to market hemorrhoid pills. Right. Everything I learned about coaching, I applied to the business and it works, you know, I mean like there's, I mean, there's some nuances that are different. Like, you know, like we have to deal with shipping and fulfillment and all that type of stuff,

Dan Henry: (59:44)

You still doing that?

Andrew Stickel: (59:44)

Yeah. Yeah.

Dan Henry: (59:45)

How's it going?

Andrew Stickel: (59:45)

We did, $300,000 in sales last year and we just got distribution. Hopefully fingers crossed. We're gonna get into Publix soon. Like we were already, we're already in contact with Publix. We're in GNC.

Dan Henry: (59:57)

I'm just gonna, I'm gonna save you here. And just say that you're not claiming that those pills cure hemorrhoids, cuz I, you probably can't say that.

Andrew Stickel: (01:00:05)

Yeah. I'm not claiming that.

Dan Henry: (01:00:05)

We're just chatting that you had a phone call where someone said that.

Andrew Stickel: (01:00:08)

I had a phone call.

Dan Henry: (01:00:10)

A dream.

Andrew Stickel: (01:00:11)

Had a dream where he basically, he had hemorrhoids, he took this concoction. He no longer has hemorrhoids So let's put it that way.

Dan Henry: (01:00:20)

Right. And I know, I know they work, but you know how, God forbid the government let you actually create something that works. They like things that don't work.

Andrew Stickel: (01:00:26)

Well, here's the thing, it's four ingredients. It's 100% natural. You know, so it's, I mean, it's literally just like, like two of the ingredients are from the, an extract from, orange peels, you know? And like, so it's 100% natural and it's insane because like the people that are taking it, like I've my biggest thing that I've been doing is I've been getting video testimon from people. So I'm actually interviewing people and talking specifically about their hemorrhoids and

Dan Henry: (01:00:51)

Must be, Hey, would you like to come on and talk about how you got rid of your ass burn?

Andrew Stickel: (01:00:55)

You know, what's crazy though, is that people are like, we talk in marketing, find the pain point, right? Like people in pain, these people are literally in pain. Like you hear some of these people, like, I can't, I couldn't walk my dogs. I couldn't sit down. I couldn't do, I couldn't work out in the yard or anything like that. You know? And like, like the best success story that we have actually, no, we've so many success stories. One lady she's she's like, I've had, I've had him since my son was born. And like, I've been in extreme pain since my son was born. I'm like, how old was your son? He's 34. He, she took him four days completely gone.

Dan Henry: (01:01:26)

So, you know, I kind of hate you right now because you realize how many emails and comments we're gonna get asking about these pills and where to buy them.

Andrew Stickel: (01:01:35)

Oh yeah. Lots of, lots of friends.

Dan Henry: (01:01:37)

Yeah. Yeah. Like, yeah. Yeah. My, uh, mom.

Andrew Stickel: (01:01:39)

Yeah. My buddy has them. Yeah. But yeah, it's funny. Whenever I tell people about it, they're always like, it's well, you, I learned lots of my friends have hemorrhoids and I also learned that lots of them have friends who have hemorrhoids, who, maybe so. But, it's actually, it's cool because, I mean, there's a massive opportunity. I mean, you can imagine like, like what, something like this could sell once we actually...

Dan Henry: (01:02:02)

Do you do dunny ads, please tell me you do funny ads.

Andrew Stickel: (01:02:04)

Yeah. You've seen our ads. Yeah. Our ads are funny. Yeah.

Dan Henry: (01:02:05)

Yeah. You sent me a couple early on.

Andrew Stickel: (01:02:06)

Well, my buddy he's a standup comedian. So we used to the

Dan Henry: (01:02:10)

One, the one that made the pills?

Andrew Stickel: (01:02:11)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dan Henry: (01:02:12)

Oh, nice.

Andrew Stickel: (01:02:12)

Yeah. Yeah. So he has no problem being on camera. He's like the face of hemorrhoids. Right. So that's like, yeah. So we have like all these like funny videos and everything and, he's creating, you know, all kinds of influencer content and all that type of stuff, all about how to get rid of hemorrhoids, what to eat, what exercise to do all that type of stuff, you know? And, you know, it's the type of thing where we can make a lot of money on it, but it's actually cool. Cause we're actually like literally helping people. Like it's, it's crazy. It's crazy this, the stories I'm hearing from people about how they, they were just debilitated and they get rid of these things and now they're li they have their life back, you know? So it's cool.

Dan Henry: (01:02:45)

Have you got any like, has anybody, like, cuz I, one thing I know about the supplement industry is that as soon as, or really even any drug industry, as soon as you have something that works, everybody, especially the government wants to take that away from you. And stop you from selling it so they can sell something that doesn't work current situation of the world. But, and so, you know, because they want the big pharmaceutical companies who create stuff that, you know,

Andrew Stickel: (01:03:13)

We, we haven't. Is there any wood around here?

Dan Henry: (01:03:16)

Some water right here. Oh yeah. Here, take this one.

Andrew Stickel: (01:03:18)

I'm just not, no. I said wood I'm knocking on wood right now.

Dan Henry: (01:03:21)

Oh, wood. We're knocking that wood. I think this is wood.

Andrew Stickel: (01:03:22)

I'm not extremely superstitious, but I also am superstitious enough to know that I don't wanna not knock on wood. So luckily we haven't had any issues yet. We did hire a, we hired a pharmaceutical law firm to review all of our claims and do all that type of stuff. And that was an absolute nightmare. And you know, all this stuff, but I

Dan Henry: (01:03:41)

They're like, you can't say anything at all that's good.

Andrew Stickel: (01:03:44)

Well, you know. Yeah, exactly. So they're gonna, you know, they're gonna go to the extreme caution side. Right, So we can't make any, I mean, the product is called Hem Healer. Right. And they're like, you can't have healer in the name. Like, so we were like, well, we kinda already have healer in the name. And we've got, we've got 25,000 bottles, so you're not gonna get us on that one, you know, but, you know, but we have all the FDA statements and all that type of stuff, and it's a supplement, you know? So like supplements are kind of their own, their own thing, you know?

Dan Henry: (01:04:08)

How hard was that to like, put that all together and, you know, make it and produce it?

Andrew Stickel: (01:04:12)

Well, so we actually, the first batch we made literally in my partner's kitchen and because I was like, look,

Dan Henry: (01:04:19)

This sounds like some Breaking Bad

Andrew Stickel: (01:04:22)

Kinda. Yeah. He's in Los Angeles. He he's living in skid row. You know,

Dan Henry: (01:04:25)

What is it? Heming...

Andrew Stickel: (01:04:26)

It's called Hem Healer.

Dan Henry: (01:04:28)

No, no, no. The guy from Breaking Bad, the bald guy. What was his name?

Andrew Stickel: (01:04:31)

Oh, Hemingway.

Dan Henry: (01:04:32)

Hemingway.

Andrew Stickel: (01:04:32)

Yeah.

Dan Henry: (01:04:33)

Yeah. Was it Hemingway?

Andrew Stickel: (01:04:34)

No, no. What was it?

Dan Henry: (01:04:35)

I don't know.

Andrew Stickel: (01:04:36)

Was it, he, it was, uh, he Walter Walter White, but it was

Dan Henry: (01:04:40)

No, no, but yeah, Walter White was his real name.

Andrew Stickel: (01:04:42)

Henderson. What was it? It wasn't Henderson. It was what was it? It's gonna drive me crazy now.

Dan Henry: (01:04:45)

The drug dealer's name was what?

Andrew Stickel: (01:04:48)

It was. Um, oh, I know it. I'm drawin a blank. The show was so good.

Dan Henry: (01:04:54)

This is where Brandon should like Google it.

Andrew Stickel: (01:04:57)

Yeah, Google it. Cause it's gonna, it's gonna drive me crazy. No, it's not Hemingway though. Yeah. It's like, this is gonna kill me. Yeah, no. But basically like, cause here's the thing like I wanted, we needed,

Dan Henry: (01:05:07)

What is it?

Brandon: (01:05:09)

Heisenberg.

Andrew Stickel: (01:05:10)

Heisenberg. That's it

Dan Henry: (01:05:12)

Heisenberg. Yeah. Yeah. There's probably so many people watching this and listening to this right now. Like yelling at the...

Dan Henry: (01:05:15)

It's Heisenberg, you idiots!

Andrew Stickel: (01:05:16)

Yeah. So, well, no, but like, you know, it's like every, like it is, it is like everything we're doing, like what's the minimum viable product here. Like, cuz I mean, before I start investing and all this stuff, I wanna see if it actually works. Right. So he put together, he ordered all the ingredients he put together. You can buy like a thing that makes pills for you. And we, we, we put it together and we went on Craigslist and eBay and just started selling bottles for $10. And the reason that we did it for $10 is because we didn't wanna just give 'em away. Cause we knew people wouldn't take 'em seriously if we just gave 'em away. You know what I mean? So basically we went there and we started selling 'em for 10 bucks and it was basically like 10 bucks. And, but the deals, you have to give us a testimony if it works. And one by one we started getting testimonials like crazy. So then I had the confidence, like.

Dan Henry: (01:06:02)

How you gonna add zero to that?

Andrew Stickel: (01:06:03)

What do you mean?

Dan Henry: (01:06:04)

You made 300 grand last year with how you gonna add, how are you gonna make 3 million?

Andrew Stickel: (01:06:06)

So we're adding in a lot more avenues. Like so actually a big part of it is testimonials. So I mean, you know, businesses are built on social proof. That's how my entire business was. So I'm literal really just interviewing people and getting video testimonials. We've got it on Amazon now, which is a whole thing. We've got it on walmart.com.

Dan Henry: (01:06:25)

Don't get me started about Amazon. Oh my God.

Andrew Stickel: (01:06:27)

They're withholding lots and lots of money from us right now because

Dan Henry: (01:06:32)

Dude, Amazon, every time I try to do business with Amazon in any way, shape or form, even in their servers. Okay. It doesn't matter if I'm selling something on Amazon planners. If I'm, if I'm doing an app that requires it, they always seem to screw me. Like it's just...

Andrew Stickel: (01:06:48)

Our return rate on Amazon's 50% less than the industry average. And they're still withholding just like, I mean a massive amount of sales from us and then even tell us they're gonna do it. You so like, so, so

Dan Henry: (01:07:00)

Is most of your money from Amazon or is from patrion?

Andrew Stickel: (01:07:03)

No. We've got a funnel. So we, no, it's all paid. So we do a lot of paid traffic. We do Amazon ads. We're starting a lot of influencer stuff though. So we're actually, we're about to launch a TikTok campaign. So we're doing TikTok stuff. We're gonna start doing TikTok ads. We've got, I mean we're, we're just advertising everywhere. There's no one, there's no one doing it. That's the thing like

Dan Henry: (01:07:23)

I could just see you holding up like some grapes, you know? Yeah and being like, listen, you know,

Andrew Stickel: (01:07:31)

Well, you know, you know what it is, it's that the only other, okay, so you have two options, right? You can get some preparation agent, you can stick your finger out and you can go and spread and then you shove it up your or you can take two pills. What do you, what would you like to do? I mean, that's the application sells itself, you know? Yeah.

Dan Henry: (01:07:48)

That should be an ad.

Andrew Stickel: (01:07:51)

Yeah, exactly. And we did do that. I think you saw that one where it's like, here's the old way. We didn't one ad. It was like, here's the old way to take, hemorrhoid medicine and like, you know, the other difference is, is that,

Dan Henry: (01:08:05)

I wonder how many people with hemorrhoids right now are like this isn't funny.

Andrew Stickel: (01:08:08)

Like it's not, well, look, I never, I'm, I'm fortunate enough that I've never had it

Dan Henry: (01:08:13)

Right. Me too. So now I feel like an, cuz we're like talking about this and well, but here's the

Andrew Stickel: (01:08:18)

I've experience that ive talked to enough people to know how much it sucks. So if somebody has, yeah, right there. Yeah.

Dan Henry: (01:08:24)

I thought my, my

Andrew Stickel: (01:08:25)

Back. Yeah, no it's it is chair. These chairs actually kind of hurt my lower back. Also.

Dan Henry: (01:08:29)

It's the same chairs that Joe Rogan uses. Oh, is it really? Yeah. For his podcast guess. Oh interesting. Yeah, they dude, they're like a thousand dollars a piece. That's ridiculous. Oh really? But it keeps your back straight but like, I think at first you gotta get used to it. So for me it's fine. But for, I guess the guests you have to get, every guest has to get used to it a bit, but you can sit in it like 17 different ways or something like that. One of those shares. Yeah. So, you know, but it's it's, I don't know. It's kind of

Andrew Stickel: (01:08:57)

Cool, but yeah, but, I don't even remember what we were talking about hem pills. Yeah. But, but I mean, the reality is is that, you know, it's something where people are in literal pain and actually helps, you know, and it's um, it's the type of thing I know it's gonna do. Well, we're just at the PA we're at the, we're at the growing phase right now. And I think this year's gonna be a huge year for us just because last year we did that and we really didn't have a lot of social proof. You know, we had, you know, some takes time. Exactly. It just takes time because how many people, you know, I mean, we sold, I think we have 2,500 customers right now. And it's like, how many of them are willing to get on camera or even leave a review talking about it? Cause it's embarrassing. You know what I mean? Nobody talks about it. That's you know, it's,

Dan Henry: (01:09:35)

It is very, it's hard cuz it's yeah, that would, I'm trying to think of all the issues or diseases or whatever you could have and that's gotta be top three. Well,

Andrew Stickel: (01:09:43)

The reality it's embarrassing, but 70% of people are gonna have it in their lifetime. 50% of people

Dan Henry: (01:09:48)

Now, 50, 70%. That's a lot. Well, okay. But here's

Andrew Stickel: (01:09:51)

The thing is that stop

Dan Henry: (01:09:52)

Talking about,

Andrew Stickel: (01:09:53)

I'll tell you what I've learned about it. It's all about your diet, right? Well, it's not all, but a lot of it is controlled by your diet. So you drink, do you drink a gallon of water a day still? Uh, yeah. Sometimes gallon in ham, like, like the instructions are when you're taking hem healer, you're supposed to, you know, you need to eat very well. Stop eating, sugar, stop eating, processed food, eat lots of, you know, vegetables and like, you know, broccoli and stuff with like lots of fiber take walks, um, drink lots of like that alone will help a lot. Just, just even if you don't take Hem, Healer is what it does. Is it reduces inflammation. Cause that's all a, he is, and this is a great, I'm sure your listeners are loving the hemorrhoid talk on this podcast, but that's all it is. It's inflamed, but blood vessel. So if you clean up your diet and you reduce inflammation, then it goes away. It's just, that's just what it is. Right. So, um, you're probably not gonna get it. If you eat clean and you

Dan Henry: (01:10:44)

Drink glass of water. So clean, I do the apple cider vinegar in the morning. Yeah. I drink so funny with the, I, I just, uh, had to do a sample. They give you a jug, you have to pee a jug for a day. Mm-hmm to test your hormones. You know? Cause like I work out, I'm just trying to get my hormones tested. And apparently you're like the jugs, like this big Uhhuh and you're only supposed to fill it up like that much. I did not. It people, dude, I filled the whole thing up. I didn't have anymore room. Cause I drink so much

Andrew Stickel: (01:11:12)

Water, bring an extra one of these also

Dan Henry: (01:11:13)

I take it to the facility or whatever. And the guy's like, you weren't supposed to fill the whole thing up. This is for one day. I'm like, yeah, that's three quarters of a day. He's like, what do you mean? I'm like, that's three quarters of a day. Like I drink a gallon, gallon and a half water a day. And he is like, you, you peed this much in a day. I'm like, I peed this to like eight until four o'clock in that afternoon. Like, and the guy was just, and, and I was, he's like, I'm just shocked. And I'm like, I'm in shocked at how little water you drink. You know,

Andrew Stickel: (01:11:41)

Let me ask you a question. Do you, so, okay. Cause I drink about a gallon of water a day also. And are you like up peeing? Every, every 20 minutes. Like I am like, it's, that's the worst part

Dan Henry: (01:11:50)

About it. So for me kind of, yeah, but for me, I drink ha at least half a gallon is in my workout. Okay. So like when I'm at the gym and I'm drinking, mm-hmm, the, cause I take the gallon with me. Half of it goes in my workout or if I do jujitsu, at least half of it mm-hmm is there, so what happens is you're sweating, so you actually expel a very large portion. I only him a couple times at the gym. Mm-hmm because I'm sweating that out. I

Andrew Stickel: (01:12:17)

Think a couple times at the gym is a lot though.

Dan Henry: (01:12:19)

Well, I'm there for like two hours. Oh yeah, yeah. Okay. Or, and I, and I'm at jujitsu for hour and a half, two hours. Okay. Total. Yeah. Stretching and all that. Um,

Andrew Stickel: (01:12:27)

So that's over a period of several hours. Okay.

Dan Henry: (01:12:29)

Yeah. But, but you sweat most of it out. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, no, I, yes. I, well,

Andrew Stickel: (01:12:33)

So, okay. So what's interesting. I haven't tried this yet, but I'm, I'm interested to try it. So I have, I have a freaking coach for everything in my life. I have a nutrition coach. Right. And basically every morning I have a guy. So every day, whenever I eat, I log it all in this app. And then at eight o'clock in the morning, this guy calls me and he's like, so,  let's talk about this French fries yesterday, you know? And this is like, that's awesome. This is the accountability that I have. And actually, I dunno if you've not, I've lost about probably 40 pounds since the last time you saw me, you do, you look great. And yeah. And it's, it's because of that accountability, cuz I hire coaches for every aspect in my life. Right. But one of the things he said is that he's like, if you drink all that water, do get a sea salt grinder and do a twist of sea salt in your water and you won't have to, you won't have to go as often.

Dan Henry: (01:13:14)

I've heard something about that, but I'm not sure I wanna, I dunno. I was trying, I don't mind peeing but

Andrew Stickel: (01:13:19)

For me it's annoying. Cause I'm always in like in meetings and everything and I gotta go and go,

Dan Henry: (01:13:23)

Yeah, I don't really do meetings. Yeah. I do Voxer. I'm just like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Andrew Stickel: (01:13:27)

And then I let my I'm working on getting outta the meetings, but it hasn't hasn't happened yet.

Dan Henry: (01:13:30)

Yeah. I'm a, I'm a Voxer dude. So I can actually be peeing and vox. There you go.

Andrew Stickel: (01:13:34)

You know, I think I've seen you do that. I actually in the bathroom.

Dan Henry: (01:13:37)

You know, you know, one thing that annoys me though, you mentioned that, like you said, you said you had a coach that comes up. Oh, let's talk about these French fries. The thing that gets me is that people, friends, whatever, you know, I hate the oh one, one will be fine. One will be fine. No it won't. No it won't. Yeah. Okay. Because it's, it's the whole mindset of, oh, just one will be fine cuz oh, if just one is fine today, then it's fine tomorrow then it's fine the next day. And if you have a goal, like if you're not trying to lose weight, if you're not trying to get in shape or not even losing weight, just any other aspect of life. If you're not trying to win a, let's say you're a fighter and you're trying to, or you're you're training for a tournament jujitsu or whatever it is like the thing is is that like the people that get the reward are the people that ne they're the people that don't buy into the one is just for and they have the discipline, you know, I always get annoyed by people that do that. They try to make you feel bad for sticking to your goals. Yeah. And it's like, you shouldn't make me feel bad for sticking my goals because what you're really doing is projecting the fact that you don't have any

Andrew Stickel: (01:14:46)

Discipline. Yeah. You want me to join you in eating these French fries where, you

Dan Henry: (01:14:50)

Know, because you suck, can you want me to suck to well, and so no discipline,

Andrew Stickel: (01:14:54)

And I don't know. I don't know how you are. Like, I'm not. So like I use like, I've done like the keto diet. I've done all these like restric, like, like these insane diets where it's basically like everything's cut out and they never work. So what actually is working for me now is that I do indulge every once in a while, but I don't do it most of the time. You know what I mean? So like, it's like I would, 95% of my meals are good, but like, it's, like you said, just one. I can't have just, if there's a plate of French fries, I can't have just one. I either have to have none or I have to have half the plate. You know what I mean? Like, well that might be

Dan Henry: (01:15:22)

A limiting belief, but for me, I just count the calories. That's the thing, like everybody of these stupid diets, like I remember like, and I've known this for a while, but I remember Alex Hermozi did a video on it. He's like, if, if you get, if you hit your protein and you get X amount of calories, that's it. Like, I remember he was roasting like every diet out there, cuz at the end of the day, if you expend this many calories yeah. And you take in this many calories, calories in calories on that's, it, it doesn't matter what diet you're on. And every, I, I know I'm gonna get heat for this cause every, oh, well, no dude, like it doesn't matter. Like you count the calories at where they need to be. You lose weight or you gain weight.

Dan Henry: (01:16:01)

End of story. Yeah. That's it right? Like, I mean, and that's what I've heard everybody. I mean, you've seen Alex the dude's huge. And he was, he was talking about, um, being at these, these entrepreneurial events where all these entrepreneurs, like I'm on keto and I'm on this and I'm on that and they're all like, they all have dad bods. Right? They're all like, they all look like crap. Yeah. But this dude is like just enormous and ripped and he's eating Twizzlers and stuff. And they're like, what are you doing? He's like, I just count my calories. I can eat Twizzlers today. Cuz it's within my calories. Y'all do your stupid stuff. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And the guys jacked. So I just, I think it's funny how people, overcomplicate things in order to avoid the hard to anyone account calories. Yeah. Well then you know what, maybe you don't deserve to lose weight.

Andrew Stickel: (01:16:45)

Sorry. You know, I think that it's also about sustainability. At least for me it is the sustainability is that like, you know, like every it's like it's like marketing, everything works if you do it, if right. It's just how, how sustainable is it? So,

Dan Henry: (01:16:57)

But see that's the thing is it's not that hard. Like I have somebody that, so when

Andrew Stickel: (01:17:01)

Well, sustaining like keto is hard, like, cause that's well that's

Dan Henry: (01:17:04)

Cuz that's ridiculous. But I mean, I mean

Andrew Stickel: (01:17:06)

I, so I did, I lost all this weight and then I got sick of bacon, you know? It's like, what, how do you get sick? It's like, if you're sick of bacon, then there's a problem.

Dan Henry: (01:17:12)

You know, I'm saying like understanding how many calories is not hard. Like yeah. So what I do is I have meals prepped, right? So I'll have whatever, six ounces of chicken, a cup of rice and, and, and a cup of vegetables. And I'll have that four times, or I'll have that three times a day and two shakes. Mm I, the same thing every day. Yeah. I grab the meal, I put it in the fridge, boom, whatever, if I go out to dinner, then I just, on that one day, I, you know, I kinda look at it. I look at the menu in my head and I calculate in my head. It just doesn't have to be super close, but it's not really that hard.

Andrew Stickel: (01:17:43)

No. And after a while you just start getting a feel for what's, how many calories are in certain things and you can kind of estimate, you know.

Dan Henry: (01:17:50)

Right, right. But you're still, you're still counting, you know, you're still doing it. And it's just, it's not that hard. People talk about sustainability say, well, this isn't sustainable because it's so hard. No, you you're saying it's hard and therefore you're making it hard. It's not that hard. And that goes with anything. Yeah. You know? Well,

Andrew Stickel: (01:18:04)

I don't, I don't even count calories. I just it's basically for me, it's just all about understanding. What's uh, what's. It's just standing like, like, like making good choices about what I'm

Dan Henry: (01:18:12)

Eating. Yeah. Well, you probably are hit, but that's what I'm saying. I'm getting,

Andrew Stickel: (01:18:15)

I'm getting the same effect. You're getting the same effect. I'm just not, I'm not having to count it. Yeah.

Dan Henry: (01:18:18)

But you're probably within the range that if you did count it, it'd be, oh, I'm you

Andrew Stickel: (01:18:22)

To be, have a salad, have a salad. Like, like I had, I had a burger for lunch today. But instead of French fries, I had a side salad with it, you know, it's like sacrifices like that and all adds up and yeah. You know, I mean, I'm not, I'm not as, I'm not where I wanna be yet, but I mean I'm down 40 pounds. Well,

Dan Henry: (01:18:36)

I do, I do the counting of the calories and all that. Cause I'm I lift weights and I'm, I'm trying to like bulk. And, and so for that, it's, it's crucial. I mean, if you're just trying to lose weight and that's it, and you're not trying to like, do like performance stuff. Then I would say that it's less crucial. But like you say, you you're having the burgers and then you're having a salad. You know, I don't know why we're talking about weight loss.

Andrew Stickel: (01:18:53)

Hemmorhoids and then weight loss.

Dan Henry: (01:18:54)

Hemmorhoids and then weight loss, you know? But, let me ask you about this. What, what's the biggest thing that you hate about, dealing with employees,

Andrew Stickel: (01:19:02)

Drama, drama, drama. That that's the, that's the biggest thing I hate because I'm a very nondramatic person.

Dan Henry: (01:19:08)

Like you have drama with employees?

Andrew Stickel: (01:19:09)

I get some employees. I mean, look, when you've got 20 employees, personalities are gonna clash. You know what I mean?

Dan Henry: (01:19:16)

I must be like super fortunate.

Andrew Stickel: (01:19:18)

It's not okay. It's not, I don't have a ton of drama. It's not like, it's not like my life is overrun with drama with employees. There's just a little bit of it. But that little bit of it, I hate drama so much. That's what I hate about. That's what I hate about dealing with employees the most. But, it's, you know, it's not the end of the world. We, we've got it worked out. But the other thing that I don't like about employee or not that I don't like about employees. Well, it's a challenge challenge. It's a challenge. It's yeah. It's the wrong word. Is I try to hire managers, not employees. Right. And what I mean by that is I tell people, I want you to come to me with a solution, not a problem. Right. And I want you to be able to work autonomously because I don't, I'm like the anti micromanager. Like I don't care when you work. I don't care what, I don't care how you do it. I just want you to just do the thing you're supposed to do. I'm like Bill Belichick, do your job and we don't have to even talk. You know what I mean?

Dan Henry: (01:20:13)

So I'm the opposite of you.

Andrew Stickel: (01:20:14)

Oh really?

Dan Henry: (01:20:14)

Yeah. So I, my employees generally don't have any drama. I can't remember the last time

Andrew Stickel: (01:20:20)

And again, if, if any of my employees are listening to this, it's not a lot of drama. It's just, if there's any drama, do it a podcast,

Dan Henry: (01:20:27)

But I mean, I don't ever, I don't remember like my employees ever having an issue with each other and I'm fortunate for that, but I also have way less employees than you that said, I do tend to micromanage because I consider what we do as an art. I mean, you might as well, but like, I consider it an art almost like pay painting and so it, and I'm, I'm a musician. I went to school for music. Yeah. Like I, I get a little bit passionate about what we do and that it's done correctly, not so much from a business perspective, but from an artistic perspective, which is probably a flaw. Yeah. And that's why when I hired my general manager, I was like, listen, I'm just gonna scream and at you, and then you translate it something nice for them.

Dan Henry: (01:21:10)

You know, it's a joke kind of, but you know, because like, I really am passionate that we do things correctly. We do things well, because I've never really looked at it. I have enough money. Right. Like I don't need I'm financially to the point where I just, I don't even money doesn't even, I don't care. You know, I'm not trying to put people on Mars. I'm not trying to make 50 million a year. I just wanna like live my life and be chill, you know, very Florida vibe, you know, I'm sure you can understand that. You know, I mean, I was born here, so like, I I'm like, yeah, I'm good. You know, I got I'm good. You know? But that said the, the aspect of it, of doing it well and making it really good and, and the same thing with clients as well, you know, if a client comes to me and says, well, this isn't working and I look at what they did.

Dan Henry: (01:22:01)

And I'm like, well, it's cuz you're not putting any friggin effort into it. You're not, or I don't wanna do sales calls. Well then why are you here? Yeah. Well, she'll just add said that I could, I could sign up all these clients without doing sales calls. It's like, dude. Like why, why are you here? Why are you here? Yeah. Why do you own a business? You know, you don't wanna hire people. You don't wanna do sales calls. You don't wanna, what can you do?What can you do? You know, like, go be an artist and travel, and paint in the Sahara desert or something. I don't know.

Andrew Stickel: (01:22:33)

Like you, you know, my favorite quote that you ever said, and this is you probably didn't remember this. My favorite. No, I never remember my quote you said being a successful entrepreneur is about not being a whiny little bitch.

Dan Henry: (01:22:46)

That sounds like something I would say.

Andrew Stickel: (01:22:47)

But it's true. That's what it is. It's doing it. Doing the crap you don't wanna do. Yeah. To be

Dan Henry: (01:22:52)

Fair though. We, we are all, I still, whine. And so I'm not saying that I'm

Andrew Stickel: (01:22:57)

I complain, but then I do it. You know what I mean? Like that, I think that's, I think that's the difference. So yeah. I'm gonna complain about this and then I'll just do it. You know what I mean? So like, but the other thing, like sales calls, for example, I used to hate sales calls. I used to like dread sales calls,

Dan Henry: (01:23:09)

So then hire somebody there's the solution, you know?

Andrew Stickel: (01:23:12)

Or, get better at sales calls because like, right, look, if you're getting on sales calls and you're closing $5,000 and $5,000 or 10,000, you're not gonna dislike them. You love it. It's like, oh, I can't wait to. And that's, and, and not only that, it's like it's mindset too. You know, that's, if there's one thing I've learned about sales, is that the most important part about being a good salesperson is believing that they're gonna buy, you know, like, and, and that's why like, I'm so good at sales, like, and I've said this, you know, if you get me on the phone with 10 people, eight of 'em are gonna buy. Right. And the reason why is cuz I've got this unha belief that when I get on the phone, this person is going to give me their credit card. At the end of this, it doesn't matter how much, it doesn't matter what, I don't even look at their application.

Andrew Stickel: (01:23:53)

I don't care what their application says. I know that I can help them. And I know that they, I know that it's gonna happen. You know? And like, I, I talk to my wife, I'm like, instead of saying, Hey, I gotta, I gotta do a sales call ID. Be like, yeah, I got let, I gotta collect some money real quick, you know? And that's that's but, but it's, it's true. And I close like 80% of my sales calls on, I mean, you know, $42,000 a year contract and I do one call close and I close like 80% of it. Right. And the reason why part of it is the celebrity effect maybe. But the other part is I have this unshakable belief that I it's gonna happen. Right. You know, and I love sales calls cause it's

Dan Henry: (01:24:27)

Fun. Cause I'm good at it. The other thing is like, you also know that you don't need them. Yeah, exactly. So you don't close the call. Yeah. Who cares? And a sale, sometimes sales reps are like, I need to make this sale. Yeah. And that vibe transfers. Um, and, and, and when you, when you don't need to make the sale, that's when you make the sale. Yeah, exactly. You know? Yeah. Cause they can feel that you don't need them. They need you. Yeah. And um, but like it's, it's sort of like golf, right? I, I I've been asked to go golfing with like a ton of clients and to people. And I, I always say no, because I suck at golf mm-hmm so like, I don't like to golf because I suck at golf. Yeah, exactly. And, and so it's like, now, if I dedicated myself to getting better at golf, I would probably love to go golfing.

Dan Henry: (01:25:12)

Yeah, exactly. You know, so it's like, if you are a business owner, there are certain things that you gotta do to grow that business. Otherwise don't be a business. You don't have to be a business owner. Nobody's ask nobody is asking you to be a business owner. Right. Nobody is telling you to do that. You are electing to do that. So if you decide to, to declare yourself one, then you do the things that business owners do. That means hiring people. That means sales. You know, that means, and if you get good at it, you will

Andrew Stickel: (01:25:40)

Love it. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, nobody's coming to save you, you know, it's

Dan Henry: (01:25:44)

And nobody cares. Yeah. Nobody cares at all. Yeah. Nobody cares. Oh God. If I could just tell, I see so many people, so many people, well, I just wanna make passive income. Well, guess what? Then be an investor. So does

Andrew Stickel: (01:25:54)

Everybody, yeah. I just wanna make all this money and not do any work. Well, you know, I would love that. If you can figure out how to do that, then I will pay you lots of money, but so far, right. Everyone that's promised that is the I've never seen it actually

Dan Henry: (01:26:05)

Work out. This is the biggest thing about passive income that people don't realize passive income is not for business owners. Passive income is not for entrepreneurs. If you expect to make passive income from a business, then you are living in a fairytale world. Passive income is for investors. That is the entire point of investing. Mm-hmm you invest money. You get a much less return. Right. If I invest a hundred thousand dollars into a business, I'm gonna like 10 X that. But if I invest a hundred thousand dollars into real estate, I'm gonna get like 15 or 10%. Yeah. Or, if the star aligned 20%, why am I getting less? It's because I'm willing to cuz it's passive. Right? If I invest into a fund or stock and I make 6% I don't have to run that company. Yeah.

Andrew Stickel: (01:26:51)

The stock is you don't do anything. You sit on the beach and they make you money. Just

Dan Henry: (01:26:55)

Not a much, but that's why you're getting 6% instead of 600%. Yeah, exactly. They're getting 600%. Cause they're running the business. You get six or 10 or whatever, because you don't do anything. So if you want passive income, be an investor and stop lying to yourself. Stop lying to the rest of the world. Stop proclaiming yourself an entrepreneur and go be an investor.Oh, but wait a minute. You don't have any money. Yeah. Well maybe then if you do wanna get some, you should be in a business owner and you should act like one.

Andrew Stickel: (01:27:27)

Well, you know what? The best investors also have business experience too. You know what I mean? Cause they understand they can identify a bus. They can identify those key aspects that a business needs to be successful. And you can't get that without running a bus. I, I knew a guy who went to college and majored in entrepreneurship, that it is the stupidest thing I've ever heard in my entire life. Like take that a hundred thousand dollars that is dumb, open a business. You'll get the equivalent of like 10 MBAs, you know? Like why would you do

Dan Henry: (01:27:55)

That? You know that that is dumb because, and entrepreneurship is such a thing that it cannot, it can be taught. It cannot be taught in. It has to be taught by entrepreneurs. Right. You can't create this academic world, because what is an entrepreneur? It's somebody and let me jam on this for a second with you, right? Because you, I I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Why does so many entrepreneurs newers also tear down and destroy what they've created? And why do entrepreneurs need people like managers to be the buffer it's because when you decide that you are going to completely and utterly remove the safety net, like a circus performer, that's doing something super dangerous and they're, and they just take down the net. You gotta be crazy to do that.

Dan Henry: (01:28:52)

You're literally saying I have absolutely no recourse. I have no safety net. If I make a bad decision, that's all gone. This is my entire financial safety and my employee's financial safety. Yeah. If I make good or bad decisions, I'm taking in a massive amount of risk, massive amount of risk. And in order to do that, you have to be nuts and you have to be crazy. And the same type of crazy that that would take on that much risk is also on the other side of that coin, the same type of crazy that would tear it all down. You know, and that's why entrepreneurs are emotional. And they are sometimes self sabotaging because that the 180 degree, other side of that type of crazy is a destroyer. It creators are also destroyers. That's why it's very important as an entrepreneur, I think, to bring people in that aren't crazy to help buffer your crazy that's employees. Well,

Andrew Stickel: (01:29:51)

You know what else the other, the other challenge is is we get bored, you know?

Dan Henry: (01:29:55)

Yeah. Well, and that's part of being crazy, you know? I mean, it's, the other thing is thing that gets me is these people who say, they make too much money. Right.

Andrew Stickel: (01:30:06)

You know, entrepreneurs make too much money

Dan Henry: (01:30:09)

Mean or C well, not maybe, maybe CEOs is a different thing, but like

Andrew Stickel: (01:30:13)

Tax the rich type thing. Like, well

Dan Henry: (01:30:15)

That plus just like I've seen stuff where they say, you know, you should pay your employees more. Right, right, or whatever, or you should overpay your employees. The thing is, is that a good entrepreneur realizes that storms come. So if you overpay your employees and you delete, or you sacrifice your reserves. What happens when a major storm comes like?

Andrew Stickel: (01:30:39)

Then you have to fire everybody.

Dan Henry: (01:30:39)

You gotta fire everybody now lose their jobs. Yeah. Right. The thing is you don't, you don't underpay people. But if you, if you grossly overpay people, then you're not making a smart business decision. Because if a storm comes now, everybody loses their job. Yeah. And so people don't realize that. Why does the entrepreneur, why does the business owner make the most well it's cuz they it's not that they do in the most work.

Dan Henry: (01:31:01)

Well, that's the other thing, right? Steve Jobs, like, I've heard this argument about Steve Jobs. Oh, well, Steve Jobs didn't build any computers. He had all of his people to, he never made a computer in his life. Why did he make so much money? Da, da, or you know, Facebook and da da, he, the thing is, is that it's not that they make the most money because they did the most work it's cuz they took on the most risk. Risk is everything. Oh yeah. You take on that much risk. You deserve the greatest reward. Yeah. Risk is everything. It takes a lot of balls to take on that much risk, you know? Not just financially, but like to save face to yeah. Your reputation, all that. Yeah.

Andrew Stickel: (01:31:39)

Yeah. We, we did. So we, we do that event, in December we made over $2 million. We been $150,000 up front to do that. That's more than most people make in a year. Yeah. And you know, like we had to, we had Jordan Belford on there. We had to pay him, we had Damon John on there. We had to pay him, we had to run Facebook ads. We had to do, you know, all this stuff without any guarantee whatsoever that we were gonna make a single penny on the back. You know what I mean? And $150,000.

Dan Henry: (01:32:04)

I mean that's, but you'll get somebody on Facebook who sees you say that and say, oh, well, you know,

Andrew Stickel: (01:32:09)

Oh, you made 2 million should have bonus. You know what I mean? And we take care of our employees too, cuz like, you know, I don't remember where I heard the, the equation of basically what, because there's the whole argument of $15 an hour, $20 an hour and you know, paying fast food workers and all that type of stuff and really like what it comes down to it's how good are you? How are

Dan Henry: (01:32:25)

$20 an hour?

Andrew Stickel: (01:32:26)

I think it's $15 an hour is what I hearing

Dan Henry: (01:32:29)

As 15, which is,

Andrew Stickel: (01:32:30)

Yeah. 20 Chick-fil-A might pay more. I don't know. But so it's how good are you at your job and how hard is it to replace you? You know what I mean? Like, and that's, and the thing is that the people that work for me, I have accidentally hired amazing people that is very difficult to replace them and you know, and they get paid very well. You know, like the highest person in my, the highest paid person in my company started as an unpaid intern. And he worked his way up and worked so way up more his way up. And he's been with us, he's been with me for nine years now. And he makes a lot of money, you know, and the reason why is because he's great at his job, and it's very hard to replace him, you know? Yeah. There you go. And that's what it is, you know, and that's, that's what it comes down to. It's like, I don't know. So make

Dan Henry: (01:33:13)

Yourself, make yourself less rep you wanna raise, you wanna make more money, make yourself less replaceable,

Andrew Stickel: (01:33:19)

Make, make yourself possible to replace, right. Yeah. And that's the thing, I mean, like, I mean, and that that's, that's what it really comes down to. Like, I don't know anyone in the pandemic that is obviously very, very good at what they do has a lot of value that was out of work. You know what I mean? And that doesn't mean that I'm saying, I don't know anyone I'm saying the people that I know that are really, really good at what they do. Every single one of them had plenty of work the entire time, and they made more money during the pandemic. And it was because of the fact that like, you know, it tightened up. So now there's more demand for really, really, really people. Yeah. Ours did too. We had a record year. Last year in 2020 was a record year for us. 2021 was a record year for us. 20, 22 is gonna be a record year for us, you know? And it's just because we provide a result and we provide value to people. You know,

Dan Henry: (01:34:00)

Let me still me switch little gears here. So I hate to hammer on this done for you thing because I'm fascinated by, uh, the fact that you've got this to such a level of scale and you're selling these packages and all that. What would you cuz there's probably people listening to this that, oh man. You know, cuz look, everything has, I believe every, if you do something well, it's gonna work out. Right. Whether it's coaching, whether it's e-commerce, whether it's, events, whether it's done for you, if you do it well and you dedicate yourself to it. Yeah. But since you do so well with it. I like, I wanna ask some questions. What are some other markets? Cuz I've always told people what done for you. You gotta find a client who's easy to find. And like I said this earlier, when they get a client or when they get a result, it's worth a lot. You know? So that like for instance, like I remember back in the day I said like stop doing marketing for ice cream shops. Yeah. Because when they get a client, they make $2.

Andrew Stickel: (01:34:59)

Yeah. Don't sell to broke people. Right. Right.

Dan Henry: (01:35:00)

Well, but, but I mean, Hagen Das isn't broke, but you know what I mean? Like, like

Andrew Stickel: (01:35:06)

You want, it's easy to get a win it's it's easy

Dan Henry: (01:35:09)

To get a win. Exactly. What, besides the lawyers what other markets out there, maybe ones that people aren't thinking of would you think would be good for, for easy wins for done for you?

Andrew Stickel: (01:35:20)

It's tough. I mean like, I, I think financial services is always good. Mortgage comp mortgage. Yeah. Mortgage brokers, things like that. Real estate. Yeah. Yeah. Real estate. I think, cosmetic surgeons. Oh yeah. Cosmetic surgeons. You know, see, I know there's a guy I think is Andrew argue who does a lot with CPAs? I think, see, I don't know if that would be a good one or not. I don't, I haven't researched that market, but you just gotta think like, who are the people that, that, that make a lot, who are the people that have a very high, average transaction value. Right. Cause that's what it comes down. Like I want, I want to have the opportunity that if I get one client, they can pay for me for the entire year and like a personal injury attorney. Like I've had personal injury attorneys that get a 20 that get a case from us that turns into 25 million, you know, like they've paid for us for the rest of their career, you know, , you

Dan Henry: (01:36:10)

Know what idea? I I've always, or not always, I recently started thinking about it is, clients who have big lists who if they just knew how to better sell to them. Yeah. They would make way more money. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. Because like what, what's one of the hardest things about, uh, client acquisition. It's it's like, well you gotta go out and market and you gotta find clients. Right. What if there was somebody that already had them? Yeah. Yeah. And you really have to market

Andrew Stickel: (01:36:34)

To them. So that's actually, our next move is we're going to be finding influencers. Like I, I, there's a, there's a, a particular guy. He's a, a fitness guy. He's got 150,000 subscribers on YouTube. He's got like 300,000 followers on Instagram. Um, similar numbers on Facebook makes 10 grand a month. I was like, I was like, dude, oh my gosh. So I don't, I don't have, have, I don't have the, the, I don't have the bandwidth to do it now, but I wanna find people like that. I wanna take equity in their company and, and, and just blow it up because I mean, it's like, they just, they know how to get

Dan Henry: (01:37:10)

Audience them to create like programs and products and they might not,

Andrew Stickel: (01:37:13)

Well, I I'll find people that are motivated. Like I actually talk to this guy he's motivated, you know, he's like, just tell me what to do. I don't know what to do. You know what, so people like that, as long as they're on board, I'll I'll do that. I'll teach 'em what to do. And I mean, cuz look, look, I've only got 6,000 subscribers on YouTube. And like my email list is only like 27,000 people. Like my, my numbers are not that big because I'm in a really, I'm in a niche, you know what I mean? But like, if it's someone like a, like a fitness person who can literally get everyone, you know, it's just, it makes it it's, it's like it's, it's stupid numbers. And if I take what I know and I apply to those numbers, even if I get half the conversion rate that I get, we'll make 10 times as much money, you know? So I think that that's something I'm eventually gonna do. I don't have the, I don't have the bandwidth to do it now, but it's, that's probably gonna be something we're gonna start moving into soon. Hmm.

Dan Henry: (01:38:01)

That's cool. Yeah. I, what about, um, now I'm just like brainstorming, but like what about, what about purchasing them? Like think, think about this. Like, let's say there was like a, a brand and it wasn't like a personal brand but it was just a brand and they did not monetize at all. Yeah. Or maybe like you said, they're making like a measly 10 grand a month. And so what you do is instead of, um, the equity thing, you just buy, you just buy 'em right. Or, or maybe they're not making anything. Yeah. You know, you buy 'em and then you go in and you create a product and you, you sell it or could maybe even some sort of affiliate thing or something, you know? I don't know. I often thought about stuff like that. I think

Andrew Stickel: (01:38:45)

It's interesting. I think you still want them involved though. Cuz like, I mean like instead of this fitness guy, for example, I'm not, I'm not gonna be a fitness model. I'm not, nobody's gonna buy fitness stuff for me, you know what I mean? Um, and also I don't, I don't wanna do the 10,000 hours to learning at all. You know, I'd rather, I've done the homework with the marketing.

Dan Henry: (01:39:01)

See, this is what you're talking about. Board entrepreneurs. Yeah, exactly. We just, by sitting here thinking about things like, like, you know, and you

Andrew Stickel: (01:39:07)

Kind of are buying like, so I wouldn't do, I would not do a deal like that unless I had equity. So at that point I am buying, I am buying it with, with my sweat equity, I guess. Yeah. You know, but um, I thought,

Dan Henry: (01:39:20)

You know what I thought about doing, I thought about, uh, going to somebody and cause like every time I do an event or I speak, I just sell like crazy. Like, I mean, we just do crazy numbers, but I thought about like doing something where I would help, you know, put on an event for somebody and sell and then get a cut or whatever. But then I was like, I don't wanna do any of that.

Andrew Stickel: (01:39:46)

Well that's like, the pre-pitch and the repitch stuff. Have you done any of that?

Dan Henry: (01:39:49)

I've done pitching and pre and I've made some money doing it, but like I I'm doing so well with our company and my passive stuff with like cryptocurrency and I do have some real estate stuff that at this point I just, um, like I said, I just like to drink really good coffee and drink and, and read philosophy, put books in my penthouse and just not do anything. Yeah. Like I've worked so hard

Andrew Stickel: (01:40:11)

For so long take quality of life at the end of the day, the most important thing is like, what do you? But I always, I

Dan Henry: (01:40:15)

Always get in my head. Yeah. I always get the ideas cuz I'm like, I know I could do it and it would be awesome and it'd make a lot of money, but then I'm like, oh wait a minute. I don't really need,

Andrew Stickel: (01:40:24)

Could you ever actually, could you like, I mean, let's say you let's say you could sell your business. Right. You're you're right now somebody just gave you like an insane amount of money. Could you actually retire and not do anything? Or do you have one of those brains where like, you'd sit there for a couple weeks and then you'd be like, I got this idea. I'm gonna go, I'm gonna do

Dan Henry: (01:40:41)

This. Ah, man, that would, yeah. I mean, if, if probably, yeah, I wouldn't be able, I would have to build something or because I'm a creator. So I think if I was gonna do that, I'd have to, if I was like, cuz if you gave me a disgusting amount of money, like I'm already financially secure, but let's say you made me even more financially secure and you gave me like,

Andrew Stickel: (01:41:04)

Somebody gave you amount of money that you can't turn it down. Like it'd be stupid for you to turn it down. Yeah.

Dan Henry: (01:41:08)

Then you mean like an amount that even if I made whole horrible decisions, like Mike Tyson decisions, well, I don't know. I don't know.

Andrew Stickel: (01:41:15)

See, I don't know what your number is, but I mean like, you know, if somebody gave you a like, so get clients.com, that's your main business, right? Yeah. If they gave you a number that would actually make you sell it. I mean, not, I mean, not, not a billion dollars obviously, but like I don't know. That'd be great. Yeah. Yeah. No, but a number that you'd be like, okay, yeah, I'll sell for that. You know, like a reasonable number that, that actually, that you'd actually, and then you're done. I mean, I have to imagine you're pretty much probably set. Um, but could you just sit around and do nothing and just read all day? Or would you get bored? I know. I, I couldn't do

Dan Henry: (01:41:44)

It. I I'd probably get bored. So I'd have to take on something that would fill that, that maybe wasn't business. Yeah. Like maybe it was philanthropy um, which the funny thing about philanthropy is like, you know, I've always had this thing where if you do it, you probably shouldn't talk about it. So like we're doing some stuff right now. And again, I don't like to talk about it, but, and I actually have my staff working on it. It's like kind of a cool idea. And if it works out and it works, I'll talk about it because it's sort of like something that a lot of entrepreneurs could do and it would help kids and it's an idea I have. And I'll, if it works out, I'll, I'll do something with it. But, um, it would probably be like philanthropy based or art based or, or something that is not necessarily money because, you know, I don't, if you don't need that.

Dan Henry: (01:42:38)

Yeah. But I guess you're right. I guess I would have to, I guess I would get bored but I might take a year and just do all the things I've ever wanted to do. I probably write an album I'd probably, um, cuz it's funny. I was in a band when I was younger and we like had whole album and we were gonna release it and we were like 95% done and then my business took off and so you just left I was like, yeah, I just left and I was making millions of dollars and I was like, well, why do I need an album? And, and, but it's always like been like, man, I should, uh, yeah, I should go back and, and make something like that. You know? Um, but I, I mean, I don't know, I'm kind of at that point now.

Dan Henry: (01:43:20)

But I see your point. You, you, you, if you are a creator, right? Like it's sort of like if you were a musician or a cook or something, maybe like let's say you were a chef, right and you sold your restaurant and you made $10 million. Cause it was the most private restaurant. Are you gonna stop cooking? Mm. You know what I mean? Like yeah. Are like, if you are a musician and you had a hit record and you made all this money, like, are you gonna stop making music? Even if you didn't release any music you

Andrew Stickel: (01:43:48)

Yeah. Right. Just doing it for yourself. Yeah.

Dan Henry: (01:43:50)

Yeah. So that's a great question. I think, I, I think like anybody you'd have to be in the position because the other thing is you don't know who you're gonna be in 10 years or five years or 20 years, or even a year. You could be a completely different person that is literally not even remotely close to the person used to be. So maybe the person you used to be would do something like that. Yeah. But maybe that new person would do something else so it's, I kind of try not to think about it and I like to just let it happen because, um, you can talk all day long about what you would do,

Andrew Stickel: (01:44:23)

But when, so you're actually in that position, it's hard

Dan Henry: (01:44:25)

To, uh, yeah. When you're in that position, then you find out what you end up doing. Yeah. So you, wow. We got all deep.

Andrew Stickel: (01:44:34)

Yeah. That's interesting. I know, I can't say like I I'll have a day, even a day where I'm like, we're like my wife and I will be like, all right. We're just gonna like Dex. The new Dexter came out. We're like, we're gonna, we're

Dan Henry: (01:44:43)

Gonna, I'm binge watching the old one. Okay. Trying to make it through the whole thing. Yeah. And then, um, and then watch the new one. So, so

Andrew Stickel: (01:44:50)

We're like four episodes behind. So like last week, um, we were just like, yeah, we're just gonna take the day. And we're just gonna sit here and watch, watch Dexter all day. We made it through like one episode and we like, neither of us can sit still. Like, I can't just sit down and watch T.V

Dan Henry: (01:45:03)

Oh, that's what I would do. You know what I mean? I'd make movies. Yeah. Yeah. I've always wanted to make like, but,

Andrew Stickel: (01:45:10)

But you have to have a project is my point, right? You have to have some sort of project that you're working on, you know? Right.

Dan Henry: (01:45:15)

So, um, we tangent, um, so

Andrew Stickel: (01:45:19)

Back to done for your services

Dan Henry: (01:45:20)

And he, so, so, so, so you're saying that you're saying that, um, uh, in done for you, the biggest thing, just to, just to sort of like, come back to that, the biggest thing is, do have control of the entire, let me ask you, how do you convince a done for you client to let you have that much control where you have, you, you do their entire process. And you're taking over such a large amount of it from a to Z that like, how do you convince them that, that to do that?

Andrew Stickel: (01:45:56)

I don't know how we did it in the beginning to be totally honest with you because like, and I really don't. I mean, now it's easy because we could say, well, look, you're a criminal defense attorney. Here's 27 other criminal defense attorneys that we've worked with. Here's the results that we've gotten. Here's videos of them talking about the results that we've gotten. So at some point you're gonna have to trust us, you know? So we've got the track record. I mean, like,

Dan Henry: (01:46:17)

I love that pitch at some point you're gonna have to trust us. Yeah. I mean like,

Andrew Stickel: (01:46:20)

Well, you're gonna have to trust somebody unless you're gonna do it yourself. You know? So you might as well trust the person that's actually that can show you that they have the results, you know? Right. Um, on top of that, I create so much content. I've got 1200 YouTube videos at this point, teaching lawyers, geez, how to, who market their businesses. You know what I mean? So it's like 1200. You, you it's all trust. I mean, that's the biggest thing is that, and it it's, it's all, it's all Goodwill, you know? So when we first started doing it, I wasn't involved with sales. Like the first, like when I started my business, I, my partner, um, who actually I bought her out last April or last may. Um, and she's retired now. Um, but she was the salesperson cuz she used to be national sales director at this really big, uh, lawyer marketing company.

Andrew Stickel: (01:47:04)

And I just wanted to do the marketing. I wanna be the guy behind the scenes, just like building the websites, and you know, doing the social media and everything. And um, she was the one that went out and got a bunch of a bunch of clients. And uh, because she worked in the legal industry cuz she worked for, uh, this, this huge marketing company for, for lawyers. She was able, she had re relationships and she was able to bring us our first lawyer and then second lawyer. And then our, and then we had four. Then we had, then we had 12 and all of a sudden, oh I guess we do marketing for lawyers. You know, we didn't even plan to niche down and we didn't plan to niche into lawyers. It was completely coincidental just because of the fact that these are the contacts that she had.

Andrew Stickel: (01:47:40)

So because they knew her, she, she could say, trust me, this is what we're doing. Right. So there was the trust there. Then we started getting results. Then we started getting testimonials and then there was trust there, but I don't know how I would do it if I had to start it over because I think what I'd have to do is I'd have to work with somebody probably for free and get 'em some sort of result because like the thing that I love that sounds familiar exactly well, but what's the other option. I mean here's the actually no, no, no. That's not true. What I would do is I would start creating content and just do it. I would just be creating video after video, after video, after video, I'd do the lead magnet. I get my funnel. But, but you would have that content.

Andrew Stickel: (01:48:17)

You have to build the trust. You already did it trust. Right. That content wouldn't exist. That's true. That's true. That content wouldn't exist. I was saying if I, if, if I lost it all today and I had to start today, it's, it's, it's really difficult because it's, but here's the cool thing. When people copy me and people will try to rip me off, I don't even do anything about it anymore. I used to send cease desist letters. Yeah. Like they stole all my stuff, but I'm like, they, I know how much it costs to get a client. And I know that for most people, there's no way they can sustain that. And there's no way they can even like consider that. You know? I mean, because I know that the bar is so high to, to a law firm to hire you that if all you're doing is copying me and you don't have any other moves cuz you don't know how to do it yourself then like I'm just gonna let you spend all your money and run an esteem until you go, you know, go do something else.

Andrew Stickel: (01:49:03)

You know, I had a guy that literally, he actually was a video editor, Vermont and I, it is a crazy story. I hired him. He was in Bosnia. Right. And I, I, I hired him. He's like he was 18 years old. I hired him to do some video editing for me. He was really, really good. But he started watching all my stuff. So then he's like, Hey listen, I want to move to the United States. Cuz I guess he was being like persecuted or something. I don't know what it was. But he wanted to come to the United States. He's like, he's like, if you give me like $2,500 to get my plane ticket over here, um, you know, pay me in advance, then I'll do your video editing for you and I'll give you the credit and everything. So he'd done a lot of work for me.

Andrew Stickel: (01:49:40)

So I gave him the 2,500 bucks. He moved over and he did the videos and he, you know, worked off all the money and everything. And then one day somebody starts sending me videos. They're like, Hey look at this, this guy he's got like, he looks exactly like you. And like, I, AB'd And our scripts are literally exactly the same even to the point where I said at this point, I think I had been doing marketing for lawyers for six years. I'm like, yeah, I've been, I've been helping lawyers for six years grow their law firm. He changed that he of change. How long he's been doing. You said I've been doing it for six years. He would've been 12 years old when he is marketing law firms. You know what I mean? Like, wow. So I, and, and sure enough, like, I mean, I called him out on it and you know, it was this huge betrayal cuz I, I helped him out. So, but you know, I mean he was, he was done after a couple weeks cuz he didn't have any money cuz he didn't. So

Dan Henry: (01:50:25)

That's the thing is, is when people copy you. Yeah. You gotta realize that the reason they're copying you is because they have absolutely no grit. Right? Exactly. They have no hustle and they have no discipline. Yeah. And so they have to just say, I'm gonna, I'm gonna copy somebody else and copy their business and just do exactly what they're doing because I don't have the stuff right. I, I don't have it here. And if they don't have it here, like you said, it'll be two weeks or a month or a couple months and they'll be out. So by the time you could even send, uh, do do anything about it. They're already failed. And that's the thing is focus on you. Right? Exactly. Focus on you because if somebody else is, you know, winners focus on winning losers, focus on winners. So yeah.

Andrew Stickel: (01:51:13)

That's true. Yeah. That's a good point. Yeah. I mean that's the thing is that it's like, you know that they're doing it because they can't figure out how to do it on their own and you know, and look nothing about this is easy like that. That's that's and, and, but honestly that's what I love about it. I love the fact that it's so difficult because yeah, cause I'm willing to do the work that most people aren't willing to do, you know, don't you get and

Dan Henry: (01:51:33)

Cause I get it in my business, I'm sure you do. People will come to you and they say, teach me how to make a bunch of money, teach me how to have this amazing result. But then when you start, you realize that a lot of those people, they don't want to, to do it. They don't want to be good. They just want to have it handed to them. Yeah. And so it's, it's sort of like, you know, the filter, the protection that you have as a, as an entrepreneur or business owner is that it's hard so if you're willing to do the hard thing, you automatically filter out your competition. Yeah. People aren't willing to do the hard thing. So to me it's like a good thing. It's like, if it's hard, I don't wanna do things. That's easy. Cause then everybody can do it. I wanna do things that's hard. So I do things hard then I don't have a lot of people hanging around trying to do the same thing. Exactly. Right. And if you don't have that mindset, then you shouldn't be there. Right. Like you don't deserve to

Andrew Stickel: (01:52:26)

Be a business. Everybody wants to be Michael Jordan, but nobody wants to spend 12 hours a day in the gym, you know? Yeah. They don't want, they don't wanna practice basketball. E exactly. You know, and it's just like, I mean like, look, I I'm up at 5:00 AM every day, you know, I'm reading, I'm, I'm exercising and there isn't, I'm exercising one for my body, but also it's it's for my mind, you know, being active and everything. And I do things that I don't want to do. And because of, I mean like the other thing is that I fail. I wouldn't say I failed. I don't think I've ever failed at anything because the way that I look at I've gotten different results than I expected. You know what I mean? Like failure is failure is the data for success. Exactly. Well, I, I look at failure if I didn't learn something from my mistake, you know what I mean?

Andrew Stickel: (01:53:05)

Like, or if I didn't get something like, so I started my first business I ever had. I was 19. Right. I didn't make a hundred thousand dollars a year until I was 30. So 11 years was basically me trying different things and learning different things. And like I used to have this website called digital fire starter. And what we did was we would interview like athletes and celebrities and, and bands and things like that in like fish outta water. Like, so, you know, the band's seven dust. Right. I love so we, we took them miniature golfing. Right. And we filmed the whole thing. We did an interview with them. Um, the band, uh, kill switching G you know, those guys. Yes. We took them to, now you're talking my, we took them to stuff. What mean? We took them to, uh, Gator land in Orlando and like wrestled alligators with them.

Andrew Stickel: (01:53:44)

Why, wait, how did you, I, I wanna wrestle alligators with seven dust, but how did this happen? Okay. So, all right. So I started a constant promotions business. Uh, so I got fired. Okay. So graduated from law school or, sorry, graduated from college 2006, uh, worked at the, the restaurant. And then I worked at a private firm and then I got fired from the private firm and I was like, I need to be an entrepreneur. I don't want to go to law school. I don't wanna do this. I am a terrible employee. I need to start my own business. So my grandmother loaned me $20,000. Um, and I got into concert promoting and I actually got into Christian concert promoting, which is funny, cuz I was raised Jewish. Right. So I'm this Jewish guy and I'm, and I, I got hooked up with long, long story short of how I got or long story of how I got into Christian concerts.

Andrew Stickel: (01:54:31)

But we used to do, um, concerts with the band, uh, skillet. Do you know who they are? Yeah, I know skillet. Yeah. So we did skillet a thousand foot crutch. Yep. Um, you know, so we, we did a lot of, uh, a lot of, any, anything from small clubs to like we did arena shows. Um, and then, and we were pretty successful. I don't know, we, I didn't make a ton of money at it, but we, we, we made a little bit of money, um, and then live nation and Ticketmaster merged. And what that meant was that most of the buildings that we were doing concerts in were owned by live nation, which meant that now Ticketmaster, it was all, it was all exclusive with Ticketmaster and Ticketmaster and live nation were basically competing and putting a lot of the smaller promoters out of business.

Andrew Stickel: (01:55:07)

So I was working with this other guy and we started a marketing company. Um, and well, no, actually before that, what happened was, so I got out of that, but I knew how to contact all of these celebrities and athletes. It's just, you call the manager, you know what I mean? Um, and I was living in Orlando and I knew that lots of bands would come down to Orlando or the be in Tampa cuz house of blues was Orlando, um, where they'd be in Tampa. So I was like, you know, I've gotten access to all these people. How can I, what can I do with this? Cause it was, I was dream 100, 100 in people before I realized that I was cuz my idea was that if I create a website and let's say I get seven dust on there and I do an interview with them and then it's an inter interesting interview and we tell seven dust to market it to their fans, then seven dust.

Andrew Stickel: (01:55:53)

Then we're gonna get lots of traffic from people who like seven dust and we're gonna get all these, all this, uh, all this publicity. Right. And why did seven dust agree to go golfing with you? Or what of, uh, miniature golf, miniature golf? Um, well, so basically I'm, I'm, I'm a really good BSer right. So the first one was the hardest one because we didn't have, because like I remember it was, uh, authority zero. Do you remember authority? Zero. Yeah. So authority zero head PE. Yep. And, and a tray authority, zero head PE and a tray. And I had all three of 'em on the, on the line. I mean like, you know, I was talking to all 'em and I was basically playing them off one another. I was like, well, I think we're gonna, you know, we're taking author zero to Ripley's believe it or not.

Andrew Stickel: (01:56:30)

So I think we can squeeze head PE. I think we can take you up and hide air balloons probably like on Tuesday if we're not busy working with a tray you on that day. So I was basically just totally BSing. Right. And somehow they all got booked, so, so, oh man. So we took, we took a tray U or sorry. So we did a boxing match with a tray U where the lead singer of a tray, cuz he's into like, uh, uh, MMA and like, uh, Mo Thai and stuff like that. Um, uh, and, and uh, my friend Ian, actually the same, the, my partner in the heh business, cuz he's a Santa comedian. This is how I met him because I needed a host for the show. So he was into boxing also. So they went and we, we did a boxing match between him and the leasing of a tray.

Andrew Stickel: (01:57:10)

Um, we took seven dusts up in hot air balloons in Orlando, we took, um, or not seven dust. We took head PE up in hot air balloons in Orlando. We did, we took Ripley's believe it or not to the, uh, to the new museum. And then once we had that, then we went to all the other booking agents, all the other people, all the other publicists. And we're like, Hey, listen, we've already worked with head PE, we've already worked with a tray, U we've already worked with author zero. I'm pretty sure we've got all these people. You know what I mean? And it just snowballed from there. And we ended up doing like 80 or 90 interviews. And the thing that you realize, like there's a quote that I heard from mark ho uh, the bass player from blink one, two he's like being on tour is all finding something better to do because it's not like the days of Motley crew where they're just sitting around doing Coke and like, you know, and hookers all day.

Andrew Stickel: (01:57:52)

Right. They're bored. So they're sitting at, they're sitting at Gator land or sorry, they're sitting at house of blues, just sitting there trying to find something to do. I get the tour managers, contact information, Hey, you guys wanna go do indoor skydiving or you guys wanna go, uh, you know, go rest still some alligators with us or you know, like do all this cool stuff. And they're like, yeah, we're what else do we have to do? So we're basically giving them and how did you, who were you like, how did you present yourself? I was just this, I was the owner of digital fire starter. So I mean that's, did they even ask what that was or what your purpose was? I mean, it was like, we're building a what? Oh, we also we had this. So like, are these, we had a letter of intent drugged out that they, yeah, we had a letter of intent from PBS where basically I had this letter of intent.

Andrew Stickel: (01:58:33)

Like I knew the guy who ran, who, who was the station manager at the PBS station in Daytona beach. Right. So I was like, uh, I was like, I wanna put this show together. Can you, um, can you give us a letter that you're interested in putting the show in the air? So then I, so basically what I'd say, I was like, it's gonna be on PBS, which was a total BS. And not only that, but also we've also worked with all these other bands and then, um, and then we put together like a sizzle reel and like, yeah. I mean, we had some big names on there, so, and it was, you do with the interviews. They're all on YouTube right now, but I didn't do anything with it, so I didn't get on PBS. I didn't do anything with it. No, no, no.

Andrew Stickel: (01:59:06)

But, um, it's the type of thing where it's like, if I would've known, then what I know now about marketing, like this would've been the biggest show ever. This was like before Twitter was really big and behind before, like, you know, all the Instagram reality still on YouTube. Yeah. They're still on, it's called digital fire starter. You can see dude. We did like, uh, so like let me think, like sublime, right sublime with Rome. Um, we took them actually. They were in St. Pete. We did a lot of stuff in St. Pete, um, because of uh, Janice landing. Yeah. So, um, yeah, sublime, we took them and went like skite shooting with, uh, sublime and uh, and you interviewed 'em while you were doing it. Yeah. Yeah. We, I, yeah. So we talked to 'em we do interviews while we're skit shooting. What did you get out of that?

Andrew Stickel: (01:59:42)

I, okay, so you had to pay for all this stuff. Well, I gave equity in the company to the camera guy and to the director. You know what I mean? So basically you said to pay for the skite shooting and the indoor skydiving? No, no, no. I didn't pay for any of that because I went to the company. I was like, Hey, listen. Um, okay. Here's a perfect example. Right? Oh, so I go to, I go to, okay, so three doors down, you know, three doors down is right of, so they were in Orlando. He asking me if I know all myself bands on, because, cause I was most people I don't, I don't know. So we call them and um, and I'm like, Hey listen. And three doors down was an A-list A-list act at this point. Right. So they were performing at, at universal.

Andrew Stickel: (02:00:18)

So I'm like, I call 'em up. I'm I'm like, Hey, uh, we're working with met life. We wanna take you guys up in the MetLife blimp cuz the MetLife BLI happened to be in, uh, in Orlando. Cuz there was like the honor Arnold Palmer. So then you go to Matt life, then go to met three doors, like, Hey three doors down really wants to go open the blimp. Are you, you know? And like, and everybody's like, yeah, that sounds awesome. So then we set this guy, his name's Steven and he borrowed his mom's minivan and he's like, I mean he, this 20 year old kid, he borrows his mom's minivan. He goes to Orlando, he goes, picks up three doors down in his mom's minivan. We bring him to the MetLife blimp and then we, um, film the entire thing, you know like, so we did, I mean we did, we like worked with saliva.

Andrew Stickel: (02:00:56)

We worked with, um, as lay dying, we worked with, um, so many people, uh, hinder, um, like gosh, and we, and we would do some funny stuff, all fans that I just like, yeah, you gotta check it out. It's we did some really stuff. I, I am, I'm gonna go watch it. Were you interviewing him? Uh, no, no, I wasn't. I'm I'm in some of, but I I'm in the newfound glory interview, we took, um, we took newfound glory to at Disney. There used to be this racetrack called Richard Petty's racing experience. Uh, and basically you could drive NASCAR, you cars. So we went to, uh, we took, uh, newfound glory there. You know what I mean? So like, so yeah, we did some cool stuff. And that actually to answer your question actually might have been my question. If I was to sell my business, I would probably do that again because I've never had more fun. Well, not now,

Dan Henry: (02:01:38)

Now that you've just admitted. like I saw your interview.

Andrew Stickel: (02:01:45)

We're gonna have to censor this part of the interview. No, but I mean that, that that's, that was like the most fun I've ever had doing anything. I just didn't know how to make any money at it back then. Cuz I didn't know. Like I said, if I knew then what I know now, like it would've been, it would've been all over it. Would've been sold to Netflix or would've been sold Hulu or something like that, you know, so, oh man. But, um, that's a crazy

Dan Henry: (02:02:05)

That digital fire

Andrew Stickel: (02:02:06)

Starter a crazy story. Oh, oh. Back to my story though. So that was the business. I started, it didn't work, but I learned how to do video editing. I learned how to, I learned how to do cameras. Uh, I know how to, how to, you know, use a camera. I learned DSI. I learned ISO is and what you know, uh, aperture is and all that stuff on the cameras. And then I took that knowledge in my current business and I started charging $5,000 for a video shoot for a lawyer. You know what I mean? So it's like that business didn't succeed, but I learned how to, I learned how to get around gatekeepers. I learned how to do video editing, you know what I mean? Like so much stuff. So it's like I didn't make any, any, so I didn't fail. I just didn't get the outcome that I was expecting. You know what I mean? And that's how I look at. That's how I look at my entire life is I've never failed in anything. I just, I just didn't get the right the same outcome that I was expecting to get. But I walked away with knowledge. I walked away with a hell of a good time, you know? And uh, so, so that's how it's been with everything that I've done, you know,

Dan Henry: (02:02:57)

Don't, isn't it crazy how, the way in which you frame, how you see that experience and the world and failure and success is the very reason why life has worked out for you and you've built a multimillion dollar company. Yeah. And it, you know, a lot of times people get caught up in the tactics and they don't realize that the lens in which you see the world really dictates how your world will evolve and sometimes you just have to change your lens. Yeah.

Andrew Stickel: (02:03:30)

It's like, it's like, uh, rich dad poor out. Um, what's the quote, poor people say, I can't afford that. Rich people say, how can I can't afford afford it? Yeah. And it's not just for buying things. It's, you know, poor people say, oh, head PE would never get in a hot air balloon with me. And then I say, well, wait a second. How can I convince them to, to do this? And then how can I, not only that, how can I get the hot air balloon company to do it for me for free and actually make a special trip just for us? Well, that's,

Dan Henry: (02:03:57)

That's the thing with like, you know, I sell sales reps this or, or people that are, you know, if, if a client gets on the phone right. And they say, well, what if it doesn't work, you know, cause we have that. Well, what if it doesn't work? Yeah. Well it's like, well that question is why it won't work. You need to be asking yourself, how can I make

Andrew Stickel: (02:04:15)

It work? Yeah. How awesome is it gonna be when it does work? Right. You know?

Dan Henry: (02:04:18)

And, and, and if you can't get over that, there's no, the there's nobody in this world that can help you. Yeah. You know, dude, it's been awesome, man. Yeah. It's been fun. This has

Andrew Stickel: (02:04:27)

Been great. I think, I don't know what we talked about for two hours, but it's been a lot of fun. Yeah.

Dan Henry: (02:04:30)

Well I think, I think there was a lot of nuggets in there about, um, just how to think about things, how to approach things. Yeah. And you know, I think it's great. Like all these stories that wrapped up into, you know, how you did what you did, and also your approach and your approach to done for you and taking the whole, you know, the whole process on so that you don't get caught up in just half the process or a quarter of the process. Yeah. That's some awesome stuff. So yeah, dude, thank you so much for coming on, bro. Thanks for coming you man.

Andrew Stickel: (02:05:03)

Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Dan Henry: (02:05:04)

Absolutely.