Joe
Hey everybody it's Joe Troyer and welcome to another episode of show me the nuggets super excited today to have a very special guest none other than Ezra Firestone. For those of you guys that don't know, Ezra, man, he's been along around I feel like for a long time in eCom and coaching and SEO and I feel like sales, funnel optimization. And I think that Ezra really shines and building very smart businesses that are systemized or process oriented and driven so that he can get the scale that he's I'm sure after, when I look at Ezra and what he's doing. I think it's really fascinating between smart marketer and what he's sharing and training on for all of us entrepreneurs, and then what he's actually doing and eCom himself and then the software side of the business. I know that Boom! alone. My team did some research has done over $86 million in revenue in the last four years. So man Ezra without further ado Dude, thanks for coming on the podcast man.
Ezra
Hey man super happy to be here. Thanks for having me. apologize for the technical difficulties. Yeah, I've been in e commerce since 2005. And just kind of fortunate enough to have gotten in it really early fallen in love with it. And I've been doing it ever since. So super excited to talk to other e commerce folks, especially our folks who have businesses is mostly who we talk to and in times like these where you know, there's a lot of challenges and also a lot of opportunities.
Joe
That's awesome. So what I want to focus now we're kind of limited on time today there's gonna be a little bit of a shorter episode, but we're gonna make sure we jam it with content is I want to get back to the basics man, like obviously, you know, as of recording this Coronavirus has hit, COVID-19 happen, you know, the economy is changing a bit. I want to talk about really the fundamentals, the marketing campaigns that every business should be running and that are even more important now than ever because of a down economy.
Ezra
Yeah, I mean, look, the way to think about a business is what you're doing is relating with a group of people who are sharing a collective experience, you know, women over 50, who are experiencing the aging process and everybody telling them that that is wrong. That's boom. Business owners who want to sell physical products on the internet using paid advertising and sales funnels, that smart marketer, people who have Shopify stores who want those stores to perform better that's zip fi. So it's like you have this group of people, they're sharing a collective experience and your job as a business owner, is to engage them in a conversation through content around that experience, get them to subscribe to you and find value from you and then ultimately offer solutions to the problems they face also related to that experience, that's your products. And so, you know, you might be in a situation like I am with boom where my supply chain is limited at the moment. So I can only offer so many solutions to the problems they're facing through products, but what I can can do is focus on audience building at this time because, you know, internet traffic is up 40%. And, you know, all the bricks and mortar stores and all of the people who sell products that are categorically not relevant to the time like luggage, coolers, you know, things like that.
They're not in the ads auction so the advertisements are much cheaper than they have ever been before ad prices are down 50% so you can use paid amplification at this time and content that is that because there's more consumption happening, articles videos like the one we're doing right now images, memes polls, any kind of content that's related to the group of people that you serve and their life experience that they will find entertaining and enjoyable that ultimately leads them to either become a fan of you on social, become a follower on YouTube give you their email address. You can use this as a time to build your audience so that when you are back to selling your audience is bigger, cheapest time to build audiences in the history of advertising. Since 2012
Joe
that's really interesting. And at the end of the day, it's, it's like you said, it's all about building that audience making the connection and then and then serving them. So even if you can't directly monetize today, right, you still need to build the audience. And it's 50% cheaper than it ever was. So yeah, I agree. Now's the time to build that audience. It's not it's not gonna get any easier.
Ezra
Yeah, and it's, you know, another way to think about it is you know, Coronavirus has not dried up demand, you figure America we got about a $20 trillion economy, and it's down 4% like that's a recession right. But there's 19 point something trillion dollars of GDP happening of commerce happening and it's just being redistributed, right? It's it's certain categories are going crazy. House products, tactical gear bullets, you know what I mean? Like certain categories are doing extremely well and certain categories are suffering. So there's a reallocation of demand, but there is not a
There's anything an increase in demand. So one other way to think about it is what could you create that could serve the demand if you if you have a product right now that is not that you're not able to sell, do things like improve your cash position so don't pay your bills. Don't pay your amex bill. Don't pay your rent, don't pay your mortgage like keep your cash on hand. You can renegotiate your, Amex will give you an eight week Furlough on that bill. You know, you can renegotiate it's a good time to renegotiate deals, renegotiate your rent, renegotiate your mortgage, renegotiate your interest payment, it's a great time to negotiate and use this as an opportunity to improve the cash position. If you have inventory, run a sale, get money in the door. And that's that's what we did. We we ran a three day 15% off sale on products that we had high inventory of which we never discount more than 10%.
So it was a big discount and allowed us to get some cash flow in the door because who knows what the next couple months are bringing I mean, I have an idea some level of viewpoint on what they are bringing but good, good time to get cash in the door if you possibly can good time to build your audience, good time to look at what offers can you create that might be relevant to the current environment like, you know, if you're an internet person, there's a lot of people trying to come online right now who don't know how to do that you could consult, you know, there's just like, there is opportunity.
And everybody's most instinct is like fear, panic anxiety. And if you have baseline, fear and anxiety and panic about anything, right, like, for example, I have 100 employees who count on me to pay their paycheck. I got 60 hippies who raised me who I'm supporting, I have all these. I grew up on an intentional community long story. But the point is, any kind of baseline anxiety I have around the success of my production cycles are brought to the surface now with this newfound uncertainty, uncertainty in the economy. And so if you carry any baseline fear, it's going to be brought up and so the compulsion is to act to respond. Out of that intense state, but you got to not let that happen. You got to just breathe, come back to center and take measured action in the direction of your goal, not action that is inspired by fear, panic or anxiety, because that will ultimately be bad for your business. If you're responding and taking action from that mental state of mind, no, we're not here to talk about psychology and philosophy. But I was raised by psychologists, a psychologists and philosophers and so just a quick little side note of like, Hey, how you approach your business dictates the results you get.
Joe
I think that's super important. But at any point, I mean, at the end of the day, my email inbox is flooded like I've never seen before. Right? And that's because of that impulse that you just talked about. And it doesn't mean that people are making the right decision. Probably they're making the wrong decision, but they're just worried, right? They gotta be doing something. They think something's better than nothing. So I definitely agree with that. And we're trying to communicate and help people but obviously there's a there's a fine line like between adding value and
Ezra
yeah, and you know, people are looking for entertainment. I mean, look at Tiger King.It's like people are looking for the opportunity to non confront this an opportunity to remove themselves from the intensity of the moment and consume something or learn something or like, you know, consumption is at an all time high. So it's a good time to put out content, it's a good time to make offers, it's a good time to offer consulting and education. It's a good time. You know, there is the upper middle class who's got plenty of money who's not you know, I mean, there's, there's social like classism is real in terms of there are different classes of people with different financial means, well, the people in the middle and upper middle class, even if they've lost their jobs, they still have expendable money and they're spending that money.
So you know, if you were serving a market that is middle class or above, like it's a fine time to make offers, you know, if you're serving markets that have less access to capital and resource then maybe it's not the best time in the world to make offers. Maybe it's just the time to make to, you know, build audience like let's say you're a local business. If you're a local business, you should be running ads in your zip code with coupons for when you reopen. Hey, you know where the pizza shop down you know, over here on on sixth and Stanton and you know, we as many of you know us here's a picture of a couple people eating our food This is the picture of our building. We can't wait to see you. Give us your email address and your first slice when you get in and 75% off or whatever I would be doing lead generation all day long. I was a local business right now.
Joe
Can you walk us through a little bit of the sale that you guys just did? You said obviously kind of unprecedented sale for built right? You never discount more than 10% drop it? What were some of the main
Ezra
so the reason I'll just tell you about why we did that. That was before we knew if fulfillment warehouses were going to be considered essential. And we were worried we would not be able to ship we Didn't know you know what was going to be shut down and what wasn't and so we were like okay we have to improve our cash position such that if we're not shipping for four months, we've got enough money to pay salaries and things like that. So, so we quick did a sale and prior to that the first two weeks of COVID like March 13, let's say March 13. To the 25th so 12 days, we were not talking about Coronavirus at all we wanted to be the place on the internet where you could come and not have to just be normal Beauty Tips not just smart marketer, I have no choice but to talk about it. It's a business owner and brand and it's affecting all business boom. I had the choice I could not talk about it. I could just talk about beauty and aging and cosmetics and have it be a place where you could just live your life as per normal and consume content you enjoy. Then when I got worried that we weren't going to be able to ship product and I looked at our cash position and I thought it would be better to have more cash in the bank.
I was like well we better take are the products that we have the most stock of and discount them higher than we've ever discounted and then we said, Hey, listen 10% of the profit from the sales will go to direct reliefs. COVID-19 fund which is out there supplying essential medical gear to healthcare workers in need. And so we kind of like . It's the only time since it started. Since Coronavirus, started and at all that we have mentioned COVID in our marketing in any way, shape, or form, you said, If you shop this sale, you're going to be supporting folks who need you know, some of the money from this is going to go to support folks in need. And what that did was give people a way to feel good about their consuming because they could feel like hey, some of the money I'm spending is being used for a positive outlet, and that makes me feel better about the purchase. And it worked is worked extremely well.
And so we did what we call the 332 or the triple Deuce which is sorry, it's actually the 2232 emails day one Two emails day two, three emails day three, only two buyers who have bought in the past and only ads to buyers not on social not publicly not to the whole list just to the people who know us like us, trust us love us tight sale, not a big hoopla three days only just kind of like low key sale designed to. And I can send you some copies of those emails if you want them
Joe
both to include those on the show notes, especially now more than ever, people do need to strengthen their cash positions. Definitely. Playing that should always be on somebody's mind, obviously, but especially right now, we don't know how long things are going to last. So yeah, and that's that's great. Um, when it comes to moving forward, what other things are on your mind in terms of promotions or campaigns that you're running? How are you adapting your marketing mat? Right so we move past that sale. Where's your Where's your head at?
Ezra
Is my camera all funny? There we go. I'm trying to think out how to get it to look a little like be zoomed out a little bit more but I guess I'm just going to give up on it's not you know anyone who's producing content you don't want to be modifying production quality midstream, but I was trying to do it. I was trying to be cool about it. It did not work for me. Now, look, we have had to throttle down. Okay, did I mention the inventory spot we're in where we only have five months inventory and all that I talk to you about that. You said okay, our supply chain is such Look, I produce my products in New York. Not the greatest place in the world to produce products at the moment because New York has more Coronavirus cases than any country outside of the EU I mean we have more we literally have more cases in New York than any other country in the world. So my you know my suppliers are shut down which is really bad for me because without suppliers I don't have product to sell.
And I run an eight figure business with, you know, a solid four to $500,000 A month in overhead, not that I'm not getting out of paying those bills, you know, so my staff salary and stuff so. So I took the, you know, volume that I took the advertising that I was doing, I spend maybe 25 grand a day on ads, and I throttled that all the way down to like eight grand a day. And I mostly throttled down awareness and customer acquisition advertising, I'm leaving, I'm going to keep serving my loyal customers, but I'm basically just not bringing anyone else in the door. So I've throttled my sales all the way down to about 40% of what they would be normally, which takes the two and a half months of inventory I had on hand and spreads it to five months. And I'm betting that within the next five months, either my supplier comes back online, or I'm able to get another supplier online because I'm working on that. So I had that basically take my very successful business.
Take it all the way down to just slightly above breakeven, so I could guarantee its operation because it's better to sell at 30% for three months than 100% for one month, right and keep operations Going so that's kind of like what I what I've been doing and in terms of promotion I'm not doing any promotion not running any sales. I'm not putting out any pre sale articles I'm just doing traditional content marketing as per normal my blog the content I put out on the blog keeping my subscribers buyers fans engaged, entertained, letting them shop, but I'm not bringing new people in the door, because I don't really have a choice, you know, at the moment. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And now let me tell you one thing real quick, which is I have an application for Shopify stores called one click upsell and I'm I process sales for Shopify stores for 4000 different stores and before Coronavirus, our average daily processing volume was 1.7 million now, two weeks later, our average daily processing volume is 2.6 million. We're up $900,000 a day. Ecommerce has grown about 40% since this all happened. So this is going to grow ecommerce it's gonna put us five years ahead of where we were.
Ecommerce was 12% of all transactions that happened The bag of chips you buy at the grocery store to the thing you order on Amazon 12% of all orders were happening online in America. This is going to fast forward our adoption rate of e commerce by a solid five years, which is really wonderful for anyone who sells products online. Because once this is over, there's a whole swath of customers who have never shopped online before, who are being forced to who are going to now continue to adopt that technology, which is really great.
Joe
That's beautiful. That's absolutely crazy. I would have never expected 40% I would have said definitely thinking 10 to 20, maybe 20 tops 40. That's nuts.
Ezra
I mean, think about it. Think about the baby boomers and Generation Y, which is essentially everybody in america who's over 50 those people didn't grow up with technology. Those people don't know about e commerce. There's a very small percentage of them who shop online well now they're all online. It's a huge and they and they have the most expendable income, the most money to spend. So I mean, it's a huge group of people. Who are coming on online and they're not going to leave once they understand the convenience of it.
Joe
Speaking of upsells, as obviously with that, you see sales funnels, you see lots of what's working, what's not? What's kind of the 80/20 in terms of upsells, somebody running an e commerce site right now, or helping a business run an e commerce site, and they're not doing any upsells. What would you advise them to do?
Ezra
So the thing to really understand about e commerce is there's only three metrics that matter. First one is cost per customer acquisition, how much it cost you to acquire customer, you should never pay ever more than double the amount of profit that you make on an order to acquire somebody in the cold pillar. So there's three pillars. The way I view businesses in three pillars of advertising awareness, people don't know about you yet. retargeting people who've engaged and not bought and loyalty people who bought before in the awareness pillar where you bring new people in the door You should never pay more than double your profit. If you make $40 profit on an order, never pay more than 80.
Because you won't make that back on the back end. If you pay 80, you can make that back. If you pay 90, you're not making that back. So never pay more than double for your cost per acquisition. And the goal is self liquidating customer acquisition. If you you show me a business that can acquire customers for the same amount of profit they make on that first order. I will turn that into an eight figure business because you have customers coming in the door and you're not paying for him. They're just coming in free. Now you got all these people you can engage upsell, cross sell. So average order value, sorry, cost per customer acquisition, CPA. Next is average order value, which is the question you asked about e commerce. whatever way you want to do it. You want to do it online, you want to do it on Shopify, you want to do it on Amazon, you want to do it in the tactical market.
You want to do it in the baby market, whichever way you want to do it. Three out of four customers who buy you'll never see him again for the rest of your life. Ever. So average order value is the second most important metric in all of e commerce, you have to get your average order value up, which means upselling and cross selling at every stage of the sales cycle, on the product page in the shopping cart post purchase one click upsells offering bundles, you have to do it because that three of those four orders are never coming back. And then the third metric is lifetime customer value. And that comes down to the 25% of people who do buy once or do buy twice, can you get them to buy three, four or 5678 times and that comes down to your ability to do content marketing, product launches and sales campaigns.
So those are really the only three things you ever have to focus on an e commerce cost per customer acquisition, average order value, lifetime customer value, and then the tools that you use to increase those things like average order value or upsells and cross sells which just go to zip fi.com zpify.com and now I've got a whole business based on how to Get the average order value up through upsells and cross sells. But it's better it's more important to understand the higher level of it than the actual technical tactical was only got 30 minutes here and I can teach it technical tactical on my site, but I have to get you to understand the reasoning for it.
Joe
So I like those metrics, you know, double is good. Usually you want to be dating or as close to it as quickly as possible. And I never really thought about the three quarters are gone forever. That really, they're never coming back.
Ezra
So again, they're gone. And and, you know, I have a 40% repeat customer rate on boom, which means 40% of my orders come from people about before, but that does not mean that 40% of people buy twice, it means that a quarter of people buy twice and some of them buy 345678 times, right. So you're losing, you're losing 75% 80% of people, they're gone. They're never coming back. They buy one thing from you and that's it. And that's in any business. Like that. So that makes it like much more important that you figure out how to, you know, increase that average order value through offering add ons through offering additional products through bundling products through offering discounts right after they buy via one click upsells you gotta get good at that. It's so important.
Joe
It seemed like a lot of people were just offering quantity breaks or selling the same thing on the upsell, is that something that you believe in and see still working today?
Ezra
So I offer one or what you just bought? Hey, you bought a broomstick trio get one more at 21% off and that is the best upsell that I have found. On the back end. Pre purchase I offer to upgrade Hey, you have one stick upgrade to a bundle. Or, hey, you bought this thing, get the next most complimentary item for that pre purchase. I don't do discounts on multiple although that's great for supplements and things but I Offering either upgrade to a bundle, pre purchase or add an additional relevant item, those are my two or I mean, I have, of course, two ounce for ounce, eight ounce, right
I've got sizes so that's a technically a cross sell through additional, you know, SKUs on the offer page. But my main two winning formula is pre purchase our get this in a bundle for cheaper and get, which is essentially get the next most couple most good things with it or just Hey, you bought this, this is super complimentary to it, get this two out of 10% discount and then post purchase. It's like hey, whatever you just bought, get more of that one time only at a bigger discount than I gave you previously.
Joe
That's great. That's easy when you talk a lot about content. What's working for you now and boom in terms of contact and staying in front of your audience, you know, staying Top of Mind, what's working to keep them engaged and get them to actually re Ordering, keep doing business with you. So
Ezra
the way to think about content is like, imagine your blog is like, or your email channel is like a television network with multiple channels. And you're gonna want most people only have one channel, and that's the buy my shit channel. And that's all they ever send is, hey, buy this stuff for me. And that's great. I'm a fan of that channel I buy from that channel, I'm into that channel. But if that's all you have, you're missing the point. Because the point is relationship building up, boom, I've got my sustainability channel, talking about sustainability and what we're doing in that regard. I've got my brand ambassador channel, which are customers talking about how they use the products and why they love them. I've got my articles channel where I'm talking about, you know, under eye circles and menopause and its articles about the experience of being woman over 50. I've got my social contest. I've got my sales, I got my product launches. So you need at least one piece of content from each channel every month. And ideally, you've got three or four channels that smart marketer there's Ezra on life.
There's Mollie Pittman on Facebook ads, there's Laura on each Email Marketing there's you know our conversion rate optimization channel There's our Facebook Live channel There's our webinars so all these different channels of content that you can subscribe to. And so that it's like less about every different markets going to be different in relationship to every markets different in relation to what content is good but the idea is multiple threads to appeal to the larger group and people can really pick and choose what they you know want to want to consume. Halo 5% internet I got around charge I got a plug my Give me one second. I my plugs outside. Sorry. I'll be right back.
Joe
All right, perfect. You go. Ah, so after you've been on quite the role the last couple years, right building, boom, building out smart marketer building out the software. I'm curious. What do you consider your superpower? Seems like you got a lot going on?
Ezra
Well, I think what I'm really great at is delegation and get in buying help. So you know, if scale can only come from outside yourself, so you have to get good at getting people to help you. And I'm really good at communication, goal setting, you know, giving people a roadmap and a vision and an autonomy and freedom and the ability to hone in their skill set. So I think team building is really what I'm best at. And I have, you know, over 100 team members now and I started with just me and so I teach a whole course and I can send you a link to the free mini course on it on how I think about team building and buying help because most CEOs are driving the car, and they're on the road taking the terms.
And at some point, if you want to scale you got to navigate, you got to get off the road. So you can see what's coming up, what's what's in the distance, what mountain terms where to go, and then you can give that information to the driver. And so, you know, I drove every department until I could outsource it and delegate it to someone on my team social media, copywriting, advertising, project management, you know, inventory and analysis data, you know, all those different things that happened in a company. Eventually you want to get yourself out of the day to day of those. And it starts with just, I mean, it's incredible. How much value you can get out of one person working eight hours a day.
A small team of four to five people can build an eight figure brand you don't need a giant hundred person team. I have I've been Like software 60% of my team is on the software side because software's like, you know, at boom, I sell a tub with glue in it. And zip if I sell a code base, so booms, you know, product side doesn't need a lot of employees, zipify needs front end engineers, back end engineers, keyways. Analysts, developers, so it you know, you don't need a big team, but you do need to get good at get buying help for your brand. And I think that that really is the thing that's my superpower.
Joe
Yeah, man, I would highly, highly agree. It seems like you have to be good at that in order to have everything going on that you currently do. I was watching one of your videos I stumbled upon, I was talking about the different business models between SAS and your training and e commerce and which one's the best we'll make sure to put that in the show notes. We don't have time for today. But nice little cool topic. I think that a lot of marketers that jump from kind of project to project and skill is marketing. We'll find a ton of value in. It seems like as raw work life balance is a big deal to you too, obviously, I'm sure Coronavirus has thrown a wrench in things a little bit. But walk us through a typical day for Ezra Firestone.
Ezra
So, you know, I don't know that My typical day is a fair comparison because I've gone through different phases of business from you know, do it yourself entrepreneur who's grinding 12 hours a day, who's 21 years old, who doesn't have any other responsibilities in life and can put in 12 to 14 no problem happily, you know, and also work a full time job on the side like I've had. I, too, like, so I've kind of traveled the gamut of different styles of relating to business. And what I've seen is that one at one point or another, most entrepreneurs experience burnout, and they overwork themselves and they make their work life their whole life and they don't make time For their body, and they don't make time for their relationships, and they don't make time for their hobbies, and they end up burning out.
And that seems to be a really, I went through that myself, that seemed kind of got lucky because I was in my late 20s. And it wasn't so much burnout as it was, hey, I need to get a life outside of my business, you know. And so I kind of be having been an entrepreneur from a very young age, I've learned that really, entrepreneurship is a marathon, it's not a sprint. And that if you can show up every day with a positive attitude four or five days a week and put four to eight hours into your business, that's plenty, because the game is a 10 year game, not a one year game. And so I would say if you're working more than eight hours a day consistent, like sometimes during a lunch, you got to do that.
But if that if the if the backdrop of your life is this work, grind, you're ultimately going to fail because you're gonna burn yourself out, you're gonna ruin your relationships, your body's gonna fall apart, like you have to figure out how to take care yourself. So now and I'm in a completely different stage of business. I have three brands. I'm the CEO of two of them, but I am I am. I'm 15 and a half years into my entrepreneurship journey. So I'm, it's not a fair comparison, but I will give you what, like an average day. So I'll wake up between seven and 8am 715 730. Have a pot of green tea, maybe an espresso, you know, sit on the computer for 30 minutes, 45 minutes, kind of answer some slacks and just check.
Just kind of do nothing work. Just enjoy it. You know, whatever. checking in with the team, see if anything happened, do whatever I want. I'll generally work out pretty hard, from 830 to 930, or eight to nine depending on the day or eight to 930 depending on if it's with a personal trainer. If it's on my own, I have gym, my house. Nine ish to 1030 ish. I'll make breakfast, hang out with my wife, talk about our day. See what she's up to. generally start my workday between 10 and 11. I'll work you know until two or three solid hours. Take a break for lunch, go outside, hang out my cat move around, come back in put in another session for maybe, you know, three to 530 or six and then be done. So I'm only putting in six hour days at this point, sometimes only four days a week. But I'm also, you know, not in a stage of business where I can do that. And there's certain days where I'll work much longer, you know, I'll have more, you know, I'll do eight to 10 hours in a day if it's something's going on.
But in general, my, the amount that I work have has decreased, and the impact of the work and I'm no longer actually doing anything, all I'm doing is talking to people about what we're doing, giving them feedback, providing strategy reviewing things, I'm not actually running ads or writing copy or building products, or I'm like not, I only talk to my team, really so. So that's kind of like where I'm at with business at this point. And it's great. I love it, but it's not really I don't know, I don't know that it's necessarily applicable to someone who might be in an earlier stage of their life. Entrepreneurship journey, you know,
Joe
definitely there is the the hustle. I think for any business just to get it off the ground to get it working, figure it out. There's definitely birds that you got to go through. But I find and I'm sure you find that way too many people stay there forever, for a reason of uncertainty and not knowing what's coming next. Right, and just staying in that mode in that modality instead of moving on. So cool to see that you have some work life balance in there as well. And it's not just all about Ezra Firestone, the internet marketer, you know, that's always nice to see.
Ezra
Yeah, I mean,the guru business, which is a word that I take issue with, but seems to be one that people like is the side business. It's, uh, you know, I like doing the blog. It's fun, I enjoy it, but it's not. It's not my main business, nor is it the most profitable business and it's actually been on a steady decline since 2016, because I haven't really been focusing on it. Now I have Mollie Pittman as the CEO of smart marketer, and I think it's gonna do much better with someone putting daily attention on it. But like, I haven't had the energy, space time to create courses, which is what makes this business go. So it's kind of been like dropping every year since like 2016. But I think it'll kind of rebound now.
Joe
Awesome, man. So just to respect your time, you know that you gotta jump. We'll wrap it up with one last question. So usually at the end of the podcast, they say like, Hey, we recommend three books, we do something a little bit different. I want to see what's the one book that made the biggest impact on the way that you do business.
Ezra
One book that made the biggest impact on the way that I do business? Well, I think stone soup. The children's book is a really good book because this guy, he comes to the town and he's got a pot of soup with some stones in it. And he says, Hey, I'm making soup, you know, do you want to join in and then he gets someone to bring potatoes and then now there's two people there and then they need someone else. By say we're making soup you want to join in and they bring carrots. And so he basically had a pot of water and some stones, but through enthusiasm and being the catalyst for creating a party, got a whole bunch of people to put put, you know, energy in and ended up with this really wonderful, amazing soup. And he started with nothing other than inviting people to enjoy a good time.
And my philosophy and business is have fun. First and foremost, you could die tomorrow, really, I lost a business partner, suddenly, out of nowhere it happens. Make truly good products that serve the world that are valuable that are that you're proud of, and be profitable. And if you can do that, at any level, you've won the game. The game is not build the biggest business. In fact, building the biggest business generally is kind of miserable, like I know, plenty of eight figure nine figure brands that wish they could go back to when they were a million dollars a year with 300 grand in profit at three employees. No overhead, no intensity, no stress. It's like the goal is have fun, make good stuff be profitable. And if you can do that at six figures, mid six figures a million dollars You have won this game. So that's what I would say.
Joe
Well man, that's absolutely brilliant. Well linked up to stone soup. Never heard that one first and we'll make sure to link up this marketer anything else also special specifically?
Ezra
You follow me on Instagram that's where I think most of the action is happening these days Instagram is the hot spot. So yeah, follow me on Instagram and thanks for taking the time and appreciate you having me on.
Joe
Yeah, man. Thank you so much guys. I hope you guys enjoy this episode look fantastic, fantastic day. We'll see you soon with another episode of show me the nuggets.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
