Webinars: The Secret Weapon To Making Your Business Stand Out
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What does need to change is you. You have control over that variable, right? And I always say there's two things that any entrepreneur needs to succeed. Sometimes when I go and speak on stages, people ask me, "Omar, what do you do to motivate yourself?" And my first answer to them is like, "You need to stop trying to be an entrepreneur "if you're asking this question." I don't need external motivation. I don't know anybody who's made it in business or anything successful in life in general who doesn't want it bad.

You think Kobe Bryant needed motivation and he was on YouTube watching motivational speeches so that he can get up and do his exercises and become a world-class athlete? No, he has an internal hunger. So if you want it bad, anything's possible. You'll figure it out. You'll learn what you need to learn. You'll take the courses. You'll read the books. You'll figure it out.

Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields, like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership, to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, the home service millionaire, Tommy Mello.

Before we get started, I wanted to share two important things with you. First, I want you to implement what you learned today. To do that, you'll have to take a lot of notes, but I also want you to fully concentrate on the interview. So I asked the team to take notes for you. Just text NOTES to 888-526-1299. That's 888-526-1299.

1-299, and you'll receive a link to download the notes from today's episode. Also, if you haven't got your copy of my newest book, Elevate, please go check it out. I'll share with you how I attracted and developed a winning team that helped me build a $200 million company in 22 states. Just go to elevateandwin.com forward slash podcast to get your copy. Now let's go back into the interview.

All right, guys, welcome back to the Home Service Expert. Today is going to be amazing. We have a guest visiting from way down under. His name is Omar Zenhom. He's an expert in leadership, e-business, and program management. He's based out of Sydney and New South Wales, Australia. He's a co-founder and CEO of WebNinja. He started that in 2014, and he's still doing that. And the

100 MBA, co-founder and CEO. And this guy's rocking it.

He's the co-founder and CEO of WebNinja, the host of the most popular podcast, The 100 MBA Show, which consistently ranks among the best business podcasts in over 30 countries with over 190 million downloads. From brick and mortar to e-commerce and SaaS, Omar learned the art of entrepreneurship from real-world success and failures, ultimately dropping out of Wharton's MBA program to build and manage his

his own companies. Now, though the 100 MBA show and Web Ninja, Omar has made his business to help others learn, teach, and grow entrepreneurs, and I'm very excited to be on this podcast. How are you today? - It's good to be here, Tommy, and congrats on all your success in your business, man. - You know, it's one of those things where I tell people, I'm like, perseverance and focus, the one thing Gary Keller, just focus on the one thing, and I tell people, the hustler had to die.

I had to grow out of being a hustler and really learn how to manage people. It's crazy the growth you've had and the journey you've been on. I just would love to hear your point of view on why you started a podcast.

Tell me about Webinar Ninja and where you're at today and where you're going. - Yeah, sure. To go a little bit further back, my first career was an educator. I was a teacher. I was actually a high school university teacher. I taught five classes five days a week. I was taught English as a second language. That was my career for 13 years. And it's funny 'cause my dad was in sales, in car sales, which is typically what people think of sales. And I used to go to work with him when I was a kid. I used to work at the wash bay and I used to just

learn from him in the showroom, but I kind of always shunned away from sales because as a child, you see sales as this kind of up and down thing. One summer we're having a holiday or having vacation at Disney World and next summer it's the backyard, right? So it's a little bit scary as a child growing up in that environment. So I went into teaching. I thought I was stable. I don't want to go to the army. I don't want to be a doctor. I'll be a teacher. But

As I was teaching in the classroom for about 10 years, I was side-hustling, I was building businesses on the side, I was interested in the internet. This is circa 2002, so it's very early on, there's no PayPal, there's no WordPress, there's nothing like that. It's really hard to build a business online, but I was still interested in these people that would just

create things out of thin air, this idea of entrepreneurship. And I started building some small things on the side as I was teaching, but eventually, I always say my frustration in my job and my lack of autonomy outgrew my fear of making that leap into entrepreneurship. So in 2012, that's when I kind of went full time and started the $100 MBA program. The $100 MBA podcast really just started out because

I wanted to help other entrepreneurs who felt like they didn't know the basics of business, they didn't know how to get started. As simple as having a profit and loss sheet or knowing how to market or sale or idea validation even. Things that people feel like they kind of need a badge of honor or sort of like a permission slip to start a business. It's like you don't actually need to go to business school. You don't have a monopoly on the education. You can learn this on your own. And that's kind of where the genesis of the idea of the $100 MBA came out.

We launched the podcast in 2014, August of 2014. And quickly we realized that this has some traction because it was a different kind of podcast at the time. I thought I was late to podcasting in 2014, but I'm glad I started back then. But like you said, just a lot of persistence, a lot of just grit. I really wanted to produce a great show to help people out. I wasn't really worried about how I'm going to monetize this right now. I just wanted to create an encouragement

an incredible podcast to help other entrepreneurs. And I wanted to share my own journey, share my own findings, things I've learned, mistakes I've made, you know, don't do this, do that. And quickly, the show got traction. We won Best of iTunes, which is awarded only like 12 podcasts, Best of Apple Podcasts every year. And that really

gave us some momentum. And during that time, I was building my own software company, which is Webinar Ninja, which is a platform that helps people teach and present and sell their products and services online with live webinars, recorded webinars. Basically, I wanted to leverage any experience I had in the past from teaching and kind of use that in my own businesses, whether it's teaching on the podcast or creating a tool for teaching with webinars.

And I didn't want to neglect my past because I felt like that was my differentiator. That was maybe my advantage in the marketplace in some way. So yeah, that's kind of how it all started. Of course, I'm glossing over all the details. There are a ton of failures along the way. Every success I've had starts with a failure. So we can get into that if you'd like. Yeah, you know, it's very, very impressive. I mean, I've had a lot of people on the podcast. I was actually, that is Wednesday, I was on Grant Cardone's podcast on Monday.

And he asked me a really interesting question and I want to ask you the same question. What's more important, sales or marketing? - I would say marketing because if you're not, people are not aware of you, if you have a great product and people know about it, I would say it would be marketing because

If you have a great product, go sell it. Sell it. Now obviously sales is not totally, it's one of my favorite things to study. It's not totally useless, but you have to advertise. You have to be out there. You have to be known. Otherwise, it's very hard to succeed. One of the biggest pain points for any entrepreneur is being ignored. And it's busy out there. It's crowded out there. And if you don't invest in marketing, it's the one thing I always tell people, you should always have a budget for marketing.

There's no reason not to do that. And there's lots of products that are self-service, whether it's software or content that you can create an online funnel and walk them through the hand. But if you don't have any kind of leads, it's hard to sell to anybody. I agree. I went down and I was like...

You need leads, but you know, Grant Cardona's done a great job of putting himself out there as a social in his podcast and what he does in training. One thing he said about a decade ago that I really respected is he goes, "I'll always double down on my brand. "Always be putting money into my brand."

You know, when you help people, Zig Ziglar once said, "If you help enough people do what they want, "you'll get everything you want." And I subscribe to that 100%. So with the webinars, you know, with all this stuff now, Zoom, we're on StreamYard right now. - Yeah. - I still think there's a lot of things that I don't know about webinars. I've done a lot of webinars.

But it's a tool that I want to bring in. And I want to bring it in. You know, I've got a garage door company and I do a lot of other things, but that's like 99% of my core businesses. And if I wanted to educate realtors and inspectors and contractors about garage doors,

what would be the best way to use a webinar? And I could do a home service crowd, so how could they use Webinar Ninja? - Yeah, I speak about this a lot on stage. I'm going to a conference in the Gold Coast next month, in a couple weeks, and my topic is webinars.

A little bit of a spoiler there. Anytime I talk about this topic, I say like, today I'm gonna be sharing with you all the strategies and the best time to run a webinar and how to convert them and a great formula for you to follow and all that kind of stuff, right? But you're gonna put that aside for a moment. We're gonna get there, don't worry. We're gonna talk about it. All of this is irrelevant if you don't understand the whole reason why you're doing webinars. The whole goal of any webinar is to build trust with your audience.

you have to use this medium. It doesn't matter what tool you're using, it doesn't matter what kind of copy you're using, all that kind of stuff. The whole reason why you're doing this is because you want to fast forward your trust building process. Because we only buy from people we trust, right? Whether it's the latest iPhone, because you bought an Apple product before, or you see that everybody's using it, so it's gotta be good, so now you're trusting them, right? Webinars allow you to do this because it's as close as possible

for you to be in person with somebody because they can go back and forth, ask questions. A lot of people have just simple buying questions like, do you take Amex or something? Do you have some sort of warranty? Is there a way for me to get this delivered in a week? Whatever it is, right? And for you, it's a very simple thing. Of course, it's right on the website, but no one's going to scavenger your website, right? So a webinar allows you to

take care of rebuttals very quickly and build trust with your audience 'cause most of people don't wanna shop around. Most people just like, hey, this person looks legit,

They solve the problem completely, what I need solving. And price is reasonable, it sounds good, let's do it. A lot of people don't want to go through this agonizing comparison and decision making. And webinars allows you to build trust quickly. And if you just keep that in mind, it's like if I have to build trust by audience, then I gotta do everything possible to build trust and not break trust. That means I gotta make sure that they know quickly that I have their best interest in mind.

That's why it's really good to say, hey, this is who we're for and who we're not for. Quickly disqualify people, which probably are not in the room, but the point is that they feel like, okay, you're not just trying to sell anybody anything. The other reason why I love webinars is because

It allows you to show your passion for your product. There's something about seeing somebody passionate about something really gets people going. Like, wow, this person really put a... And you're hearing the story behind it, understanding that like, oh, there's a person behind this business. You know, it's a family business. There's somebody that actually rolled up their sleeves and, you know,

started on their kitchen table and hearing all that gets the customer jazzed about doing business with you, right? So all that is really what webinars is all about is giving you the opportunity to build massive trust with your audience so that you can close the sales cycle so that you go from, I want to learn about your services. I want to learn about what you offer to, uh, where do I sign up? You know, and that's really what I love about it is because I don't,

see anything converting better than that because of that interaction. So when we talk about the perfect webinar, are you a fan of A-B testing to get the perfect webinar and running that three times a day and just being there for questions once you get the conversion? And I hate to get into the analytics, but it's true. If you got a winning formula, you might as well repeat it. Why come on and do the same thing over and over instead of just answering questions and running it again? Yeah, so I...

see webinars very similar to you know like a comedian do a set right

they don't create five, 10, 20 sets. They maybe have one or two sets and they just go out there to the nightclubs, to the local clubs in their area and they just go and they do their set and they work out material and then they take notes later, okay that got a laugh, that didn't get a laugh. And webinars are the same way. You want to get as many reps as possible. One of the things I say is the hardest part of doing webinars is doing your first one. Just get on there, get some data

that you can work with. Understand, okay, wow, people really were excited about that and the chat started to buzz when I was talking about this. I got a good response here. This headline or this title for my webinar got more registrants versus, it's the same topic but the way I titled it was different and therefore I'm gonna go with that title instead.

So it's great for you to just perfect a webinar so that you can run that play over and over. I'm a big believer in double downing on things that work. So you just work on one thing, if it works, keep doing it. A lot of people take their foot off the gas and they're just like, okay, what's the next thing I can do? What's the next marketing strategy I can pull off? No, do it until it dies, right? And then that's it, I've exhausted the market, which is gonna be very hard to do with this topic.

But if you do, okay, now let's move on to another topic. Let's move on to another webinar or workshop that I can give my audience. So yeah, I'm a big believer in iterating and improving. I always say, if you say something 10 times, the example I give is,

Everybody's got that crazy uncle in their family on Thanksgiving who tells the same story every year, tells people the same story, the same jokes, right? Why is his delivery so good? It's because he's been saying it for 30 years, right? So if you say something more than once, if you say it three times, four times, five times, the delivery of your content, if you know it like the back of your hand, you're gonna just perform at a higher level because you're so comfortable with it.

A lot of people just say, "Oh, I know my stuff. "I'm an expert, I've been doing this for 20 years. "My dad's been doing it for 20 years. "I know this, it's in my DNA." That's great, I probably don't doubt that, that you know this, but do you know how to deliver it? That's a totally different thing. Do you know how to communicate it in a way that's engaging, that people understand, that gets people excited? That's what you need to work on, is on the delivery. When I work on speeches or work on webinars,

spend maybe one third of the time on the content and then the two thirds of the time just rehearsing the content, making sure I know my beats, I know exactly when to stop, get them to think a little bit. If you have a mic drop moment where you're gonna give them something like, wow, I never thought of that before, and you give them a fact, you give them a stat, it's important for you just to pause for a second.

and gets them to think about it, and gets them to say, "Oh, okay, great, that makes sense." Because if it's just the same rhythm, it's the same speed, people will start to just kind of tune out. - You know, I got two speaking coaches right now, and I was working with one two weeks ago, and he goes, and we were watching some of my speeches, and he said, "Everybody laughed and clapped, "and you just kept talking." He goes, "Can you imagine a comedian "when they say a great joke? "Do you see how much time they pause, let it sink in?" You know, I'm a student for life,

and this will be my last speaking coaches. I wanna get better. What is the best time to do a webinar? And I guess it depends on the industry and where you're at on what continent and whatnot, but is there a special time that you think is better attended?

- Yeah, we did a lot of research on this and we have one of the, we have the number one ranking blog posts on Google for this topic for that reason. And yeah, we go into details of time zones and your industry and all that kind of stuff, but there are some rules of thumb that everybody can follow. We stay away from Mondays and Fridays. Mondays people try to catch up and Fridays people are tuning out. You have to remember, some people that are gonna be attending your webinars are not business owners. They might be working for the company, they might be gathering information.

they might not be as committed as you are on a Friday, so that's not the best time. So we recommend Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. We think those are the best days. And generally, between 10 and three is the best time in North America.

10 and three people have time to catch up in the morning, answer to whoever they gotta answer, email inbox, all that kind of stuff. And they have some time either while they're eating their lunch or before their lunch or whatever it might be. 10 to three is a sweet spot is what we look at. I,

I often run the same webinar back to back in two days just so I wanna, 'cause I have a global audience and I like to cater to North America and Europe and then I cater to Australasia, you know, Australia, New Zealand and Asia the next day at a different time so that way I'm catering to both of my audiences and making sure I capitalize on it. You know, it's interesting that I find that the retention for webinars and the engagement in webinars has really gone up big time in Europe.

And Europe has, like, kinda has been a little bit behind the US when it comes to, you know, attending webinar workshops, you know, the marketing side of things in the internet world. But they're really attentive. They're really asking questions. They're there as if it's a call like we're having right now. Much more so than the US these days. I think the US sometimes will have it in the background. They'll jump in when it's important, things like that. - How long should a

a webinar, I was gonna say podcast. And I'm gonna talk about that next. - Yeah, so what I recommend for those who are starting out is to

have all your content as if you're gonna run your webinar for 45 minutes. Why do I say that? It's because 100% you will go over. You are not ready to be that precise yet. It's hard to get that kind of content and be that good at knowing your timing that you do it right on the minute. If you're a beginner, do 45 minutes, that way you can finish in an hour, so like the actual time for the webinar that you're allotting to the audience is an hour, and that would include your content, your Q&A,

any kind of call to action or offer you're gonna be doing towards the end or at any time, that's one thing I recommend. There's a technique that I learned actually from my speaking coach, Michael Port, who runs Heroic Public Speaking, and he does a lot of webinars, and one of the things he does when he's selling something, I love this technique because it's incredible, is he runs a webinar back to back, same time, but one day after the other. The reason why he does this is that

that he makes the first webinar full workshop, where it's just like, you're gonna learn how to do X, Y, Z. His expertise is public speaking, so he says, he talks about scripting, for example, like when you're scripting your speech, this is what this webinar is about, right? And this is not a sales webinar whatsoever, right? So when they're going through the workshop,

a lot of people are going to ask questions like, so, you know, how do I know how to do X, Y, Z? And they'll be like, well, that's actually in our program, but we're not going to be talking about that today. We have a webinar tomorrow demoing our program. If you'd like to attend that, you're automatically going to be registered for it. You're going to get a link.

Okay, great. So it lets people just relax a little bit, learn, focus on the workshop, get the value, all that kind of stuff. And then, the next day, where everybody's registered already to the next webinar, when he shows up and does his demo for his sales pitch for his actual product,

he can freely sell without having to feel like he's hoodwinking them or having to say, "I know that this was a workshop, "but now I want to sell you something." They're going in knowing they're being sold. And then you got buyers in the room, which is an incredible strategy to kind of just have, like break it up. Maybe you want to do like a 30 minute webinar that's a workshop, and then tomorrow you do the sales pitch for 30 minutes. - Love it, and what do you recommend?

as far as follow up, there's email, there's SMS, there's social media. I'm gonna go back, probably did this in the wrong sequence, but what's the best way to get people to opt in because now TikTok's growing, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and then you've got email marketing and now SMS is becoming a real thing as long as you're getting real opt-ins. - Right.

When it comes to registration, the best paid advertising that we've seen work for webinars is Facebook lead ads. So this is where they actually opt in for something right on Facebook. They don't leave Facebook and that way it's easy to see the conversion 'cause of all the different blocking of tools and iOS and all that kind of stuff. So you could offer something in this ad,

like registering for the webinar and say, hey, we have this live workshop, get them to register, and then you can get an EA or you can just use a tool like Zapier or something like that to zap those leads into the webinar registration. That way they're registered to the webinar. And that will get you the lowest cost per lead for the webinar.

And I even take a step further, 'cause I've been doing this for so long, it's okay for me to go a little long tail. I get them to register for something completely different on topic, but maybe like a workbook or a guide or even like a 30 minute workshop or video or something like that, or a template. They get on my email list and then with an automation sequence, I invite them to the next webinar. And then they go on my webinar,

allows me to have a low cost relief. It depends on your audience when it comes to SMS. The US is totally comfortable with this. If you have a US business, especially a local business, I would definitely collect their phone number so you can do SMS reminders, 'cause the American population is quite comfortable with that. I find that outside the US, besides Canada I would say, but Europe,

especially like Australia, New Zealand, they are very sensitive to that and they don't like getting messages from companies. It feels a little bit too intrusive for them. So you just gotta know your audience, you gotta know where you're based, so that's what I would say. Now when it comes to the follow-up,

One of the things that we built into Webinar Ninja is email sequences inside so that people can be able to set up automated emails so that they can follow up with their registrants with their offers. This is where a lot of people drop the ball. 30% of all my sales come from follow-up emails because people may not attend the live webinar and watch the replay. People might attend the webinar all the way to the end and not see the offer. Some people will watch the whole webinar, right? But as soon as they get off the webinar,

their son or daughter needs to go to practice, they totally forgot about it, and they need a reminder. People need reminders. We are super busy. They got a million distractions, a million notifications on their phone. They have physical distractions in the real world with their family and friends and their own personal needs. So it's okay to send a couple emails reminding them of the offer, reminding them of the webinar, all that kind of stuff to watch the replay. So I definitely recommend doing follow-up

And I would say a series of three emails immediately after like two hours after the webinar, the day after the webinar, and then two days after the webinar is my recommended follow-up. My mind is going crazy. So the listeners are used to my randomness and ADHD. One of the biggest things I find is an A-plus player will produce a thousand percent more than a B player. And have

Have you ever used webinars for recruiting and giving an overview and just getting a lot? Have you ever heard of anybody doing that? Just to say, join the webinar to see if this career is for you. - We have actually a lot of users that use it for HR, for recruitment. They do it for training as well. Like they're hiring like 20, 30 people at one time and they want to be able to onboard them easily. They use webinars to do that. I've done it myself with my own team because sometimes

We know that not everybody's going to make the cut. So when we hire for a position, for example, like customer service, let's say we need two positions filled. We'll hire four or five people, right? And just be transparent. Hey, some of you are not going to make it.

past training because this is a special place and we want superstars on our team and some of you will make it. So understand that you are trying out right now. You are in tryouts, like back in high school you're trying out for the baseball team or something. And it's okay to be transparent about it and we pay them for their time and we use webinars to train them and onboard them and recruit them so that way all the recordings are there so they can review it.

and they can have a chance, sometimes they're nervous and they're not gonna be actually listening in the moment, they're thinking about themselves too much. So it's good for them to watch the recordings so they can review when they're doing their own work. And also just, it's a good record for you so that you can watch and say, okay, maybe I need to improve the way I train, the way I be able to, and review your actual footage. I actually get my EA to do some transcription so that way I can be able to, and so easy with the AI tools now to do that, so I can just go ahead and review

review the transcription and say, "I think I was a little bit too long-winded here," or maybe I didn't explain enough here. - I love this stuff. I got so many more questions. I might go a little bit over, but I want to jump to podcasts because I started about six years ago

And I'm happy the way things have gone. We get 50,000 downloads. I don't get any sponsors on my podcast. It's really, I haven't really wanted to turn into a revenue stream. I just, this kind of stuff, this is a podcast that I'm here asking questions, learning as a home service guy.

and learning about tools, if I want to have a CFO, like the best in the world at home service, they'll come on the podcast. But if I'm really looking to grow my reach, I mean, 190 million downloads, the $100 MBA show, like, if you had to give me three tips outside of the box, obviously there's some things that I guess would be international. But if I wanted to grow the following and just deliver more value.

- So I've been running the podcast for nine years and let's break it up into three phases. Like the first three years, how I marketed was different than the next three years and the last three years I've run the podcast. So the first three years is just brute force guerrilla marketing. Like I would just try to get as many subscribers and listeners as possible. I would go to every meetup,

every conference I can go to. I would get on any podcast that would even, you know, I didn't care if they had five listeners. I would just go and show up and be a guest on their podcast and try to get those five listeners to be listeners of my podcast. Basically, I would just leverage my time in the worst way possible so that I can get as many listeners. One of the out-of-box things that I did, a lot of people, you know, they look at our podcast and they see the success and they don't realize, like, you know, I rolled up on my sleeves big time and they don't even believe the story, but

At the time, I was living in San Diego and we launched a podcast. This is like maybe three months into the podcast. The listeners are starting to grow. But I wanted to get people that are thinking about starting a business and always wanted to start a business but don't know how to get started and our show would be perfect for them. So Nicole, who's my wife and my co-founder, we just went

loaded up our cooler, our little roller cooler that we'd take to the beach with ice and a bunch of soft drinks. We went to the boardwalk in San Diego. We had a whiteboard with us and we just wrote on the whiteboard, you know, free cold drinks for iTunes love.

or at the time, podcasts were on iTunes. So iTunes Love. And people would be like, what is that all about? And I'm like, oh, we have a podcast called The $100 MBA. Do you know what a podcast is? 2014, remember. No, what is that? Open up your phone. See this app is podcasting. Okay, great, awesome. And I just have one-on-one conversations with people, five-minute conversations. This is my podcast called The $100 MBA. It'll help you start your first business if you want to start your first business. Give it a listen. If you like it, give us a five-star review. If you don't, you can just delete it. Don't worry about it.

And they'd be like, oh, they hear about my story and whatever. And like, really? I can just take whatever I want from the cooler? Yeah. Like we had like, you know, lemonade and root beer and all that kind of stuff. Right. And it was just like, I wanted to talk to people that I would be talking to on the podcast. I want to understand their pain points and what they're struggling with and what's stopping them from starting a business and what their fears are. But more importantly, I was just trying to get the word out about my podcast and things like that maybe are not like super scalable, but

There's something about hitting the pavement and talking to people one on one that just allows you to understand that this is what business is. It's hand to hand combat. It's you going at it and understanding that hey, even if I just get one more listeners day, that is momentum. I think I have two, three, four, five. At the end of the day, we spoke to over 100 people which is incredible. And it was just a great time. We're out in the sun, it's the beach.

I could have spent my Saturday morning in worse ways. So those are some of the things that I did almost on a regular basis, like every week, just trying to reach out to people, talk to people, figure out how I can influence them or help them with the podcast. What's great about a podcast is it's free.

Like you're not selling anything, you're actually just giving them free content to help them in their life or their business. One of the things I really focused on is trying to get on other podcasts like I know that you do. And I just did that on Hyperdrive my first year. I got on 50 podcasts. I just really just tried to get as many podcasts as possible. I basically looked at the top 500 podcasts in my genre which is business.

and I said 500 podcasts, I just went all the way to the bottom, I started from the bottom to the top, and that way, when I get to, let's say, podcast number 200, I could say I've been on all these other podcasts, these are some of the samples of me speaking, so you can know that I'm not a fool, and it just allows me to have a bit of credibility. Also, I think it's a blessing in disguise

to start out small and talk in front of smaller audiences because you're not good enough yet, right? You're still working on your communication skills, you're working on the delivery of your message, you're trying to figure out, you know, am I being clear enough, am I breathing into the mic, all that kind of stuff. This allows you to perfect your message and your presentation skills. So by the time you are able to get to a top podcast and be a guest, you are more than

much more polished and able to deliver a better performance on the mic. So those are some of the things I did in the first phase. Second phase of growing a podcast is you're gonna have to put some money behind it. So one of the things I did is I, again, same mentality of like how do I tap into these communities and try to influence to get people into my podcast? And that is basically sponsoring other podcasts because

it's easier to convert people if they're already listening to podcasts. So I'd go to smaller podcasts that have maybe 500, 1,000 downloads a month in the same kind of genre of business and say, hey, I'd like to sponsor your podcast for the next six months. How much is that gonna cost me? And it'll surprise you. People will be like, oh,

Give me $2,000. Great. Awesome. I'm now in their ears for six months about my podcast. Yeah, it's not a huge audience, but 500 to 1,000 people now are going to move over to my podcast and I have those listeners. So it's a great investment for you to do that. And I did this before they had all the tracking tools and Chartable and all this other stuff. I just did it

on goodwill and knowing that I'm gonna meet this person, the podcast host, one day in a conference, and it's just better for them to know that I'm a supporter of their show and it all comes back somehow. So I did a lot of that, sponsoring other podcasts, getting in front of other podcasts,

And then I started working on my speaking career. I invested, like I said, in a speaking coach, in a voice coach, and I really made an effort to try to get on as many stages as possible. And it's not just because you're gonna be talking to people that are in the crowd. All these conferences get recorded. You can use these recordings, cut 'em up, put 'em on social media, make reels out of 'em, all that kind of stuff. And this allows you to have a little bit more reach and a little bit more

of a bigger brand to promote the podcast. So that was kind of the middle stage. And the last stage is, again, putting some money behind it. But now I'm doing it at a different level where

I'm sponsoring creators, newsletters, their YouTube channels. I just want to be kind of like attached to the people that have a really strong brand with their audience. So I would go on Twitter and follow some up and coming creators that are in my area that like, you know, they're starting to become popular. You know, they're not making millions yet, but they have a great following and they're really undervalued in terms of sponsorship dollars. And I just DM them and cut a deal.

and try to get out there. So that's really have been my strategy from just a hardcore marketing standpoint. But all of this does not matter if you're not working on making your show amazing every day. You gotta, every time I step up to the mic for my podcast, I am thinking to myself, how can I be better than the last episode? Because

I'm going to be judged on this episode. Somebody's gonna find my podcast and it'll be the first time they're listening to my show and they're gonna stumble upon this episode I'm about to record and they're gonna make a decision, should I subscribe, should I continue to listen, should I listen to another episode? Is this person legit? I have to be aware of that. A lot of people,

today don't want to say like, oh, be yourself and don't worry about being judged. No, people judge, okay? People have the right to judge because they're going to be spending their time and their effort listening to your podcast. Why should they listen to you and not Joe Rogan or watch a Netflix special or listen to music, right? They have so many options. You have so much competition out there. So every time I get up to the mic, I'm like, I got to make this a better show than it was yesterday because that's the only way to survive and keep going. Right.

We're putting a lot of time and effort into the podcast. We've been for a while, but it's one of those things where I'm never content. I'm not satisfied. I love conversations like this. One of the biggest things I try to do is find somebody that's really good at some things.

and extract information of what I want, knowing that everybody else has these, how do I apply this to home service? Should I start a podcast? One of my questions is, especially for the listeners, I have a podcast, it's for home services, but trust me, most of the people I get on are in home service. I'm always looking for answers outside, and just because I'm in garage doors, I talk about HVAC, solar, roofing, pools. We find out how to do that in my industry,

- Should somebody start out, everybody now says, start out with a niche. You did business. And you've been doing it nine years. And 190 million downloads, you're very successful. For the people out there, and actually I had an incubator of podcasts on the podcast years ago. And he's like, what are you trying to solve for? Are you trying to get customers?

are you trying and he really had a really good sequence of how to choose how to start a podcast but in your uh professional opinion if you were to start out now maybe home service maybe another niche would you try to go business or leadership or management or would you just

make it more detailed and get into a niche? - So you can have a kind of general topic like me, business, but you can niche down on how you deliver it. So my niche was that most business podcasts are conversations or there's a few hosts, maybe a bunch of banter, maybe a couple of guests. That's usually most podcasts in business in my category.

What we do is business lessons, so I'm teaching a lesson. It's short form. It's very action-oriented. I get them to do something, and then they come back the next day, and they learn something new. So basically, we merged. This is not something that we came up just out of thin air. We just basically combined two ideas. Nicole, my co-founder and the producer of the show, she loves languages, and she was listening to podcasts like Coffee Break French and Coffee Break Spanish, which were like language lessons.

Right.

every day you'd learn a little bit of Spanish, right? And we love business podcasts and we love learning about business, but we thought no one's doing lessons and business. Everybody's kind of just either doing an interview or doing some sort of founder story or something like that. And we wanted to kind of take that idea and use it in our genre. So we kind of niched down in that way. So if I was gonna recommend anybody starting a podcast, the first thing I would say to them is podcasting is a long-term game.

meaning you're not gonna see whatever results you're expecting immediately. You need to commit to podcasting at least for a year, I would say 18 months, especially if you're new to just even presenting or talking on the mic. So you could start to see

if the trend of what you're looking for is moving in the right direction. It just takes a while, but it's a good investment. The best thing about podcasting is it's evergreen. I have people listening to podcast episodes I recorded five, six, seven, eight years ago. So it's not like these episodes just disappear like a story on Instagram. They're there for people to look in your back catalog and listen to. So it is an investment of time. Now, I believe that

But if you are interested in personal development, if you're interested in just getting better as a person, in learning about interesting things, if you wanna meet interesting people, like podcasting has opened so many doors for me. I've met so many interesting people, it's incredible. One of the first people I met in podcasting, his name is John Corcoran, he runs a great podcast, Business Revolution Podcast.

and he's introduced me to so many people. In fact, just the other day, he's introduced me to Michael Jackson's bodyguard. Like, what in the world? How would I ever be able to do that if I wasn't in the world of podcasting? So just having a podcast opens a lot of doors for you to meet interesting people, improve yourself, get different perspectives. I can't tell you how many times I've been on a show like this talking to somebody, and after the show, I'd be like, you know,

I think I'm going to change my mind about this thing that we're talking about. I thought one thing, but I got a new perspective that I didn't even consider, right? And this is important as a business owner for you to start understanding that there's many ways to get to where you want to go, right? And,

And maybe you see the world in one way, but there's other ways to get there. So I think podcasting is a great way for you just to improve and to grow and also just be a better communicator, all that kind of stuff. So if that's just your goal and you just want to be able to build insight and network,

then podcasting is a great tool. If you're trying to build the podcast so you can improve your business, this is also a great option because even if you're very niche, say for example, you are an electrician and you want to do the electrician podcast, people that love this topic are gonna love your podcast and they could be future employees of yours. They could be future customers of yours, maybe as vendors or whatever it might be. So like, yes, you're not gonna be the next Joe Rogan, but

That is not your intention. Your intention is actually to be able to be the person in your little niche in your market. - You know, personally for podcasting, it opened up so many doors. And for me, as I've always used it, I had a guy tell me, "I listened to your first 100 podcasts, "it took me to 15 million. "I listened to your next 100 podcasts, "it took me to 30 million." 'Cause I felt like I was on your journey. I was picking up the same questions you were going through.

And I'm trying not to make the podcast like a timeline, but it just happened to be in business. I was facing certain questions and now I'm like, okay, how do I go to that next level? And I get the people on the podcast and it's like me feeding myself. This is so important. We partnered with private equity and I said, I'm going to still write books. I'm still going to speak on stages. I'm still going to do podcasting because this is what I need for me.

It's almost selfish at this point, and I'm glad a lot of people get a lot out of it. But there's so many things you just gave. So much information, so much great information. I mean, I've got a million notes. The difference is, between me and a lot of people, Omar, is I implement to a fault. And a lot of times I go down the wrong direction. I get back up and I keep going.

- That's what it's all about, man. That's what it's all about. I have this poster of Rocky behind me. Rocky's my favorite movie, and it's because Rocky didn't have a motivational coach. He just understood that life is about moving forward. It's about doing the things that are painful despite your fears, despite your feeling tired, despite the fact that everybody thinks you're a loser, right? He's got his hands up at the top of the stairs in Philadelphia. No one's around. He's cheering himself on.

He's being his own motivator. And as entrepreneurs, we have to remember that no one's coming for you. No one's gonna come and just save the day and swoop you up and be like, now you got a successful business. You gotta figure it out. You gotta push yourself to get to the next limit. You gotta be able to say, hey, you know what? I'm working too much. I gotta hit the gym. My body's suffering. My family's suffering. I can't be my best self if I'm not fulfilling myself in those areas. So you

You have to understand, and I love this, this is a great reminder, I love this movie, I love this character, Rocky, is because he has to become his biggest fan. He has to say, you know what, everybody thinks I'm a loser, everybody thinks I can't do it, I'm the biggest underdog of the century, but why not? Why not go for it? Why not push for it? I have an opportunity here. One of my learnings in life is that life is just a combination of opportunity and struggle.

You're gonna have opportunities in your life, but they're not gonna be without struggle. You're gonna have difficulties, you're gonna have fears, you're gonna have issues. It's never smooth sailing. You can't enjoy the sweet without the sour, and that's what I love about this reminder, this poster, is that we have to push ourselves. No one's gonna push us. - Where are you from, Omar? - So, originally I was born and raised in Long Island. My parents are Egyptian background. - Okay, I was like, there's no way this guy's from Austria. I can't wait to come out. I'll be meeting you here this year.

I got a million questions, but I'm just curious. So you've been podcasting for a long time and there's so many people out there, they get into business for freedom, right? They get into business because they don't, they're single working nine to five watching the man at the top make all the money. And my life is,

since I started a business and I started mowing lawns when I was eight years old with shoveling snow. It's not been an easy road. It's full of sacrifice. It's full of long hours. I think I can give you 10 things. They don't delegate well. They're poor at time management. They don't hire people that are smarter than them. They don't hire people for their weaknesses. They tend to hire more of their strengths. They have somebody to get along with. They're underfunded when they get started. They don't have any clue what financial statements are. And I can go on and on. And

A lot of people think it's going to be, man, if he could do it, I could do it. And it's true. And I tell people, I'm just a dude from Detroit. I didn't live in a big house. Parents didn't have a lot of money. They gave me a lot of love. Never had a golden spoon, never had anything handed. But if I can do it, you could do it. But it's not like I'm going to give you this secret guide. It's a lot of work. I can tell you how to get a six pack, but you got six times more likelihood

Six times more likelihood to be a millionaire than have a six pack in the United States of America. Wow, I like that. And I'm just curious for those out there that are struggling and trust me right now, it's more than ever. Interest rates are up. The lead volume is so far down from where it was during COVID. We were deemed essential as home service people. We had record years and people are like wondering,

what's next, what's going, and a lot of people say what's going on in Ukraine, Bidenomics, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. - Yeah. - But what do you tell people? I mean, you've been doing this a long time. You've listened to a lot of people. - Yeah, one of my favorite quotes from Jim Rohn, who's like the father of personal development, is like, a lot of people asked him, you know, what is the next 10 years are gonna be like? And he says, I know exactly what the next 10 years are gonna be like. It's gonna be very similar to the last 10 years.

nothing really changes in the world. There's gonna be struggles, there's gonna be difficulties, things will change politically, things will change economically. This happens every generation, happens to everybody, whether it's wars, whether it's economic disasters, whether, you know, like, we didn't go through a world war. We went through COVID, but we didn't go through a world, like, most people go through some serious stuff in their lifetime, right? So this is just par for the course. What does need to change is you.

You have control over that variable, right? And I always say there's two things that any entrepreneur needs to succeed. Sometimes when I go and speak on stages, people ask me, Omar, what do you do to motivate yourself? And my first answer to them is like, you need to stop trying to be an entrepreneur if you're asking this question. I don't need external motivation. I don't know anybody who's made it in business or anything successful in life in general who doesn't want it bad.

You think Kobe Bryant needed motivation and he was on YouTube watching motivational speeches so that he can get up and do his exercises and become a world-class athlete? No, he has an internal hunger. So if you want it bad, anything's possible. You'll figure it out. You'll learn what you need to learn. You'll take the courses. You'll read the books. You'll figure it out if you want it bad enough. And wanting it bad

When I say that, I'm not just saying this is like this bravado and just, it can mean something for you. Maybe one bad for you is like, I'm sick and tired of being strapped for money. I'm sick and tired of having late payments on my bills. I'm sick and tired. You know, frustration is a great motivator, right?

I'm sick and tired of being behind on my promises to my family and telling them that next year we'll buy a house. Whatever it is, you gotta find your why. You gotta find your thing that's gonna motivate you to like, I gotta figure this out, this equation of business or success in my life. So that's number one, you gotta want it bad.

Number two is you gotta understand that if you wanna build a great business, you have to be a great entrepreneur. One of the things I love doing is reading biographies. I love reading the story of Phil Knight, the founder of Nike and his book Shoe Dog, or Elon Musk, or whatever it might be. The reason why I like reading these books is because I read 'em and I realize, wow, this guy ate glass for 20 years before he saw a dime.

Am I willing to do that if I want to build the next Nike? Am I that kind of person? Like the person that builds that kind of company is not the same person that builds, you know, the local pizza shop.

So you have to change, you have to become better. So usually when your business is not growing, it means that you're not growing. You need to level up so you can make better decisions, you can make better hires. And this is what's so confronting about business, is that there's no bulk. You can't escape it, it's so honest. So for me,

This has been one of the things that have been the biggest struggle for me is because I had to come to terms that like, I'm not good enough to build the business I want right now. I need to get better. I need to figure out, I gotta hire some help. I gotta, you know, get a coach. I gotta, you know, expose myself and be around people that are interesting and are doing crazy, amazing things. One of the things I do is I actually go on vacation with people that are a few levels higher than me. So I can be like, shoot,

I need to get to this point where this guy's paying $500 for a dinner, no problem. These are the things you gotta do in your life sometimes to just come to terms like you're not what you need to be right now. You need to get better, you need to improve, and it's very confrontational, and it's not for everybody, but that's what business is about. Or you can just stay where you are, and you can keep your business where it is, but one thing I learned about business is that there's no Stacey's in business. You're either growing or you're dying. A lot of people are like, oh, Jeff Bezos, he's greedy. He has no choice, he has to keep growing.

Otherwise, it's gonna die. He's gonna get eaten by some competition. That's just the nature of commerce. Now, we can get into the details of how much money and all that stuff and the way he's treating people. That's all irrelevant. The point is that he has to either grow the business or it will die. So either it's gonna exist or not. So this is how you gotta see your own life and your own business. And you also gotta know when to cash out.

This is another thing a lot of people don't talk about. You gotta know when to just say, you know what, time to fold 'em. Kenny Rogers, right, the gambler, right? When is time for me to say, I did what I gotta do, this is enough for me to sustain myself and my business, time to sell my business, time to downsize my business, time for me to turn into a lifestyle business, because everything has limits, including your life.

Right? So you got to think, I'm 40, I'm 50, I'm 60. How long am I going to be doing this for? Maybe I need to start thinking about who's going to take over. You can still own the business, but have somebody run it for you. But you got to think about when is it time for me to just say, all right, now I got to focus on other areas of my life. I've built a great empire and a great business. I've achieved all my goals and my dreams in that area. What about my health?

What about my family? What about my community? What about my spiritual health? What about all that kind of stuff that we probably haven't focused on for a while and you're gonna find yourself malnourished in those areas. So I always think that you also gotta think about not what right now you gotta do, but what do the next stages look like and when is it time for me to fold them? - Very, very hard for a true entrepreneur, and I say a true entrepreneur, we like building.

We're never content. I don't talk about football. I don't go, you know, I have a lot of fun. We do a lot of cool stuff with the group. And I genuinely want to sit down and talk about business. And it excites me. And it's in my DNA. And I tell everybody, and man, I was wrong. I'll tell everybody now.

you build a company to sell it for the most part. And even if you don't plan on selling, it needs to look like it. And people say, I'm not selling now. Who cares if my financials are screwed up? I'm not selling now. Who cares if I got a bad culture? Build a business that's sellable at any time. Because you never know what tomorrow's going to bring. And I'll tell you this, if you could, maybe I'm wrong about this, but from my experience, it's been the real

freedom comes from selling and knowing that that's not the end of your life, the end of your chapter. Well, A1 Garage Door Service will always be in my DNA. I'll bleed A1. My face is on the side of the truck. But I went through a process. I retained almost half of the company. And you hear the horror stories of P&E and this and that. And I'm a capitalist. And I believe Elon Musk and Bezos, they should continue because they're providing a lot of jobs and a lot of people are paying taxes that keep the economy going. And that they're innovators.

But why wouldn't somebody build a company that they could sell on? - It's scary because you gotta judge yourself. One of the best exercises you do is you sit down for a day and you pretend you're buying your own business. If you bought your business today, what would you change? What would you do? What are the first hires you'd make? What are the first fires you'd make? If you had to fire everybody on your team right now, who would you rehire and who would you not rehire? These are great questions to ask because-- - Oh, I like that.

Yeah, because you could then...

Transform your business because you're seeing it from a different perspective. And not only, like you've mentioned, build your business to sell. It's also great to do that because if you ever want to raise capital, it's essentially the same thing. They want to see the books. They want to see if this is worth investing. Is it worth for me to raise capital? Even if you're looking to get a loan even. Just to have you have your business in good shape so that you can easily hand it over and say, "Hey, I'm proud. "I built a great, well-oiled machine "and I have everything in order."

It's a hard process to do that in your business just to clean things up because when you're starting out, you're just kind of like running as you're putting your clothes on. You're just kind of like, how do I get this going and how do I make money and how do I make a profit and all that kind of stuff. So you're just really kind of doing all that and then you gotta go back and visit those days and all those documents and clean things up and just make it all work. So it's very healthy to do that and the reason why people don't do it is because one, it's a lot of work. Two,

it's scary to kind of have to put yourself to that standard and judge yourself and say, "Hey, my business is not good in this area. "I need to clean it up." Right? And one of the things I always recommend is that most of the people will not do something they need to do because it's painful. This is something I learned from one of my coaches, Dan Martell.

We don't grow into pain. We don't do things that are painful. So if something like this, you know you have to do it, you're probably just saying, too hard bucket, I don't want to do it right now because there's so much admin work and there's so much things I have to do to kind of organize. Then if you know that, just hire an administrator, hire an EA, a part-timer. Be like, hey, I need you to make sure we have this in order and this in order and this in order. Train them a little bit. Get them to do all the admin for you so you don't have to kind of worry about it and then check on their work. The point here is that

Get them to sign an NDA, that's fine. But the point is that you gotta figure out a way to do the hard things, even if it means hiring somebody to do the things that are painful for you. Otherwise, you're just building something to basically pay your bills. You're creating a job for yourself, really. You're not building an asset. And building an asset's the name of the game in business, so that you can have these assets, you can leverage these assets in a lot of ways, and then eventually have an exit.

- You know, I've really pushed for a lot more of my teammates and coworkers to get an executive assistant. The problem is some of the most advanced gifted individuals, it's not even a delegation problem, it's a trust issue. They never do it right. They booked my ticket wrong, they didn't put my TSA number in. And I watch this and I say, have you ever seen a really, really great salesperson and you move them to a coach and you're like,

holy shit, they suck at coaching. What was I thinking? And the same thing with like a lot of leadership. They go, I'll just do it myself so nobody screws up. And I'm okay. I've been very content with people not doing something right as long as they learn from it.

And right now I have an executive assistant, I've got a personal assistant and a chief of staff coming on. So I have three people that just work on me. Mike Jordan and four coaches. I've got a lot of coaches. And literally like I'm always learning and I'm literally like observing my team and just giving them the help here or there and giving them a resource. And I always tell them, millionaires they cold punch, they get up really early. I mean I've been doing a lot of this stuff too but millionaires are hard workers, they pray every day, they show up for dinner.

Billionaires, they don't do their laundry. They don't really do much. They know who to call and they're not afraid to just take an educated guess. And they say, I'm gonna pull this person in. I'm gonna ask for help and I'm gonna implement. And it's crazy because I've got to know a lot of billionaires and I know lots and lots of millionaires. And what a different mindset

It's crazy because you don't see the billionaire outworking anybody. I see all these influencers out there that are writing books and really great. And they're really smart. They're like, I'm going to outwork you. And I'm like, good. I'm going to delegate you.

I don't want to work 24-7. I never brag about burning the midnight oil. That's not what I'm... What does that working one person mean? You know, 800 employees, if there's 70% of me, that's 56,000% of what I can do.

- Exactly. - Really get help. My superpower, I don't wanna ask you what yours is, my superpower is asking, A-S-K. Always asking. I'm not afraid to ask, I'm not afraid that the answer is a no. I never get offended if it's a no.

I ask all my marketing advertisers if they'll do this for me, if I do this for them. I just ask, I say, "Can you introduce me to these people? "Can you do this?" Somebody asked me yesterday on my podcast during the Q&A, which is my favorite thing to do, is they said,

How do I become number one in this niche? I don't remember the exact question. And I said, there's 50 states in the United States. Go find the next door state next to you that'll never compete with you. Find the top person on Google organically or on pay-per-click or on LSA or GMB or whatever. Or find the number one guy on Angie or HomeAdvisor or Thumbtack or ValPack or whatever it is. And go there and just ask them.

If you don't mind, I look up to you. I want to learn more from you. I'll even pay you. I want to be just involved in what you're doing and I want to learn from you. You'd be surprised who will pay it forward. Success leaves clues everywhere. - Totally. My advice to anybody who has a hard time delegating is twofold. First one is there's a great book called Buy Back Your Time, Dan Martell. It's all about how to leverage your time, which is your greatest asset.

we have to realize we only have 4,000 weeks in our whole life. Most of us have already run through 2,000 of them, so you only got 2,000 weeks left, right? It's over after that. So by you doing administrative tasks, do you think that's a good use of your time? You have to get over, it's a mindset thing, you have to get over the fact that you don't have unlimited time, okay? So you need to leverage somebody else's time to get things done, things that

you don't need to do that somebody else can do. That's the first thing I would say. The second thing is, I learned this from my buddy, Carl Taylor, who runs an agency called Automation Agency. And he got me over this by saying to me, you are 100% correct. No one's going to do it as good as you. You know, no one's going to make as little mistakes as you because you care the maximum amount when it comes to your matters. 100%. But you need to accept the fact that it's

healthier and better for somebody else to do the work even if they do it up to 80%. That means 80% of the time, if they do 100 tasks a week, that means 80 of those tasks are off your plate, 20 of them they screw up, who cares, 80 of them are done, right?

you would have to do all those 80 tasks. And it just unlocked my brain. I just gotta be okay with 80%. 80% is fine. And if they screw up, it's a teaching moment, it's a learning moment, it's a chance for them to learn and for me to coach and to train and get them moving on so they don't make the same mistake over and over. If they make a mistake again, right, if they make the same mistake again and again over and over, that means they're not learning and you gotta be okay with...

firing people with saying, "Hey, you're not a good fit. "I gotta find the next person." A lot of people that resist this because they're like, "Oh, I gotta train somebody new, da-da-da-da." But you have to get in the habit of having that standard of saying, "Hey, if they're making the same mistake going over,

I gotta rehire. So I definitely agree with you. You have to start leveraging your time. In the beginning, of course, you're scrapping and you're trying to make it happen, but once you have some money to invest in talent, you gotta do that. You talked about coaches. You have a lot of coaches. You're learning constantly, you're improving. I always say this is the best investment you can make in your business is investing in yourself because you always take that asset with you. Your skills and your knowledge, you always have. You sell your business, you still have your skills and knowledge. You go bankrupt, you still have your skills and knowledge, right?

people go to prison and come out of prison and they still know how to do business because they did it on the streets. The point is that this is a great asset you can never get rid of and never be taken away from you. It's amazing because it's yours, tax-free, which is great. So it's like always invest in yourself, always invest in your knowledge and improvement, and just start enjoying being a lifelong learner, understanding that

As good as I think I might be right now, I know in 10 years, 50% of the things I know and believe today are going to be wrong. I know I will say to myself 10 years from now, 'cause I know 10 years ago I was wrong about half the stuff I thought I believed in, or thought was true, or thought was the right way to do something. So that keeps you humble when you're learning. Keeps you humble, understand like, I'm learning, I'm improving, probably,

I'm gonna move up a level in 10 years and I'll be wrong about these things, but it's okay. I'll improve. And I love what you talked about with the billionaires. Those high performers, people that have done well in business, they understand that their job is making a few key decisions. Their asset in the business is

making high quality decisions. So they make their whole life about how can I make sure I make the best decisions? Whether it's advisors, whether it's getting coaches, whether it's going to the gym, getting some sunlight in the morning, having breakfast on the balcony, whatever it is that inspires you to make better decisions. Because at the end of the day, your decisions are gonna influence the business in a big way. It's gonna impact you in a big way. Look at Warren Buffet, the guy's like,

89 years old or whatever he is, and all he does really all year long is make a few key decisions that keep his wealth going. - Well, he's had a lot of trusted advisors. One thing I was gonna say, if you're looking to hire a personal assistant, executive assistant, and you're absolutely right, and I read Jess Bezos' book and I study him about how he makes his decisions, when he makes his decisions. He doesn't start his day till 10 because he's got four hours to get started, and basically this is decision time.

What if you just recorded and said out loud what you were doing? I'm going to book a flight. Now, let me show you how I do this. I go to this website, then I go to this website and I make sure I got a direct flight. Now, I'd like to fly at this time. Here's where I enter my number. Here's one thing I want you to know. I love the miles from here and here's how I use them. And here's kind of my critical process of how I make decisions. And just go through your email and say, I've known this person for 14 years. Here's what they're involved in. And just categorize those videos.

And if you get a great student and a great EA, they'll pick it up very quickly, especially if you make it easy for them. And they say, I've done it enough. And then you just create SOPs. You just transcribe that stuff, have a VA, or you can find something on Fiverr. There's a million sources I could give you. And I've got a buddy that just I talked to. He's high level business. He said, I hired a VA for 500 bucks a month. And he goes, I cannot believe how great she is.

He has perfect English. My life is so much easier. And then the deal is how can I replicate myself? What is something only I could do? I'll tell you the only thing. The only thing that could come from me is when I praise somebody because I'm not going to have my EA call somebody and say, Tommy's happy with you. I think it means something for me to take the time to do that.

And when I have to have a one-on-one and truly be there. But everything else, pretty much, and I always say, I always look at what else could I delegate? And like, I have a housekeeper and we're frustrated with a few things. And I'm like, it's our fault. If she doesn't do the stuff right, did we train her? Do we expect her to be Nostradamus and figure stuff out? And that's the one thing is like,

I make manuals and standard operating procedures and checklists for the easiest things. And I've always said, there's either no system, the wrong system, or the third one, which is the most important. The current system is not being followed. And that falls on you. You got to take complete ownership of that.

- Totally true. I learned this from Derek Sivers, who wrote a book, Anything You Want, which is this idea that when you build a business, you're building your own utopia, or you're building your own perfect world, and you get to make the rules. So one of the things that, he created a company called CD Baby, it was the first kind of online e-commerce store where independent music producers and the musicians would send their music to him, and he would sell it on the site, and they would send the CDs out to the customers. So he literally had a physical warehouse office,

every time somebody had asked the question, hey, Derek, how do I do X, Y, Z? He'd gather everybody and they would have a manual. This is back in the early 2000s, late 90s. It was literally paper and pen. It was like a binder. And he would just like, all right, let's write this down. When this question comes up, this is what you do. One, two, three, four, right? And then the next time somebody asks the question, hey, how do we do this? Let's open a manual. Do we have this answer in the manual? Oh, no, it's not there. Let's add it to the manual. Blah, blah, blah. And then

they just get in the habit of just checking the manual. Okay, here we go. This is what I have to do. Okay, it's in the manual now. I know what to do. And what's great is that when you make a hire, everything is already documented, like you said, in those SOPs. And now it's even easier with Google Docs and all these tools and Notion. There's all these ways to do this. But even if it's just physical paper and pen, like Derek did it,

It's better than them coming to you constantly. One of the things I always say is that if you have all the answers and they can't do their job without you, then you don't really have a business, right? If you don't-- - You have a job. - Yeah, and it's not a fun job, right? The point of the EA and the point of the team is to make your life better, make it more enjoyable. Imagine somebody in your company has a baby and you could just send a message, hey, send so-and-so flowers.

And you don't have to think about this and you know you've done the right thing. And what a joyful feeling of bringing that brightness to somebody's life. And it's just taken care of, right? And a lot of people are like, well, what about...

you know, credit cards and what if they like embezzle money? It's like, this is so easily solved. Just give them a card with a limit that is no more than their salary, right? And they're not going to get paid if they embezzle. That's it, over. You know? - It's crazy. People get taken advantage of, it leaves a scar on them that they can never heal. Because one bad experience, so be careful, but you're right, is I don't open my own mail. I don't open up my own email. I mean, I look at everything that's important that gets,

dissected to me. What is your, if you had to pick one thing, you know, there's a book, 10% or 10 X is better than two X and Dan Sullivan. And I'm trying to think,

Anyway, if you had to give your superpower, what is it? If you had to pick one thing, it can't be a multitude. If you had to say, this is the thing that separates me in the world. Probably teaching goes back to teaching. I've always been a teacher, whether in the classroom, whether it's in my own team, coaching my team to get better, whether it's me using teaching as a sales technique and selling my own products and services or speaking on stage. One of the things I learned early on in teaching is the students don't care about how much you know until you show them how much you care.

They're not interested. They're not interested in what you have to tell them until they understand, I care. I have your best interest in mind. I want to make sure that you win. And this is what I like to, that's my superpower, is whether I'm speaking on stage, whether I'm doing the podcast, whether I'm trying to train my team because they screwed up and be like, hey, listen, the reason we're having this conversation right now is because I'm investing in you. I want to see you win. I want to see you shine. I want you to be...

say I did the best work of my life at this company, right? And this is why we're having this conversation because you made a mistake, let's learn from it, let's see how we can do better, right? And let's make sure we don't do it again because I don't want to have this conversation again because, and I, a lot of people don't do this and I feel like it's really important is to,

hold them accountable a little bit and just say, hey, I believe in you. Don't make me regret that. Don't make me regret me investing in you and hiring you. I believe that you can do it. Now you gotta believe in yourself and you gotta do the job I'm asking you to do in the correct way. And it just kinda wakes them up a little bit and say like, they're right, they gave me a chance. They invested in me. They don't skip a beat on salary. They make sure that I'm taken care of. We go on team retreats.

"What am I doing?" It's like they wake up out of a stupor. They're like, "Oh, okay, yeah, let me focus up now. "Let me get it going." And sometimes you're gonna have to do that every once in a while, every year or so with employees because, again, I can't expect them to want it as bad as I do or care about the business. They don't own the business. They're not building the legacy, right? What they're doing is they're building their own career through our business and

I have to accept the fact that I will have to coach them and help them through the way. And sometimes it's gonna work and be great, and sometimes we're gonna have to say goodbye in part ways, and that's okay. Not for everybody. I love using sports as a metaphor. One of the most successful basketball teams of all time is the Chicago Bulls. A lot of people say, oh my God, that was amazing. How did they win all those titles? Well, look at the...

Look at the players they had on the team. Look at the coach, they had Phil Jackson. Phil Jackson's got nine rings, right? Look at the organization, all this has to happen. So if you want a winning team on your business, you gotta have great players. You gotta have A players, you gotta have people that know how to win, that want it bad, that are willing to sacrifice and play their role, right? And be able to fit into the system that requires them to win.

I would say my superpower is teaching and helping people improve. - I'm gonna send you my new book Elevate. - I love it. - 'Cause I have a philosophy that if you sit down with people who understand their why, what their goals, what their aspirations, what their dreams are, and you write them down and see the vision of how to get there through your tool, which is your business, they'll work 10 times harder. And then instead of saying you need to work on this, say, remember you said you wanted to take your wife on a 10 year anniversary?

you wanted to take it to Hawaii, all expenses, you told me that was gonna cost 20 grand, I know a way to get there quicker. Let's look at these KPIs. If I show you how to accomplish your goals a little bit quicker, and I'm on your team and I'm your cheerleader, wouldn't that make it, it's just so much easier to motivate people. Couple more questions, how do people get ahold of you? If they want to reach out, obviously you've got the podcast. - Right.

The best way is to actually join our email list. If you just go to 100mba.net, you can just sign up for one of our freebies and be on our email list. We have a resources page. We have a templates page where you can download templates. The reason why I say that is because I actually still write our own emails. This is my form of communication. I still write all the emails to our subscribers. And if you reply, I will reply.

and I'm still the guy that replies to emails. I'm not huge on social, but if you could follow me on Facebook or on Twitter, I'm @TheOmarZinhome on Twitter, OmarZinhome on Facebook, and Instagram as well, OmarZinhome. So that's kind of where I live mostly. And yeah, I'd love to help people. If you send me an email, I will reply. It might take me a bit of time, but if you're stuck in your business and you're trying to make some decisions, let me know.

- And Omar, I'm gonna give you a chance to close us out. We talked about a lot of things and you, I really, really enjoyed this and I can't wait to meet you in person. So anything you feel like the audience needs to hear. - One of the things I learned along the way in business is when you're dealing with people in life, whether it's your employees, whether it's your family members, your friends, if you are judgmental, if you're finding yourself being hard on people,

This is a sign that you're not being kind to yourself. This probably means you're hard on yourself, and not in a good way. I'm not saying it's okay to push yourself, but when you're putting yourself down, right?

You can't afford to put yourself down. Business is as hard as it is. You need to be your biggest cheerleader. You need to make sure that you have your own back. So whenever you catch yourself kind of like being judgmental of somebody or criticizing somebody, it probably means this is how you treat yourself. When you screw up, you probably inside, you know, call yourselves names or something. You can't afford that. You need everything on your side in business to

to succeed, including yourself, having yourself on your side. You gotta be your number one supporter, believer, because sometimes you're gonna find yourself alone. You're not gonna have, everybody's busy, your friends are busy, your family's got other issues, your spouse might be taking care of other things, and you're having a low moment in business, and you can't allow yourself to go to that place where you have that negative talk, talking to yourself in a bad way. A lot of business is a mind game. You have to be able to master that,

and quickly turn those negative thoughts and say, I can do this. I can turn myself around. Let me figure out what's the next question I got to ask myself so I can improve and get myself out of this situation or improve my business in some way. So that would be my advice. A lot of us, we give up. We have struggles because we don't say the nicest things to our own self. We probably put ourselves down more than anybody else. I love it, man. This has been amazing. I really appreciate you jumping on today.

- It's been great, Tommy. Thanks for having me and I wish you and everybody who's listening an amazing day. And guys, this is a gift, man, that we are on this earth, that we're alive, that we're breathing. If you have your limbs, if you have your health, you have so much to live for. You have so much to do. You have this opportunity. You're exposed to this idea of business and this chance to improve. This is, just alone, that's a blessing. We gotta just be thankful for that. Just be happy in the fact that we have these opportunities. - Absolutely, and I'm very thankful.

I was talking about that on stage. I made myself very vulnerable the other day. I made a deal with Jesus. This isn't my platform for religion, but I'm keeping my word. And a guy called me up two weeks ago and said, hey man, I don't know you, but I had an epiphany. And I think you were on your hands and knees and praying. And I don't know what you did or what kind of deal you made, but

It seems like everything's going right. And he goes, this never happened before. I'm not just, I'm not your savior. I'm not an angel. But I want you to know that keep your word of what you said you were going to do if, you know, God did this for you. And I was like, all of a sudden I got goosebumps and I'm like, oh my gosh, this is crazy. So I'm thankful, very thankful. And thank you for coming on the podcast. Can you stick around for a quick minute? Sure, no problem. All right. Thank you. Take care.

Hey there. Thanks for tuning into the podcast today. Before I let you go, I want to let everybody know that Elevate is out and ready to buy. I can share with you how I attracted a winning team of over 700 employees in over 20 states. The insights in this book are powerful and can be applied to any business or organization. It's a real game changer for anyone looking to build and develop a high-performing team like over here at A1 Garage Door Service. So if you want to learn the secrets that helped me transfer my team from stealing the toilet paper...

to a group of 700 plus employees rowing in the same direction, head over to elevateandwin.com forward slash podcast and grab a copy of the book. Thanks again for listening and we'll catch up with you next time on the podcast.