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>>> Get Daily Success Mentoring By Becoming A Member At How To Think<<<------Are you struggling to grow your business?From tackling day-to-day operations, handling employees, and overcoming unexpected or unforeseen issues…It can be difficult to find the time to work on your business instead of working in it!You may already know entrepreneurship can be challenging, especially if you're striving to grow your business alone. If you have been struggling to grow your business, this is for you!In this episode, I talk with Andrew Stickel about the mindset and skill required to build and scale a successful business. He shares his insight into investing in yourself and your business through coaches and mentors, and he shares the mindset that has allowed him to grow his business to a massive 6-figure company that is projected to do 24 million this year! In this episode, Andrew and I are going to cover:How To Approach Done For You ServicesWhat No One Tells You About Coaching ClientsHow Selling High Ticket Is EasierWhat Can Happen When You Accept An Unexpected OpportunityHow To Go From 300K to 3 MillionWhat Is The Biggest Challenge With EmployeesHow To Deal With Piracy and CompetitionIf you got value from what you heard here, please be sure to subscribe and rate this podcast! Bonus points for you if you write a review! ;) — SUBSCRIBE & FOLLOW — Subscribe to Dan’s YouTube ChannelFollow Dan on FacebookFollow Dan on InstagramFollow Dan on TwitterClick Here To Get Daily Success Mentoring By Becoming A Member At How To Think— TRANSCRIPT — Dan Henry: (00:00)In this episode of the, How To Think podcast. We had Andy Stickel on, who is the founder of Social Fire Starter. He does marketing for lawyers and he was able to go from a 1 million a year business to a 4 million a year business to now a million dollars a month and projected 24 million this year. And we sat for about two hours and we talked about a lot of things. We talked about growing businesses. We talked about mindset. We talked about managing and dealing with employees and just everything in between as well as how he got started. And we told a lot of awesome stories about growing and leveling up. And I really think that you're going to enjoy this sit down interview. So with that said, let's jump right in.Dan Henry: (00:57)Andy Stickel.Andrew Stickel: (00:58)How's it going, man, been a while.Dan Henry: (01:00)And it has been a while. Yeah. Yeah. I'm really excited you came on because you were my client for like years.Andrew Stickel: (01:09)I take, I take pride in being your number one client.Dan Henry: (01:11)You are like, you are, You are. So, it's really cool because I recall like when we started working together, you know, you were very ground floor and now you're just, you're just absolutely crushing it. I mean, you did, I know that you did. What did you do last year with your, cause you have a software. You have a coaching company, you have it done for you agency, and last year was good, but this year's like ridiculous. Like what'd you do last year?Andrew Stickel: (01:40)Yeah, so we did, we did 4 million last year. When I started with you. We were at about a million, I think. And that was 2000... When was Ad Con? It was Ad Con.Dan Henry: (01:49)Oh that's ancient history.Andrew Stickel: (01:49)I hired you a, you know. Okay. So you know, the whole story about how I saw, I knew who Dan Henry was, and I was like, this guy's a douch bag. Like I don't. And then, so, and then I bought, and then I went to Ad Con cuz I live in Lakeland, which is, I don't know, like an hour from here. And I'm the type of person. And this is one of the secrets of my success, is that I understand that I can learn something from everybody and Ad Con was gonna be there. And I was like, all right, it's cool. I think you were doing like a Black Friday deal or something on Ad Con. So I got, I got a ticket for it. And I went to Ad Con and I was watching you. And I was like, this guy actually does just know what he's talking about. Like, it's pretty clear this guy actually knows a thing or two here.Dan Henry: (02:27)So, you know, what's funny about that is I talked to Tai Lopez once. And he said that when he was starting out, cuz he's very different now, just like I'm very different nowAndrew Stickel: (02:37)When he was starting out, he was like Peer 1 and like,Dan Henry: (02:40)Yeah, like ridiculous what he is doing now.Andrew Stickel: (02:42)So smart. Yeah.Dan Henry: (02:42)So when he started out with what he was doing, he said that he knew his market, his market was like 18 to 25 year old males. And that basically, if he was to act all smart, they would get turned off. So he kind of had to act, I mean,Andrew Stickel: (02:57)He played dumb.Dan Henry: (02:58)He played dumb. He kind of acted like a douch because he was, I hate to sell this, but he was selling to douches. So, that was his strategy. And I always thought like, wow, to put your ego aside, and be able to do that. And do it because you know, that that's what, how you're attacking your market. And you know, you're smarter, you know, you're more, you know you can articulate yourself in a more intelligent way, but you suppress that cuz you know your market. I think that like that's a lot of discipline there. And so, but like I think anybody, you kind of get sick of that market, you grow out of it. And when I started realizing that I could attract, you know, better people, not that there's anything wrong with being, I mean, I was male in 18 to 25 at one point. But you know, when you I didn't want to work with people that just wanted like Lamborghinis and stuff. You know, I wanted to work with people who wanted to create great products. And so I changed my whole thing a bit and, just like he did and a lot of people do so. But yeah, yeah. I was, I've heard that a lot. LikeAndrew Stickel: (04:02)Yeah. I mean, I just didn't yeah. I mean, you know what, you know, it's like, you know, and you even talked about this even more recently on your social media about you don't know somebody, you really just don't know somebody from basically their onscreen persona. Whether they're an actor or athlete or an entrepreneur or whatever, you know, so, but I went to Ad Con and I was like, oh, this guy really actually knows what he's talking about. And I'm the type of person where like, if I wanna learn something, you know, there's that Tony Robbins quote, where if you want to be successful, find somebody who's already done exactly what you wanna do and just copy what they've done. Right. So, or maybe hire them and tell them whatever it was.Dan Henry: (04:38)It's copy them. I, and then I say, Dan Henry says, if you really want to be good at it, just pay whatever they want.Andrew Stickel: (04:43)Yeah. So I don't know what the actual quote is. I think the quote is copied. I don't, I don't like, I don't like the, I don't like the copy in there because you get in, like, I think a lot of people think that like funnel hacking is literally just copying and I've, I know you've had that. I've had that happen where it's copying,Dan Henry: (04:57)That's what it turned into.Andrew Stickel: (04:58)That's what it turned into. But I don't think that was ever the intention. I think it was basically look and see.You know, it's like, and I still funnel hack. I'll look and see like, you know, this market is like, somebody's doing this cool thing in this market. That's neat. I'm not gonna steal or copy word for word. I'm not gonna steal their landing page, but I'll take that idea. And I'm like, okay, that's really cool. How can I apply that to what I'm trying to do? And it just, you know, it's like that book, Steal Like An Artist, you know what I mean?Dan Henry: (05:24)That's sort of like, if you ever go to the gym, and you see people doing like flies and instead of doing them properly, they're like this. You know, that's the equivalent to properly, like that's what I see in the online business industry is everybody's pretty much like, no, no, I'm do, I'm marketing and it's like, no, you're just making crappy products. And stealing other people's stuff. And you just, you kind of suck. So,Andrew Stickel: (05:48)And what I found is that typically, typically when you're just copying, when you're not actually doing the work, then you end up, you don't have any more moves. You know what I mean? Like so,Dan Henry: (05:59)Right. Exactly. you, dude, that's exactly right.Andrew Stickel: (06:01)That's what happens to me all the time. People steal my stuff, people steal your, I'm sure people steal your stuff all the time you know.Dan Henry: (06:06)Yeah. I'm definitely, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, I guess it's flattering at this point. But let's, so you did 4 million in last year, but you're on track to do what 24 million this year?Andrew Stickel: (06:19)So we're gonna, yeah. Well, we'll do, I mean, barring a yeah, we're gonna do 24 million this year, you know? Now that's few things have happened. I mean, you know, my company's being acquired. I now own a piece of a bigger company, but, yeah. We're on pace to do 24 million by the end of this year. Yeah, that's gone from doing a million a year to out doing 2 million a month. You know.Dan Henry: (06:40)We spoke before this started, you said the, if you were to separate that out, you got software, coaching and you got, done for you. The majority of that is done for you?Andrew Stickel: (06:51)Yeah. The majority. Well, the majority, I would say 60% is done for you. I'd say 30% is gonna be coaching and then 10% is going to be software. But we're, you know,Dan Henry: (07:03)What do you charge for your software?Andrew Stickel: (07:04)So the software right now, we're making some transitions because what we were doing is we were charging $3,000 a year. And basically I was just like, I learned really marketing from you. So what I did was I was doing, I did, ad, webinar, phone call, right. So, we were selling it at $3000. Well, we started at thousand and we started, 20 then went to 2,500. Then we went to 3000. Eventually, my plan was to get it up to 10,000 a year and we're still gonna get to that point. But what we're trying to do right now is we're actually gonna probably drop the price to like $249 a month right now, and just get on a reoccurring revenue model.Andrew Stickel: (07:37)Cause we wanna get as many users as possible. And it's easier. What we found is when we're doing it at $249 for the market that we're in, we're able to sell it a lot more at $249 than 3K up front, you know, so.Dan Henry: (07:49)$249 per month?Andrew Stickel: (07:50)$249 per month. Yeah. Which is basically the same thing. It's still $3,000 a year. It's just a monthly revenue model. But what we're trying to do and you know, we're trying to make it that we're looking at how can we make our clients stickier. Cuz that's the biggest problem with monthly recurring revenues, how do you keep the clients? You know, so we have contracts and everything, but what we're really trying to do is we're trying to figure out what kind of software can we do so that, you know, we can provide lots of software for them that they really use so that they're not going to want to leave. And that's the software that we have is like, it's like revolutionary in terms of getting reviews for law firms, because it's, that's what we do. We figure out the problem is that lawyers can't get reviews on.Dan Henry: (08:29)You should probably mention who you market.Andrew Stickel: (08:32)Yeah. I mentioned for, I've work for lawyers. Yeah.Dan Henry: (08:33)You do marketing for lawyers. Yeah. So, that, so for like for my app, How To Think, you know, I think about it and I'm like, you know, I think Calm, the app Calm did like 200 million last year.Andrew Stickel: (08:47)Oh, did it really?Dan Henry: (08:47)It's ridiculous.Andrew Stickel: (08:47)What is Calm? I don't even know what that is.Dan Henry: (08:49)So it's like an app you download and they have, and it just has like meditations and stuff. And there's other apps like it. Ours is a little bit more like your daily dose of wisdom where, and we're still on the ground floor of it building it up. We, we actually had, we launched it and we got over a thousand members and we did really, really well. And then the Amazon servers crashed and it corrupted cuz like with apps and stuff, a lot of 'em, most of 'em are based on the Amazon, like S3 and Amazon servers.Andrew Stickel: (09:23)Yeah. AWS, all that.Dan Henry: (09:24)AWS. And so, there was this, this massive crash. It was like literally like a, a dooms day event and it just thousands of companies or logistics departments, apps, it just crushed them. It like fried them, you know?Andrew Stickel: (09:39)Interesting.Dan Henry: (09:39)Like, think about like, the Terminator, what's a Sky Net, you know, just right? And so of course we're like a small company. We don't have like 20 developers sitting in a room, you know, with star wars on, you know, know coding and being plugged in. So it just, it hit us like crazy. So we had to, we had to like rebuild the whole app from the ground up, which is what we're doing now. And we're redoing it a little bit, but the reason I mentioned that is because like the app game, the software game is hard. Like I had a software before and that was hard because it had to connect to all these other softwares, and if they change something, then you gotta change something in yours.Dan Henry: (10:22)You know? And so it's a very tough game. But if you think about it, there's a lot of apps out there that do like a hundred million, 200 million a year. So to me I'm thinking like, man, if my app can just do 10 million a year, that would be amazing. But our angle is like a daily dose of wisdom. So you, you get, maybe there's a quote or there's a piece of wisdom from anyone all the way from Aristotle to Steve Jobs that in history have talked about something, maybe something from books and every day there's a five minute audio that sort of dives into that explains it and how to apply it to your life. And you get that five minute audio every day. And it just helps you with your mindset, helps you become more successful. We have a ton of, like the people love it, but we did have to put it on a separate app temporarily while we fixed this one. It's been, I'm not gonna lie. It's been a nightmare. I'm sure you've dealt with software stuff. But we're, we're looking to when we relaunch it, looking to be a lot better. So yeah.Andrew Stickel: (11:14)It's different. It's so different. Like, and you know, I know you got into physical products, I've gotten into physical products. It's different because like, like you and I are used to having an idea, getting a whiteboard out, drawing, like turning, going on Facebook live and then selling it and then there's money. And then like fulfilling. It is just going on to like teaching a course. Right. That's like the easiest thing, but then with software now, okay. I can sell this thing. I can do the sales, I can get all the sales, but now I'm dependent on all these other people and all these other companies and all this technology to actually make it work. And, you know, and, fulfillment or, e-com is even worse,Dan…
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