Leading the Pay Per Call Revolution

Transcript lightly edited for clarity.

Adam Young 00:00:00

The other day, one of our customers said, bro, you're crushing it. Are you going to sell or bring someone in to run the company so you can just relax?

And I was like, what? I'm just literally getting started. Hard work trumps everything and you'll hear a lot of work. Smarter, not harder, but at the beginning, hard work trumps everything. If you want to achieve incredible success like billions, the easiest way to do that is to retool your motivation into a mission that is bigger than yourself, that serves other people. When people talk about work-life balance, I don't think that exists For an entrepreneur, what it needs to be is organized priority. Everyone has a lane and they try and stay in that lane because it's comfortable. But really the most valuable skill and business that people can have or maybe even in life is being comfortable, being uncomfortable. I think the reality is 1% of people are the ones that can really find major success in life. But

David Stodolak 00:01:15

LFG fam, we just shot a fucking banger right now. I can't wait till you hear this shit. It's like next level. No one's talking about this. Shout out to our sponsors. Without them, this shit wouldn't be possible. Shout out to rba. Shout out to Adam Young. The paper call revolution. There's big, big money in paper call, whether you're someone who's a novice looking to get into it, whether you're someone's already doing it, putting up big numbers. Let's fucking do this. Guys. Get the fucking book on Amazon. We're going to drop a link here. Take your shit to the next level. Let's fucking go. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another episode of the LFG Show. This is going to be a really great show. I'm super excited about it. I'm with my man, Adam and Young, the CEO founder of Co-Founder Ring Book, the author of the Paper Call Revolution. Amazing book. There's going to be a very, very deep show. And I'll tell you one thing, I'm in this penthouse right now in Miami, and this place is like a shrine to paper call. He's got a wall maybe we can cut to later. We like, I know how many dozens of Ring bug goat awards on there. I see a hundred million dollar one right outside of the wall here. There's another one on the way. And man, it's just blowing my mind away. So Adam, it's really a pleasure and honor to be here with you.

Adam Young 00:02:22

Thanks for coming. The goat wall we're putting up right now, I'll send you a picture of it. It's 105 awards and that's only a few of them. And we were just out there talking about it when they were putting it up. I was just staring in awe. It's a really humbling thing to see how many people we've helped make a million dollars, but even crazier in the stack in the kitchen, there's $10 million goats and 25 million goats and 50 million goats. And like you just said, we have a hundred million dollars one right over there through the glass and we have another a hundred million dollars one on the way. And it's crazy to me, I didn't think this would happen When we founded Ringa, it wasn't part of my thought process, but to see it playing out now as a really special thing.

David Stodolak 00:03:18

Yeah, there's over a hundred million dollars on that wall right there. And then you got the a hundred million here. I see 25. You see there's another a hundred million going on. And I want to go back to in your book the paper called Revolution. You talk about what started this all really essentially is that your home, you got, your father gave you a computer when you were 10 years old. He said, Adam, this is a computer. I don't know what this is. This is a future. Figure it out. We talk about LFG moments. I feel like that was an LFG moment for you. You got immersed in that and that immersion obsession is far the seed that led to all of this stuff.

Adam Young 00:03:53

Yeah, it really is. My dad thought it was a cool thing and no one had it. And they were kind of,

David Stodolak 00:04:00

What year was this would you say? Oh,

Adam Young 00:04:03

Well, I was 10, so it's 1994.

David Stodolak 00:04:05

Wow.

Adam Young 00:04:05

And computers then were kind of a status symbol. No one had 'em. It wasn't dial up, really didn't even exist. A OL and Prodigy were just starting. And so, I mean, I'll be real with you, I wasn't a popular kid in school. We had just moved to a new city. I didn't have a lot of friends. It was the winter. And so there was snow on the ground and I had nothing to do with my time. And then my dad brings home this crazy machine, you could hear it. It clicked in word and made a bunch of noise. And I just said, wow, this is kind of amazing. It's like a giant puzzle. You can do incredible things with it. You can code it to make it do what you want. And then shortly after we got a copy of Windows 3.1

And then you could actually visually play with it. So I started breaking the computer constantly in Ms. Dos and then Windows came and I started writing software and it was really an incredible experience. And a lot of that time I spent tinkering with that old computer, taught my brain how to build things all the way back then and to see what possibilities existed before they were created. So I'm super grateful to my dad for that. He had the foresight there and I mean technically it's his fault. I have scoliosis now too, from sitting too much in front of the computer. But yeah, it was such a cool experience. I just wish I had a mentor earlier that suggested to me, Hey, you can make money with these things.

David Stodolak 00:05:52

Well, you did though at some point you created, you got in for this tour, didn't you get people calling your house at four in the morning and your parents like, what the hell is going on here? So it did eventually lead to you making money online and it led to our ups and downs of successes and failures.

Adam Young 00:06:09

I went to the University of Michigan when I was very young and I lived in the dorm when I was 14 years old. I taught classes on north campus in their engineering department as a teacher's assistant. Wow. And one

David Stodolak 00:06:22

Of, how old were you when you were teaching there?

Adam Young 00:06:23

14.

David Stodolak 00:06:24

That's incredible. How the hell did that happen?

Adam Young 00:06:25

My parents contacted some people there and they had a summer program for kids and I got connected with them and then they invited me to come and actually teach. And so one of the adult teachers there had a hosting business, a web hosting business, and he sold me a dedicated server. And then I started selling a smaller server packages to people. And in an a OL chat room, I found a guy who wanted to buy my first hosting package for 20 bucks a month. And I was ecstatic, right? Check comes in the mail, I think I'm going to be rich. Next thing I realized, I sold hosting to an email spammer, and this was before any of us knew what email spam was, right? I had no idea that you could send millions of emails or that people put marketing and emails. This is before all of that.

And the email spammer literally had people sign up and send him checks. This wasn't like run your credit card or whatever. People had to send him a check. I remember the offer and it was a dumb offer, but he would send millions of emails out and then people would actually mail him physical checks. But what ended up happening is these people would complain and they'd find the hosting provider and they'd call, and I had just used my parents' address and my parents' phone number for that. It was all we had, right? There were no cell phones at the time. So yeah, at four in the morning when he did his first email drop, we started getting flooded with phone calls and those calls went on and on and on all day long. And the guy who sold me the hosting terminated my server, didn't let me keep going. Yeah, it was a mess. I actually lost money. He didn't refund my dedicated server fee. And so that was my first digital business. I made negative money. I really pissed off my parents. I just wish I was old enough to understand at that point, wow, you can sell things by sending an email. That would've been great, but it didn't click in my mind at that point. I was like, oh, this is bad. So I had to try and figure out something else.

David Stodolak 00:08:52

Yeah, well you stuck with it is what it was. I think that's one of the tenets of business that you got to stick around. You got to be around, you got to show up and make it happen, and you continually did that and continue to make money online. So I mean, if you fast forward to where we're at today, I mean obviously RMA has grown tremendously, right? You've made people help make people a lot of money and with a book you're educating them and teach 'em how they can continue to grow in this industry. So what do you think has been the biggest ingredient or the couple biggest ingredients for success? Ringwood getting got you guys to where you're at right now?

Adam Young 00:09:28

I think those ingredients change as a business grows. So as of today, I think we have 70 or 75 people and we're hiring for at least 10 more positions. We're bringing in key leadership to help us grow certain departments and we're professionalizing the business for immense scale right now. And so the ingredients that go into that today are making sure that your leadership adheres to your values. They think the way you do that, everyone is focused and aligned on your mission.

So that way when you have a problem as a customer, for instance, that you reach out and if I'm not available, that our team is going to make decisions based on our mission, based on our customer's best interest. And if there's a problem, they're going to think along with our value structure. For instance, our first value at Ring bows to lead, and there's a bunch of different components to leadership, but the most important one for me, and thus the most important one for RBA, is that we leave everybody better off than where we found them no matter what or who that person is. So if you're a customer and you're only with us for a short period of time, for whatever reason, we've bettered your business during that period of time, that's how we gauge success. Or if we have a team member, and the reality is at our size, not all team members are going to be with us forever.

That someone comes, they learn skills, their career advances, even if that advancement isn't with us. And so it is a very servant leadership approach, and all of our values are that specific. I literally did a podcast for our company and dictated our values, which are my personal values and Harrison's personal values. And so now at our scale, the most important thing we have is making sure people adhere to those values so that we know that everyone will make decisions like us when we're not around. Now, if we rewind all the way back to the beginning, and it was just me and Harrison, hard work trumps everything. And you'll hear a lot of work smarter, not harder on the internet, and a lot of people have opinions on this, but as somebody who's grown, sold, failed, destroyed all kinds of businesses, I've had exits and I'm invested in startups and I've had ones fail and I've had them peter out and not be successful, I've had them grow and then something changes. The one thing that's a constant the entire time is at the beginning, hard work trumps everything. And I can't guarantee I'm smarter than anybody, and I can't guarantee I'm smarter than my competitors, but what I can guarantee you what's within my control is that I will outwork all of them. And so at the beginning, that's what really matters. And not to say we don't work hard now you just did five trade shows or something. I just did four with a trip in between

David Stodolak 00:12:45

In April, just

Adam Young 00:12:46

In April, just in April. And so we're working our asses off. I still am. I'm working harder now than I ever have my entire life, but it's a different kind of work. I'm not in the weeds so much I am doing these things or I'm sitting around thinking about strategy or I'm recruiting or something like that. So just to recap at the beginning, hard work is everything. And then as you grow and you start to recruit, making sure those people have your values becomes the difference between incredible success and immediate failure.

David Stodolak 00:13:25

Yeah, amazing. A lot of information there to digest and pack in. And I think that as you read your book, you'll see that at every step of the way you worked hard, you were dedicated. I think you're obsessed with being the best you can be, right? I'm not just saying in the business business wise, I'm talking about you have your attendance in life, your four tenant health is one of those,

Right?

And at the end of the day, if you're not healthy, you can't work hard, your body's going to be run down. I'm the same way. I take care of my health, very much so, right? So hard work, super, super important. And the fact that we talked about this in Las Vegas, this book took you 15 months to write and you didn't have to write this book. We talked about this, but you have such a passion. You want to evangelize paper call. You've seen the success is brought to you personally to your clients. And I think that's the proof is in the pudding. You can't fake that kind of stuff. There's a lot of people in the industry, we talked about this, they talk, they talk, they talk, but they don't walk the walk right at the end of the day. So I think that's a key component of what you have going on here.

Adam Young 00:14:25

Look, I'm turning 40 on Friday.

David Stodolak 00:14:28

Congratulations.

Adam Young 00:14:28

Thank you. We're in a similar age group.

A lot of people in our industry are younger, and I take it as my personal responsibility to give back, but also to evangelize a message that you can build a successful business by doing it right, one that's sustainable. And man, I've learned a lot through suffering. People see this now, they're like, oh, look at Adam. He is in the ring by penthouse and flying with his clients on Gulfstream jets and whatever, dude. People do not know how much pain and suffering went along the way to get there. And by doing a book like this and by teaching people, we get to help alleviate some of their pain and suffering in their journey so they can get to the end result faster. And I feel like if people get to a point of success in an industry and people look to them for guidance, that it's important that they give back to the industry and the people who support them so that those people can build a better life for themselves.

And Ring's mission is to help our clients grow and to innovate and help the industry grow into the future. And so if that's our mission, there's no better way to do that than to train the next generation of people on how to be successful and how to build a great business. And when they do that, you've seen the effects of this I have too. Their families have a better life, their team members have a better life. There's only really great things that come out of that type of evangelism. And so that's why I put the effort into the book, and that's why this is so important to me. And I truly believe that rising tides lift all ships. And so if you focus on helping as many people as possible, then that will come back tenfold and help you. And that's something that's super important to me, and that's the reason why I wrote the book and put so much effort into it. And this isn't a chat GPT book. You've read it. This is a really intricate in depth book on our industry and how to be successful in it. And I've already seen people change what they're doing and build businesses because they've read the book and the book's only been out for 45 days. It's absolute insanity to me to watch, but I'm super excited about it.

What's important to me actually not, Hey, how do we grow ring ba and how do we make money and do these things? It's actually how do we help other people become successful?

David Stodolak 00:17:13

And I can say, firstly, I've been in the industry since 2016. I got into paper call. We started a company called Senior Direct Marketing. That was our foray in the paper call back. I think 2021 is when we started that. And I think the first time I met you was at Carlos K's. He had an event here in Miami. Then I started at the geek out in Beverly Hills. And I wasn't a customer of Ring, but you were more than willing to answer any questions I had. And that went a long way with me. And I know people, guys like Ray Sin. I interviewed him for the show in Madine, very close with him and other people, and he said, Anthony, Andrea, they say you were very instrumental in helping them. Ray's putting up big, big numbers right now. He's grown tremendously. He came from e-comm, got into paper call.

You helped him along the way, you helped him. There's stuff you helped him with that you didn't have to help him with, or outside of regular scopes, legal looking at MSAs, guiding him along the way, Anthony on his exit. And you talk about that in the book. So I can say personally, it's not, again, you're not just talking about it, you're actually doing it. And then now, look, you're sponsoring the LFG show, right? I've read the whole book here. And that's how we grow. I do believe we're rising tide lifts all boats. And a lot of people, I think have the scarcity mindset in industry that they're scared to show their secrets or they're scared that someone's going to take the rip their ads. And you talk about in the book too, it's just a stupid way of thinking. You're going to limit yourself by doing that, right?

Adam Young 00:18:31

Yeah,

David Stodolak 00:18:31

Yeah.

Adam Young 00:18:33

Look, there's enough meat on this bone for everybody.

David Stodolak 00:18:37

A lot of meat on this bone. There's

Adam Young 00:18:38

A lot of meat on this bone. And to me, a gauge of real success is are my activities impacting the industry so much that my competitors' businesses are growing because of it? And the answer to that is,

And so to me, that's real leadership and that's real success. And my goals are generally bigger than most people I meet. I have very audacious goals because I want to see what's possible. For me, Harrison thinks the same way, and I don't expect everybody to have these same goals, but with the goals we have, there's no other way to do it. If we were like, Hey, we're going to grow our business and try and do it with a scarcity mindset, we wouldn't be able to get where we want to go. It would literally be impossible. So I mean, I don't care. I think it's important to help other people, even if they're your competitors. And what's interesting is we do masterminds on private jets. It's kind of a silly thing. I've

David Stodolak 00:19:47

Been on one. Yeah,

Adam Young 00:19:47

Yeah. I cannot tell you how much value I get out of that, and the other people do. If you can lock yourself in a tin can with eight other incredibly smart people for four hours, I mean your

David Stodolak 00:20:00

Phone can't ring. It's like yeah, you're

Adam Young 00:20:02

Locked in.

David Stodolak 00:20:02

Yeah,

Adam Young 00:20:02

The opportunities are priceless for that. And what's interesting is a lot of our customers are actually technically competitors. They're in the same industry. They're promoting the same products and services. And when we do these, we curate who we allow on the plane. And I got to tell you, every single person that gets on the plane shares,

David Stodolak 00:20:23

They

Adam Young 00:20:23

Don't care. They're not scared of someone being their competitor. In fact, they would rather help their competitor grow and be more successful. And it's funny, all these people are the biggest people in the industry that come with us. Manny from Velocity was on a flight recently. That's his a hundred million dollars award sitting over there. By the way, Manny, will you come get your award, please? I need to get this out of my living room. And he's happy to share anything with anybody. And he's doing over a hundred million a year. I mean, I think that says it all now, the people with the scarcity mindset, however, their businesses are smaller

David Stodolak 00:21:06

And they're always pivoting. They're always chasing the next shiny object is what I noticed.

Adam Young 00:21:10

Exactly. They're not focused. They're not dedicated. They're thinking, how do I take something away from somebody else so I can win? And I mean, you can make money that way, but you can't build an incredible business that way. And if you're not building an incredible business, you're not hiring more people, you're not changing people's lives, you're not getting the personal fulfillment out of your business that will really, really drive you. And so I think it's hard to think this way. I think especially in our industry, there aren't a lot of people that think this way, but the ones that do, they're running the largest businesses in our industry.

David Stodolak 00:21:49

And you mentioned Manny, and you told me a story. I don't know if it was, it may have been in the book. I know we talk a lot and I'm trying to piece it together, but you talked about the importance of trade shows, right? You built your business at Trade. I built my business, my very first leads ever. It was in 2017 when we went to Leeds Con. And the last one, I got emotional because my first leads Con ever was at Paris. The Paris. My wife came with me. We signed some major deals there, and it was just, we were a tiny company. I don't even know we're doing a million of revenue at that point. But the deals, we signed one contract. We've done over 10 million with this advertiser back from seven, eight years ago, and we're still selling them leads, which is pretty rare for a lead gen company to do that for that long.

But you mentioned, I think it may have even been that same one. I think that's the first time you met Manny. He came to your booth. It was just him. So to go from solopreneur to doing nine figures in revenue, flying on private jets, and also to have that mentality of still giving back. I think that's the beauty of this industry. And to think about it, to go from whatever he was doing then and one person to doing nine figures in what, seven years? That's pretty incredible. And that's the exponential growth you can see in this industry.

Adam Young 00:22:59

It's interesting. I have a bunch of friends in the industry like Manny, Anthony Sarria as well. In fact, Anthony and I are going to EDC next week. Oh, nice. Yeah, he's coming for my birthday. And

David Stodolak 00:23:13

He still DJ Djx, he still

Adam Young 00:23:15

DJing, he's still love it. And there are a bunch of other people like this who are really good friends and they're hyper successful in our industry. And what's interesting about that is all of them, we've talked regularly and have talked regularly over the years, and they always make time to give back for people. They always take people's calls when people genuinely ask for help. They're really, really amazing people that way. And then coincidentally, they also are running the biggest businesses in the space, or Anthony had this big exit. So I mean, the proof is in the pudding. If you can change your mission to have one that serves other people, you're really going to be able to find a huge amount of success. And so to touch on this, I gave a mastermind maybe a year ago in Vegas. It was small. There were 12 people. And the theme of it was how to 10 x the size of your business. And there's a segment in there where we talk about mission. And I asked everybody in the room whose mission is Lambos, who wants to make money? And one person raised their hand and they're like, what? I just want to make some money. Leave me alone.

David Stodolak 00:24:28

I thought a lot more to raise their hand.

Adam Young 00:24:30

No, it was just one. And that's okay, right? You want to make money. It's perfectly okay. I'm not talking poorly about anyone's motivation here. There's just a specific outcome you're going to get. And so if your mission is simply Lambos, I want to make money, there is a lower probability that you're going to achieve extreme success. Now, most people start here. I did when I was a teenager, I had a photo of a Mercedes on the wall and I was like, I want this. And one day I eventually got it, but my growth was limited. Next, I ask everyone in the room who's doing what they're doing because of family. Everyone else in the room raises their hand. And I know you're a big family man. I respect you because of it. And there's nothing wrong with doing what you're doing because you want to help your family and see your family successful.

You'll be able to recruit people because of this. Absolutely. People will see, oh, Dave is a family man and he works hard for his family. I resonate with that. I can be a part of that. I can believe in this man because of that. Now that's a great mission and you'll grow more than just the Lambo mindset, but it still limits who you can recruit and how big your business can be. And then since everyone had raised their hand at this point, no one had thought about it. The way we think about it, and that is if you want to achieve incredible success, I don't mean a great business or a 50 million exit or something like that. I am talking about incredible success, like billions.

The easiest way to do that is to retool your motivation into a mission that is bigger than yourself that serves other people. And the reason for that is the best talent you can possibly find does not need you. They have unlimited options. So no matter what, they're going to make a lot of money. The best talent doesn't care that you're going to offer them whatever. You're going to offer them some six figure salary or whatever. They literally can get it anywhere. And so the only way to recruit those people is if they believe in what you're doing and your mission. And that mission has to have a major positive impact on the world. And the reason it needs to have that is because those type of people, they want to come, they're going to get their money or whatever, but they want to feel personally fulfilled and they want to believe in what they're doing every day. Because most really talented people want to be super successful. They have a hunger for it. And so if they have unlimited options, they're going to pick the one where they believe in the mission and they're helping people so that they can love what they do.

David Stodolak 00:27:35

That's a great point that you came up with. It made me think of something that Tony Bins says, success without fulfillment is failure. And I think that's a big thing. You see so many, I think it happens a lot with men in particular, successful men, they'll get involved in drugs or stupid stuff, and then you're like, how the hell did that happen? This guy on the outside looks so happy, but I guess he wasn't fulfilled or she

Adam Young 00:27:56

Wasn't empty inside.

David Stodolak 00:27:57

They're empty inside. So I think that that's what you said is a big thing, having that mission statement. So if you're someone listening to the show, and I think a lot of affiliates, they're very talented, but they don't know how to build teams and they don't know about these mission statements, and that's really how you go to the next level. That's how Anthony was able to sell his company for tens of millions of dollars. He built a team around the mission's. What I'm trying to do, I know that's what you're doing. So I think that's a huge component of all this because I feel like a lot of people listen, you have the book, there's money flown at it. I have the LG show. I'm always like, let's fucking make money. But you can't make money without creating value. And I think the greater the value ties into a mission that's bigger than you, then you wake up, you feel alive. And one thing I want to say is that I said this in Vegas and I said it here again, but you didn't have to write this book, but you felt you were on a mission to evangelize, right? The first time I came here, by the way, everyone, I'm at a penthouse, his penthouse in Miami, this place is sick. This the penthouse in the movie war dogs.

I remember the first time I came here, you pointed to some island there. He said, that's the highest concentration of billionaires in the world. Sergey Brin's yacht there. And it blows your mind away. And you said to me, I'm here. This makes me feel like I'm a schmuck. I got to do bigger things. And I thought that was awesome that you said that because on the outside, people be like, you're a raging success, but you feel like you have more to do. You feel there's more people whose lives you have to impact. So can we touch upon that? And I know there's a lot to digest there.

Adam Young 00:29:18

No, no, it is. I mean, so the harbor right down here, right out the window here is where the billionaires all park their boats, and it's super humbling. I don't even know what to say. So we also across the street, have a suite at the Miami Heat. It's our customers use it. Usually so many of our customers want to go that. I give my tickets to customers too. I don't usually go. And the other day I did go to one and one of our customers said, same thing you just said like, bro, you're crushing it. You're tired. Are you going to sell or bring someone in to run the company? So can just relax? And I was like, what? I'm just literally getting started. I have accomplished literally nothing, right? I look out the window and I see every single day a different billionaire's yacht. The other day there was this Canadian billionaire who built their whole trash system for the entire country of Canada, and it's his responsibility to make sure everyone's trash is removed so they can live a clean life. The CEO of Harbor Freight, the tool store's boat was down here the other day. Sergei Bris yacht, like you said, every single day there's a different one. And Harrison and I have a little subscription so we can see the transponder on all the yachts, who owns all the yachts. And man, every single day I see these people down here who have accomplished such incredibly large things. And I say to myself, there's absolutely no reason why I can't do that.

David Stodolak 00:30:57

Absolutely. Yeah.

Adam Young 00:30:58

I think about this every day, and that's one of the reasons why we picked this place. It wasn't even for sale. Then the people who sold it to us tried to get out of the deal. They're like, Hey, we changed our minds. We don't want to do it. And we're guys get contracts signed, escrow money is in, we're doing the deal. And it's a really incredible place to wake up because every single day I'm surrounded by people who have accomplished things so incredibly massive that it's hard to comprehend. And then also we've covered the walls in here with the success our clients have and what they're achieving. And so every morning I wake up and it's an instant reminder to be humble and have humility and to realize that I have accomplished literally nothing, nothing

And have such a long way to go in my personal development and professional development and leadership skills. And I think it's only from that mindset that can you really have rapid growth. You have to take a step back and say, wait a second, I'm not great at everything or really great at anything, and I need to find people who are so much better at what they do than I can do that. It's humbling. And we have a bunch of people on our team like that at Ringo that are so good at what they do. I learn from them every day. And those are the only people I want to be around, frankly.

David Stodolak 00:32:34

Yeah, amazing. All amazing stuff. And one thing I could say is that when I came up here today and the first time I came here, I felt humbled. But today even more, and I know you said you got really emotional, right when We should probably cut to that, where you see the whole wall, the wall's amazing. I got emotional too. It's not even my company, but to see that's possible, I always say it off camera, I wish we record. I see a hundred million dollar gold award. I'm telling our producer Chance, I got to step the fuck up, man. I got to do bigger things here. Well, what am I doing? I'm like, I got to take it to the next level. Let's talk about that. And the wall, you mentioned how that made you emotional tears came to your eyes.

Adam Young 00:33:11

Yeah, I mean the whole purpose of the Goat Club was exactly what you just said. It was for me to show someone else that something was possible. And it's like the guy who ran the four minute mile, I forget his name.

David Stodolak 00:33:28

Banister

Adam Young 00:33:29

Banister, Roger Ban, Roger Banister.

David Stodolak 00:33:30

I don't even know how I know that shit.

Adam Young 00:33:32

And so for decades, people tried to do this and they couldn't do it. And then the moment Roger Banister does this a couple weeks later, the second person breaks the four minute mile. And I really love that story because it shows that it's really hard to be a pioneer, but once you see something as possible, you believe it. And so you can go for it. And so that's why we started the Goat Club is so that I knew we had customers that were more successful than other customers. We have thousands of customers, so obviously some are going to be more successful than others. And when you can show entrepreneurs that someone else is achieving something clearly and validly, they say what you say, they're like, wait a second, why don't I have a hundred million dollars go award? In fact, Anker from Flight Calls,

David Stodolak 00:34:28

Great

Adam Young 00:34:28

Guy, I love him. He literally said, bro, the only reason I'm growing my business right now is because I saw that someone else had a $50 million got award, and I don't. And I think he's basically there. And then he said to me the other day, I have my plan

David Stodolak 00:34:48

For

Adam Young 00:34:48

The hundred, and I'm literally sitting here watching this, and it's just like human nature, but it's so powerful and it humbles me to hear you say, that humbled me. Like, fuck, I can show Dave something and then Dave's going to go, why not me and go grow his business. That to me is incredibly fulfilling. It's the most fulfilling thing in my life. And so as long as I have that, my motivation is just incredible at all times.

David Stodolak 00:35:22

And man, you have a lot going on in your life when you say that you are working harder than ever. I believe that because I started the LFG show, I never realized how much work that was going to be. You have the podcast, you offer podcast, and I know personal,

Adam Young 00:35:36

I'm dropping, not to interrupt here, but I'm bringing the paper collar show back too, so I'll be doing too awesome.

David Stodolak 00:35:42

And I think you're on this mission and to create more and more value. And that's really what the LG show's about too, is that we have kind of similar backgrounds. You grew up in Michigan, right? Blue collar, I imagine a blue collar neighborhood. I grew up in primary Elizabeth, Newark, New Jersey. I dunno if it's blue collar, what the hell was, it wasn't like the best neighborhood, but I had a very big scarcity mindset when I was here. I thought rich people were bad. There were no rich people around me. A lot of people were food stamps. My mom was making minimum wage. She busted her ass. I learned my work ethic from her. But I went to college, NYU, got to a great college, got good grades, but man, for a long time I was like, fuck rich people, man. Hey the fuck these guys?

You had this bad mentality and that once I started working with some wealthy people, and so these guys are actually great people. They're giving back to society, they're creating jobs. And then when I started making some good money, I'm like, man, these guys, I had it all wrong. So I think that I keep talking about a scarcity mindset. I think it's so important. It applies to basic human psychology and also applies to business at the end of the day. And I think to tie it into the book, that scarcity mindset finds itself in the affiliate curse that you talk about. That's a huge thing. So can you explain what is the affiliate curse? I know I packed a lot in there. I feel like we can talk for hours on this stuff, but what is the affiliate curse? And ultimately how do you break out of it? I think your book gives the step-by-step way to break out of it.

Adam Young 00:37:06

So the affiliate curse, all affiliates suffer from, and it is very simply that they don't have control over their business. And so they're promoting a product or service or lead gen or clicks or whatever. And eventually the landscape changes or the advertiser goes out of business or doesn't pay their bills or stops working with affiliates or whatever the case is. And every affiliate has gone through this, and I know this because I was an affiliate for 10 years. Harrison was an affiliate for a decade. We've ran every campaign imaginable. We used to run singles net and match.com. These companies don't have affiliate programs anymore. They've changed their business model or a lot of e-comm products like Ray in-law was promoting. That's what he was doing before these advertisers, maybe they're not making the best product in the world or they don't want to manufacture it anymore, or consumer reception wasn't good. And you're like, oh crap. One day I was making 10,000 a day. The next day I'm making nothing. And the moment in my life I talk about in the book, Harrison and I had been building a campaign for two years and we were doing eight figures, mid eight figures in revenue with a team of four.

David Stodolak 00:38:23

Wow.

Adam Young 00:38:24

Yeah, it was great. And one morning the advertiser got notice from Google that they're changing their search feed rules. And so they changed the campaign and they no longer wanted to run the campaign anymore. And that was really unfortunate. And overnight, our eight figure business went to zero. And I had a panic attack. I had a breakdown. I was like, I literally built all this technology to power this business. I thought it was going to be long-term. We worked our asses off, traveled all around the world to negotiate traffic and build a really great business. I mean, I taught myself two programming languages. I wrote all the software for that. I don't generally write software anymore, but I am an engineer and I was incredibly proud of what we had built. We were handling like 300 million clicks a day or something, just like crazy infrastructure for that.

And there was no guidebook for it. This was in the early 2000 and tens. A lot of AWS products were not refined, and we had to really figure it out. And so yeah, I literally had a panic attack over this. And that's the affiliate curse is you're not in control of your destiny and you're not promoting industries that are necessarily sustainable for whatever reason. It doesn't mean they're bad. Ours wasn't bad. It's just Google. Yahoo and Bing had search feeds. They make the rules, they change the rules. They're like, Hey, we're not going to let all these companies use our feed anymore. And Google removed a ton of their partners, not just the one we were working with. And it wasn't even for bad behavior, it was just, Hey, we're changing our business model. So we were like, fuck, we need to build something that's sustainable.

And then once we figured out with calls that basically a company is not going to stop taking calls, why would it? Because they have all this money invested in infrastructure. They have all this money invested in call center agents. They have all this money invested in everything else they're doing. There's absolutely no way that they're going to stop taking phone calls. And so these campaigns aren't going anywhere. And a lot of them are the biggest companies in the United States, healthcare companies, insurance companies, home services companies. People are not going to stop needing their gutters cleaned. People are going to not stop needing health insurance. I mean, it's legally required that we have it. And so once we realized this, we were like, okay, we need to go build in this industry because people can build long-term sustainable businesses. And affiliates still have kind of the cash grab mindset sometimes with calls too, but they don't last very long.

They get weed out very quickly. People are on the phone. But that's the mindset that affiliates should have. And when they do have that mindset, how do I build a sustainable business where everyone's happy, consumer's happy, I'm happy, advertiser's happy. Once they do that, now their business has enterprise value. They can sell it like Anthony and multiple people have sold their businesses in our space. Jake Kaufman at Express Revenue sold his business. Most people don't know, but it was heavy in calls when he did. And I think that's something very different for affiliates. That's the real opportunity. You can create generational wealth in paper call by building a business and selling it. And I am literally only talking about actual success stories of our customers and what they have achieved publicly. We all know Anthony sold his business. It's literally in the filings of the public company that bought it. And so that's the incredible thing about Pay Perca is these stories are real. There's tons of them. I mean, just on the wall in the kitchen, there's 105 million goats, but out there piled up, we have over a half a billion dollars worth of goats that are going to get hung up in here. And so that's real money. That's real money that people made, and they did it building sustainable businesses that will continue to produce. And the opportunity remains because these companies aren't going anywhere.

David Stodolak 00:42:49

And I'm glad you touch upon here and you talk about in the book all over the place about creating a sustainable business that has enterprise value. I went to Tony Robbins Business Mastery in 2019, and one thing he says, you have to, when you start your business, you have to think immediately of an exit plan. And I'm like, I never thought about selling my company. I'm like, that never crossed my mind. But after I got out of it, I'm like, he's right. You really have to do that. And then all of a sudden we started growing and growing like a weed. We probably since that moment, I think we 30 x, 40 x, I don't even know what we did, but grew tremendously. But you talk about all the time, I think that anyone listened to this, any affiliate, think about that mindset. How do you grow a team?

How do you create enterprise via value? And like Adam said it, it's happened to numerous people. I saw it happen in solar with a lot of my competitors that they grew a lot. I helped those guys out with a lot of these accounts that I grew going to their call centers. And we were there too. We're about to sell our company. But seeing is believing. When you see that, you hear about it. And I think that's a beautiful thing about your book, that you talk about these success stories. You talk about your failures too. You talk about what people have done well have done bad. And going back to the affiliate curse, I think this is important. We're going through a lot of changes right now in our industry. We just came out back from Geek out, great event, but I sense a lot of nervousness.

Their anxiety, first of all, a lot of new rules, regulation with singular opting going on doesn't really affect paper costs much. But people in web forms, you have assurance just stop buying leads. Something happened with them a week ago, health IQ a couple of years ago. So it seems like you're going up, you're going up this big hill, you're going fast, and all of a sudden something knocks you down. You got to keep doing that. So did you sense that kind of anxiety and intention there? And what's your advice for people feeling that in this kind of atmosphere we're in?

Adam Young 00:44:31

I did sense that.

David Stodolak 00:44:32

Yeah.

Adam Young 00:44:35

My personal opinion on all of these situations is that they're generally a gift and an opportunity. There's only one healthy way to look at any major landscape or any major change in a business or personal life or whatever. And it's that it's a gift and an opportunity, and it's more important that you look at it that way. The more painful the event is, the only thing we can really guarantee in life is that we're going to die and that things aren't going to go right at some point, right? No one lives this perfect life where everything is incredible and it's all rainbows and unicorns. It's not that all of us are suffering. And even when people seem like they're on top of the world, they're always facing something, we are all always facing something.

David Stodolak 00:45:24

Absolutely.

Adam Young 00:45:25

And so the only healthy way to look at these challenges are like, Hey, we're in school. This is a test. This is a gift. I'm going to learn from it. And an opportunity, opportunity to change my mindset, change what I'm doing, pivot. And I think a lot of the people that are sort of looking at the new FCC changes related to lead gen or the changes in the industry with big companies going down or losing a partner or whatever, they immediately start to panic. They get the fear response, and you can't change the way you feel. So you get the fear. But you have to be courageous enough to stare that fear in the face and go, wait a second,

This is now an opportunity for me to change my business, change my life, rethink what I've been doing, do the things that I know I've been putting off, right? Like, oh, I have to focus on this big partner. I'm making a bunch of money. And that's where all someone's focus is. And then that partner goes away. And so now you're forced to look at your other opportunities forced to grow and change as a leader. And you should accept that challenge with all your being and pour as much as you can into that change and be as open-minded as possible. And that's how you retool your life and find incredible success. And a lot of the times when the universe puts a change like that or a challenge like that in front of you, if you handle it correctly, your outcome is way better than what you were doing before you find something that is much more profitable or much more fulfilling or better for your family or more exciting for you, or whatever it is you want. And people get so caught up in the fear that they don't realize how much of an incredible gift that event is and what you can do with it. I know you wanted to talk about this, and I'm happy to go there. I faced a personal one of these not too long ago.

My ex-wife sat me down at the kitchen table wearing a ring ba hoodie.

David Stodolak 00:47:39

It's pretty ironic, right?

Adam Young 00:47:41

And said, I don't think we should be together anymore. And we weren't doing anything terrible to each other. We've been together for 12 years. If she ends up watching this straight up, she's cool. I have no beef. She's great. And I'm grateful for the time we spent together. I grew a lot and I wish her the best. And I think the reality was she was fed up with my travel schedule. She didn't want to travel, and I had so much going on at that time. I was fighting so many battles that she just didn't want that in her life anymore. And so we decided I was just going to go. And a couple hours later, I was in Miami. It was like just right new life. And I was in this shitty hotel room down the street by myself for a few days, and I just said to myself, this is the most painful thing I've ever gone through, but I'm going to look at it as a gift and an opportunity.

So I made a list of who I wanted to be, what I wanted to accomplish, what I wanted to build, and who I wanted to find in no particular order. And then I wrote down what my priorities were before that got me into that situation where I was super stressed out. I wasn't clearly, my relationship wasn't going the way I wanted it to go. And you know what? Honestly, I dunno if I could have fixed it because I'm unwilling to give up on what gives me my fulfillment, which is my business. And I'm committed to my clients like you. I'm committed to my partners, my team. I have incredible people. I would never give up on those commitments. So I don't think it was fixable, but I was like, how do I come out of this way better? And so I reorganized my priorities into in this order, health, education, relationships, and then wealth is at the bottom. And if you take care of your body and your mind and your relationships, it's much easier to rapidly

David Stodolak 00:49:53

Grow connected.

Adam Young 00:49:54

Yeah, rapidly grow your wealth. And people talk about work-life balance. I don't think that exists for an entrepreneur. What it needs to be is organized priorities. Because I'm on 24 7, I work seven days a week. I'm available all day up until the evening. You text me at 11 o'clock at night. If I'm awake or available or have my phone, I'll reply. And so it's not about balance or I guess people would call this balance. It's about making sure that your priorities are in order and then not changing the priorities. I've done over a hundred Pilates classes since I moved to Miami.

David Stodolak 00:50:37

Yeah, Pilates is tough. I just came from yesterday. My legs are fucking ed.

Adam Young 00:50:42

And so I've done literally over a hundred. I looked at ClassPass before this pod and congrats. Thank you. And I'm down 30 pounds as of this morning, but I won't take a meeting no matter how valuable, if it's during one of my classes because my number one priority is not business.

David Stodolak 00:51:01

You don't negotiate with yourself is what is you. I

Adam Young 00:51:03

Will not negotiate with myself. I set those rules. Those are the rules.

David Stodolak 00:51:07

Kobe Bryant said the same thing. He wouldn't negotiate against it. He, he said something, he freaking does it or he did it.

Adam Young 00:51:12

And the answer is no. I had the opportunity to talk to the CEO O of a major company that I wanted do business with, and he wanted to talk to me. And he gave me one time slot, and it was during Pilates. And I replied, I can't take that call. I'm very sorry. And you know what happened? His assistant sent four more times, right? It's fine. And I don't have to justify it, but before I would've been like, oh my God, I don't want to lose this big opportunity. What am I willing? You just immediately sacrifice. And I changed that. I changed that about my life, and I'm the happiest I've ever been. I'm in the best shape I've been in since junior Olympics when I swam when I was 17. I'm learning the most I've ever learned. My relationships are the strongest they've ever been. I just won't sacrifice these things to get to business. And our business is growing the fastest. It's all connected. It's ever

David Stodolak 00:52:08

Grown. All. Yeah. Yeah. That was great. And there's so much to unpack there. And first and foremost, thank you for sharing that because I feel a lot of people would be nervous or scared. They want want to share their personal struggles. If you're not feeling whole with your relationships, whether you're married, girlfriend, whatever it is, boyfriend, it is going to be hard to be successful in a business capacity. So I was in similar situation. I got divorced and we got separated. My ex-wife and I had 20 14, 20 15, I don't remember when, but a lot of had to do my business schedule. We weren't compatible in that sense, but we have a beautiful daughter as a result and everything worked out. Now my current wife, she gets it. And I want to say she's been very committed to the business, whatever. You've met her before. She's

Adam Young 00:52:51

Amazing.

David Stodolak 00:52:52

Yeah, thank you. And I think anyone listen to, that's a huge decision. Who are you going to settle down with? Do they support your values? If they don't, it's going to be a disaster at the end of the day. So I would say that's one of the biggest decisions you can make. And the fact, if you saw that it wasn't working, look, you have to move on and you grew as a result personally, professionally, and you're happy. And I'm sure it sounds like your ex-wife is happy too. Everyone's moving in the right direction. So that's

Adam Young 00:53:21

Huge. I haven't spoken to her, but I hope she is. Okay.

David Stodolak 00:53:23

All right, cool. I really hope she

Adam Young 00:53:24

Is. And you know what? She's a super strong person and she's very successful. She will be just fine. She's going to have a beautiful life. I know that. I'm confident in that. But I want to touch on something, and I haven't really talked about this publicly because it's a really interesting thing. When you look at a situation like this as a gift and an opportunity, and you take the time to write down, physically write down what you want to do, who you want to be, what you want to change, and you do it from ultimate humility, you go inside yourself and you're like, look, these are the things I don't like about myself. The inner work, right? Incredible things will happen. The universe will grant you

What you're looking for if you ask for it. And this isn't like some mumbo jumbo. These are literally the cheat codes of how to advance your life. You have to manifest it. You have to define what you want, and you have to put it out there. And so as I was going through this process and writing my goals, and I want to finish my book and I want to write a second book, and I want to write a third book, and I want to do this, and this five page list at the bottom, I was like, you know what? I deserve happiness

And I'm going to find that happiness and I'm going to do it in such a way that works with my business. Just like you were talking about here. And I literally wrote out the qualities in somebody I want to find exactly very specific. And so this is a crazy story. So in 2021, I saw a girl in a travel promotional video on the internet with a group of other girls like this incredibly beautiful girl. And I never forgot it because I was like, that is the ideal human being for me. I was in a committed relationship. It was weird. You just see someone and you're like, whoa, you felt it. You felt it. Nine days after I got to Miami, nine days after I split with my ex and a few days after I wrote the thing, I get a suggested post on Instagram of that girl and I reach out and lo and behold, we have an hour long phone conversation that day on personal development and growth. And I literally read through what I had written on the piece of paper of who I wanted to find. And there it was. It was that exact human being. And you've met her.

David Stodolak 00:56:16

She's literally absolutely great. Yeah, she's

Adam Young 00:56:18

Amazing sitting over there

Every single day since nine days after I left Michigan, I've hung out with this person. She travels with me. I'm super happy, super fulfilled. It's just an entirely different life and I never expected it and I never saw it coming. But there is a lot of power in asking the universe for what you want. There is a lot of power in being honest with yourself and who you are and there is a ton of power and having the humility to look inward and say, there are parts of myself that I can improve and that's okay, and none of us are perfect, but a lot of the times people are scared to admit that they're not. But there's so much power in that you can accomplish anything. You can literally change the fucking world if you just stop, look inward and say, I'm going to work on these things better myself and then never give up on that process. You literally can do anything. You can be the billionaire that owns the yacht down there and if you don't believe it, I mean just keep watching these pods because I'm going to do it

David Stodolak 00:57:30

And you're doing it as we speak. And that's the power of the subconscious mind. And a lot of people might say think, oh, that sounds hokey pokey, but it's true. It's, it's worked for me. I think it's some things and boom, I attract it. It crazy. You become like you attract what you think about and your thoughts create your reality, and that's what you're talking about here. So speaking of that, you talk about cheat code. That's the cheat code is really your subconscious mind program in your mind. This book, the Paper Code Revolution, to me, it's a cheat code and how to create a fortune or create an enterprise group company with a lot of enterprise value, create value for your customers. You talk about, it's so in depth. I finished a book and I'm like, wow, there's so much to pack in here and I don't even know, I feel like we have to do a whole other podcast about it, but you go from A to Z, how to start the company, how to find networks, how to find buyers, how to collapse timeframes.

You talk about legal, even though I have a barcode in the back of the book with iOS that you put out there and templates. Yeah, you really went above and beyond. You talk about, everyone thinks about paper call, about internet marketing, but it goes beyond that. It goes to radio, it goes to, IM print advertising, newspapers. You're talking about someone that's done doing eight figures a year with 14 people with newspapers. Classified ads. Classified ads. So I would never think about that. So you are expanding people's thoughts of what paper callers are making. They're learning about it or if they're already doing it, how can they do better at, so I can't emphasize this enough, if you have not bought the book and you want to make money online, internet marketing paper called Buy the book, it's amazing. And I don't even know where to begin with it. I feel like we're talking about this for freaking days, man.

Adam Young 00:59:06

I mean look, I took the last 20 years of my life and boiled down the business strategy, the marketing strategy and paper call into the book.

And so the book costs the same as two coffees at Starbucks without the carbs and the sugar, or if you buy it on Kindle, it's one coffee at Starbucks. The audible will come out this week. I mean, I don't know, I put 20 years of my life in here and I've helped people make billions of dollars with the information in this book. It's real. You literally can see it. It's on the wall over there. I am not making it up. It's not a pitch. There's no rebuild or continuity program or nonsense with the book. I just want to see more people successful that fulfills me. And this is something I really wanted to do and accomplish. I mean selfishly for myself, the more people I help, the better I feel, the more motivated I feel, that's what I get out of it. And so I'm super excited about that in the book.

And so I encourage anybody, skip the Starbucks, buy the Kindle version anywhere in the world. And even if you're not a digital marketer or you're not in the space, I guarantee you there's something in this book that will help your business grow. And I mean if you're watching this and you buy the book and you read the book and you're like, you know what? There was nothing in this book that helped my business grow. I got nothing out of this book. Just like, shoot me an email, I'll give you the money back. I don't even care. No risk. I keep the book. I just want people to grow their businesses so they can hire more people so they can build incredible things because I know that I what that's done for my life and I want more people to have that.

David Stodolak 01:00:57

What's the mold? You said in the book someone made over a hundred million dollars on a single campaign. That accurate? I read that correctly.

Adam Young 01:01:04

Yeah.

David Stodolak 01:01:05

Okay. What vertical was that in?

Adam Young 01:01:07

That was Medicare. Wow. The first one was Medicare.

David Stodolak 01:01:10

That's incredible. What do you think, and this is a personal question here. You talked about when you're 10 years old, you got that first computer, right? That computer, I think that it got your brain going and it put you in the right mindset to start building things, breaking things. It created the ups and downs. And then you became teaching at 14 at Michigan. What do you think your dad would say or have you talked to him? Has he seen what you've done? And I imagine he's guy be very proud of you. What are those conversations like?

Adam Young 01:01:39

I'm not sure he fully understands. He's pretty old. He's going on 80 right now. Oh wow. Yeah. My parents are older. I know they're very proud of me and I don't know if they fully understand all of this stuff because they're not technology people. They're like good, hardworking Midwestern folks. I think what they did really, really well is they forced me to read constantly when I was young. They forced me into athletics. So I learned what being on a team was and they had the foresight to try and expose me to things like a computer, the foresight, and they were really expensive at the time, and so I'm super grateful for them. I text with my mom all the time,

Actually more than when I was in Michigan, just down the street from her. I think that relationships, I've changed my priorities and I'm not scared to admit I wasn't perfect, but I text with her all the time now. I send her photos. I know she wants to be part of my life, so I don't think they fully understand it, but I do know that they know that I work incredibly hard and they're proud of that. And I do know that they know that my goal is to help other people and I think, I dunno, they're probably very happy with that outcome

David Stodolak 01:03:05

And I think it's amazing that he was able to do that. I have three kids, my daughter's 12. My producer has his son, 9-year-old son reading the book. He was an elevator with us and he knew who Harrison was. I mean, that's the best gift we can give our kids or young people to the future at the end of the day. So I think that really struck me, resonated with me. Big time,

Age, data. There's only a few months left of this. A lot of different ways to monetize data. Data is a very broad term. There's a lot more money in it. You already spent the money, let's just say it costs you $10 for a Medicare lead. You make a million dollars in sales. You really only made a hundred thousand bucks

And you might not get paid by your advertiser.

What if I can get an extra 50 cents dollars or $2 $3 per lead in perpetuity? What does that do to my marketing campaign? What does that do for the stress of the profits of my company? A percentage or two at those kinds of numbers are huge as moving the needle. So for us, what I love about age data, the hard part's already been done, now it's just a revenue lift for your company. What would the extra 10, 20, $30,000 a week do for your business? Absolutely. All of our big partners are making hundreds of thousands, if not millions a year with us. They're never going to have this gold rush again.

Adam Young 01:04:14

While we were doing the pod, I got a text message that a few of these presenters from an industry event we were going to, were refusing to give their presentation. So I bagged and zip tied them and hauled them off to New York on a Gulf Stream.

David Stodolak 01:04:30

Wait, wait, what do you mean you bagging zip tie, literally put a bag over their heads and

Adam Young 01:04:34

Yeah, we have a video. We'll cut the video in. But yeah, I bagged them. I ziptied them. I put them in a sprint van and then I hauled them off to New York in a G four. Yeah.

David Stodolak 01:04:45

Wow. Can you reveal who these people were or is that to be We'll leave it for the,

Adam Young 01:04:49

Well, it was Coy and Carter

David Stodolak 01:04:51

From Policy Jar it two big heavyweights in our

Adam Young 01:04:53

Industry.

David Stodolak 01:04:53

Paper. Coy Heavyweights. Yeah.

Adam Young 01:04:54

Yeah. And they were just a little reluctant to give their presentation. They probably got a little

David Stodolak 01:04:58

Nervous stuff in it.

Adam Young 01:04:58

Yeah, they were a little nervous, but they did a phenomenal job.

David Stodolak 01:05:01

They did. I was there.

Adam Young 01:05:02

They had great energy. They engaged the crowd well, the content was good. So that was their first presentation. I'm proud of those boys. They did a really nice job,

David Stodolak 01:05:10

Guys. Adam doesn't fuck around. You give 'em your word, you got to commit. Right. Non-negotiables, right?

Yeah. Awesome. Well, I'm glad we're back. This is why we're in different outfits right now. So we're doing, I was a little disappointed I was cut short because of that situation, but I'm glad we're back. There's so much value here. And again, I've said that before. I'm a big believer that success leaves clues and obviously you've been hugely successful with Ring, but as an affiliate, you broke the affiliate curse that I want to talk about a little bit more here, but I want to talk more about the book, the Paper Car Revolution. I know from speaking with you in the past, you spent, I think you said 15 months to write this book and you said it's a laborer love, and I'm really fascinated. I know we talked about in Vegas again, you didn't have to do this book. You already were successful with Ring ba, you had other ventures you're making money with. So for all intents and purposes, you didn't have to do it. So why did you actually decide, I'm going to write this book? What was the driving force for you?

Adam Young 01:06:08

Well, our industry changed my life. I was destitute and owed people a ton of money and was not winning when I was young. And I discovered this industry and I started going to trade shows and at one of my first trade shows, actually this was the first trade show I ever went to. I met Scott Richter and I said to him, I heard you were an amazing email marketer. How do I do that? I'm new to affiliate marketing, I'm doing kind of well, but I'm still living in my parents' basement. I would like to figure this out. And he took me behind the booth and he had a table there and he sat with me for an hour and just taught me the ins and outs of email marketing, how to get started, what offers worked. He was expecting me to run them with his network and I did, but I was so surprised that this man who was so successful was willing to just sit down with me as a kid behind a booth and not talk to anyone else for an hour and just teach me a bunch of things about email marketing.

David Stodolak 01:07:12

So how old were you at the time?

Adam Young 01:07:15

21.

David Stodolak 01:07:15

Okay. Wow. 20 years ago.

Adam Young 01:07:18

Yeah, it was 20 years

David Stodolak 01:07:19

Ago, 19, 20.

Adam Young 01:07:20

And he didn't just give me surface level information, he walked me through the process of how to do it, wrote it down on a piece of paper and drew doodles of Here's what you're going to do and here's where you need to go and I'll introduce you to these three people for servers and IP addresses, and I'll give you data on revshare. And just was completely open to helping me be successful in a way that I had not experienced before in life. And I talk about this a little bit in the book, not as in depth, but I think it's because I just went to him and told him the truth. I wasn't like, I'm crushing it. I'm making all this money. It was whatever. I was like, listen man, I went through a rough patch in my life. I'm trying to escape my parents' basement. Can you help me out here? I'll work my ass off. And he did. When I started writing the book, I remembered this story and it was really important to me and I wanted to give back to the industry essentially. That allowed me to get out of my parents' basement all those years ago. And I thought the best way to do that would be to write a book

Because it's physical. People will take it seriously. We can distribute it at scale and give it to our customers. We now ship the book out to a lot of our customers so they can train their staff. For instance, if we have a new customer and they say we have 10 people on staff, we say, great, we'll send you 10 copies of the book and we can now use it as a tool to educate more people in the industry on paper call and just marketing in general so that they can be more successful. I feel like I've gotten to a point in my career where it's super important to me to give back to the industry and help as many people as possible also become successful because there's so much opportunity in our industry, you know this, it's not necessarily about how do I find an opportunity, it's about, oh my God, which one do I focus on? And so I want to teach people what I've learned, learned because it drastically changed my life. And I almost feel like it's my duty. It's certainly part of my personal mission, but it's like my duty to help people in our industry be more successful.

David Stodolak 01:09:42

How do you feel when, and again, it's happened to me on the LFG show, I'm getting these messages, nice messages on Instagram, on Skype, what a great episode. Wow, I implemented this. How does it feel for you? Obviously you've had a lot of success in this industry, financial success, it's obvious that's happened too, but that's something that money can't kind of replace that feeling like you made a difference. Can you talk about that?

Adam Young 01:10:07

Yeah, so at the event we were just at, I was waiting in line for lunch and a random guy just said, Hey, I think his name was Josh. Hey, I'm Josh, great to meet you. What do you do? And I told him I own Ringa. And he was like, oh, whoa, that's incredible. I'm your customer. I use your software.

And then a guy turns around in front of me and goes, oh shit. You're Adam Young. I read your book. It taught me so much. I'm getting into lead gen now. I'm working on building landers for calls. And then other people around me turned around and started asking me questions about where the auto insurance industry is going and how can you do all sorts of stuff and pay per call. It's really a unique feeling. It's one that is really fulfilling to me. I have to remember that these people want to be really successful and that they're at a different stage and that just a little bit of my time to motivate them can create a huge outcome. So this has been happening to me constantly. It's a really new experience for me at Leads Con. I had numerous people come up with copies of the book and ask me to sign it for 'em. I had people fly in to leads simply because they read the book

And in the book I say, you need to go to trade shows, come find me at the Ring ba booth. And people literally came out just to say hi and talk. And they followed my trade show plan on how to work a trade show. And it's, it's a lesson in humility, man. You put yourself out there like that and you realize you're impacting people. It's an amazing feeling. But also it forces me to take a step back and just be like, wow, I have so much more to do. I can impact so many more people. It almost reset my climb up the mountain. I don't think I'm at the top of the mountain. I think I'm barely at Basecamp. And the more and more this happens, the more I feel that way

David Stodolak 01:12:19

That's inspiring to hear for someone like you. That's how I feel too with the LLG show. I feel like it's kind of like when I birthed Solar Direct Marketing back in 2016 and then seven, eight years later where we're at. And again, I know there's so much more growth and we're still really young. At the end of the day, guys like Colonel Sanders didn't really make it until the sixties and everyone's got their own trajectory in life, and I feel like these are the best years. So that, that's inspiring. Hope Audience really took what you said and absorbed that fully.

Adam Young 01:12:48

Well, I think, and a point I want to make here is I think when you make your mission about other people, that more people want to be involved in that more people want to spend time with you and help you and do those things. And a young marketer at the event we were at saw my social media and he's amazing at social media, and he was like, listen dude, you've made time to speak to me. You've helped me. I don't want anything, but I want to send you my social media playbook so that I can help you reach more people. And that type of thing keeps happening to me too because I'm willing to focus on helping other people and delivering value to other people. I don't even have to ask for it. People just literally show up and they want to help too, which is a pretty incredible thing.

David Stodolak 01:13:41

I have a question for you. I dunno if Sean Kelley is one of my friends. He's a big influencer online. His podcast getting has over a hundred million views, 150 million views. He says something interesting. He's got one of the top business podcasts and he rose really fast within a year, but he was socially awkward. He had to step out of his comfort zone to do that because even I'm outgoing and people will say I'm outgoing, but there is times where my producer's like, Dave, we got to, I'm like, fuck, I don't want to do it, but then I do it. I'm like, I'm thanking for motivating me. Have you been and felt that way too with doing this or no? Yeah.

Adam Young 01:14:11

I mean, look, I just had a conversation with some friends about my personality type the other day. I'm a Myers-Briggs, INTJ,

David Stodolak 01:14:19

So introvert.

Adam Young 01:14:20

Introvert, yeah, super introverted. Lock me in a room, just let me think. They call my personality type, the architect,

For instance. And so for me, I learned social skills by going door to door when I was young, when no one else would give me a job. And I walked into thousands of businesses and had to create relationships with people. So that was a learned skill, but I don't particularly love it. It's not something that energizes me. This is fine. I like sitting down with people I know really well and I'm close to and I can talk for hours with them and vibe and that's great. But in a big party or a social setting or at a trade show even that is something that's super draining to me and it's something that I've had to learn to do and really put the effort in to get good at. And you've seen me at trade shows. I'm there all day. I do the booths, I do all the meetings, I do all the things. We host events afterwards and then after the event, I'll go host a dinner or whatever it is. And I like your question because I think it's important for people to realize that just because you're not comfortable or you're not good at something doesn't mean that you can't do it. And you certainly probably should,

Right? If Harrison and I, he's also pretty introverted. If Harrison and I weren't willing to go to the trade shows, we would've never had a business. I don't feel particularly comfortable interacting with a hundred new people on a daily basis. I'm exhausted at the end of the day. I go back to my hotel room, sometimes I go to the gym, I just,

David Stodolak 01:16:09

It's like an athletic event is what it's,

Adam Young 01:16:11

It

David Stodolak 01:16:11

Really is.

Adam Young 01:16:11

Yes, dude. It's like literally coming back from training hard for eight hours and I have to sleep and I really have to make sure that my mental health is in a good spot and I take the time to wind down, which is why you don't see me out afterwards. A lot of industry people, they go out and party and that's really not my thing. You will not catch me at Omnia after Leads Con. It's not in my repertoire.

David Stodolak 01:16:43

We got to do it one day LFG show. We're going to get you out there even for five minutes, 10 minutes. I'm not going to say who, but one time we had someone that doesn't drink that came to Omnia, great guy drinks once or twice a year. I don't know, he must have the LG effect. I didn't even know he was drinking. All of a sudden he puts him on his shoulders in almost got kicked out. I was worried I was going to bust my head, but everything worked out. Guy was strong. But it's the LG effect. You never know, man.

Adam Young 01:17:06

I mean, you can try. You can try, but it's going to be hard.

David Stodolak 01:17:11

I got it. Challenge accepted.

Adam Young 01:17:13

Yeah. But I think at its core, right, like you said, you were uncomfortable doing some of these things. I would say that the things that I'm uncomfortable doing are some of the keys to my success. And I think everyone has a lane and they try and stay in that lane because it's comfortable. But really the most valuable skill and business that people can have or maybe even in life is being comfortable, being uncomfortable. That's going to be uncomfortable. You know, don't want to do it. It's not going to be fun, but you do it anyways because you know have to. And that's something I've always been willing to do. And it doesn't matter how hard or uncomfortable or how much of a pain in the ass something is, if I know it's the right thing to do, I can fight that feeling and just go do it.

David Stodolak 01:18:02

And I think that's great what you say, and we have to step out of our comfort zones in order to grow. That's the only place that growth happens. And I think I see a lot of media buyers that I think they're natural. It tends to attract introverted people and the ones that step out their comfort zone, they're like, damn, I didn't want to go to Leeds Con or whatever. But then they have work, they feel they're glad they did. They always make a connection that helps to move their business. And I think that those are the people that are going to have an edge at the end of the day. Would you agree with that?

Adam Young 01:18:30

Yeah, I do. And something you do really well and that I respect about you is you're always on the trade show floor. You usually do a booth, you spend the time at the event because you realize that new companies coming to the event are going to get a pass and they're going to show up

David Stodolak 01:18:47

Hundred

Adam Young 01:18:48

Percent and they're not going to go do the chandelier bar as their trade show. And I think that something, not to say that you can't find business at the bar.

I think where a lot of people miss the boat is they spend their whole time not actually at the event, at these trade shows. And you're not going to catch the CEOs of big companies or the people that you want to work with that you're not at bar. Most of the people that show up, let's say a big buyer of calls, for instance, they're a corporate company. They're going to have policies on drinking and what you can and cannot do. And so their staff is not going to be like, all right, I'm going to fly to Vegas. I'm going to go to the chandelier bar and hang out with a bunch of affiliates during the day when I should be at the trade show, taking meetings with people. And I think this is about comfort too. If you go to a trade show and you know that a bunch of your friends are going to be having a good time at the bar, you gravitate towards that because it's your comfort zone. But the reality is if you can be like Dave, put on a suit jacket and show up to the trade show hall, you can conduct business with business people.

David Stodolak 01:20:07

Correct.

Adam Young 01:20:07

And I mean, that's where we make the most money. I mean, there's no question about it. Our whole team is generally at the event or around the event all day long and we crush it. And there's something to be said for that. The people that are the biggest are the ones that are scheduling meetings all day that are behaving like professionals. And I don't mean to talk down. I have a bunch of friends that obviously spend all day at the chandelier bar, and that's fine. But I would love to see these people grow bigger businesses, impact people more, influence more people to be more successful, and you're just simply not going to do that at the bar.

David Stodolak 01:20:49

Great words of advice there. I do agree. I think it comes down to being comfortable. People are comfortable hanging around their tribe of people, and that's great. You can do that, but you have to kind of slice up your time. The show has limited hours is what, nine to five? Sometimes 10 to four. So I try to be around the floor as much as possible doing those hours afterwards, whatever. I find out what's going on.

Adam Young 01:21:08

Of course

David Stodolak 01:21:08

You do that, but I do agree, and I feel like a lot of people, or they won't even buy a badge, they're like, oh, it's a thousand bucks. But to me it's all about ROI. That thousand bucks could turn into a million bucks easily. Where else do you have an opportunity to get a hundred XA thousand XRO? There's not some shit coin you could lose all your money on. So I think that's a mentality. People have to break that mentality and get out their comfort zones.

Adam Young 01:21:30

Well also I'd like to touch on that because I've seen a lot of people not buy badges over the years. If you don't buy a badge and you're hanging out in the hallway and you meet with somebody, you're essentially saying that you don't want to support the event, but you're there mining value from it, which may seem like a hack or a win. But in reality, when you meet a high performing, high producing executive or individual and you're not wearing a badge, I mean we take you less seriously.

I hold all my meetings at our booth because it's convenient for me and just go meeting to meeting, to meeting to meeting. I'm not going to walk out in the lobby and take a meeting with someone that says like, Hey Adam, I'd like to meet you, but I'm not buying a badge. That to me is an inconvenience. And so I just won't do it. I want to support the events so that they continue to happen year in and year out to provide opportunity for people. And that's why we spend so much money at them. I mean, we're the biggest sponsor, I think, of every industry trade show, I think. And so the reason for that is, one, the business, but two, I want these events to be successful and they've helped us grow. So I want to give back to them so that they keep throwing the event, keep doing marketing, keep bringing people there.

And so when I see someone that comes to the event and they don't have a badge, but I know they can afford a badge, that to me is like a poverty mindset, a scarcity mindset. And I mean, sure you can do business with people like that, but I'm not generally seeking out people with poverty mindsets. I'm seeking out people with abundance mindsets. There's enough business for everybody in every industry to go around. And if you have an abundance mindset, you create partnerships and you build and you create great relationships and everyone becomes more successful. The poverty mindset, people are thinking, I need to take away from someone else or find an advantage that someone else doesn't have so that someone else can make no money, but I get value. And that's just not the type of people that I'm seeking to do business with. And I don't think that they realize that people are judging them based on this constantly constant

David Stodolak 01:23:49

Judgment

From the way you dress, the way you talk to all those things. I never thought about it that way, but you're right. I dunno how much money I personally spent. My companies I spend, we probably high six figures, or not million bucks on these shows, but we always get the badges, we're always got booths or we're doing this and doing that, but it's true. And then you don't have access to the app. The app is important to set up these appointments. So that's also, I know some big buyers, former clients of mine, a company that got bought out for about a billion dollars, they wouldn't even show up to sell of those shows, but they would buy the interest. So they would just make this the advertiser. So everybody wants to sell it to the advertiser. So if they couldn't make it to an international show, they would still spend a thousand bucks, get on the app, and that thousand bucks would turn into millions of dollars for them. So that's the mentality you have to have.

Adam Young 01:24:34

Exactly. And I talk about this in the book and I'm putting out a workbook, a companion workbook with the paper call Revolution now. And in there we talk about my trade show strategy for working a trade show. Every single person on our team is in the app and mining the app and seeking people out and then doing research and business development. And so the people that don't buy the badge, they think they're getting something, they think they're like an edge in reality, they're fucking the entire thing up. Yeah, not cool. They're not the people who are going to put in all the effort to track people down and present really well and care about their appearance. And we say about appearance, you and I are basically dressed for the gym right now. Well, we

David Stodolak 01:25:18

Turn it on when we go to the shows.

Adam Young 01:25:20

Yeah, exactly. We do it there,

But I think you're exactly right. And the poverty mindset puts blinders on people so that they can't actually see how to maximize their opportunity. If you have an app filled with thousands of people who want to do business and you don't want to pay the thousand dollars to get access to the app that says everything I need to know about the person, because the solution is not at the chandelier bar in the lobby, the solution is on the exhibit hall floor. The solution is in the app. And not only that, there's some pretty good panels at a lot of these

David Stodolak 01:26:01

Shows. Oh, the amazing panels.

Adam Young 01:26:02

Yeah. And I rarely see people go up to speakers after the panels and try and create relationships and whatever, and that alone is worth the price of admission. We were just at this event in New York and look, I'm going to be real with you. The content really for me, I am not going to use any of that stuff. I think I sent two notes to our team to like, Hey, check this out. And so the price of admission was not worth it for me. It just wasn't. And then Harrison went there and then we flew speakers out on a jet and this whole, we spent a bunch of money. You

David Stodolak 01:26:41

Zip tied them,

Adam Young 01:26:41

We zip tied them. And so we wanted to make sure the event was a success. We made sure that people showed up. And the value I got out of the event actually was I saw two people speak. I wasn't particularly interested in what they spoke about, but I knew I needed to talk to those students. And so they got up, walked off stage and walked to get some water or something. No one

David Stodolak 01:27:08

Got

Adam Young 01:27:08

Up to go talk to them. I know this because I was the only person that got up to talk to a speaker. After the speakers were done, I literally chased them out into the back of the room and was like, Hey, I'm Adam. I own Ring ba. This is what I want to do. I'd like to potentially do business with you and Cell phone number Exchange done. And then I followed up with them afterwards and that was the value that I got was I was like, Hey, there are these really great speakers, I want to go talk to them. And so you have these people at trade shows that don't buy the pass and then the buyer they want to work with has someone up on stage on a panel. And then you go to the panel and no one goes and talks to the one person everyone wants to talk to afterwards because none of the people that need that relationship go to the panel, listen to the person, and then make the effort to create a relationship, which is mind blowing to me. And I gave the keynote@contact.io last year. I'm giving it again this year. I was on stage at Leads Con and I'm on stage at most of the events. Maybe one person will come talk to me and that one person, I generally spend 20 minutes, 30 minutes talking to them. And if they ask me for help or they need assistance with something, I'll generally hear them out and help.

And so there's so much value that people leave on the table by not engaging. If you're going to fly to Vegas, get a hotel room, do all the things, but you don't think you can get a thousand dollars in value out of going to the content and the exhibit hall and all this stuff. People are literally spending millions of dollars so that other people can learn and grow and then you see people not want to pay. I dunno, it's a little offensive to me.

David Stodolak 01:29:04

Yeah, I agree. And you talk about, we're talking about the book and this is one of your chapters, a whole chapter about trade shows and started, I started my business off of 2017 Leads Con got five solar buyers, two of them, and I still do business with to this day, which is crazy. And I think that everyone, again, the point is that the book has, all this goes really in depth about it, but the trade shows in particular, I do agree they're not worked properly. I built my business on trade shows. We still always get value out of trade shows. Even stuff like we went to Roof Con last year and I have a guy from nine months ago I met, we're doing some commercial solar deal with this guy. Amazing. I saw him again, a solar, it doesn't always happen off the first event.

It might happen second or third or fourth, but they see you seem like you're legit. You're buying the badges, so you obviously have some money you dress represent. Well, it's consistency at the end of the day. And then going back to the panels, what I used to do is I would go to those panels if I was looking to expand our mortgage lead division, I would go to where the mortgage buyers were speaking. Those are your buyers right here. Sometimes you don't have their phone number, you can't get 'em on LinkedIn to respond. And I went to one of them one time and I started selling them leads, right? And I did exactly what you said. And because the people that are watching them speak, they're also going to probably be other buyers as well. They're looking to get insight from a Quicken Loans or a multi-billion dollar organization that's publicly traded. So those are the little tips of the trade that I don't think that a lot of people do take advantage of, but if you don't buy the damn pass, you're not going to get access to the panel. So you got to get the damn pass.

Adam Young 01:30:36

Exactly. What I thought was interesting is the CEO of Perform CB click booth,

They're a very large company in this space. She reached out to me on LinkedIn at Leads Con and just simply said, Hey, I'm speaking at Leads Con, you're speaking at Leads Con. We should probably connect just in case there's any business to get done. And what's crazy about this is they're our customer. They have been for a really long time, I had never met her, but as the CEO of this big company in this space, she clearly goes down the list of every single speaker and writes them a personal message and connects with them before the show. And I thought that was brilliant. Of course, I'm going to connect with her and if she ever needs anything, she can reach out. And so the most successful people, the richest people, the most powerful and influential people in any industry, they go to the show, they buy a pass, they're speaking on stage, they're big exhibitors or sponsors of the show.

Why would you not want to be around these people? Those are the people I want to hang out with. I don't want to hang out with the people who don't want to buy the past and want to spend all day at the bar. I want to go spend an hour with the CO of one of the most successful companies in our industry and chase that person down and just ask 'em a bunch of questions about how's your business, how's it growing? What are you learning? What's the most concerning thing on your mind? Where is your energy focused right now, this year that it wasn't last year and why? There's like a million questions and I want to go spend as much time as I can asking people those questions who are already super successful. I just think a lot of our friends in the industry are missing the boat.

David Stodolak 01:32:31

Yep, you're right about that. Last thing I'll say on that topic is proximity, right? Proximity is key. You got to be in where the decision makers are, where the buyers are, where your potential next partners are and they're there. So for whatever that price is, I mean I spent a lot, but it's generated X amount. So have you and you talking about many Elli, right? A hundred million dollars go to award winner. You met 'em seven, eight years ago, a lead. He was solopreneur at the time now looking

Adam Young 01:32:57

Right? He was in a suit.

David Stodolak 01:32:58

Yeah,

Adam Young 01:32:59

He was in a suit and he came up to our booth. I mean, it doesn't get any more clear than that. I met a lot of people that way in our industry who are really good friends and put the time in and it's a process, but it's worth the investment. We're doing InsureTech Connect. It's a tough show. It's so big. A small percentage of the people that go there are target audience and it's super expensive. But we're like, all right, well, we're going to make this work. We're going to do the work, we're going to sift through the people, we're going to collaborate with the trade show, and we're going to do whatever. And the reality is, it may take a few years for us to get it right. We'll probably spend half a million dollars before we see a return on that. But if you believe and understand the value of what you're doing, it's an investment and it will yield. But you can't sell the dip. And I think so many people, if they don't see an immediate return on something, they'll sell the dip and then they lose their opportunity effectively. And so I love that I see you consistently at trade shows and consistently doing the things that help you become successful because consistency is key. If you work in business long enough, you will be successful if you keep banging your head against the wall and learning. The people who don't make it in business are simply the ones that quit.

David Stodolak 01:34:36

Absolutely. Yeah. Great. That was amazing, and I'm glad again, I wanted to dive into the book with this time, and that's right there. You talk about, there's a whole chapter on that. We went even more in depth into it. And I love trade shows. I feel like I should do something on trade shows too, on the LG show, but amazing. That was great. Now going back to the book, another thing I think that's really important, you talked about this on the affiliate marketing show, is picking the right verticals. And that's a whole chapter, and I almost feel like a lot of the success or failure of someone new it contingent upon which vertical that they choose. In my particular case, I chose solar because I felt like I had a competitive edge. I had contracts with utility companies, which they're involved in energy. I heard them talking about solars coming up there.

The government was backing it. There was all this pro stuff. And plus guys that I knew from old call center days were all gravitating towards solar. The money was there and they were reaching out to me for help because they knew I was a call center whiz. So I was able to marry a few things and I hit the ground running. I had an edge there. And I feel you talk about this a lot. We know there's a lot of shiny object syndrome in your industry. People are trying to find out what's he doing, what's he doing? And they try to jump into it. And I feel like the vertical you choose is almost like as important as in relationship. Who are you going to date? Who are you going to marry? And it could be the difference between success or failure. So can you elaborate upon that and the importance of that?

Adam Young 01:35:58

So I got a phone call the other night and this gentleman was like, I'm looking for some advice. I'm having some wins, some failures, some ups and downs, and I want to work on all these opportunities. How do I select the five or whatever? And I just laughed. I think focus is extremely important. And my advice to this individual was that you need to focus your energy like a laser.

If you're spreading it all over the place, you cannot focus. And so in my life, and I'll get to the vertical thing, but in my life, I want as few distractions as possible and as most stability as possible, I don't particularly, I don't seek out new friends, for instance. That's not something that's exciting to me. When I meet people in our industry or like you and I are friends now that came from years of being in orbit, seeing each other do business, our mutual reputations in a space. I don't have to really worry about our friendship that way. You're like a serious human being. And so I can talk to you if we have an issue, we can collaborate, we could do business, we can hang out, we learn when we're around each other. These are the type of things I look for. And so I don't want to seek out new energy to come into my orbit because I want to focus all my energy on as few high value things as possible, whether it's my health or education or relationships or business.

I want as few high value targets as possible to work towards. And so I think this advice translates to business in a really important way. Harrison and I used to constantly be thinking about what's the next big thing? What are we going to do? What campaigns do we want to run? And in reality, that really held us back. And so now we ignore almost all opportunities. People hit me up on a daily basis and want me involved in things. My default is no, right? No matter what it is. The answer's no. And if you're going to be persistent and try and convince me, maybe I'll listen a little bit, but the answer's probably still no. Because I want a hundred percent of my energy focused on my most important thing, which is my mission. It's growing the industry ring BA and what we've talked about on the show. And so if you're new in any business and you're trying to find all the opportunities, the reality is most of them you could probably be successful at in paper call, any vertical people are making millions of dollars in. People are like, where are people making the money at 'em? And I'm like, I don't even all, every,

We service customers in hundreds or a thousand verticals. I don't even know how many verticals they're in. And so it's kind of a silly question to me when people ask, what's the next big thing, whatever. And I always follow up with a question, and that is, what do you know the best? Are you an insurance agent? Did your dad own a mortgage company? Does your uncle have a towing business? Has your family been in cranberry farming? I don't know. Tell me about you. And I'll tell you what verticals you should focus on. Now, it doesn't have to be one, it could be a couple, but in reality, it's something where you should understand fundamentally what the backend of that business is so that you can get into the mind of the consumer, but also push the consumer to have intent that will result in the best outcome for the business.

So an affiliates mindset is generally get to the conversion rate as quickly as possible. If it's submit this form, I want as many people to fill out the form as possible. And they don't even consider what happens after the form. A lot of the times they don't know. If you talk to most affiliates and you say, oh, hey, you do lead gen for solar, what happens after the form's filled out? And they're like, nah, bro, they just pay me eight bucks for the submission and that's how I get my money. And that type of naivete is the reason why they're not building a bigger business. Because if you understood how the backend worked for the solar company, you could go to a David STO and be like, Hey man, you're paying $8 a form, but I understand that your backend conversion rate needs to be X, and if I can deliver that or better, can you pay me more money? Or can I get a rev share on what I produce that's above your baseline or teach me these things so that I can deliver for you the best customer possible. And that doesn't happen very often to you, does it? No, no,

David Stodolak 01:41:15

Not at all. Never. Everyone's thinking short term.

Adam Young 01:41:17

Exactly. And so anytime I walk into a partnership or a new relationship, I think about it like a partnership. Now, if it's not a partnership, I'm not interested. Superficial relationships and business or in my personal life are just not interesting to me. I don't like small talk at all. For instance, you're either going to tell me what's most important to you and how you're going to get to your goals, and we're going to have a conversation about that, or I don't care. I am not going to sports ball with somebody. I don't know how to do that. I'm an introverted computer nerd. I just don't know. And so the same goes for vertical selection. If I'm picking a vertical, my dad used to own a mortgage company, for instance. I know how loans are underwritten. I know how deals are closed, I know what the commissions are on mortgages.

I know what the fees are. I know what the credit profiles need to be. I know when people buy houses, why they buy houses, why they refinance, what type of major life events cause a refinance. I know why deals fall through. I know what the whole process from start to finish is going to be, because I spent a lot of time in his office when he did this, and I learned the whole business. And so if I'm doing lead generation for mortgage companies now, or getting people on the phone pay per call for mortgage companies, I know how the consumer needs to think. I know what consumers are going to result in a great outcome for the buyer. And so I can target those consumers

And then I can listen to the calls and refine the process much easier because I understand all of it. Now, if you're a mortgage company and I show up at your door and I'm like, Hey, I know your whole business. I have these consumers we're they're going to be really qualified for you right now. You're willing to have a discussion about how can we pay more for these? How many can you deliver? What can this partnership look like? And that is an incredibly powerful competitive advantage. And there was a guy named Kent who yelled at me once many years ago at a trade show in San Francisco, Kent Keilback. What trade show was it? It was Ad Tech,

David Stodolak 01:43:34

Which is, oh wow, old Gone Unre peace way back in the day.

Adam Young 01:43:37

And Kent aggressively, maybe even on the verge of yelling at me, said, all you affiliates are the same. I'm paraphrasing here. It's been 20 years. All you affiliates are the same. You don't understand what the buyers need. You just are trying to make a quick buck and you make more money than me, but you literally could be wealthy if you'd pull your fucking head out of your ass. And I was like, well, what do you mean? And he's like, well, you're running education leads. Do you even know what an enrollment rate is? What happens after you fill out the form? What are your partners doing? And I was like, oh man, I don't actually know the answers to any of these questions. It was a super embarrassing moment for me. We were in this hotel bar and there's all these other industry people around, and this guy, you turned red.

David Stodolak 01:44:30

You thought you felt that uneasy feeling.

Adam Young 01:44:32

I was embarrassed, dude, this guy's yelling at me and he is really successful in the industry and all these people are listening and he's just berating me in public. And I didn't yell back, I just listened. I'm like, this man's delivery is terrible, but he's really smart.

And so shortly thereafter, I went out to one of my partner's offices, PMA media group. They did education leads, Steve Scanlan. I don't know if you know Steve, might've been before your time. Rest in peace, Steve. He was one of my best industry friends. He's no longer with us. And I went out to their office, I learned how their call center operated. He taught me about what needed to happen and what enrollment rates they needed to achieve. And then we started looking at traffic sources by enrollment rate, not conversion rate at the form, but enrollment rate. And he's like, these are crushing it. These are no good. Pay you more for these. Let's cut these. And we built a partnership and then eventually they let me run on Google ads as the exclusive for four or five years. It was on autopilot. I didn't have to do anything,

But I was delivering consistent enrollment rates for their business. And then because we had the partnership, they let me test a ton of stuff that most people wouldn't take. Most of it didn't work. Some did. One day we blew up a call center with too many leads. It happens. But that created an incredible partnership and friendship for me. And it was all by learning the back end of the business so that I could deliver quality consumers that worked for everybody. So it was a win for them, a win for me, a win for the consumer too. Because if the consumer's buying or getting their mortgage or enrolling in school, they're happy.

And so that was a really long answer to your question about vertical. But fundamentally, I think that you need to pick a place that intimately. And if you don't know it intimately, you need to know it intimately because that's how you can out compete everybody. And so there are people making tens of millions of dollars in towing calls and tens of millions of dollars in dentist calls and tens of millions of dollars in cable TV calls and all sorts of shit. Long distance moving calls. Of course the insurance, different insurances. But if you don't actually understand what moves the needle for your customers, you can't win long-term longterm. And so that's where I would start.

I would make a list of every industry or vertical that has a paper call campaign that I understood something more about. And it could even be I just blew out a tire on the expressway and spent two hours changing a tire on the side of the road and almost got killed while cars are whizzing by or whatever it is. That experience is enough to say, wait a second. I know how a consumer feels when they're in this situation. So I can recreate that feeling in the ads copy so that you can target those consumers better. Does all this make sense?

David Stodolak 01:47:54

No, it is great. And you talk about in the book too, and I really think that someone up, it comes down to you got to pick a link where you have a competitor. An edge at the end of the day doesn't help you collapse timeframes and you have to invest some time into it that you got pretty much dressed down by this guy. But a lot of people would've been like, oh, fuck that guy I'm going to do. I'm going to do it. What a jerk off. But you were like, I want to actually take action. I'm going to take heat to what he said. I'm going to go to one of my clients. I'm going to dive in with him, get to understand it better. And that's what I did with solar. I remember going to Louisiana to a client that I knew was going to blow up. They had 30 agents. I went there, I went under the hood. I'm like, guys, you should do this, do this. I kind of advised them, but that helped me sell them more leads. And then they went to 500 agents before I know it, they're doing high six figures a month with me like a year later. So that's what you have to do. You have to dive in and do what everyone else isn't willing to

Do

While you can. I thought it was a lot of information, but it's great if people actually, the 1% of people that actually listen to what you said, they're the ones that are going to have that edge and figure it.

Adam Young 01:48:53

Yeah, and I think the reality is 1% of people, or let's say the 5% are the ones that can really find major success in life, but it's because they're willing to do things that other people aren't willing to do. Earlier we talked about comfort zone. They're willing to step out of their comfort zone and then they want to spend the time to engage with people on a deeper level and learn from people that are at a different stage in their journey. So I mean, I still do this. I listen to podcasts, I listen to books I read constantly. It's the same thing. If you can really sit down and study the people who have already accomplished what you want to accomplish and what their behaviors are and how they think, then you can essentially model what you're going to do on those people.

David Stodolak 01:49:45

It goes back to what I said are success leads clues and so does failure. Failure and success both leaves clues. It's like what lane are you going to choose? So going back to the book, which is all full of great stories, there's one chapter in particular that blew my light, blew my mind away because you really went in depth from A to Z how to start in paper call, whether you're a novice or someone that's been doing it for a while, maybe you're stuck or someone trying to break the affiliate curse. The one thing you talked about that I was really surprised you went into was the psychology of advertising. So can you elaborate more on that? I thought that was, it blew me away. You really went in depth and psychology is a whole other, you talk about that for hours and hours and hours. So let's talk about that and the golden nuggets from that chapter.

Adam Young 01:50:27

So on a one-to-one basis, the psychology of advertising doesn't work, but as you scale the pool of people bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, you're more likely to reach someone through advertising. And what we're doing when we're creating an advertisement is we're effectively mining a human brain for a memory or experience that someone already had. And we're trying to get what they felt during that experience up into their conscious so that they can make a decision related to that. So most people are emotional and they make decisions based on their emotions and humans share experiences how they feel and memories. And it's our job as marketers to find a memory that is shared among lots of people. And those memories could be all sorts of different things. They could be. In the book, I talk about debt consolidation, people having debt. And so there's a large group of people in America that have debt and they feel uncomfortable about that debt and they want to do something so that their life can progress and move forward.

And so those feelings that an individual has are shared among a large group of people. And we want to speak to those people so that we can help them. And I want to be clear, I'm not talking about manipulating someone into doing something that they don't want to do. That is not what we're talking about here. We are talking about reaching a group of consumers that need our help and a lot of people need help getting out of their own way. And we can help people do that and unlock the solution to their problems by bringing out the memories and feelings that they have in directing them towards a solution. And debt can be crippling. For one was in $50,000 or so in debt when I moved back into my basement the first time my business failed and it was crushing to me. I didn't know what I was going to do.

It was like making $500 a week when I started going door to door on commission and I got to pay taxes, cover my expenses, pay for gas, and then somehow pay back $50,000. It's not, and so it was debilitating for me. It hurt every single day. It bothered me every single day and I didn't know what to do about it. But if I saw a way to help deal with that, I would've engaged with it. And so I would've had to first feel the memory and the emotions about the debt before I'd be willing to do something about it. And so I'm explaining this, I think there's a misconception that marketers are bad and that appealing to someone's fears is a sleazy way to market or do advertising. But if someone would've offered me at my lowest point help in dealing with my 50 K in debt at like 28% interest or was all credit cards, it would've been really great to have some help. I'm not going to lie, and I never got any help. I didn't know debt consolidation existed.

David Stodolak 01:54:05

Were there even ads? What year was this around

Adam Young 01:54:07

Dude? Like 2003 or

David Stodolak 01:54:09

Something? I don't even know. Debt settlement exists like it does now. I feel like debt settlement started law like 20 0 7, 20 0 9 area, but I don't remember back then. Yeah, I never saw it.

Adam Young 01:54:16

Probably around the economic collapse. The internet wasn't as prolific even at that Facebook ads didn't exist at the time. We were all on MySpace. That's true. And so there was no solution for me. And so as a marketer, I say to myself, what would younger Adam have vibed with? And what we do is we break down those emotions into the feelings someone has felt. And obviously there was fear there, fear of my future, fear of answering the phone because it was debt collectors harassing me all the time. It was fear of what if I didn't take care of this stuff? I'll never have good credit again. It was fear of never getting out of my parents' house again. It was fear of how do I have a relationship? I'm a lover boy, and how am I going to have a relationship? Women are

David Stodolak 01:55:10

Asked through credit scores, they pull up the credit card. Now

Adam Young 01:55:12

They're crazy. I don't blame them either. And so this is 21-year-old Adam or whatever. Am I ever going to be able to hold a relationship again in debt? What if no one wants me? And this is a vulnerable moment, but this

David Stodolak 01:55:28

Is that scarcity mindset too at that point, how you have abundance mindset with that ability,

Adam Young 01:55:31

With that crushing down. How can I build a business again and how am I going to be successful? And

All these fears exist because of the debt. And so what we have to do is break down how someone in a situation feels, whether it's debt or they're on the side of the road changing a tire or there's a beehive in their garage, right? Like, oh my God, what if my daughter gets stung with a bee? I'm scared of getting stung with a bee. What if it keeps growing? What if they get into the walls like, oh my god, and we need to sell the house and no one will buy it because a beehive in the garage. Like, ah, what are all these things? And so you make a list of all the feelings that someone's feeling for the product you're selling, right? They have a problem, you have a solution. And then you also make a list of all the feelings that the person would feel if they get the solution. The dead example would be like, ah, freedom,

Much less stress. I feel happy. I feel like I have a future. I can see success again. Basically the opposite of the problem feelings. And then I run through an exercise in the book that basically you take this and it's a step-by-step and you break it down into words. And then you take those words and recombine them into advertisements based on the ad specs that allow you to take a consumer on a journey. So first it's like, Hey, do you even have this problem? And if you don't have the problem, right, Adam today does not have a debt problem. I don't even hear the ad. I don't even see the ad. It's like, oh, it's there. They're talking about something. It's irrelevant to me. It's not pulling up the memories needed to get me interested or the feelings. But the audience that does resonate with it, pay attention.

And then you offer them in an ethical way the solution to their problem. And then they're like, wow, I feel some type of way about this. I need help. Maybe these people can help me. Boom. If you do this correctly, the consumer gets a solution to their problem. So they win. You as an affiliate deliver a highly qualified consumer that has the intent to buy that picks up the phone and calls, and then the buyer isn't an order taker, or excuse me, they're not a salesperson, they're an order taker, they're a consultant, they're counseling the person, not selling them. And so you get a consumer who's got a problem that's negatively affecting their life. They get on the phone with someone who can help them solve that problem so that their life is better. And then everyone wins the consumer, the affiliate, and the buyer.

And so there's nothing wrong about breaking this down at all. In fact, if you do it this way and you deliver the ads properly and you understand the back end of the business that you're promoting, everyone wins. The consumer wins the affiliate and the business, and that creates a really sustainable business. So in the book, I talk about this in depth. I also have some resources and materials available if you scan the QR code in the book, I have some posters that have the emotional wheels and how all the emotions are connected. And so as humans, we feel a small group of emotions, but different situations branch them off into different flavors of those emotions. And there's a couple hundred of them and you basically are just looking at what emotions are people feeling and then taking that information and then using it to find words that draw it out and then work that into an advertising copy. And it's a highly effective way to do ads. And this is how I did it for 10 years plus as an affiliate. And I effectively just broke down my successful strategies of creating ads in the psychology behind it from over a decade of research and tens of millions or a hundred million dollars in successful ad spend or something like that.

David Stodolak 01:59:47

And you've seen it. You've seen it amongst the code award winners. You have 105, 115 million on your wall right there. It's crazy. You got a hundred. I mean I think this house alone, just 300 million

Adam Young 01:59:58

Going towards, I think pretty close to half a billion.

David Stodolak 02:00:00

Yeah, half a billion. So you've seen from your experience and you've seen from the winners and the losers, what's going on? I think right now, particularly that chapter is very relevant, a lot of changes going on. We just came from an event where I saw, I felt the tension. You said you felt the tension. People are nervous what's going on in the insurance space, particularly with a CA, because there's a lot of heat on people that are running noncompliant ads and doing shit the wrong way. So at time there's big money involved. There's people that they kind of do things the wrong way and it mess up things for the whole industry. So you could do it, right.

Adam Young 02:00:32

Well, that's because they don't understand the strategy or the process to actually do it. And so if you don't understand this and you're a marketer and you don't understand the strategy and the process to create ads that actually convert but deliver quality consumers without lying, then you just default to lying. And that's the problem. This is one of the reasons why I talk about this in the book specifically because I want affiliates and marketers to have a roadmap to creating ad copy that can fit within the guidelines of an advertiser or a regulator and be successful without having to make a bunch of shit up to lie to people. Because that type of behavior is unacceptable. The consumers know when they go to buy the product, they don't get what they want and then they're unhappy.

David Stodolak 02:01:17

And

Adam Young 02:01:18

So then the buyer cuts off the affiliate and they don't work with them anymore. So you can make a little bit of money short term, but you're not going to build a business. You're not going to get really rich. And the process is exactly the same amount of work. It's not like the process I talk about in the book is that much more effort. You just need to learn it and follow the framework. And then you can build ad copy. And a lot of the ads I see, these people are super creative. They're fast paced moving ads and TikTok style ads, and they come up with all this creative stuff and then they're like, well, oh, how do I actually talk to the consumer about what they need?

And they were never trained on how to look at a consumer's needs, look at a product-based solution and then connect the dots between the two. And that's what I teach in the book. I teach people how to connect the dots between getting the consumer's intent correct, finding the ones that want the solution, and then bridging the gap to the solution so that the buyer's happy to. And you don't need to lie in ads to do that. I mean, bro, the winners of the a hundred million dollars awards, the $50 million awards, the 25 million awards, the 10 million awards, even the million dollar awards. But the biggest customers we have, the ones that I understand what they're doing, they're the ones doing it the most compliant, the best way. They're building the biggest businesses that exist in our space, and they're doing it in the most sustainable way. And that's because the CEOs of all these companies, the ones that are my friends and I know they are super thoughtful about what they're doing and how they do it. They're building frameworks like I teach in the book for creating their ads and their ad copy and doing it within the guardrails of what is acceptable. And it's funny, I talk about this a lot. The people who do the least amount and are the least thoughtful are the ones that make the least amount of money and disappear

David Stodolak 02:03:33

Or they're chasing. One thing, one quote I like is how you do one thing is how you do everything.

So if you're someone that's going to be cutting corners or doing stuff, get away with it for a short term, but you're going to lose that client. I always that mask towards made perfect. I heard some crazy stories of some attorneys that are doing stupid stuff and some markers doing stupid stuff. You mess with one attorney, then you're banned. You're kicked out of the whole thing is what it comes down to. So why would you risk that and risk your whole reputation? Because our whole industry, it's a relationship business at the end of the day. So if you can't uphold your word, you're not going to be in this long term and maybe you'll be jumping from here to here, then that's got to be stressful. I can't imagine that, right? So I think that's the big thing, and I'm glad you talked about the winners. The people won the a hundred million go towards 50 million, 25 million, 10 million, 5 million, whatever. They all have a commonality because again, success leaves clues. And that's exactly, they're doing things the right way. So I think that's beautiful.

Adam Young 02:04:34

Beautifully

David Stodolak 02:04:34

Said.

Adam Young 02:04:35

And look, if you want to be wealthy, you look out the window, a new billionaire's boat just rolled up. We got to check it out. It's unbelievable. I've been staring at it for two days. If you want to be wealthy, wealthy, you need to think about the consumer winning. That's the key to the success. The customer's

David Stodolak 02:04:57

Always right.

Adam Young 02:04:57

The customer's always right. You want your customers to win. In our case at Ringa for instance, we do everything in our power to make sure our customers are happy. And if they're not happy for any reason, I'm not hard to find they can reach out. And I'm not talking about the crazy customers. We've all seen them, but for the most part, customers just want to feel like you're going a little bit, not a ton, just a little bit above and beyond for them that they can trust you and that they actually want to be repeat loyal customers. I don't think mean as a consumer myself, I don't want to try a ton of different products. I don't have time. I want a great product with great customer service, and I want to be a loyal customer so I don't have to think about

David Stodolak 02:05:48

It.

Adam Young 02:05:50

Gillette sent me a razor on my 18th birthday. I just turned 40, it was 22 years ago. I still use Gillette razors. And the reason for that is they sent me a quality product. They went above and beyond for me, and they sent me a razor and some blades when I was 18 years old as a birthday gift. And I've been using them ever since for 22 years.

David Stodolak 02:06:13

That's amazing.

Adam Young 02:06:14

Because their product is solid, it's dependable, it's a little expensive. There's some cheaper players out there now, but I don't care. I don't want to go test a bunch of other products. This one I'm happy with.

David Stodolak 02:06:26

They're consistent.

Adam Young 02:06:27

Yeah, I'm consistent. They're consistent. And that's what consumers want. They want a consistent experience. They want good customer service. They want to be excited about shopping or buying from a company, and they want to feel good about their purchase. And to do that, you just have to take really good care of the consumers. And sometimes that means you eat a little shit. Sometimes that means, you know what? Maybe it wasn't your fault. You're still going to do right by the customer to make them happy because it's not about how it makes you feel as the business owner or the affiliate or whatever. It's about how you make the consumer feel that matters. And when you start to think that way, your business can get huge.

David Stodolak 02:07:13

Yeah, it sounds so simple. And it is, as long as you focus on that, don't get sidetracked by a lot of bs, right? And

It

Goes back to the book, choosing your Vertical, but choose choosing your mission, what your mission is at the end of the day. And it should always revolve around the customer. They're the one paying the bills, and you got to make them happy. And it's just true what you said about you don't even have to go that crazy above and beyond what Gillette did. How much did they spend sending you that maybe it costs a few bucks, five bucks, right? And look, they got you. You're probably going to be with them until for the rest of your life, four or five, six more decades, whatever. But that's amazing. So I'm glad you touched upon that. Another thing, now going away from kind of tied related to this in the book, you talked about something that I thought was amazing. You talked about call fraud and the importance of quality assurance and building a QA team.

And I have a lot of experience with quality assurance running call centers. I think one edge that my call centers have had over other call centers that we put money into quality assurance. And this was a battle I had with adults, boss of mine that didn't want to invest in quality assurance. He's like, oh, you're taking our reps off the phone, we want 'em producing. I'm like, listen, these guys will help if we train 'em right? They'll help us get more sales, squeeze more juice and we'll get less complaints and we'll keep the customers for longer because our customers did not want to get complaints and we're having, we had too many, we're being too reactive rather than being proactive. So I'm a big believer in how do you be more proactive? So we put in the quality assurance department, and that was one of their keys to winning this big contract with Duke Energy is an 80 billion utility company, and I'm not with that company anymore.

I didn't own that company. I was a consultant there. But five years later, these guys are making, I think seven figures, eight figures a month on residuals off of these campaigns that I put in place. And a lot of my solar clients that I consulted for have QA departments that help them grow. So I never thought about that. We actually do something in my company with this smaller division, but where we listen to calls to make sure there's no anomalies going on. So can you talk about the importance of investing quality assurance to catch call fraud and maybe elaborate what exactly is call fraud for the people that don't know what we're talking about?

Adam Young 02:09:15

Sure. First, I want to start with the word choice you use because I think it's important. You said investment.

David Stodolak 02:09:21

Yes.

Adam Young 02:09:22

Quality assurance done correctly is a profit center. It is not a cost center. And this goes back to the poverty mindset versus the abundance mindset. A lot of people in business are so focused on reducing cost that they miss out on opportunities. And we see this a lot at Ringa. Obviously, we're the most expensive game in town. And the reason for that is if you use it, you're going to make more money than if you use anything else, right? Because we have more engineers and more support and tons of people doing all sorts of stuff constantly. And so the bigger players in the space, they don't complain about the bill because they understand that if they work with us, they make more money. And so it's a profit center, it's an investment.

David Stodolak 02:10:12

ROI, it's

Adam Young 02:10:13

ROI. Quality assurance is exactly the same thing. And the reason for that is twofold. One, you can catch buyers doing bad behavior. We'll touch on that in a second. The call fraud you're talking about. And two, the amount you can learn about the consumer, which then goes into a feedback loop for your advertising, is unbelievable. And so no matter how big or small the campaign, if I were running it, we'd be doing quality assurance from day one. There's no question about it. And if I couldn't afford to hire people to do that, I would do it myself. In fact, I would do it myself anyways. If this were my business, we don't run

David Stodolak 02:11:01

Calls. You've done it before when you first you were one. The

Adam Young 02:11:03

Wes, yeah. Yes. So the reality is if you listen to the phone calls, the consumers will tell you what's working, what's not working, what ad copy works, what ad copy doesn't work, what they're confused about, what their desires are, what their problems are. And you really just have to go through every single call, not some, every single call and listen to the exact words the consumers are speaking, and you can do this various ways. I like to listen to calls because you get the vibe, the tone, when you're face-to-face with someone, it really changes everything. And when you hear their voice, the text doesn't always show the

David Stodolak 02:11:46

Emotion.

Adam Young 02:11:48

And so I like to listen to it at scale. Transcription is also very effective so that you can read the words if you're looking for the keywords. And so both used together can be really powerful. For instance, if you have a hundred phone calls and 10% of those calls, the consumers are agitated when they're calling in, are they agitated about their problem or the way they were marketed to? And so maybe a percentage of consumers are really sad, but it's related to the problem they're calling about. You understand their emotional state when they're calling in. So you can go back to the psychology of ads and the exercises that I teach and modify what you're saying. And then with the transcriptions, or if you just listen and take notes, you can look at the transcriptions and see the exact words the consumers are saying, and those exact words can go in the ad copy. If you're qualifying the consumer, their answers are the solution to improving your ad copy because maybe you're targeting a group of 55 plus individuals and they use different words like, oh, gosh, and G Willickers or whatever it is. And you're like, why do these people keep saying these things? And then you realize, oh, wait a second. That's how they're describing the problem they're facing. And then you take those words and you put them in your ad copy, and now you're speaking to the people

David Stodolak 02:13:22

Subconscious. Yeah,

Adam Young 02:13:23

Yeah, subconsciously. And so that's really powerful. Also with Google ads or Bing ads or anything that's keyword related, negative keywords are super important. And so you listen to the phone calls and then the consumers are like, oh, I have this problem, but that's not what you sell. And you're like, oh, crap, we're pest control. They're looking for where to buy honey. And you're like, oh, wait a second. I need to make sure honey is a negative keyword or something of that nature. And so you can even more so target the intent of the consumer, which lowers your ad costs. Negative keywords will lower your ad costs by listening to the calls and reviewing the transcriptions and really understanding what the consumer's doing. Now, this can be a gold mining operation because if you have a hundred consumers, or let's say you really need to listen to a thousand calls. If you have 1% calling in for pest control that are asking for honey, you need to listen to a thousand calls to find 10 of 'em to see the pattern. You're like, oh, but you can chop off 1% of your ad spend. Now if your margins are 12%, now they're 13%, how many times can you repeat that process as you're going through negative keywords and consumer intent and changing your ad copy? And this, because you've been in the business long enough when you're a scale media buyer, even if it's just one dude, right? When Harrison and I ran ads, we did the media buying, it was just the two of us. And so two people can manage an eight figure ad budget, no.

And so we would always get really into the weeds to figure this out and look into the consumer behavior. If we could spend more money on the advertising, we could win more of the clicks. And so we'd run it lower margin. And so we'd be like, how do we shave half a percent of spend off? And this is exactly how we do it. It was just listening and understanding what the consumer is saying and then modifying the advertisements. And then also consumers will say some crazy stuff on the phone and you won't expect it, but it's very powerful. For instance, in ad that it's like drilling for oil. You're like drill, drill, lose money, drill, drill, drill, lose money. And then, right?

David Stodolak 02:15:56

Yeah, I listen,

Adam Young 02:15:57

You're like, holy crap, my ad creative crushed it. We're spending 30,000 a day on this one ad. And so to find those nuggets of gold, you really have to be creative or you have to be a really good listener because the consumers, that's the cool thing about paper call in the call recordings, the consumers will tell you how to reach them, and you can change your qualifying questions too. So your call center agents are asking questions that draw out that like, oh, you for calling? What's the biggest problem you're facing

David Stodolak 02:16:31

Today?

Adam Young 02:16:31

Just simple. And they're like, oh my god, there's bees in the garage. And you're like, okay, add copy bees in your garage, mark.

David Stodolak 02:16:39

Exactly.

Adam Young 02:16:41

And so it's not that complicated. It just requires a lot of work.

And then also on the other side of this, and I want to be a little bit careful here, I'm not accusing anyone of doing anything bad, but the reality is that not all buyers are the same, and some of them engage in shenanigans. It's just the truth. Over the years, I've learned that callback fraud is generally the most common type of fraud that a buyer of calls will engage in. And it's super simple. A consumer calls in and they're like, oh, Dave, I can't hear you, Dave, I can't hear you. I tell you what, I'm going to call you back on your caller id. Okay? And you're like, sure, hang up. The phone doesn't meet the 90 seconds or whatever. The affiliate doesn't get paid, and then the agent calls 'em back. Typically, the bigger the call center, the bigger the buyer, the less likely this is to happen. Like a 500 person Medicare call center is not behaving this way because it's not scalable for them. They're not trying to rip off affiliates. This is not, they're running

David Stodolak 02:17:44

A bigger fisher fraud.

Adam Young 02:17:45

Yeah, they're running a billion dollar business. They don't care about this nonsense. They're not trying to save 20 bucks. The smaller phone rooms like 30 people or so. That's where we generally see this. Now, I'm not saying that all of them are bad. There's plenty of great small phone rooms, but when it's a smaller group of people, money's tighter

And there's less people, the owners of the call center can incentivize this type of behavior. And it probably won't happen on every phone call, but it will happen. And so listening to all your phone calls that are below the conversion duration is really important too. And sometimes you can also find your negative keywords there. It's not just the long call recordings. If a consumer calls in and they're like something, something and then hang up in 30 seconds, they weren't qualified. And so I want to know what's going through their head too. But at the same time, I can also keep track of the buyer behavior. And then during this process too, something you'll notice that happens in any call center is cherry picking. And this is basically when an agent thinks they hear someone and they're like, I don't know if this person vibes, I don't know if I'll get a sale or whatever. And when I was 16 years old, I worked at a mortgage call center doing leads, and the guy who ran it had zero tolerance for this. And what I learned over working there for five months or whatever it was, is I closed so many people, I prejudged

Into leads and the guy was right. But not all leaders in call centers are paying attention to this. And some agents may take it upon themselves to make these decisions. And so doing the quality assurance is really important because the agent generally introduces to themselves with a name and you have the recording, the timestamp, the caller id, and so the call center also has this information and can line up the disposition. And so if you do QA and there's some guy named Bill who keeps messing up or cherry picking or hanging up or he is just lazy or a bad salesperson, you can take that information and give it to your partner. And if you have a good relationship with them, they will go retrain or deal with the situation. They don't want it either. They're paying this guy to be on the phone and if he's burning their partners, it's not effective for them either. And so there's so many ways to optimize when humans are involved. You literally have to be insane to not do quality assurance or listen to your calls. And speaking of which, five years ago, Manny and I did the paper caller show, and it was the most watched episode,

And we talked about quality assurance the entire time.

David Stodolak 02:20:39

Huge.

Adam Young 02:20:40

He had a grid and a language and a coding system, and he had people listening to the calls and marking all these different codes on the calls, flagging the ones with agent, bad behavior and unique situations. Or anytime something wasn't on an anomaly, they would flag it. And I actually checked because I am writing another book right now, crazy. And I wanted to go back to that conversation, and he shared the results of a QA process with me, and I went back and looked at it, and still to this day, it was the most detailed QA grid or process that I've seen in the industry. And that was five years ago, first a hundred million dollar

David Stodolak 02:21:20

Go award winner success clues.

Adam Young 02:21:22

Yeah, exactly.

David Stodolak 02:21:23

Down to

Adam Young 02:21:24

I've been preaching quality assurance and professing it for a really long time. I think that getting into the mind of the consumer is valuable for so many reasons. You can deliver a better experience, but you can also fix your ads. You can keep your buyers in check, but you can also help your buyers. Some of the buyers aren't doing QA or realize that their employees aren't doing a great job. And so you don't have to pick a fight with them, be like, Hey, this guy, Billy's terrible. You're just stealing from me. No. It's like, Hey, Dave, I'm a really great partner. When we talked before, I told you we have an amazing quality assurance program. And so what I did is I had a team of highly skilled quality assurance agents, listen to all the calls that went to your call center. And I found a few areas that if we collaborate on, we both can make more money, would it be okay if I shared this information with you and you'd be like, yeah, why are you so excited?

And then I'd send it over and I'd be like, look, I think you have a couple agents that need training, or you might need to deal with this situation probably costing you a lot of money. And then also, these agents are amazing. They have the highest close rates. You should maybe, can we listen to some of what they're doing and use it to train your other agents? And so that's the other side of it is you can also hear what agents are incredible and have the best close rate and convert the highest durations for you, and then go into what they're doing and do the work for the buyer. Just be like, listen, Chrissy over there. She asks these four questions every single time. She immediately connects with the consumer, asks these four questions every single time she is converting, double the amount of sales for you. Then this guy, this guy doesn't ask any questions. Can we use her as a framework so that we can close more deals? And then that call center's going to be like, oh, wow, that's amazing. Dave delivered incredible information to us. Forget these other affiliates I want to work with. Dave.

David Stodolak 02:23:26

You get more of that budget, boom. Yeah, exactly.

Adam Young 02:23:29

Exactly. And so the work is very powerful if you do it. Quality assurance and paper call is one of the most important things. Anyone new to the industry, if they're not listening to every single call, they're crazy. And look, I'm biased here. You need software to listen to the calls, right? You're going to need to buy ring ba, but a hundred bucks a month if you're new, ain't moving the needle for me. So it's not really that bias. You just need the software. You're not going to win in the business if you don't have access to the recordings and the routing and all the tools. And so yeah, QA is just incredible. And we have a team at Ringo that's working on improving our transcription technology to automate a lot of this.

David Stodolak 02:24:18

And

Adam Young 02:24:19

So earlier this year we released transcription technology in beta, and then we have a team of people working on training models to effectively help with all of these things. How do I improve my ad copy? How do I automatically detect callback fraud? How do I look at the emotional regulation of all the people on the phone? How do I find agents that aren't doing their job properly? Like everything we're talking about here, we're building technology to automate. However, I will never change my advice. And that is if you are new, whether you're new to the business or you're a new employee, you need to listen to a thousand phone calls from beginning to end, or you do not have enough information, and I mean it a thousand phone calls in the category that you are working in because no one else is doing that. And so if you do that, you'll understand it better than everybody else.

David Stodolak 02:25:17

What you just said was amazing. And I've seen in my career running call centers and currently QA gives you that edge, and we're all looking for an edge. There's a lot of people in our industry looking to get into it, and some guys are playing unfairly, they're running crazy angles or whatever. So you're competing against some people that are just doing stuff they shouldn't be doing. But if you have QA on your side and you have these ingredients, it's going to give you that edge. So one thing I want to talk about about this book, and I've heard people say this not just with regard to this book, but also John Cass has a podcast. I have a podcast. There's some people who maybe it falls, comes down to the scarcity mindset or nervousness or anxiety where they're like, why are you giving out all these secret, the secret sauce, it's going to make it, you're going to bring all these people, amateurs in the industry, they're going to mess it all up and blah, blah, blah. What are your thoughts about that? Has anyone said that to you or am the first time you've heard this

Adam Young 02:26:15

Mean? I've heard some of it. I mean, look, what I have to say to that is in 2015 when we started Ring BA and we went to trade shows to talk about pay per call, there was no one. There was Anthony Palooza ring partner and Eric Evans,

David Stodolak 02:26:38

Man, and that wasn't even that long ago when you think about it, right? It

Adam Young 02:26:40

Was almost 10 years.

David Stodolak 02:26:41

But when you say 20, it sounds like 20, 30 years ago it could be, right? It's crazy.

Adam Young 02:26:45

Yeah,

David Stodolak 02:26:46

It feels that way.

Adam Young 02:26:47

And at that time, there was no one evangelizing pay per call as a business. And so look, you don't have to tell me where the rumors come from or what people are saying, but the reality is here that Ringa is a big part about why these people have the opportunity they have today. We've spent millions of dollars, not two, not three, like many millions of dollars, evangelizing pay per call. And what happened, people now have huge opportunities to grow their business in the space. And so I would counter that argument with pay per call is still very new. The opportunities are endless. And if you teach people how to do this and bring more people into the industry, everyone has a bigger opportunity. Now, if someone has the scarcity mindset, the poverty mindset, and they're like, oh God, more people are going to come into the industry and take our opportunity, those people are never going to be successful anyways. The people that are going to be successful are the ones that are watching and they're going to go, oh, Adam's going to bring a hundred thousand people into the industry, affiliates, insurance agencies, pest control companies, everyone at every part of the value chain, he's going to go find 'em all and bring 'em into the industry.

I need to figure out how to create offers

And drive traffic and build a bigger business here so that as the industry continues to grow, I can come out on top. As more people have gotten into the industry, the bigger the businesses that people are building have become. When I met Manny, paper call really wasn't that big of a thing, but now it's huge and it's growing faster than ever, and he's running a giant business in it. And so if people actually think that what I'm doing is going to cause the industry harm, they are out of their mind. What I am doing is growing the entire industry so that everyone has more opportunity. That even means my competitors' businesses are going to grow. I don't care. I want to see as many people successful as possible. And this vehicle is incredible to do that. And so to anyone out there who thinks like, oh, Adam's giving away the secrets, this is bad.

You probably should go think about how do I buy traffic from affiliates? Oh, there's going to be 10,000 more people in pay per call. Well, how do I be the first person they call to do business with phone calls get brokered all the time. Like one broker, two brokers, three brokers, four brokers, five brokers, just crazy. And so what's the difference? More people come into the industry, someone figures out a great idea, the industry grows more. You buy calls from them, make a million dollars. Maybe they do exceed you one day and go do their own thing. So what make friends learn, the bigger the industry, the more people can make money and the more money people can make. And so we don't want a tiny industry. We want one that's as big as possible. So that, I mean, all my friends are industry friends so that all my friends can build bigger businesses and hire more people and provide more for their family. And I want to see our industry grow. And the people who are scared of that, they're the ones that would likely leave or fail anyways, because the ones I'm thinking about, the guys I know that are building, dude, you bring a thousand more people into the industry, they're going to make an incredible amount of money just like they'll see it, they'll capitalize on it. They're not scared of innovating.

Innovation has to happen or you can't push something forward. So I mean, I won't apologize for it, but I'm going to tell you right now that I've just got started evangelizing this and we're going to see tens of thousands of people show up in our industry and it's really going to grow. And that's what we want. Rising tides lift all ships. And so sure, maybe there's a couple losers people, maybe some event happens or something happens and their business doesn't succeed. I would put forth that that's not my fault. It's someone else's fault for not capitalizing on an opportunity or growing or changing or reinventing their business so they can take advantage of how fast our space is growing. And then also, man, look how many people have come into the industry and started doing really well. I mean, we got hundreds of go towards lying around. You don't hear any of these people complaining that more people are showing up to affiliate Summit. That's what we want. I don't know.

David Stodolak 02:32:05

Yeah, I agree. It's a sign of rising tide, lift all ships, like you said. And I've done that too with Solar. I helped the client in New Orleans, they blew up and everybody, there's companies that knew that got bought out because that was their main client and everybody benefited. So that's a positive side effect at the end of the day. And it comes down to that mindset disruption is good for businesses. Disruption is where at least is usually a result of innovation, but someone doing things a little bit differently. So it's a matter of you're going to adapt or not adapt, and this is the way it's going. So the people that listen, read the book, they'll listen to the nuggets and man, we've shot out so many nuggets here that during the breakouts on that we should charge people for this episode. There's so much fucking information on here.

This is like a mini mastermind we're doing right here. It's just incredible how deep we're getting. But the people, whatever percent that actually harnesses this information and utilize it, they're the ones that are going to adapt. They're the ones that are going to go to the next level. And it's just amazing. So yeah, thank you for saying that. That got me excited because Paper Co isn't our biggest division, but we're growing that we're about to make hopefully a really big hire in the space that's going to help us grow it even further. So we're focusing a lot of attention on it because we know where things are going, and we're pivoting right as we speak. So gets me excited to hear you say that.

Adam Young 02:33:20

Yeah, I think everyone should be excited about that.

I mean, it's just like the trade show thing. I met you at a trade show. I met my business partner, Harrison, at a trade show. We were both there. Someone's going to read the book, show up to a trade show, meet one of these people that are saying that, oh no, Adam's bring tons of people in and LA and then they're going to get together and be business partners and grow a great business together or something. And that person wouldn't have shown up if they didn't read the book. Why would you not want more smart people around you? I mean, the market for pay per call is every business that sets an appointment or sells something over the phone. It's like trillions of dollars. Do you think Exxon cares if someone opens a gas station? No one cares. And so you really have to be small-minded to think that way. And I encourage anybody who's actually concerned about that to start asking different questions that is like, oh, if there's 500 more affiliates, they're all going to be looking for offers. How can I build a backend using technology and have all the buyers lined up and automated so that I can pay them more money than they can get for themselves?

Now, I got 500 new potential affiliates and I'm good at business development and I created a backend and now I got a product. All of the technology exists to do this. I mean, we make it. So if an affiliate out there is concerned about more affiliates showing up and eating their lunch, they need to start moving up the value chain and they need to do that anyways. If they're going to stay affiliates, that's always going to be a battle for them. And it's not. Do more paper call people, show up and eat their lunch. It's does some guy make the next version of Sham Wow and then chew up all the Google ad spend for the keywords they need that has nothing to do with pay per call and prices them out of the market. There's a million reasons why an affiliate's ads can stop running. I mean, it's a curse. We literally call it the affiliate curse. And so this is not going to be the cause of that something else. External will sooner or later. And so the affiliates need to start thinking like business people and start building backends and start entrenching themselves in the industry and creating more value for others. That's how they're going to survive. It's not going to be Adam Young in his book with the funny cover that puts them out of business. I mean, come on, get real. Right?

David Stodolak 02:36:10

Great. And I think what you said about going up the value chain, it's really the key to anything that's part of the evolution. And how do you, I started off as a broker, right? Just me. And then I hired somebody of two people, and now I have dozens of people on my team. You were started as an affiliate. Now you own Ring. But we were author of a book author creating a second book, have a podcast. I mean, we evolve, right? And that's how you create the value. And I think this goes into my next question to you is the question I was going to ask you, which is probably, you probably may have answered it, and I think it has a lot to do with value creation, is what's the commonality between the top performers you've seen in paper call with the people that won the a hundred million Go award, the 50 million, what makes them different than someone that's just struggling or someone just stuck in the low seven figures? And not that the low seven figures are bad. I mean, you have to get to get to eight figures, you have to start seven figures to get to nine figures to go to eight. But what do you think is the one or two defining traits or characteristics that separates them from everybody else?

Adam Young 02:37:09

Leadership skills? The most valuable thing I've ever learned is how to be a leader. And every single person that is running a big business in our industry or any industry is doing so by leading people. And that is a really different challenge than being an affiliate, for instance. And it is a very different challenge than let's outsource all our work to virtual assistants or whatever and tell people what to do.

You really have to start thinking about how you make the lives of the people that work for you better. They need to be the priority, not you. And that's a really hard thing to internalize. And I think as an affiliate, it's a very hard thing to internalize because the affiliate industry in general is driven by people who want to do well and make a lot of money and be the center of attention. And if you're going to lead an organization and do something powerful or build a really big business, you have to put all that aside and focus on how do you make the people that work for you more successful and forget all of this, right? It's not about me, it's about them. Because you can't do everything. And a lot of people struggle with having control and giving that to other people, but if you want to recruit really high quality talent, they need to understand that you're invested in their future.

It's not about them working for you. It's not like, oh, I'm paying you money. You need to better my life. No, no, no, no, no. I am giving that person money. But what I really need from them is their dedication and their willingness to subscribe to our mission and make decisions with our values. And the only way you can convince high quality talent to do that is by them knowing that you are working to build an environment where they will thrive and they will be happy. And so something I'm super proud of at Ring Buzz is we essentially have no turnover.

We do occasionally let people go for performance related issues like every other company, but very rarely do we have someone quit. And most of our people have been with us a really long time. And the reason for that is very simple. It is, we're here to serve them. I want them to grow. I want them to get better. I want them to have more opportunities in their lives, whether they're with me or without me. It's about them and their mission. Also, my mission is about our customers. And so none of what I do on a day-to-day basis has anything to do with Adam. It's about how do I serve my team and how do I serve my customers? And the biggest companies that work with us, where I have really close personal relationships, they're all servant led organizations. They're all really great at leadership. They care about their people and they want more than anything for their people to be successful. And there's a very selfless vibe that goes along with that. And it's funny, you've flown with us a couple times on Arva,

But usually we get together some amazing people that are running pretty big businesses and they talk about business, and they're flying on a private jet, and none of them care about what they're getting. They only care about how their teams win and their customers win. And so in the end, they win. And so it's a very selfless but selfish mindset. I know if I serve all these people, I will win. The difference is I can't focus on me. I don't know when I will win or how big I will win. That's not on my mind. I genuinely am focused on our people and our customers. You can't fake it. It has to be real. And so not only are all the biggest businesses and the leaders of those businesses sharing that these traits, but they genuinely subscribe to this. It's not lip service. They will clean the toilet if they have to. It doesn't matter. They will serve their people.

David Stodolak 02:41:56

And that wasn't the answer I expected. I thought you going to, I dunno where I thought you're going to go with that. I thought it was have something to do with media buying or something. And that kind, it makes sense when you say it that way, right? It's always those simple things. And we talked about Manny, we talked about ourselves, solopreneurs that grew. And you can't get to these numbers by yourself. You need a team and a team that believes in you. And what you said about turnover, that's true. Turnover is expensive, and the time you can't get that time back. So it's an investment you make. So that's a testament to what you guys are doing. But yeah, I never thought about it that way. So that for me, that's pretty inspiring to hear.

Adam Young 02:42:32

Yeah, you got to lay down the gold chain in the Lambo

And really understand that you're serving people and that's how you get the best outcomes. But it has to be real. It can't be faked. You have to truly care about your people and truly care about your customers winning and get involved in that success and live it and breathe it. And that's how you get the best outcome. We talked about this before, and I say it a lot, the best talent doesn't need you. They don't need me. They can get a job anywhere. They're the best talent. And so the reason that the best talent will come work for me or or anybody, is what they get out of it. They need to believe in what they're doing. They need to have a great work environment. They need to have the resources that they need to be successful. They need to have a voice. They need to know that all the leadership has their back before they eat first, I eat last. And when they know that, then you can recruit them, then they can be excited. You can unleash them. And ultimately that that's the goal. You want to find people who are so good at what they do, it scares you and that you are learning from them.

This is an evolution that all entrepreneurs make. And then they have to really find those great people and they either have to mentor them or they have to convince someone who's already done what they need to come work for them. And it's a really hard practice, and it's a really hard process. And the people I know that are the most successful, that own the biggest businesses, and they just are really, really great to their people.

David Stodolak 02:44:28

Oh, great. Simple stuff. But it's what works. It's that old school wisdom

Tried and true tactics. So I want to shift real briefly here. We've been talking a lot about the book about media buying leadership, all those things you have. I think one way we connect a lot is that we believe in health, right? Taking care of ourselves. And we have what's called, I hope I'm saying a priority. Life matrix is what it is. And I think that's very important because at the end of the day, any business, especially what we do, it's like a mental sport is what it comes down to. And I think that everything's connected. I've had Dr. D on the show who works a lot of athletes and celebrities. He's a big believer in that. And I know a lot of successful people, people that are successful and not successful too, that, I mean, people that are successful, that are taking great care of health, other people that aren't. But you don't really get long-term success if you don't take care of your health. So can you elaborate more about your prior life matrix and what that is comprised of? Because I think it's really relevant.

Adam Young 02:45:24

Yeah. So I mean, my work schedule is 24 7, 365. There's no, I don't work after five o'clock or whatever. And this is part of the leading people and serving them, they have to know that you're fully engaged and available. And so anyone who says that there's work life balance as an entrepreneur is out of their mind.

That doesn't exist. And so you do not become an entrepreneur to not work. The reason you become an entrepreneur is you really, really, really, really like working and you need to love what you do. And so the priority matrix is really important because if you don't make the time to take care of your vehicle, your machine, it will break down, which means you cannot perform at your highest at all times. And so it's interesting how that works. If someone's number one priority is their business or wealth, they're really screwing it because the way you get the most performance in your business or your wealth or your life is to be as healthy as possible.

Because if I am mentally healthy and strong and physically healthy and strong and I am taking care of myself, I can put in more hours. My brain functions better, I sleep better. I'm able to handle stress better, I'm able to be more calm. And as a leader, having all those things in order is really important to me. And I work really hard to make that happen. And I am constantly thinking, even here on this set right, you and I are having a conversation about all these things. I can't turn it off. I got to list.

David Stodolak 02:47:15

Same with me. Yeah,

Adam Young 02:47:16

List of notes, I got to go back and do stuff, they're in my head. And if I don't take care of my body and my mind, my ability to do these things degrades. So it's like, and I made this mistake before and focused all my energy on my business and I let other things be by the wayside. And what ended up happening is the business did not grow as fast as it could have. Whereas now where I've restructured my priorities, our businesses are growing, all of them are growing faster than they ever have, and they're bigger than they've ever been. And I attribute a lot of that to stress management and taking care of myself and making sure that all of these things are in order. I'm eating healthy, I'm exercising a lot, I'm taking all my supplements and I'm getting my blood tested and I'm focused on my health and doing these things. It's really been an accelerant on business. And so I think as a new entrepreneur, there's a lot of struggle here. They think like, oh, just as much time as possible, I need to make this successful. But taking that time away from the grind to go to the gym or exercise or turn off for an hour, that's actually more valuable than an hour of tired work.

David Stodolak 02:48:39

And one of our, someone we both know, good friend Ker, I've been hanging out a lot with him, A lot of these shows and man successfully his clues, he gets up really early, I dunno, four in the morning, three in the morning, he goes to bed. He's very regimented. And you are as well for a lot of successful people, very regimented. They don't negotiate. I got to be in bed by nine. I'm in bed by nine or eight, wake up this time. He's actually had a positive influence on me. I've always been into health and where I move right now, we're riding in the water, which is great. I get to sprint on the beach, but one thing I would do, I would wake up around seven 30 and I felt like my kids would wake up like 15 minutes later. I couldn't get ahead of the day.

I'd work out, rushed, and I'd get a lot of ideas when I'm working out that peace of mind, which is great. I would get all my ideas. I know a lot of times I would shoot you texts, Hey, I'm at the gym, I'm about, we were shooting each other, the texts, right? I'm at the gym too. All my great ideas. But I think it's also because you have that peace of mind. There's no one there that can interrupt you. It's just you. Right? Yeah. So he influenced me. He doesn't even know this yet, but I've been getting up, reached the last four or five days at 6, 6 15 in the morning. I'm trying to work up to five in the morning. I'm thinking a little step, but God, what a world of difference. I have a good hour and a half to myself. The kids are sleeping. No one's bothering me. I walk on the beach and it, it's been great for me the last few days. And I feel I'm reading a new book, actually reading the book instead of actually doing, because I do audible as well. But

Those little habits, it might sound simple, but it goes a long, long way. And you become the people you hang out with at the end of the day. So if you're hanging around people that are healthy, you're going to be healthy, or people that are wealthy, you should be wealthy or you'll pick up some of those habits. So I want to thank you for that. I feel like that's, you've been a good influence for me on that. Ker has been a good influence on that. And people watching this, I know, especially when you start off new, it's hard. I think you've explained to me, you went through your situation where your health wasn't the priority. It wasn't for myself either. And I hated myself for that. I knew better. But I think that if you really want to get to the next level, you got to do this. I liked the fact that you talked about that because it's something important that I think a lot of people brush aside and you have to make it a priority at some point.

Adam Young 02:50:46

I think for each person, the formula here is different. You have kids, they get up early, they have to go to school. I don't have that in my life right now. I've always been a night owl. I get my best ideas at night. I like to think at night. And so I'm not an early riser.

David Stodolak 02:51:05

I'm not either.

Adam Young 02:51:06

Yeah, I think you can restructure it so you can get that hour of peace and value. Whereas for me, it's never gotten me where I want to go. So I mean, maybe this sounds embarrassing, but I get up whenever I want. It's usually around nine in the morning and I have a protein shake. I do my stuff in the morning, and then I get to work immediately, usually around nine 15, maybe nine 30. And I don't have any shame in this because at 11 o'clock at night when it's quiet and there's no one around and I'm just sitting by myself in the dark, that's when I get my best ideas. And so I had been in my previous relationship, she wanted me to get up earlier and earlier, earlier and thought that the way I was trying to do my sleep schedule was lazy. But she would go to bed at nine, I'd be up till one in the morning, and it's not like I'm up till one in the morning. Netflixing. It'd be like

David Stodolak 02:52:21

Being productive,

Adam Young 02:52:22

Being super productive. That was the most productive time for me when it was quiet and no one was bothering me. My phone wasn't blowing up. I get messages first thing in the morning up until maybe six or 7, 8, 9 at night. I mean, we have a bunch of staff on the west coast, and we also do software deployments at specific times. So I'm around. And for me, that schedule works better, but it's the same thing. I make sure I get the quiet time and then I take care of my health when it's convenient for me. Because if you're working 24 hours a day, essentially you can pick and choose where you want things to fall within your lifestyle as long as you get them done. Later today at four 30, I'm going to tremble before I go to the airport. And yesterday at 1215, I had a Pilates class, which people would be like, what? You're doing this in the middle of the day? But

David Stodolak 02:53:19

Yeah, I just did one with my wife at one 15 yesterday too.

Adam Young 02:53:22

Yeah, it was

David Stodolak 02:53:23

Great.

Adam Young 02:53:23

Exactly. And so when you're on it so much, it's okay to break that schedule up and choose what works for you. I mean, I do the Pilates at 1215 because the instructor's amazing, and that's when she's available. So it's like whatever. But I think as long as you're doing some sort of activity like that on a daily basis, you're going to win. And Harrison, he did a lot of self-improvement over the last calendar year, and he was constantly saying 1% better every day.

David Stodolak 02:53:59

So true.

Adam Young 02:54:00

Just like I need to do a little bit better every day. I'm going to do a little bit more working out. I'm going to diet a little bit better today. If you're just focused on a little improvement every single day, over time you can achieve amazing results. It doesn't have to be drastic or crazy. When I realized I was not where I wanted to be, I just went ham. I just went crazy.

David Stodolak 02:54:24

Like a radical overall, you think?

Adam Young 02:54:25

Yeah. Well, I'm down 30 pounds.

David Stodolak 02:54:27

Congrats

Adam Young 02:54:28

Since June of last year. Wow. And so, I mean, it can be as fast or as slow as you want. You just commit to yourself and don't give up on it. And then over time you'll see the results. Everything is not a race. Most things are a marathon. And then when you change your priority structure, you need to commit to it for life. I will never do that again. It was too painful. It was too painful in the moment, and it was too painful to earn my way out of it. And so now I'm just like never again.

David Stodolak 02:55:04

I love that. I love the fact that the 1% a day, even one 10th of 1% reading a book or starting on a book, all those things just go such a long way. We're looking for an edge. There's such a competitive landscape out there in what we do in the business world. You got to have any sort of edge you can get. So that's great. This has been incredible. I was going to ask you, I dunno if you, is there anything else you feel we haven't touched upon you want to touch upon?

Adam Young 02:55:30

No, I don't think so. I mean, I would say that I really encourage people to read my book.

No one's making any money off the book. Okay. I'll never get my money out of the book. I think that there's just a ton of value in it, and I really want to see people successful in our industry. And if they read the book, I guarantee that they'll get something out of it. If they don't, they can hit me up. I'll give 'em their money back. I don't even care. It's just the more people that come into our industry, the more opportunity we'll see. And that's what really excites me about the future. So I encourage people to do that. And then I encourage people to show up to all the events, meet people, build relationships, and then not give up on their dreams. Like the people who win a business, like I said, are the ones who just simply don't give up. And there's unlimited opportunity out there. You just have to not give up.

David Stodolak 02:56:28

Yeah. Beautifully said. And my last question to you was going to be what's the future hold for you kind of answered it right there. I know you have masterminds, you have a lot of stuff. You look to evangelize the industry, right? Would that be your answer? How would you answer that question? What's a future hold for you or for Ring?

Adam Young 02:56:42

I mean, we've been drastically scaling our team and bringing in new key leadership. I have some new leadership that just joined in the last week. I'm very excited about. We're going to keep building on the opportunity we have and helping other companies be successful. So that's super exciting for me. I have some extremely lofty personal goals. We can talk about those off camera, but I think that anything is possible. And if you believe that it's possible, you can make it happen. And so I'm very excited about where I'm at in my career. I'm the most motivated I've ever been. And that's amazing. Yeah. I'm just super excited about what we've accomplished to help our clients win. And I can clearly see the future of where we're headed in a really big way. And I'm very excited about that because it's going to impact so many people in a positive way. And so that's what gets me out of bed every morning is how do I impact as many people as possible in a positive way? And I find when I think that way, the best opportunities and results just literally show up at my doorstep.

David Stodolak 02:57:59

Yeah, you attract very, rather than trying to farm, they come to you.

Adam Young 02:58:02

Yeah.

David Stodolak 02:58:02

That's amazing. That's a testament to your decades of doing this. You build yourself a brand and it's working. And like I said in the very beginning to the audience, success leads clues. This book, I read the whole book and I was just, and that helped me really prepare for us getting in depth here. And I'm glad I did that. And I would say that you're giving everyone a template to succeed in Paper Call, whether they're brand new or they've been doing this for a long time, how to break the affiliate curse. So I think in conjunction, read the book. Listen to this podcast again. I'm not even joking. I'm even thinking we should charge for this thing because there's so much freaking information there. So the people, a lot of people will watch this, but I bet you maybe five, 10% will actually watch the whole thing.

And there's just so many. If I were someone new, I would take notes, I would write 'em, I would highlight them, reach out to us, implement the stuff, show up at the shows. There's so much information, so we just dissect it. So Adam, thank you so much, man. It really means a lot. Your time is money, right? You spent a lot of time. This is probably a good two and a half, three hours that we spent here, but it means a lot to me that it means a lot to the audience. And I think this is going to be an incredible episode. I can't wait until it airs. Appreciate you, bro. Lift G. Let's fucking go.