Ep638: Drew Neisser – Be Real Estate Light

Andrew Stotz 00:00
I gotta get Hello fellow risk takers and welcome to my worst investment ever stories of loss to keep you winning in our community. We know that to win in investing, you must take risk. But to win big, you've got to reduce it. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm on a mission to help 1 million people reduce risk in their lives. And that mission has led me to create the become a better investor community where you get access to the tools you need to create, grow, and protect your wealth go to my worst investment ever.com right now to clean your spot. And I just wanted to mention that yesterday, I ran into a student of mine who listens to my podcast on a regular basis. He said, I've learned so much about reducing risks. So we are getting there one person at a time. Fellow risk takers this is your words podcast host Andrew Stotz, from a Stotz Academy, and I'm here with featured guests, Drew Neisser. Drew, are you ready to join the mission?

Drew Neisser 00:57
I am indeed as someone who has been pushing folks to take risks for a long time. I'm excited to be on your show. Yeah. And

Andrew Stotz 01:05
I'm really excited to have you here because I think you know, the stuff that you're doing is pretty amazing. And we have some commonalities, not only in name, but in other matters. And I want to introduce you to the audience. So Drew Neisser is the founder of Renegade and CMO Huddles. Drew has helped dozens of CMOS unleash their inner renegade via multiple award winning campaigns, and told the stories of over 500 marketers via his podcast, Renegade, marketers unite Ad Age column and two books. His second book renegade marketing 12 steps to building unbeatable b2b brands, was named the top b2b audio book of 2022. DREW is ranked among LinkedIn top 15, marketing voices of 2022 and has been a featured marketing expert on TV, radio, print and dozens of podcast says Best Selling Author Jay Baer, Drew nizer is among the strongest b2b marketing thinkers in the world. My goodness Drew, take a minute and tell us about the unique value that you're bringing to this wonderful world.

Drew Neisser 02:15
First of all, thank you for that very kind and staggeringly overstated introduction. Gee, how am I, you know, everything I'm doing right now is helping CMOS, that's busy. You know, those are Chief Marketing Officers primarily see a business to business cut through and in a job that's almost impossible, with parameters that are really ridiculous and getting worse because of the pending recession. So yeah, everything I do, whether it's writing, podcasting, CMO, huddles work that I do on a consulting basis or the agency, it's helping b2b CMOS cut through hmm.

Andrew Stotz 02:52
And why is it you mentioned, it was impossible, almost a nearly impossible job is that just because of the current conditions, or is that just the competitive space of that job or resource,

Drew Neisser 03:03
so it's the only C suite job that is bespoke. In other words, if you're a CFO at a company, you can pretty much do that job anywhere, if you're a CEO, you have the same three things you got to do, which is, you know, build the team, set the vision and allocate resources, then you know, and it wouldn't matter if you've seen CEO, marketing, because less than 10% of all CEOs have any marketing experience. Marketing is in fact, a different job in every company. And the expectations of what marketing can do is different. And so the CMOS come in with this, oh, you're a marketer, you're really a magician, you can take $1 and turn it into 500 million tomorrow. And so there's this imbalance of expectations, that starts it off as problematic, and an ever gets much better. And when you get to a recession, it goes like this. And this is a conversation cuz I'm hearing it real time with cmo huddles. We're going to take 20% of your dollars away. But we're going to still have a growth target of 20%. There is that that is

Andrew Stotz 04:14
today's reality. Watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat.

Drew Neisser 04:17
Exactly. I'm Dumbledore. I can use a weird thing I can make magic happen.

Andrew Stotz 04:24
It's interesting that way you talk about because my whole career track has been kind of CFO, right. As an analyst in the stock market. I'm talking to the CFOs. I'm talking to CEOs, but generally and all of my students are studying finance and people that have worked with me, it's all about finance. I'm just curious, from your perspective, where how does that how does the CEO view the difference between what they're relying on their CFO for versus what they're relying on their cmo for? What's the difference there?

Drew Neisser 04:54
Well, I mean, every CFO and every c, e o want revenue And they, you know, it's top line growth or bottom line growth. And you know, there's more would say the last two years were about top line growth, and the next two years are going to be about bottom line. Right suddenly even matters again, whereas it was whenever you have an sort of artificial growth period, like we had over the last, let's say, two years in tech and 10 years in tech, you have this growth, growth, growth, growth, growth, and then recession hits and reality Oh, wait, we need to be profitable, too. So they want revenue. And so what does revenue mean? It means getting revenue from new customers in, you know, getting more revenue from existing customers. And marketing plays a role in both of those, to the extent the business is it can Oh, if it's an enterprise business with an 18 month sales cycle, marketing is involved with, say, 20, to 27 touches. I mean, everything you can think about any product that you buy, whether it's business, business, business consumer, how do you know, When didn't you research it on the web? When didn't you visit the website, when Didn't you go to a review site, we'd get it. And so marketing plays a role in this vast thing called b2b sales. And, and it can play a profound role. Or it can play a really modest role.

Andrew Stotz 06:18
It when I think about that, in contrast to the CFO, there's plenty of CFOs that just sit in their office, and they never have that much contact with the client or anything, and they come out and they produce numbers, and they support the CEO, they go to the management team and say, here's where we're at, and all that even a good CEO could do that. Right? You know, you want your Si Si, si CFO, you want your CFO, of course, to you know, be in touch with the team be in touch with the clients and stuff. But that may distract them from, you know, really keeping a tight ship on revenues, and costs and all that and capital expenditures and things like that. But in the case of marketing, if you're stuck in your office, and you're not interacting, seems like you're kind of dead.

Drew Neisser 07:01
Yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna add sort of three different thoughts on that one, one, there's a magical moment that happens when a CMO has done his job so well that the CFO comes to his office and says, I've got him or he or she comes to the office said, I've got a million dollars, what could you get me for that? Because suddenly, the CFO sees marketing as a lever in their arsenal of levers, right? That's a magical moment for any. And what that means is that CMO is educated the CFO enough to recognize that input and output have correlations, right? And you spend a lot of money and we do it in this way. And so that's a great conversation as to your other point about. And one of the things that I talked about in the book and really encourage every CMO, the best sentence a CMO can say is, I was talking to a customer the other day, there is, in any board meeting, if you start that sentence, all the eyes in the board will turn to your attention. That's probably the only starting part of a sentence that a CMO can say and guarantee positive results. So I really encourage CMOS to think about customary customer advisory boards, and so that they manage those. So they're always talking to customers. That's part one. And part two is there's something called an executive sponsor program, where every single executive owns a customer. And that way a CMO wins or customer CFO wins a customer and there's so there's no excuses about, we're all in this we are about securing customers and growing them, right. And so if the customer just wants one note, neck to choke, so that could be the same. If you all share that inch your best customers, and you have seven people in the C suite, and all seven of you have the top seven customers, you're going to be a much more cohesive group, you're gonna have a much more common language because you understand the customer.

Andrew Stotz 08:58
What did you call that? Again?

Drew Neisser 09:01
It's called an executive sponsorship program. And it just means you have executive sponsors. And it's a great thing to tell your customers to that you know, what your executive sponsor is our CMO or is our CFO that it's very cool when you can be able to say that.

Andrew Stotz 09:18
Love it. So I take three things away from what you said, First, is the idea of when getting CFOs to think of marketing as a CapEx item almost and thinking that, hey, I got a million bucks. What could you generate, if I invest that in what you do? And the second thing is the customer advisory board, which is a great idea, and then the executive sponsorship program. Let me just ask one last question about you know, since we've got you on, and since Jay Baer said, you know, okay, let me know, you're amazing, and you're strong in an area where I just don't know much about but let's just think about my listeners for a second and they have small, medium sized businesses and They're maybe a lot of them are financial people. So they're providing some sort of service they may be providing to high net worth, they may be providing institutions. And so they are, let's just assume they are b2b, they're, let's say, three to five years old, and they're, but they're kind of hitting a point where they're really not getting where they want to get the products. Good. Let's assume that products good, they can be just as good as anybody else out there. But from a marketing perspective, they really need your advice, what would be I don't know, let's say 123 things you would say get this, right.

Drew Neisser 10:32
Right. And so I have a one page one sheet or by the way that I'm more than happy to send to your listeners, they just have to hit me up on LinkedIn. But in that's why we have the 12 steps because they're additive. But if I were just to focus on one thing, and guess what the problem is, the problem is, they're trying to do too many things, which means they haven't cleared away the clutter. They're just trying too many things, too. They're not distinctive in any way. Like your podcast worst, you know, is distinctive from the beginning, it absolutely sets the tone, like oh my god. So but most people in their business don't have the courage to be distinct. And that's why this whole courageous strategy, and then the last thing is, is sort of being able to answer the question, why do I do this? Hmm. And, you know, we've talked, I know, You've had big guests on your show that talk about this, but really looking for why are we right now? Why do you exist, because if you can articulate that your employees will be happier, you'll feel better about what you do, and you don't have to save the world, just, you know this, but just be clear on that. And, and this purpose, in my in the book, I call it a purpose driven story statement, this gets down to simplicity. And what I do really well, which is sort of radically simplified, the way you think about this, I want you to be able to describe your business in eight words or less.

Andrew Stotz 12:03
I'm on a mission to help 1 million people reduce risk in their lives.

Drew Neisser 12:07
Pretty good. Pretty good. I mean, it's a powerful purpose. It's clear who you want out. I mean, you, you know, you it's a big bold statement, which is also a great way. You know, I talked about in the book, different ways of assessing your purpose driven story statement, and you hit a lot of boxes. You know, you don't answer the how, which is fine. You can't answer the how in everything, or you can't answer the why. But it just want folks to think about you can differentiate on your how your why or your watch, but you have to go all in. And, and it has to be intriguing enough. So I mean, I know an insurance company that went all in on their who and by who I mean their employees and their four letter mission statement was happy employees equal happy customers. That was it. That was their marketing plan. That was their communication street happy employees equal happy cause unique Check. Check. No one else in the insurance that simple, clear, what does it say to employees, they have the highest loyalty in this was a Chicago based company and the highest favorite place to work always. And they were outselling all their competitors. So it is really

Andrew Stotz 13:31
the story of NJ bears book where he talks about the insurance company A taught what's it called Talking Talking tips. I can't remember the name of it right now. But he talks about the insurance company that basically is the kind of not-not insurance company collection agency that focuses on being kind to the pizza. There's no collecting from

Drew Neisser 13:52
ya know, and it's great. And it's a very, you know, he talks, talk triggers, triggers, yep. Right. And he talks about that. The one thing that is, even if you have that, there's still some work to be done, which is why we have more steps. And so I will say that most businesses fail on a strategic level before they get to execution at all, then they fail on a targeting level because they're trying to target too many people. They're trying to boil the ocean, you know, really narrow it down, get this down. And that's where the risk is. And there's a story in my book of a small business, a construction company, who I was on the board of a co-op. We were having to renovate our halls for the first time in 40 years. None of us had ever done it before. Our managing a brings in three building construction companies. First one says so what do you guys do? We do construction for restaurants and buildings and everything. Second one, what do you do? Same thing. And we asked him also what's your process and he said, Oh, we start at the bottom and work our way up. Third Person set comes in What do you do? We only do halls for coops and condos. That's it. And by the way, here are the 10 emails that you're going to want to send your, the tenants in the building, because by the way, the biggest complaint is dust and noise, we put 10% of our budget into cleanup. And by the way, you're not in the construction business, you're really in the complaint mitigation business. You won't get any complaints with us, shall we write it up? I mean, it was the easiest decision I've ever made in my life and our board. And by the way, they were fantastic. They were cost effective. And I asked him later, after the fact I said, So Joe, what is the story here? He said, and I said, how hard it was it when you cut back?

Andrew Stotz 15:46
Because it used to be every single question too. It was really

Drew Neisser 15:49
hard. He said, It was really hard at first. But now, they when they are invited almost every hallway job in the city. And two, they win 70% of them. And they're never under bid because they always have crews in the marketplace that only do hallways and for coops and condos. So they're winning on multiple levels by daring to be distinct, only doing the one thing and their definition is on the who, and a little bit of the what, by the way there How is amazing too. But simply narrowing their target and their scope. And I have another story recently on a podcast where they were doing multiple cloud service providers, they narrowed down to one their business doubled.

Andrew Stotz 16:29
Hmm. Okay, so for my listeners, you know, it's a simple question I asked, How can drew help you? And he's talked about some specific things. First, he's talked about the idea that you're probably doing too many things. Second thing is that you're probably not distinctive, and you got to think about how you really stand out. The third he talked about is you probably are not answering the question, why do I do this? What's our mission? Why am I here? What am I doing? Am I just doing this to because of, you know, whatever, I've been doing it. And then the other thing you mentioned was eight words to describe your business, how have you narrowed down the description of your business? What I like to say when I teach about giving a great presentation, is that the audience members need to be able to repeat to the next person, they talk to what you said, it's not how brilliant it is of what you said, it's that the audience can repeat it. And that's where the eight words or less to describe your business. And then, you know, you told the story talking about narrowing the focus, and, and you said something that I think is really powerful. That's where the risk is. It is risky, to narrow your focus. But once you've done it, you're gonna wish you did it a long time ago. Anything you would add to that, but I don't know, I would just say go to LinkedIn and reach out so that you make sure that you get that checklist from Drew.

Drew Neisser 18:00
Yeah, I mean, I'll give you one other quick story. So there's a paper company that we worked with called case paper. It couldn't be more generic. They sell paper. It's white paper from rolls and they got it. Yeah, I mean, then they cut it down, and they don't even make the paper, they just cut it. But they differentiated themselves on service. And you would say, Oh, well, service isn't really a differentiator. Everybody can talk about service. But there are three words that we developed for them was case paper on the case. Okay? On the case, right? It's upon well guess what, they are a brand with a sense of humor. So if you take on the case, and you actually put it on their logo, we've made it their logo upon and then from there, every bit of their communications has a sense of humor, sense of humanity. And nobody in b2b has a sense of humor. So they stand out immediately all these other paper suppliers are oh, here's the paper, where's the bid, it's an RFP thing and everything they do has a sense of humor and a sense of peacefulness. So on the case became this rallying cry and so anyway, again, it does it could be right there in your name, you could just find it there's usually another element that you need to bring to it which is a sense of personality that is uniquely yours.

Andrew Stotz 19:24
So much gold in this discussion, I really appreciate it it helps me as I think about my business and my you know, endeavors that I'm going off to and now it's time to show you a worst investment ever and since no one goes into their worst investment thinking it will be tell us a bit about the circumstances leading up to and then tell us your story. Okay, well

Drew Neisser 19:43
so all three of my worst investments all have to do with real estate. The first one is just personal one and for many years my wife and I were the counter indicators of New York City Real Estate if we bought you sell. No big deal everybody makes that mistake you buy it at the P You can sell at the trough that happens. The biggest mistake that I made in was a real estate mistake for the business. And it happened that renegade was growing tremendously over a certain period of time between 22,005 and 2008. What I missed was that we had $10 million of feed dollars that were non reoccurring, coming through our business. And so what we did was we went, Oh, well, we have 40 people, but we really need 100 people to service this brief moment in time. 18 months or so to sort of swallow digest process and deal with it. And then these were one time commitments, this was not a Oh, there's another 10 million fees on the other side. And so we ended up, oh, tripling our space. And obviously, that was a problem. But let me compound it with a little bit more flavor for you, which is, in addition to being in this gigantic space, I had the genius idea that this was the moment that I would buy the company from the parent company, we used to be owned by Dentsu. And the reason I did is I knew that some of this business wasn't going to rip reoccur, and I thought this is gonna be horrible. So I do the deal, we fund it with their money. So that seems like a really good thing. But 45 days into it, I get a call from one of our clients who says, oh, you know, that $500,000 that we owe you? We're not gonna pay you because the person who was paying us got made off scanned scam, so they can't pay us, we can't pay you. And then suddenly, the real estate problem and the cashflow problem really came together. And you know, and then of course, we went through the worst recession since 1929. So yeah, that fall of 2008 was certainly the lowest point that I've been in, in my career. But here's the good news. And there is a good news on this. I did what a, we cut everything we cut all the way back to one thing, we've sort of started to focus on strategy and content, and CMOS, just that was our gonna be our focus. And that's when I started doing all the interviews. We started, you know, writing articles, and you know, and since then, we were much more fork focused organization, but oh, man, it was really hard.

Andrew Stotz 22:34
Can you remember it like, a day or the day where it just really all came down and you realize we've we've we've got to change direction here. We've got to make some change. Oh, the exact date

Drew Neisser 22:46
the date was December 17. Two, because my dad called but I thought I mean, I thought it was my dad's my mom's birthday. And I thought he was calling me to say, Hey, call your mom, it's your birthday. And it said it was this client. So saying that money. And by the way, that was our cash flow. That was our plan to sort of eke through we knew we were going to that $10 million was going to disappear. We knew we were going to go through a trough. But we didn't know that. It would be that that sort of catastrophic, cataclysmic, I think is the right term.

Andrew Stotz 23:20
Is that one of those moments where sweat starts pouring out of your head, and you think, Oh, my God,

Drew Neisser 23:26
you know, and, and the good news is, since then, I've really come to look at crises as opportunities. Yep. And I mean, when COVID came around, and I said, Okay, I don't know what's going to happen to our business. But I do know this, the CMOS out there are going to be really, really sweating. And so that's when we started cmo huddles, which is this community. And for six months, it was just a beta. But we met 55 times. I mean, this was great. And we made a lot of good friends and enabled us to start another business in the middle of you know, in the first six months at COVID. So that 2008 experience of crises plus 911, plus all these other things that happened, and sort of my mindset now is sweat. then figure out where that opportunity is.

Andrew Stotz 24:19
Yep, yep. So let's let's just summarize your learning so that the listeners can just get it super clear.

Drew Neisser 24:27
So I think the biggest learning as in 2008, we were over invested in real estate, we had too many product lines, if you will, we were doing event marketing, we were doing sort of event slash guerilla marketing. We were doing website development, we were doing strategy, and we just started to do social. At the end of 2008, we were only doing one of those things with about a 10th of the staff. Like starting again, was brand new starting again. And yeah, so that I would say, you know, and what saved us, we shouldn't have survived a lot of agencies went out of business in 2008 2009. We shouldn't have survived. But but but we did. Really because we and it's funny you want to hear I think it was Chris doe, talked about dude I talked about on your show was there's a lot of give to get out there. And we did a lot of giving to get, yeah. And to stay alive.

Andrew Stotz 25:28
Yeah. So maybe I'll share a few things I take away. One of the things that I was thinking about is I always say like in a startup company, you go through this chasing revenue phase, you had this vision of what you want to do, and then you end up chasing what's going to pay. And sometimes that chasing revenue phase can take you into a lot of interesting places. But eventually it will overextend you. And

Drew Neisser 25:54
you lose focus, you lose, what are you really good at? What are you better at?

Andrew Stotz 26:00
I recently lost a customer that I had had for many years in a particular area of the business. And it seemed like tragedy, but on the other hand, it allowed me to shut down a portion of my business that I had kept going because of that. And I thought, Look, if I haven't really sold this part of my business to others and gotten others in after this time, it needs to be shut, and what a relief. It was, what a relief it was. So you know, there's that chasing revenue phase, we all go through it, but you got to make sure you don't get over, you know, over extended. And the next thing I thought about was the idea you were talking about non recurring revenue. And I think it's really important for everybody to think about recurring versus non recurring revenue. And obviously, you know, nowadays we have memberships and other things that we're doing, we're changing the way we charge customers by saying I'll charge you a monthly amount rather than a full amount upfront or whatever. But the concept of non recurring revenue and recurring costs. So make sure if you've got, you know, and think about it for those listeners and viewers out there, look at your business right now today and ask the question, what amount of my revenue is non recurring? And what amount of my costs are just recurring, and you may find that there is a risk right there that you need to address before that non recurring revenue, you know, before you get the phone call, like you got. And then the third thing is, you mentioned about the huddle and saying that you've had more than you had more than 50. How many meetings did you say that you had? Well, with

Drew Neisser 27:34
this was in the pre this was in our beta, we now by the way, have over 100 subscribers, and it is a subscription community. But we started with a teen. And between those 18, we met 55 times in a six month period. Because of all the admin, it's like, you want to keep meeting weekly. Yeah, so there's so much to talk about, and so much to share.

Andrew Stotz 27:57
Interesting, because at the beginning of the COVID, you know, stuff, I felt like I had, I've met so many people and you know, quite busy with lots of activity, but I wasn't getting the deep relationships that I wanted out of what I was doing. And so I set up a little, I called my achieve your goals mastermind group, and that particular group is just for, you know, CEOs and business owners who really, really need accountability to each other. And we've now met probably 9090 weeks in a row, I think, right? It's incredible. And every single time we meet, we go through what our goals are, what are you know what we're doing. And so for the listeners out there, if you're not in a community, like Drew's community, or any other community, look at, look for one. And if you thought about creating one, create one, start try meet once a week, find out what people want. In my become a better investor community, we have about 100 members, and we met last night. And what I said is I said look, I've got ability to meet at least 20 of you one on one between now and December 31. And so here's the link, let's book a time because there's nothing that heals better, there's nothing that comes up with solutions better than talking with your customer.

Drew Neisser 29:18
It's so true, I'm gonna add a couple of little thoughts. So I just want to join a community first and get to know it really well and participate before you start your own. I was part of CMO, the CMO club for 12 years and my good friend who founded that had sold it to Salesforce on March 2 2020, which is why I knew there was an opportunity so but also I knew what we could do that would be different that from what that was and I had a really good insight and I knew some people of the community so I think it was really important that I got to learn on someone else's nickel and and develop something else. But the second thing that you said that I think is so important in this I see every week is It's so much easier to solve other people's problems. Right? Because you we all create artificial constructs, oh, I can't do that, Oh, can't do that. And the minute someone else talks about, you could Oh, well, why don't you do this and go? Oh, yeah, it's so liberating. And the other part is, and this is particularly true is, let's say you do have a problem that you can't solve, and another person has that problem that feels good, too.

Andrew Stotz 30:27
I'm not alone. It's liberating.

Drew Neisser 30:31
It is liberating. And I think that's, you know, probably the real strength. And I talk about cmo huddles as this combination of an executive workshop and therapy session.

Andrew Stotz 30:44
And what are your goals for that? As far as the next I don't know, a couple of years? Or where do you think that goes?

Drew Neisser 30:49
So I have like a 10 year plan. Yep. And the goal is, first and foremost, to you know, keep this community that we have, it's very much of a retention, reoccurring revenue, but really build the most effective community of Chief marketers in the world. And so we're gradually expanding to Europe, we're expanding in various partnerships, and so forth. And I, you know, I look forward to growing it to a few 100 Over the next few years in a very smart way. And it's what's really fun for me is, this is a very different business than running an agency. And I think that for people who've been doing the same thing, like I've ran this run Renegade and have since 93, it's a long time to have a new business with a new business model is really invigorating as well, and, and allows me to sort of take some of the things that I've been learning and apply it in a very different way. So it's just, it's nice. I'm 65. And I'm started, I started a new company two years ago in the middle of the recession, and COVID. And I have a 10 year plan for that.

Andrew Stotz 32:05
It's glorious, and it just has another revenue pattern or behavior compared to other revenue streams. So that's fantastic. Let me just to wrap up the discussion on that, let me just ask you, what is the typical type of person that would join number one, and what would you say would be the main takeaway that they're gonna get from joining.

Drew Neisser 32:27
So the person who would join is a seasoned chief marketing officer, someone who's been in marketing for a long time who works at a company from anywhere from 35 to 50 employees to enterprise, we have a full range because we divide them up by business size. And we talk about the if you want the purpose driven story statement for CMO, huddles, it's Sharecare. Dare. And in that's that in, there's a longer vision statement, which is we bring together an elite group of CMOS to share care and dare each other to greatness. And but Sharecare dare is, it is the motto and we it all three of those things we're thinking about sharing, caring and daring.

Andrew Stotz 33:16
And are the individuals usually paying or is it a company that would say we want to pay for this

Drew Neisser 33:21
right about 95%, get the company to pay for it under sort of two buckets. One is consulting, because there's a lot of real value, like if you're about to buy anything, and there's five CMOS who have already tried and said, Don't do that. Or by the way, we've done that analysis, and here it is saves you 1020 30 hours. So you know, our promise to the companies is they're going to make faster, better, more informed decisions. Promise to the individual is we're going to help you be a better CMO. And that's really about getting control on their careers and a job which I described at the top of the show as really hard to get control on. Yep. Right. So that's, that's where so yeah, the individuals, we do have a few individuals who subscribe now. And then we support by the way for free. CMOS. We're out of work in between we have a transition team.

Andrew Stotz 34:19
That's an interesting one. That's interesting. Wow, lots of stuff. I mean, since I kind of serve CFOs, maybe there's some ideas that I can get from this discussion. All right, there you go. Let's go back in time and think about when you were getting into your worst investment ever. So and think about a young person that's facing a similar situations right now, based on what you learned from that story that you told us and what you've continued to learn what one action would you recommend our listeners take if they find themselves in that situation? To avoid suffering the same fate?

Drew Neisser 34:54
Yeah, I think when you look at a profit and loss statement and you We understand the mount of real estate, because real estate is one of those fixed costs that can really screw you up. Particularly if you have business scale. You know, if you're you might be a business, it goes up and down or subject to that. The advice is be real estate light, and adjust just be, that's a place that you can really get burned out. And particularly in a service company, if you know, and particularly now, and we were getting to the point where clients weren't coming to the office. Now, clients don't care whether you have an office. So that's all and so I think a lot of companies would avoid that. And that's probably one of the best things that came out of. And by the way, I think humans are missing that interaction. And I think companies are going to suffer from it. So I do think you have to think about color. If you don't have real estate, you have to think about collaboration, and how you do that, and why and you bring people together. But real estate as a fixed costs. Just be careful there. That's it. That's a huge risk that I did not. And by the way, I made that mistake twice, not just once, because it was optimism. I said, Oh yeah, we'll be able to do it. And optimism is not a strategy.

Andrew Stotz 36:14
You know, 28 years ago, when we set up one of the businesses I have in Thailand, which is a coffee factory, we were two American guys living in Thailand, trying to set up this business. And you know, we couldn't own the land, we couldn't own a factory and that type of stuff, we had to lease. And thank goodness for that. Because that allowed us to keep a monthly fixed cost that was reasonable there, and allowed us to invest all of our money in our equipment in our people, and in servicing our customers. And that's really what kept us, you know, going all these years. And so yeah, it's a great thing to remember is, watch out for those big fixed costs, particularly real estate. Alright, let me ask you, for the listeners that, you know, there may be one or two that have never heard of you, or renegade or any of these types of stuff. What is the best resource that you'd like to direct them to start to get to more of what you've got to give?

Drew Neisser 37:09
Sure. So renegade.com It's a glorious URL. And on it, you'll find links to the podcast, we have a monthly newsletter that a lot of folks in business subscribe to whether they're marketers or not, it comes out once a month. We have a blog that's constantly being updated and transcripts from all the podcasts. So there's a renegade.com is really is our media brand at this point. And you know, there's a lot of good stuff, including a shorter version of my book, because I re released that two years before I actually released the book.

Andrew Stotz 37:45
Okay, fantastic. And watch. I'll have links to that in the show notes. So you guys can just click on those links and go there. Last question. What's your number one goal for the next 12 months?

Drew Neisser 37:56
Number one goal for the next 12 months is to work four days a week? Not six. Yeah, and that's, that's, that's number one, really, probably and at the same time, be able to achieve the goals that the business goals which are you know, growing Renegade, growing CMO, huddles, and then enjoying every minute of it.

Andrew Stotz 38:22
You've earned it. You've earned it well, listeners, there you have it another story of laws to keep you winning. If you haven't, haven't yet joined the become a better investor community, just go to my worst investment ever.com right now to claim your spot. As we conclude, Drew, I want to thank you again for joining our mission and on behalf of a Stotz Academy I hereby award you alumni status for turning your worst investment ever into your best teaching moment. Do you have any parting words for the audience?

Drew Neisser 38:50
No, go out there and do it. Just don't don't get. Don't be afraid. Just get out there and do it.

Andrew Stotz 38:56
Beautiful, beautiful. Well, that's a wrap on another great story to help us create, grow and protect our well fellow risk takers. Let's celebrate that. Today. We added one more person to our mission to help 1 million people reduce risk in their lives. This is your worst podcast host Andrew Stotz saying. I'll see you on the upside.