Ep772: Solomon Thimothy – Give Yourself Permission to Fail

Andrew Stotz 00:02
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 I want to thank my listeners in Florida, in particular, Naples, Florida, where my grandma and grandpa retire when they were older, for joining the mission today fellow risk takers this is your worst podcast hosts Andrew Stotz, from a Stotz Academy, and I'm here with featured guests. Solomon Timothy Solomon, are you ready to join the mission?

Solomon Thimothy 00:44
I am so ready.

Andrew Stotz 00:48
I want to introduce you to the audience. Solomon is a highly accomplished entrepreneur with over 17 years of experience in marketing and sales. As the co founder and CEO of IBM s, a leading inbound marketing and sales agency as well as click X, he has helped businesses double their revenue using the 10x framework. Solomon is also an expert in lead generation and customer acquisition in the USA Today. And Wall Street Journal best selling author in addition to his work, Solomon also is an angel investor and startup advisor. He has helped numerous startups grow and scale leveraging his expertise in marketing, sales and business strategy. Solomon, please take a minute and tell us the unique value that you are bringing to this wonderful world. Absolutely.

Solomon Thimothy 01:32
I think as entrepreneurs, Andrew, everybody has one goal, which is to grow their business. But the challenge is, which avenue is best for each entrepreneur? And the answer is, it really, really depends on the business. I spoke to a young lady today was trying to grow her really high ticket mastermind, you know that she put together handpick people, and she's trying to build her funnel. So my value prop is figuring out which model which system is going to work best for the entrepreneurs that I get the privilege of working with, it literally is that unique. It's kind of like our fingerprints, what works for you may not work for me. And what works for me, may not work for you. So you need to build these custom, you know, blueprints per business. And that is where I find all my joy every single day.

Andrew Stotz 02:22
It's interesting about growth, you know, for any of the listeners out there, you know, listen carefully to what he said, Because the thing that matters most in business is growth. And I want Solomon as a financial analyst, I was asked the question, what's more valuable to own a highly profitable company, or to own a fast growing company. And when I said growth, I mean growth in profit. And so I think that for most people, it's kind of intuitively obvious, but that that's a great opportunity to academically test the question. So I looked at all companies in the world and I narrowed it down to about 10,000 companies that had data over a 20 year period. And I rebalanced a portfolio of stocks into the highest growth and the highest profitability stocks. So in other words, like the top decile, or the top 50, or 100, stocks that were the fastest growing, or the highest profitability. And every year, I really rank them based upon their past or most recent growth or their most recent profitability. I didn't forward forecasts because that brings a lot of complications. And then I measured the performance of those two portfolios as if I put $100 million into both of them and let them grow over time. The good news is both of them outperform the stock market or the average performance of all the stocks and, and growth, profitability outperformed by a considerable amount, but growth outperformed by a much higher amount. Now, of course, I like to being the analyst, I asked the question, what if I was to combine a combination of these two companies that are highest in profitability and highest in growth? Of course, those are the superstars and they are outperforming all others. But if you had to only choose one measure to understand your business, how much did your net profit grow this year versus last year? And how much is it going to grow this year? Or next year versus this year? That's what matters. Any thoughts on my research?

Solomon Thimothy 04:34
Wow, first of all, kudos on that. That should be like a paper, you know, in Harvard Business Review or something like that, because that is insanely valuable. Secondly, if you live in my world for a day, while obviously they're not, you know, fortune 50 companies. These are entrepreneurs, they're on a mission to figure out how they can crush their competition in the nicest way possible. Right like they want, they like competition, but they want to make sure that they don't look like they're competing. Because either you're a follower or a leader, would you agree like that is those companies that you were researching their leaders, they're not following somebody else's trend, they're not living off of somebody else's AI research, they are creating value that is new that no one's ever done before or in a way that no one's ever done before. So to like, literally, I admire that kind of research. But our job is to figure out how to turn our customers from looking like a follower, because they might be leaders, but they don't look like a leader, to actually make them look like a leader where people say, Wow, if you want this, this is the company, there's no doubt, there's no doubt that you're gonna go to somebody else, because they they really are. And people make buying decisions, unfortunately, just by the way a website looks.

05:54
You know? Yeah,

Andrew Stotz 05:56
it's, it's, I was posted something on LinkedIn last night before I went to bed called thank capitalism and love point. The point is, it's not government bureaucrats or climate change fanatics, or ESG compliance people or others that are out there trying to regulate innovation. It was capitalism. It's the private ownership, the free market, and most importantly, the voluntary exchange. And Solomon, a lot of people say to me, I'll look at capitalism, you get this big, big, big company, you know, like Amazon. That's a problem. Well, I can say that, you know, a government can set guidelines about what's a maximum market share, and can try to regulate that a little bit. I'm not totally against that. But I like to tell those people grow up. Look at the other side of the equation, there's millions of dead businesses that died this year, because they couldn't get product market fit. And that is the beauty of capitalism. You can't get it until you've got that product market fit, which means voluntary exchange, people have to voluntarily want to sign up and get your product or service. And that's why growth is hard. And that's why capitalism brings so much innovation.

Solomon Thimothy 07:21
Absolutely. I couldn't agree with you more. And, quite frankly, that goes in line with what we teach here. You know, you talked about the 10x framework and our growth formula. Is it okay, we go over that real,

Andrew Stotz 07:33
please tell me because I probably need some help with that, too. And the

Solomon Thimothy 07:37
reason is, this goes in line with what you were saying. There's two ways that we can grow any business two ways. All right. So call is the growth formula. It's the granddaddy of wolves, everything that everybody's trying to do is inside here, and I think you could research this and turn it into a giant research paper. It's a plus r equals growth. So for those of you are, what is a and what is our, it's acquisition on one side, and retention on the other side, equals growth, you got to add customers. And that's every business we all wear everyday, everybody's worried about adding customers. But we need to equally be concerned about retaining the customers that we have. That is a whole different kind of conversation and a podcast episode in itself, you add the two together, then you get growth. This is the exact same formula that we would use. If I were to grow your podcast, we got to get new listeners, and we got to keep the listeners that we have. That's how you grow YouTube channel, you and I talked about wealth and portfolio management, we got to acquire a bunch of money and keep that money. Because of that money is gone. We don't have growth, right? Like, it's the two always that has to work. So when we use this framework in a business environment, we look at the pipeline of the customer and say, how do we grow this company? We got to acquire new customers? Is it okay, I show you exactly how the only two ways there's only two ways. There's amazing. And this is and I'll tell you the easy way, the hard way that we got to do both, and we are marketing folks, and we do both? Is that the easiest way to grow your business and anybody that's listening, I don't care. You're selling little goldfish, you know, for the aquariums and the ponds of people or you're a giant, you know, manufacturing company, okay. You have two things that you can do every single day after all the work that we've ever done. We've consulted every activity that you can do in marketing and lead generation into these two things. Either you are capturing the demand of the service people are looking for you just going in and holding up the sign saying I do this. Do you want it I got it. Or you're in the process of creating demand for people that are looking to buy your services. That's it. That's all there is to it. That's the entire eight acquisition side. So when I say the easiest way to grow a business Is because again, we have to, I'm measured by people's opportunity in their pipeline. They're not measuring me based on the day of the week and the weather in Florida, or how many rounds of golf they played today, although that is part of the conversation. It's how much business did you get me, Solomon, and your people got me, right? How much money did you guys put to my mind, like you said, growth is the ultimate name, I wouldn't be able to keep a client if I don't grow their business, right. So just like a financial advisor can keep a client if you're not gonna grow their portfolio, same exact thing. I think there's a lot of parallels there. So they asked me how much what we do is, we literally try to capture every piece of demand that we can for that client first, before I work on trying to create demand. What a lot of entrepreneurs they go to work, or they hire marketing person, they post things or do things. They're literally thinking that there's nobody out there that needs it, we need to like drum up some demand as if what the, like you said, the product market fit, oh, we gotta like, go to a trade show and, you know, figure out how to get in front of people, because right now they're Google searching what you do, if you don't show up right now, somebody else is getting that lead. And I know that sounds really super easy. A lot of people say, Oh, just Google ads. Why don't I just Google ads? Well, can you confirm that you pass you showed up for 98% of every searches pertaining your top profitable service, our original conversation, highly growth and highly profitable, I only help our entrepreneurs with the profitable service, like the most profitable service, because I want them to look at their role as return on adspend to say, well, Sama, you did? Well, you don't I mean, you help me make a lot of money. If they're lower profitable service, then they won't, they won't have a lot of budget to invest into ADS and everything else. So we look at that 8020 rule and say, hey, where do you make the most amount of money, that disproportionate amount of profit, you're so good at this thing, you crush it, let me help you get as much of that demand as possible.

Andrew Stotz 12:00
Okay, so let's do that. Go ahead. Let's break that summarize that. So two ways to acquire customers. One is capturing the demand that's already there. And they're looking for it. And the other one is creating demand. And, you know, in Thailand, we have like a person opens up a noodle shop on the corner, and they just have a cart. And they make great noodles. And people start to come. And as soon as more and more people come, another cart shows up and another cart shows up. And they're capturing the demand, that's that's happening right there until they may, or they may get four cards, one of them ends up leaving, then they're down to three, they've captured all that demand, and they've done it by basically replicating the service that was given, why go out and do something dramatically. No, don't serve hamburgers if people are going to that corner for soup as an example. So that's one of the things that I see. Now, on the other side of it, you know, as entrepreneurs, we're often taught to be innovative, don't bring the same thing to the market. You know, you need to be creative. And so, you know, it's What's hard is that when you create something that's somewhat innovative, it's not the exact same bowl of noodles that the person that you're setting up into next to is doing, and therefore it starts to turn into having a create demand, or how do you handle that you know that you want something that's somewhat unique, but yet, that's also hard or to capture demand? I'm just curious what your thoughts on that? Oh,

Solomon Thimothy 13:27
absolutely. So to our customers, they don't know the difference that your soup is a little better, because you use organic ingredients, and you triple filter water and that you put fresh whatever on top, you know what I'm saying? That little, little greens, they don't know that. They don't know that. So what we do is we still want to show up for noodles near me. And then on our page, we say why we're the top. And in this way, the only organic. We're the only company that has organic carts. In fact, we don't even have anything that isn't organic or good for you. You see what I'm saying the differentiation happens at that zero moment of truth when they're trying to make a buying decision. They're like, well, do I do the whitening Colgate press this or that one or the other? They don't know they know they need toothpaste. But you have one chance to make that difference. That's why that aisle is so competitive, right? Like which 1am I going to pick that's what they put little, little show silver shiny colors on the package because you want to grab their attention. Same exact thing happens on Google search, the ad copy will tell them the best in town served over a billion as McDonald's might say. That gives them some confidence that this is the company. However, if you're selling a complete different product, you will probably have to do a little bit of search on the noodles and the hamburgers on the whatever because you're trying to get as many of those other people to come to you if that makes sense because they just need food. They need food and

Andrew Stotz 14:57
maybe use my business As an example, but for the audience listening and viewing, you know, think about it for your own business. In my case, I sell services. One service is completely online and can be global. And that's my evaluation. masterclass bootcamp, six week course, basically, helping people learn in six weeks what it would take them years to learn as a financial analyst. And the second one is profit bootcamp, which is more local, in Thailand, where I am, maybe some of the other bordering countries. But let's focus on Thailand, where I help midsize family businesses doubled their profits in 12 months, without overwhelming their teams. So those are two different types of products. One of them that say is more local, targeted towards mid sized family businesses in Thailand. And the other one is global, anybody can attend. And it's targeting people who really want to build skill in company valuation, so they can become a successful fund manager analyst or they want to sell their business. What would you do? How would you look at a guy like me and say, Here's, you know, step 123, of the way that you would work with someone like me? And you know, be curious to hear that?

Solomon Thimothy 16:14
Well, number one, some of these things are universal, right? So if you go and create a content about figuring out how much is your company worth, I'll just give you an example of the type of videos that we might want to be creating. So what you do is you go to Google, number one, everybody says, Do I have to buy tools that cost subscription money? The answer is no, you actually don't need any tools that we buy with like $10,000 subscriptions every day. But we don't need that for someone who's looking to figure out how to do the growth formula. When you search company valuation, how to figure out the company match. And there's a section on Google, it says people also asked, now, this is the part, you think Google is giving you all these questions that are in your mind, because they can read your mind. Technically, for a marketer. That's what you need to be putting out in terms of content. In Video, Audio text, we're a podcast slash video podcast. So you have audio video happening right now, if you transcribe this AI can transcribe it turned it into a nice blog post, and you put the exact same question as your headline. We are now hitting a global audience. Because when you search that topic, the search can come from Canada, or it can come from UK, Google will show the appropriate answers, but they don't care where you're from, because I see UK search results. And I'm in the US. Yeah. So number one thing is when you go to YouTube, we search, we don't need to see UK content, we see whatever the most relevant content to what I just punched in it could be on Spanish.

Andrew Stotz 17:44
So in the case, in the case of I typed in company valuation, I see private company valuation, how to value a company, company valuation methods, company valuation calculation, those are the types of things that you're talking about

Solomon Thimothy 17:56
Correct? You would have to create that exact answer with that exact question. And when you click into two and three, you're getting three more, or you can do three more, and then three more and three more. And then you put another keyword, you get 12 new ones, you literally will not run out of topics to create content for anybody that's struggling to create content. This is it, I gave it to you for free. You don't have to pay me anything. Now the hard part is executing. That's what our team does. My customers also has access to Google. Yeah, they also know how to do this. But the challenges are, they get stuck. They go to work. What happens their family midsize company, I'm busy turning the profit the business picks the best of them, they literally go home tired, exhausted, I'm here at six o'clock at night more energized than ever. I haven't even had coffee yet, Andrew. Like this is why because I'm in my zone, right? This is what drives our business. So long story short, they cannot produce the content, then they don't have the video, the audio or the text, the copywriter, they don't have any of the tools that are already posted on the web, they get stuck. So if you do that part that will solve the global business. And if you want to run ads or content when people are searching for that on YouTube, you should promote this video so you can make sure that there's eyeballs for them make sense. So that enables you to reach the global audience and I reach a global audience for one of our businesses where I help people start and scale digital marketing agencies. They're not in America, literally. I have people in every country you can imagine. They find me on the web, they sign up by themselves. And they buy products and services while I'm sleeping. Great and that's what you're looking

Andrew Stotz 19:39
for. Want to earn while we sleeping? Yes. Okay, that gives a good teaser on what you do. And for the audience and the listeners. I'll have all the links in the show notes. What would be the best place for them to go to learn more about you?

Solomon Thimothy 19:54
Yeah, absolutely. My last name is spelled Timothy T H I M O thy.com. I'm trying to get a shorter domain name. Andrew helped me out with that, you know, my last name was available 20 years ago. So I just bought my last name. So I have an email, Solomon and timothy.com, which most people can't say is my first name and last name. Fortunately, my last name is complicated. So it was easy for me to get that domain name. But, you know, I plan on making that easier because I get on podcasts a lot people ask me all the time. Now I want to solve the local problem. Can we do that real quick? Yeah, please, please. Now we have this local, let's grow your business, double your profit in the next 12 months. Sounds like a fantastic program, I want to be part of it. But guess what, we can use Google, we can use LinkedIn events, we can do Facebook events, we can do anything where location is part of the search, right? So we can literally show up. There's things like events and all of those things. Here in America, we have all these events, you know, even write events or Eventbrite or whatever, those all kind of aggregate events locally and show up on the you can create a Facebook event, you could probably run ads against an event. I know LinkedIn event is also another thing where you can invite people that are local to it, I would use anything where location is high. So like Google ads would work where I can say if somebody's searching for how to increase my profit, only show my ad in a 50 mile radius, and not anything else. So I would not try to hit up UK or Canada or anywhere else, New Zealand or wherever. This ad can only show up. And I assume that they're local.

21:32
Yeah, like a local. And it could be in Thai or English. Yeah, exactly. Yes, put it in their local

Solomon Thimothy 21:37
language. Now they know how to read it. You can also run YouTube ads, but only in a 50 mile 100 mile radius if they really need to drive that much. This allows us to penetrate that location based searches and local people for that second business. They're just two different funnels. We have customers that are b2b and b2c at the same time. Some people go buy online yet the whole sales happen on b2b Does the same company. So we have to run b2b ads, we've drawn b2c ads, we have to measure b2b and b2c separately, and some of them have a physical location on top of that, so that, like throws it off even more, right? Like, we have to make all of it work. And it's totally possible. It's not impossible. You're doing different things. But they're all digital. They're all measurable trackable, down to the penny.

Andrew Stotz 22:24
Fantastic. Well, as I said, I'm gonna have links in the show notes. So for those people that are interested, make sure to go there. But now it's time to share your worst investment ever. And since no one goes into their worst investment thing, here will be tell us a bit about the circumstances leading up to it. And then tell us your story.

Solomon Thimothy 22:41
Absolutely, Andrew, so glad you asked. Because I've been really excited to share my worst investment. Alright, so let's go. So I start off as a service company, service company is a like you said, professional services, building websites that was a self taught web designer, self taught means you're not that great entrepreneurism, if you didn't really get professional training, you started to do it, and you got good at it over time. So I was building websites, and I'm onboarding customers. And I realized I've hired people, of course, I was hiring kids out of college. So I hired college kids process was terrible. We looked at our numbers, you would probably hated saying this is very inefficient. In other words, we're spending a lot more time. More time means money in this in our industry. So we make less money at the end of the day. And I said, I have to create some systems. And I'm a techie. It's I just told you, I'm a web developer. What if we built a software that helped onboard customers software that enable them to see their own reports, because we're doing you know, lead gen ads and things like that, and a software that we can automate. So my, you know, 22 year old kid that comes from college doesn't have to think you'll just tell you what to do, right? You log into your employee portal tell you, here's all your clients, here's what you need to do. I'm very much a systems guy. There's no software like does exist, of course not because it's unique to my problems. So we decided to become a software company, even though we're a service business. What I mean by software companies that go build your own software to build your own back end, like an SAP or whatever else out there, which costs 10s of millions of dollars. Here's a kid out of college with barely enough money to just pay the bills now has to go hire developers pay 10s and 1000s of dollars of money. He doesn't have to become this super efficient business that is just going to automate everything's going to my CPS is terrible. Bad. What is going on again, you're just barely barely breaking even and you're like going to spend 10s and then go hire people overseas you've never met. That rarely delivers any, like they never deliver anything on time. They're great at taking your money. They want me to wire my money. Of course, I did that at age 22 whatever age I was, and I did that for months and months? Do you want me to keep going? Yeah.

Andrew Stotz 25:05
It's painful listening to it. But tell us how it kind of went. When did you come to the realization that you had to stop it?

Solomon Thimothy 25:12
Yeah, no, it's a great story. Because there's a lot of web design companies out there. There's a lot of companies that did not scale. Why? Because they didn't have the same vision as I did. My vision was, there's no way we're going to scale with people. If we're going to scale, we're going to scale with technology. And I promise you, I knew that conviction, I had that conviction, there's no way we could scale. So I built not one tool, Andrew, I built multiple tools. One was our back end, to manage the projects and things that we did. To this day, we have this to show you that we built another software company called click x, which is the name you said in the beginning. On paper, I'll be honest with you. Terrible, nobody would invest because I'm not a funded company I used to, I used to help some, you know, startups figure out their market product market fit and just get them some marketing help. They couldn't afford a real marketing company, right. But fast forward a decade of bad investment. It turned out to be our best investment.

Andrew Stotz 26:20
Tell me more. What, why is that? Because

Solomon Thimothy 26:23
like I said, we have our own system where our employee can log in and they see their tasks organized by we can automate things in the background. So that they don't have to think about it right. Like, it's, it's what I'm saying is at the time, so many so many entrepreneurs, they see these kinds of things. And they might literally just stop investing. But I was everybody was having much more shorter term outlook on business. You know, Amazon hadn't turned profit for 20, some years or something, you probably know the

Andrew Stotz 26:55
seven, that seven years or so. Yep. Right? Like no, and

Solomon Thimothy 26:59
they were hemorrhaging money, like crazy. And so is all the other tech, I'm not trying to be like them, I was not funded, I've always wanted to own 100%. And not share any of that, because I don't want. I've been in companies where you know, your investors tell you what to do. And they'll tell you whether you sleep or not, you don't. That was not kind of my style. So I'm like, I'll bear this through. So I didn't need a salary. I was a kid, I was married, I just needed a crash. And my parents gave me a bedroom. That was plenty for me. But I burned all that money. Building something to this day, it is our IP, to be honest, it's like one thing. So on the click side, we do outbound and inbound lead generation, we use AI today, thank God for open AI open API's API, we personalized emails at scale to 10s and 1000s of businesses, we book appointments, all of this because that time, I made a terrible investment decision. But I knew that if I wanted to be somebody 17 years from now, buying an off the shelf project management company, I would have just probably made you know enough money and that I would have pivoted to something that that kind of did a Slack JIRA or whatever, you know, out there. But because I had a longer term vision, does that make sense? Because I was seeing 30 years out, maybe I was with my little young entrepreneurial eyes. It is now one of the greatest things that helps us grow our own business, and we're able to take that product and, and help other people. So let him do it as well.

Andrew Stotz 28:32
Let's go back to this story and just summarize what would be the key lesson learned?

Solomon Thimothy 28:37
Yeah, I mean, like I said, entrepreneurs were bound to make bad decisions. You know, I'm wearing a shirt that says scale. We have a, we have a program just like you have a program does cost scale. So when you're trying to scale a business, which is that growth thing, we talked about the very beginning, you will make mistakes, you will invest in things without knowing what is going to happen. But I want to give the entrepreneurs that are here today the permission to fail, because if they don't give themselves the permission to fail, and we want everything to be perfect from the first like no bad marketing campaigns, no bad headlines, no bad, creative, no bad, you know, videos on the internet, they'll never figure out what actually is the right message, the right video, the right anything. So I let my employees fail all day, like go and try. If it doesn't work, don't worry about it. We wasted a little bit of time, but you know what could be a great lesson for you personally, and we know what tried didn't work. Just as when we started, we said my marketing campaign may not work for you. And your strategy may not work for somebody else. Yet. We all watch YouTube channels all day where they're getting millions and you know her most he's making only 100 million I can make 200 million like everybody tries to do what Hermoza does, but they don't get even 2 million, right like, because what worked for him is isn't going to work it is that you need. And so I like to give even myself permission, even though I might much the steak is much greater. Like it's okay. And I think that would be the greatest lesson I can share with someone is that they're not willing to invest in themselves. They might not be like, like your six week bootcamp. Yeah. I think that would be a terrible mistake. If you're trying to sell a company, you don't know how to evaluate a company, which, if you want to get it done, right, you'll pay 10s and 1000s of dollars. And if you want to know if the people that you pay 10s of $1,000 to get it done, right, if they're doing it right, you need to know yourself. Yep. Right. Like, that's the kind of mistakes that people are trying to avoid, because they think it's not going to work. But it is a big mistake, to not invest. That's where I come from.

Andrew Stotz 30:48
Yep. So let me share my takeaway. And that is, my first reaction always is the same. And that is never develop an app, never develop your own software. Now your case where it kind of worked out over time, and all of that, but from my experience in the people that I've met in business life, and my clients and others, as well, as people I've interviewed, I would say, it rarely works out, it turns out being a huge amount of money, and massive delays, and it doesn't deliver. And so I had a friend of mine told me he's going to develop an app, and I was practically yelling at him at dinner, until he couldn't figure out why I was so upset. And I'm like, I'm just telling you do not do it. And he's like, no, no, it's just for me, and it's gonna take I'm like, No, don't. So my first advice for that, you know, is don't do it. But I think also, you know, what you're talking about, too, is trying to develop internal IP and that type of stuff, which is, you know, valuable. Let, I want to, I want to go into the next question, which is, you know, based upon what you learned from that experience, you know, going back in time, thinking about the decisions that you made at that time, okay, you made it work. And it did work eventually. But based upon, you know, what you've learned over the years, what's one piece of advice you'd give to a young person who was in your situation, who came to you and said, I want to develop an app or software to do this, and that they didn't have much money? You know, they had a lot of ambition, what would be one action that you'd recommend that they would take to avoid suffering the same fate?

Solomon Thimothy 32:26
Absolutely. And I wouldn't say it's highly recommended, but I felt like, if you didn't give myself a chance, I would regret that right? So I think the one piece of advice that I would do is, is literally make sure that this is the thing that you want to spend your next decade trying to figure out. Because if that's not you, which today we live in this shiny object syndrome world. I mean, I have entrepreneurs, so stressed out that they're not doing crypto or they're not doing this. And I'm like, Why? Why do you have to be in everything? Because to be honest, the richest the richest people will tell you, they just did a couple of things, right? They didn't actually diversify. They didn't, you probably will tell me the same thing. They just like, Okay, you want all money came from like Tesla, like he didn't have 700 different funds that he invested in closed end fund and secret fund and hedge fund. And that's not how he made it. Is and and Zuckerberg is getting a several 100 million dollar payout for this one dividend, they just rolled out that didn't come from all of his hedge fund and his other fund and this, this other thing he's secretly doing in his crypto, whatever, you know, wallet that didn't come either, just got to get a couple of things, right. And you'll be way better off anyway. You know, so if they're going in with a short side, get rich quick thing probably isn't going to work. I'm so grateful that my parents, they raised me up a little different, they never rushed me. They didn't first of all, tell me what to do with my life. So that actually freed me up tremendously. So I had the freedom to choose what I wanted to do. Right? They didn't tell me to be a doctor or a lawyer. So that's the greatest gift they gave me. Secondly, they didn't tell me that I had to do certain things by certain time. So I was okay, failing and trying and testing and learning. Grateful that the people that started the app is still with me today. Right.

Andrew Stotz 34:19
That's that. Okay. So that's helpful long term vision in particular. So what's a resource that you'd recommend for our listeners?

Solomon Thimothy 34:25
Yeah, I mean, I just, I, there's a, there's a book that I would recommend, I think this will be one of the greatest books, where you kind of hear the 10x framework I never used to say 10x, because it's a marketing jargon. Lots of guys. I love grant, Cardone. And all these people, they do it. Except that's not really my 10x framework. My tenants framework is that 8020 principle that we just said earlier, 80% of the things that entrepreneurs are doing today isn't going to add to their pipeline. They don't know that that's the problem. They don't know that isn't going to work, because there's nobody like me telling them that so they think all of them has to be done to grow. their business. So the resource is a book that is written by Dan Sullivan. And Benjamin Hardy, it's called 10x is easier than to X. Great resource for anyone, I've actually put another masterclass called 10x. Pipeline, I'm sure it's on my website, where I literally break down how to become the authority in whoever in your niche. That's you, Andrew, somebody else who's listening, because that's where I shine, I help people become authority from obscurity. Because the problem is, you're, you're nobody knows that the products and services exist, how they're gonna buy it. So using that framework, or reading that book would be fantastic. And also learning how you can leverage the 8020 principle, so that they're not doing the things that are adding to their pipeline. I mean, I'm all about pipeline, because if you don't have a good pipeline of deals, you're not going to have a great month or a great quarter. So my next masterclass is called dry pipeline, I have a website called dry pipeline.com. The greatest sad thing that I see in organizations is they couldn't make their money, they don't have enough leads. They don't have enough people that are in market with budget qualified, ready to make a decision. So what do you do? The I help them do the thing I told you go to Google search or keyword, let's go get you some people that are searching right now saying, How do I evaluate my business? What are the different methods? If I gave you 100 of those people that want to learn more, Andrew, would that help your global product?

36:32
Yep, yep, exactly.

Solomon Thimothy 36:34
Yeah. Will that fix the dry pipeline? Of course, like, the disconnect, right, what needs to happen? They may not have the knowledge, or the know how the people internally to get it done. And this is sad, like you said, in the very beginning, for every $50 billion company, or 2 trillion, or Microsoft is hovering like Apple and Microsoft head to head. There's 100 million apples and Microsoft that couldn't figure it out. Yep. I feel like I can help them. Because this very episode is what they need to listen to, literally this episode right here. Would you agree? Yeah,

Andrew Stotz 37:09
definitely. And the book 10x is easier than 2x is, as you mentioned, Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy, came out in May of 2023. It's ranked at about 4.6, out of five on Amazon with about 1000 reviews now. I've read it. And I would say it's an excellent book, I'll put a link to the show notes in it. And it when you read it and you go through it, you'll realize that yeah, 10x is actually easier than two acts. So that's a great recommendation. You're the first one to recommend that. Last question. What's your number one goal for the next 12 months? Well,

Solomon Thimothy 37:51
I think you said you want to help a million people

Andrew Stotz 37:54
reduce risk in their lives, their risk. I

Solomon Thimothy 37:58
love that. For me on the entrepreneurs side, I want to personally impact meaning interaction like this 10,000 entrepreneurs, because I can't handle a million person. But I can scale the slack and the whatever communication channels so I can impact their business, their personal income, which is something that we talk about it clicks a lot and I think is very doable, because we're living in a world where people are trying to get rid of the job that they hate. The bosses they're getting, you know, beat around, like, go here do this or their job is not fulfilling anymore. People want to go off on their own. You're living in Bangkok, like look at that life. It's fantastic. I say that in the agency world. That's the only business where you can live in Bangkok and make 100 grand a month. So you're making dollars but you're spending whatever Thai curry, which I'm sure, right, I'm sure it does better than $1 to $1 ratio. So like, that's, this is one of the businesses we do that being an agency on for so long. I want to help as many people figure out how to generate a side hustle, a full time income, I don't know whatever it is that they're looking for. 10 grand 100 grand, I wrote a book that's on Amazon 99 cents, why it's impact driven. I don't need any money. I'm great. I can help 100 Andrews, I'll figure out how to make all the money I need. But there's a lot of people I can help figure out how to quit the job that they don't like, or the boss that they don't want to see anymore. You know, that excites the crap out of me.

Andrew Stotz 39:24
Great. Well, listeners, there you have it another story of loss to keep you winning. Remember, I'm on a mission to help 1 million people reduce risk in their lives. As we conclude Solomon, 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?

Solomon Thimothy 39:49
I would say keep taking risks. I know you want to reduce them, but there's ones that you will win big so that would be my advice,

Andrew Stotz 39:56
careful risks and win big. That's a wrap on it. 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 worse podcast hose Andrew Stotz saying. I'll see you on the upside.