190: The Lean Way to Double Your Sales with Allan Dib – 8FE

What if all the new marketing tools you’re chasing are actually slowing your growth?

Today’s guest, Allan Dib, bestselling author of The 1-Page Marketing Plan (over 1 million copies sold) and Lean Marketing, reveals why entrepreneurs waste time on shiny objects instead of mastering the fundamentals. Allan’s helped thousands of businesses strip away complexity, focus on what actually works, and build marketing machines that run without constant founder involvement.

In this episode, you’ll hear why personal brand is becoming the most defensible advantage in any industry, how to spot and plug “leaks” in your customer journey before pouring money into ads, and why subtracting is often the fastest path to growth.

You’ll also learn the two questions that determine whether a new tool is worth using, and the simple “dead man switch” system Allan uses to ensure consistent output even when he’s off the grid.

If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by marketing options or stuck on the hamster wheel of content creation, this conversation will help you simplify, amplify, and finally get the leverage you’ve been chasing.

Listen in and learn how to do less, but far better.

Inspiring Quotes

• “With new tools, we can do it better, faster, and cheaper. But a lot of people are acting like the old rules don’t apply.” – Allan Dib
• “Do the same shit, but with new tools.” – Allan Dib
• “If your message is bad and I amplify it, it’s going to make things worse, not better.” – Allan Dib
• “I haven’t come across a business yet where we couldn’t double or triple revenue without adding a single new client — just by plugging some of the leaks.” – Allan Dib
• “Convenience is the ultimate force.” – Allan Dib
• “Take a simple idea and take it seriously.” – Allan Dib

• 00:00 Intro
• 01:08 Biggest marketing mistakes in 2025
• 03:26 Authenticity in content creation and personal branding 
• 07:14 The democratization of content creation 
• 10:30 Lead generation vs. conversion optimization 
• 16:15 The most underrated asset for entrepreneurs in 2025 
• 19:19 Doing fewer things better
• 26:45 Lean marketing and organization 
• 30:48 Frequency vs. quality 
• 34:02 The importance of systems and processes
• 41:14 The role of AI in copywriting 
• 46:01 Focusing on the fundamentals vs. new concepts 
• 50:08 Allan’s winning routines
• 53:36 Allan’s advice to his younger self
• 56:14 Outro

00:00
Allan Dib
If your message is bad, just like if I’m a bad singer, if I amplify it, that makes things worse, not better. Right? That’s where we get people that say, hey, advertising doesn’t work in my type of business or it doesn’t work in my type of industry. It’s because they’ve been amplifying a message that just hasn’t been connecting and converting with their audience. We want to amplify something that actually works.

00:22
Brad Weimert
Congrats on getting beyond a million. What got you here won’t always get you there. This is a podcast for entrepreneurs who want to reach beyond their seven figure business and scale to eight, nine and even ten figures. I’m Brad Wymert and as the founder of Easy Pay Direct, I have had the privilege to work with more than 30,000 businesses, allowing me to see the data behind what some of the most successful companies on the planet are doing differently. Join me each week as I dig in with experts in sales, marketing, operations, technology and wealth building and you’ll learn some of the specific tools, tactics and strategies that are working today in those multi million 8, 9 and 10 figure businesses. Life can get exciting beyond a million. Alan Dibb, thank you so much for making it across the entire fucking world to be here.

01:07
Allan Dib
Pleasure to be on. Thanks for having me.

01:08
Brad Weimert
I love it, man. So you wrote the one page marketing plan. It’s got a million copies sold, translated into 30 languages. It is all over the place. 10,000Amazon reviews, most recently. Lean marketing is the business I want to talk about that journey and a lot of the elements of content creation, the book, marketing in general. But as a starting point, technology is moving tremendously fast right now and there are all these shiny new places to try to do things for entrepreneurs. What are the big mistakes that you see entrepreneurs doing today as it pertains to marketing?

01:44
Allan Dib
Yeah, so I see people talking about AI and using words like online business and things like that. And I just want to remove the qualifier like it’s not an online business, it’s just a business. Right. The medium that we use, similar to AI. Yes, of course it’s game changing technology. Of course it’s something that will bring us massive leverage. But again, the time tested rules of product market fit of making something that people actually want to buy, of having a message that really connects with your audience, all of these still apply, but we can now do it accelerated. So instead of we needed 10 people in our marketing department before, now maybe you need three and you can do the same kind of output. So I see it as a very high leverage tool, but it doesn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

02:30
Allan Dib
We still need to get fundamentals into place, and a lot of the work that I do is talking to people about those fundamentals. What are the basic things that we need to get implemented in a business to make it work and specifically in a marketing department.

02:45
Brad Weimert
So the general message there is stop trying to do new shit and do the same shit, but with new tools.

02:51
Allan Dib
Yeah, exactly the same. The same shit with new tools. We can do it better, we can do it faster, we can do it cheaper. But a lot of people are acting like the old rules don’t apply. Don’t worry about your message. We can just get ChatGPT to write any crappy output or whatever and that’ll work. Or you see these TikTok videos. Hey, I’m going to show you how to do 100 posts on social media in one minute. Just upload these quotes to Canva, send it up to ChatGPT, boom, boom. And so great. You’ve generated a whole bunch of slop that nobody wants to read or engage with.

03:26
Brad Weimert
Yeah, yeah. I was just listening to something that Dan Martell posted and it was something along the lines of content creation being one of the most defensible business models that you can have. And I thought that was such an interesting stance because people look at content generation as commoditized right now because of AI. And his opinion is, with authenticity, it can’t be commoditized.

03:51
Allan Dib
I think it’s going to be the only thing that isn’t commoditized. I mean, you know, where, you know, it used to be that you needed factories and you needed relationships and you needed all of the. I mean, you still need relationships, but you needed all of these big supplier relationships. You need. You know, your big advantage was that you could manufacture at scale and all of this sort of stuff. And now I’m thinking about personal brand. Like I was thinking about SEO in 2007. We’re still early and I think business brands are going to be great. Business brands are going to be derivative of great personal brands. We’re seeing that already, but I think we’re still early on. I mean, we’ve seen that with Elon, with Richard Branson. When we think of even Apple, we think of it as Steve Jobs Co.

04:34
Allan Dib
Even though the brand stands on its own, but still a lot of it is derivative of the person that we see as the personal brand at the front. And I think that’s going to be the Thing that’s going to differentiate the mortgage broker, the realtor, the whatever, butcher, baker, candlestick maker, whatever it is, it’s going to be the personal brand. We see, you know, all of the Kardashians launching skin creams and all of these things and becoming billion dollar enterprises overnight. Why? Because of personal brand. So I think that’s going to be more and more important. So 100% agree with Dan. And Dan’s had an amazing trajectory as a personal brand himself.

05:11
Brad Weimert
He really has. He really has. I was sitting with him in a ski lodge that we go to every year. Middle of nowhere, totally isolated, you heli into it. He is one of six of us that get up at like 5 o’ clock in the morning and drink coffee before our. We go out and ride. And he was launching the brand then.

05:27
Allan Dib
Yeah.

05:27
Brad Weimert
And I don’t. He didn’t know. He didn’t have the foresight to think about how big of a deal it was going to be in his world. But, but the difference is, and I saw him a few months ago and after this trajectory of just extreme growth and one, and I mentioned this the other day on an episode with Chandler, a bolt good friend in town. But Dan said, yeah, we’re professionals. I wanted to go pro Y and I was like, oh shit. But it was just this frame of yeah, you took it really fucking seriously and that’s why it accelerated. And of course there’s other, you know, there’s a million things within that sentence. But the idea of going pro was a really sort of, it wasn’t profound. It was one of those things like were just talking about like it’s a simple idea.

06:16
Brad Weimert
It is. And it’s just not as simple to execute.

06:19
Allan Dib
Yeah. And it’s a simple idea that he took seriously. And I think that they’re the ideas that are the most powerful. You take a simple idea and you take it seriously and you take it to the max. And Dan has really executed that so well. I was having dinner the other night with Caleb Ralston. He was the videographer behind that Gary V. And Alex Hormozi. And now he’s kind of going on his own. He’s starting his own business and now, you know, obviously himself. But others, one of their first hire is a videographer and someone to manage your YouTube channel. You know, we used to think as first hires, okay, I’m going to get an ops guy. I’m going to get someone to do some, you know, marketing or whatever or sales team or that Sort of thing.

07:05
Allan Dib
Now a lot of people, their first hire is a videographer. So someone who’s going to create content and build that library of authority.

07:14
Brad Weimert
Yeah. One of the things that occurred to me more recently is, you know, people talk about you, you brought up a bunch of examples of massive, very famous celebrities that can spin off brands, which is evidence of the value of a personal brand. But as all of the different elements of business get democratized, the distribution, the creation, everything, all elements, as that happens, it allows people to create a vertical or create a business much more quickly and control the entire thing.

07:50
Brad Weimert
And so I think if you look at the overarching trajectory of economics, like of what the economy is going to be worldwide, you will start to see a whole bunch of fragmentation where people can just spin up inside of a space instead of having what we’ve had in the last hundred years, which are these massively dominant players that control an entire market. Right. And you’ll start to just see a bunch of these different verticals and that might mean that we have huge platforms. Right. To do that. But I think you’ll have a lot more rich people because they’re able to create businesses quickly in these different spaces and control it through their brand.

08:25
Allan Dib
Yeah. And you know, things that were barriers before like hey, I can’t code, okay. So I need expensive coder or need a coding team or whatever. These are maybe not going away, but certainly reducing and possibly going away down the track. So hey, I can’t code or hey, I don’t have the skills to create something or whatever. Now these are going to go away, go away. And just seeing some of the disruption where, you know, you can just spin something up really quickly, try it out, you don’t need a seed fund, you don’t need venture capital, all of those sorts of things. We’re definitely going to get to the stage where we get to a billion dollar single person company.

09:05
Allan Dib
I mean right now I know of at least half a dozen people who are doing like eight figures and are essentially a single person company. Maybe they’ve got a few contractors here or there that they use. But it’s just incredible what you can do right now.

09:20
Brad Weimert
Like it is. Yeah. And I think that an important distinction when you said a billion dollar company, I think there are going to be billion dollar companies in revenue that are single people, you know, not billion dollar valuations, but actually producing, you know, 100 million a month.

09:34
Allan Dib
Yeah.

09:35
Brad Weimert
In revenue. That’s very real. And like I, I, I wanted to bring that up because YouTube. Not YouTube. Instagram was eight people when they sold for a billion plus, right?

09:46
Allan Dib
Yeah.

09:47
Brad Weimert
Crazy. But that’s not the same as a billion dollars in revenue.

09:51
Allan Dib
Yes, that’s true.

09:52
Brad Weimert
At all.

09:52
Allan Dib
That’s true. That’s true.

09:54
Brad Weimert
No. Okay, well, so other quick marketing tactic then. I want to kind of talk history and your book and how things and frameworks and structure because both the tactics and strategies behind your work are applicable to the audience at a whole bunch of different stages and business. One of the things that I see people doing in marketing across seven figure companies pre 7 figure 8 figure 9 figure is this shift in distribution of lead generation and focus on conversion optimization.

10:29
Allan Dib
Yeah.

10:30
Brad Weimert
What stages of life in a business should people be focusing on lead gen over conversion optimization or vice versa?

10:38
Allan Dib
It’s the very first thing we start with. Like we’re on an accelerator and most of the time people come in, they’re excited, they’re great, let’s run a new campaign, let’s run an ad, let’s run a whatever. And we look at their whole funnel, we look at what they’re doing right now. And there are so many places where there are leakages. And one of the first big wins is, look, let’s plug some of those leaks. And I haven’t come across a business yet where we can’t double or triple revenue by adding no new clients. Right. Just by plugging some of the leaks. And some of those leaks are in leads, some of those leaks are in churn, some of those are in customer journey.

11:15
Allan Dib
So sometimes we start working with a business and they’ve just never emailed their list before and they’ve got thousands and thousands of subscribers and that’s a very common thing we come across. And a lot of times, I mean, we’re kind of in the digital world. We podcasters, we work with people in digital businesses. So that kind of seems weird, but there are so many kind of in quote marks, normal businesses, you know, the chiropractic clinic, the construction company, the realtor or whatever. And they don’t think like marketers, they don’t think like digital marketers. And so they’ve got these assets that not yielding what they should be yielding. Right. And so just by plugging some of those leaks, we can have massive wins and then we can pour into the bucket, right, so we can add to it and then we can generate leads.

12:09
Allan Dib
So I always start with identifying, hey, what are the current constraints, what are the things there, what are the leaks right now in the System, let’s plug some of those and then let’s pour into the bucket later.

12:21
Brad Weimert
Okay. So I think, I guess my challenge with that or a point of clarity that I’m looking for is where it’s coming from is I see lots of new entrepreneurs that are trying to focus on both of those things at the same time and it prevents them from going anywhere. So they’re trying to do the lead gen and then they’re trying to work on the optimization of conversion in particular. And they’re just trying to do it all and it stunts production and then they get nowhere at all. So do you. And when you just said when you come in for consulting or when you work with people, the first thing you want to do is say, do you even have a functional funnel? That’s what I heard.

12:56
Allan Dib
Exactly.

12:57
Brad Weimert
So do you have a functional funnel? And then do you toggle between those? Do you think that like, is there a time and place to just work on full blown lead gen or to stop and say, okay, now we’ve got to just go back and hone it? How do you think about sort of test iterate the ab structure of that?

13:12
Allan Dib
There is absolutely a time when, hey, you know, someone comes in and their stuff is solid. It’s a, I would say it’s a minority.

13:19
Brad Weimert
Yeah.

13:20
Allan Dib
So you know, so it’s an understatement. Yeah. In that case, absolutely. Let’s, let’s go all out, let’s do lead gen, let’s run ads, let’s do all of that sort of thing. Like I said, it’s kind of the minority. Often we need to look at some of the messaging we need. Because the thing I tell clients is, look, a lot of what we’re doing from a marketing perspective is amplification. And so if your message is bad, just like if I’m a bad singer, if I amplify it, that makes things worse, not better. Right. So if we’re going to amplify your message, it’s going to be a message that’s converting. Right.

13:54
Allan Dib
So if we present your message to 10 people and they don’t get excited and buy, and then we do it to 100 people that get excited and buy, why would we have any better results with 10,000 or 100,000 people? So let’s fix some of the core issues. So messaging technology, the right people in place, once we’ve got some of those and doesn’t take long often, and it doesn’t have to be super hard. Just let’s get the basics into place, then we’re going to, once we’ve got a solid message and then absolutely, we can amplify it. So we don’t want to be amplifying a crappy message because it’s going to make things worse. You’re going to spend a lot of money.

14:32
Allan Dib
And that’s where we, we get people that say, hey, advertising doesn’t work in my type of business or doesn’t work in my type of industry or whatever. It’s because they’ve been amplifying a message that just hasn’t been connecting and converting with their audience. So we want to amplify something that actually works.

14:49
Brad Weimert
Yeah, I think that the, you know, it’s the measure twice, cut once adage and I think specifically the entrepreneurial archetype has a hard time with the planning and structure and methodical side of running a business.

15:09
Allan Dib
Yeah. Ready, fire, aim. And, and that was the point of really putting together before it was a book, the one page marketing plan was a process because I tried to get entrepreneurs to, hey, let’s, you know, before we spend all of this money, let’s put together a marketing plan. Let’s figure out who our target market is, let’s figure out our message, figure out what media we’re going to use, all of those sorts of things. And I got a lot of pushback. It’s like too hard, don’t know how. I need to hire a consultant, it’s going to take six months or whatever. And I’m like, look, I think we could do this in 20 minutes on a single page. So it was a process in my business long before it was a book. And I think that’s why it’s connected with a lot of people.

15:49
Allan Dib
Because, hey, we can now do this really quickly, really easily. We can go to one pager that we can share with the team, share with our web developer, share with whoever needs to be on board with whatever we’re doing.

16:00
Brad Weimert
Yeah, I love that. I think people often get in their own way by overcomplicating things and I think it comes from a good place. Sometimes it’s just confusion and you’re not clear on where you’re going. And so you’re trying to think of all the elements.

16:14
Allan Dib
Yeah.

16:15
Brad Weimert
And often it’s an attempt to make things perfect instead of just getting the framework and the basics done. You have said that tools, assets and processes are the ultimate marketing leverage. What is an underrated asset for entrepreneurs in 2025?

16:37
Allan Dib
Yeah, so one of the assets I recommend most people have in their business is what I call a flagship asset. So what’s something that you’re going to be famous for? What’s a. It could be a tool, it could be an experience, it could be some, a piece of content that you’re famous for. So for example, in my business, it’s the one page marketing plan, right?

16:58
Brad Weimert
It’s this guy.

16:59
Allan Dib
Yeah, exactly, exactly. And so, you know, even though there’s a lot of depth to what we do and what we deliver, so, you know, we talk to entrepreneurs about, we’re kind of business coaching disguised as marketing assistance. Right. So. And as a marketing accelerator. But you know, I’ve been on a zoom call with entrepreneurs talking about the most personal stuff in their lives and talking about exits and talking about team and talking about all of those things, but that’s giving them what they need. But when I’m on a podcast, when I’m speaking, when I’m doing a keynote, I’m talking about one thing, I’m talking about marketing and really marketing planning. And so I’m talking about that one thing. Even though there’s a ton of depth to what we do, I could talk about 100 different things that we do.

17:49
Allan Dib
So the point is, what are you going to go out to the market with? What do you give people what they want? It’s kind of like, you know, you start working with a trainer, right? They advertise six pack abs, but you start working with them, they’re like, all right, we need to fix your diet. We need to, you know, abs happen in the kitchen, right? So we need to set your macros and your. All of that sort of stuff. So yes, the thing that you want is the six pack abs, but the thing that you need is diet. We need to figure out your exercise routine. We need to do all of those sorts of things. So similar to that, we can’t be all things to all people.

18:23
Allan Dib
So a lot of people, like I was just talking to a client yesterday and it was just like a mess of pro, different programs that they had and it was just, you go to the website and you spend five minutes, still couldn’t work out what it is that they actually did. And so a lot of it is subtraction and simplification. The more I’ve simplified my business, the more I simplify a client’s business, the more we subtract, the better we do. So I love this quote. There’s a guy, he was a Formula one engineer for the Lotus team, he said if we add power, we can go faster. On the straights. If we remove weight, we can go faster everywhere. So just subtraction is often the biggest lever that you can have.

19:10
Allan Dib
And so what can we subtract and then add technology, tools, assets, processes, and then really leverage that up back to back?

19:19
Brad Weimert
You said subtract, subtract, then add technology, tools, processes, which sounds like adding a bunch of shit, especially when you say adding technology. Yeah. Because people today are riddled with new shiny tools that you can implement to do amazing whiz bang things. And one of the biggest mistakes that I see people make all the time, our team included, is getting caught up in new technical implementation in the name of progress. But really it ends up distracting them from the core focus. Your most recent book, Lean Marketing, is about this, right? Is about doing fewer things better.

20:00
Allan Dib
Yes.

20:01
Brad Weimert
Tactically, what does that look like? So within the tools, processes, etc that are additive, how do you keep things lean? What do you get rid of? What are the tactics and strategies when the rubber meets the road?

20:14
Allan Dib
Yeah, so I think of tool, you know, just like a physical tool. So if I want to break through that wall, I don’t know, maybe I could do so with my hands, but I don’t think so and I don’t know.

20:26
Brad Weimert
Man, that’s cinder block right there.

20:28
Allan Dib
Okay, well, I’m definitely going to hurt myself. Even if I could do it’s going to take a long time. It’s going to be very hard. So. But if I had the right tool, if I had a sledgehammer, I could probably do that in a few minutes, right?

20:39
Brad Weimert
Yeah.

20:39
Allan Dib
So I think of that in a similar way. So what are we. So first we want to lean down. What are the two or three things that we really want to do? And in almost any endeavor in life, there’s a few things that really move the needle. Like you want to get strong. It’s probably about three to five movements. There’s a deadlift, there’s a squat, there’s a bench press. That’ll get you the 80 20, right? Yes. There’s a million different moves and there’s a million different machines and things like that, but that’ll get you the 80 20. Similar in marketing, when I looked at who are the best marketers in the world, they weren’t doing a thousand things.

21:13
Allan Dib
They were going deep one or two things and then adding things as they became masters of those one or two channels or those one or two strategies or tactics or whatever they were doing. And so the best marketers in the world were just really lean and then just going really deep by adding technology, by how can we do it faster? Can we do it cheaper? Can we do it easier? So from that perspective, where can I use that sledgehammer to do it faster, cheaper, easier? But I’m not just adding tools for technology for tool sake. I want to, I want the tool to either do one of two things. I want it to give me massive leverage. So I want to be able to do things faster, better, cheaper, or I want to remove friction from the customer journey.

22:01
Allan Dib
So all of those, we look at the customer journey and where are all those touch points where there’s potential leakages? You know, where is a customer like you know, having to make a decision that where maybe if we used a technology tool, they didn’t have to or they could get a result quicker or better or easier if we use a technology tool. So we never went want technology to kind of be in the way. You know, there’s that old British show, Little Britain, and the lady types and she goes, computer says no. You know, so technology is like getting in the way. Right. So, you know, anything the guy asks you, she’ll tap on the computer, she says, computer says no. And I’ve seen so many times, you know, where technology actually gets in the way.

22:48
Allan Dib
So we want to make sure it’s reducing friction, giving us leverage.

22:51
Brad Weimert
That’s its two jobs, reducing friction and giving us leverage. Yeah, I think that those are, I mean, simple frameworks that allow you to assess whether or not you’re making the right choice are so valuable.

23:03
Allan Dib
Are we making clients jump through more hoops or fewer hoops using this thing? It’s like you go to the doctor’s office and they give you this iPad and you filled in the thing already and now they’re making you do it and triplicate or whatever. So that’s adding friction. Whereas, you know, we’ve all had those experiences where it’s just like super easy and smooth and that makes you want to do more business with that person.

23:31
Brad Weimert
Yeah, well, I think today reducing friction is the name of the game. I mean, it’s too, it’s, there’s too much competition everywhere.

23:38
Allan Dib
Well, why do we use Uber? Why do we use Netflix? I mean, you know, streaming services are now just become the new cable, Ubers become just the new cabs. But hey, we can touch a button on our phone, it arrives to where we are, we know where it is, we can track it or that removed a lot of friction used to, you know, I mean, probably showing My age, but back in the day, you’d call a cab and you don’t know, is he on the way? How long is it going to be? Whatever, all of that was brutal.

24:06
Brad Weimert
Yeah, it was 5 to 45. I remember vividly cabs saying, we’ll be there in 5 to 5.

24:10
Allan Dib
Yeah.

24:10
Brad Weimert
What?

24:11
Allan Dib
Yeah, exactly.

24:12
Brad Weimert
Or, or maybe they won’t come at all.

24:13
Allan Dib
That’s exactly, that’s exactly right. And so the actual product is pretty much exactly the same. It’s just we’ve removed a bit of friction and uncertainty and we know now, okay, he’s seven minutes away or whatever. Again, similar. Used to pay for different channels of cable. Whatever. Now we’re just paying for different streaming services. But you know, now it seems ridiculous that we would wait for a certain day and time to watch our favorite show or whatever. It’s like, no, we’re just going to binge watch the whole thing whenever we want. Right. So. And so it’s just removed that friction.

24:47
Brad Weimert
Yeah, well, they’re still figuring that part out.

24:49
Allan Dib
Right.

24:49
Brad Weimert
Because now you see some of the platforms still are sticking to that. Like Apple does weekly releases for shows and Netflix largely does the binge protocol. But I think that the lesson there is super interesting, which is, and you’re using it, your platform is that marketing has existed forever. The fundamentals exist. Still keep implementing the fundamentals. And interestingly, the analogy that was just brought up is that businesses and business models are the same way. So you know, you move from taxi to Uber or cable to streaming and the fundamentals are still the same. The elements that have changed largely are friction.

25:32
Allan Dib
Yeah, exactly right. Convenience is the ultimate force, you know, convenient. You know, I love supporting small businesses, but I order from Amazon a lot because I just click it arrives same day or maybe next day at worst. So convenience makes you do things that you. Even against your own will, to some.

25:52
Brad Weimert
Some extent, you know, against your own principles.

25:55
Allan Dib
Yeah, totally.

25:56
Brad Weimert
Yeah. I say this a lot, but if somebody makes me enter a credit card number when I’m checking out, that alone makes me abandoned cart. Yeah, absolutely. When I’m used to just pushing the button. Apple Pay, Amazon, et cetera, you made it this far, which probably means that you’re an entrepreneur, which probably means that you’re accepting credit cards and maybe ach payments. Beyond the fact that we can do a rate review to save you money, beyond the fact that we give you dedicated account reps, world class customers, customer service, world class technology, and can actually optimize the way you accept payments online. Our average client saves a year by working with us. If you want to find out how and get a free rate review from us, check us out at epd.com forward/am.

26:45
Brad Weimert
So from a lean perspective, you talked about the marketing side of it. From an organizational perspective, what does lean look like?

26:52
Allan Dib
So lean looks like lean marketing. Specifically, a key principle of lean marketing is we want marketing to be so valuable that people would potentially pay for it. So and that kind of comes full circle to something were talking about a little bit earlier about personal brand. So you know, the old style of marketing is we’re going to interrupt you lots. We’re going to do commercials, we’re going to do pop ups, we’re going to do all of this annoying stuff. We’re going to interrupt you and it’s just a cost of you having to watch your favorite show or read your favorite content or whatever. Now what we’re actually seeing is people want to consume your marketing.

27:33
Allan Dib
You know, people want, you know, if you put out genuinely valuable content, so you look at something like, you know, like Dan, we talked about, or let’s say Alex Hormozi or whatever, they come out with stuff I actually want to listen to, I want to watch like it’s genuinely valuable stuff. And so again if now the name of the game is the marketing is going to be so valuable that people are just want to watch it’s not an interruption, it’s not something that people want, you want to skip. It’s an ad that’s just annoying, that’s or spam or whatever, that sort of thing, or clickbait. It’s something that you actually want to watch. It’s valuable, you might even subscribe to it. It’s so valuable. So I think about that way.

28:16
Allan Dib
And so that’s a benchmark I have for my team is like we don’t want to release anything, whether it’s an email newsletter, whether it’s a YouTube video, whether it’s a podcast or whatever. We want to assume that someone watching this paid a subscription to watch it or read it or whatever, right? So it’s got to be valuable enough for them to keep subscribe to us. It’s not an interruption, it’s not something that we want to spam them with. So that’s a key principle. And then when you do that, your marketing becomes incredibly efficient because previously, you know, you’re having people just swipe away or you know, try and block the ads or whatever, whereas Here people are actively seeking your content out, seeking out your stuff, and a percentage of them buy. And even those ones that don’t buy you being built, incredible goodwill.

29:04
Allan Dib
And you’ll notice when you know, I’m sure, you know, like when you sell a business the money that you make over and above the plant and equipment and the physical assets and things like that, the accountant will put a little ledger saying goodwill. Right. So the. The intangible assets of the business is the goodwill. So I think of that very literally is, hey, we’re building goodwill in the business, and that’s going to translate to real dollars either now through sales of whatever we’re doing on the back end or down the track if we exit the business.

29:39
Brad Weimert
Yeah, one of the. So, God, I have a lot of thoughts there, but one of the fundamentals while we’re pulling things back to the past and how they’re manifesting in the future here is product placement has existed for decades. And product placement was the realization in marketing and I don’t know, maybe the 80s when they realized interrupting with a commercial is not as effective as just having the product existing in the entertainment.

30:09
Allan Dib
Exactly right.

30:10
Brad Weimert
And it started with just brand placement.

30:12
Allan Dib
Yeah.

30:13
Brad Weimert
And then you now, you see with podcasts. Podcast. And this started actually probably with Howard Stern, where it was host read ads.

30:21
Allan Dib
Yeah.

30:22
Brad Weimert
Instead of an ad interrupting, the host would read it because it’s less intrusive. Today, Mr. Beast is very good at product placement in his own videos because it’s. If you even notice that he’s doing it’s sort of a fluid integration that’s playful and it’s accepted because it’s his also. So he’s selling his own shit, which is like the truly integrated ad. I love that.

30:47
Allan Dib
The.

30:48
Brad Weimert
I guess the question for me with that is with content creation in general now, and this is true of, I think all marketing, there’s a question of frequency over quality. And obviously, best case scenario, everything is super high quality and you get tons of frequency. But I see lots of people trying to win with the frequency game. Meaning let’s just get 100 pieces of content out and some percentage of them are going to hit. How do you think about that versus just putting out 100% quality and putting a lot less out?

31:25
Allan Dib
I definitely lean towards putting less out in quality. So we had a strategy day with my team, and one of the things, one of the conclusions we came to is we want our marketing to be essentially a public service. Right. So we want it to be so good that it’s Essentially a public service. Now having said that is if you don’t test a lot of things, if you release one piece of content a year, you’re not going to have a lot of data to figure out what’s actually hitting what do people like. So I don’t believe in just releasing tons of slop and hoping that something hits. But we want to have a thesis, we want to have a process, a system. So you mentioned process is one of the key parts of lean marketing.

32:08
Allan Dib
So how do we create a daily, weekly, monthly cadence of stuff? So prior to the pod, were talking about know simple things like systems over goals, right? So a simple system for me to get strong is to show up at the gym three to six days a week and just do my lifts, right? And if I have that in my calendar and I just show up, it would be unreasonable, assuming I’m actually doing this stuff, for me not to get stronger in a year, in two years or whatever. So in a similar way, I just want to show up and do simple marketing stuff daily, weekly, monthly. And so let’s start with one thing. So like being really lean. So let’s say we decided it was a good idea in your business to send an email newsletter twice a week.

32:58
Allan Dib
Okay, let’s just systemize that one thing and let’s just start get that process going. So we need to figure out three things. Who’s going to do it, when are they going to do it and how are they going to do it. So if we put that system in place, great, now we’re regularly sending email newsletters. We can see, we can test subject lines, we can send, test, you know, do shorter ones work better, do longer ones work better, do ones with a link work better or with a video or whatever. And so now we’ve got a system going and then we can start stacking. Then we say, all right, great, we’ve got this one process going in our marketing system. Let’s add another.

33:32
Allan Dib
So let’s, you know, maybe we want to reduce, release a YouTube video, really high quality one, once a month or once a week or whatever. So again we add that as a process. So that’s the way I think about lean marketing is how do we create one process, make it systemized so it’s not dependent on some genius or dependent on, you know, the founder, you know, having inspiration or whatever. It’s just a systemized approach. It’s a daily, weekly, monthly thing that we just do.

34:02
Brad Weimert
So Embedded in that. Especially with something like an email newsletter or a posting schedule within that you have the complexity of the messaging of the post or the messaging of the email. The content of the email long form has always sold, which is bizarre to me. I mean the advent of the Internet, people started doing these fucking like multi thousand word sales copy letters. Sales letters, it was all just copy. Today on social, you see people do the same shit. These super long posts, narrative emails sell. But those take creativity, structure and inspiration from the entrepreneur often. Or they delegate down. Right. Where does that fit into the simplicity of marketing and the structure of marketing? From a lean marketing plan.

34:57
Allan Dib
Yeah. So all of that. So we talked about a simple idea, but taken seriously. So all of that can be systemized. So it’s like how do we have an ideas board? Okay, great, we’ve got an idea. So right now, for example, I’m traveling for a month and you know, sometimes I’m in conferences, I’m in podcasts, I’m in airports, I’m whatever. But you can be sure, like clockwork, our email newsletter is going to go out twice a week to my list. It’s not dependent on me if I’m on a plane, if I’m somewhere or whatever. But because we’ve got a system in place. So we’ve, we. For example, for us, we’ve got an ideas board where both myself and the team will post to that. So the sales team will be like, you know what, we keep getting this question.

35:42
Allan Dib
A lot of times we should address that in some of the content. The coaching team will be like, hey, I was talking to a client about this. I think that’ll make a great piece of content. So that goes on the ideas board. Sometimes I’ll come up with something. Then I’ve got a copywriter on my team, he’ll put together, he’ll get it to about 80% and then I might add some of the finishing touches and it just goes out. Now we’ve got a process that’s called the dead man switch, which means I’ve got 48 hours to do an edit to an email that’s going to go out. And so most of the time I’ll get to it. I’ll have a look in the Slack channel, be like, and you know, my copywriter has my voice down very well.

36:25
Allan Dib
So most of the time I’ll just make minor edits or no edits at all. But if for whatever reason I’m traveling, I’m at an airport, I’m at a conference, or whatever we default to publish, it’s just going to go out. And so that way we’ve systemized this whole process where it’s not dependent on my inspiration or the amount of time I’ve got or if I’ve got something going on or whatever. And they are my ideas because they come from me, they come from my team, they come from questions that people ask about the book, from readers, from things like that. And we have got a good database of past ideas that we’ve used and we’ve got a style guide that’s the kind of language that I use, how I communicate and things like that. So it’s a systemized process.

37:12
Allan Dib
So you can systemize things that are complex. And in fact, you should systemize things that are complex, where they’re long form, they’re structured, they need, you know, multiple kind of iterations or you know, they need a system to kind of really pump out just like, you know, you would systemize. You know, something. Let’s say you’re manufacturing shoes, you know, that can be complex. You know, how do you attach the rubber to the sole and how do you get the leather and how do you stitch it together, all of that? Someone’s back engineered that. Yeah. And they’ve created the tools, they’ve created the processes that created the systems and, and they’ve created that production line. And I think of content and marketing in a very similar way. I don’t think of it as this hugely creative thing or whatever. Mostly it’s a systems thing.

37:55
Allan Dib
It’s like, can we back engineer the process? What are the tools we need, what are the systems we need, what are the processes we need? And let’s just get those in and let’s create that production line.

38:05
Brad Weimert
I really like the. You call it the deadman switch. Yeah, I like that. Put systems in place so that the default mode is execution.

38:18
Allan Dib
Yes.

38:19
Brad Weimert
And that doesn’t mean that you’re going to end up with some garbage going out. In fact, the ratios that you mentioned were. Your copywriter is going to get it to 80%. So worst case scenario, you’ve got something somewhere between 80 and 100%. Because maybe he nails it or she nails it.

38:33
Allan Dib
Right.

38:36
Brad Weimert
But 80 to 100% is going out. And then you get to tweak it. If you get to it.

38:39
Allan Dib
Yeah, and I get to tweak it. Most of the time, you know, most of the time I’ll get in there, I’m like, yep, change that word or whatever. But if I’m not It’s not holding things up. I’m not a bottleneck in the business. You know, so many times I see a controlling business owner or entrepreneur, they’ve.

38:57
Brad Weimert
Got a. I know some of those.

38:58
Allan Dib
Yeah. They’ve just got to approve every little thing and they just become a bottleneck to their team. Like, you can’t move at speed.

39:08
Brad Weimert
Yeah. How do you. So for those controlling entrepreneurs, how do you reconcile. To me, this is sort of progress over perfection, but how do you reconcile protecting your brand, it being the asset and your marketing message versus putting something out that you’re not happy with?

39:24
Allan Dib
Yeah. So there’s definitely a transition period. And, you know, I didn’t just one day say, you know what I’m not going to do this stuff and get some random person on Fiverr to write some. Some crap. Right.

39:34
Brad Weimert
Yeah.

39:35
Allan Dib
So you’ve got. There is a transition period where, hey, we’re. Well, first of all, we’re building some of the assets. So everyone’s familiar with like a design style guide. You know, here’s our logo, we use these colors, we use these fonts, all of that sort of thing. So people are familiar with that. So that’s how you tell your web developer, hey, create the website so it looks like this. So it’s in line with our brand. Well, one of the assets that we create is, we call it a copywriting style guide is like, what kind of words do we use? How do we. How do we write email newsletters? What does a post look like? What does good look like? And so what’s the brand? What’s our brand voice? What’s our personality? All of those sorts of things.

40:15
Allan Dib
So we put that together so when a copywriter starts to write, they can reference that. Just like a graphic designer or a web developer would reference our design style guide. So we have a copywriting style guide so that not only just in an email newsletter, but even on the website, on our about page on various assets we’re writing in the same kind of voice. We’re not got some weird stuff that doesn’t gel with my overall message because people will have spent maybe six, sometimes more hours reading my books. And then if the other stuff isn’t congruent, if they get on the email list and it’s like this weird stuff that’s not similar, that’s going to have a disconnect.

40:57
Brad Weimert
Yeah, that’s interesting. Yeah, we have a brand style guide and a messaging guide, and one of those things, some of the things that are on that for Us are words, you, words that are commonly used and words that you do not use. Don’t say this shit.

41:13
Allan Dib
Yeah, totally.

41:14
Brad Weimert
What just occurred to me was the sort of intersection with that and AI, and I can think about a bunch of different ways you could do this. How does the messaging guide work or the copywriting guide in your company work alongside the implementation of AI in your writers? Where does AI fit into your marketing plan today as it pertains to copy in particular?

41:39
Allan Dib
Yeah, a great question. So I use AI a lot as a thought partner. I’m like, I’ll have. One of the biggest queries I have with AI is like, does this make sense? And it’ll come back to me. And like, yeah, that makes sense. But you could have made this more clear this way. Or sometimes it’ll be like, there’ll be a word that I’m like, insert a word between here and here. And I’m like, okay, not quite. Or give me a few others. Or complete this sentence. You know, I’m just not quite sure how to complete this sentence. But in terms of creating content from scratch, context is such a huge thing with AI. So a lot of people, like in the computer science industry, there’s a term called gigo, garbage in, garbage out. And so the same applies in life.

42:32
Allan Dib
You know, you have garbage inputs, you’ll get garbage outputs. So if you just say to AI, hey, write me a LinkedIn post about, you know, how to get wealthy or whatever and make it 600 words, you’re going to get some real crap, right? And whereas if you give it a goal, you tell it exactly who the audience is, what do you want to have, what do you want the format to be? And then this is the key, you give it a ton of context. You say, here’s 10,000 words of stuff that I’ve written in the past. You use that as context for the output, use it as for the style especially. So use the same words, use similar phrases, use things like that. It’s going to, it’s still not going to be 100%, but it’ll be worlds apart from just a crappy input.

43:20
Allan Dib
So if you can tell it format, goal framework, and then most importantly is the context. Give it a ton of context around what you want output, it’s going to give you way better results.

43:33
Brad Weimert
Yeah, I love that. One of those things being the copywriting guide.

43:36
Allan Dib
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

43:39
Brad Weimert
Okay. Well, I would be remiss to not talk about the specifics of the one page marketing plan. I want to talk about how it came to be though, because before, I think before it, you had sold a company or two today. And I would imagine you promote this narrative. Well, actually you already have. You’ve talked about the critical assets in your company that you use to build the company. And for you mentioned that the book was a big part of it. Did you write the one page marketing plan with a concrete funnel to build the business or did you figure it out along the way?

44:16
Allan Dib
I definitely built it with a funnel in mind. So you’ll notice there’s a lot of resources referenced in the book that generates a lot of people opting in to our email list. And so from day one, I definitely had in mind that I’m going to have conversations with readers. I never predicted how big the book was going to because how could you? I’d never written a book before, but I definitely knew was a good hook because when I would speak from stage, when I would talk about a one page marketing plan that really connected with people really love things that if you can take them from complex to simple and show them a path that really connects with people. So I knew it was a good hook. I didn’t know how well the book would do obviously. So I definitely had that in mind.

45:04
Allan Dib
And obviously the funnel has evolved over time. Now we’ve got a team of closers and setters and you know, all of that sort of stuff, all the backend programs and things like that. But yeah, I definitely had in mind that this would be something that, where I could continue the conversation beyond the book.

45:21
Brad Weimert
How do you balance. So the book and were talking, I think were talking about this before we kicked off as well, but were talking about James Clear and atopic habits and how it was a. When I heard that initially when the book came out, I had no desire to read it at all because I was like, I think about this stuff all the time. What are the habits that I put in place that have long term ripples in my life? Because there are so many things in life that you have a thought of, oh, I should do that. And then you wake up and 10 years has passed.

45:54
Allan Dib
Yeah.

45:54
Brad Weimert
And the question is, are the things you’re doing today going to serve you 10 years from now?

45:59
Allan Dib
Yeah. Right.

46:01
Brad Weimert
Also focusing on the fundamentals is kind of boring. Not kind of like very boring. When you’re thinking about marketing today and content creation today, how much do you focus on just the basics versus the new things and the new concepts and chasing what might be working today?

46:27
Allan Dib
Yeah, I think it’s the barbell strategy, which applies to all things in life. Like, you know, it’s 90% basics, safe stuff, and then 10, 5 to 10% of the risky bets and things like that. So similar to investing, I’ve got 90% of my stuff in just safe, boring real estate, S&P 500, Vanguard or whatever. And then 5 to 10% is kind of the risky stuff that could 10x, you know, 100x or whatever else. And so similar to marketing, again, most of it is just the boring stuff. I saw a tweet the other day, I thought it was really good. It was like, woodworking sounds really cool. Until you find out it’s 90% sanding, right? And almost everything is like that. 90% of writing is not the cool stuff like signing books and doing all of the cool author stuff.

47:21
Allan Dib
It’s just sitting in front of a screen with a blinking cursor. It’s kind of the sanding, right? The polishing the words. 90% of getting jacked is just doing the reps, right? Almost in anything where you want to get better. It’s just the simple stuff repeated over and doing the boring work that’s going to make all the difference. Right. And so I think it’s also James Clear who said this. It’s just the people who can tolerate the boredom of whatever they’re doing. The boring stuff, the sanding, the lifting, the. The staring at the blinking cursor, they’re the ones that are going to win at whatever they’re doing. You know, it’s people who kind of like just can’t stand that boredom and they need to jump from shiny object to shiny object. And it’s like, you know, I’ll see an entrepreneur.

48:09
Allan Dib
And they’re like, yeah, I’ve got eight different businesses and I’ve got a skincare business and an IT business and a whatever digital business and all of that. And none of the businesses are making any money. Right. You know, most people who’ve done well, you diversified later down the track, but they usually go really deep on one thing for a very long time and do the boring work.

48:32
Brad Weimert
Yeah, I’ve talked to a bunch of people about this and I think, I mean, the data around the most successful people is basically all of them have gone very deep in one thing. And when I say the most successful, I mean like most of the richest people in the world. And, you know, Elon is a bizarre example of the alternative. But it’s also true that there is no one size fits all. There are A million ways you can do things, of course, and lean marketing applies to everything else, which is lean business, lean life, Do Less better. In fact, theme and easy pay to rect this year is Do Less Better.

49:15
Allan Dib
Love it.

49:16
Brad Weimert
Yeah. Well, you can go over the same thing over and over and over and consistently improve it. And those 1, 2, 3, 5, 10% improvements make a massive difference. Or you can try something brand new and not only have no improvement, but set yourself back by not getting the 1 to 5% improvements in the core.

49:40
Allan Dib
Well, it’s the compound interest, you know, for a very long time, compound interest looks like it’s doing nothing and then it’s a hockey stick. Right. And so if you’re resetting from scratch every year or two years or whatever, you just lose that, the magic of that compounding. So that’s like, you know, you see someone, like someone they’re struggling for five years, six years, seven years, ten years, then suddenly, wow, they made it like overnight success. And just that compound interest applies to almost everything in life.

50:08
Brad Weimert
Yeah, it does. It’s so easy to forget and get distracted in the moment though. Do you have any routines in either your business or your life that ensure that you get that compound interest and that you’re doing the daily things or the weekly things, the monthly or the annual things to get to your future?

50:26
Allan Dib
I do. I’m kind of a maniac with my calendar. So I’ve got a preloaded calendar where by default I’ve got the most important things in my life pre scheduled, meaning things like exercise, things like time with family, things like writing. They’re already pre scheduled and I treat them like an appointment. Just like I would, you know, I wouldn’t come on a Monday morning and I’ve got an appointment with a client. I’m like, yeah, I don’t really feel like it. I’m not going to show up. I would never do that. It’d have to be, you know, something terrible has gone or I’ve gotten sick or whatever for me to cancel an appointment with a client. And so same thing. I have an appointment with myself in the gym and I treat that as seriously as I would treat an appointment with a client.

51:09
Allan Dib
So I’ve got those preloaded now. Things happen in my day. Maybe I’ve got to move that little tile around. Maybe instead of doing the workout at 7am, I’ve got to move it to 9am because something came up or I’ve got to handle something or whatever. But would be a very rare case where I would miss something in my calendar. And the other thing that I do is I track all of my waking hours in my calendar like in 15 minute chunks. So I could tell you last year on June 3rd, what was I doing that day. And so it helps me to keep track of my time so I can say, you know, how last month, how many hours did I spend writing, how many hours did I spend working out, how many hours did I spend traveling or whatever and is that good?

51:50
Allan Dib
Should, should that be more, should that be less, should that stay the same? So it allows me to have some data and analytics around how am I spending my most important asset, which is my time.

52:00
Brad Weimert
Yeah, I love that. I live and die by my calendar. And part of it also is analytics around it. AI has been an unbelievable tool from that perspective. I’ve had this annual practice every year where I analyze my journal, I analyze my calendar, and I also have a form of, I’ve got a free flowing journal that I write in and then I have another form of a journal where I just capture moments. And then I for years have been doing analysis on word frequency, both with people’s names, locations, and then sentiment. So what words do I most commonly use that are in conjunction with Alan? That’s cool, that’s great. And it’s very, I have a pretty good gut sense of things, you know, relatively high sense of self awareness. So I’m rarely surprised.

52:50
Brad Weimert
But sometimes at the end of the year I look at it and I’m like, whoa, the frequency with this person of positive or negative word or, you know, drinking or shenanigans or whatever. Yeah, I should probably watch that.

53:03
Allan Dib
Yeah. Are you writing like in a physical journal?

53:06
Brad Weimert
Fuck no. Everything’s digital. I was just talking to somebody about this yesterday. We were talking about handwriting and I was like, handwriting? Why would you be writing with ink on paper? No, like you can’t analyze that later. Yeah, you know, it’s just, that’s the core reason to do the digital.

53:22
Allan Dib
Yeah.

53:23
Brad Weimert
Is you can assess all those things later.

53:25
Allan Dib
Yeah.

53:26
Brad Weimert
You know, today you could just take the pictures and give it to AI and it would analyze it for you. Probably. But not a chance.

53:34
Allan Dib
Oh, it’s awesome.

53:36
Brad Weimert
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think it’s easier today to do it than it was before. Let’s rewind. You know, a couple decades before you sold the first company, if you could whisper into Alan’s ear before selling the first company, what advice would you have had for yourself?

53:56
Allan Dib
Just do the basics, man. Like, you know, I Spent so many years just trying to, you know, do hacks and do the stuff that didn’t matter. And just the basics were the stuff that. That move the needle the most. You know, it’s just like trying to find the shortcuts is really the long cuts. The long cuts. I think. I think it’s the Navy seals say that, you know, slow is smooth. Sorry. As smooth is slow and slow. Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.

54:28
Brad Weimert
Yep. Something like that. Something like that, yeah.

54:30
Allan Dib
Yeah. So, like, I just was in such a hurry to just, you know, cut corners and do this stuff that I. The work that was obviously I needed to do and just trying to find hacks and things like that, it’s just like, just do the basics. Just the. Put the. Put the money in the Vanguard account. You know, just lift the weights. Just do the basic stuff and just systemize it and just reap the compound interest.

54:57
Brad Weimert
Yeah, I love that. I think that’s a great sentiment. Yeah. There’s Stephen Covey in 7 Habits of Highly Effective People said, with people, fast is slow and slow is fast. And I probably read that when I was 19, and it stuck with me because I was in sales at the time. And what you just said, I think is more applicable broadly is the Navy SEAL sentiment, which is the same thing, but because in process and in life, it’s like that, but with humans in particular, you know, in sales, that you can’t rush the process of sales to push somebody to buy something. You’re trying to get them to get to the finish line theirselves.

55:42
Allan Dib
Yeah.

55:42
Brad Weimert
And the same thing is true in management. The same thing is true in leadership.

55:45
Allan Dib
Yeah.

55:45
Brad Weimert
And that is take your time.

55:47
Allan Dib
Yep.

55:48
Brad Weimert
And do the basics. Yeah, I love that. Alan Dibbling. Where do you want to point people? Where can people find you?

55:56
Allan Dib
My books. Wherever books are sold. So Amazon. They’re very popular on Audible, so it’s the one page marketing plan and Lean Marketing. And you can connect with me [email protected].

56:07
Brad Weimert
Love it, man. Thank you so much for coming from across the world.

56:12
Allan Dib
My pleasure.

56:14
Brad Weimert
All right, the episode’s over. If you’re new here and you don’t know me, my name is Brad Wymert. I am also the founder of Easy Pay Direct, which is a payment processing company that serves a tremendous amount of our guests on the show and a ton of our audience people like you. So if you’re accepting credit cards and you would like better service, better rates, and a way to optimize the way that you’re accepting payments, you can check us [email protected] forward slash, bam. Again. That’s epd.com forward slash, Bam.