187: From College Dropout to 8-Figure CEO with Chandler Bolt – 8FE

Struggling to scale your business without burning out? One book could change everything.

In this episode of Beyond A Million, Chandler Bolt returns to share how one book helped drive $7 million in revenue, not from royalties, but from its deep integration into every corner of his business. The founder of Self Publishing School and author of Published, breaks down the real strategy behind writing books that generate leads, close sales, and onboard employees at scale.

We also take a look at the big picture: hiring A-players vs. farm league talent, what it means to “go pro” in content creation, and why Chandler transitioned from a fully remote company to building a culture-driven in-person office. Along the way, Chandler shares painful (and expensive) lessons from his early years, like partnering out of insecurity and undervaluing top talent, and how they helped him grow to multi-8-figure success.

Whether you’re thinking about writing a book or scaling your ops team, this episode is packed with strategy, structure, and straight talk.

Tune in! 

Inspiring Quotes

• “I see a book as a tool to generate more leads, drive sales, and increase referrals.” – Chandler Bolt
• “The worst reason to write a book is because you want to get rich from royalties. Just because James Clear did it doesn’t mean you will. Instead, you should write it to grow your business.” – Chandler Bolt 
• “Use your book to stop repeating yourself—to prospects, customers, and employees.” – Chandler Bolt
• “Do less better.” – Brad Weimert 
• “Pros show up all the time, whether they feel like it or not. So just show up.” – Chandler Bolt

• 00:00:00 Intro
• 00:01:29 The worst reason to write a book 
• 00:05:11 Thinking in frameworks and structuring thoughts 
• 00:11:20 Lessons learned in business growth 
• 00:16:04 Shifting business strategies 
• 00:23:14 Content strategy evolution 
• 00:32:28 Remote vs. in-person culture 
• 00:39:04 The secret to good leadership 
• 00:45:53 Roles for remote vs. in-person work 
• 00:49:43 Management and leadership in hybrid businesses
• 00:59:46 Advice for aspiring entrepreneurs 
• 01:05:32 Resources and outro 

Chandler Bolt 0:00
One of the most expensive lessons I learned early on was don’t partner out of insecurity. So many people early on in their business, they search for a business partner because they want validation and they feel like they can’t do it themselves. Sometimes the cheapest talent is the most expensive. You want the value higher kind of just figuring out of the business, are you a farm League, or are you going to go get the prize draft picks?

Chandler Bolt 0:22
What is the worst reason to write a book?

Chandler Bolt 0:25
The worst reason to write a book is because you don’t want to get rich from book royalties. You saw James clear do it, and so you think that you could do How

Brad Weimert 0:31
successful are people using a book to grow their business?

Chandler Bolt 0:34
I would say a base hit is,

Brad Weimert 0:38
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 10 figures. I’m Brad Weimer, and as the founder at 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, eight, nine and 10 figure businesses, life can get exciting beyond a million. Chandler bolt, so good to see you. Man, thanks for coming.

Chandler Bolt 1:21
Brad, great to be here in the mansion. The funnest, most baller podcast studio I’ve ever done an interview. And this is

Brad Weimert 1:28
fun. This is, this is the first episode in the lake house. I’m pumped to do it. I’m pumped that we got a good spot here to do it. Yeah, I was concerned that we wouldn’t be able to anybody that’s listening and not watching. You really got to get to YouTube. But it’s hard to get like an outside lit backdrop without it being blown out. Yeah. So I’m excited to have the lighting right to be able to do it. I’ve known you a long time now we recorded, actually, you were episode 17, I believe of beyond a million. We are now on episode 190, ish, so we covered a bunch of stuff with your business, but a little recap, you’ve personally written seven books. You Your company has published over 7000 books that you’ve tracked 90 plus countries. You’re publishing two to five books a day, which is bananas. You’ve been in the eight figure plus range for multiple years. Now, I want to talk a little bit about books, but I want to talk about business in general with you, and kind of how you’ve approached things before we dive into the business side of things. Couple quick questions on books. There are a lot of reasons to write books. What is the worst reason to write

Chandler Bolt 2:35
a book? The worst reason to write a book is because you only get rich from book royalties. You saw James clear do it, and so you think that you could do it too? I think instead, you should write it to grow your business. Yeah,

Brad Weimert 2:49
how successful are people, on average, using a book to grow their business? I mean, what percentage do you think actually knock it out of the park? What percentage is it functional, and what percentage is it like? Man, it was a decent business card, but it’s just a business

Chandler Bolt 3:02
card. I think it depends on if they work with us or not at the start, but I think it if someone just does it, the odds that it is a meaningful thing in their business is pretty low. If you do it strategically and you say, All right, I’m gonna align this directly with the business. I integrate into my business. I’m gonna talk about it for at least a year, not just for a week, and then you kind of strategically put it into everything that you do, then it’s a lot better. So I would say a base hit is 100 grand. I would say, you know, single double is a few $100,000 and then if, then there’s kind of like, that 5% 10% that can really make it a multi seven figure generating asset over a period of years, like this book has brought in about $7 million in the last 12 months, but that’s because we very strategically integrate it into everything that we do, and the speaking gigs, into the webinars, into the funnels, into referrals for our customers. Like it’s just

Brad Weimert 3:59
embedded in everything. When you talk about generating revenue from the book, you mentioned base hit 100 grand. You know, double being a few 100 grand. Are you talking about money from the sale of the book, or money tied to the book

Chandler Bolt 4:13
clients, from the book client I look at the book is like, how do I use the book to get more leads, sales and referrals? Yeah, so those are kind of the three buckets I think about top of funnel, leads, unlimited leads, people here who hear about the business because of the book. Then there’s more sales that’s using it as part of the sales funnel. Then there’s the referrals on the back end. But then I like the extra layer is, how do we use the book to give you leverage so that you stop repeating yourself? So with prospects, with customers and with employees. So that’s like where I kind of think the big unlock is for most business owners, is you teach your core frameworks, and then you just give that book to everyone say, I’m tired of talking about it. So every new employee in my company, they get this book, they read the book. They instantly understand what we teach. It’s like the fast it’s a cheat code for onboarding. It’s kind of, in my mind, it’s a way to give leverage and go from one to one to one to many. It’s work, but then you crystallize it, and then it goes out and helps fuel the business.

Brad Weimert 5:11
Most people have not thought through their frameworks very well in general, yeah, yes. And most people ramble to get to the point. Actually, everybody rambles to get to the point. And I think that’s part of the process of crystallizing your thought process, or crystallizing your frameworks. What? What is your structure for getting to the point and helping people get their framework out?

Chandler Bolt 5:33
Yeah, so I like the way you’re thinking about that, because you want to think in frameworks. So it’s kind of like, hey, and that’s why I think the book actually makes people do, is you start crystallizing, hey, what do I think about this? And even when I wrote this, the newest book, there was a bunch of stuff that I just kind of haphazardly taught for almost a decade. Yeah, right. But I really try to make a concerted effort to say, okay, how can I take this thing that we’re already teaching? Make a framework. Make an acronym. Make something that is mean, like, kind of catch phrase II, like with how our mutual friend is safers, right? Is jammed, jam together.

Chandler Bolt 6:14
What is, what is the awkward one? Scribing,

Chandler Bolt 6:16
yeah, yeah, totally. I mean, it’s, it’s catchy. It’s a huge deal. And I mean, the even the Miracle Morning, I mean, it’s, it’s a memorable thing. So that’s what I try to think and say, what’s the stuff you’re already talking about, and how do you integrate it?

Brad Weimert 6:30
So for me, there are tons of things in business, both in terms of, like my industry expertise, and in terms of how I manage and how I lead, that I sort of get caught on. Eventually I get caught on a way that I say something, in a way that I explain something. And, you know, I personally have a fairly complex industry that I’m a part of, right payments are like horrible, layered tons of people, super complicated to people. Nobody knows what’s going on or what the mechanisms are, who the players are. So simplifying that stuff is tremendously important. But I think that that’s true of all areas, and so you are working with this wide range of different businesses. So how you get to simplify and how you create the structure and framework for the clients is probably one of the most important frameworks. So what are the basic building blocks for somebody that’s trying to crystallize a message. And it could be a book, it could be creating a YouTube video. It could be creating your personal brand. But I think that the structure of the principles are probably very similar. How do you think about creating a brand or a book structure or outline for a client? Yeah.

Chandler Bolt 7:35
So I think about two things. There’s the structure of the book, and then there’s the pulling out the frameworks. So the structure of the book we talk about, or I teach this concept, is called the more writing method. So mind map, outline, rough draft editing. Mind Map, everything you know about the topic, use that to crystallize the outline. Use the outline to write the rough draft, then move into the adding editing piece, right? So that’s how I would structure the overall book itself. But then, to your point, there’s the frameworks. What the question I would ask is, what are the broken record conversations that you keep having over and over in your business? So every sales call we’re gonna like, well, hold up, what? How does this merchant account? What’s the difference between that and the ACH stuff, and then the whatever exchange fees and like from massacre to visa, and then what’s the gateway? What’s this? And so it’s like, okay, well, you probably have repeated that hundreds of times. Your team is repeating that hundreds of times. Yeah, so then how do we just take that broken record conversation and turn it into a framework that’s easily repeatable? That’s kind of how I like to think about it. And that’s the part where, when you’re actually writing the book, you have to do that in a way that you probably have it before. So even when I was just doing this book, I mean, you just, it’s just framework after framework. It’s like, explaining traditional publishers. And then as I’m thinking about this, I’m like, oh, it’s kind of exactly like the venture capital industry. They’re betting making 10 bets, two of them are going to pop, you know, two more going to be base hits. The rest of them are going to be losers. That’s traditional publishing. Okay? What’s an acronym that you do? Well, it’s kind of like a bank. They only give you money when you don’t need it. The publishers only give you, give you a publishing deal when you don’t need it, right? And so then it just sort of thinking and crystallizing in those frameworks of the four Ps of a best selling book, person paying promise price, the more writing method. That was something we were kind of teaching, but I’d never really called it that, and so I just went through the whole process saying, How can I make this framework? How can I make this framework? How can I make this a framework, and what’s the stuff that we’re talking about all the time? Okay, let me distill that in the book and then give that to my people, or, better yet, give that to the prospects or customers before they even hop on the phone with your sales team so that they’re reading that. They’re saying, Oh, I get it, and I know I want to work with

Brad Weimert 9:45
you. Yeah, I love that. So what are the broken record conversations? And then how do you turn that into a framework, exactly? And the other thing that I heard that I think is relevant are devices for memory. In this case, you’re talking about hacker and. To do that? Yeah, and I think all those things are tremendously powerful. And the other thing that you mentioned actually were analogies. So how do you compare this back to something that’s going to be more familiar in somebody’s life? But if you think about anything that you’re trying to convey, any sales pitch, any message, any idea, if you can convey it back to something somebody already knows, right? Compare it to something that they know. If you can build a structure or framework and name it around your specific deliverable, your specific way, and if you can give it some silly acronym that makes them remember it, that’s a really powerful way to deliver a message,

Chandler Bolt 10:33
yeah. And the only thing that I probably left out is a visual. And so if you can do that also with a visual, so I think especially for your industry. It’s, I’m a visual learner, so we’ve worked with you guys for, gosh, almost a decade, probably, yeah, and I don’t know if I could draw on a napkin, how all this stuff, I

Chandler Bolt 10:53
am certain I could not, and, like, I

Chandler Bolt 10:56
probably don’t need to, and that’s why I’m gonna work with you, right? But even if it just like, if you had a visual, that’s, here’s how it works, and this is why we really matter. This part right here. This is what you’re paying us for, yep. Okay, now that’s a sales enablement material. That’s all that. So that’s the only piece I probably left out. Is like the visual that really pulls all that together, I think, is extremely powerful. Yeah, dude,

Brad Weimert 11:20
that’s super funny. So we actually were going through, I have a, like, a general, a general belief that you should do less better. And part of that, what goes hand in hand with that is, instead of trying to figure out new ways to do things better, new sales methodology, new funnels, new, you know, products just refine the core funnel over and over and over and over, refine the client experience over and over. So we’re going through this additional iteration of define, redefining the client experience or making it better. And part of that was literally today, talking about visualizing these different things, and how do we create these different additional visual aids to simplify complicated thoughts and structures? I think that’s super smart. Okay, let’s shift into the business side of things. So you, you grew up in intense sales like I did, but you went straight from intense sales to entrepreneurship, basically. And I kind of went from intense sales to slowly dipping my feet into merchant services and to other types of sales and building it over time you just went in. And, I mean, you started when you were that child, basically, yes,

Chandler Bolt 12:39
yeah, yeah, honestly, yeah.

Brad Weimert 12:41
Early 20s. Now you’re you’ve had many years, multi, eight figures. What do you think the most expensive lesson that you’ve learned growing to you know, 5060, 70 million, has been,

Chandler Bolt 12:52
I think one of the most expensive lessons I learned early on was don’t partner out of insecurity. And I think so many people early on in their business. They search for a business partner because they want validation and they feel like they can’t do it themselves. And that was me included. And so I, I partnered with someone who ended up trying to kick me out of the business, and we had all this stuff, and then, you know, I ended up buying him out of the business, but that was a at the time. It was a six figure mistake. Bought them out for multiple six figures, borrowed money from my parents, retirement from my parents, retirement from my brother, and from how Elrod. There’s a three people that funded me, and I’m so I mean, that was the best thing I ever did, was buying them out of the business, because then I controlled my own destiny. But that would be a super expensive lesson. I think there’s a lot of other expensive lessons of sometimes the cheapest talent is the most expensive. And so early on in the business, I feel like I still fall into this trap sometime is you want, you want the value higher, yeah, like it’s like, kind of just figuring out of the business. Are you a farm League, or are you going to go get the the prize draft picks? Like, I grew up in South Carolina, and we were always a Braves fan, and the Braves were always known grown ups, like, they got the farm League. So they’re just like, you know, taking these undervalued players and kind of developing them. Well, that’s a really long term strategy, and it’s a low cost talent strategy, but that was always kind of the way that I approach bringing people into the business is I want to, probably, because I’m a college dropout and blue collar guy, so it’s like, I want the I Want to bet on the underdog, and I want to bring them into the organization, but then realizing this is some of the most expensive talent I have, and sometimes you got to know when to go for the proven Winner and just either, well, pay or overpay top talent. So those would just be a couple. There’s a bunch of them, though.

Brad Weimert 14:45
Yeah, you know, I think that that’s a really challenging issue for specifically. I mean, I think it’s challenging at lots of stages of the business, but until you have a lot of money, until you have, like, a lot of excess in your business, it’s very hard to make those decisions,

Chandler Bolt 14:58
especially with a. Emerging markets or emerging channels. Say more. Well, like, right now we’re investing a lot in the content. This snow is bringing in no revenue. But in my mind, I’m like, I know I need to go get the best people, which on the P and L looks really stupid, yeah. So you got to have a lot of conviction for that. So then I catch myself saying, well, this person, they got a lot of potential. And it’s like, okay, well, this is a no cat channel that has the potential to grow to an eight figure channel over the next two to three years, if we do it well, where the only costs are the Why would I not just go overspend on the best talent? But it’s just almost like this weird. I don’t know if you ever, I guess you’re more Midwest guy, right? Yes. So, I mean, like Midwest southern kind of, but just like blue collar frugal mentality, it’s like, so hard to shake when you just grew up that whole that way your whole life. I just find myself, even still in a decision like this, I’m like, I’m extremely bullish on this, and yet I’m wanting to cheap out on the investment that it’s gonna take to make it pop

Brad Weimert 16:04
off. Yeah? Well, I think that. I mean, certainly there’s an emotional component to those things, and inevitably, we all have emotional triggers on this stuff. And sometimes it’s like, you spend, you spend, you spend, you spend, and then you hit a wall and you’re like, What the fuck am I doing? I’m spending so much. Let me not spend as much. Yes. And that happens to be the moment when you’re making a decision around x, y, z, right? Yes. And you cheap out on the thing that you shouldn’t be exactly but I also think that you’re talking about it very pragmatically, and which is great, but you’re also talking about it pragmatically when you have money, and so when you don’t have money, you have a totally different conversation, which is, I’m going to go in the red and I’m going to be going negative for X amount of time and just racking up credit right debt. Is that the time right? Or I’m not going to be able to hire this other person, because I’m going really big on one person’s salary right now. So do you do three people that are a farm League, like you said, or do you do one Pro? So how do you think about that from, let’s back, let’s go back to 2 million, 5 million coming up. Where were you when you shifted your mentality to let me find the A players like truly, and I’m willing to overpay the A players to bring them on, because I know that you brought a bunch of people up. Oh

Chandler Bolt 17:22
yeah, big time. I think probably around the 5 million a year range is probably where I really had to learn that lesson, because we took the total farm league approach, which I actually think, if you can do it early on, is a super smart approach. And you just got to really invest in the team. You invest in the culture. And that’s where, I think, on the last episode, we talked about a lot of that, of like vote, virtual culture development, people, like all that stuff, and you got to find the right kind of people. But then what ended up happening is develop all these people. And I kind of talk about this, like there’s this value curve right with talent, where early on, you’re paying them more than they’re worth, and they are not making you any money. But you know that you’re going to keep investing them, investing them, investing them, and then, kind of like, their marketability, like, so let’s say I bring someone in for 50 grand, and then over two years, get them to 100 grand a year, marketability, market rate, right? But then maybe they’re making 7075, but like, that’s kind of the payoff for like, they would be making 55 at this other company, but now they’re worth 100 but I’m paying them 75 because I have developed them. That’s where I think I it. My hypothesis was like, Okay, well, that’s just gonna work, and they’re gonna be loyal to that. And then I think we go through that phase, and it was they just start getting picked off by other companies. And so now I realized, Okay, well, I probably should have just paid them more at that point, yeah, because I developed them, and the cost to bring someone off the street is going to be more than that. So I think I made a lot of mistakes there. You’ve got your zero to one employees, like, kind of your your pioneers, and then you have your builders. And so in that early stage, you need the pioneers, you need the zero to one people. But then you start introducing structural organization. They’re like, Yo, I didn’t sign up for this. This is fun, like it used to be. This is all that stuff. And so then you just realize it’s actually a totally different avatar of the person that you’re hiring in general. So I think I’ve had to shift with some of that, where I love the I love the Pioneer, and I want to hire pioneers, but it’s the stage of the business we’re in now. It’s like, no, I need the person who wants to be a lieutenant and has done

Brad Weimert 19:32
it, yeah. I think the the other side of that, outside of those two worlds, you have the third, which is like the corporate executive and so, you know, I gray hair, the gray hair and I hire there are at sort of the executive level. I look at those people and I really don’t want them, because they’re so used to other people doing things right, they’re. Too far up the chain. They’ve worked for very large organizations, and so they’re used to being able to delegate everything, and so the accountability and ownership, at least, what I’ve experienced, tends to be pretty poor. And I know for sure that there is, that there are amazing executives out there, and that there is a place when they’re unbelievable, but I think that then you get into the, you know, multi million dollar a year executives that really are drivers, but the, you know, few 100 grand a year executives who have done well in some organization have had layers of management under them, layers of employees. And so there is also this cultural fit. And it’s not only in you. I think you highlighted a good point about those two elements of cultural fit, which is brand new, or, Hey, I need team players that can take directives and run with them, right? As opposed to actually mutual friend. Noah Kagan got kicked out of Facebook. Yeah, he was employee 30 or something at Facebook, and his story was really about taking a marketing campaign and running with it without permission.

Chandler Bolt 21:07
Do you know that? I didn’t know that. Oh yeah. So his, he got fired. He basically,

Brad Weimert 21:11
he basically, to your point, he basically doesn’t talk about it. Doesn’t want to talk about it, because he’s like, I fucking wrote a blog post about it. Go read it like, I’m tired of talking about this. But that was basically it is the pioneers of Facebook. You know, the first 30 employees were doing things running quickly, and he took the initiative to run with something, but they had moved into the sort of like you said, we need lieutenants to follow direction and actually execute.

Chandler Bolt 21:37
To your point, it’s Jason Lemkin talks about, I think, like the different types of VPs of sales, and how they’re not all created equal, and a lot of times, and I’ve fallen in this trap too. It’s like, oh, they worked at HubSpot, or they are high up at meta, or whatever. And it’s like, well, the litmus test becomes, have they recently done what you’re hiring them to do, and if and are they ready to sign up for it again? So if they did, they go 10 to 100 million recently, or did they join HubSpot when HubSpot was at a billion? Well, then they actually don’t know how to do this, even though you think they’re amazing, they’re and they have seven people under them that are doing everything to your point, right? So this like, You got to avoid those people like the plague and find the people who have actually done it. But then there’s, I think, the the other side of the coin, which Gary Vaynerchuk talks about, which is, like, you need B players, and also knowing where do we farm league or value higher, and where do we need to and so that’s where I think, when I started making this shift, I’m like, okay, cool, we got to have top tier everything. But then realize that the business can’t support that. It’s like, Okay, over here in this entry level sales or customer support role, we need farm link, yeah, and but then over here with this key executive that’s going to go tackle XYZ, like customer acquisition channel, we need the sniper and go find the best person and pay top talent. So then almost just trying to figure out, Okay, what’s the position I’m hiring for, and is this it’s okay if we have a B player or a firm league person, are we gonna go hire the best? Well,

Brad Weimert 23:14
you’re also not gonna have happy employees if you hire the best and put them in a role that doesn’t have the growth potential, right? So if you hire people that are newer, but they have the growth potential in that they will be happy there, right? If you hire somebody and put them in that role, and they already know it all, they’re not gonna be happy, right? Like growth is the primary deciding factor of happiness in life, like you’re either progressing or you’re not, but you said something that I think is worth highlighting, which is, have they done what you want them to do recently? And I want to double click on that, because it’s not enough. And I think where I’ve fallen on my face a bunch of times, and I think people tend to is they hear, as you said, Oh, I, you know, I did the sales process at HubSpot, right? And so it’s, you have to click on, double click on that, and say, did you What was that sales process like? How many calls did you make? What were your stats? What was your closing rate, you know, etc. And until you actually dig into that, they can say, oh, yeah, I did the sales cycle. Here was the sales cycle, what I’m asking you to do. And sales is a, I think about a lot is a beautiful one, because you can track the cycle so cleanly. And so it’s, it’s so easy to drill into that and compare it to what you what you have. It becomes much stickier with, you know, other roles, customer service, marketing, etc. Speaking of marketing, book sales, book marketing content in general, has take the whole overarching content world has changed a lot in the last 10 years, since you’ve been running the company. How has your approach, how has your marketing approach for self publishing school changed? It’s

Chandler Bolt 24:53
you’re constantly having to skate where the puck is going to be, and so I think early on, it was all affiliate stuff. Yeah. So it was guys like, how and people who had done it before, and we were doing affiliate launches. And then I said, Hey, this is this. This is exhausting, first of all, but also this song and dance is going to come to an end at some point. This is not really a sustainable business model, just doing launches. So we said, All right, well, let’s start investing in other places. So we started investing in content. That was a big one. And we started investing well content for a while. And so that was organic content on blogs. So we started building that stuff out that was with self publishing. School starts stacking stack and stack and stacking. And then we bought self publishing.com started building out there. And then ultimately that went so well that we rebranded the whole company. I sell publishing.com and so content is still a huge driver for us. But then we said, Okay, this is not exactly linear. You can’t just turn the volume up.

Brad Weimert 25:51
So also hold on. So you said you’re you keep saying content, but you’re talking written.

Chandler Bolt 25:55
Yeah, yeah, right. I’m talking content like nobody talks about No, right? When people ancient times, books and blog posts, baby?

Brad Weimert 26:08
Yeah, it’s worth delineating those two things. Yes, nobody, when you say content today, nobody thinks I’m gonna write some blog posts

Chandler Bolt 26:15
exactly, right, exactly. And I don’t think anybody thought of it then, either. But yeah, it’s, I mean, it’s ancient, the ancient content strategy, which still works. I mean, it still brings in a few million bucks a year. But then we said, okay, there’s something to this partnership thing. Got a guy, Pedro on my team, who’s just built out a massive channel that continues to grow, that’ll probably be about 6 million this year of black affiliates partnership speaking. We built out a speaking team, so we have about seven speakers that will go out and speak at events. We bring books to events. We do a lot of revenue that way paid is still kind of a meh channel for us, even though we’re still working to crack it, because I know that the upside is massive. We just have sucked at it for a really long time, so we’re starting to get better at that. But then now we’re kind of at this crossroads where AI is eating a lot of the SERPs, so where we’ve had just like, I know you’re a big real estate guy. I’ve always looked at blog posts and organic content is real estate. It’s like, all right, how do I get this site to rank in the top three for this term, and then I get paid rent every single month.

Speaker 2 27:22
Do you still look at URLs as real estate in the era of AI? Ooh, probably

Chandler Bolt 27:28
yes. But we just got, they just moved my house from downtown Austin to like Georgetown. So still good. I can still get a rent for it, but it’s not it or, you know, they just moved my house from the lake, from the lake lot to, you know,

Chandler Bolt 27:46
be down the street, yes,

Chandler Bolt 27:48
somewhere between here and San Marcos, I don’t know, but yeah, so, I mean, it’s, but I always looked at that, it’s like, Okay, I’m gonna get this. I’m gonna get monthly rent, and it’s just, just by being in the top three in the SERPs, and it’s a zero CAC channel. So I think I it was very smart. But then on the flip side of that, I always looked at social and other content, is like, that’s a hamster wheel. You’re always posting new stuff and it has no shelf life, right? So just thinking leverage, I was like, well, that’s a waste of time. We’re not doing that stuff, let’s do this piece where we get paid rent every single month, and it’s pretty steady, and we can keep making it go up, but then obviously that’s shifted now. So now we’re just having to reimagine the landscape and say, Okay, I was probably an idiot over here. We should have just while we were harvesting all that profit, we should have reinvested and built a media team and really went all in on video and social content. So that’s what we’re starting to do now, is just like, invest in more building on a media team. And that’s because I see it. I mean, you know our mutual friend Dan, it’s like, okay, you see what he’s been able to do with that. And then that’s the external, I guess, validation. Then there’s the internal validation. I know when we did this back in the day with the blog stuff, and nobody talked about it or wanted to do it because it has a long pay off. I saw what was possible there. It’s like the classic. I’m sure you’ve seen this all the time. It’s like two things, the longer it takes to build it, the longer it lasts, but then the longer it takes to grow it, the less people do it, and so the more of a defensible mode it probably is. So that’s, that’s at least hypothesis for now,

Brad Weimert 29:27
yeah, that’s interesting. So it took me a second to start a friend Dan and I was like, Dan Martel. Dan’s approach was we were, we were both snowboarding with him in BC this year. And he, I was talking to him in the gym in the morning, and his his like, rise to gym fame is hilarious to me, because it’s new, and he’s so fucking intense about it right now, yeah, which is awesome. But he, we were in the gym and we were talking about content, and he looked. To me. And he was like, yeah. I asked him about the growth of it, and his response was, yeah, I went pro. And I was like, What do you mean you went pro? And he was like, Well, what does it mean to be professional in something? And I was like, I mean, I guess, like, you take it super seriously, you get the best of the best with everything, and you pursue it like it’s your career. And he was like, yeah. I was like, Oh, yeah. And the thing is, I think when you talk about content, whether it’s written blog posts, SEO, and that’s how most people treat SEO is not pro, and it’s also how most people treat content, is they pick up their phone and shoot something, man on the on the one off, that works, and something catches steam and it’s viral, but it’s not a sustainable business. And so his point of we’re going to make this engine work by going pro, I think, is very relevant to lots of people. And like in your point, what you just said is that’s what people aren’t willing to do. Yeah, they’re not willing to do it for the long term, for the long period of time, choke on everything all the way through the process, and get all the shit, hoping that it’ll work. And I think Dan’s difference too, is that he didn’t hope, yeah, he was like, I’m just going full fucking steam on it, and I’m gonna make

Chandler Bolt 31:12
it happen. Leave nothing to chance. I mean, it’s kind of very similar to real estate or any other investing, right? Is the longer the payoff, the less people are willing to wait around for that payoff, even if it’s significantly greater, yeah, if you can just survive those because, yeah, I mean, it’s gonna take three to six months at a minimum, probably to even get within eyeshot of break even, right? So then it’s but then, to his point of going pro, I remember he talked, he gave a talk at our office, like, a few months ago, same thing, but he said, Show me your bank account and show me your calendar, and then I’ll tell you if it’s priority. And that’s where, I mean, I Hats off to him. I mean, he said, I’m basically resigning as CEO of SAS Academy. So he basically it. V is a very similar parallel. Has a business about of my size, said, All right, cool. I’m just gonna hand that off to a management team, and I’m gonna go build a media company where I’m the talent and I’m going all in on that. And trust me, guys, it’s gonna work, and it worked. It worked, yeah, it was the Vision Plus execution. I

Brad Weimert 32:28
think where most people go wrong with that move in particular, because I see people make that move is three months, six months, one month, one year later, they abandoned it, right? Yeah, yeah. And they go full speed for some period of time. They get frustrated, they get bored, something else happens. And they’re like, Yeah, I tried that thing. And sometimes it’s a, it’s actually, very rarely, a concrete decision to stop doing that thing. What happens is they lose energy in that thing. So hey, we’ve got a new initiative I’m excited about building the media company. They go full, full force for a month, and then they just stop spending energy. And I mean, I understand that, because doing the podcast alone is an absurd amount of energy, right? And the one of the things that keeps you moving is pressure from the outside. And so I think when you put yourself in a position like Dan did, where you hire somebody to run your company right, bring somebody else in, and he gave away equity to do that, you put yourself in a position where, what else are you going to do? Right? Burn the boats. Yeah. You grew the company. Remote. First. Remote, only. Remote first. Yes, nobody in part of that was that you were unwilling to commit to one location. Yes,

Chandler Bolt 33:44
that was actually, if by part of that you mean 99% of the pie chart.

Brad Weimert 33:51
So normally, I interrupt the show to promote EPD to tell you about credit card processing. But today I’m going to tell you about our partner program. If you know other business owners that accept credit cards and you refer them to easy pay direct, you will get paid a percentage of what we make for the life of the account, as long as they’re processing. You can build a residual for doing nothing just the introduction. You can do that by going to epd.com forward slash bam. Partners, that’s epd.com forward slash b, a, m, partners, you a year ago, maybe said, Hey, I’m going to build a local office. Why did you choose to do that when you had this well run or seemingly well run, I’m sure that you had your issues with but seemingly well run company that’s all remote. Why start an office? What’s the point? And how did it shake

Chandler Bolt 34:40
out? The same reason you go Everest thing, right? Because I’m a masochist and addicted to the pain. Now, I think I just looked around and I said, all of the biggest, most successful companies that I can see have an office and built in person, and I could count on one or two hands the amount of color. Companies that I knew of that were bigger than me, that were remote companies. So it was just kind of okay, do you want to swim with the tide, or do you want to swim against the tide? And so it just became super clear that it was kind of this, what got us here? Won’t get us there. Okay, you can get to a figures, but can you get to nine remote? It’s certainly possible, maybe in a technology company predominantly like you would think of, like, I even know maybe Zapier Atlassian, or, like, a couple, like, fringe cases outside of that, who do you point to? Right? So it was like, Okay, well, you know, swim with the tide. You want to swim against the tide. I think that was the big one. And then just realizing that, I think we can go deeper and faster and further by building in person like the level of collaboration, the level of just getting people in there, and we were running as some challenges, scaling our sales organization too, and just kind of realizing, like all these people are at home in their home with a bajillion distractions, and no wonder it’s hard to hold them accountable or train them because we’re not even the same. It’s like just hard to do that remotely. So that, combined with phase of life shifting, like buy my dream on at home in Austin, I’m going to finally going to be somewhere for the foreseeable future. All right, now I’m switching into a phase where I want to just really build community and build mastery and kind of a core people I want to grow with. So all that kind of started clicking together, and I said, All right, well, really hard, and it has been, but then just attacking it and getting your teeth kicked in for about nine minutes so far, how has the

Brad Weimert 36:34
approach to management and leadership changed running a fully remote company to running an office in person. I

Chandler Bolt 36:42
don’t know if I figured it out yet. I think what I say we were and in some ways, are so good at remote culture. And so right now, we’re in that weird, messy in between where it’s okay, well, we still want to have a great remote culture, but then also, there’s certain things that we want to really build in person. And we also kind of want to have a little bit of FOMO like, I want, I want you to feel like, Hey, I’m missing out. I’ve just been asking a lot of people, though, so probably ask you some questions on this as well. How do you do it? And how are you doing it? I like, that’s what I’ve been asking a lot of friends, but I think we’re starting to figure it out, like just little ad hoc, informal things, trainings, fun stuff, in person at the office. Like we’re figuring it out, but we got a long ways to go. I think probably one of the biggest things I realized is you have to have a critical mass of people. Early on, there were like two to five people in the office, and we were in that stretch for probably three to six months, and it was just hard to get a vibe and energy and what I wanted to create. And I’m like, Man, this is brutal. You got one or two people out. You’re there’s like one or two people at the office, and so then inevitably, people are like, Why the hell am I here? Yeah, like, I could this same environment exists at my house, yeah. Like, whoa. What are you doing here? And so then I noticed when we kind of passed 10 people, and now we’re more like 1520 people in the office, it’s like, Okay, now it’s clicking the vision that I had. You’re coming into the office, there’s energy, there’s there’s music going, there’s stuff like that. Like, I think that’s what I ultimately wanted to create. And it kind of came from, there was this guy that I hired a while back that ran Chick Fil A’s, and, you know, he’s probably six or 12 months into his role, and I’m at, I’m checking in with him. How are you liking it? How’s it going, all this stuff. He’s like, he said, Well, there’s been one really challenging shift. He said, When I showed up to Chick fil A, I just got sucked into the energy, and it was instantly I’m in the energy, and it just elevated my performance. He’s like, but then now when I’m at home, I have walk into my office, there’s no energy. I have to bring the energy. And so that really clicked for me of like, okay, that’s the difference in environment. How do I create that?

Brad Weimert 39:04
Do you keep that on your shoulders? Do you feel like I have a Do you know Randy Cohen? Super familiar? Yeah. Randy started ticket city, and then he owns Z Tejas, which is a local Austin chain. He’s also also done an episode on beyond a million, but he refers to himself as the chief energizing officer, and he think he believes his role is to specifically play that role in the company. I’m the one that brings the energy to the office. I personally believe that the role of CEO or of leader or whatever can take a lot of different forms. Do you think that it’s necessary for you as the leader in the office to bring the energy every day to set that standard and expectation to lead the team,

Chandler Bolt 39:44
at least for the first until it’s until the process or the environment is created. I think until it exists, it’s definitely your responsibility, because otherwise, how’s it going to exist, right? But I mean, I would like to believe that I can create a container and environment where that. Happens automatically. And I build that in my leaders, I build that in the systems. I build that in the you know, just like you’re building a casino, there’s certain things that you do to keep people in the casino, right? There’s, there’s you can’t see outside, yeah, so that doesn’t all apply to the office, but, like, how do you gamify it to where? So we’ve got scoreboards everywhere. We’ve got somebody makes a set or a sale, they go ring the bell, and it’s like, and they’re walking down this alleyway high fiving people ring the bell, right? If we have a Green Day, which we hit our target for the day, the lights are going green, like, there’s music that pops on. So I’m like, okay, a lot of those things, you can do this. It’s like any system, you can just embed it in the system. But then, yes, I think it’s my responsibility to be additive to that. And so I’m bringing the energy. I’m one of the first people in and last people out. I’m, you know, high fiving people on the way to the bathroom, like, you know, going out, just that quick celebration when someone has a big sale or a big win or a big whatever. And so it’s like, I definitely think that’s, that’s my responsibility, at least for the foreseeable future.

Brad Weimert 41:08
Yeah, that’s interesting. So I think it’s, it’s interesting to me because you’re far enough along the path now that lots of people get to a point where they don’t want to do things anymore. We talked about this from a hiring perspective, where you bring somebody on, they’re like, I’m past that. Or like, totally Yeah, I’m doing sales. But they’re used to actually overseeing sales, not doing sales. I think that that’s also very true of entrepreneurs, where they go through the journey and they’re like, I already spent all this fucking time developing these people, building these people, you know, managing these people. I don’t want to. I shouldn’t be that person anymore. What do you do today? What are your daily KPIs and metrics for yourself? And how has that changed from when you started?

Chandler Bolt 41:51
That’s a million dollar question. I mean, I’m constantly asking that question of, what is the highest, best use of my time, and I think it always shifts. I think a good leader shifts what they’re focused on based on what the organization needs. So it’s like, sometimes, sometimes we’re in this weird stretch right now where we’ve been in wartime, like, there’s a lot of adversities. It’s like, All right, well, I need to get into that mode. And there’s sometimes where it’s more, you know, wartime, peacetime CEO, it’s like, yeah, well, this is peace time, and I need to manage like that, or lead like that, focus on that kind of stuff. I think it constantly shifts. I think there’s kind of two core tenants. One is what’s highest, best use, but not just that generates revenue today, but that can compel long term. So that’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, is how do I create assets that will compound, not just win the day, but I was running on a hamster wheel, and cool, we won the day, but like, that’s not gonna stag anything for our future. I think there’s kind of like, that piece that I think about, but then just like, what are the what are the troops need, and how do I make sure that I’m showing up in the best way for the team. And my parents always just taught me, growing up as bloom or your planet, if you’re going to be the street sweeper, be the best street sweeper that ever existed. And then also, my mom would always tell me, don’t get too big for your britches. It’s like, there’s nothing that’s below my pay grade. Yeah. And so sure, is there things that I’m like, if I’m doing my job well, I should never have to do that, and I should have systems and team and all that 100% and I will make it very clear, I should not have to be doing this, but also, at the same time, needs to be done. It needs to be done.

Brad Weimert 43:33
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that that’s a really important posture to have in general. And I think, honestly, I think if you don’t have that posture, it’s hard to expect anybody else on your team to have that right, right?

Chandler Bolt 43:47
No one wants to follow you. That’s where I make it clear to my team, is like, I don’t do anything, or I don’t expect you to do anything that I haven’t done or wouldn’t do. Yeah. And so just says, I feel like that sets the tone. Yeah, I agree.

Brad Weimert 44:01
How do you? How do you think about showing up that way all the time? And maybe this is a maybe this won’t hit you, because you seem to be jovial and fun and talkative and charismatic all the time. Do you have days when you’re like, I don’t want to fucking do this? Yes, yeah, yeah. How do you, how do you adjust yourself to be able to manage those things? Yeah,

Chandler Bolt 44:22
that’s a great question, because I think I’ve had more of those days, probably in the last year than I’ve had in a really long time. And I think that’s the difference, like earlier you’re saying, of being pro, pro, show up all the time, no matter what, no matter if you feel like it, so you just show up. You know, that’s the only way I know how to do it. It’s just like, all right. Well, what’s the one thing I can control is just show up. I remember going to college, and I was going to be the first person in my family to get a four year degree, and my dad had flunked out of college after. Semester, and when I was going off to school, he just made me make him one promise. He said, Just promise me you’ll show up to class. He’s like, you’re gonna think that your buddy’s gonna go to class for you and sign you on the roll or whatever, and tell you when there’s a final or a test or a paper, they’re not it’s like, they’re probably not going to class either. If you just show up, you’ll at least know what’s going on, and C’s get degrees. You know, you can at least kind of like, make it, make it. But if you don’t show up, like I did, I do my dad, that’s how he flunked out, is he just, he lost track of what was going on, and so he just made me promise him to just show up. And so I think that translates as a CEO or as a leader, is just show

Brad Weimert 45:38
up. So just for clarity, this is right before you dropped out of college, right? Yes, yes,

Chandler Bolt 45:44
yeah. It’s like, you show up for two years and then drop out, I showed the hell up, right?

Brad Weimert 45:53
That’s great. That’s great. So back to the back to the remote in person. Split, yeah, do you think that there are certain roles that are positioned for remote work and certain that you need in house? Or do you, are you this point? Are you just trying to fuel things in house entirely?

Chandler Bolt 46:16
Just about any position that we lose, we’re hiring it in house and in house, being in Austin, I think it depends on the company. The question I would ask, what is the biggest core competency that you have in your business, or the biggest area where you need to have core competency? So maybe that’s development, or maybe that’s sales and marketing, or maybe that’s product or something else, and I think that probably needs to be in person, unless there’s just some kind of ridiculous cost advantage or talent advantage, you know, maybe you’re saying, Oh, I’m gonna, I’ve got a development team in Latin America or in the Ukraine or whatever, and like, okay, but we’ve got an office there or something, and that’s really but I think it’s where’s your core competency need to be. For us, it’s we’re largely sales and marketing driven organization, so I think the sales team needs to be in person. I think running a remote sales team in any organization is really freaking hard and just dumb. It’s hard. It is like running on a treadmill in a pool. It’s like, well, you could, what

Brad Weimert 47:24
do you think makes it hard? What are the elements that are easier in person than remote, with sales,

Chandler Bolt 47:29
training, energy and accountability? I think it’s, how do you train someone if they can’t overhear people’s calls, or if they can’t, you know, just if you’re onboarding someone, and you can’t just come up next their desk and say, Hey, let me walk you through this. Okay, let me or, you know, right now in our office, somebody, I hear people, they get off a call, and I hear somebody else say, Hey, I would have done this right there. I mean, it’s just real, just in time training. So there’s the training piece, there’s the accountability piece, which I think is, I mean, that’s just way easier, obviously, oh, an energy. I mean, that’s

Speaker 2 48:06
the big one, yeah, where so too, you you,

Chandler Bolt 48:09
if you get into the energy and there’s natural accountability, because we got scoreboards, you got it so everybody sees it. They’re on that sales for they see huh? So and so has made $140 today. I’ve made 20, yeah, and so to them, and everyone in the office, their manager, everyone’s like, Hey, what’s going on? Because you, you’ve got, like, you’ve got that natural accountability, and then you’re kind of sucked into the energy, and then it just,

Brad Weimert 48:37
it’s magic, yeah? I mean, I think that it goes back to what you were saying before, about just showing up, and how professionals just show up, right? But those that aren’t professionals or unprofessionals yet have a coach that makes them show up, right and pushes them to do that. And I think in a sales office, that energy is contagious. And so it also goes back to this, like, if you don’t feel like doing it in the moment, you cannot feel like doing it and burn your whole day at home, yeah? If you come into the office and you don’t feel like doing it, and then somebody else is killing it next to you that can light the fire, yeah, and force you to go,

Chandler Bolt 49:15
Well, it’s a great analogy, right? Because the it would be the corollary, you could say, Who has more success getting fit, people who show up to the gym, or people who do at home workouts, like, well, massively the people who show up to the gym. Now, can you have success with at home workouts? Yes, typically, if you’re already super fit or super disciplined. Yeah, this is kind of, I feel like, very similar.

Brad Weimert 49:43
I do too. I do too. Also, you know, post covid world of a whole bunch of people thinking I’m just gonna work from home, it is. I feel like it’s an uphill battle to hire in in house, in office, right as much as possible. I feel like there’s a consistent pushback from. Um, staff, do you run into that?

Chandler Bolt 50:03
Oh, yeah, on the way in, yeah. Are you guys hybrid?

Brad Weimert 50:07
We are, but we’re probably 60% in house, 30 remote.

Chandler Bolt 50:11
60% in house, 30 remote. The people who are in house, are they fully in, in in person? Are they

Brad Weimert 50:17
almost entirely okay? Yeah, but like, you have a couple exceptions though, you guys, but everybody

Chandler Bolt 50:20
else is five days a week. Yeah? Okay, perfect. I said that was my line in the sand. And so early on, I just, I said, if I’m doing it, I’m doing it. So we just put a hard line in the sand. It’s like, You’re five days a week in office for a minimum of eight hours of the office. Yeah? And that’s what success like. That’s, this is what we’re doing. That’s the rule. Like, it’s, I don’t much care when you come and go, but like, you’re in the office for eight hours, that’s like, for five days a week. So, and we’ve done some stuff, like, we have emergency work from home days. Like, you can do three of those a quarter, because then we start realizing, like, Okay, some stuff pops up, your car breaks down, something, whatever. But like, we want, we realized we needed a policy for that, because people would start asking for these, you know, extenuating circumstances. And then finally, I’m like, Okay, what’s going to be a one off? And where does the one off exceptions put the pressure? It puts the pressure on me or our managers, and I would rather just not have any of that and just say, all right, there’s a policy. You, lose your three days they’re gone, and now it doesn’t matter what the reason is that gone. So that’s, I mean, we’re nine months in. I’m not forgetting, like we got stuff figured out, but that was kind of our approach to say, but yeah, I mean, we definitely get pushback, but that’s where I’ve just learned to really lean into that, into the office, or, sorry, in the interview process. So it’s, how far are you from? Like, start every interview I do, the start is out where you come from. How drive is that? Oh, 30 minutes. How long is your commute currently? Like, just, even just going into that kind of stuff when I’m in, like, final interviews with people. And then, hey, 30 minutes a day, that’s gonna get old, huh? Have you done that before? Just Did you know this is five days a week in the office, right? Just like, oh, well, we I’ll, yeah, drilling into it. I drill in on it, because I I never had to think about that hiring remotely. And then early on, I made that mistake, and realized if I hired someone who was coming from a remote role, that’s a huge transition for them. And I lost a couple people because they couldn’t make the transition, so then just kind of breaking down. I’m like, Okay, well, the I’m not stacking the odds. So how do I stack the odds? Well, I look for someone who’s currently in person. I look for something, you know, just like, what are the markers? Or this person’s gonna have to be really good, because I’m essentially rolling the dice if they haven’t checked these boxes. But yeah,

Brad Weimert 52:43
but I think that’s also I think the other lesson there is that it makes sense to make sure people are comfortable with the bad part of the role. And I don’t even look at the commute as the bad part, but I would say make sure that they’re comfortable with the reality of the role. Is another way to say that, right? And so there are things that, like, when I when I pull somebody that’s from a bigger company, and they come in, one of the check marks there is, are you comfortable doing X, Y, Z, yourself, right? Have you been in a role where you are an independent contributor and you don’t have anybody to delegate something to? Yeah, what’s the smallest team that you’ve been a part of? Right? Like, I need to know that you’re comfortable integrating into a sub 100 person team. Yeah, when you come from something that’s 1000 right? Super smart, but I would much rather push on them in the front end, then a weekend, two weeks in a month in two months. Yes, realize that they’re not in a good place. And I actually think that you’re doing them a tremendous disservice if you aren’t intense in the interview on the front Yeah, to push against those things, I

Chandler Bolt 53:46
think it’s your job. I mean, as a hiring manager or CEO, you’re the final filter, and so, I mean, at that point, when I’m showing up to those interviews, I’ll probe in with a bunch of tough questions, but then I will just get to the part of the interview where I’m like, All right, cool. This is the part of the this is the part of the interview where I try to scare you away. Oh, nice. This is going to be the hardest job you’ve ever had. Are you in for that? This is extremely fast paced. Are you in for that? We need people who are very autonomous. Have you ever done that? You’re going to come to me asking me how I would do stuff, and I’m going to say I hired you because you’re really good at this thing, figure it out like, this is, this is why, literally, why you’re here. Don’t ask today. This is your job. And so just like really probing into that stuff with people, I’ve I’ve said, Hey, here’s all my red flags, here’s my here’s what I really like about you. But here’s a few things that are pretty concerning. Can you speak to that? And then I try to just go to my managers, or whoever else is maybe in the interview, and say, All right, you got any red flags or concerns you want them to address? So kind of giving them permission to bring up the thing and just really get it all out in the open. And

Brad Weimert 54:53
years ago, I was talking to you about, you know what? I don’t even know if I was talking to you. Maybe I watched a YouTube. Video that you made because you were tired of answering the fucking question, and you really just watched the YouTube, this YouTube video, but you were taught, I think, you were talking about doing interviews, and it was hard for you to have those difficult conversations and hold yourself accountable to having those hard conversations so you would bring somebody else into the interview with you, solely so that you didn’t wuss out. Yeah, on that difficult end of the interview, exactly, do you

Chandler Bolt 55:25
still do that? I still do that for the final interviews a lot of times, and because you give each other permission to ask hard questions, and I’ll never forget, this was one of the most unhinged versions, super introverted, kind of quiet, you know, not somebody who’s gonna come and just punch you in the mouth. But we were all. We were back to back interviews, interview, interview, interview, and we were interviewing with this guy, and it comes up that he ran track growing up, and he had actually had this weird defect where he broke his back running track. And this, I can’t even believe it. I’m telling you the story, but he so then I kick it over to my guy that we’re co running this interview. I’m like, already final red flags or whatever. And he was asking basically, like, if he could handle the pressure. And he’s like, I mean, could you even put the team on your back? A call back to what he said, Yeah. And I just was like, Oh my gosh, that that is the craziest thing I’ve ever heard on it and but then this guy, you know, came to work with us. He thrived for years. He was but he would always joke about that, like that. He’s like, I was so pissed when he said that. But I mean, this just goes to show like, challenge people put them in the boiling pipe. Can they handle it? If they can’t, it’s probably not going to work out, especially how you and I are

Brad Weimert 57:02
wired. Oh no. Well, for me, those things are either you’re going to that specific situation, either you’re going to see it as a joke or laugh, or you’re even if you don’t see it as a joke, you’re going to let it roll off you, and then that means that you’re going to be okay in a shit talking environment, which you’re going to run into in my company, for sure, or you’re going to get offended and call OSHA or HR because you’re upset that something happened. Yeah, and you’re probably not going to fit in the company, so you probably shouldn’t be here in the first place.

Chandler Bolt 57:34
Have you ever heard of the the Southwest brown shorts? No, this is kind of one thing. So Southwest has these things. It’s the brown shorts. Oh, right, interview process. And so they get to deepen the interview process. And then they show up to this group room and they say, Oh, hey, so sorry. We just need you to put these brown shorts on. And so they make them change, like, these are people in suits and stuff.

Chandler Bolt 57:57
This is Southwest Airlines. Southwest Airlines, okay,

Chandler Bolt 57:59
yeah. And so they have them put on these brown shorts for the interview, and it’s a total filter. Like, do you take yourself too seriously? That’s something that matters to them, right? And so then people that weeds them out, and if they, if they just embrace it, and whatever, it’s like, okay, cool, you’ll probably fit in here. I feel like it’s a very it’s like, what are the cultural litmus tests that you can inject into your interview process to then instantly see if someone’s a fit or not. And there’s kind of so we did this whole kind of brown shorts exercise to just say, like, okay, what are those type of things? And we’ll do it like for the company or for the role. And then what are some questions that we can maybe ask, or situations that we can put them in to figure out if they fit or

Brad Weimert 58:40
not? What are examples of those? Do you do those in person or digitally? Yeah,

Chandler Bolt 58:47
I would say you. I mean, you can do them either way. It’s almost just like situational questions about if they’ve been in the type of environment that they’re going to be put in here. And I mean, so that’s probably the best way I could explain it. But then I also, like, I was doing a final interview today, and just my first question is, like, all right, cool. Tell me about time where you’ve done this. The thing that we’re going to ask you to do, when have you done it? Like, you know what the job is, when have you done it? So I don’t know that’s a great example of brown shorts, but just kind of that situational type interviewing to kind of flesh that out, but then also giving them the blunt, direct feedback at the Internet into the interview, and seeing how they or sometimes trying to scare them off, say, hey, this can be one of the hardest jobs you ever had. Fast pace. Do you get that? Do you understand that sometimes we’ll have people email in later in the day, say, after further consideration, this is not for me. I

Brad Weimert 59:46
definitely get those people that self, self, select out, yeah, after having that final conversation. Okay, so there are a million questions. We could talk about operations, and we could talk about hiring, or, say. Our operations for hours, and we have but for the on the ski lift right? So we spent probably an hour talking about building out a sales team that’s right on the ski lift in Nelson, British Columbia. And you were kind of, I mean, that was five years ago, maybe mid swing. What are one of the things that is challenging for entrepreneurs, I think in general, is getting advice from people that are at different stages and transposing it onto their current world, and it’s not the right advice for that stage. What is something that you obsessed over when you were at a million or 2 million to 3 million that you thought was super important, that you see entrepreneurs focus on intensely, and now you fully delegate it, and it’s not on your radar at all,

Chandler Bolt 1:00:52
the minutia of everything just I mean, should we be answering this email? Should we say yes to this client, should be everything ran through me, and then just realizing that almost nothing should run through me. If we have a good business, good process, good systems, nothing should run through me.

Brad Weimert 1:01:11
So, yeah, that’s probably that. I love this one. We see that all the time with tiny fees, where somebody wants to save $5 a month or $10 a month, and it’s like, bro, focus on growing your business. Like the five or 10 bucks isn’t going to make or break you. What is is your lack of focus on the thing that’s actually generating stress. I love that. What advice do you have for an entrepreneur starting out today?

Chandler Bolt 1:01:40
Go get customers until you until you have customers, you don’t have a business. You have a business idea. And so many people get distracted with the logo, with the website, with all the things that don’t matter. Go get customers. Pay people who pay pay attention, and when they give you their credit card, they are actually a customer. Now you can go build the solution that they that they actually want. So I think getting customers before building anything, pre validate everything and just go, go get customers, go make the cash register ring. And if you get really good at that, well then you can pay out of that to just about everything. But that’s just, I think it’s the uncomfortable thing. So most people don’t do it at the start, and they want to do everything. But the uncomfortable thing of actually making the cash

Brad Weimert 1:02:23
registering. What advice do you have for somebody that’s stuck at 5 million and everything’s still going through them and things are starting to break? You

Chandler Bolt 1:02:31
gotta level up your people, and you gotta level up your process. You probably have people who came from you from one to 2 million that are the people for the next phase, or maybe they are, but you got to demote them. I’ve had to do that a bunch of times. It’s really, really hard, but if you do it, well, you can keep the relationship and you can keep the person. So I’ve had that happen multiple times where it’s like, this is a great person. I want to lose them, but they’ve been promoted to their level of incompetence. So that’s not going to work. And I will always tell people, the business is gonna grow fast. The question is not, will there be opportunity? Is, can you grow fast enough to keep up? And every year, I need to evaluate every role and rehire people for those positions. And if you haven’t grown enough to stay in that position, then I can’t rehire you, myself included. So I it’s like, if the business gets 30% bigger this year, well, I have to get 30% better to re qualify for my existing position. And if I did not, and if you did not, well, then that would be a disservice to the company, for me to keep you or me in those positions, so that the people got to get better, but then, probably more importantly, the process has got to get a lot better. And you got to, you got to raise the level of your node, or be able to raise the level of your yes, so obviously, the first thing I do is just whip out a notepad, stop doing list, and just say, what are all the things that I’m doing that are, you know, it’s like the classic, take your amount of money that you made over the last year divided by 2080 that’s your hourly rate. Okay, now what are you doing that’s less than that hourly rate? And you just list out everything and then say, I either I got to stop doing we call it sad time. It’s like, either I need to stop doing it or I need to systematize it, automate it, or delegate it. And so just like, putting stuff in the sad bucket, it’s like, that’s sad time. That’s sad time. That’s just like, if you’re at 5 million and everything runs through you, you got a lot of sad time. So figuring out what’s in the sad bucket and then getting it off of your plane as quickly as possible.

Brad Weimert 1:04:35
I like that acronym. I also like the idea of you have to re qualify every year to be here because the company’s bigger, different, more demanding. I have a friend that every year, friends that every year, on their anniversary, they talk about getting divorced, and that’s their ritual on their anniversary is to say, hey, no, totally serious, hey, does it make sense for us to get divorced this year? Year, or should we re up for another year? And that’s how they view their relationship, and it keeps them in a position of, I need to show up to be here for you. Oh

Chandler Bolt 1:05:10
my gosh, that’s a wild one. I don’t know if I agree

Speaker 2 1:05:16
with that. That’s funny, because it’s basically what you just said to me with your employees.

Chandler Bolt 1:05:21
Touche, yeah, but I’m not making a lifelong commitment. That’s fair. That’s fair. I’m not putting a ring on you my interesting construct,

Brad Weimert 1:05:32
yep, that’s a good point, though. Awesome. Well. Chandler bolt, where do you want to point people? Where should they find out more about

Chandler Bolt 1:05:39
you? Self publishing.com, forward slash apply. That’s the place to go. Book a call with my team if you want to talk about book stuff, we can help you with your book or we’re doing a bunch of YouTube stuff. So Chandler bolt YouTube channel, you can subscribe there, or the self publishing.com youtube channel, subscribe there.

Brad Weimert 1:05:56
Love it, man. Well, your house is just across the lake from me now, so we’re gonna have to get some time on the water sometime soon.

Chandler Bolt 1:06:04
Yes, no doubt I will be surfing by here in about 30 minutes. So

Chandler Bolt 1:06:10
wave. I’ll swim out. Love it, man, appreciate the time. Dude, always good

Chandler Bolt 1:06:15
to see you for having me. Appreciate

Brad Weimert 1:06:17
it. All right, the episode’s over. If you’re new here and you don’t know me, my name is Brad Weimer. 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]

Speaker 2 1:06:42
forward slash, B, A, M, again, that’s epd.com, forward slash, am you.