199: How to Create Funnels That Convert Cold Traffic into Cash with Patrick Riddle – 8FE

What if you could create a marketing funnel that works for you while you sleep?

Today’s guest, Patrick Riddle, is here to show you how to turn cold traffic into cash with a high-converting funnel. Patrick is a seasoned entrepreneur and the CEO of a multi-million-dollar educational publishing company. After getting his start in real estate, he shifted to the info product space, where he’s helped thousands of students grow their businesses using smart marketing strategies.

But Patrick’s strategy isn’t just about driving traffic or having a good offer. It’s about owning the customer journey from start to finish. He explains how to create front-end offers that bring in the right leads and then maximize profit with smart back-end partnerships, allowing you to scale without risk. We’re talking recurring revenue, software upsells, and affiliate partnerships that pay you long after the first sale.

Plus, he reveals why email marketing is still king and how you can take advantage of the most underutilized tool in your marketing arsenal to grow your business.

Tune in to learn how to turn your funnels into money-making machines and stop leaving cash on the table.

Inspiring Quotes

• “You’re never going to be 100% compliant. It’s a moving target. You just have to decide where on the spectrum you’re comfortable with.” – Patrick Riddle
• “Email is still the primary channel for monetization.” – Patrick Riddle
• “Today’s new wave of coaches and consultants just don’t use email marketing the way we did back in the day.” – Patrick Riddle
• “We sell info and then immediately upsell into some kind of recurring revenue offer.” – Patrick Riddle
• “All of our funnels the past few years have been straight to sale, not lead gen.” – Patrick Riddle
• “Many wannabe entrepreneurs struggle because they jump from one thing to the next without putting in enough time to see real success.” – Patrick Riddle

• 00:00 Intro
• 02:22 The impact of AI on the info product space 
• 03:32 Building a marketing funnel that actually works
• 05:25 Patrick’s winning business model 
• 18:17 Building an all-star team 
• 21:58 Order bumps and upsells 
• 28:10 Scam reviews, reputation management, and compliance 
• 38:46 Becoming a CEO 
• 53:08 Advice for aspiring entrepreneurs 
• 56:56 Outro

00:00
Patrick Riddle
All these Facebook people, new gurus that I’ve never heard of, none of them do email marketing like we did back in the day. That’s where all of our profit in the business comes from. So without it, we don’t make any money. In 2019, we did almost 2 million. In 2020, about 6 million in revenue. And then in 2022 we had a big growth year and did 18 million. And then last year did 23 million.

00:25
Brad Weimert
Congrats on getting beyond a million. What got you here won’t always get you there. This is a PODC for entrepreneurs who want to reach beyond their seven figure business and scale to eight, nine and even ten figures. I’m Brad Weimert 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. Patrick Riddle, thank you so much for showing up, man. It’s good to see you.

01:08
Patrick Riddle
It’s great to be here, man.

01:09
Brad Weimert
You got into real estate investing in 2009, you raised a few million bucks, you did a hundred plus deals and then you promptly went into the info product world.

01:20
Patrick Riddle
Me and a couple friends were in college, we bought a couple books, went to a seminar and a few months later had bought our first house and all quit school and been at it ever since.

01:33
Brad Weimert
Yeah, well, I want to get into the journey a little bit. But the. I met you after that chapter where you got into info marketing, where. Yes, you know.

01:42
Patrick Riddle
Yeah, that was 2009.

01:43
Brad Weimert
2009, so. And you are a client of Easy Peer Direct as a whole bunch of people at this event are. But you are unique in that space because people know you for how good you are at marketing. So Today you’ve got 200 plus thousand students, 100,000 subscribers on a daily email list. You’ve got a distributed team, so 40 plus people in a bunch of different countries, many years in your Inc. 5000 in 2025. I don’t want to talk to you about real estate. I want to talk to you about marketing, business growth, remote teams, culture. But before we dive into history in those chunks, I have to ask the creator space right now in the info product space, how do you think AI is Going to impact that in two to five years.

02:33
Patrick Riddle
That’s the question. You know, our business currently we’re a publishing company and we sell educational courses, currently static evergreen courses. And we’re asking the question, you know, we’re looking at different tools that we can start adding to our products and we’re starting to just envision what it might look like and how what we sell today will change in the future. And just recently we have a new initiative where we’re starting to just take bigger swings with our marketing. More big swings. We’ve had a standard kind of way that we stamp out our offers and our funnel structure and our pricing sequence and it’s worked and it’s got us to where we are. But we’re really wanting to, to try out as much different new things as we can so that we.

03:32
Brad Weimert
Evolve with the future. So I think there’s a technology in the world today is stress testing the traditional funnel. If somebody’s starting today, what is one thing you see newer entrepreneurs not doing with a fundamental marketing funnel that they should be?

03:52
Patrick Riddle
Email marketing. Like it astounds me. A year, a few years ago I just opted in to every real estate list out there. You know, all these Facebook people, new gurus that I’ve never heard of. And I was just, I was amazed that the whole, it seems like the whole new crop of coaches, consultants, etc, none of them do email marketing like we did back in the day or. And still do today. Yeah, and I don’t see how they make their business work and the traffic work because email is still the primary channel for monetization for us.

04:35
Brad Weimert
How much of a lift do you think you get from the email follow up after somebody goes to the initial funnel and does whatever on the front end?

04:42
Patrick Riddle
I mean that’s where all of our profit in the business comes from. So without it we don’t make any money.

04:47
Brad Weimert
Yeah. You know, I think that there’s this emotional, I know that there’s this emotional attachment to like I don’t want to bother people or I’m going to get unsubscribes or I don’t think it’s too much. Did you, did you track Alex Hormozi’s book launch?

05:00
Patrick Riddle
Just through friends, just mainly that.

05:02
Brad Weimert
Yeah. So my director of marketing sent me a screenshot of the amount of emails he sent leading up to launch. Dude, he sent an email like, he sent like 18 emails the day of the launch. Hey, get on the Launch. Hey, get on the launch. The launch is happening.

05:16
Patrick Riddle
Get on the launch.

05:17
Brad Weimert
Not to mention text messages blew people the up. So email is definitely not dead, is the message? No, not at all. All right, so I want to dive into kind of some of the mechanisms that you, that people in this group at Family Mastermind know you for and that you teach to the group. But I have to get kind of a breakdown and structure of what the business model is. And you mentioned some of it. There’s like, you know, course info, products, static, how to invest in real estate. But what are the other things that you’re selling and what’s the path of selling it?

05:52
Patrick Riddle
We kind of carved out a unique publishing model where in 2019 we kind of went all in on where we create front end offers and basically bolt those front end offers onto other guru businesses. Other people who are already doing millions in revenue have great backend offers. Some of these companies have large telephone sales floors. And we just went all in on doing our one thing of like we’ll work with a company, we’ll look at everything that they teach their entire product line and we’ll figure out, okay, we want to peel the, this smaller how to course to the front end and with our funnels like we like to sell info and then immediately upsell into some kind of recurring revenue offer. Love to sell into software.

06:43
Patrick Riddle
But if the course that we’re selling doesn’t really lend itself to a software upsell, then we’ll sell into more of a coaching Mastermind style offer and we just focus my company on doing everything we can to bring in customers, thousands and thousands of customers. And we’ll funnel those into another company, let them monetize the lead, we’ll get commissions on all the back end sales. We own the customer too. And it’s just a cool model where we can do one thing really well. You know, driving cold traffic to our offers, just bringing in customers and a collaborative model to where we can add value to really any company in our space.

07:32
Brad Weimert
What I heard was basically you’re generating leads on the front end yourself and you’re selling a small dollar item and then you’re leveraging functionally affiliates, but you have deeper partnerships with them and you’re selling somebody else’s product and I look at the back end. Stuff like that is what I call third party monetization. So how do I make more from the existing client that I brought in? Oh yeah, are you guiding the entire message or experience or do you do a handoff where you say hey, go talk to these people. They’re going to sell you, they’re what you’re looking for.

08:04
Patrick Riddle
Like, like once we bring in the customer, like we’ve created for instance, like one of our offers is with a guy named Lee Arnold.

08:11
Brad Weimert
Yeah, lovely. He’s been on the show at some point.

08:14
Patrick Riddle
Nice. So we’ll, we’ll bring in a Lee Arnold customer who’s bought him in the course we’re selling, pass off the lead to Lee’s company and then we’ll give them the first 30 days to monetize the lead and it’s up to them to figure out the best way to do that. Some companies we work with go straight into telephone sales, some have more of a warmup process or some even sell into a mid ticket offer and then high ticket afterward. So it just depends.

08:44
Brad Weimert
Do you stop your marketing when you say you give them 30 days to monetize? What does the transition look like? And, and what are the two paths of sales look like?

08:52
Patrick Riddle
We’ll, we’ll have a small consumption sequence of content emails that send them to the product, the course that they just bought from us. We’ll send emails that just send them to log in and try to get them to consume the course. But we’ll, we won’t send any marketing messages for that first month. And so we wait until after 30 days, let you know what’s the best thing to sell a Li Arnold customer? More products and services from Li Arnold. So we let them have that first 30 day window and then after that we can market any other products or services of our own affiliates or we can sell whatever the customer.

09:32
Brad Weimert
Is the product that you’re selling on the front end specifically mapped to that back end affiliate?

09:38
Patrick Riddle
Yes.

09:39
Brad Weimert
Yeah. Does it talk about the backend affiliate like when you talk about Lee Arnold? We front end offer a Lee Arnold product.

09:44
Patrick Riddle
Yes.

09:45
Brad Weimert
Oh, interesting.

09:45
Patrick Riddle
Yeah. And we’ll, we’ll like whenever we work with Lee, you know, we look at his entire product line, the escalation opportunities and we’ll say okay, this vertical that you teach here, you know, we want to create a new course and so we help design and outline the whole thing with Lee. Then we’ll come in and JP on our team is kind of the host of all of our trainings. Lee comes in and teaches, but we’ll create a brand new asset, a course that we then market. We have the exclusive license basically to market and sell on our end.

10:20
Brad Weimert
Interesting. And are you taking all the profit there are you splitting it.

10:23
Patrick Riddle
We take. Well, in order for us to do what we do and scale paid traffic as big as possible, we keep all the front end funnel revenue.

10:34
Brad Weimert
Right.

10:35
Patrick Riddle
And then, and we get a cut on all back end sales.

10:38
Brad Weimert
Yeah. Okay.

10:39
Patrick Riddle
And that’s what really allows us to crank things up and run our traffic at a lower return on ad spend and run things so that we can have a higher cost of acquisition.

10:51
Brad Weimert
Newer entrepreneurs in particular, but I mean all sizes and shapes do not focus on liquidating their ad cost. Yeah. And they grow and they growth sort of in spite of that. Right. And they figure out mechanisms to grow. But if you’re driving leads with cold traffic, that is the path to scale.

11:12
Patrick Riddle
Well, there’s all these, you know what’s so popular these days is just online lead gen to offline high ticket sale. You know, a lot of people are making it work. Yeah. However, you know, when we’re able to recoup 100% of what we just spent. Yeah. We’re probably going to be able to pay more to acquire customers.

11:32
Brad Weimert
100% of what you just spent in what period of time for you?

11:35
Patrick Riddle
Usually we look to recover it right away. Yeah. All of our funnels the past few years have been straight to sale, not legion. And so we’re looking, I mean different funnels we can run like some of our funnels where we’re making a lot more on the back end allow us to run the traffic at a lot lower like return on ad spend. And some funnels we might be able to run bring in 70,000 in sales, spend a hundred grand, go in the hole initially. But we know that within 30 days, 45 days we break through to profitability.

12:12
Brad Weimert
And by selling the back end with the affiliate.

12:15
Patrick Riddle
But we, but by all the back end sales that happen with the companies we work with that we get paid on and our list monetization once we can market to the customers.

12:25
Brad Weimert
After the first 30 days or whatever.

12:27
Patrick Riddle
Yep.

12:27
Brad Weimert
I like, I like digging into this because your model is unique in that you are actually going out and talking to all the existing companies and then crafting a front end offer that you can drive traffic and monetize the ad spend and then just hand off not even a lead, but a buyer. A customer who is like our typical.

12:49
Patrick Riddle
Customer spends $230 in our front end funnel. And what we have found with some of the companies we work with that are really good with high ticket telephone sales is that they can take these customers straight to 10, 15, 20,000 program.

13:06
Brad Weimert
Well, like you said, people are doing that with just a schedule, immediate, just delete with no purchase.

13:11
Patrick Riddle
Oh yeah.

13:12
Brad Weimert
And I don’t, do you have any thoughts on why that is the case today? Because our upbringing and marketing, mine certainly, and I think you would agree was you can’t go straight to high ticket. You need to warm them up and you know, selling the seven dollar ebook and then a five hundred course and then you know, a membership.

13:29
Patrick Riddle
I, I feel like it’s just, it’s easier, it’s just easier to convert sales offline than online. And so it’s just for whatever reason gotten more popular, you know, to just get people on the phone. That’s the, you know, easiest way to just talk to somebody and convert a sale. It’s hard.

13:46
Brad Weimert
Yeah.

13:47
Patrick Riddle
To convert sales online.

13:48
Brad Weimert
What I like about sort of digging into this is that you can do the back end monetization, the third party monetization with any business model. How, how dependent, like do you think you could get this to work if you weren’t customizing the front end product when you handed it off? So let’s say, could you go and say, hey, I’m going to do a generic real estate course and then from there the same. Would, would it still work?

14:12
Patrick Riddle
It, it could still work. A buyer leads. A buyer lead and someone who effectively designs a sequence to sell to them could still sell to them. But I do think there’s a lot of enhanced value where if somebody just bought Lee and then they’re just looking to remonetize.

14:35
Brad Weimert
Yeah, 100%. Yeah, yeah, no, a hundred percent. I’m thinking about sort of the broader application for all the people listening that aren’t like, okay, I’m going to craft a new business where I’m specifically going to go out and like target, which by the way is a great thing to do anyway.

14:49
Patrick Riddle
But customer acquisition is, is hard, is tough and for a lot of businesses that’s the kink in the hose. Yeah, like that’s what’s causing their business to stagnate and not grow. So if you can focus on that and become pretty good at any funnel type of acquisition and you know, you could be the challenge guy. You know, you’re really good at optimizing challenge funnels and you take that to companies and bolt your front end on. And especially with, with what we offer, like we take all the risk.

15:24
Brad Weimert
Right.

15:25
Patrick Riddle
We don’t, we don’t charge upfront for what we do. We we don’t charge per month. So we put in enormous resources to build out something to then sell it, take the risk on our side. And if it doesn’t work, you know, they have their time involved recording the product and helping it too. But.

15:43
Brad Weimert
Well, that’s precisely why I’m digging into the other side of it.

15:46
Patrick Riddle
Right.

15:46
Brad Weimert
Because most entrepreneurs like you’ve obviously done a very good job building this because you can increase conversion through that mechanism. But most entrepreneurs don’t have the capital and are. Don’t have the wherewithal. Yeah. To take all the risk and do it themselves. But I could see, you know, in the real estate space. Right. Let’s say today in the AI space, I could see a generic front end AI offer that is lower dollar amount.

16:10
Patrick Riddle
Okay.

16:11
Brad Weimert
Where then you back into basically all the people trying to be AI gurus that have high ticket AI product offerings or services and doing a handoff there. And I think it’s less specialized than real estate where you’ve got these specific real estate verticals.

16:25
Patrick Riddle
I mean you could almost do co registration style where you have like three different companies that you’re generating the gener AI buyer for.

16:33
Brad Weimert
And. Yeah, and so the idea with that is you get the lead gen, you sell a front end product but then immediately you’re giving it to three different people. Yeah, yeah, I love it. So you mentioned software sort of in passing. Explain to me where software fits in. Is it yours? Because you said you sell the information and then you want to sell a subscription immediately after you want to upsell a subscription of some sort.

16:57
Patrick Riddle
We love selling. Yeah. Recurring revenue after the initial one time purchase.

17:02
Brad Weimert
Yeah.

17:02
Patrick Riddle
Is our.

17:03
Brad Weimert
So you sell the one time purchase and immediately you’re like hey, but how about you pay us every month?

17:08
Patrick Riddle
Well more like hey, how about. Are you interested in easier and faster result? You know, instead of you having to do step one in the course, here’s a software that does it for you. And initially years ago when we worked with a company that had software, if it made sense we would plug that into our front end funnel, then set things up also where we handle all the billing on our front end funnel and then have it to where they handle the billing on the back end. But recently in the last year and a half we built out our own software, a website software that we can customize to about any offer of ours in real estate. And we’re now upselling into our own in house software.

18:02
Patrick Riddle
So, so initially, years ago, in essence we didn’t do a real private label, but we would sell other people’s softwares in our upsell funnels. Until now that we have our own. We’ve got that plugged in.

18:17
Brad Weimert
You built it? We did. That seems like a really inconvenient thing to be doing as somebody selling information.

18:22
Patrick Riddle
Well, true. The only reason we did, two years ago, there was an opportunity where a company that I was familiar with was selling and the leadership at that company, the two guys running the company, along with kind of their part of their all star cast. I found out we’re leaving. The company that was buying was taken over. They had new leadership coming in and there was a crew of eight from this company and the guy that was heading up the company years ago I had said, like, if we can ever hire him, we can take over the world.

19:08
Patrick Riddle
And so when this all kind of came to be and I slowly started like making chess moves a couple of years ago to lure them into our spider lab and we ended up striking the deal and brought all eight of them at once, hired them and at that point in time we basically all of a sudden had just a badass development team that is, that have built many softwares in the past, some that have sold for big money. And it was like, all right, well what do we do now with this all star cast of team that we just hired?

19:45
Brad Weimert
Took, took a big risk.

19:47
Patrick Riddle
Overhead went from here to here. You know, we’ve got a lot of high income earners on our team. But yeah, two years ago, all of a sudden we had development capabilities that we didn’t have prior.

20:00
Brad Weimert
So you had just sort of, there was a seed in your mind of maybe like these guys are just great. I don’t know what I’m going to do with them, but I would love to be working with.

20:09
Patrick Riddle
Yes.

20:10
Brad Weimert
When you say high income earners, what range are we talking about to.

20:13
Patrick Riddle
Hire their whole team? It was a million bucks a year. Shit. Okay, so not cheap.

20:21
Brad Weimert
So the ranges of 1 to 200 grand a year. Yeah, that’s beefy for one fell swoop.

20:30
Patrick Riddle
Yeah, yeah, it was a big move and we knew that, you know, margin would suffer and it did. But man, oh man, today just the, the ability that our team has to just crank out basically any project across any department of the company is just, it’s awesome.

20:54
Brad Weimert
Are they all us based in house?

20:58
Patrick Riddle
No, we don’t have in house.

20:59
Brad Weimert
Right. You’re fully distributed.

21:01
Patrick Riddle
We’re a total virtual workforce. I’m the only one in Charleston South Carolina. We’ve got about a little over half of our staff that’s in the US And a little less than half that’s over other countries. A lot of our support staff is in the Philippines. We kind of randomly hired someone through our normal hiring funnel who was a Filipino and we loved her so much. We’re just like, we need more and just their. We go through a couple staffing agencies, but they’re so loyal and they’re like, we pay them more, a little bit, you know, above their normal pay grade. But they’re amazing to work with. And once we found the Filipino customer service kind of hookup, we’ve just gone all in.

21:58
Brad Weimert
I want to talk about the team structure and sort of leadership as you’ve grown it. But I don’t want to leave the marketing stuff just yet because there’s so much nuance to it. The basics or I want to try to back this out to not your business model because I love it. But I’m thinking about sort of most of the people in the world that have a funnel and let’s say the funnel’s working. How do you amplify that by bolting on other products that aren’t yours. Let me say that you’re a. Well, so your coaching is so prevalent these days in consulting, it’s annoying. We talk about it so much.

22:33
Patrick Riddle
Well, I think for coaches and consultants a great way to get started is online Legion offline, you know, telephone sales, conversion call.

22:42
Brad Weimert
So how do you break that apart and then amplify it with order upsells? Well, yeah.

22:47
Patrick Riddle
Then at a certain point I think adding just a simple low ticket info product to test on the front end is something that’s like, especially if you’re, if you’re char. Like our front end offers start at 97 bucks. It’s kind of our bread and butter price point. But selling the info product for more like 27 bucks or 17 or even 7 or $3, that’s a lot easier conversion. Selling our price point is a lot harder. Like our sales letters are usually 8, 10,000 words. Like an hour long sales message. Like hard hitting copy. But for people that are more just getting started, start with something in the 7 to $17 range. And you don’t need nearly as good of copy. A copy you can hire or even with heck with AI these days you can even maybe write a decent sales letter yourself.

23:48
Patrick Riddle
But I’d start with a really low priced front end info product.

23:53
Brad Weimert
To start what are the most functional order bumps order upsells generically order bump.

24:00
Patrick Riddle
What we found is what converts great is just sell them what you’ve already sold them in a different format. So they’ve already purchased for us an educational course where they get the video, you know, in depth video modules, all kind of resources. But then for our order bumps, we do a, we call it an executive guidebook. It’s basically just Cliff notes of the video training. So yeah, just sell them what you already sold them in a different format and that tends to convert really well.

24:36
Brad Weimert
That’s crazy.

24:37
Patrick Riddle
Yeah, we go from 97 to 27 is our normal order form bump price.

24:43
Brad Weimert
What’s the take rate on that?

24:45
Patrick Riddle
65. Damn.

24:47
Brad Weimert
Really high. So. But you do multiple order bumps, right?

24:51
Patrick Riddle
Just one offer on the order form. And then after they purchase, that’s when we have our core kind of sell offer. Got it. For some kind of recurring revenue offer, product or service. And our typical. When people say no to that first offer, we typically then downsell the exact same thing, half the price upfront and we just take away a bonus easy additional offer toss in so that if somebody is just stuck on the price a little bit, but they still want the core thing, you know, they can get access to it.

25:30
Brad Weimert
So the idea here is you sell.

25:32
Patrick Riddle
Do you.

25:32
Brad Weimert
Is the bonus tied to the front end product or tied to the order bump?

25:36
Patrick Riddle
It’s just, it’s just part of the upsell offer. So you know, you got, we sell the educational course, front end, your order form bumps, the kind of Cliff notes executive guidebook, then we’re offering typically a software and the software has bonuses with it.

25:52
Brad Weimert
Yes, got it.

25:53
Patrick Riddle
Yeah. And if someone says no to that software plus bonus offer, then we just take away a bonus, cut the price in half and offer it to them again.

26:02
Brad Weimert
So I love the nuance of that because it, if you just decrease price, if you negotiate solely on price and the value doesn’t change, you’re bastardizing your product. Yeah, absolutely. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. And it smells of skis.

26:20
Patrick Riddle
Yeah.

26:20
Brad Weimert
Oh yeah.

26:21
Patrick Riddle
No.

26:21
Brad Weimert
Oh.

26:21
Patrick Riddle
Oh yeah. No, I’m, I’m with you. We, we always want to justify the discounted price based on the offer being different.

26:29
Brad Weimert
I love that. That, that actually answers the other question because if you’re testing price points on the front end, you’re going to piss people off at some level. So how do you come up with your just front end prices that you figure out?

26:44
Patrick Riddle
Well, I mean we we still test pricing on the front end sometime. And I, I don’t know. I don’t see a problem with doing a test where somebody lands on a page and they get it for 37. Somebody lands and they get it for 97. Hey, go to Walmart across town and they got this particular soap discounted today. Go to this one and they don’t, you know, and so price testing is what it is. And we, and we do a lot of price testing. Like an even 37 as a front end price works really well. However, even though we’re able to bring in a lot more customers, the degradation of quality is meaningful for the back end. So we still kind of have stuck at that 97 price, mostly.

27:30
Brad Weimert
So you’d rather have less, but qualified. More quality, More qualified, yeah. Is there any direct correlation on refunds or chargebacks with the $97 offer, which is 37?

27:40
Patrick Riddle
I don’t remember or know of a difference. Refunds are. Jeez, refunds are tough. I mean, when we’re selling to cold traffic, you know, people that don’t know us. And they’re buying Joe Schmo, you know, they’re not buying some celebrity TV person that they know. Yep. And so, yeah, refunds are just a. When you’re aggressively selling, like we do too, you got, you know, refunds are part of it. So.

28:10
Brad Weimert
Yeah, well. And you’re selling information and info. Yeah, so info. Part of the reasons that coaches, consultants, creators are deemed high risk in the payment space.

28:21
Patrick Riddle
Okay.

28:23
Brad Weimert
Despite the quality of the business, it doesn’t matter how credible you are, how good you are, what your track record is at large. Information is subjective in quality, and so you don’t know who’s going to get it. And if an expert in your field gets it, they’re going to have a different take on the info. And if Anonymous gets it.

28:41
Patrick Riddle
Yeah.

28:41
Brad Weimert
Right. So the likelihood of refunds is just higher information that leads to shitty people saying shitty things online or good people saying shitty things online. Yeah. What do you do when you’re confronted with. And at your scale, at hundreds of thousands of people that have been customers, which means millions that have been exposed.

28:59
Patrick Riddle
Oh, yeah.

29:00
Brad Weimert
How do you deal with somebody posting a scam review or a scam article about your company.

29:07
Patrick Riddle
Reputation management practices years ago? Whatever. Reviews on the. The Better Business Bureau and Trust Pilot and whatever scams. Oh, geez. The extortionist ring.

29:22
Brad Weimert
Oh, Better Business Bureau. Better Business Bureau and Yelp are like, why the FTC doesn’t go after them is beyond me.

29:29
Patrick Riddle
Yeah. Years ago we didn’t have a strategy and that became a problem because the only people that ever posted on those sites were people that were mad, you know and you know, maybe something did slip through the cracks in our support. You know it does happen from time to time or maybe not, maybe they’re never going to be happy no matter, you know, what, what you provide. But once we put a specific practice in place to start to manage, help manage our reputation online, it made all the difference. Like if you look up our company today we’ve got I think 560 plus Google reviews, we’ve got 350 or so Trustpilot reviews now. And what we started to do is just direct happy customers asking them many times if they would leave a review for us online.

30:23
Patrick Riddle
Because if you don’t just people don’t naturally go to leave review that many positive reviews. Yeah, especially in I guess our industry I think, period.

30:32
Brad Weimert
I mean I think there, I can’t, I don’t know where I’m pulling the stat from, you know, my youth probably but it’s like you know, 17 times more likely for somebody to leave a negative review than a positive. Oh yeah.

30:46
Patrick Riddle
Once we especially heard that the FTC to some degree paid attention to the bbb we’re like wow, we really need to care much more about this.

30:57
Brad Weimert
So is it as, I mean is, are you doing more than or is it as simple as email automation? Once somebody leaves a has a positive experience or once they buy or once they achieve a certain mark, how do you think about the reputation manager component and automating it?

31:12
Patrick Riddle
There’s, there is a system where when people rate us, if they rate a certain star level then we get in has them to to rate us in one of the meaningful places. Also in our support we’ve trained our support staff to just listen out, look out for opportunities where you know, we’ve got a really happy customer that you can ask a small favor for.

31:38
Brad Weimert
Yeah, I would think that would be. You would have much higher conversion on that. You’d have much more success with your customer service actually requesting it versus the email automation. Yeah, the email automation is owning it in but is effective, it does work Y.

31:52
Patrick Riddle
But yeah it’s probably the combo of the two that you know and yeah the personal connection from the support side of things.

31:59
Brad Weimert
So to that end we. You’ve got these two elements right. You’ve got the reputation management and the people that are going to bash you online who have nothing else to do or something slipped through the cracks and the other angry. And then you’ve got eftc, then you’ve got regulation. We have, there are people in the payment space that just lie on the front end in ads and say we’ll never hold your money. You know, you can run as much as you want and you can’t do that in payments. That’s not how payments work. Oh yeah, like unfortunately it’s just in for a variety of reasons. That’s not how that works. So they’re just lying on the front end. When they get big enough, the FTC gets involved. As we’ve recently seen with Tai Lopez. Oh yeah, totally different story.

32:48
Brad Weimert
But with you are at a size and shape where the FTC can notice. So how do you think about putting practices in place to make sure that you check all the boxes with regulations, don’t say what you shouldn’t say, terms and conditions are right, etc. Claims.

33:07
Patrick Riddle
It’s really tough. I mean I had the conversion mindset as a marketer locked in for years. Conversion, conversion. And then when I had to shift to compliance first it was just jarring.

33:23
Brad Weimert
But.

33:27
Patrick Riddle
It’S been a, it’s been a long journey with compliance. We’ve worked with a couple of different attorneys on the FTC side of things and we really started working on the marketing with the most exposure first. So for us we’re running a lot of paid advertising campaigns. So it’s our ad creative, our video ads that are all over Facebook and Instagram and YouTube that we first went to work on to clean up for compliance. And, and really one cool thing that came out of much more compliant copy is the ease of getting more of our ads approved on different platforms. And we didn’t realize that a lot of times it was the copy that was the problem back in years ago. But you know, you just kind of take one bite at a time.

34:27
Patrick Riddle
We finally hired our first in house compliance team member and she’s part time but about 20 hours a week. And yeah, we’ve just been kind of going one area of the business at a time to try to, and we’ve got all this old marketing, you know, funnels from years ago that are still out too. And so it’s been a process but really with compliance, you know, you’re never going to be a hundred percent compliant. You know, it’s a spectrum and yes, a moving target and you know, you’ve just got to decide where on the spectrum you’re comfortable with if you want to run full throttle wide open and say whatever you want, then go for it, you know. Will you get in trouble? Not necessarily. Maybe.

35:15
Brad Weimert
Yep.

35:16
Patrick Riddle
If you get big enough, probably. But yeah, it’s a total different lens compliance first, then conversion, compliant conversion.

35:29
Brad Weimert
You’ve 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 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 [email protected] forward slash, bam. If you’re at, you know, let’s rewind. Let’s say your business is doing 2 million a year. Do you focus on conversion then compliance or compliance then conversion?

36:11
Patrick Riddle
I mean me, whenever I was there, it was conversion.

36:15
Brad Weimert
Yeah. Would you do that again the same way?

36:18
Patrick Riddle
Yes, probably.

36:19
Brad Weimert
Yeah.

36:21
Patrick Riddle
Or I mean, knowing what I know now, it would be much less aggressive than, than years ago when it was just kind of wild west and you know, copyright or write something and you just kind of run with it. So.

36:38
Brad Weimert
Yeah, no, I think, I mean I, I have a, my general belief in business at large is when you are getting going, focus on the one thing that matters, which is making sales. Sales, yeah, getting some sales. And obviously you have to take care of the customer, but you need to stop worrying about all the details and you need to just sell a product that is of value to somebody else, period. And keep doing that. And then as you get bigger, you can worry about the nuances and optimizing. But the number of people that I see that are up and coming entrepreneurs who get just mired in the details of business and they’re spending three hours trying to negotiate four pennies. Yeah, it’s like, sir, ma’, am, you’re.

37:22
Patrick Riddle
Never going to make it.

37:23
Brad Weimert
Like this is not the path, you know, you have to focus on just making more money.

37:27
Patrick Riddle
It’s, I mean, for so long, you know, I’m studying every book I can get my hand on. Sales, marketing, conversion. I didn’t think about it at the time, but just because they’re teaching something in a book doesn’t mean it’s compliant. You know, a lot of the marketers said nothing about compliance in their courses and seminars and more nowadays it’s becoming more Prevalent that compliance is. Is just a much bigger deal.

37:56
Brad Weimert
Yeah. Well, it’s also true that the FTC goes in waves. Right. So it does something like it. Yeah. Oh, there’s no question. There’s both with administration changes and with just sort of how much there is to do in the world to try to police.

38:11
Patrick Riddle
Oh yeah.

38:12
Brad Weimert
So they’ll focus one area, make an example in that area.

38:15
Patrick Riddle
Like now REI offers, you got. I heard that they were looking at.

38:18
Brad Weimert
A bunch of AI.

38:19
Patrick Riddle
You got it.

38:20
Brad Weimert
They’re just going to keep going. They have to cycle through stuff. Yeah. Okay. I want to know how you built the company and how your role in the company has changed and how you think about growth as an entrepreneur. Because it’s one thing, as were just saying, to grow and sell, sell, convert, convert. It’s another to deal with all the. That comes after you do that.

38:45
Patrick Riddle
Oh yeah.

38:46
Brad Weimert
I think what I read on the Internet, which might not be true, is that you have 40 plus people working for you across several countries. Give me a makeup of the company as a starting point. Is that accurate so far and if so, what are the roles like?

39:02
Patrick Riddle
Yes, yes. Like I originally when I started in this business, I was the face of our product line. I was like our content and sales guy. A guy. Trevor Mock was an original partner. He was more the marketer. He was kind of running the company. Once I bought him out, I knew that I had to switch over and become the marketer. And so for many years I went down the rabbit hole to become a pretty good copywriter.

39:34
Brad Weimert
You bought him out not being good at marketing and then you’re like, I should figure this out.

39:38
Patrick Riddle
Well, yeah, in that year prior to buying him out, I took over running our email list and our email promotions and started taking over some of the marketing related task and whatnot. But yeah, it wasn’t until I bought them out that I fully just dove in and offers funnels. Copy was my focus for years until 2019 when we really dialed in our publishing model stopped doing all the things weren’t that good at and kind of went all in. That’s when I finally realized that after hiring our at the time director of marketing who became our cmo, I knew it was time for me to shift to CEO to Patrick as CEO. Like I’d had that after my name for many, for years, but hadn’t really acted like one.

40:32
Brad Weimert
Yeah.

40:32
Patrick Riddle
And so it was a real path to learn what the heck to do as CEO since really 2020.

40:41
Brad Weimert
So where were you at revenue and revenue at that point?

40:44
Patrick Riddle
Well, in 2019 when we finally went in on our publishing model, that was when we finally broke out of a few stagnant years where were doing a little over a million in revenue. 2019 we did almost 2 million in revenue and so finally had that growth. And we really saw in our model that wow, if we just now that we’re not doing these things that weren’t that good at and we just stamp out our model over and over again, we finally saw what like this.

41:14
Brad Weimert
Could really, this could really scale.

41:17
Patrick Riddle
And so went from in 2020 doing about 6 million in revenue, doing similar revenue the next year. And then in 2022 we had a big growth year and did 18 million and did similar revenue the next year and then last year did 23 million.

41:35
Brad Weimert
Awesome.

41:36
Patrick Riddle
And this year we’re pacing right now a little less than that. But yeah, around 20.

41:43
Brad Weimert
What were your responsibilities as the CEO in 2020 and what are they today?

41:50
Patrick Riddle
I, I had to figure out what the heck to do. I, I remember like I actually went to Google and typed in what does a CEO do? And, and I, I come across these job descriptions and I’m reading them and I’m just like man, this isn’t me like this. And and so yeah, I’m like geez. I, I bought a couple books, like CEO books, started going to YouTube looking for material to learn from and even the books, I remember getting the books and opening them up and just like I couldn’t get through the material. Like it just, I was kind of hitting a wall. But it wasn’t until I, I found Sam Ovens came across some of his videos on YouTube.

42:34
Patrick Riddle
He was years ago, he was putting out really deep content, really stuff that looking back on it is really strategic thinking was a lot of what the content kind of revolved around and that really helped me at the time a lot of what he was putting out and just getting my mind thinking at a higher level. There was, there was also one book that it was Perry Marshall’s 8020 shares in marketing. Yeah I think and there was this chart in the book and it was the dollar per hour task chart. And it went from ten dollar per hour tasks to ten thousand dollar per hour tasks. And at that time I said, you know what, I bet a CEO would spend all their time doing 10,000 per hour work.

43:32
Patrick Riddle
And at the time I could see, okay, I do these couple things that are $100 per hour. I do these things that are a thousand dollar per hour and I need to be just doing this 10,000 per hour kind of work. And so I, I then strategically hired my way out of all task work that wasn’t 10,000 per hour type work. And that’s like big idea generation, strategic negotiations, like recruiting talent, all those type of things. And it took me just a few years to kind of finally figure out that nowadays what my role has evolved to is visionary thinking, strategic thinking, business development. And that fourth one, what’s the fourth? And recruiting talent. There we go. Yes. I just needed an extra second there. Yeah, Yeah.

44:32
Brad Weimert
I was like, am I supposed to know?

44:34
Patrick Riddle
I just had to remember. And so that’s where I spend my time now. I still.

44:39
Brad Weimert
What is business development in this context?

44:42
Patrick Riddle
That’s, that’s striking deals with the companies that we build. Offers.

44:46
Brad Weimert
Got it.

44:46
Patrick Riddle
Yeah. I’m still big deal. I’m still that guy. Yeah. And, and we average about two new courses per year since 2019. And so that means two new parts. So two deals per year. Sometimes we’ve rolled out some offers with the same company before, rolled out multiple offers. But, but yeah, I strike, I figure out which companies we’re going to work with, strike the deals with them, and I’m still our offer guy. So figuring out what we’re going to create. But once I’ve got that teed up now I just step out of the way and the team builds everything out.

45:26
Brad Weimert
Well, this might not be a question for you then, but what is a, what’s an SOP that you put in place this year that’s had the biggest impact on shifting the company or moving in a good direction?

45:38
Patrick Riddle
That’s, that’s a great question for our operations guy. I love Adrian.

45:44
Brad Weimert
I love that.

45:44
Patrick Riddle
Me, no SOPs, but Adrian, I. For years we didn’t have an operations guy and in 2021 we hired Adrian. And man, if I was starting over from scratch with a brand new business, I might hire an ops guy from first. Like if years ago I would, I’d hire like you know, some support staff member. But yeah, operations guy is going to build everything out. Going to do all the hiring.

46:14
Brad Weimert
Yeah. Well, so I heard two things there. You said build everything out, do all the hiring. But I also heard you say as your fourth responsibility as a CEO, recruiting. Well, what’s the distribution of that right now?

46:28
Patrick Riddle
Yeah, Adrian handles all our hiring, but I’m on the lookout for unicorns. Like, like a couple years ago when we hired that Team of eight, the two guys that ran that company, Unicorns. So I, I’m looking out for just incredibly talented people that we can put in strategic roles in the company. You know, media buying, copywriting, the head of a department.

47:02
Brad Weimert
I want to do that to look out for major impactful hires. But I also want to sign off on the final interview. Are you involved in the final interview at this point?

47:14
Patrick Riddle
If it was for like a department head? Yeah, I could see myself being on a call, but otherwise known.

47:23
Brad Weimert
I love it. Are there things that you feel like other CEOs do, that you should do, that you’ve just decided not to? Because the role of CEO, really, it’s an interesting one. There’s like, I think historically, if you look at the traditional business, the sort of brick and mortar Fortune 50, Fortune 1 hundreds from the last several decades, there is a fairly sharded, articulated roles and responsibilities for what a CEO does and what a COO does. But I think today, as things have moved quicker and more money has gotten involved to launch things quicker and the barrier to entry is lower, you see a much more diverse spectrum of what the responsibilities are for a given role. Are there things that you see other CEOs doing that you’re like, no way.

48:11
Patrick Riddle
Am I doing that. I mean, I, I feel like I see CEOs working typically a lot of hours and being very plugged into the, still the dated some of the day to day of their business. Yeah. And like I used to see like, even like Lee Arnold, like you look at a guy like Lee and him running his company. I, I used to think that I needed to become more like other CEOs, but I’ve kind of discovered in, through my own path that’s not necessarily the case.

48:50
Brad Weimert
Yeah.

48:53
Patrick Riddle
And I, I feel like it’s been just far more valuable for me to just get out of the work, clear my schedule. And any given week, I mean, every morning I’ve got wide open, like one day a week I’ve got two calls in the afternoon, another day I have one call. That’s, that’s the only recurring calls that I have.

49:13
Brad Weimert
I’m jealous. Well, so look, I, I’ve been grappling this with this recently. There is a side of me that believes what you just said, which is what worked for that person isn’t necessarily going to work for me and who I am. And that’s, and people use this term authentic, like I’m being authentic to who I am. There’s another part of me that’s like you should work to be authentically a different version of you if you want to achieve more and get more out of business in life. How do you reconcile those two things personally?

49:51
Patrick Riddle
Yeah, that’s a good question. I don’t, I don’t know if I know how to answer it.

49:56
Brad Weimert
I don’t.

49:57
Patrick Riddle
Yeah, because at times, like I was, I was terrible at writing. Like, that was. I was no good at it. But in 2008, when I started thinking about starting a blog and getting into the info business, I was like, I have to learn it. And I went through the painful process of learning how to write content well and how to do videos and that sort of thing. And me learning to become a good copywriter was excruciating, like, for me still, for me to sit down and like write a long form sales letter, it’s like, oh, yeah, like that’s the last thing I want to do.

50:38
Patrick Riddle
Yeah, but I just went through the pain because I knew that it was going to be valuable enough for me and the company, and I needed to do that to, to become the marketer and I guess, business person that I wanted to become. Then I, then I look at, you know, so CEO, you know, do I need to become a different person or learn new skills? And I got to the point where I guess I felt like I didn’t. And you know, the kind of four areas of my focus, like most of my time is strategic thinking. Like, that’s. And, and like, how do you schedule that?

51:21
Brad Weimert
I don’t know, man. I don’t know.

51:23
Patrick Riddle
I go to my office and I read like I’m reading 48 laws of power. Yeah. Then I go on a walk. You know, maybe I call one of the team members to check in. But it’s strange getting to a point in business where you don’t have anything to do on a lot of days. And it’s a different type of work and it’s. And it’s taken a few years for me to even get comfortable with it.

51:49
Brad Weimert
Really went through a boredom phase and.

51:53
Patrick Riddle
Asked, you know, should I start another business? Should I do some consulting?

51:58
Brad Weimert
And I was just like, I don’t want to.

52:01
Patrick Riddle
I want to just continue to grow. You know, I want whatever work efforts I put in to continue to grow the business. And anyway, it’s a, it actually is a problem when you just have too much of your time back. You know, people think they just, you know, they want to get to that future one Day where they have their time. But I can tell you that it can become a problem having too much time.

52:27
Brad Weimert
Yeah, I think there are, I don’t have that problem. I, I, I don’t even know if I hope to one day. But I, I do believe, I, I do think that there’s a lot of, I have admiration for working yourself out of the day to day and the busyness and I also believe that ultimately if you are super busy, it’s a choice and you are there as a result of your own actions and if you want to be in a different place, you can take different actions and get out of it. Oh yeah.

52:58
Patrick Riddle
People feel, a lot of people feel trapped or they’ve built the business that has trapped them. Yeah. And they have to be the dancing bear.

53:05
Brad Weimert
Absolutely.

53:06
Patrick Riddle
They don’t dance and it’s over.

53:08
Brad Weimert
Yep. Yeah. And I think that you have to be practical in your approach to try to get out of it. And you, the practical approach that you took was dividing tasks into $10, $100 thousand, $10,000 an hour tasks and deliberately delegating those out effectively over time. And that took you a couple of years to do. Yeah. And I have, I could go into the weeds with all this stuff but backing out. You know. Today in the advent of AI intense robotics coming online, the creator economy has boomed alongside it. You can learn skills anywhere. You can get robots to teach you skills quickly. It soon the, there was a question of whether knowing the skill is going to be of value if the robot can do it for you.

54:02
Brad Weimert
In light of all of that, what advice do you have for a 25 year old entrepreneur right now?

54:07
Patrick Riddle
It’s tough. Like my advice four years ago would have been different. Now that AI and technology is heading, headed where it is. I mean I think people in their 20s, I mean you’re young, you know, you’ve, you’ve probably got a big advantage over a lot of people who will never adopt, adapt to these tools that are coming out. Specifically advice. I, I, I, I don’t think I have the answer right now. Well, how would you answer that? Firing. Let me flip it back to you.

54:47
Brad Weimert
How would I, what advice do I have for a 25 year old entrepreneur? I think that broad stroke advice from my perspective is to give things enough time to get good at them and stumble through learning them and build competency. And I think if you fail to, and I don’t think it’s actually about building the competency, I think it’s about building the Muscle to have enough commitment to go through difficult things, to train yourself, to be able to learn things and be able to follow through. Yeah. And I think today so many people are pulled, myself included, in a thousand directions by the dopamine hits that happen from the deliberate mechanisms that are trying to distract us and extract money from us.

55:34
Brad Weimert
And amidst that, it’s more important than ever to be able to commit and work through hard things and work through the distraction, distracted moments and all these elements of life to get to a goal.

55:45
Patrick Riddle
Oh, yeah.

55:46
Brad Weimert
And instead people get part way there and they’re like, yeah, this. And they switch directions.

55:50
Patrick Riddle
Yeah, that’s, yeah, I, I feel like that’s why so many wannabe entrepreneurs struggle is bouncing from one thing to the next to the next and never putting up in enough time to see any success. I mean, I, I, I, I started my entrepreneurial journey as a real estate investor and was a hundred percent all in it for years. And it wasn’t until 2009, kind of as an extension of the knowledge learned through that business, then started the info business and have been at that ever since. Yeah, yeah, I’ve said this before, I.

56:33
Brad Weimert
Say this often, actually, but I, I know and you know, many people that we’ve known for 10, 15, 20 years and they keep going on to the.

56:44
Patrick Riddle
Next thing and I see them and.

56:45
Brad Weimert
They’Re like, oh, you’re still doing payments? And I’m like, yeah, yeah, that’s like, I can build on that. And yeah, getting better and better. Patrick, love talking to you, man. What’s, where do you want to point people? You told me before we started that you haven’t done any interviews in a long time, and I found that shocking because you were so good at breaking things down and explaining things and you speak on stage, but apparently also only in this closed room at this mastermind group.

57:16
Patrick Riddle
Yeah.

57:18
Brad Weimert
Where can people find out more about you? Where do you want to drive people?

57:21
Patrick Riddle
I would say just check out awesomely not because I’m trying to send you there to buy a course from us, but, you know, just to check out what we’re doing. Yeah. And like, currently I don’t put out any content through any platform. I’m not very social. I lurk, I lurk. I exist on the Facebook, but, but yeah, like I, I do love to teach. It’s just I’ve. The only opportunity mainly that I’ve had for years is Matt asking me to share it to family Mastermind Yeah. And I did recently speak at a guy Jordan Hall’s event, which was. Which was fun.

58:02
Brad Weimert
Which was Jordan’s killer. Were you in Austin for that? I was.

58:05
Patrick Riddle
You.

58:06
Brad Weimert
You were supposed to hit me up when you’re in Austin.

58:07
Patrick Riddle
Dang it.

58:08
Brad Weimert
All right, all right.

58:09
Patrick Riddle
I’ll remember that next time.

58:10
Brad Weimert
You need to love it, man. Well, I appreciate the time, dude. Until next time.

58:14
Patrick Riddle
Awesome. Thanks, man.

58:16
Brad Weimert
That’s a wrap for today’s episode. Please subscribe. And most importantly, leave us a review. Takes, like, 30 seconds, and it makes such a big impact, it helps other people find us. Also, you might not know this. You can watch over 100 episodes of Beyond a Million with guests like Grant Cardone, Wes Watson, and neil [email protected].