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Ryan Deiss:

All of the joy and easiness that we’ve had for the past five to seven years, really, the mistake that people made is they thought that was them. Right? They thought they were that good. And then when it stopped, the downside of believing it was all about you before, is now you believe it is all about you now. And the reality is that neither of those things were true.

Emily Hirsh:

You are listening to the Not for Lazy Marketers podcast, episode number 430. 

All right, everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. I have a very special guest and amazing entrepreneur Ryan Deiss with me today who I’m so excited to have on the podcast. Welcome Ryan.

Ryan Deiss:

Thank you so much for having me Emily. Good to reconnect. We were talking before how we met years and years ago through Warren, but got to reconnect through our mutual friend, Alex Charfen.

Emily Hirsh:

Yeah. We had a great conversation that actually led to a long time ago. I did a podcast episode after that conversation, because it was such a fun one. So, I’m so excited to now have the real deal, we can conversate here.

Ryan Deiss:

We’ll see if what I say here aligns with what I said back then.

Emily Hirsh:

Yeah. Right. It’s probably changed. So, we need to refresh. Awesome. Well, I’m so excited to have you. I wanted to dive in. Our conversation then was a lot about where’s industry going. And this was kind of, I think it was like six months ago maybe, or maybe was actually, no, it was probably 10 months ago we had this conversation and so we weren’t as much in the recession, but we talked about a lot of like what was coming. And one of the things for me like that I shared afterwards was you’ve been around for a long time. And so you have a lot of wisdom in terms of what we’re going through right now, right. In the digital marketing industry. And like iOS updates was, you were kind of comparing it to what happened in Google before. And you were very much like I knew this was coming, you know, I’ve been ready for it. And so I found a lot of value in that because I don’t have that wisdom. Like this is kind of the first recession I’m going through with my business. And then the iOS updates obviously impacted me a lot. So I’m just curious now, 10 months later, what your conversations are, like, what you see happening kind of in the industry over the next couple of years and anything you’re doing differently now from when we talked then?

Ryan Deiss:

Well, I want to clarify. I mean, and I knew it was coming, but it still sucks.

Emily Hirsh:

Yeah.

Ryan Deiss:

Totally. I mean just because you know something is happening, doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s only so much you can do to prepare before it does, because you know, if you believe that we’re going to move into a recessionary environment, that’s fine. I mean, there’s stuff that you can do in terms of setting back cash and just making sure that you’re trimming the fat. But you really don’t act upon it. Especially as marketers. Yeah. Right. We can look in the future, and in some ways prepare for the future, but we can’t act upon it until it’s happened and our customers realize that it has happened. Right. And, and so I think it’s important to acknowledge that whatever we talk about right now, I think we kind of have to keep two things in mind. There’s what do we need to be thinking about as business owners and then as marketers, what are we talking about to our customers?

Ryan Deiss:

Because very often those are two different things, right. We need to speak and engage with the conversation that people are having, trying to change the conversation. It can be a really frustrating, it can be a really frustrating thing. So all that stuff, like as a business owner you know something had to change. Yeah. I mean, it was just getting ridiculous. There’s just all the things that were happening for as long as the bull run had happened. I mean, understanding that life in the world is cyclical. Like there was going to have to be some kind of a pullback. And I think we’ve seen it. I still don’t know to the extent. I’m not an economist. I don’t know, to the extent that this is going to be, you know, impacted when we’re thinking about different wars and stuff like that, is this going to be a recession that we generally recover from fairly quickly?

Ryan Deiss:

Because look, there’s still demand out there right now in the marketplace. I mean we basically created a supply side recession by shutting down the economy. Right. We shut down the economy, created this massive supply side recession because nobody could buy anything and then everybody wanted to buy stuff. Right. And there was nothing to buy because nothing had been made for a while. Right. At the same time, the government’s printing a bunch of money and giving and so everybody’s got more money to spend. Which only exacerbates that issue. So now what we’re doing is we’re seeing the economy slow down because interest rates are going up because things are getting more expensive because of inflation because that’s what happens when demand outpaces supply. Right? It’s like pretty basic stuff. And so now we have a demand side recession where, where people aren’t wanting to buy as much.

Ryan Deiss:

So what happens when you have a simultaneous supply side and demand side reception? Yeah. Do they counter each other out and it just kind of goes back to normal. It goes back to really what it was before everything was artificially inflated, post COVID? I really don’t know. That’s what I think is generally going to happen. So I think that right now we’re kind of in the worst of it. And those of us, even if you weren’t around and in business during 2008, 2009 or prior to that in 2001, I’ve seen two of them now. The worst part is kind of where we are right now, and the closest I can think to explain it to is in the early months  of COVID,

Ryan Deiss:

When nobody really knew what was going on and it was all just this uncertainty, that’s kind of the worst part and that’s where we are right now. So I’m trying to just tell everybody don’t panic yet. Don’t make any rash moves yet. I mean, acknowledge that the game has changed. Don’t get into denial about any of this stuff. Acknowledge that the game has changed, but once it kind of, once everybody figures out where it’s going to be, then you can just get back to work again. Right. So this is kind of the worst, the worst part of it. I think so. That’s just the general macroeconomic perspective.

Emily Hirsh:

Yeah. I think so, too. And I think that at least my experience with the online space, like we started feeling stuff iOS was almost worse than..

Ryan Deiss:

That’s what I was going to say. 

Emily Hirsh:

Was, this is not a harder time last year than this year.

Ryan Deiss:

Yeah. I, I think most marketers, certainly if you’re doing any type of Facebook and Instagram, I think iOS was a much bigger slap in the face than any recession that I’ve ever been in.

Emily Hirsh:

Yeah. I totally agree. And so I felt like it started then and I feel like I’m like this isn’t that bad compared to the shifts I had to make when iOS happened. And, and I think now it’s like, we’re used to the cost. We’ve had to adapt and adjust and the people who did are still here.

Ryan Deiss:

And an argument could be made that if we do get into a bit of a recessionary type space, one of the first things that gets cut in a recession is marketing budget. Now that’s not the greatest news to hear you know, if you’re running an agency. Right. Because that means that you’re likely to see some cuts. But what it may mean is that some of your lesser competitors get pushed out of the market. It may mean that prices do go down a bit. Right. They’re not going to go down a lot, but their rate of increase should slow. So now really is the time to just be doubling down. There’s going to be a lot of people who get scared. And as a result of getting scared, they kind of, they freeze. You can’t freeze.

Ryan Deiss:

You got to be over communicating with your clients. You got to be overdelivering value right now. You need to go over now is the time that you’re working harder than you’ve ever worked to maintain. Because the second it comes back, you will springboard. And I’ve seen that following every single recession. If we can just maintain, if we can hold onto what we have, then once the dust clears, we are the ones left standing. Everybody then jumps on your back and you just springboard up. And that I believe is what the next 12 to 18 months are going to be like.

Emily Hirsh:

Yeah. And I feel that, I feel like a lot of people, myself included working really hard for definitely not the same results that was a couple years ago. But knowing that’s just what you have to do. Like you either do it or you don’t, you either give up and quit or you just hang on and you have to put in the work. And I think there is, have you noticed that there is kind of like that burnout exhaustion happening for business owners right now? Because I definitely have had a lot of conversations with people feeling that, of having to work really hard. And then they’re like, but I’m not getting as much out of it. And it’s kind of like, that’s the reality right now.

Ryan Deiss:

I’m hearing it from my peers. We’re hearing it from our clients at the scalable company. You know, just, I feel like we’re having to work so hard just to maintain kind of where we were and I’m telling them it’s like, yeah you are. And what I’m seeing is that there are some who hear me say that and they go, oh thank God. And they see it as encouragement. Right? Because what they know is it’s not them. It’s not like that overnight exactly. Their business got broken. Their customer stopped caring. Like it’s just that there’s external forces, a realization that we’ve been propped up by external forces. Like if you think about it, all of the joy and easiness that we’ve had for the past five to seven years, the mistake that people made is they thought that was them. Right. They thought they were that good. And then when it stopped, the downside of believing it was all about you before, is now you believe it’s all about you now. And the reality is that neither of those things were true.

Emily Hirsh:

Right, right.

Ryan Deiss:

We are impacted by outside forces. Okay. So now what, you know, does that mean we’re totally controlled and therefore have no agency or autonomy? Of course not. Right. Of course not. But if you’re going to accept a hundred percent of the look at me, I’m God’s gift to marketing and business, during the greatest, you know, bull market run up that the world has ever seen, then, then yeah. It’s going to hurt really bad when that party stops. If you just acknowledge that boy, I was in the right place at the right time and I’m really glad I got to learn and cut my teeth and build a brand during this time. Now this is when brand leaders were made, right? Yeah. It is during recessions and this is so important for everybody to know it is during recessionary times, that market share is captured. Okay. Share of market gets captured during buildups. The pie gets bigger and bigger and bigger. So you’re making more, but from a relative perspective, your slice of the pie could actually be getting smaller.

Emily Hirsh:

Mm-Hmm.

Ryan Deiss:

It is during these times when the pie very much stops growing and now it’s when certain people bail out. And so, I’m hearing people who are getting, who are having this realization, the vast majority, when I say that to them, they get frustrated, they get discouraged. And many of them are coming around and asking, they’re kind of giving up the entrepreneurial life and going around.

Emily Hirsh:

I’m seeing that so much. Which it’s kind of like, this is just a reset in so many ways. And that’s what a recession is, right? With capitalism. Like it’s just a reset back to a more normal place of cost of employees. Like we had, you know, employees who didn’t want to work, now they’re going to want to work. Like we’re just going back to that. And so I think the, the biggest mistake you could make is unless you don’t want to have a business anymore, is walk away in this and, and be like, I’ll wait until it gets better because it’s like, this is like you said, it’s not real. Like, this is kind of going to be the new reality in terms of cost and how hard you have to work in business like that. We’re almost getting to a normal place where before it wasn’t normal, where you could just throw up a funnel and have it 50%. And then it was successful. Like those days are gone and we’ve been listening to a lot of people who have been saying, that’s coming for a long time, but of course people don’t want to believe it because that sucks. But it’s the reality. So buckling down and putting in that work, it’s like, that’s the only option that you have right now.

Ryan Deiss:

Yeah. I mean, if you could compare it to spending an enormous amount of time eating poorly and not exercising and then suddenly you come to the realization that, you know, gosh, this has got me kind of in a, in a bad place and it’s time for me to like buckle down and get back to work and it’s going to be really, really, really miserable. And for a time there’s going to be almost no gain and all I’m ever really going to be able to do for the next little bit is get back to where I was before I, you know, started doing all these things. Yeah. That’s a painful realization. And it’s painful to have to endure it. But those that do are the ones that succeed and those that don’t, don’t. And, and so it’s okay. You know, I believe that entrepreneurship is a calling. It’s not meant for everyone to do.

Ryan Deiss:

Right? And that’s hard to say, and it doesn’t mean that somebody who’s not an entrepreneur is less than. It just means that it’s not for everyone. I think there’s a lot of people in this season who are finding out is this lifestyle really for me? Right. Do I want it badly enough to endure the pain? But the point that you made is dead on. You don’t just get to decide, well, I’m just kind of going to sit this one out and when it gets better, I’ll pop back in. Right. It won’t be the high left for you when you do it. You better pop back into a brand new place. Yeah. It won’t be this one.

Emily Hirsh:

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I know we kind of talked about this at the party, but I, I think that right now, or my experience through this, my realization personally is how much I was previously attached to like my business is this offer that I created and then realizing it’s that’s ever going to be changing and evolving because if I don’t pivot and move fast at changing and meeting my market where they’re at, like for me, especially with iOS, I had to like work so hard and change things and serve people differently and help solve their problem. But realizing like I’m always going to be pivoting and changing in my business, no matter how much, I don’t want that to be the case. Like, it would be so great if it just lasted forever. But I think that is a big learning thing for people is they’re so attached to the fact of like, but this worked for me before it worked for me two years ago. So it must be my ads. It must be this, it must be this. It’s like, no, you just haven’t changed and you need to change.

Ryan Deiss:

Yeah. I mean, the biggest mistake that that entrepreneurs make is they define their business by either the product they sell or even worse, the way that they sell it. So they say, I’m going to define my business by I run a Facebook ads agency, or I’m going to define my business by I’m a D TOC e-commerce company, you know, or I’m a traditional retail company. If you define your business by the products and services you sell, or the way that you sell them, you will, at some point be disrupted. Every business must define. Every entrepreneur must define their business by the audience they serve, period. And so if the audience tastes change, then you get to decide do you want to go with them and continue to meet their needs? Or do you want to look for a different audience? Right. Which you can do, but you can’t be mad at them for changing their mind. And I see that happen a lot of times and people almost like, why don’t they want this anymore? They don’t.

Emily Hirsh:

Yeah. You can’t change it. They don’t.

Ryan Deiss:

Yeah. They don’t. And they don’t want to buy in that way anymore. I mean, look, one of the biggest markets for digital marketer. So the company that I’m probably best known for digital marketing, one of the biggest segments of our market we serve, there’s three primary segments that we serve. We serve marketing professionals. So people who work at companies as marketers and who want to up level their career or, you know, marketing leaders that want to train their people. So marketing pros also entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs who are at the early stages of business. And the only thing that really matters right now is selling what they got and then agencies, marketing consultants and agencies. So independent marketing professionals. Well, for years, that last segment, that’s been the biggest, fastest growing segment of digital marketers’ audience.

Ryan Deiss:

Yeah. The fastest one. Why? Because it was so easy. Anybody could go out there and just, I can run Facebook ads, too. And so everybody’s a Facebook agency. Therefore, we had a big, massive growing. It has been the lowest growing. It was the smallest segment of attendees at traffic and conversion last year than it has been in the last five years.  So we can get mad about that. Or what we could do is say, you know what a lot of these people are doing, a lot of these people are saying, screw the agency life. I’m going to go and just come up with something to sell, I’m going to do what I’ve been helping my clients do. I can come up with a product and they’re shifting over into the I’m the entrepreneur who’s going to, who needs to sell what I got.  So, we’re going to talk to you about selling what you got. There’s also a lot of these folks who are saying, I just need to go and get a job in Corporate America. I’ve got skills. They’re hiring like crazy. I get paid a ton of money right now if II can spell SEO. And they’re going over there and they’re bringing us with them. So we’ve had a complete change. Right. Who we’re talking to.

Emily Hirsh:

Yeah.

Ryan Deiss:

That’s how it goes.

Emily Hirsh:

Yeah. And the faster you do that, the faster you’ll bring back success or put revenue back up. I mean, that’s been my experience and I’m still changing like this month, literally, you know, changing and pivoting. And I think that it’s almost been taught in the online industry, especially that like, once you achieve success, you just do that thing and you just scale it and you don’t have to change anything and that’s not business. Even what you said on the, you focus on the audience and not the offer. You can look at big companies who made that mistake. You know, Microsoft. Netflix took over from Blockbusters. Like they made that mistake. Right. And they’re huge companies. And so I think it’s also something you have to almost constantly check yourself on and get out of your norm and get creative with what you’re doing, because it’s easier to just keep doing the same thing and hope for a different result.

Ryan Deiss:

And that’s why if I’m trying to sell somebody, which we don’t, but if you wanted to sell somebody a course on how to get rich online, then you would come up with one offer and sell it forever. Because that’s what people want to believe. That’s just not how business works. 

Emily Hirsh:

Exactly. Amen to that. Yeah. That’s not how it works. Okay. I want to pivot just a little bit and ask just from your experience, you have so much experience form different companies. One of the things that I admire the most about you is you don’t, you’re not as front facing as a lot of people in the digital marketing industry. Like you’re not the face, right, of digital marketing. You’re a part of it. How have you built that? Like, have you done that very intentionally and how have you done that? Because I know even myself, like I’m the face and I don’t always like that. Because all the content is on me and it’s, you know, it’s not as valuable of a company when it’s dependent on that person, but so much in our industry is that. Like they’re the face of the brand and it’s so hard to change that. So how have you intentionally done that? I’m curious.

Ryan Deiss:

It’s hard and I’ll tell you at the beginning you probably do need to be the face of your organization. I’m reliving that right now, because we launched a new brand at the scalable company and there I am back out front and center again. I don’t, you know, for me, it’s not easy. A lot of people like being in the limelight, they like the fame aspect. I don’t, I’m an introvert. I’m sure it’s not my favorite thing. But I’m willing to do it because it’s required because if you just have a logo and there’s nothing behind it, there’s no trust. There’s no character, no personality. Then it’s just a logo, like nobody’s ever going to trust that or want to do business with that. We want to do business with people.

Ryan Deiss:

So, in the beginning you are your company and your company is you, period. When you’re launching you need to be the best spokesperson your business has ever seen. Then over time you can get very intentional about, okay, what does it mean? Like what do people like about me and what I bring to this company, because obviously I’m resonating with someone if we’re successful and it’s why you can’t do this until you’ve experienced some degree of success. A lot of people want to decide ahead of time what their brand is going to be. It’s really hard to do unless it’s worked. And so go back to digital marketer, I’ll use this as a very specific example and I’ll tell you what we did so we can get out of the hypothetical and just in the here’s what we did. So I didn’t want it to be the Ryan Deiss show and I didn’t want to do it for the reasons that I mentioned before.

Ryan Deiss:

I also wanted to, if needed to sell it. And I I’ve known lots of people in businesses that they were stuck in. They couldn’t sell because they were the business. And so the first thing that you have to ask is, well, why are people attracted to me the, and this brand  and I think to do that, you have to acknowledge that they’re not attracted to you specifically because who you are when you’re facing your brand is probably different than who you are when you’re just at home with your, you know, with your kids, with your spouse, right? Yeah. It’s probably different than who you are when you’re hanging out with your friend. We’re always playing a character and it doesn’t mean that we’re lying. It’s just that we behave differently depending on what circles we’re running in.

Ryan Deiss:

And it’s only multiple personality disorder if you don’t know who you’re supposed to be. Right. And so to kind of unpack that is to say, well, what about me is resonating in this time? And what I realized is that in the marketing world, everybody was either super academic, like super crazy high level academic we’re running all these tests. And you know, you had literally like some of our, some of the brands that we competed with were brands like marketing profs, right? I mean, marketing professors, marketing. But like all of these very kind of highbrow, you know, professorial type things. And then the guru, I know everything and I do no wrong. And what people liked about us was that we screwed up a lot and admitted it. We’re like, yeah, we try out stuff and sometimes it works and we tell you when it works and we tell you when it doesn’t, but we generally dive into the tactics.

Ryan Deiss:

Yeah. And so I was thinking, and it’s a very simple exercise, but it’s harder than it seems, but it’s worthwhile for anybody to do. If you think about your brand and you say what character from movies, TV shows, comic books, do I kind of embody when I am doing what I’m doing for this company. And what I realized for me is I was Forrest Gump. Not even kidding. Yeah. Like I realized, I was like, whoa, okay. I’m kind of the idiot, right? You know, if you think about Forrest Gump, it’s like, he’s always messing up. Yeah. Right. I mean, but everybody loves him. Everybody loves him. Right. Because he’s got a good heart, like, well intentioned. You know, there’s that whole thing. And when I realized holy crap, there’s actually a tool and I’ve done some videos on, you know, on this called creating a character diamond.

Ryan Deiss:

I didn’t invent it. They teach it in screenwriting school. But it’s what makes an interesting character. An interesting character is somebody who there’s something about them that is extraordinary. So in our case, it’s like, we’re really good at marketing, we’re the marketing savant. But that needs to be counterbalanced by something that is also kind of extraordinary, but opposite of that, right. So if you have somebody who is, you know, a genius, but they also screw up a lot. That is by the way, the type character of the idiot savant. And we see this show up again and again and again, Michael Scott in the office was the idiot savant. Dustin Hoffman, the Rainman idiot. Somebody who’s brilliant at this one thing. Yeah. But really stupid in a lot of other areas. We like that character. It’s a character that we’ve seen a lot and we always like it cause we resonate with it.

Ryan Deiss:

Yeah. But then you need to say, what’s the hill you’re prepared to die on. Cause you don’t trust people if they stand for nothing. Right. Right. So, what do you stand for? And for us, a digital marketer, it’s just tactics, period. Like it’s like, let’s figure out the step by step tactics. Yeah. No freaking theory. Just give me, just give me the absolute, the absolute tactics. In terms of the mistakes, well, those are on, they’re also looking for where, what are their flaws? Because, they don’t have flaws. They’re not human, you know, you’re Superman, your Clark Kent, your man of steel, can’t be defeated. There’s nothing there. Right. So, you know, for us, it’s like, yeah, we definitely just screw up a lot. Right. Yeah. And so if you pack those together, that’s a really interesting character that we’ve seen. And so if you want to shift from you being the face to then hand that off to other people and, and that’s kind of the next stage you have to first say, what is the character diamond of this particular brand that makes it interesting?

Ryan Deiss:

Then I could say, okay, anybody that I put have come next to me up on the stage, anybody that at any point in time is going to be another face of this business, they also have to embody this character diamond. Right. And so one of the first people that we did this with was Molly Pittman. Yeah. Who now has gone on running her own businesses. She’s now running the CEO of smart marketer and is doing great. But Molly literally was on stage one year at Traffic and Conversion Summit Fully. Mic’d up about to finish her talk and was like, you know, “Okay. Everybody I think that’s it. It’s got to be it, because I got to pee.” No joke said in front of thousand people, “I got to pee,” and then ran off stage. And I thought to myself, that’s literally a line from Forrest Gump.

Emily Hirsh:

It is. Yeah.

Ryan Deiss:

Who better than this person to do it. Right. Yeah. And, yet at the same time you got my co-founder and business partner, Richard Lender. Okay. Richard. I don’t know if you’ve seen, Richard’s like pretty buttoned up perfect. Like his hair is always right. He doesn’t really mess up, he’s not particularly self-deprecating, so it’s like, you could be around, but you don’t really get to be a face of the brand. Right. We had a news anchor who came and worked for us, a former news anchor that came and work for us in our comms department. And she would help with PR, but I would never put her in front of the camera. Right. And she’s like, I’ve got more on camera and experience than anybody else here. Why won’t you put me on camera? And I said, you’re too perfect.

Emily Hirsh:

Yeah.

Ryan Deiss:

You do not embody the character diamond that is digital marketer.

Emily Hirsh:

Yeah.

Ryan Deiss:

It’s just like I get it. And so once you clarify that, now you can begin to slot other people instead of you and your audience will accept it as long as they fill in those different areas of the character diamond. And then as more of them come, you can begin to step back and it’s like, you were never missed. And we will remain true to the voice. The voice of the brand, the voice of that particular character. And so that is, I don’t know, that’s how you do it and it’s not easy. It literally takes years.

Emily Hirsh:

Yeah. That’s awesome. And I mean, I like that at the beginning you said, but you have to be involved. And I think that’s the key is like you have to be the face first to figure that out. And there’s probably a lot of people who try to start without being the face to start to make it easy. And I think another important thing you said is you started the new company and you step back in to do this, to build this. And I think that’s just indicative of your character of being willing to do the work right. Willing to step in willing to let..

Ryan Deiss:

Let me acknowledge something really quick, though. I thought too, because I’m arrogant. I thought I got to skip steps and for a year and the first thing I did, we created the scalable brand is I created a character diamond for it.

Emily Hirsh:

Yeah.

Ryan Deiss:

And I tried to go out there and not have me be out there and for, you know, almost 18 months it went nowhere. And then finally, when I was like, all right, let me get out there. Let me start creating videos. Yeah. And it’s only literally been in the last month or so that I finally just dove right back in. So even me who knows this stuff, right. We always like to think..

Emily Hirsh:

We always want to do that. You know, I do that too. Like we don’t want to eat the frog or whatever that saying is of like having to do that thing, but there’s so much in business that you have to do that. So I think that’s, that’s a great example. Okay. My last kind of question that I have for you that I love asking successful entrepreneurs, because I always wonder, is what do you do to manage like the pressure of employees, especially in a time right now, I know like in the last year I’ve felt it a lot of ups and downs of, of entrepreneurship and being like breadwinner employees. And especially when it does get harder, like how do you manage that pressure? What is your advice on that?

Ryan Deiss:

I’m fortunate. So I mean, there’s a couple of simple things and then I’ll give you something that’s maybe a bit more something that anybody can do. I’m fortunate. I’m always coaching and being coached and I think that’s essential for any entrepreneur. The worst season in my life when I grew the least and, and struggled the most was we had masterminds and we had coaching programs and because I was so busy with them, I stopped being in masterminds and I stopped being coached. And I just think you have to do both. I think you should always be mentoring someone no matter how early you are, maybe it’s a kid, maybe it’s a student, just somebody in your family just to help them because it gives you that perspective. And I think that we always need to be coached.

Ryan Deiss:

So that’s one of the ways to do it, to have somebody that you can vent to. It’s really, really, really important. Because the tactical thing that I do when things are getting really, really dark and I’m getting really, really scared is I allow myself to do business with the worst case scenario, so I’ll actually sit there and I will, whether it’s through journaling or again, my, my preferred way of doing it is just venting, to a very close peer or, or a mentor and saying here’s what I’m worried about. And I just want to play out different scenarios. When I hear my myself say some of the stupid crap that I’ve allowed to fester in my brain and I realize how utterly absurd it is, it’s like, okay, well if, if you know, so let’s iOS 14, so iOS 14 happened.

Ryan Deiss:

And so therefore everything I’ve ever done is gone because that was literally the only thing that ever mattered apparently. I’m never going to be able to figure it out because I guess I’m a complete idiot. All of my clients are going to leave me, my friends are going to realize what a miserable disappointment I am and they’re going to be like, haha. My wife’s going to leave me. My dog’s going to run. And I just allow myself to go and I hear all the things that I say and I go, you know what? That’s not going to happen.

Emily Hirsh:

Yeah.

Ryan Deiss:

Right. And so I come back from the brink by allowing myself to go there in a safe place. And, it’s really, really powerful when you go ahead and put words because the worst things that we do to ourselves, the worst stories that we tell the most violent stories that we tell are the stories that we tell to ourselves in our quiet moments, in the dark.

Ryan Deiss:

And if you can just get out of the dark and it, it isn’t quiet and you vocalize it, you realize that the things that you’re saying are just a lie, you’re lying to yourself and you would say that and you go, okay, but there’s a kernel of truth here. So let’s, let’s talk about this. Right. This does suck. Well, what does it really mean? Well, it means that we’re going to not have the same targeting options that we had before. Well, what does that mean? If we can’t micro target, you know, through technology, what are some other ways we can micro target? Well, could we target through messaging? Yeah, we could target through messaging. Okay. So what do I need to really get good at? Well, I need to get really good at messaging and coming up with big ideas. So, I just need to learn something new. That’s fine. I’ve learned new things before. I maybe need to watch for new examples. Okay. I can do that. I should be able to figure this out. Whereas we’ll never allow ourselves to think and process because we’re living in panic mode because of a lie that we told ourselves. So I just go there, I go to a deep, dark place. I allow myself to panic safely. Yeah. We jokingly say step one is to panic.

Emily Hirsh:

Yeah. Yeah. That’s good. It’s always the first time. It’s so good. And I think it’s important. Like it can be really isolating. That’s kind of what I have learned through the first harder time that I went through is like, when I didn’t tell anyone I experienced the same thing. Panic. And it was like, I couldn’t tell my husband, because I was like, what if he gets more worried? And I’m the breadwinner. And so who do I tell? And I can’t tell my team, because I don’t want them to know something’s wrong. So you just like keep it all in and that’s obviously not productive. So I think that’s so simple, but it brings it to like solutions oriented the logical brain where you can actually move forward with actions.

Ryan Deiss:

And realizing that you’re not alone.

Emily Hirsh:

Absolutely!

Ryan Deiss:

Realizing that it’s not just you that’s sitting there broken and scared. And it is hard. Look, if you’re if you’re married, you’re in a committed relationship, the person that you spend the most time with, if they’re not in the business with you, they’re probably not going to understand. And if they’re human and they see that you’re scared, they’re probably going to get scared too. Right. And they’re probably going to want to tell you stuff like, it’s going to be okay. Yeah. But you’re not going to believe them. Because they don’t know anything. You know that. So, it’s just going to kind of drive you further apart and isolate you. And so, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t talk to them but you absolutely need to have peers and mentors that you can talk and vent to and in terms of peers and you need both, right. Because you need peers who are like, yeah, yeah, me too. Me too. I’m scared to, what do you think? And you can hear each other, just be total irrational, panicking idiots. Yeah. And be like, we’re kind of both being, you know, whiny little bitches right now. Aren’t like, yeah, we are. Okay. And then you need mentors who will just sit there quietly, listen to you, do all your whole thing and go ready to fix this yet..

Emily Hirsh:

Absolutely. Give you the, the kick in the butt that you need sometimes. Yeah, for sure. Awesome. Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Ryan, for your time. If anyone wants to go and check out what you’re up to and, and look at some more of your content, where should they head to?

Ryan Deiss:

Yeah. If you’re an entrepreneur and you’re kind of in that feeling super stuck and, and worried about climbing the next mountain, breaking through the next barrier. That’s what we’re all about at the scalable company. So scalable.co that’s my new passion project. I love marketing. You know, we still own, I’m very active at digitalmarketer.com. But I just love entrepreneurs, too. And so yeah, if that’s where you are and so much of what we’ve talked about, look, you’re a marketer, you know, you get this stuff, but you’re an entrepreneur.

Emily Hirsh:

Yeah.

Ryan Deiss:

Yeah. You’re an entrepreneur that does marketing.

Emily Hirsh:

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

Ryan Deiss:

And that’s, that’s what we talk about. And so I think if somebody got value out of this conversation, you know, you’re an entrepreneur. That’d be the place.

Emily Hirsh:

Awesome. Well, definitely go check that out. Ryan has some of the best content out there, so thank you so much for your time. This was awesome. It was great to have you on the podcast.

Ryan Deiss:

Thanks for having me.

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