Hey MFM fans, it's Sean here. And I want to let you know about something pretty cool. You have an opportunity to get on to my first million. How does that work? Well, we're going to be doing a live episode on June 8th. And it's going to be our first demo day. A few lucky startups are going to be able to pitch us. Their company live on my first million soon. It's gonna be like Shark Tank. You're going to hear them pitch. You're going to hear our reaction and we might actually invest our money into these companies if they're any good. It's like a live episode of Shark Tank done. The my first Million Way, which is going to be
I see a little more real talk than what you see on Shark Tank. We're doing this in partnership with our friends at stock.com. If you're looking to raise some money, go ahead and apply its stumps sto. NK, s.com, / MF M as in my first million so stocks.com MFM that's where you apply. If you want a picture start up to us now, on to the show. Alright, let's take a quick break to talk about success story, a new podcast by the HubSpot podcast Network. Success story, features, Q&A
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Successful Business Leaders keynote presentations and stuff about sales marketing and business. They have episodes. For example, the Dark Side of venture capital sounds interesting
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and the day you understand this framework as the day you basically know marketing. If you're considering going to business school to learn marketing. Let me save you. Two years and about 200,000 dollars. It's just one diagram.
I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to put my all into it. Like all Days on the Road, Less Traveled never looking
back. Hey guys, this is producer. Ben. Sam has been in Europe. Sean has been in Hawaii. And so we are going into the vaults this week for an episode. We dipped way back into the vaults as from a couple years ago and it is Sean laying out. Some of his favorite Frameworks favorite ways to think about entrepreneurship and and how to start and run a business.
And I thought it's really valuable and because one of our early early episodes, it has very few downloads compared to what you get now. So over 90% of you haven't listened to this before, so we thought it'd be good to to reshare it. So check it out Sean's. Favorite Frameworks. Hey guys, Sean here. Gonna try something different for this episode. This
is going to be 10 of my favorite Frameworks as you guys know,
I am the framework Don the framework King.
The prince of Frameworks and really just a nerd about
Frameworks. And so over the over the years. I've tried to take all the lessons. I learned building businesses and turn them into
little nuggets that I can remember a little principles philosophies or Frameworks, whatever you want to call it.
And so, I attend together and I recorded myself reading it. This is like, when Lucky Charms release, the marshmallows only version of the cereal. It's just the best stuff. There's four techniques for Frameworks and the four best philosophies. That's
Total, I hope you enjoy your to-do list is killing you. I use list for years and I love writing to list, but as soon as I put the pen down anxiety, would start and the longer my list went, I would just start collecting dust. It would just serve as a guilt trip for all the stuff that I didn't do yet. So even though list feel good in the moment, they're not the best way to be productive. One of the problems with list is that they bury the headline in
Your day, there's probably one or two things that are way more important than everything else. If you just did those things alone your day would be a success. It's that old 80/20 rule. I call that my one big thing or opt for short instead of making a list. I ask myself. What's the one highest impact thing I could do today? Take note my friend. I said impact not difficulty. Don't confuse the two and sometimes that high-impact thing is just a 15-minute phone call or sat.1 conversation. I've really
Voiding with Mikey person. That's it. And if I do my OB T, the rest of the day, anything else I do is just gravy on top. I have a zero guilt. Once. I've done my OB T. It's a simple daily productivity technique that has made me way more productive and way less stressed. And by the way, the two things go together, and I know what you're saying you're going to say but but what about all those things that I need to do? Okay. Well even with an OB T you sometimes have to write stuff down so you don't
Lose track of it, but not on a list instead. Use what I call the power box. I think other people have different names for this, but I invented it for myself. And so, I named it for myself, a power box, is a, imagine like an X and Y axis. This is a little bit easier if you just look at the diagram, but I'll try to describe it on the y-axis. We have impact high impact on the top low impact on the bottom and from left to right, you have not urgent to Urgent and anytime I think of a task like
A and I need to get a haircut low impact but might be getting urgent, you know, depending on the situation or if it's, I need to find a tax accountant because I got to do my taxes in a month. That's high impact and its high urgency. Maybe I have a big pitch or big sales presentation. I need to do high impact and if it's if it's tomorrow, it's high urgency. If it's two months from now, I'll put it in the lower engine see bucket. You get the idea.
It's like a list but it Maps every task based on what matters time, sensitivity or urgency an impact. And when it comes to do it, when a new thing comes up, I just quickly triage it into one of these boxes is very, I don't know stress relieving to do that. Then, you know where it stands, you know, when to went to get to it. There's a powerful way to organize your day.
Whenever I start a new project, I make a kickoff Dock and there's four parts to any kickoff process that I do. Number one, I Define winning. Number two. I set my anti goals number three. I back-of-the-envelope. What does it take to get there? Number four? I figure out how to get one hour of momentum. Notice. What's not on this list? I didn't say research or asking other people if it's a good idea.
Via or worrying. If it's going to work or not or coming up with grand vision statements, you know, those come later. Let me give you a breakdown of each of those parts. So, defining winning. I like to set clear measurable goals. So, you know, you can say, I want to achieve financial success and not stress out about money. It's not a great goal because what is success? And by when there's no time. So you could also say, I want to have 5 million in liquid assets, by the age of 35.
That's a good simple goal. It's measurable. It's time bound. So now you can actually act against that goal. The trick is to see. Could I fail this? If you can measure it, then you can fail it. So how ambitious should you be with your goals? Should you shoot for the moon or be realistic trick? Question? Do both? I like to set two goals. There's a good goal. Like if we hit this goal and things went well and then there's what I call the fuck. Yeah, goal. That's pretty self-explanatory. Some people call it a
Rich goal, but I prefer my lingo. This is what you do. This is the goal. If you hit it, you'd be excited about it. You would say fuck. Yeah.
All right, process apart to setting your anti goals. There's an old saying when it comes to deal-making, which is you pick the price. I'll pick the terms, basically, even if you get the price you want, if the terms of screwed up, you'll be screwed up. So, let's say your dream was to become a musician and guess what you did it. But while you're touring the world, you gained a bunch of weight, you get addicted to drugs. Your marriage is in shambles. Your kids don't recognize you so you won the battle, but you lost the war.
I stole this idea from my friend Andrew Wilkinson. It's called setting anti goals. These are the things that you don't want to happen along the way. Write these down. So now you got your goals and you have your anti goals. So step 3 time to back-of-the-envelope, how might I get there. I'm a big fan of running quick numbers on things early on even when I have no clue how to achieve the goal doing a quick calculation will show you some of the options. Let's say, I want to make a million dollars. I can make a one dollar app and sell it to me.
People or can create a hundred thousand dollar product and find ten customers. The back of the envelope is meant to walk through some of the scenarios and identify which numbers seem hard to hit the ones you're worried about. That becomes my focus. Okay, that seems hard to do. How could I do it? How might I get there? I start to brainstorm strategies to get to that. Number. The last piece is getting one hour of momentum. It's the most important step. You never want to leave the scene of a decision without taking action. So I end the kickoff by brain.
Storming things that I can do in an hour, not researching or planning things. Like can I talk to a customer right now or couldn't make a prototype in an hour and show that to somebody the whole process. For this whole kickoff, should take about one to two hours and it creates a ton of momentum. Give it a shot.
This is one of my favorite Frameworks. It's called Big Mario marketing and the day you understand this framework as the day. You basically know marketing. If you're considering going to business school to learn marketing. Let me save you, two years and about 200,000 dollars. It's just one diagram and I know you can't see it, but I'll
describe it.
So, on the left side, there's a little picture of Mario, Mario when he's small and this is a, you know, a potential customer of yours.
Yes, and then the customer, you know Little Mario's running along and finds this item right? Item is in this case a fire flower. That's your product and when little Mario picks up that item he becomes big Mario and can shoot fireballs and kick
everybody's ass,
right? And the big mistake that most people make, and these are smart people. Make this mistake, is they get so obsessed with their product. The thing they're building is the company, something they work on every day that
And they go to tell customers about it. They go to market their company. They talk about their product, right? They talk about the fire flower.
But you have to understand that people don't care about you. They don't care about your fire flower. They care about themselves. They care about themselves going. From little Mario who's weak and can't really do anything. Too. Big Mario, who can run around shoot fireballs and kick everybody's
ass.
So I don't care what you're doing. Let's say you're selling breakfast bars. You could tell me about the granola and the bar and the carbs and all this good stuff. But instead you should tell me how this bar will save me.
It's in the mornings because I have a grab-and-go breakfast now and how all lose weight, because you made this delicious bar with no carbs. No sugar at it. I repeat. Nobody cares about your product. Literally, nobody even your mom. Your mom doesn't care about your product. Your mom cares about you, and customers care about themselves. Everybody cares about their own quality of life improving. So that's what you should do. You should describe how their life will improve, if they use a special little item of yours, the special product of yours, and then you
Back it up with evidence and social proof and explanations for why it works. So I'll give you an example. I have this thing called the all-access pass. It's where I blog about, you know, businesses that I'm starting. And the reader, you know, little Mario in this case, is somebody who wants to build a successful business, but it's not sure how to do it, right? They have ideas, but they've never really been successful as an entrepreneur before. So, they're, they're, they're unsure and big Mario. Is that version of them? That's confident that knows they can build a successful business.
Somebody who's seen it firsthand, how to do it. And now his arm that the toolkit of tactics in a blueprint that they can follow to be successful. So that's what I provide. I give you a way to go from unsure to confident and you're confident because I showed you how I did it. And I gave you tools and I gave you tactics in a blueprint follow. That's it now, you know, marketing.
So I have a little play book that I use to get unstuck and it happens, right? You get stuck. You have a setback. You face an obstacle, you hit a wall. We have all these words for this. It's just you trying to move forward and it's not easy, and it can feel draining. I call these plateaus, and when you're in a plateau, you feel stuck. When I was younger. I used to over react to these types of situations. I would hit a plateau and I would just feel worthless. Like, why can't I make this work? And then I moved.
Looking Valley and I got on Twitter and now everywhere. I looked, I just saw people, you know, crushing it and it made me feel even more worthless. I've learned that there are three ways to handle plateaus. I learned this from Tony Robbins. He says, you can be number one, a dabbler, a dabbler hits, a plateau, and gives up moves on to the next one. Right? Dabble in this, a double in that.
The second type. It is what you'll encounter, what I encountered a lot of at work, or I went to a good University, and these are called stressor Achievers. So a stressor hits a plateau, get stressed, chunk. Some coffee loses, some sleeve, sleep and tries to plow through it. They try to work their way to the Bone to try to make it work. This is the person cramming for an exam.
It works, but it's painful. You're not going to enjoy the journey. You're not even really going to enjoy the destination because you'll be so worn out by the time you get there.
The last option is a master and a master hits a plateau, and it greets him like an old friend. Right? A master says, Ah, mr. Plateau. I thought I'd be seeing you soon because a master knows that plateaus are inevitable. There are part of the growth process. Why would you stress over the inevitable? That's like stressing out every time. The sun goes down each day. So if you're trying to grow, you know, plateaus are gonna happen.
So a master creates a Playbook or a recipe for how to break through and I'll tell you mine. So step one of the plateau breakthrough recipe. First, relax, plateaus are always a part of any growth process isn't normal a to get in the right state of mind, you know, you make better decisions. I know I do, I make better decisions and I'm more creative when I'm feeling loose, when I'm feeling confident, when I'm feeling happy, and when I'm frustrated or tie,
Scared or stressed? I make bad decisions. It's just that simple. So, how do I change my mental state? How do I change my state of mind? I use the 3m's music which is easy, put on music and you're already. You'll start to your photos are tap in and you'll start to feel a little different movement. This is a big one. A lot of people try to change the way they feel through their brain and that's like, you know, trying to open up a door, you know, using your fingernails rather than the key.
It's very painful, slow way to do it. So movement is a faster way to change your mindset. You could do push-ups. You can go do some wind Sprints. You can swim. You can do jumping jacks to 25 minutes on any kind of high-intensity movement, physical movement, and you will change the way you feel. You could even just do a quick ice plunger, you know, splash some cold water, on your face. It will change the way you feel and the last one. Now we go into the head is meaning
It's putting a different meaning on what's going on. So instead of thinking shit. This isn't working. You reframe it right? Maybe you reframe it as. All right. This is an opportunity to try something new or okay. This is a signal. It's pushing me. I got to get more creative to solve this or all right. Let me roll up. My sleeves is a chance to sharpen up my skills and learn more. It sounds a little corny. But the meaning you give something will totally change your response to it. When you think you're getting screwed you'll get angry.
When you think you're being challenged or tested you might rise up. If you think the world is giving you an opportunity, you will approach that situation in a very different way,
you know, as a leader, you're always on the lookout to arm yourself with knowledge, the books and seminars to podcast, to help you make the best decisions for you and your customers. Because
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My favorite one of all is no matter how bad it gets. I say this is going to make for a hell of a story later and just putting that meaning of this is a hell of a story in the making changes, my own experience.
In two minutes, I can change my state of mind and when I'm in the right State I start asking questions. I don't look for answers. I ask questions. I say, what does the data tell me is that's happening. What's the evidence? What does the evidence telling me? Number two? I'll say what's the stupidly obvious thing? I haven't tried
yet or what would
a friend or mentor of mine do in this situation? Right? What would somebody who's awesome do?
Another question is, what's a 20% tweak? I could make what's a little change? That would make a hundred percent of a difference.
Another one is who's already successfully doing this? And what the heck are they doing differently than what I'm doing? Lastly, who are three, smart people. I could talk to on the phone to help me solve this.
As a little sidebar, the name I use is Suey. My friend Cecilia is probably the best entrepreneur. I know. And so I always ask what Suli do. I've never seen him. Stay stuck for long. He's always positive. He's always thinking. He's always taking massive action and finding a way to win. In fact, he literally text me in the morning. I'll five times a month just saying, let's win win win today, all caps win win win. I don't even know what he's talking about. He doesn't even know what I'm working on. That's just his mindset. So whenever I get stuck I start to
Feel that energy draining out of me. I think. What would Sully do it? Just asking that question, makes me 20% more creative and determined to win. You don't even have to know the guy just ask yourself that question.
Okay, the final step of getting unstuck patients. I'm an impatient motherfucker in general, right? I used to take pride in that patient. Who wants to be patient, patient people. Just wait around doing nothing all day, right? I'm not patient. I take action. You see? I viewed action taking and patients as opposites. But then one day like, you know, the modern-day Buddha that I am. I figured it out. I got wise and I said, okay, I need to be impatient with action and patient with results.
I'll say that again. Slower this time impatient with action, patient with results. This is the yin and yang of Entrepreneurship follow this and you will win, win win, like Sully says, it's just a matter of time, building an audience, first, you know, my audience is like steroids if I was you, and I was somebody who watches me? Do what I do. I would think I would think man, this guy is able to do all this because of his audience. It makes everything easier when I don't know something. I asked.
When I want to spread the word I mentioned on my podcast, having an audience gives you optionality to build many future businesses. When I started my podcast, I had no idea. I would be doing other businesses based off that, I raised us and a start-up fund from listeners. I created a paid newsletter that makes tons of money and I could have never seen that going. But once I created this audience, I had all these options and that's with my teeny tiny audience. Imagine if I was actually famous, you know, I can't even imagine how easy it is for Joe Rogan or
Paul on, Kylie Jenner or you know, these YouTubers to launch new projects or get the problem solved. They could, they could snap their fingers, take a tweet, something out. And people would come out of the woodwork to help them get where they want to go. It took me one year to build my audience and that was in my spare time. If I had focused. I think I could have done in about half the time if you don't know what to you know, exactly what you want to build, or what company you want to start. I recommend building an audience, first building, an audience, in a topic area that you care about, or
Building an audience of a group of people that, you know, really? Well, that can be a great place to start and it can give you options when you do think of a killer idea. You can start with a newsletter or podcast or YouTube channel, whatever medium is fun for you because if this stuff takes time and it's not easy and you don't get instant results, so it's got to be fun. You have to enjoy creating the content. Now, how do you actually build that audience? That's a topic for another day.
All news is good news. There's two big mistakes that I've seen Founders make and I've learned not to make these mistakes anymore. I make some new ones, but I don't make these ones anymore. The first is that bad news. Demoralizes them and even worse is the second one because bad news demoralizes them. They therefore subconsciously avoid looking in places where there might be bad news, which sometimes not be your company bank account, or the metrics dashboard, or going out and talking to customers.
But for us all news is good news if I'm working on something and it's works, good news. It worked. If I'm doing something and it's not working, good news. I learned something. I learned something from this. I try to always create a culture where I want to see the data whether it's good, bad or ugly. And the way to do that is to make it so that all news is good news. This creates a habit where people start to seek out the truth to go. Look for the data. They go try to talk to customers and see what they'll say.
Because no matter what happens, we're going to celebrate the finding when the news is bad. We don't panic or get demoralized. We focus on the learning. What this result. Teach us. The sounds obvious, right? This is a lesson. I could teach a third grader. So why did I put this as such? A big take away because in my experience 98 percent of Founders don't operate this way. They write an emotional roller coaster based on good or bad news. You don't have to ride that RollerCoaster. Your entrepreneurial life will be more fun and more successful. If you just adopt the mantra.
All news is good news.
Work like a lion. Not a cow. I stole this from Duvall. I heard it and I loved it. Today. We are trained to work like cows cows stand on the field all day, slowly chewing week and low nutrient grass every day. The same thing at the same slow pace. This is how we're trained to work right 9 to 5 Monday through Friday 50 weeks in the year.
Go to work. Instead. We should work like a lion, a lion, sits weights observes looks for its prey and when it sees it, then they Sprint hunt and catch it. Then they eat. They enjoy, they celebrate. And they hunt is a pack and then they rest their relaxed and they wait for the next juicy. Pray. This is how winners work its high intensity and it's focused on the high-value projects that juicy pray.
And this frequent breaks to rest and recover. Your not just grinding all day. You're not just standing there. Working all day. Your boss, may not like this. But this is the way that Winners work work like a lion, not a cow.
We don't sell Saddles here. Have you ever heard the memo that the CEO of slack, you know, 18 billion dollar company. He sent his employees before they launched. If you haven't, you should check it out. It's called, we don't sell Saddles here. Go read that shit, and come back to must read, but I'll try to explain it in simple terms. If you're operating in a new or a niche market, you want to promote the lifestyle, not your product. But what does that mean? Put let's put the dip. Let's put it differently. Let's say you're a company. That makes sense.
All's right, Saddles the kind of thing you put
on a horse. So rather than talking about how your saddle is better than the other Saddles and just marketing to people who already are in the saddle market and looking at me looking to buy a saddle, know, they may already have one and they don't want to switch, and the never heard of your brand. They've heard of some other brands instead. What if you promoted the lifestyle of horseback riding to the masses? Instead, This is why the CEO slack, explain we don't sell Saddles here meaning instead of just selling their chat app.
They sold a dream of working without so much damn email. And if you sold that lifestyle of working without email being buried, in these long email threads, he offered an alternative. You could use this live chat app, and we put this into action when we were promoting our course, right? We had a niche course learning how to buy businesses. Not many people were in that market to try to learn how to buy businesses. So instead of selling the course, we started promoting the badass entrepreneurs who buy businesses who have done it.
I built a hundred million dollar Empires doing it. So we ignored our saddle, which is the course, and instead promoted the badass Cowboys who like horseback riding like Jim author Andrew Wilkinson. It worked way better. People love to learn about this new lifestyle and then they start to ask. All right. I kind of want to go horseback riding, which saddle should I use? And we were right there, ready to sell them or saddle?
This is a tactic that we stole from Breck's. You know, we like to say good artists, copy, great artists, steal. That's Pablo, you know, the big paint Picasso. So he used to say so like a great artist. We stole this sales tactic from bricks, which is a multi billion dollar startup grew really fast because they had tactics like this and we use this tactic to close about 500,000 dollars for our fund and two days. We used it for fundraising but you can pretty much use it for any sales process that happens over email. So here's the
Taking action. I'll show you an example from bricks. So you have a sales agent from Breck's who writes an email to a client and he says, you know, hello client, you know, my chief sales officer asked that I reach out to you see below and Below. He has an email from the chief sales officer saying, hey, check out, you know, the prospect name, check out the prospect name. They're not on bricks, and I think we can help them. Can you start with a call to the, to the, you know, name?
Of the person offered a wave, the credit card fees and get them on the accelerated rewards list if they're open to trying us out by the end of the month. It's a private email from the chief sales officer to the sales rep, but the sales rep is sharing this with the client. And now the whole thing is he says, you know, my chief sales officer said, I should reach out to, you see below for context breakfast, a corporate credit card, designed for companies like yours. We don't require a personal guarantee. We offer High credit limits and with the best rewards program.
Want any corporate credit card? Do you have a few minutes for a call? Now? This is genius because a, it feels special. It feels like you've been handpicked by someone with authority, right? The chief sales officer had reached out to his own sales rep and said, go talk to them. They look interesting. It feels raw, right? You got a forwarded private email. You're not even supposed to see that email. So you feel like you're seeing something real and it's friendly. All the language in these emails is transparent, very friendly. It's not like a normal cold email where you just feel
Feel like it's a robot could be writing this. So here's our version. We would say. Hey blankety-blank. Nice to meet you. Sean. Saw that you signed up for the fund waitlist and he wants to open up a spot for you. See below. I'm happy to share more details with you. But just so, you know, to invest, you have to be an accredited investor and here's a link to the deck. If you haven't seen it and walk you through all the key points, give it a read and let us know if you're interested jumping in and then, you know, below that, there's an email from me saying, hey, Ben.
I saw that blankety-blank signed signed up in his background, looks really good for the fund. He helped do X, Y, and Z. This is just pulled from the LinkedIn.
Can you reach out to him and offer him one of the spots that just opened up in the fund. Now, this little tactic closed about half a million dollars in two days, great artists steal, and keep an eye out for the great tactics that other people are using, and put your own spin on it, just like this one. I feel like I can rule the world. I know, I could be what I want to put my all into it. Like all Days on the Road. Less Traveled never looking back.
