0 (2s):
Lights that spark Fire Nation JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs On Fire brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network with great shows like being boss today, we'll be focusing on entrepreneurs, changing the world to drop these value bombs. I brought Anthony Sarandrea into EOFire studios. He is recognized as one of the top customer generators in the world, specializing in the financial services space, running a team that drove over 1 million customers. In 2020. Today, he runs a profitable portfolio of websites arranging from commerce to content blogs that combined reach millions of buyers every month and drive 4,000 inbound calls per day. As an affiliate. He is consistently featured as one of the top under 30 entrepreneurs and was recently featured alongside Snapchat's founder, Evan Spiegel, as one of the “Entrepreneurs Changing the World”.

0 (50s):
And today Fire Nation, we'll talk about the culture of rejection about working with friends and family approaching publicly traded companies, how to fail fast and so much more. When we get back from thanking our sponsors Fire Nation, are you finally ready to publish a book the right way Kevin Anderson and associates can help for a limited time, they're offering Fire Nation a free 90 minute consultation to discuss writing and publishing your book in just six months. Visit KAWriting.com/fire to schedule your free 90 minute consultation today. That's KAWriting.com/fire ever wish you had a mentor to help improve your customer experience and scale your business.

0 (1m 30s):
HubSpot's new podcast, the shakeup with Alexis Gay and Brianne Kimmel has you covered. I love it because it shares how real people are building real businesses in very unique ways. Listen, learn, and grow with the HubSpot podcast network at hubspot.com/podcast network. Anthony say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with.

1 (1m 55s):
What's up everyone. I believe that becoming successful or wealthy is actually a spiritual or Goodwill obligation that you have. And the reason why I say that because being successful can have a lot of negative connotations. People feel like Jeff Bezos is dirty, cause he's so rich or sales are dirty. Things like that. I think you need to create more value consistently in the marketplace in order to become successful. So therefore I believe it really, at the end of the day, it's a call it a human Goodwill, a spiritual, if you're religious obligation to become successful, because it means you're creating value for your employees, your investors, your customers, your vendors, and everyone around you. Otherwise you by definition cannot become successful unless you're creating an immense amount of value consistently. And

0 (2m 34s):
You can create value to a lot of places in this world. I mean, I do believe in the phrase that's, you know, people that say money can't buy happiness, have never been able to give a blank check to a charity or a cause that they truly believe in because man, that will make you thrilled and happy. And today we're talking for our nation about entrepreneurs who are changing the world. And as you heard in the introduction, Anthony is obviously one of those, but I want to start off Anthony, by talking about the culture of selling in the culture of rejection, you have a story of going door to door, selling solar panels, which that's all about selling. And that's all about rejection because you have had some doors slammed in your face brothers.

0 (3m 17s):
So talk about that story.

1 (3m 20s):
I did exactly what you mentioned. I went door to door selling solar hot water systems in the Arizona, 120 degree heat, right? But quickly found this little thing called the internet and pivoted, but found that the, you know, that that same principle applied of gaining trust within the first few seconds and having to deal with, you know, now online, it might be, campaign's not working, but then it's, it's getting doors slammed in your face. I think you need to, or, or entrepreneurs in general, you know, w w what is it Les brown says, you know, you do the things that are hard. Your life will be easier, or you do things that are easier. Life will be harder. I think, I think you may have like, almost like a sickening, delusional attitude to run at things that are uncomfortable for those around you.

1 (4m 1s):
And, and, and one of those being that, that, that spirit of rejection, and being able to handle that and being able to emotionally be ready for the next at-bat and the next step and the next step at it. And I think that's just so overwhelming li necessary for an entrepreneur. Even if they think they're more of a tech entrepreneur, or they're someone like, oh, I'm not the sales guy or anything like that. Well, your product or your service or your software is going to fail over and over and over again. And people aren't going to like this or that, or this about you cannot please everyone. So starting to build that, that call it, call it a, you know, attitude of, of, of resilience. It is, in my opinion, one of the most necessary skills that you as an entrepreneur or as a human can build to be able to carry on whatever your mission or journey is in this life

0 (4m 45s):
Was one of your tactics that you use while you were selling door to door to quickly attain trust. What did that look like?

1 (4m 52s):
A few of the things we would do is, you know, you could go talk to the grumpiest guy on the street. I didn't even sell them. I just got to know him. And I would just literally talk to him and, and learn about his neighbors and everything like that. And then I would, I would then take him his name and his address to the next door neighbor. And I'd say, I'd say, you know, I just talked with, with, with, with John and everyone in the neighborhood knows John's the grouch. And I'd say, you know, John, John was telling me a little bit about how much this utility bills are and this and that. And, you know, I didn't know where w where you were, but, you know, I got to have tea with John and, and, and hang out with them a little bit longer. So essentially I leveraged, like in, in, in, in modern day would be like an influencer. In this case, it was like the gate getting past the gatekeeper. The gatekeeper may have been the neighbor, but yet, you know, being able to go to the next door neighbor and saying, Hey, you know, indirectly I gained your, you know, the gatekeepers trust let's have a conversation was that was a pretty effective tactic.

1 (5m 43s):
What a

0 (5m 44s):
Tactic that is fascinating go after the grouch Fire Nation. And that's the end of the interview. Now, I'm just getting, talking next about working with friends and family, because let's be honest, that can be trouble. So talk to us that working with friends and family and how you personally navigated that minefield

1 (6m 3s):
And immense benefit to that, I think you inherently have loyalty. You're not necessarily worried about them stealing trade secrets or turnover you trust these people. And I think the business can, can grow in a lot of ways because of that. I think where the, where it becomes a little harder is, is even in those early stages. But especially as you grow, when you get past that it's now are, are, are you overbearing overstepping our, do you have feelings of setting in that that, oh, the my brother's not working that hard, or maybe he's not the right person for the shop. Someone else shouldn't be in there. And, and, and then you're micromanaging, then you're losing that friendship and family relationship. And I, I think that's something I, I, I've learned the hard ways in a lot of ways I've been able to manage around.

1 (6m 46s):
And, and really what, what it comes down to, to, to me is if this person, if I'm running my personal life like a business, if, if this person is in my life, obviously if it's a brother or a father or mother, you know, they're, they're kind of by default in my life, but not really. You don't need to, I don't need to spend an immense amount of time with these people, maybe holidays and catch up on a text or two, but if I'm including them in my life, it's because I think that they, again, getting back to that value, add value in my life and that they are positively influencing me. And then if work for me, this is my, my, my mindset and frame, if work for me is where I'm going to be spending a disproportionate amount of my time, because it's, it's where I think I can make the greatest impact in this world.

1 (7m 29s):
And it's what quite frankly, I, I now enjoy doing, why would I not want to have the same people I'm choosing to run my life as a business around, which is have the right people around me. Why would I not let those right people in my business now, does that not mean I've needed to help shuffle some of the people, friends, and family to other positions in, in, in the organization? Yes. Does that not mean that there's not better people for those positions at times? Yes, but I think when, when you break it down to that level, it, for me, at least it made a lot of sense to include those people and also put rails around it, like bumpers as if we're, we're about to go, go, go bowling. So, you know, for my brother, my little brother is a close person on the planet. You know, we had a rough patch in work and it was quite frankly, because I was overbearing.

1 (8m 11s):
So we put in rules. She said, we're only going to communicate on slack. If you get a call from me after 5:00 PM, it's not work-related even if the world is on fire, if I call you after, after I guess no pun intended here. Even if the world is on fire there's, if you get a call from me after five, it has nothing to do at work. And so a lot of these, a lot of these open, transparent conversations around, Hey, I'm, I'm thinking about someone potentially doing your position better, but I love you in the, in the company. What, what do you know, how do you think we can solve around that? I think that at least for me, it's bled into people that we've hired outside of my sphere of influence or friends and things like that. And it's, and it's allowed that personal connection where I think people, it forced me as a leader to be more of a servant leader and to be overly with how I'm feeling, thinking where I want to operate.

1 (8m 59s):
And it's really allowed that culture for the inverse to happen. So even friends, family, or beyond that, to come to me with problems or come to me with, Hey, you know, my, my wife's being a pain in my, you know what I'm saying? I'm not making enough money. You know what I love working here. How do I solve around that? You know? And, and maybe we find a creative solution around that. Or maybe we do need to pay you more. Maybe there's value there. But yeah, that, that, that open transparent organization, I think a lot of that was birthed out of necessity. Otherwise I was going to lose all my friends and family, no one wanted.

0 (9m 25s):
So you find it. There's obviously pros and cons. And I like how Anthony talked about both of those, because, Hey, you know, when you're starting off, like, you don't want to have a lot of churn. You don't want to have like your secrets being taken to the competition. And that's a risk. If you don't have friends and family gave, you can trust those friends and family, you know that stuff's going to stay in house and a lot of other good points you brought up as well. We have some awesome things. We're talking about Fire Nation. As soon as we get back from thanking our sponsors, these days, too many businesses let their data exist in siloed solutions and personalized content, productive, prospecting, and exceptional customer service is so important when it comes to scaling and growing your business. When marketing data lives separately from sales data and sales data lives separately from service data teams, lack the context required to effectively communicate.

0 (10m 13s):
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0 (10m 50s):
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0 (11m 31s):
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0 (12m 12s):
They look at publicly traded companies as just untouchable. Like I could never work with companies like that. How can we get our foot in the door with publicly traded companies? Because you've had plenty of success in this area.

1 (12m 25s):
A couple of interesting things to look at. One is what is your offer? So for us, you know, I I'm the, the impetus of the company was, it was a, it was an internet marketing agency that would hire, you know, 10 grand a month, we'll manage your Facebook ads or your Google ad words. Right. Great, awesome, great business was very excited about that in order to get better attention and make the sale better. We then pivoted to, okay, let me get a percent profit share on top of that, of whatever we can deliver for the company that was a great offer. And it helped us separate us from everyone else in the space, maybe doing a percent of ad spend next. We said, what if we productize the service? What if we were all of the risks? Only when you enroll a customer, will we get, well, we get paid, how is that for a no-brainer offer?

1 (13m 9s):
And, and for us, it became just that it became a no brainer. We now are on the other side of the table, where now we're interviewing is Geico better than progressive with handling our customers because we only get paid when they actually enroll a customer. So it was really important. One to focus on, you know, what is the unique differentiator and what is the, you know, the offer. You can't, you can't say no to, for lack of better words, but then to your point, how do you get in the door with those people? So now you've got a great offer. You've got a nice, unique differentiator. You're gaining traction. And in a lot of ways, you know, th th this may sound funny, but I spend a lot of time with those people that are software vendors that, that a lot of people run from.

1 (13m 49s):
Cause they think they're going to get sold to. But like in a couple of scenarios, I found a software that was the CRM for some of these health insurance, publicly traded companies. And I became really good friends with the, the CRM guy. And he already has the book of business of all these healthcare people he's specific in the healthcare niche. And I, you know, I wasn't doing it to necessarily use him or not, but that was my in, and I became great friends with him and he started trusting our work and understanding what we could do. And I grew that relationship to where he felt comfortable to add value to his publicly traded clients and make direct introductions because it was a win-win Hey, a publicly traded company wants better or more customers. Anthony wants publicly traded company because they can handle the customers better than, you know, a guy in his basement or guy down the street or something like that.

1 (14m 34s):
So really it's finding people that already have those relationships with whoever it is. You want to get in touch with you, but it's not a publicly traded company in one way or another. And sometimes it's being a little creative with them. It's thinking a little bit outside of the box, not just the employee that works there today, or hitting up LinkedIn, the marketing manager it's okay. Who else has already that book of business in there that I can, that I can create relationships with? And in this case, I mean, we've made introduction to several of these publicly traded companies, because I created that relationship where it would've taken me years and potentially decades. If I went one by one by one, by one, a

0 (15m 7s):
Lot of great points here at Fire Nation. And I want to circle back to something that Anthony shared at the top, just so you don't forget it because this is key. What is your offer? You need to work on that and make it irresistible just as Anthony lined out his irresistible offer. How can you say no? Now, Anthony, you've driven over a hundred thousand dollars a day in customers and leads to different financial and insurance products. How the heck did you accomplish that type of feat?

1 (15m 35s):
I have a friend. He has a lawn company and his eyes, he cut grass and he had huge turnover with low wage people. He was competing on price with everyone, and we really dig in and dug into, what do you actually do? What do you do? And, and a couple of layers, deeper of the onion and the onion you give dads back their Saturday with their kids. Holy cow. What, what a, what a differentiating a conversation that is now to your employees now, to your cus when you're going around and trying to sell it, it takes, we want to give you three hours back, you know, a month or five hours back a month with your kids. Like what, what you're like, oh yeah, by the way, I cut lawns. Like it's, it's a much different frame of reference point.

1 (16m 17s):
And I always joke, I become a method actor in some of our, our, and those that aren't familiar with the term is it's really putting yourself like deeply, deeply in the shoes of the, of the consumer. So like, I, for, for some of our debt consolidation companies we work with, I literally went delinquent on my credit card bills. It hurt my credit score wasn't but I get to feel what it was like getting debt, collector calls, getting letters in the mail that, that my, my bills were delinquent to see my credit score tank and feel that like, kind of like the gut in my stomach of like, holy cow, what if I need to get approved for this or this or this? And all of a sudden the messaging, not only to the team of what we're doing, cause we're not just running ads and driving leads. We're now solving for divorce, anxiety, depression, suicide, all these other things that come out of financial hardship, like what a different conversation that is when you're attracting talent, which is, which is massive to be able to get to a level like that, but also on the messaging on the front end that we're actually talking to the customer in a lot of ways, you know, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're having a completely different conversation than we've been in business 30 years, or we've got the best service or, or BBB plus, that's all great.

1 (17m 19s):
But what if, what if now you're talking about how it's a, you know, a 65 year old can get a thousand dollars a year back in their pocket by making a call. It's like, whoa, that's a much different offer than everybody else is potentially running on the planet. When they're talking about checking your insurance coverage or other, other nice things like that. So I'm really deeply intimately understanding what business are you in? What are you actually doing? What are you actually solving on a deeper level? And, and, and, and I challenge anyone listening when you say, oh, you know, we drive leads. Okay, no, we don't just drive leads. We save Americans money. Great. So what does that do? Well, saving Americans money helped them be able to buy more things they want. Well, what does that do? And then eventually you land on, well, it stops potentially a divorce as that's, you know, one of the number one factors into a financial hardships or financial options.

1 (18m 3s):
One of the number one factors into divorce, excuse me. So really figuring out what you actually do allows you to attract a team. That's now there for a mission. I, I, I saw, you know, it was a Tony Robbins event and I'm trying to remember the exact reference, but you can look it up like reasons why employees choose companies and compensation was like number like seven on the list. Like it was so low. And like some of the first ones were like transparency, you know, having more of a purpose in life and a why. And I think we're all. So purpose-driven, even if it's, we think it's money, it's really at the end of the day, it's to solve a purpose in some ways to be good fathers, to, to have a good ego and be able to get that, that, that good looking girl with a hot, with a nice car, you know what I mean?

1 (18m 43s):
Or whatever that is like, it's that purpose driven when you can give that to employees and customers and help them understand you really create, create some, some magic there. And of course, you know, John, we can get more into tactics, but I just wanted to paint that picture on a top, top level. Like, what does your business really do? What does it really solve outside of, you know, the, the surface level stuff that you're thinking? What

0 (19m 4s):
Do you do? Fire Nation? I mean, it's such a fantastic question and you probably don't have the best answer yet. Cause I mean, how amazing is an offer of, I give you three more hours a week with your kid, like, who's going to say they don't want that. I mean, come on, then you can talk about a little more details about what you do. I mean, that is just a fantastic way of looking at things. And one thing that you do believe in is failing fast, Anthony expound upon that, I

1 (19m 29s):
Call it the mom approach. A lot of people when they create a new business or an idea or something like that. And what does it, perfect. Perfection is the enemy of something. Great. And I find more and more often, I don't know if it's because of social media, everyone putting out their best foot forward now, or for whatever reason people want to hoard their idea or their business, especially if you're an early stage entrepreneur or, or maybe you're, you're, you're at a decent stage, but you're afraid getting back to what we said before, the resilience of no's or people saying they, they don't, they don't like what you, what you have. I mean, man, that is where all of the gold is that if you can go through your competitors, Amazon reviews, Yelp reviews, what Google reviews and look at all the negative, the one-star reviews.

1 (20m 10s):
Like that's your angle, that's your differentiator. And I think the more often you're asking your customers, what am I doing bad? Like seriously, no, we love you. No matter what, if you had to give me one thing, maybe even pretend like you're not even in the company, Hey, we're a third party survey company. You know, we've gotten a lot of complaints with company ABC, what are they doing poorly? What do they do bad for you? Like people are so afraid to ask these questions and do this. I think a lot of times, cause maybe they're so emotionally tied to their business potentially. And that it's their identity, which we can talk for hours on. But you know, that idea of failing fast and over and over and over again is so necessary with how fast the world moves today. If it, you know, you got a run to stand still today and not just in business, but in life with technology and the way, the speed of things.

1 (20m 54s):
So if, if someone is exponentially learning on where they can improve and consistently seeking those things out, both professionally and personally, they're going to, if they take action on it, they're going to have reach and will reach exponentially higher Heights than you ever will. When you are just a one-on-one to tell you anything that's wrong with the baby, or you want to go to your mom and say, mom, what do you think about this idea? And she says, honey, it's the best thing I've ever seen. You're incredible. A hundred

0 (21m 22s):
Percent in Fire Nation. This is why you need to be listening to these value bombs. And I'm such a believer in good is the enemy of great. I mean, if you get comfortable and you're unwilling to get out of your comfort zone, Fire Nation, you're missing all the magic because all of your magic will always happen outside of your comfort zone. And guess what failure will happen outside of your comfort zone, mistakes, missteps, all of that will happen outside of your comfort zone, but that's where the magic also happens. So Anthony you've dropped so many value bombs. Take the mic for a second. Give us the one big takeaway that you really want to make sure Fire Nation gets from everything that we talked about here today. Also share the best way to connect with you, your company, your business, any call to action you have for us for Fire Nation.

0 (22m 4s):
And then we'll say goodbye.

1 (22m 6s):
Yeah. For everyone listening right now is us as entrepreneurs. A lot of us, we talked, I talked earlier your identity, or maybe you just love the heck what you do. Like my biggest problem is not a problem. But my biggest thing I manage around is I love the heck out of what I do for work. And maybe you're doing, maybe you don't use have the head down, but, but really, really what I would challenge everyone to do is take 15 minutes every morning and just be to think, and I know that sounds funny, but I bet you nine out of 10 people listening right now do not take 15 minutes deliberately to spend time thinking away from technology away from other things in life. And I think what you'll start to find, hopefully my hope for you is what really matters in life because you work in 80 hours a week, maybe amazing for reasons that you think are incredible and maybe they are the right reasons.

1 (22m 57s):
Maybe they're not, maybe they're there, there's different things you actually want out of life. Like we get back to what are you actually doing for your business? Have you ever put a mission statement to your life? Have you ever taken a second and wrote your mission statement, your why for living, and then are you tracking towards that and saying, I, I am taking the right actions. I have the right goals. I have the right schedule day to day. I'm taking the right phone calls and meetings to track towards that mission statement. And, and, and, and a lot of us set a nice, massive 50 page business plan and vision statement of the company. But have you done that for your life? And, and, and I think that comes from a lot of introspection. I think that comes from a lot of deliberately scheduled time to think and, and spend time figuring out what do you want?

1 (23m 39s):
Because I myself have found when I feel like I take two steps back, I'm now working the least I've ever worked and I'm making the most money I've ever made. And I think that's a very interesting oxymoron in life. It's it's when, when you're able and, and to, to actually step back and look and where to strategically place your time and remove all the minutia, that 80% of the minutia that you're doing day to day and focus on the 20% that, that that's already working. I think there's, there's a lot of happiness in your life to be found. And I, and I wish that upon everyone listening, you know, as far as where, where to find me or my company, or company's pocket your dollars.com, we help Americans save money on different insurance and financial products.

1 (24m 21s):
But myself, I'm very active on Instagram, Anthony Sarandrea, I try and get to not try to, I get to every single person who messages me for a question, entrepreneurial related life related to mental health related, what physical related, whatever, whatever, whatever it is. I, I respond to every single person. It might take me some time, but I do this purely as a value add of less than John. I've listened to dozens of your episodes to learn and get towards where I am today and continue to digest the beautiful people you have on here. So I just feel so honored and blessed to be here. And I, you know, I hope this, this is able to give back to the community. And in some way

0 (24m 54s):
You dropped tons of value, bombs, firing issues, taking notes. This is definitely a real listener Fire Nation. And you know, this, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with Anthony and JLD today. So keep up that heat it, head over to EOFire.com type Anthony in the search bar. The show notes page will pop up with everything we talked about here today, the direct call to action pocket, your dollars.com, check it out. And of course, just type an Anthony's name, social media, send him a message. He will get back. You. He promised on entrepreneurs on fire. So, you know, he will. And Anthony, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today, for that, we salute you and we will catch you on the flip side.

1 (25m 37s):
Hey,

0 (25m 37s):
Fire Nation today's value bound content was brought to you by Anthony and Fire Nation. Are you ready to rock your very own podcast? If so, check out our furry podcasting course. We're able to teach you how to create and launch your podcast for free freepodcastcourse.com. I'll catch you there. Or on the flip side, Fire Nation, are you finally ready to publish a book the right way Kevin Anderson and associates can help for a limited time, they're offering Fire Nation a free 90 minute consultation to discuss writing and publishing your book in just six months. Visit KAWriting.com/fire to schedule your free 90 minute consultation today.

0 (26m 20s):
That's KAWriting.com/fire. Ever wish you had a mentor to help improve your customer experience and scale your business. HubSpot's new podcast, the shakeup with Alexis Gay and Brianne Kimmel has you covered. I love it because it shares how real people are building real businesses in very unique ways. Listen, learn, and grow with the HubSpot podcast network at hubspot.com/podcast network.