550 - Landing clients is his game: Tom interviews Mark Firth - Screw The Commute

550 – Landing clients is his game: Tom interviews Mark Firth

Mark Firth is here. He spent a large portion of his life working in London. He worked for companies like IBM and Siemens. But he left there feeling unfulfilled and he went in search of answers, and an 11 year journey from the U.K. to Columbia. He fell in love with someone in Columbia. And guess what? He started a family and then a business, and he finally made it into Florida on an investment visa, which I don't know what that is. And so I'm going to get him to tell me. And that was supported by his business. And he runs high profit consulting, which is also the name of his podcast High Profit Consulting, which has helped hundreds of B2B consultants to land clients through a mix of organic and paid business strategies.

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Screw The Commute Podcast Show Notes Episode 550

How To Automate Your Businesshttps://screwthecommute.com/automatefree/

entrepreneurship distance learning school, home based business, lifestyle business

Internet Marketing Training Centerhttps://imtcva.org/

Higher Education Webinarhttps://screwthecommute.com/webinars

See Tom's Stuffhttps://linktr.ee/antionandassociates

[04:21] Tom's introduction to Mark Firth

[08:38] Getting an “Investment Visa”

[12:50] Paid ad strategy across platforms

[20:05] Test slowly and keep your costs down

[23:05] Sponsor message

[25:04] A typical day for Mark and how he stays motivated

Entrepreneurial Resources Mentioned in This Podcast

Higher Education Webinarhttps://screwthecommute.com/webinars

Screw The Commutehttps://screwthecommute.com/

entrepreneurship distance learning school, home based business, lifestyle business

Screw The Commute Podcast Apphttps://screwthecommute.com/app/

College Ripoff Quizhttps://imtcva.org/quiz

Know a young person for our Youth Episode Series? Send an email to Tom! – orders@antion.com

Have a Roku box? Find Tom's Public Speaking Channel there!https://channelstore.roku.com/details/267358/the-public-speaking-channel

How To Automate Your Businesshttps://screwthecommute.com/automatefree/

Internet Marketing Retreat and Joint Venture Programhttps://greatinternetmarketingtraining.com/

KickStartCarthttp://www.kickstartcart.com/

online shopping cart, ecommerce system

Copywriting901https://copywriting901.com/

copywriting

Disabilities Pagehttps://imtcva.org/disabilities/

Mark's websitehttps://markfirthonline.com/

Clients Impacthttps://www.clientsimpact.com/guide

Email Tom: Tom@ScrewTheCommute.com

Internet Marketing Training Centerhttps://imtcva.org/

Related Episodes

Phone Tips – https://screwthecommute.com/549/

More Entrepreneurial Resources for Home Based Business, Lifestyle Business, Passive Income, Professional Speaking and Online Business

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entrepreneurship distance learning school, home based business, lifestyle business

entrepreneurship distance learning school, home based business, lifestyle business

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Episode 550 – Mark Firth
[00:00:09] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode five hundred and fifty. Can you believe it? Five hundred and fifty episodes of Screw the Commute podcast. I'm here with Mark Firth and and since it's five fifty, make sure you watch for our fifty five percent off sale on a bunch of stuff throughout the weekend, so make sure you jump on that because these are momentous occasions for us. So we want to give you a chance to get stuff half more than half price. So we'll bring him on the minute. He's going to give us a really cool method that he's used with his clients to to combine several entity social media with paid ads. And, you know, I'm in favor of paid ads. I gave up on SEO years ago, even though I was really good at it, because this this way you can control your destiny in a hurry and find out what works and what doesn't. So he's going to give us his proven method on that. All right, so hope you do this up. Episode 549. That was one of the series I do on phone automation tips. I use iPhone, but the same things can be done pretty much on Android. I just don't know how to do it, but the idea is that I gave you our great and everybody that listens to this knows how, how big I am on on certain types of automation.

[00:01:42] All right. How'd you like to make big money referring my stuff? Well, you can make I mean, just for one speaking engagement, you can make more than 5000 bucks. So and everything under that, we've got all kinds of products and all price ranges, and we never get complaints. Tell you that. So email me at Tom@Screwthecommute.com. If you're interested in that and also make sure you pick up a copy of our automation e-book. We sell this for 27 bucks, but it's yours. Free for listening to the show and this book. We literally, literally estimated it about two years ago, and it's say the techniques in this book have saved me seven and a half million keystrokes and allowed me to ethically steal customers from people too slow to get back to them knocked my workload down like crazy, save me carpal tunnel syndrome and allowed me to handle up to one hundred and fifty thousand subscribers and sixty five thousand customers without pulling my hair out. So you got to do this. Check it out. It's screwthecommute.com/automatefree. And while you're at it, pick up a copy of our podcast app at screwthecommute.com/app. You can put us on your cell phone and tablet and take us with you on the road. Now we're still in the middle of this wonderful program.

[00:02:58] I got going. It's a pilot program for persons with disabilities to get them trained in internet and digital marketing so that they can legitimately learn from home and legitimately get hired from home or start their own business or both, and love to have your help on this. I mean, they're very inspiring people. Two of the people in the program are blind and they're shooting videos, so I don't want to hear people out here listening, crying, the blues. Oh, can't do. Video Listen, if you're blind and you can do video, guess what you can do? Video Check that out at my school website. It'll be everything we'll talk about today, including Mark's great stuff will be in the show notes. The website is my internet marketing training center of Virginia. Of course, you know it's the only licensed dedicated internet marketing school in the country, probably the world certified to operate by SCHEV, the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia. But you don't have to be in Virginia because it's distance learning and good quality distance learning, so check it out at IMTCVA.org/disabilities. Go over. Check out the Go Fund Me campaign. There will be a link there for it. Anything you can kick in, we really appreciate and those people appreciate. And hey, if you're really flush with cash, you could you could get in touch with me and sponsor a person yourself. And boy, that's something you can really be proud of. I know I am.

[00:04:22] All right, let's get to the main event, Mark Firth is here. He spent a large portion of his life working. Oh my God, I have to cuss a corporate. I'm not even going to say it, J-O-B, you know, that's that's blasphemy here on this show in London. He worked for companies like IBM. What's the see? Ibm stands for some weird stuff like, I blow. I don't know. I don't know what it isn't. And Siemens, both of those, if I say what I'm thinking, there would be an explicit show which I don't want. But he left there feeling unfulfilled. I wonder why. And he went in search of answers and an 11 year journey from the U.K. to Columbia. And that was. He fell in love with someone in Columbia. And guess what? He started a family and then a business, and he finally made it into Florida on an investment visa, which I don't know what that is. And so I'm going to get him to tell me. And that was supported by his business. And he runs high profit consulting, which is also the name of his podcast High Profit Consulting, which has helped hundreds of B2B consultants to land clients through a mix of organic and paid business strategies. Mark, are you ready to screw? The commute?

[00:05:42] Oh yeah, really. You're right. You were already in Columbia, obviously. So ready. So good to meet you, man.

[00:05:50] Nice to meet you as well. Tom.

[00:05:51] Yeah, I'm really excited about hearing this strategy. Have I forget how I ran into you? Maybe on Pod Match or somewhere?

[00:05:59] But yeah, I think it was.

[00:06:00] Yeah, but I listened to some of the episodes of your podcast and it was very intriguing because I'm the people on here know that I, you know, I was really good at search engine optimization at the top of the heap for years, but it's just too much trouble nowadays and it takes too long. And then Google turns it one dial and you disappear off the face of the Earth. So. So I'm all about paid ads. And then the other thing I liked about what I heard was get them the heck off of they're onto an email list. That's why I have so many email subscribers, and I don't really look that prominent on social media. But I don't care because the big money to me is an email. So tell us about what you're doing then and your strategy.

[00:06:42] Well, it's funny, you what you say to introduce that because I personally do not ever Tom want to put, you know, when I was in corporate, I, you know, I had the fate of my family and you know, my life, you know, in the decision of some middle manager who could fire me at whim. Do you know what I mean? That's yeah.

[00:07:01] It was probably an idiot to

[00:07:03] Think, Well, we're going to go down there. But also fast forward to running a business. You know, you see all these people running around in LinkedIn T-shirts and caps and, you know, tying their identity to to a platform which is really just a faceless corporate designed to pay a very few people a lot of money. I don't want to have to rely on them to show my content and, you know, restrict my activities. I want to as much as possible, own my audience. I, as much as possible want to be able to show my content to people whom I can help when I wish. And that ain't going to happen by just relying on the platform. So that's really where this this strategy came from. Linkedin and on other platforms, you probably know that, you know, the life cycle of a social media platform at the beginning, they're all friendly. They're nice, like, come in. Come in. You're welcome. As soon as they got that critical mass of users, it's like, Well, you're going to charge you for this, we're going to charge you for that. And, you know, good luck. And before you know it, they're throwing people off the platform. And what's going to happen if LinkedIn decides one day that you're not, you're not suitable for their platform and for you off, you're going to write a strongly worded letter to them. Good luck with that. I know what I'm doing. I'm I'm going to build my lit list and I'm going to own my audience. So that's really where it comes from.

[00:08:25] That's exactly my philosophy is is get them. Everything I do is to get them the heck off of the social media. I use them as a necessary evil to get them off of their into something that I control. Before we get into it, though, I got to go back to this investment visa thing. What is that?

[00:08:44] All right. So as you can hear from my accent, I'm not from Florida. You're kidding. You're kidding. You got that one. So I grew up in the United Kingdom, a city called Nottingham Robin Hood fame and got a bit lost after corporate didn't know what I wanted to do and asked around. And some people say Colombia, so it's Colombia. Ten years later, I'm married to kids. We decide that it's not a place to bring up, bring up kids, no matter what people say about the United States, right? It's still the best country on the planet to bring up kids, and we discovered there was a way to get in there by employing people here and investing money in the country. So we moved up. The survey here started investing money, started employing money, and they gave us five years, so there we go.

[00:09:29] So what did you have to do to get it to qualify for this?

[00:09:32] We have. We had to invest. It ranges, but it's around $100000, and that does not constitute legal advice, by the way. I have to say that. But if you look at a visa, but it's around $100000, you've got to invest in the country that you can't get back and you've got to prove it. You've also got to have a certain number of employees on your books, and you've basically got to prove that you're going to be a benefit to the country.

[00:09:52] All right. So invest in the country, though. What? What kind of different ways can you do that?

[00:09:57] Oh, for a business, this is a business right to be a business for like two people,

[00:10:01] You're going to invest a hundred thousand dollars to start a business or.

[00:10:05] Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Things like there you go, franchises and people do franchises. They buy all sorts of stuff. It's just you've just got to basically be legitimate and have a going concern. I think is the best way is to say, do you say that in the states? Yeah.

[00:10:20] But what happens after five years

[00:10:23] When you either go home? It's a non-immigrant category visa and I plan to go back to the UK. That's that's the plan. I want to come here and build my network and create a business and employ people and then probably back to the UK. I'll be honest.

[00:10:37] Ok, but do they do they make it? What happens from are the United States point of view after five years? So they evaluate you or what

[00:10:47] They can re-evaluate you. It really depends. I mean, I haven't got that far. If I'm brutally honest, we just got here. But an immigrant visa is a visa that's not tied to residency, so it does mean that you will return to your country of origin. And that's my plan.

[00:11:01] All right. So. Ok, so let's get into the well, tell us about the podcast first and then we'll get into the thing you just got that started to right.

[00:11:12] Yeah. So I believe in what I call reverse organic. I'm not I'm not great at organic marketing by great. I mean, I can do it and I have done it and have built a business and we can implement it. But you know, the problem with organic marketing is it ties your lead generation to time.

[00:11:32] You know, if you don't buy organic marketing from your

[00:11:35] Organic marketing would be would be when you when you don't pay for people to see your content, you or you don't pay for key messages, you all all all you're doing is using the free services of the social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, you certainly people messages. You've got a content marketing strategy. I started my podcast because not to acquire new listeners really that never know me. It's just to provide more value to my email list and more value to my organic audience. Does that make sense? That's why I call it reverse. Organic people already know me. I send them in the episodes as opposed to what a lot of people do, that they started podcasting training, acquire players. So I decided, well, a lot of my lists told me that they like to listen to audio content and the statistics do back me up, you know, be wealthy. Affluent business owner tends to listen to audio a lot more than they do read books or do other things. So that's why we did it. Well, yeah,

[00:12:33] And I doubt if you would turn it down if somebody heard you and wanted to give you a bunch of money.

[00:12:40] So oh, of course not.

[00:12:42] Yeah, so. So I kind of do both. Yeah, please. The people that know me and brings in new people. So I do both of it pretty much. All right. So this strategy tell them I heard this strategy about using paid ads cross-platform, and I really liked it. So tell them, tell them what that's all about and pixels. Yeah. So explain to them.

[00:13:04] Yeah, we'll explain them. Explain all of it. So as I just alluded to, I'm a big data guy. I don't tend to. I'm not. I'm not trusting of what I see in my social media feed, right? Because anyone can say anything. I tend to look at studies. I tend to look at statistics, I tend to look at real data. And what the data tells me is that linked in despite what a lot of people think is not the platform where B2B decision makers spend a lot of their time. In fact, the statistics show that the average B2B decision maker spends only twenty eight minutes on LinkedIn versus 12 hours on Facebook. 12 hours is enough time for a transatlantic flight from New York to London, whereas 28 minutes is not even enough time for my coffee to get cold. And what does that mean? It doesn't mean that they're on like Facebook, like posting about, you know, pictures of themselves in the gym or, you know, talking about who should be the next president. They're not doing any of that stuff, but nevertheless they do have an account and where it might be on LinkedIn, they might be in a suit and a vice president on LinkedIn, on Facebook.

[00:14:05] It might be a picture of their cat. But nevertheless, Facebook knows who they are and knows the websites it visits. Because whether you like it or not, Facebook follows you around the web. Facebook That's why when you go to a social website, you start seeing images of sofas. So all we did is we looked at this data and said, Well, how do we solve this problem? People don't spend much time on LinkedIn. And by the way, the other piece of data data says people like to do business on LinkedIn, and that's true. I think we all feel more comfortable on LinkedIn. It basically means it's a transactional platform so that where they do the transaction, they don't spend much time. So how do we get to them where they spend a lot of time? Simple. We put the the adverts on Facebook and then when we and then we push them to our LinkedIn profile. Simple. So we have a steady stream of inbound leads every day. And whether retargeting pixel comes in just like Facebook has a pixel when you go to the social website. You start seeing sofas. Linkedin also has a pixel, and it's called the Insight Tag Tag Pixel. Call it what you want.

[00:15:03] They do the same things. It basically says if someone is tagged by the LinkedIn LinkedIn Pixel, I can then put adverts in their feed on LinkedIn when they're online, and LinkedIn knows where or when they're online, and so I can guarantee that they see my content. What that means is what's working really well for us and our clients is the front of funnel. And by the way, the front of funnel I define is first contact when someone doesn't know you is a Facebook ad, and then we're pushing the LinkedIn profile. We get inbound connects every day because LinkedIn is obviously got all these restrictions around how many messages you can do. We get these inbound leads and we've got the ability to retargeting them. So it's just a great recipe for any B2B business because if we ultimately boil down internet marketing, I can't make many guarantees, but I can guarantee that if somebody no doesn't know who you are and has never seen your stuff and is not connected to you, they're very unlikely to become a client. If they have, they're much more likely. And that's what we're doing. Bring them into our world that way. Does that make sense?

[00:16:02] Yeah, so so just for people that are a little bit lost at this point, about pixels. So pixel, yes, kind of. Think of it like cookies. You know where you land somewhere and they know they know somebody, they know it's you, but they don't know who you are. And then you can create audiences. They're called and then advertise back. That's why I'll tell you what, Mark. One time my girlfriend was in had needed a bra real fast for some event, and she knew I had Amazon Prime and she said, Hey, hey, I need this in a hurry. Will you please get this? I so so I bought this bra for her, and then bra ads started following me all over the internet. That's where we go. So folks, if you do what Mark says, bra ads are going to follow you everywhere.

[00:16:51] If you if you want to see this at work, here's what to do. Who I'm about to describe. They are ruthless, and I know this because I just moved to the states. Go to a mattress website. After this podcast, go to a mattress website. You will not get mattresses out of your feed on any platform for the next two weeks, I absolutely guarantee. And then they'll disappear because they said it for two weeks. They'll follow you around internet because if someone goes to look at mattress, you know, most people don't buy a mattress very often, then the mattress sellers have got one chance. They've got one bite at the cherry to get them to buy from them. So they are ruthless. They will follow you everywhere. So there's another one, you know?

[00:17:29] Yeah, but what the thing is is that when when you have an audience that you know, has already done something, you can target your ad better to them. And so exact conversion rate is bigger.

[00:17:41] Yeah, exactly. That's that's the other element of it. Of course, it's so, so important because we call it the buyer's pyramid. Some people call it the buyer's journey. You know, there's numerous names, but whatever it's called, it's the same concept. Only one to three percent of your market is an active buyer, which means they're in market. They know they've got a problem and they're looking to urgently buy. And when you use the power of the other platforms, you can get from thousands of people. So it's really easy to find those people, just like with the mattress, right? But when you're relying on one hundred connects a week on LinkedIn, that's just hard work. You need to have LinkedIn and it's important to do LinkedIn, and there's lots of people that still teach the messaging, and that's really valid. What we're saying is there's other ways you can your pour fuel on the fire, you know?

[00:18:27] So give us give us some hypothetical numbers on leads that you know you and some of your clients have pulled in number wise.

[00:18:37] I mean, I it's it's a great question because, you know, from the internet marketing world, we're so used to phrases like scaling to the moon and, you know, all that biz opportunity hyperbole. But to be honest, a lot of B2B consultants, they usually charge a lot of money. And to them, it's it's not something they want. They don't want a lot of clients. They just want consistency. So some people are going for a lot of leads. I mean, I go for about 15, 15 to 20 a day. That's what I want, 15 20 a day, of which about 12, 12 or so come into my LinkedIn. That's enough for me a week, and we don't spend a lot of money on ads, and that's enough to have a nice business that's cash profitable without being overwhelmed and so forth. Because I don't want to scale into the Moon business. I want a business that gives me a lifestyle where I get to spend time with my kids and my family. You know, that's my preference. So, yeah, that's what most most people are doing. Some people are talking about five or six, but if you're doing five or six, you know, leads, let's say five, let's keep it low. Five leads a day. Come to your LinkedIn Monday to Friday. That's twenty five leads. If you work weekends, that's thirty five four weeks in a month, four times thirty five, 30, 60, 90, 120. You're talking 150 leads a month. Is there a client there? Of course there is. If you've got a decent offer. So it's as you know, your experience in advertising. We're just bringing in the right people and converting some of them and those that don't want to convert. They can go on their way, you know? But to me, it's a much better way to do it than than chasing. Yeah, and just the way I feel.

[00:20:06] And for the for those wondering about amounts of money, I mean, you can start with like three to ten dollars a day and to test it out, even five dollars a day is reasonable. And one thing we never do is, let's say, do five dollars a day and then it's starting to work a little bit. And so you jump to $15 a day. Well, if you do that, Facebook is going to know you don't know what you're doing and they're just going to take all your money because they're going to they're going to put your ads in the worst places ever because they know no professional would ever do such a thing. The only the only drawback I see from Cross Platform is that the ads are going to cost more on Facebook if you're sending them off the platform. Well, we don't reward you.

[00:20:51] Yeah, so so we get round that as follows the landing page, they don't go directly linked in the landing page in the way, but on the landing page they go to a landing page. On that landing page, we take email SMS and then it redirects to LinkedIn because you're right. So we actually get the we get a number of different mediums to contact them. As well as connecting on LinkedIn, we get email, we get a semester, we get the retargeting pixels on my LinkedIn connection. That's four channels. That's why it's so effective. You can't

[00:21:17] Escape us. What are you using for SMS?

[00:21:20] I I use a platform called Go High Level, Go High Level is it does the email does have some status. It does all in one. I kind of found, you know, with go multi-channel, you don't want to have separate platforms, you want everything in one place. There are some compromises, but it makes life a lot easier, you know?

[00:21:38] Well, I definitely know because when I first started doing this, which is, you know, twenty eight years ago, the the shopping cart was $2000. Yeah. And if it happened to take the order correctly, we would have a big office party, you know, so it was just terrible.

[00:21:56] Yeah, yeah, I bet.

[00:21:57] I bet. And then when we went to put an affiliate module from a different company and make them work together, never did work. And then each company would blame the other one all the time, you know, so you know, when you can combine stuff, it's it's going to save you a lot of headaches.

[00:22:14] Yeah, no, exactly, I had exactly that headache last year. It got crazy. I found myself having to pay someone every time I wanted to make a change, and it was like this big game of chess. If I change this, what's going to happen to this, you know?

[00:22:26] No. Yeah, that's crazy. You know, so much can be done and a lot of people are so techno phobic that they think, Oh, I can't. I'm not technology savvy. Well, somebody just points something out. Some of this stuff is literally child's play if they just tell you where to click, you know, so. Exactly. I tell people in their WordPress websites, If you have trouble, just go wake up a kid from his nap at preschool and they'll help you. So these kids are so tech savvy nowadays.

[00:22:54] Yeah, no. I always say it's a story we can tell ourselves. We're not tech savvy or we can say we're not tech savvy. Yeah, but I'm going to make it work. And like you say, it's been simplified. It's not like it used to be, you know,

[00:23:07] I definitely know. So we've got to take a brief sponsor break. When we come back, we'll ask Mark what a typical day looks like for him. And does he have a morning routine? You know, what's all that stuff and how he stays motivated? So folks, about 20, I don't know. Twenty four or five years ago now, I kind of turned the internet marketing guru world on its head, and that guy's at my level. We're charging like 50 or a hundred grand up front to teach you. And you know what, if you give him 50 grand up front, you'd be chasing them down to Columbia to find them because they still never help you. So. So I said, you know, I'm going to fix this and make it better for small businesses. So I charged an entry fee and then I tied my success to their success. So for me to get my fifty thousand, you have to net two hundred thousand. Well, guess what? People love this and 700 students and twenty four years later, it's still going strong. And people know I'm not going to disappear on them because I want my fifty thousand. We have the longest running, most unique, most successful mentor program ever in internet and digital marketing, been running continuously for 24 years now.

[00:24:19] And you have an immersion weekend that the retreat center here in Virginia Beach. We have our own TV studio. You shoot videos and you also get, you know, you heard me talking about the school for the pilot program we're doing for persons with disabilities. You also get a scholarship to our school, which you can either use yourself or gift to somebody else. And also, everything is one on one here. I used to try to do group training, and that was just crazy. I'd have to dumb everything down to the lowest common denominator. So everything is one on one with me and my staff. So nobody on Earth at my level even talked to you, let alone, you know, teach you stuff one on one. So check it out at greatinternetmarketingtraining.com.

[00:25:09] Let's get back to the main event. Mark Firth is here and he got hooked, got grabbed up in Columbia with a beautiful family on his way on his journey. Right. But so tell us, Mark, what's a typical day look like for you and tell us about the kids and the wife and all that stuff?

[00:25:29] So we're still we're still settling in as of recording. It's the 31st of January, and we only moved here on the 5th of December, so that's less than two months ago. So we haven't really got there yet. If I'm honest, we're still we're still settling in and shaping things. My my daughter, Sienna is two, and she's due to start her kindergarten next week, and that's when the routine will fit in. But I have an office

[00:25:55] For wear a mask or, you know, they're in Florida. They're they're really against all that stuff in Florida.

[00:26:03] Yeah, there doesn't seem to be much mass mask wearing down here. I have an office, so I I wake up, I take my son to school and I go to the office. I try and get a run in every morning. I believe it's important to do do exercise, if anything for for my health. And and I also I do like to do 30 minutes of meditation. I find that kind of centers me for the day. Otherwise I feel a bit out of it, to be honest, if I don't have that moment to myself. So with two kids a business, it's very difficult to find that moment to. It's quiet time, I guess, is the best way of putting it, so that's pretty much what we look like at the moment.

[00:26:40] Meditation is part of the business.

[00:26:42] No, she's not. She she actually works in. She has a job that she works for a company here in the states. So she's at home in the day doing that and I'm in the office. And just after this interview, I'm going to pick my son up from school and and head home.

[00:26:57] There you go. And then then what?

[00:27:01] Know yet, yeah, that's a good question, oh, today I actually work reasonably late, we have our group coaching call at. Four o'clock No, five o'clock Eastern and after that pretty much chill, we don't do tend to do much in the evenings, it's kind of a military operation to get the kids to sleep, and any parents watching this will know what I'm talking about. Listening to this will know what I'm talking about.

[00:27:23] Well, every operation, that's good. So. So how do you stay motivated?

[00:27:28] I don't, you know, you know what? I don't believe. And how do I say this, I believe, you know, people have to force themselves to be motivated. What what's the best way?

[00:27:39] I mean, I don't I don't need that, but a lot of people have things that they do, you know, play mental tricks on themselves and all that.

[00:27:47] Yeah. If you read Tim Grover's books, the guy that coached Jordan and Kobe, he talks about mental tricks, and that's important. But I think there needs to be something that's pulling you as someone or something that's pushing you right. And Tony Robbins says, we all do something more for others, more. We do more for the people than we do ourselves. And I think I just have a pull to make sure my family grows up in a good environment and they're safe and they're looked after. So I think I'm pulled rather than pushing myself. I think when I got started, I didn't have that sense of direction and purpose. But now, you know, sometimes look, I'd be lying if I don't have days when when I don't want to go to bed and I don't want to do the work and that needs a push, right? And you have to remember it. But I would say for the large, if you're having to push yourself every day, that's hard. And it's very it's very rare that people keep that over a sustained period of time. Like, you know, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, you've got to have something more pulling you. Does that make sense? Tom.

[00:28:42] Well, it's I've been pulled for all these years, that's for sure.

[00:28:45] But yeah, you know,

[00:28:46] So it looks like, I guess you found the answers because your introduction said you went in search of answers answers to what

[00:28:53] Do you sorry you talk about? My bio is that.

[00:28:55] Yeah, yeah. You said he went in search of answers on an 11 year journey. So did you find the answers and what were the questions?

[00:29:04] I don't think we ever find the answers. I don't ever think we find the answers. I think we I think just like personal development, if anyone's listening to personal development, I think it's a journey rather than a destination. You just find new questions. Mm hmm. Have I found some answers? Yeah, absolutely. We're in a better place and a better country. My kids are in a better school. We're better off financially. We've got a great business. So yeah, there's definitely some of them there. But I think I think that, you know, you get where you want and then new questions come right and then you start looking for the answers to those.

[00:29:36] Well, that's that's kind of the way the only mental. I guess it's a mental trick. I've played on myself forever, but I've never reached a goal because any time I get near it, it disappears and there's another one passed it somewhere. So. So now when you were on that journey, did you did you picture a family in your future?

[00:29:57] Yeah, I've always wanted a family. Yeah, that's always been a part of the future. It's always been a plan. So absolutely definitively beyond a doubt. Yeah, I did. And I'm very grateful. I wake up every day, grateful for them. My son's five and as I mentioned, my daughter Sienna's too. So we're very privileged and lucky.

[00:30:16] It's a military operation. I never heard that one. Oh, you get a little crazy. So how do people get a hold of you?

[00:30:24] They can find me at some. Well, obviously the usual suspects LinkedIn, Facebook and Mark Firth or my website clientsimpact.com.

[00:30:37] And they can learn all this stuff from you. You have programs.

[00:30:39] Yeah, yeah, we got programs. We've got free gifts. We've got I tend to give away a lot of my stuff, to be honest. We've got like process documents you can give to your VA to get, you know, linked in going all sorts of stuff on there.

[00:30:50] Awesome. Well, thanks so much for coming on and glad we met on Pod Match.

[00:30:55] No, thank you. Tom. I'm so glad I really enjoyed the questions. There's some great questions..All right, everybody. We will check out mark stuff at clients impact. It's Mark Firth on all the social media and check out all his stuff. And then, hey, if you if you want to do something you can really be proud of. Give us a hand on that pilot program for the persons with disabilities. You will really be proud of yourself. All right, we'll catch everybody on the next episode. See you later.