KEALA KANAE | Proof of Past Performance, Skillset with Mindset and How to Get to 101 Million with Affiliate Marketing
Full Episode
Show Notes

Keala Kanae (@kealakanae) started his career at a coffee shop with a 500 credit score and living in his mother's spare bedroom. After quitting his job, he became a successful entrepreneur and started Inspirean, a company that focuses on skillset and mindset as a dual approach to business growth. Despite facing challenges like a partnership breakup and the pandemic, Keala believes that successful entrepreneurs need to be prepared for any situation and not surrender to the struggle. He suggests constantly enhancing and innovating businesses, investing in people, and interpreting data for meaningful decisions. Lastly, he advises combining professional experience from various industries and businesses for successful development.

What Travis and Keala discussed:

Affiliate marketing can be a great entry point for those who want to earn an income as an entrepreneur or creative without dealing with the hassles of building a business.

Keala shares his experience of failing at various businesses for over a decade before finally finding success in digital marketing and affiliate marketing.

Why Keala thinks that when hiring, the main focus should be on proof of past performance and not future potencia, nor degrees or certifications, and also why culture fit is also important, as skills can be taught but character cannot be.

The importance of understanding how and why linking personal values to unenjoyable tasks can lead to success in entrepreneurship, and to emphasize developing the right mindset and cultivating self-awareness.

Success requires a combination of skillset and mindset; without both, opportunities can be self-sabotaged and potential left unfulfilled.

How Keala has transitioned from focusing solely on paid marketing to incorporating organic marketing strategies to combat increasing advertising costs, ultimately leading to a reduced net cost per acquisition, increased customer value, and faster purchase velocity.

Impactful podcasting, how to build a great product and an amazing customer experience and so much more!

Don't miss our latest podcast episode featuring Keala Kanae, the founder of AWOL Academy, as he shares his inspiring journey from humble beginnings to becoming a successful entrepreneur. Discover the importance of combining skill set and mindset for business growth, the value of affiliate marketing, and why focusing on past performance is crucial when hiring. Plus, learn about Keala's transition from paid to organic marketing strategies and how it has transformed his business. Tune in now to uncover valuable insights and expert advice for thriving in the world of digital marketing!
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Transcript

Keala Kanae (0s):
Skillset without mindset is a nightmare cuz you wake up every day knowing that you're capable of more, but you can't accomplish it. And other people have what you want. Mindset without skillset. Singing kumbaya, lighten candles, making vision boards and dreaming about fucking paychecks, showing up in your mailbox without learning a skillset that's gonna actually make that happen. That's a fantasy. But if you can marry the two, then you unlock the dream.Travis Chappell (21s):
Welcome back to the show. I'm Travis Chappell and I believe that if you can connect with the best, you can become the best. So after creating 800 podcast episodes about building your network, I've come to realize that networking is really just making friends for doing it the right way. Anyway, join me as I make friends with world class athletes like Shaquille O'Neal, entertainers like Rob Dyrdeke authors like Dr. Nicole Lapera, former presidents like Vicente Fox, or even the occasional FBI hostage, negotiator, billionaire, real estate mogul or polarizing political figures. So if you want to make more friends that help you become a better version of yourself, and subscribe to the show and keep on listening because this is Travis makes friends. What's going on everybody? Welcome back to another episode of Travis Makes Friends.
Travis Chappell (1m 1s):
Today I'm making friends with Keala Kana. Keala. What's up dude? Welcome to How you doing?
Keala Kanae (1m 6s): Thanks for having me

For having me. First off, we typically go like directly into backstory, but I thought it'd be fun to shake things up a little bit. Yeah. And just go directly into what you're working on right now. So just for a little wow factor to start this episode off and get people to keep listening for the rest of this episode, why don't you tell us how much you have now made in your business online to date?Keala Kanae (1m 25s):
101 million so far in about, in the last like six and a half years or so.Travis Chappell (1m 31s):
101 million in six and a half years. Yeah. And you started that as a side hustle before you went full-time?
Keala Kanae (1m 38s):
Yeah, I mean I got started as an affiliate marker in initially, yeah. While I was working in a coffee shop earning minimum wage. And then after about seven months of that, I was able to quit my job, had my first five figure month, made my first million dollars purely as an affiliate marketer. And then people kept asking me to teach him about like Facebook ads or copywriting or funnel building or all the different things that I was doing. And that turned into a course as in coaching business, which has now scaled up past nine figures.Travis Chappell (2m 2s):
We're essentially You teach affiliate marketing.Keala Kanae (2m 4s):
Exactly. And we still do affiliate marketing. We do about somewhere between five to 7 million a year, just as an affiliate as well. Okay. So we're doing what we teach also.
Travis Chappell (2m 13s):
Sure. Are you buying traffic for that or just email list only for that business? The affiliate?
Keala Kanae (2m 18s):
Yeah. We run quite a bit of traffic. Okay. And the majority of our affiliate sales these days will come actually from our list for like any non-buyers of our offers, we push in other offers. And then we also do occasionally like a JV type thing where we push somebody else's offer. Okay. Occasionally. Great.
Travis Chappell (2m 33s):
So one of the reasons that I like doing the show is I like to expose the audience into different paths. And this is one of those ones that frankly, like if I were gonna go back and start over, I wish that I would've gotten into affiliate marketing when I started my podcast. Because when I started the podcast, frankly I had no idea how to make money online. I just wanted to do something online. So I started a podcast cause I didn't know what else to do and I was listening to a bunch of podcasts. So I figured like, oh, this would be cool, cool. But it didn't make any money, you know what I mean? For a long time, like I didn't realize at the time that I was building brand, I wasn't like being a marketer. Those are two different things now. I'm grateful for the brand that, that we took a long time to build, but I also lost out on I think, really fast growth opportunities and, and then securing myself and my family financially because I like didn't do a lot of those things.
Travis Chappell (3m 22s):
So we're, we're gonna get into a a few things here later on, but can you just break down for somebody why affiliate marketing can be a really good entry point? If you have no idea any of the words we just said, copywriting, email marketing, like funnels, you have no idea what any of that stuff is. Why is affiliate marketing a good place to, to start?
Keala Kanae (3m 39s):
Yeah, that's a really good question and it's probably the, the reason that I fell in love with it as a, as an idea. Anyway. So affiliate marketing is basically just selling somebody else's products or services and earning a commission by doing it. So you don't have to have any of your own products, services, you don't have to deal with any fulfillment, customer hassles, merchanting, like any of the stuff that it typically takes to run like a legit business, right? You don't need any employees, any of the drama. And the thing that I think is attractive for most people like yourself, what you're describing is basically that you're creative, right? Like you want to produce some sort of content, you wanna talk to cool people, you want to engage with cool folks. And then if you had added affiliate marketing into your monetization strategy earlier in the game, it would've allowed you to basically get paid to learn from a bunch of smart folks.
Keala Kanae (4m 23s):
So there's a lot of content creators out there, there's a lot of influencers out there. There's a lot of people that are like, they just have that creative mindset and they don't necessarily want go build a whole business. But if they're willing to build out content, create content, build a following, create some sort of an influence that's easy for them to find other products. So if you find something that you're like really inspired about, really passionate about, you know, you jump outta bed every morning and you're excited to go do this thing, then can you find ancillary products or services that are around that market that you can push your audience's attention to and therefore monetize that attention and then basically be able to like fund the growth of your audience. It's something that you can push back into the business, right? And so I, I find it as like a really cool way for people to earn an income if one, they have no idea what product or services sell, but they know they wanna be an entrepreneur or if they wanna be a creative of some sort and they don't wanna deal with the whole hassle of building an actual business and enterprise.
Travis Chappell (5m 17s):
Yeah, it was funny dude, I was meeting with, it was Chris Wrecker back in the day, like, I don't know, four years ago, five years ago, I was first started my podcast and I was like making great traction with my podcast and we sat down to lunch or dinner something one time and he was like, bro, I went into like your system and stuff and I, I didn't find what it is that you're, that you're doing. Like what are you, what are you actually doing? I'm like, I have a podcast. And he's like, no, no, no. Right. But like what, what are you selling? Like, what's your business? And I was like, I, I podcast, I don't know, what do you mean? You know what I mean? I was just like, I was so lost. I looked back and I was like, ah man, so many missed opportunities. But everybody has their discovery path. How did you first happen upon affiliate marketing and think, oh
Keala Kanae (5m 53s):
That's an interesting story. So what, I started my first business in 2000, the year between which I graduated high school. I was in the summer between high school and college and I was, you know, gonna go to the University of Hawaii and some friends of mine and I, we used to throw these hotel parties and eventually the parties got big enough that people would actually just pay to come to the party and we're a bunch of dumb degenerate kids. So we just had like stupid rules like bring two girls for every guy, a case of beer for every person in your party, or pay us 20 bucks to get in and start. People started paying us and that spun off into eventually us like having our own nightclub promotions business. So we would try to find nightclubs that we could promote, people pay to get in, we get to keep that money they pay at the door. That thing failed for three and a half years. But in the process I had brochures, business cards, I, I made fake IDs for us because we, none of us were 21.
Keala Kanae (6m 40s):
And we quickly figured out that if we wanted to make real money, we had to like be able to promote a nightclub that sold alcohol.
Travis Chappell (6m 46s):
Three and a half years is a long time to fail, bro.
Keala Kanae (6m 48s):
Well most people won't even stick with something for three and a half weeks. Right? That's what I'm saying. So I'm sticking with it for three and a half years, failing miserably. But that was my introduction into the world of like entrepreneurship. And then basically for the next 12 years I failed miserably at all sorts of things. I joined all sorts of network marketing companies, direct sales businesses. Yes. Did I knocked on doors, I tried to sell loans as a mortgage broker going into or a loan officer that was going right into the financial collapse actually. So I thought, I thought that, I was like, it's always this hard to sell loans, but no, it's like actually the rugs being pulled out from under the industry, now you
Travis Chappell (7m 23s):
Have to get licensed and shit.
Keala Kanae (7m 26s):
So now you gotta actually look out for the customer. Crazy thought. Yeah. Right. So I just tried all sorts of stuff. Even some like extra legal businesses. We wouldn't say illegal cuz that would be bad. I'd say they're extra legal. They were beyond the limits of the law. And so, and all of those didn't work either. And come to about 2010, I was trying to sell a real estate investment program and I couldn't do the whole make a list of your friends and family and call 'em cuz I had already beaten that run through
Travis Chappell (7m 53s):
Them like 12 times. Yeah. I was basically on Cutco and like solar, whatever else
Keala Kanae (7m 58s):
Stuff. I'm like, guess what I'm into now? Come to this hotel meeting. Don't pay attention to the circles on the whiteboard that look like a pyramid. Just get three people who get three people
Travis Chappell (8m 8s):
Just like Michael Scott, just, I gotta make some calls.
Keala Kanae (8m 13s):
So I had done all that. My family had basically probably saved my name in their phone as do not answer. And so I had gone on on Google one day and I just started googling like how to generate leads online. Yeah. And that just took me down this rabbit hole of learning about affiliate marketing, online marketing, online advertising and all these things. And what originally caught my attention is I would find some of these people that had their own online businesses who would be on vacation for quite some time throughout the year and still be earning money even while they're on vacation. And I was like, that sounds like the American dream to me. Yeah. Basically they had, and it's because as marketers or digital marketers, we tend to find ways to automate a lot of things.
Keala Kanae (8m 52s):
Right. So I became fascinated by that, but I, I never really, and I bought courses and watched a ton of videos and bought eBooks and, you know, pH eBooks and physical books and all this stuff with
Travis Chappell (9m 2s):
All the leftover money you had in your bank account. Yeah. With,
Keala Kanae (9m 5s):
With all the tons of money that I had in my account. And then what happened is, so I never really took it too seriously. I did, I, I I dabbed in it, I guess a a bit, but come 2012, I give August 13th, 2012. I walk into my mom's bedroom while she was folding some laundry and stuff and I was living in her spare bedroom at the time and she's like, what do you need? And I was like, Hey mom, I was just wondering if you had that a box of that cardboard box that you were gonna take down a goodwill for that friend of yours. And she's like, yeah, I still have it, but what do you want with it? I was like, well tomorrow's Tiana's birthday and I don't really have any money to get her anything. So I was hoping that I could go like find a purse or something in that cardboard box.
Travis Chappell (9m 43s):
Is your girlfriend at the time? Yeah.
Keala Kanae (9m 45s):
And I mean, we're engaged now. Yeah. But I mean we had already been together at that 0.7 years. Oh wow. And there had been a point in which in that time there was a point in time where she used to sleep in a car with me and she wasn't homeless. I just was kind of temporarily homeless. And here I am, like now I can't even afford to get her a gift for her birthday. And I ended up going shopping that evening Shopping Yeah. In a cardboard box. And I pulled out this old used purse. I put it in a Macy's box that my mom had laying around. I put a bow on it and on August 14th, 2012, I gave her somebody else's trash for her birthday. And that kind of became this moment where I was like, this cannot continue this. I gotta make, I made that solemn oath. I'm figuring a way out of this. Why
Travis Chappell (10m 24s):
Was your way out of it to continue down the path that was beating you up for the last few years rather than like go get a secure job?
Keala Kanae (10m 33s):
Man, that's a good question. I'm just being perfectly honest for like that, that 12 years that I was failing, there was many, many, many, many times that I sat up late at night. There's many times I even sat up at night like with tears in my eyes thinking like I'm just, maybe I'm just not cut out for this. Yeah. You know, maybe I, I should just, is it really that bad if I go get a job and climb the corporate ladder and retire one day? Right. I don't really know exactly like why I, I, I took on yet another shot at entrepreneurship. I'm grateful that I did though. Sure. But I guess the long and short of it is I just couldn't really see a way for me to own my future, my destiny, my calendar, my my financial wellbeing and be doing that while working for somebody else.
Keala Kanae (11m 13s):
Yeah. I just had bigger goals than that I guess.
Travis Chappell (11m 15s):
Yeah man, that, that has to be what it comes down to. Because like you said before, there's a lot of people that will do something for three and a half weeks and then be like, nah, alright, I give it a shot. That's a scam. You know what I mean? That's like the mo is like, let me try something, it doesn't work and then I call it a scam. It definitely isn't me. That's the problem. It's definitely the vehicle, you know what I mean? Yeah. But it's the something that's unexplainable inside of you that you just can't shake. And it's just like, I don't know if this is going to work at some point, but I would rather spend my life trying to figure it out than go to this other path that might even logically make more sense. But I just know it's never gonna work for me.
Travis Chappell (11m 55s):
And that's, that's definitely definitely how I would explain it for me as well. Cuz like, it was a very similar story, just kind of like poking around, trying different things, 14 different opportunities, six MLMs, four door to door companies, all this other stuff, bro, I found out we used to sell the same thing. What? And magic con water machines. Oh
Keala Kanae (12m 13s):
Bro. Yeah. Oh yeah man,
Travis Chappell (12m 16s):
I did that back in the day. Although you did it the smarter way after you learned a skill like digital marketing, I was the one like doing the, the fucking in-home meetings and the phone calls and demos and all that, all that shit. And you probably sold like 12 times more than I did. But that actually led me into this other like door-to-door water machine opportunity where the rips were like $5,000 a piece instead of like 2200 for a K eight or whatever. So it ended up working out just in a different path. But I thought that was hilarious when I heard you say that. I was like, oh shit, I didn't know that you used to sell those back in the day.
Keala Kanae (12m 46s):
So what happened is I'd been an affiliate marketer for quite some time. Basically somebody just showed me like the enagic compensation plan or whatever, and I was like, they've got high ticket health and wellness product that pays into the few thousand dollars per sale. So we ended up building out the front end marketing system with the network marketing offer on the back end. We weren't the face of it. We had some other people that played like the front man for it. Sure. And yeah, we, we blew that thing up so hard that they were changing their compensation plan because of how quickly that we were growing. Yeah.
Travis Chappell (13m 16s):
Did you, did you run into issues with like payouts and stuff with them?Keala Kanae (13m 19s):
Yeah, there was quite a few issues with payouts just in like they, they like to pay via check in the mail check.
Travis Chappell (13m 24s):
Yeah. And you get like 43,000 checks in the mail that are like, this one's $22, this one's $1,000. You spend like an hour and a half at the bank, like just depositing checks whenKeala Kanae (13m 35s):
We launch it. I have a picture online, it's even included in some of my advertisements these days where I got 140 checks in the mail. Like imagine showing up at the bank dude with 140 I, I had freaking a shopping bag full of checks and the bank teller is like, this is gonna take a little while, you might wanna have a seat. And I sat there for 45 minutes while they processed 140 checks or no, it was, sorry. It was actually, it was 400 checks for $140,000 is what it was.
Travis Chappell (14m 3s):
Oh, in total? Yeah. Oh wow.Keala Kanae (14m 5s):
Yeah, that's what it was. So 400 checks totaling 140,000 bucks. My mailman was asking my mom, what do you guys do?
Travis Chappell (14m 12s):
I hope these are checks and not bills. I had this guy, this guy in my upline who was like, he was like one of the top earners in the whole company, had been there for like 30 fn years and he, like, he still is there today and he makes great money doing it. But he hired a guy, he literally has like a check guy who just goes to the bank once a week just to deposit checks for him. You have to hire somebody to go deposit checks because that's the volume of checks that you're receiving. Like, hey, maybe stop wasting all the paper and figure out direct deposit. Dude, we
Keala Kanae (14m 42s):
Used used to ask him, can you please just do direct deposit because I, my, my girl was actually auditing all of our checks and we'd have to let the company know every month the checks that were missing and they, they would like recut a new check. But it literally became like there were so many checks missing that it was worth paying somebody Yes. To audit the checks. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Travis Chappell (15m 0s):
Yeah. What a nightmare.Keala Kanae (15m 2s):
It was a good problem to have inTravis Chappell (15m 3s):
Comparison to some of the other problems I had. Sure. Exactly. Yeah, that was a problem you're, you're praying for? Yeah. Back in the day. Oh, that's hilarious. Okay. So since then you've now built and, and made over a hundred million dollars online. So you must have like gone to Harvard to get a master's degree in between that period? Yale
Keala Kanae (15m 22s):
Actually went to Yale. Okay,
Travis Chappell (15m 23s):
Great.
Keala Kanae (15m 24s):
Paid off. No. Yeah, man. Just the school of hard knocks dude. Yeah. The school hard knocks for marketing, thankfully. Learned to love it. Right.Travis Chappell (15m 33s):I'm, I'm curious, when you hire people, do you look for like certifications or degrees or anything? Especially as when it comes to like your executive team, the people that are, that are really kind of right hand for you. Are you, are you wanting them to have like these accounting degrees or whatever the things that you didn't have? Are you looking for them to fill the gaps or are you just, hey, if you can do the job, you can do the job. Doesn't matter to me.
Keala Kanae (15m 55s):
So when we're hiring, we don't necessarily look for somebody that has a degree. I mean, it might show up occasionally in their resume. Our number one hiring principal is that we hire for proof of past performance, not promise of future potential. So a lot of early stage entrepreneurs, you know, they want to hire their friends, their family members, people that they know, oh I trust 'em. Oh, I, or I know so-and-so I bet they'd be great for this job. Right. But it's something that they've never done before. And I went down that route at one point and quickly learned that that just was not gonna work. And so especially when it comes to the executive team, I'm more so looking for, have you already solved Yeah. The problem that we're hiring you to solve, like how many people have, like how big of a department have you run before? How many people have reported to you? What sort of innovations did you make?
Keala Kanae (16m 37s):
What, what are some big problems that you ran into in your position that you know you were able to solve? Tell me a little bit about that. What are some failures that you've had where you wish you would've done things differently? What did you learn from that? These are some of the questions that I ask. One of my favorite questions in an interview is, if you were me interviewing you, what question would you be asking yourself? And then they'll start to be like, what the fuck? Take some thinking. Right? And they gotta think for a little bit and they're like, well I guess I'd want to know da da da da. And like, great. So now I want to know that. But long and short of it is I just wanna look for somebody that I know from their past, they've already done the thing and I don't care if they have a degree or not because a degree doesn't tell me whether or not you can actually execute. Sure,
Travis Chappell (17m 13s):
Yeah. And then culture values fit.
Keala Kanae (17m 16s):
I would rather have somebody who is a great culture fit and good in their role versus somebody who's great in their role, but only a good culture fit. Sure. Because skills I can teach. Yeah. Right. Or my team can teach. Right. But character, which is really what culture is all about. Character can't be taught. That's like they're gonna come with whatever they got. Sure. Right. And maybe you can shift your character over time, but that's a way longer investment and much
Travis Chappell (17m 40s):
More difficult. Yeah.
Keala Kanae (17m 42s):
And they have to first be willing to even want change. Exactly.
Travis Chappell (17m 44s):
Yeah. Right, right. Which a lot of times is the, is the value piece that's missing Exactly. Is that they don't view themselves as ever being the problem.
Keala Kanae (17m 51s):
Exactly. They
Travis Chappell (17m 52s):
View everybody else as always being the problem and it's never their fault. Right. You know what I mean? It's like, well we can't do really, we can't really do anything with that. Well,
Keala Kanae (17m 58s):
Yeah. Well the great thing about good leaders, typically good leaders, like one of our leadership philosophies in the business is probably them. Definitely me. So means anything that goes wrong in the business, any issue that we're having with customers, with refunds, with an a process issue in the business or with a team member in the business, the first question as a leader is, okay, it's probably them, but it's definitely me. So what did I do? Where did I drop the ball? What could I do differently? Where did I miscommunicate? Where did I mismanage expectations? And I think like that is like a key principle for leadership is to first own it. Because if it's always somebody else who caused the problem, then it's up to somebody else to solve the problem. Yes. Right. And then if then basically that's like saying that my future is in their hands, like that's just not gonna work.
Travis Chappell (18m 40s):
Totally. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's what, that's when you just start cycling through people, right. Because you're hoping for this savior to come along and Right. Do everything
Keala Kanae (18m 49s):
And nobody's coming to save you.
Travis Chappell (18m 51s):
Right. Exactly. Well listen dude, there's several things that, that I wanted to chat with you about in the, the marketing world, but I want to kind of set that aside right now because I know something that I respect about you and something that I respect really about just the best marketers that I know. And these aren't necessarily the people who are the best at marketing, they're just the best marketers because they've evolved beyond just being a marketer and moved into this seat of being a real business owner. And
Keala Kanae (19m 20s):
There's not very many of them that have done that, to be honest. Yeah.
Travis Chappell (19m 23s):
Cuz there, there's a ceiling, right? But you bump up against the ceiling when you're in the, for me it was being a salesperson for you as being a marketer, like you bump up against this ceiling that you, you can't go past this stage of the business without completely adapting yourself to become a different version of yourself. Like, well before we turn the mics on, you were saying like, you're not even really in the marketing in your business anymore. Right. Which has to feel weird for you because like in your core, your DNA is your marketer, but you have stepped into the role of CEO so that you can operate and run the entire business effectively. And that came as a result of basically, from what I understand, you were focused so much on marketing and sales and acquisition that you grew and scaled so much, like really fast, like from zero to a million a month in a matter of less than a year.
Travis Chappell (20m 7s):
Right.
Keala Kanae (20m 8s):
We went from zero, we launched and went from zero to a million a month in four months.
Travis Chappell (20m 11s):
Yeah. I mean that's
Keala Kanae (20m 13s):
20 1st year.
Travis Chappell (20m 14s):
Yeah. That, that's unheard of. And, and the, the, the fact that you, you were even able to recover from that is still mind blowing. But you obviously, there was a time period where you say you were even in a state of depression, almost suicidal. You're doing 1.5, 1.8 million a month, top line revenue and then start realizing that you're losing 300 grand a month even though you're making a hundred, like 1.5, 1.6, 1.7. It's like what is happening? Because now you're a marketer and you're thrust into this massive business and now you're running into all the other problems that a business has, which you don't think about as a marketer. You're, you're thinking acquisition, you see that top line moving up. You're like, we're winning. And then you take a peak behind the curtain and you're like, wait a second, how do we lose 300?
Travis Chappell (20m 57s):
Like how does our bank account have less money in it this month than it did last month, but our revenue says that we made $1.8 million. How did that even happen? So, so talk me through your transition, you know, when did you embrace that role of moving from, hey guys, I'm a marketer to like, no, I need to be the CEO and I need to have an understanding of what's happening in every aspect of my business,
Keala Kanae (21m 19s):
Man, so this is gonna be a little bit of a story, but I, and I, but I will pro, I will say that it's probably worth it and it's like one of these things that like I think every, some everyone who is aspiring to be, you know, an enterprise level entrepreneur has to kind of go through and almost everybody, like you've talked about, marketers who've evolved into a CEO and actually we've been able to build something that's like a real legitimate standing business. They've all gone through this sort of evolution in their own ways. And so yeah, we launched and scale. So we launched November of 2016. We opened our doors to the public with our courses and coaching program. By March of 2017 we had our first million dollar month. We scaled to like 19 million and some change by the, so almost $20 million in revenue by the end of 2017.
Keala Kanae (22m 4s):
And I thought that when I got to that place in my business, when I got to like a million dollars a month or whatever, I thought that there would be some sense of fulfillment or satisfaction or happiness that was found there. And really there wasn't, there was actually like a real vast emptiness that was found there because I thought that somehow the money was gonna make me happy, let's say realized fairly quickly that that was not what was gonna make me happy. And I found myself in this place where all of a sudden I had like 60 something employees, I had all of these different financial issues. I spent much more of my time on meetings and, and working through issues and problems in the business and people problems and process problems and all these things than I did actually doing the thing that I loved, which was marketing.
Keala Kanae (22m 46s):
Right. And so I eventually fell into this several month long depression that depression, it originally started out as like some severe anxiety. I would get up in the morning and I would instantly start having panic attacks like before I even got out of bed and I would not wanna get outta bed. It's
Travis Chappell (23m 2s):
A good way to start the day.
Keala Kanae (23m 3s):
Great way to start the day. Yeah.
Travis Chappell (23m 5s):
Yeah. I forgot, I forgot what stage that is in Tony Robbins morning routine, but yeah, panic and anxiety. I forget where that go. Like somewhere between meditation and like cold plunge. Yeah.
Keala Kanae (23m 14s):
It was like journaling, panic attack. Yeah. So yep. I'd wake up, I'd have a panic attack man on many mornings. Get in the shower, try my best to get through it. Oftentimes I would have to take a shit, take a shit take, take a Shot.
Travis Chappell (23m 26s):
Same with me. Yeah. Yeah. We're on the same page bro. Panic attack, meditation. We're on the sameKeala Kanae (23m 31s):
Shit.
Travis Chappell (23m 31s):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, no. We're take a
Keala Kanae (23m 33s):
Shot sometimes just to like take that edge off a little bit and then plug into work and then I'd find myself drinking myself to sleep at night. Yeah. Just to wind back down. And so it started out as an anxiety, it eventually rolled into a depression. I then went on a vacation to Hawaii to take a break and I thought that that would gimme some space to like chill out and relax. And in fact the depression got worse while I was in Hawaii. And that's when like the suicidal star thoughts started to kick in. And now I'm like thinking like, oh my God, am I gonna off myself? Like, and all this sort of stuff. And so I, I started looking for, for help and the long and the short of it is, so I went through this process for several months, but the long and the short of it is I I over time I I, I talked to a psychologist who I had started seeing originally when I was like 16 years old.
Keala Kanae (24m 17s):
Cause I went and I ended up in anger management and all this shit because I was getting lots of fights and stuff in school. That was my way of coping with my parents' divorce. And so I go back to see him. I, I hire a couple of coaches that I had met along the way. Thankfully I had a lot of personal development experience prior to that. And I don't mean just reading personal development books, I mean like going back and looking at my traumas in life and trying to heal those traumas so that I could bring more of myself to the, to the present and to the table in my business. So I hired a couple of my coaches. I went back to see a psychologist and I started to work through this stuff. And one of the biggest epiphanies that I found is that I was doing all this stuff every day that was no longer the stuff that I loved doing.
Keala Kanae (24m 57s):
And I either needed to scale the business back and learn how to, and, and build something where I could just do this thing that I love doing. Or I had to learn to fall in love with a new role that I was being called to do. Right. So I think that that's the evolution that most of us as entrepreneurs have to go through. Cuz most entrepreneurs start out as a technician. Like they're great at something, right? Oh, I love baking. I want to open a bakery. And so Well you open a bakery and now you never fucking bake again. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I love marketing and sales. So I wanna teach people marketing and sales and people keep asking me about it. So I'm gonna create this courses in coaching business and I'll get to talk all about marketing and sales and now I never talk about marketing and sales.
Keala Kanae (25m 39s):
Yeah. Right. And so, and now I'm dealing with all these human resources issues and accounting, drama and all this looking at balance sheets and all this stuff that I can't understand. So the overwhelming majority of entrepreneurs will actually reach that point, that breaking point, and then they eventually scale their business back down and they never push past that limit. And I'm not saying that you should, I'm just saying you, I mean at some point just decide. Right. What I did is I decided like I needed to fall in love with this new role that I was doing. And so thankfully I had kind of a, a model, a framework to work off of. It comes from a Dr. John d Martini who's easily my favorite, like probably the brightest human being walking the earth that almost nobody knows of.
Keala Kanae (26m 21s):
And his model is called the hierarchy of values, which comes from a field of study known as axiology, which is a study of value of and worth and through the hierarchy of values, which I talk about a lot because it's the most universally sound principle that I've ever found from a teleological perspective. And teleology is the study of why things happen, not in the form of what causes them, but in the form of what purpose do they serve. And so a lot of the challenges that we face as human beings, procrastination, hesitation, frustration, overwhelm, self sabotage, imposter syndrome, those actually serve a purpose, believe it or not. And the hierarchy of values model that was derived by Dr. D Martini helps explain what some of that purpose is.
Keala Kanae (27m 2s):
But I, I looked then at my values, like what did I really value in life? And I, I learned that I had to like link my values to the things, the activity that I had to do in my business every day. Like I didn't love reading legal contracts, I didn't love looking at accounting spreadsheets. I didn't love getting on 50 meetings a week. I didn't love dealing with people problems and their in-fighting and their drama and stuff. I didn't love those things. But then I had to figure out, okay, but if I do have a high value on building financial independence, well then how is me reading legal contracts gonna be a benefit and service to my value of building financial independence? How is understanding human resource issues gonna be a benefit and service to my value of building financial independence and really linking those things together.
Keala Kanae (27m 46s):
So the way that Dr. Demartini explains it is that when it comes to your values, right, you can either do what you love by delegation, which means that you just do the things you love and delegate everything else or learn to love what you do by linking it back to your values. And so I, I've had to do a bit of both, right? I do a lot of delegation obviously, or I wouldn't be able to have the enterprise level business that we have right now, which I guess you would call about a medium size business and, and growing. But I also, along the way at times still even till today, have to find ways to link these tasks that are on my plate. These things that I have to do that I quote unquote have to do, like listen to our language, our language tells us a lot about how we're actually operating subconsciously, right?
Keala Kanae (28m 27s):
So have to do, need to do, ought to do, should do. These are all things that we say when we're trying to acc when we're trying to approach something that doesn't link back to our values. And so when, when our conscious mind can't link together something that we're doing or a goal that we have, and if he, if he can't link that back to our values, it spits out that feedback in the terms of our language. But when I find myself doing things that I feel like I have to do, need to do, ought to do, should do that I don't really want to do and I'm coming up in a resistance against and I'll sit and I'll ask myself, okay, well how is doing this? How is solving this problem in my business? How is executing this task gonna be a benefit and service to the things that I do value in my life? And I'll look for those links so that I can learn to love what I'm called to do on this journey that is entrepreneurship.
Keala Kanae (29m 11s):
You know? Yeah. I
Travis Chappell (29m 11s):
Love that answer, man. Linking values back to the things that you don't enjoy doing to give you a sense of purpose behind them or Yeah man, I forget the book I was reading recently, but essentially said something very similar to that. It was talking about linking your purpose, your why to the, to things that you don't super enjoy. And it, and it got me thinking about like, hey, if this is something that I'm not, like if I'm selling something that I'm not like super passionate about, but it helps fulfill like some sort of a why, like if I could really understand the why behind it, then you can really start to fulfill that role. And in that particular scenario, you can sell more effectively, you can have more confidence in your offers, you can, you can lead more effectively, but in this scenario saved your life.
Travis Chappell (29m 53s):
It wasn't a matter of like,
Keala Kanae (29m 54s):
Probably in a very real sense, it saved my life. Yeah. Is
Travis Chappell (29m 56s):
Philosophy something that you think a lot about now? It sounds like you kind of had this journey of like hustler, hustler, hustler, hustler for 12 years and then entrepreneur marketer and then, oh no, everything's going terribly even though theoretically it's going really well and now I'm becoming this, like this modern day philosopher cuz I have to figure out first how to get my own mental state under control so that I can go back and do the things that I enjoy doing. Because if I don't figure that out first, it was almost like you went entrepreneur, philosopher, then ceo. Do you feel like you still think a lot about that stuff now? Would you say that you found at least some sort of purpose or meaning or happiness or joy af after the reset?
Travis Chappell (30m 39s):
I
Keala Kanae (30m 39s):
Would say that the evolution probably looked more like failed, entrepreneur, philosopher, successful entrepreneur, revisiting philosophy to like take me through to that next stage of my own evolution. Okay. Philosophy is like, so that, that's just something that I came across in the world of personal development. Yeah. Right. And going to seminars and doing these experiential things and retreats and I mean, I mean, I slept for two days in the fucking woods by myself, like vision quest and all these weird things. Okay. But philosophy is probably what helped me to kind of formulate a set of principles and belief systems that allowed me to go from failed entrepreneur to somebody who could actually be successful. Yeah. Right. And I, I say this a lot and we even, it's, it's a part of our core curriculum is that success is the marriage of skillset and mindset.
Keala Kanae (31m 25s):
So philosophy helped me develop the mindset that was necessary. Yeah. As well, here's what I find man, is I find like the most successful people that I know. Like last night I was at dinner with a guy who just acquired 49 businesses last year in a roll up and is on the cusp of exiting this thing for 150 to 175 million. And he's got four buyers on the, on the table right now. And then I'm sitting next to a guy who has one of the largest VC funds in the world. And inevitably what we end up talking about is some philosophy that we have that's helped us achieve that success in life. Right. If you look at Hormoze got super popular right now and I, I've hung out with Hormoze in the past. Really, really smart dude.
Keala Kanae (32m 6s):
But if you look at like some of his interviews that have done the best, it's where he starts to transition into his own philosophies Absolutely. About business and success and life. Right. And so I think that to some degree, as part of our evolution, especially when we're reaching for new heights to places that we've never been before, we've got to create some sort of philosophy around who we are, how we fit into the world. We, we create models about the world and our, and how we fit into that. And for through that philosophy, we develop some sort of like principles Yeah. Or models that we, we use to kind of understand and problem solve. I was reading something recently that said that science is the exploration of what we know and philosophy is the exploration of what we don't.
Keala Kanae (32m 49s):
Hmm. It's asking the questions that are almost unquantifiable, can't fully be measured, can't fully even be answered. Right. And if science does find a way to catch up and answer it, then a new philosophical question opens up as a new gateway Yeah. To the next threshold of understanding. Yeah. A new
Travis Chappell (33m 5s):
Line of thinking, right? Yeah. Trying to bridge the gap between what we know and we don't know. Right. The more that I study this stuff, the more that I like, it's, it's kind of funny, you jump in, everybody's like, oh, it's all about your mindset. It's about your mindset. And at the, and I don't know if you were like this at the beginning, but at the beginning I was always like, okay, I get that, but what's, what do I need to do though? Like, what's the practical, gimme the skillset. Like what do I need to work on? And then it, it was like I, I almost had a departure from mindset because I got so focused and like practicality. But then to your point, if you still don't fix that, everything else is, everything else is less important from that point forward. Cuz you don't have a strong enough foundation to build anything on. Right. Because all success starts with self-awareness.
Travis Chappell (33m 47s):
What do you want? Because success is subjective. Your definition of success is gonna be different for me, it's gonna be different for him, it's gonna be different for her, it's gonna be different for everybody. So self-awareness, which is in your mind, and then mindset, which is like, do you believe that you can go get it? If you don't know where you're going and you don't believe that you can go where you want to go, then like you can learn all the skills in the world and you're never gonna get there. Cuz you're limited by your own belief or lack thereof in your ability to do so.
Keala Kanae (34m 14s):
I, I got a great example of that. Yeah. Have you seen the Untold the Rise and Fall of And One, have you seen that documentary?
Travis Chappell (34m 22s):
It's actually really funny. I did not watch the documentary, but I interviewed the founder of and One when that documentary came out and I've had it on my list and I just never watched it.
Keala Kanae (34m 31s):
Oh, okay. So this isn't, I think this is a perfect example of what we're kind of discussing here. And it's why I, it's, it's a perfect example of why I say that success is both skillset and mindset, right? So specifically what I say is that like skillset without mindset is a nightmare cuz you wake up every day knowing that you're capable of more, but you can't accomplish it. And other people have what you want. Mindset without skillset, singing kumbaya, lighting candles, making vision boards and dreaming about fucking paychecks, showing up in your mailbox without learning a skillset that's gonna actually make that happen. That's a fantasy. But if you can marry the two, then you unlock the dream. So untold is the story of the and one brand, the basketball brand, right? That was like really popular mid nineties. So let's like recap this really quick as best as I can for those that maybe aren't familiar with the brand.
Keala Kanae (35m 16s):
So, and one starts out as this basketball brand and they have this dream of competing with Nike, the fucking 800 pound behemoth of the industry. And in their search for how they could compete with Nike, they'd start to decide, they think, well, maybe we should sponsor some athletes. Yeah. Except all the athletes are outside of their price range and or already sponsored by some other big, big brand Reebok, Adidas, Nike, whatever it is, right? So somebody tells them to go check out these bad, these street ballers playing in up in like upstate New York and they go to visit this basketball game like in the Bronx, I think it was somewhere. And they find this unseen experience where there's hundreds of people gathered around a public street ball court to go watch a bunch of street ballers play an ex exhibition game.
Keala Kanae (36m 3s):
People are hanging out of their housing projects, like whole families have come over and they're hanging out the windows of their housing projects looking down on this game. And it's got this massive crowd that it's drawn. And so these founders are sitting there, they're looking at these basketball players and they're finding that they have all this fancy footwork and they've kind of created their own nuance to the game of basketball. Now NBA at the time thought that that sort of play was like quote unquote unprofessional. Sure. So what they did is they decided to go like, why don't we sponsor some of these guys and create like a recreational team. So they sponsor these an one players, they then start touring across the US doing these recreational basketball games. And then they videotape that they release DVDs. These DVDs get sold in all the athletic stores.
Keala Kanae (36m 43s):
These DVDs start going viral. Every this, they start building this fan base. And all of a sudden this an one basketball brand starts booming in sales in such to such a degree that Nike does. So both the NBA and Nike do start paying attention to what's happening with, and one NBA starts to allow some of that behavior in, into their game because they see that, you know, if they don't offer their audiences that level of entertainment with all the fancy footwork and and stuff, then they're gonna lose some of their audience. And Nike starts looking for these street ballers that they can start sponsoring so that they can get some, they can take back some of that market share. But what ends up happening that's I find most interesting, which is really the pinnacle of the lesson here, is that these and one players, they end up having their names on the back of jerseys.
Keala Kanae (37m 30s):
They're sitting, they're, they're signing autographs with hundreds of people in line at their local champ sports and Footlocker. They both over time build fame and fortune. Now are they as, as, as are rich as maybe the NBA players? They don't have contracts quite that big. Sure. But you're talking about people that came out of the ghetto. Yeah. I mean, you're talking about people that came out of nothing Yeah. Rising from the, it would take minimum wage to play basketball. Right? Yeah. I mean, and they're, they're, they're not only getting paid like pretty decent salaries by most people's standards, right. But they're getting paid that to do the thing that they love doing. But what, how come we don't hear about and one anymore? Well, in the documentary they start exploring that. Like those athletes started all of this infighting with each other about why are you getting paid more than I'm getting paid and you know, why doesn't the company appreciate us?
Keala Kanae (38m 13s):
Why don't they pay us more? Look how much money we're making them and blah blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And all these things start to, it tears down the company from the inside out. And that's because these guys had, would you argue that they had skills? Anybody who watched them would know that they had skills. Yeah. But their mindset destroyed their own opportunity. That's self-sabotage. Because I would argue that probably likely to some degree because of their upbringing, their background and the, the lack of like personal development or exploration of their own belief systems, they didn't truly believe that they were worthy of having those things. Yeah. And so they destroyed it.
Travis Chappell (38m 45s):
Yeah. It's what Ed my is always, always calls the internal thermostat. It's like if you're internal thermostat set to 70 degrees, you start getting around people that are at 80 degrees and you start going up your internal thermostat's immediately gonna correct it and bring you right back down to 70 degrees because you do not believe that you are worth the things that you're, that you're right. Accomplishing or getting or the, the paychecks that you're getting. You have this, you have this thing going inside of you. It's like, I I shouldn't be making this type of money. So you find ways to destroy your own success
Keala Kanae (39m 16s):
Yeah. To bring it back down to someplace where you feel comfortable. Yeah. So here's an interesting philosophical question. Can your net worth ever exceed your self worth
Travis Chappell (39m 24s):
Barring any sort of like outlier, lucky circumstance? I don't think so.
Keala Kanae (39m 29s):
Well, I mean, even if you look at like lottery winners, man, I mean, you do the research on them, the majority of them that they takes
Travis Chappell (39m 35s):
A few months Yeah.
Keala Kanae (39m 36s):
To go broke again. Right? Right. They go broke again, typically, and most of them, a lot of professional athlete wish that they wish that they didn't in win the lottery. It actually made their life worse. Right. And yet the right now, poor people all across, like the majority of tickets sold for the lottery, are sold to people. Like I was just recently, recently, listen, listening to an audiobook, the average person buying a lottery ticket is spending on about $412 a year, but doesn't have $400 in their checking account on any given moment. Oh my gosh. Think about that. Oh, now it's hard to understand that mentality, right? Like, it might be easy for us to judge sitting from where we're sitting, but to them it might look like, listen, I got no other shot. Sure.
Keala Kanae (40m 16s):
This is all I got. Yeah. So maybe that's the way that they see it. But then you go look at the people who've actually won it and if you don't have a sincere reverence for money right, then you, it will destroy you. Yep. And so if you come into a millionaire a million dollars, you better become a millionaire quick. Yeah.
Travis Chappell (40m 30s):
Better adopt that mindset really fast. Or it's gonna be gone as soon as it came into your bank
Keala Kanae (40m 34s):
Account. I think the, the, the most exciting thing for me about this journey is like, it's not the money, it's who we become in character and mine. Yeah. That develops the money. The money is just a feedback mechanism.
Travis Chappell (40m 47s):
Yeah. It's your identity. It's who you, it's the person. That's what I always tell people is like, stop focusing. Like your goals shouldn't just be focused on a certain outcome that you have. Your goals should be focused on becoming the person that's capable of achieving that outcome. You know what I mean? And, and if you focus on becoming that person, then that person is capable of achieving those things. But if you just say like, I want to whatever, make a million dollars, but you've only ever made $35,000 a year, then like going from 35,000 to a million is a massive jump because you likely don't have any of the skills required currently to get up to a million dollars. Now, lucky for you, there's no special requirements. Like we talked about.
Travis Chappell (41m 27s):
You don't have to have an MBA from Harvard to go make a million dollars. You can make a hundred million dollars without going to college at all. All like, you can do whatever you want. Right. You have the ability to do so. Right. So that's the good news. The bad news is that you don't have any of that right now. So like, you gotta start from scratch, you know what I mean? But if your goals are only related to like, I'm gonna make a hundred thousand dollars in six months, you know, it's like, okay, but what if you focused on, instead of saying this, my goal is to make a hundred thousand dollars, my goal is to take 300 sales calls in the next six months instead of I wanna make a hundred thousand dollars in the next six months. Right? Because the person that takes 300 sales calls is likely more capable of selling a hundred thousand dollars worth of products or services in a month because they've taken 300 sales calls and they've learned over 300 sales calls what to do, what not to do, what to say, what not to say, how to respond to this objection and that objection.
Travis Chappell (42m 15s):
What tonality to use when they can sense somebody's feeling put by the conversation, that person is going to be more capable of achieving that goal. Right. So instead of setting up all these, just like arbitra, that's why nobody keeps up with their New Year's resolutions. Like, I forget the stat, but it's like 80 something percent of of people give up before the month of January is even over. And it's because there's nothing magical about the switch of the year. There's nothing magical about the switch of the quarter. It's you have to focus on building yourself to become the type of person that's capable of achieving the things that you want to achieve. And that person can do those things. You cannot. And if you can do the things that you want to do, then you're not aiming big enough. You know what I'm saying?
Travis Chappell (42m 55s):
Like if the current version of you Yep. Is, is like setting these goals and you're like, I could totally hit that. Well you're not thinking big enough then. Right? Like, you should be putting goals that stretch you and, and force you to become a different person because that's the person that's going to be capable of doing that. Like the, the person that you were before you ran into all those issues with your company is like, if you would've just stayed at that identity, it's not like you'd live a bad life. You'd probably still be making, you know, a half a million a month with good profit margins and a small team and just being the marketer. But instead you were, you're pushing these crazy revenue numbers with higher profit margins with multiple businesses because you adopted this new identity of becoming the CEO because that was the person that you had to become in order to be able to reach the level that you were trying to get to in terms of like the actual numbers and the goals themselves.
Travis Chappell (43m 40s):
I love
Keala Kanae (43m 40s):
This little rant by the way. Yes. This is great.
Travis Chappell (43m 42s):
This, this is, this is brought to you by Magic Mind. No, I genuinely, bro. Is that what
Keala Kanae (43m 47s):
Happened? We took this shot, dude, and all of a sudden we're like philosophers, bro. We're channeling like Aristotle and Play-Doh.
Travis Chappell (43m 52s):
That's what happens, dude. That's what happens. You take a little bit of magic. Have you taken this stuff before? Yeah. It's pretty solid. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like little macho shot, but lots of ne tropics. It's got like, it's got like 30 milligrams of caffeine, so like, not enough to, to do a bunch by itself, but that's why I always take it with my morning coffee and stuff. But yeah, this, this good stuff. It's good stuff.
Keala Kanae (44m 8s):
Are you an affiliate?
Travis Chappell (44m 9s):
No. Well the we're, they sent me a bunch of free stuff, so, so you plug 'em, they might, they might end up sponsoring the show, but I told 'em that. I was like, Hey, if you guys sponsor or don't sponsor, it doesn't matter to me cuz I like the product so Awesome. Yeah, that's why We'll see if it, see if it turns out into anything, but, but I like it in free shit. So,
Keala Kanae (44m 25s):
So go to, if you want to get, get it, go to magic mind.com/travis
Travis Chappell (44m 29s):
Travis. Yeah. Yeah. We'll just assume that they're gonna accept the sponsorship terms I sent to them and Yeah. Go to magic by do com slash travis. Pick up, pick up a couple cases. This shit's, this shit's really good. Okay, so now you are focused a lot on organic. Talk to me about that. So you, you are kind of master of paid marketing. You have a paid digital agency, you guys spend a million a month in advertising for clients and stuff like that. You're also spending a ton on yourself, on your own businesses and now you're, you're looking to get into a little bit more like organic, doing more content, stuff like this, stuff like vertical video. Talk to me about that. Why and, and what's been working for you?
Keala Kanae (45m 5s):
So about that transition into organic, man, this is, and this has been quite the journey. I'm at this place where I'm like learning all over again. Yeah. Like I, I know paid marketing really, really well and I can show almost anybody how to use paid marketing to grow their business. And the reason that we're venturing into organic right now is basically what I start to see over time is that the cost of advertising is always going to increase. Okay. So then if the cost of advertising is always increasing, then the cost per impressions is always increasing. Your cost per acquisition is always increasing. So that, so it literally means that the cost of acquiring a customer is always going to be increasing for us as business owners. And so the only way then that you can combat that is to continue to increase your average customer value at the same rate that you, that the cost of advertising is increasing.
Keala Kanae (45m 56s):
Now try that one on for size and see if you can figure out how to grow your customer value at the same rate that the advertising costs are currently rising. It'd be very, very, very difficult not to, to say that it can't be done. Sure. And it's probably better, it's easier done in some models versus others depending on where people are at in their business. But we've kind of gotten to a place where like just tacking on yet another high ticket offer so that we could quote unquote increase our average customer value. Doesn't really do much for us in terms of actually serving the client. Yeah. That's more like us doing something to serve the business over the client. Sure. If that makes sense. So I'm looking at, okay, so how do we continue to combat this? How do we bring down our, our average customer value over time?
Keala Kanae (46m 37s):
And the best way that I could find in order to do that, I mean obviously you can do all the conversion metrics, you can do all the split testing, you can do all these things. But if I look at organic, which is essentially free traffic, let's call it, right? We invest time versus money. If I add in the organic component and then we blend the cost per acquisition, what ends up happening is now we are, because we have that organic traffic and that organic customer acquisition where the net cost per acquisition becomes less. Yeah. Okay. And that's probably the best way that I've seen so far to combat the rising cost of advertising and you know, so that's basically like why I started doing all this YouTube organic and, and Instagram reels and all these different things.
Keala Kanae (47m 19s):
The other thing that I found interesting as a byproduct of that, that I didn't previously calculate for is as I start to add in YouTube and reels into our production, what ended up happening is our lead to front end sale conversion started to increase and our customers started to buy more. So our customer value increased and so did purchase velocity, which by purchase velocity mean at the speed at which they upgraded with us. So it's not just about how much money do they spend, but how fast do they spend it because the faster that they spend their money with us, the quicker that we become liquid on our advertising costs, which allows us to scale up faster. Sure. What we found in like just pulling the audience is that all of a sudden, like more and more people started to report that, oh, I've been watching call's YouTube videos for a while.
Keala Kanae (48m 4s):
I've been following Kalala on Instagram for a while. I know that he knows what he's talking about. So I've built that no, like, and trust. So before when I did it all through paid advertising, you know, you got on my email list and then I did everything possible to own your inbox. Right. And now consumers today versus like 2016 when I got started, they're much more intelligent and they're gonna go do the research. And so if I didn't have other things where they could see some of my content Yeah. Then they were just going based off of like, I guess believing that I could help 'em. But, but long and short of it is, so what indirectly happened is that we started to convert more of our leads into customers, which directly brings down your cost per acquisition.
Keala Kanae (48m 46s):
And those customers started to buy more from us because the no, like, and trucks factor was much more solidified. Right. So then our average customer value went up and the speed at which they made that purchase increase, which allowed us to get liquid faster on the front and scale up our advertising sooner. Yeah.
Travis Chappell (49m 3s):
Overall, if you're starting from, from scratch, do you think that it's possible to build both at the same time? Or do you think, like when you look back are you like, you know what? Yeah, we didn't do organic when I first started and if we did do that, we'd probably be way further ahead in terms of volume and followers and, and traffic that we're getting on the organic side. However, I did master paid traffic pretty well and that is like directly tied to our top line revenue growth over those years. Do do you think it's possible to have done both of them at the same time?
Keala Kanae (49m 31s):
I don't know if it's really possible to, I mean, I I go back to that saying he who chases two ravage catches none. Sure. So I don't know that it's necessarily possible to do. At the same time, here's what I've seen though, like recently I, I've seen this quite a bit actually, is like I see all these people on, on, on doing their reels and their tos these days that are like running a business that's struggling and everybody's doing like, kind of like the style of reels and tos that Hormoze made really popular. Right. And people are starting to think that that's the reason that he's growing. And it's like, no, it's not the reason that he's growing. You know what, he's growing. He's growing because he launched a super sick book. Yeah. Right. A hundred million offers that went viral and then in the midst of that virality, this timing could not have been more perfect.
Keala Kanae (50m 15s):
Then he has a 50 million exit in the middle of that virality, which now all everybody going is like, this guy actually knows what he's talking about. Right. And boom,
Travis Chappell (50m 23s):
He's actually made a hundred million and he wrote a book about making a hundred million dollars. There's probably something in there. Yeah. And then he actually spent time writing the book. He didn't hire a ghost writer to like shit out a product. You know what I mean? Like he, he actually like put hundreds of hours in the product. You
Keala Kanae (50m 37s):
Tell that he invested his own personal time in that book just in the quality of that book. And to be fair, and this isn't a dig on the book or him like reading the book, there was as a marketer myself, a direct response marketer who's been in the industry for years. There was nothing that I learned in the book necessarily that was new. Sure. But it was the most well thought out and organized compilation of information marketing material out there. Exactly. Put it was like a freaking manual.
Travis Chappell (51m 2s):
It was like a mind meld of like Dan Kennedy, Russell Brunson and then his own practitioner or experience.Keala Kanae (51m 8s):
Yes. Yeah. And it was like, yeah, it'd be, it was like a user manual for how to create an offer that Right. Just mops the floor Right. In the marketplace.
Travis Chappell (51m 16s):
And then when you go search like, who is this guy? It's like, oh, PR piece about, he just sold, not even the whole company, he sold like 70% of the company to a private equity firm for over $50 million, which is extremely difficult to do in a personal brand education company. Yeah. To, to sell off a piece to a large private equity firm like that is, it's, it's, it's difficult to do.
Keala Kanae (51m 38s):
Well Ann got a lot of that, maybe even all of it in cash, bro. Yeah. Like that's really hard to do, right? Yeah.
Travis Chappell (51m 44s):
Without, without like a five year earn out. Exactly. But he built the business in a way that was attractive enough for that private equity firm to, to happen go down the rabbit hole. Yeah. But yeah, I actually a post about that the other day. I was like, Hey guys, I don't think it's the yellow text that made or moseys stuff blow up. So like if you're just, if you're only focused on this one thing and expecting it to be the thing that's gonna make you go viral, it's like you should maybe go like build a stack of proof first because that's the real reason. And, and not, and it's not, it's not, it's a combination of those things. Right. Because obviously not everybody who's, who's built a hundred million company is as well known as Amos is now. Right. So it's a combination for sure. But without that piece, he's not where he is now.
Travis Chappell (52m 26s):
Like he has the proof first and then he built the engine second and he spends, I think the last figure I heard was a hundred grand a month on, on organic, just producing content. But he's getting like a hundred million impressions a month or something crazy like that from pure organic. So probably worth it. Yeah. At the end of the day you're starting a podcast soon, is that right?
Keala Kanae (52m 50s):
We've been thinking about doing a podcast for, I mean I, I I've kind of been fascinated by the idea of doing a podcast for a few years and then there's just also like trying to where does that fit into my time and my schedule and my calendar and what's the return on investment gonna be there? Tell me about it. But down the road, actually, Travis, I came to interview you about should I actually do this bro? I don't know. But yeah, I mean we're exploring doing a podcast. I don't know if we'll necessarily do something that that's like the traditional route Sure. Of doing a podcast in terms of like weekly episodes or whatnot. But here's my theory on the podcast idea as a concept is, and I don't know, I mean if anybody else wants to steal this and go, go swipe it and deploy and see what happens. Awesome. So if I had a studio, which I don't even necessarily need to have a studio, but if I have a podcast in a studio, I have the opportunity to bring people in that I can align my personal brand with, right.
Keala Kanae (53m 38s):
So I can bring people in that are further ahead in terms of their personal brand and their reach that already have the captive audience that I want to get, get my brand out to. Let's say I have a reason to bring them in, interview them, and then it's basically becomes a guilt by association, let's say. Absolutely. Right. So just the fact that I'm sitting with them having that conversation, people wonder, well who's this person? Yep. As an example. Right? And there's been several times that I've watched the podcast from somebody that I do know being interviewed and I look at the podcaster, I'm like, who's this person? And I go Google 'em and I try to find out who they are cuz I've never seen anything from them before. And if all I had was the platform and the ability to bring them in and then because of my paid advertising background, I can basically guarantee that, hey, I can get you 250,000, 500,000 views of our interview.
Keala Kanae (54m 25s):
So I know that I can produce that tangible result for them. Yeah. Where most podcasters probably can't produce that tangible result. Right. I don't necessarily care about having all of the episodes. What I ha what I care about is having a carrot that I can dangle to bring people in that are further ahead of where I'm at and that already have my, my ideal audience's attention and I have a tangible way to ensure that they have something measurable by which to say that it was worth their time and energy to come beyond my podcast. If that makes sense. Absolutely. So I'm trying to like collab, I'm, I'm trying to put together these various skill sets Yeah. In a way to do a semi organic audience growth.
Travis Chappell (55m 1s):
That that is, that's the blueprint to me. If you get into podcasting because you want a Joe Rogan audience, then you're probably gonna quit within a year or two because it's very difficult and it's very long tail to grow a podcast audience, especially a hundred percent organically. That's why I tell people to like restructure the way you think about it and think about it as a connection tool alone. Like it's the Trojan horse, it's the vehicle through which you get through the gatekeeper of anybody you want to talk to and you actually can hop out and have a conversation with that person. And it is the ultimate relationship builder for, especially for people that you, you would think normally wouldn't give you any of their time. Right. You know what I'm saying? So like the, the com the the doors that it opens, like I, like I said, it's that, it's that it's that Trojan horse and especially if you build a studio on your office space or something like that and you can bring people into that, it kind of like gives them a glimpse of your world that builds insane credibility in your brand to that individual.
Travis Chappell (55m 58s):
Makes them more likely to share the content with their audience. Cause that's one big thing is like interviewing's the first thing, then you have to have a successful interview and actually ask good, engaging, thoughtful questions that produce a real conversation instead of the scripted things everybody else asks. Then you have to create good enough content that's repurposed from that interview in order for them to share it. And then they, you have to come off as an incredible enough person for them to be okay with sending their audience to you. Right. Right. So like, cuz that we were a lot of podcasters and one of the big things that they always, they always say is like, I can't get my guest to share the episode. It's like, well there's a multiple, a multitude of factors that are around that. Number one, you're probably too desperately asking them to share it all the time. And that comes across as needy and they're not gonna share with their audience because they have no idea what you're gonna do with that traffic.
Travis Chappell (56m 40s):
So why would they share it? Secondly, you're not conducting a good interview. The the content you're producing sucks. Like they're not, you're not extracting any like nuggets from them or you're not talking about things that they don't normally talk about that would prompt them to want to share with their audience. If they're gonna share stuff they normally talk about, they're just gonna share their own stuff while they share your stuff. Right. Third, you're probably not repurposing the content well enough that makes them go like, shit, this makes me look really good. This makes me look like I know what I'm talking about. Yeah. I definitely wanna post this. Like, you should be, like, after the interview's done, that person should be coming to you and being like, Hey, do you have any assets from that? Can I have that file? My team really wants to cut that up. You know what I mean? Like, if you are doing it well, they should, they should be actively a like in asking you like, Hey, hey, is that content done?
Travis Chappell (57m 25s):
Can I share that yet? You know what I mean? Like that's, that's the only part of the transaction that people don't think about is that you have to be able to also conduct a good enough interview and then be good enough. Have a team that's good enough. Like Eric's sitting in the corner over there who goes through and cuts up clips that make that person look good and then shares them with that person that are for that person. Because a lot of people will share, it's like, it's like when people give you like swag and it's just full of their branding and they're, and it's like, I might wear that to the gym if it's nice enough, but like, I'm not just gonna wear your shit everywhere. You know what I mean? If you like John Rule and a buddy of mine talks about, he has a book called Giftology and his whole con, his whole business is about, they plug into like fortune 500 companies and they do gifting for them.
Travis Chappell (58m 8s):
So one of his principles is like, hey, if you're gifting something to somebody, don't put your own stuff on it. Put their stuff on it. Make it to where they wanna show it to other people. Cuz they're still gonna think about you every time they do it. So that's a huge mistake people make. So when people share content, when people repurpose content for their podcast, they give it to that person. It's like branded with all of their stuff all over it and it's like, well this doesn't go with that person's stuff at all. You have to think about what the other person wants, what their audience needs, and then that's what's gonna get them to share it ultimately. And like, that's what's really increasing impressions for us right now is that we, we interview really great people. We have great conversations, we work hard on repurposing great content, and then we do like actual Instagram collaborations with them. And those are our most viewed videos right now. The videos that ha that are a hundred thousand views or more, or 50,000 views or more, almost every single one of them are collaborations with somebody where they accept the collab and it appears, and that's a perfect example of like somebody scrolling through their feed, seeing like maybe they're a fan of, of you.
Travis Chappell (59m 2s):
And then they see my face and it says like, Travis Chapel and Kayak and I, and it's like, well who's this guy? I've never seen this guy before. Right. And same with May audience. My audience goes like, who's this guy? I never seen that guy before. And they tap in and that you get exposed to this entire new, you know, audience of people. So I, for what it's worth, I know that was a long explanation, but I, for what it's worth, I think that you're thinking about it 100% the correct way.
Keala Kanae (59m 23s):
I think what's most interesting about what you said, man, they're listening to you, is you're really highlighting, in my opinion, one of the biggest reasons that entrepreneurs don't really grow into what's possible for them. And that is because they're so busy trying to serve themselves, they forget that business is in the service of others. You know? So if you're looking at somebody like, oh, I can't wait to get this person on my podcast so they can help me grow my podcast. Yeah. That's the wrong motherfucking question, man. Exactly. The question is, what do you have going on in your life and your business in which my podcast could serve you in accomplishing that? That's the real question, right? Like, if I'm sitting down with somebody and I was gonna interview 'em with in a podcast like, hey, is there something that you wanna promote to your audience or something that you want to, like a message or something that you want to get out there and how can, how can I ask you questions that are gonna help you achieve that goal, that purpose that you know Yep.
Keala Kanae (1h 0m 14s):
End result that you want to, that you want to accomplish so that they are perfectly then incentivized to share the content that we created because it's a, it's exactly what they want their audience to hear and see if that makes sense. Right. So it's, it's really about sitting there and being of service to them. When you talk about, you know, pe gifting people. Last year I threw out some invitations for my 40th birthday party. You, you came to it. So you know what
Travis Chappell (1h 0m 40s):
I got? I got one. Yeah.
Keala Kanae (1h 0m 41s):
What a weird debacle that party was. But I had people reaching back out to me and they're like, Hey man, I just show me your address. I can't make it, but I'll send you some of my swag. And I'm like, why? Yeah, what I want to wear your brand
Travis Chappell (1h 0m 57s):
At my birthday party. Like
Keala Kanae (1h 0m 59s):
Wouldn't you if you're gonna do something for me, like throw me some Louie or something. Like it doesn't even
Travis Chappell (1h 1m 4s):
Send me your address so you can give me some free advertising. What? Yeah.
Keala Kanae (1h 1m 7s):
Right. I'm like, yeah,
Travis Chappell (1h 1m 9s):
Give me, give me, give me, give me, give
Keala Kanae (1h 1m 11s):
Me. That's so much what it is, right? They're always looking for an opportunity that serves them versus looking for opportunities that serve the people that they're supposed to be in service of, if that makes sense. Exactly. Yeah.
Travis Chappell (1h 1m 20s):
And then they wonder why it's not working. Right. But all, they're just, they're just selfish. They didn't share that with their audience. And it's like, no, no,
Keala Kanae (1h 1m 27s):
You are being selfish bro. I've
Travis Chappell (1h 1m 28s):
Literally had people share clips with me from an interview that I did on their show and they'll, they'll send me like a Google drive, like, just like we do, we send out a Google Drive, it has a bunch of cut up clips, we have like a Google Doc templated email to send to your list. We have, you know, example tweets and just, we repurpose a ton of content for you, put on a Google drive, make it really easy to share. But when I've gotten some, some of those, like literally some of the clips are like, if it's a 62nd clip, it's 45 seconds of the host talking. Yep. And it's like, dude, why would I share this with my audience? If I'm sharing like something for with my audience and it's me talking, then that makes sense for me to share. But like, if you're just gonna talk in the entire clip, why would I like this?
Travis Chappell (1h 2m 10s):
This gives me zero incentive to share this clip with my audience. You know what I mean? Like, it doesn't, first of all, it doesn't even look good. It looks like it was edited by a VA in the Philippines, which 90% of 'em are. And there's nothing wrong with that per se, but it's not gonna match up with the quality of the regular stuff that we post. So you're already starting from like a bad position. Yeah. But if the content's really good, then I'll share it, but not when it's 45 seconds of you asking a question and 15 seconds of me going like, aha. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like that doesn't make any sense, dude. Like no, I'm not going to share that and then they're gonna get mad at me cuz I didn't share it. You know what I'm saying? It's like, well it's a, it's disrespectful to the other person's time and disrespectful to the other person's audience to assume that they're just gonna share everything just because they came on your show.
Travis Chappell (1h 2m 55s):
Like you are still in the position of being the person who has to prove value to them. And people think like if they have a podcast, even if it gets a hundred downloads, which most of them do, they have this weird like, misconception that I'm doing you a service cuz I brought you on my show and shared you to my 34 listeners, so therefore you should be willing to share my episode with your 1 million Instagram followers or whatever. It's like, what? This doesn't make any sense, dude. So short-sighted, have some self-awareness. Jesus. You know what I mean?
Keala Kanae (1h 3m 25s):
But I I would say like, I think that that's, you know, so one of the biggest lessons I've learned probably in business, you know, if you want your business to grow very quick, be so obsessed and focus on creating a product or service that when you deliver it to the customer, they can't help but talk about it. That's the goal is that product or service, you know, really something that can, that in and of itself it is its own marketing material. Yeah. And I came from the, the background of direct response marketing. Affiliate marketing, right? And so, you know, in coming from that background, everything that I learned was all about, you know, dollars out dollars back in the door, cost per acquisition, cost per lead is a numbers gain. Right? And so all the con, even when I go to most masterminds, man, you can probably relate to this.
Keala Kanae (1h 4m 6s):
Most masterminds I go to in the, in our business space these days, it's all the, all the conversation is around marketing and sales. It's customer acquisition, customer monetization, that's it. Right? But almost nobody talks about retention. And so this is one of the things that almost destroyed us in 2018. So I was going through a partnership breakup. We were, we were partnering ways, there was a kind of a legal battle over the business for about eight months or whatever. And at that same time, this is when I discovered that we were doing like 1.5 to 1.8 million a month and losing $300,000 a month. And so I was, you know, really pouring through all the information and trying to figure out what was causing this. And one of the things that I started to find was I, you know, I had never really seen like our refund rates and really from a, from two sided perspective, cash and cash out, but customer in customer out became more, more interesting to me.
Keala Kanae (1h 4m 51s):
Like of the customers that we acquired, how many did we actually keep? And I realized that because we had been so aggressively focused, we had such a marketing centric business at the time, right. And all of my energy and attention was there. I had forgotten about the other side of the coin, which was the retention piece. And I realized as I'm doing the numbers, I'm like, it doesn't matter how much we grow our marketing at this point, because we were never gonna be able to outrun our reputation. Like no amount of ad spend will ever allow me to outrun the reputation of the business. Yeah. And so at some point, acquisition is going to meet attrition, meaning I'm losing customers as quickly as I'm acquiring customers and then I might see top line revenue going up, but I'm not building a real business.
Keala Kanae (1h 5m 36s):
Yeah. I have the illusion of growth, you know, and I'm really just a dog chasing my tail. Yes. And that's why as soon as I got the cus the, the company from my business partner, we went from 60 employees to 12 employees over the next nine months. We cut everything back and I just went to the team and I was like, listen, we're gonna get focused on the basics. Right? Like, we got full of ourselves, we got cocky, we grew really quick, we thought, you know, we had the mightest touch, everything we would touch would turn to gold. Yeah. But instead we're gonna focus on keeping the main thing, the main thing and the main thing is gonna be customer results and the systems and processes that lay the foundation for the business to scale on top of. Yeah. Because I'm not gonna go build another business again and scale on, you know, quicksand. Sure. Most people are trying to build an empire on quicksand and they don't even realize it.
Keala Kanae (1h 6m 17s):
So yeah. When we began to re really focus on retention as much or more than we focus on acquisition now we have like a real sustainable business. And that's,
Travis Chappell (1h 6m 28s):
That's the only thing that makes the business valuable as well. If you have any desire to exit your business at some point it will be val, like your value will be greater or less than the amount of occurring revenue that you have coming in. Right. And, and like if you go to, if you go to raise money for your business that one of the core things that investors that know what they're talking about are gonna ask about is churn. What's your churn? Right. You know, they Yeah. They wanna know cac. Yeah. They wanna know ltv, but like mostly they're, they're interested in churn because you can figure anything else out on the marketing side and if you can, and if you have really, really, really low churn, then you can estimate your lifetime value of your customer to be extremely high. And you can pay whatever you want to acquire that customer.
Travis Chappell (1h 7m 8s):
Like the marketing will take care of itself if you focus hard on product. Which is one thing that actually I learned building the software company because there's a lot of things in like the VC world that I just don't like, I don't, I don't, I don't like the idea of like burning capital for 18 years before you make ascent. I don't like, I don't like wildly inflated valuations because the founder used to run a good company. I don't like investing, you know, 75 million into a company that's made $0 so far. Like there's a lot of things I don't like about it and I think that it perpetuates a lot of bad habits and entrepreneurship.
Keala Kanae (1h 7m 38s):
Dude, I think it's the next bubble.
Travis Chappell (1h 7m 39s):
Yeah. I I I think that, I think that we're experiencing it right now. Yeah. I think that that's what's happening right now currently in that world. But one of the things that they get right is product. They have a, a very large emphasis on building product rather than marketing and sales and stuff like that. And that, it taught me a lot about product building cuz I never thought of it, never, never thought of it that way. It was just kind of like, oh yeah, you sell a product and, and like your ability to sell the product is the number one factor in your ability to scale. Because if you can't sell the product, doesn't matter how good the product is. But if the product is that good and people are selling it for you, then to your point earlier about organic marketing, most of your job's already done. All you have to do is like turn on the hose of traffic.
Travis Chappell (1h 8m 21s):
You know what I mean? But, but most people, especially in the internet marketing world, because the focus is marketing so much, there's no award for retention at ClickFunnels. There's, you know what I mean? There's, there's, it's, it's always, it's top what's your top line revenue? Yep. What's your top line revenue? How can we make that look good? Everybody's talking to every, like you see an ad, it's about, it's a stripe homepage screenshot, you know what I mean? It's not, it's not a screenshot of their churn per their churn rate. It's a screenshot of what did we make top line? You know? And to be fair, I think there's a stage for that in every business where you should be focusing on growing top line even at the expense of profitability or, or potentially losing a couple customers here and there. I think there is a time and place for that, but probably not a hundred percent of the time.
Travis Chappell (1h 9m 3s):
Like most people are Yeah. Focused on,
Keala Kanae (1h 9m 6s):
I mean, when, when you start to, any business that's gonna go through the process of scale is gonna run into these constraint points wherein they are seeing revenue grow but margin diminish. And that's just part of scaling a business. And most businesses, most entrepreneurs aren't sophisticated enough in their problem solving skills to be able to see their way past that. And that's why so many businesses that I know, like even in in in my industry, they end up getting someplace of scale where they just, they just can't scale. They quote unquote can't scale any further. Yeah. Right. But there's these these break points where you just, you have to con you have to be able to problem solve your way through and break past that and be able to find that margin again on the other end of that scale process.
Keala Kanae (1h 9m 48s):
But I, I'm a hundred percent on pay on board with you. And I think that, you know, when you look at like the tech world in our digital products, coursing coast's, experts world, right? We could probably learn something from the tech world regardless of their, you know, over their extreme overvaluations at times. Yeah. Dropbox grew because Dropbox created a, a great product, you know, zoom grew because Zoom created a great product. Yeah. Their product became their best form of marketing
Travis Chappell (1h 10m 15s):
Material. It was their only f I mean Dropbox was just the, you you, you share this, you get free storage. Yeah,
Keala Kanae (1h 10m 20s):
Exactly.
Travis Chappell (1h 10m 21s):
So simple. So simple. And it was just like, oh yeah, why not? Yeah, I'll share that. Yeah. You know, and all of a sudden they have whatever, a hundred million fucking users, you know what I mean? And they sold for billions of dollars. It's just like, oh, okay, that, that makes a lot of sense. They have infinite scalability and they have a fantastic product. Yeah. And then they didn't have to drop a ton of money in ads to grow their business. Right. Like that's why they talk about product market fit all the time. And I think, I think a lot of online marketers would be better suited to be thinking about offer market fit. You know, like is this offer good enough for people to share it without us even prompting them to share it? If the answer is no, then maybe we're not ready to push to a half a million a month. Maybe we're not ready to push to a million a month.
Travis Chappell (1h 11m 2s):
Maybe we should really like take six months and button up our processes, our systems, work on fulfillment and find true offer market fit before we start worrying about going and bringing on hundreds or thousands of customers. If you want longevity anyway. Right. If you're in it for a quick cash grab, then sure. I guess, you know, dude, you know, you do you, but like I'm not in this game to like burn through bridges and my reputation and be out in three years and like retire in Bali. Like that's not what I want to do. I want to build a long-term established branded business where people actually still like me after they do business with me. Right. You know what I mean? And trust me even more, you know what I mean? Not trust me less,
Keala Kanae (1h 11m 39s):
But I have a business that we're rolling out right now that we just started to, we, we launched it last year. We just crossed the seven figure mark at about 10 months into it and it's, it's in the personal development space. So it's a series of seminars that we do. It's a seminar that we do here and currently in Vegas, but it's like local seminar and then we do a couple of retreats. So right now I'm at escrow on a 322 acre property in East Texas, two hours east of Dallas that we are acquiring in order to build out the retreats because we just Oh, sweet. It's one of the constraint points that we're running into is that we just having a hard, more people wanna buy it right now than we have the ability to sell to because we don't have the space and we have to keep finding and leasing space in order to do it and blah blah blah blah.
Keala Kanae (1h 12m 21s):
But anyway, the reason that I say this that, and it ties into what you're saying is that business is more of like a legacy play for me that's like this thing that I wanna leave on earth when I'm no longer here. It's a way that I live longer than my human body because of that. Because I'm taking that, that approach to it of like, where can this thing be in 200 years, which I imagine in 200 years will we will be a galactic species and so am I creating a product that's good enough that it could leave earth is a question. But in our pursuit of that, we are not doing any marketing or sales. So we're doing no advertising for that. The way that it's growing right now is that I just take my customers from my primary business right now that have already grown and I push them over there as part of our curriculum and then they end up going into that business and it's sales sequence and then they upgrade.
Keala Kanae (1h 13m 9s):
Right. But if essentially that business right now has no cost per acquisition cuz it has no advertising dollars. It's just overflow from one business over to the next. Yeah. And you know, my team and I, when we've met and we talk about like advertising and marketing and turning on funnels and all these sorts of things to like grow that business, my thing with them right now is that we will do that when we achieve a 10% referral from our customers. So when 10% of our recu, our customers are referring us more customers. Cuz at that point you have like this infinite, if you do the math, you have infinite scalability at that point. Rowdy
Travis Chappell (1h 13m 42s):
Loop. Yeah.
Keala Kanae (1h 13m 43s):
Right. And so if 10, once 10% of our customers are referring us another customer, which is starting to to happen because I mean in a personal development world, it's like our classes, I'm not gonna say that. I'm gonna say that they're really freaking amazing. And I took the concepts from a, a personal development company that's already been around for 50 years that almost nobody knows about. And I head hunted some of their best people because proof of past performance, not promise of future potential. There we go. Bring
Travis Chappell (1h 14m 4s):
It back. Good callback.
Keala Kanae (1h 14m 5s):
We we head hunted some of those people, we brought 'em in and you know, the goal is for like I said, for for 10 to get to a place where 10% of our customers are referring us a customer before we turn on marketing and advertising. Because at that point I know definitively, you know, through data and numbers that we have created a product that's so phenomenal that customers will refer us more customers without us even asking to. And until we do that, we're not gonna turn on marketing and advertising and all of these marketing and advertising purists that might be listening to this are gonna think this guy's an idiot. No, I'm not an idiot is because the reason that I say this is because when the moment that you turn on ads and you start spending money to acquire a customer, the next emphasis immediately becomes sell to that customer.
Keala Kanae (1h 14m 48s):
We gotta get that money back that we just spent on advertising. Yes, exactly. And then you become a sales centric business, not a service-centric business. And service-centric businesses are the ones that stand the test of time. Absolutely. I remember watching an interview a while back, I think it was like a three minute interview with Jeff Bezos and he said the term customer experience 97 times in a three minute interview. I can't watch an interview with most marketers where they say customer experience once in an hour. Okay. And it's no wonder that then Jeff Bezos goes on to be the richest man in the world. Yeah. And look at how much he obsessed about the customer experience. He solved a problem that nobody else in the e-commerce was willing to solve, which is or even
Travis Chappell (1h 15m 24s):
Knew existed. Yeah.
Keala Kanae (1h 15m 26s):
Well he's just thinking about like, he's so fascinated or whoever on his team is fa there's somebody in there is sitting around going, what does the customer ult ultimately want? Well, at some point they must want us to deliver the product before they even know that they want to buy it. Yeah. Right. Because I mean, I'm buying stuff on Amazon right now and like in 10 minutes it's at my door. Yeah, right.
Travis Chappell (1h 15m 43s):
It's like Christmas bro. Every time you open the door it's like, oh Amazon. Yeah. It's like, what, what this was Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
Keala Kanae (1h 15m 51s):
But think about how much they've transformed our customer exp bro. I go online right now and I will see, like I will see ads from businesses and I'll go look at like a freaking shoes or something that I, that I'm looking to buy and the very next thing I do before I buy it is I go to Amazon
Travis Chappell (1h 16m 5s):
Available on Amazon. Yeah. And
Keala Kanae (1h 16m 6s):
I go see if they have a store on Amazon, some
Travis Chappell (1h 16m 8s):
Motherfuckers in this evening. Exactly. Not in two and a half weeks when your free shipping hits my door.
Keala Kanae (1h 16m 11s):
What I'm saying, bro, at least at Amazon, I know exactly when I'm gonna get this thing so true. Right. Versus like I, you know, use shop pay on your website and I'm like absolutely pre after that. Yeah. It's the shot five
Travis Chappell (1h 16m 21s):
To seven days. What are we in the ice age? Like, get this shit to my door. Can
Keala Kanae (1h 16m 26s):
You imagine our ancestors were like horse and buggy across the freaking country for months to get something and now we're like, I need it today. You guys didn't even
Travis Chappell (1h 16m 33s):
Understand I need toothpaste, I need it now. But the
Keala Kanae (1h 16m 36s):
Degree to which he went and solved that issue for customers and then change the entire marketplace's expectations around what good service was. Right. Is the direct, you know, it has a direct correlation to why Amazon is a behemoth of a business right now. Well
Travis Chappell (1h 16m 52s):
He's, he wasn't just e-commerce, he solved logistics. Oh, he reinvented the logistics industry. You know, like they have their own fleet of jets that are flying packages, places, you know, they have fulfill like their fulfillment centers. Like it's so buttoned up that it, like it is wild now. It was, it used to be like two days was like, two days is a fast shipping, you know, it's like wow, two days. Sure. I'm up Amazon Prime, 79 bucks a year. Now they make, I don't know, billions on in just free cash flow. It's 79 bucks a year from prime members without having to do anything different in their business. But now the, it's just, it's so streamlined. Like you said, it's like I could order something right now, it'll be at my door in three and a half hours under the guarantee of two day shipping.
Travis Chappell (1h 17m 32s):
You know, I was talking to somebody recently, it was funny cuz like they were defining their experience living in a different country by the fact that Amazon Prime wasn't there yet. He was like, he was like, I was like House Costa Rica, man. And he was like, you know what? It's really cool we're building a house down here and everything. He's like, but I don't have Amazon Prime, which is weird. And I was like, oh, that is Apri. It's like a, it, you, you are so good at solving a problem that now you've created one when your service doesn't exist. Think about that for a second. Talk about product market fit. You know what I mean? It's like now that your, your service is not
Keala Kanae (1h 18m 5s):
Fascinating.Travis Chappell (1h 18m 5s):
Yeah. Is not available to this person. They're actually upset that your service does not reach them yet because it's that good. And it completely changed the way that they did their life.
Keala Kanae (1h 18m 15s):
So, I'm not gonna lie, man, when we were looking at the property that we're now in escrow on that, that ranch, there's a nice little house on it and stuff. It's beautiful, beautiful. Like, I mean 322 acres, bro. I saw
Travis Chappell (1h 18m 25s):
Some videos on it. Yeah, yeah. It looks
Keala Kanae (1h 18m 27s):
It's gorgeous spot. And my girl was like, so would you wanna like live out here for a part of the year or something? And I literally said, I don't, I bet Amazon doesn't deliver out here like in the same day I
Travis Chappell (1h 18m 40s):
About that life. You know what I mean?
Keala Kanae (1h 18m 42s):
Oh no.
Travis Chappell (1h 18m 42s):
Dunno if I can go back. I don't wanna go
Keala Kanae (1h 18m 44s):
Far off the edge. I'm not trying to be here.
Travis Chappell (1h 18m 47s):
Cave man.
Keala Kanae (1h 18m 47s):
Yeah.
Travis Chappell (1h 18m 49s):
Not Ron Swanson over here, but yeah. Oh, that's so funny, dude. Yeah. Well, hey, listen man, I, I, I appreciate you coming out. I know we gotta wrap this up. You got some shit to do. I got some shit to do. But before we go, where, where can people go find, find you if they want to hear more from Keala about all the stuff that you know about marketing, sales, affiliate stuff as well as, you know, ops. I know you're talking a lot about ops, business growth, hiring, firing people, culture and all the stuff about running a real business as well. So where can people go learn more from
Keala Kanae (1h 19m 14s):
You? Yeah, so I'm fascinated these days and, and much more excited these days to talk about like the things that actually grow a business long term than just regular old marketing and advertising and webinars and all these things. So if that's something that interests someone, I would say probably the best place to find that content for me. Which I give it all of it away for free, the vast majority of it. Anyway, best place to find that content would be on YouTube where I talk about quite a bit of our different business strategy, both, you know, mindset and skillset side. And then also Instagram's a decent place where people can find me and I actually respond to my messages there. Well, maybe I won't now because I don't know how many listeners you have, Travis. I might have destroyed my inbox. I don't know.
Keala Kanae (1h 19m 53s):
But it's, it's Cala can I at both of 'em? I mean just, it's, it's got somehow, interestingly enough, because I'm from Hawaii, it has 10 letters but 32 vowels in it. So you'll figure it out. It's Kinai. Yeah, go look it up. You'll probably only be one by the way if follow, if
Travis Chappell (1h 20m 8s):
You start typing it in, I'm sure it'll pop. It's K E a l a. Yeah, right. So if you start typing in kla, there's, I mean, there's not that many Ks out there that are, that are reputable.
Keala Kanae (1h 20m 17s):
Well if you do that on Instagram, you'll actually find about 15 different accounts now. A bunch of Bitcoin scammers. Yeah. But the one with 90 something thousand plus followers is the one that's actually me. So. Okay,
Travis Chappell (1h 20m 27s):
Sweet. So at Ick and I over on Instagram and then Kalik and I over on YouTube as well too, go check out some of the stuff that K is putting out there. I know that you guys will not regret it if you're checking this out on Spotify or Apple. Don't forget to leaves RA rating or review helps us out tremendously. Cala, thanks for coming on, dude. This a lot of fun. Appreciate
Keala Kanae (1h 20m 43s):
Your brother. Thanks for having me. Yes sir.
Travis Chappell (1h 20m 45s):
That's it for today's episode. Thanks for spending some time with me and my friends. If you want to be better friends with me, then head over to Travischappell.com/team to subscribe to my free newsletter, your friend Travis, where I share what's on my mind about life, building a business, raising kids, being married in anything else I would normally share with my close circle of friends. That's Travischappell.com/team. And my biggest ask of you, since I'm sharing my friends with you, is to share this episode with a friend of yours that hasn't listened to the show yet. And leave us a quick five star rating in Apple Podcasts and in Spotify. It would mean the world to us as it helps us make sure that this show continues to be more valuable to you. Thanks in advance and I'll catch you on the next episode.

Full Uncut Interview