Tanner Chidester
Appearances
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
Leadership is the most important skill you can learn. And what that means is like, you're very good at finding talent. Like if you had no skills, you weren't good at sales, you weren't good at marketing, you weren't good at anything, but you knew how to find people who were good at that, that actually would overcome your deficiencies.
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
And like even I found myself like this year, you know, sometimes you just get away from the basics because you've been doing it so long. Right. And so you forget that the basics are what made you successful, not like all this other shit.
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
I think there's certain things, like, it's just hard to replace yourself with. Unless you find a true number two. But, like, to get a true number two, like, usually... But they might still not be good at marketing. Yeah, or you just got to be willing to pay the piper. Because I think sometimes, like, we're like, oh, yeah, like, I found this guy and he's willing to come in for, like, a good amount.
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
And, like, it's a good amount, but it's not, like, it doesn't hurt. And sometimes I think, like...
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
Right. Because ultimately, like if you're spending to count ads, you're making eight. Then it's like, OK, if I spend four, I'll make 16. I'll make six. I'll make. Yeah. And it keeps going up. So eventually, though, with ads, there comes that blocking point. And the first thing I try to do is like optimize. So it's like, hey, can we look at the sales team? Can we look at the ads?
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
Where can we optimize? But eventually you kind of see like, hey, like you know, we spent about 200 grand on this and we're going to make about eight. And every time we've gone up from that, we really don't make a much more, but it's a lot more bullshit.
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
So I think like in that it going back and looking at like Ready, Fire, Aim, Michael Masterson and like some other books, that's when I should have just stopped having the ego of like, oh yeah, we can like force it and then maybe make something else. Because at the end of the day, no one really cares. Like you don't really care how you get there. You just want to get there.
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
I just think the issue is a lot of people they'll lose focus too soon. Like it gets hard. And so they're like, oh, I got to make something. It's like, no, like you just suck at marketing. But eventually, like if you're at a high enough level, it makes sense where it's like, hey, instead of trying to keep pushing this thing, let's maybe sell something else.
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
And that's where you can look for another opportunity. Or like even now where I've made millions of dollars, like I've invested in other companies that I'm like, OK, like this guy's running the company. It's a different avenue. It's different leverage. It's like different. Right. It's like gives me a different way to win. That's that's unique. And I think that's important.
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
And up until I was about 22, it was pretty much to play in the NFL. That was my dream. I wanted to play sports, play in the NFL. I got very into weightlifting, mostly because I got bullied as a kid. I was a little strange. And then at 22-ish is when that ended. And I had a mentor who convinced me. He's like, hey, you should drop out of school and start a business. And I was like, you're crazy.
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
So when he was licensing clothes, what is he licensing?
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
So he would license it to another company.
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
Yeah, because the fulfillment is usually the biggest nightmare with sales. Like actually fulfilling all the customers.
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
We're always worried about our reputation going down through the... fulfillment, not through the actual marketing.
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
Yeah, I was thinking Kevin O'Leary when I hear licensing because that's just a game on the show.
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
is the most important skill you can learn. And what that means is like, you're very good at finding talent to do stuff because ultimately you can't, like if you had no skills, you weren't good at sales, you weren't good at marketing, you weren't good at anything, but you knew how to find people who were good at that, that actually would overcome your deficiencies.
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
And so I think that's hard to happen over time. But I think now what I've realized is the best skill I can learn is acquiring good team players. Because when I look at the issues we've had, it's like, oh, this guy sucked. Oh, this guy had a problem.
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
This girl sucked. And it's like, what's the common denominator? Yourself. You're the one who's hiring them. So if you can get better at hiring staff and finding A players, all of a sudden you notice like, oh, there's really not any problems in the business because you can trust that that person is going to do a good job. And that just took me years to learn.
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
Yeah, most of the headaches I've had from business has been from bad decisions. So like, if you think about like, you know, we'll use a dating example. Like if you think about like in a dating example, like you have a high stress girlfriend, it's the same thing. It's like your life's going to suck. Like if she's like constantly sucking your time, like, oh, why aren't you doing this?
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
And eventually I did drop out, but it took me two to three years to actually start making money. But once I started making money, it just blew up really fast because I kind of I feel like looking back, I there's three things that really make you a different person. And it's like skills, obviously, criteria.
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
Why aren't you doing that? You're just like, oh my gosh. Like it's the same thing with a team. But a lot of times in hindsight, you think at least what I thought is I was like, oh, I got to do better training. I got to do this. But it's like, yes, that's part of it. But really, finding a 7 and making him a 10 is way easier than getting a 3 and then trying to make him a 7.
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
And even if the 3 is a 7, he's still just a 7. He's not that great. He's average.
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
The first thing you do when you cut staff is you go, okay, is there someone on the team who can handle this responsibility? That's the first thing you do. Because ultimately, if you're cutting staff, you don't want to have to replace them unless it's vital.
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
like people i know like two people where they're like pretty useless at business and i'm like dude how do you make so much money and then it's just because they've got a bunch of good people around and so if you can get better at like hiring staff and finding a players all of a sudden you notice like oh there's really not any problems in the business because you can trust that that person is going to do a good job and that just took me years to learn
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
It doesn't. It like comes down to how good the staff is ultimately.
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
where do you see the industry right now because i know like me and most people we grew a bunch of post-covered yeah and i feel in the last year everyone's like that yeah it stopped yeah so i i think part of my success is like i didn't realize it but it was like right place at the right time and i was like like i didn't realize it like when covet happened i didn't realize that that actually was a massive boost in business i'd say now like trust is lower because
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
online services and online coaching, they've been out now.
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
So there's so many options. Trust is much lower. So either has to be much better or people have pivoted because ultimately, I think I also want to grow. And I've just told myself, I don't want to be six years old and still doing coaching. Right. So it's like I think where the industry is right now is like either a you have to be willing to build more trust. Right. And it just takes more time.
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
So you've got to really be on top of people's minds with your marketing, your ads, your branding.
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
or b it's like moving to other industries that have higher equity and like you know software like um you know hermosa i saw him just recently like he got into school with sam ovens now when i saw school to be frank with you i was like this is a piece of like i honestly to this day i still was like i cannot believe this got as big as it has but like ultimately that company can probably sell for over a bill oh yeah but because it's got so many users and it's doing so much revenue yeah so it's but it's a different business model no one's ever going to be like school's a scam
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
characteristics and then beliefs right and i think i just was doing all this work on beliefs and characteristics without knowing it and so finally when i got the skills things just blew up so in a short amount of time like six years we did 100 million in sales and it was it was pretty crazy yeah and you know 100 million sales and you built teams about 100 similar to me right so i want to dive into like what were some of the biggest uh jumps and lessons during that journey
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
But in coaching, consulting, people do it all the time. So I think in this industry, like you can learn a lot of skills. You got to build more trust with people and or you just like be done with it, like wipe your hands clean and move on. The great thing about this industry is high cash flow and cash flow. You can move into other things, but I don't think it's a great equitable business.
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
This industry, you learn more skills than any other business because you have to. Like other businesses where there's marketing and all this stuff, you're not going to learn it with a fast feedback loop that you do in this industry. This industry is crazy.
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
Yeah, and so it gives you that competitive edge. And then also I think when you take, like, I don't know how you want to say it, like more legit, like a more seasoned industry. Like it's crazy. You'll just see like people, they don't know how to market.
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
Because this industry, if you look at it, it's like, it's actually much higher levels of marketing and client acquisition and sales and all that. So when you take it into like a normal industry, you just stand out because it's like, dude, these people don't have any practice like with actual marketing.
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
one of the first in our space to build the info products in real estate right and now he's doing it in like manual labor like flooring companies and he's like no it's just like play a child's play yeah because he says no one's doing it and you're the only option the other the other thing that makes you successful and i tell this a lot of people is like low competition yeah like some of my best clients i look at their offers one of the clients it's like he helps uh people get ebt1 green cards yeah yeah yeah
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
like no one's doing that and like he's one of the only people so his application is like it's 15 grand yeah like and as long as his ads more than like one line that most people's already winning yeah or like uh there's a girl who we're working with right now who does career uh progression for like engineers yeah yeah and it's just like it's just the fact that there's no competition which gives them this a massive advantage that they don't understand that they have yeah we see that a lot like this client's making millions i'm like looking at it i'm like i got
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
But it's just like, some of it is just like how much competition there is in the marketplace.
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
My younger self, I just would have told them to invest sooner. And there were two reasons. One, I didn't know this world existed. I didn't know you could pay people to learn stuff. I was like, that wasn't a thing. And number two was I told myself, oh, I can't afford it. And as an adult, I just think that's a bullshit excuse. It's like you do whatever you got to do to survive, right?
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
And so instead, if I had the mentality I had now, what would happen is I probably would have not wasted three years. I would have made a million dollars two or three years sooner. And then if you do the math on like how much I made, let's say on average, like I do 15 million a year or something. Well, that's $30 million I lost by...
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
delaying that and so i always tell people like just just be willing to invest in yourself because that is the best investment you're going to make and it's going to be the one you're not going to regret you're not going to look back at your life and go man i wish i didn't try harder i wish i hadn't you know sacrificed as much like yeah you only care usually because other people talk shit but it's like if you can just move that to the side and not worry it's not that big of a deal like it's something you'll be proud of love it and last final question if people want to learn more from you or see what you're up to where do they find you
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
Yeah, honestly, if people are listening to the podcast, they could DM me on tanner.gist or Rudy so that I know they came from this and they can just ask me for whatever help they want and I'll do my best.
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
Yeah, so we have Elite360.io, which is a white label Go High Level. So I don't lie to people or try to make it up, but it's got the Go High Level infrastructure, but it's our own stuff. It does about six figures a month. The benefit, though, when people work with us is they get our software, our templates, our services.
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
to stop one lesson that i look back now and i didn't realize is i was lucky i had my brothers to start with because i could trust them and i just and they were good in the business yeah i mean just to be frank like at first i didn't train them very much so i was like figure it out and i just would get mad i scream at him but that actually gave me like some latitude to to grow really fast because i had reliable people yeah outside of that i think a big mistake i made when hiring is i didn't
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
I didn't hire them before I hired them, meaning I didn't test people out. And I wish if I could go back, I would have tested people out, meaning, hey, like a sales rep, I would be like, hey, here's some calls. Here's a script. When you're ready, like we're going to give you a live call. If you close it, you get paid.
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
You know, and like trying to actually test people out before you bring them on, because you bring people on and then you waste all this time and ramp up period, getting them up to speed. And then they're not even a long-term fit.
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
It's not even like... Yeah, you know, I don't know how it was for you, but I didn't really look at resumes from the standpoint of where they go to school. It was just what experience you had.
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
It's just better if it takes you longer, and you have to work with more people up front, but then you find that longer, I guess, person on the back end. It's totally worth it.
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
I think that was the other thing is I didn't have like set SOPs and KPIs when I started. So, you know, like now they can come through and it's like, right, here's the job. Yeah, here's exactly what to do. Here's a video for everything. Yeah. So if they can't follow that, you're just like, you can't work here. But in the beginning, when you're growing really fast, I think
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
having that structure just like it sounds nice on paper but it's like sometimes you don't get to build it as you're going or you you build it too slow like and that's just reality though and i also think like as entrepreneurs it's great hiring mentors and everyone that tells you to do this but i think part of us entrepreneurs we like have to get punched in the face to learn yeah like ultimately you have to go through it yeah ultimately like one of the best learners is experienced
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
You can read stuff all you want, but there's no substitute for having a kid and then probably reading about having a kid. It's not anywhere near the same, so probably similar.
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
You know, I lucked out on that. I'm so glad I was good at sales and marketing because I see horror stories all the time. People are like, oh, this person says they'll come in and run all my sales and marketing. I'm like, yeah, but why would they run your business for you? It doesn't make sense.
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
One of the best benefits I ever had was door-to-door sales because door-to-door sales teaches you so many skills very quickly. It teaches you not to be nervous. It teaches you to be quick on your feet. It teaches you to just be bold and aggressive. I think because of that, that really helped me grow faster because I was able, that was like one of those things I could just tell right away.
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
I was like, you're full of shit. You're good or you're not. And there's some positions you're not as skilled. I think being good at sales and marketing is more important in the beginning than it is to be like, product or client fulfillment, right? You can come back and get better at that. But like in the beginning, if you're not good at sales and marketing, you can't make any sales.
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
and you're like i was 17 18 19 20 and like you legit had to walk up to someone like running on a treadmill and try and talk to them yeah and they're like and it's like it get at least for me i don't know how it was for you but when i did door-to-cells like two months i'm probably really nervous when i would knock on that door like my heart would like beat and after two months you're just like whatever like you just get so used to like abnormal situations that
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
I think it just made abnormal situations normal. So I was like, I'm not going to even get nervous anymore because who cares? Because I realized it didn't really matter for the situation. Like, it doesn't do anything. They are not... They don't care as much as I think they do. This isn't as big a moment as I think it is. And you're never going to see them again.
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
And that was a big thing, too, is you just realize, like... I'm never going to talk to that person ever again, like literally not ever again in my entire life. And once you start to realize that it gets a lot less scary.
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
Dude, honestly, if people are willing to do it, obviously very few people are, but dude, going and doing door-to-door sales for two or three months would absolutely change someone's life. I even look back to this day at the hardest thing I've ever done, and some people are like, was building a $100 million company the hardest thing? I'm like, I still think door-to-door sales was harder.
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
Well, you're literally just walking around getting the door slammed on you. It's mentally just a beat down. And it's like pretend you're working out at the gym and people are yelling and screaming at you at the same time. That was kind of what it was. And so I would tell people usually like do that.
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
If you can't do that, the next best thing is just to get on some type of sales team and get your feet wet. But there's really nothing that's going to be an experience in that realm because you kind of hear what people say, but there's a difference between hearing and implementation.
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
But for me, door-to-door sales was by far what made me so successful because when I finally sold online services, I was like... dude, this guy actually wants what I'm selling. And that was so different for me, but it was so much easier, obviously.
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
Oh, yeah, because it was like, just copy me. A lot of the times when you're building the business to start, you're not hiring people smarter than you because you can't afford it. You're hiring people to follow you. So the better you are at the skill, the easier it is to get results because you say, guys, this is the script. This is the cause. This is how it should sound. Do it like me. Right.
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
Versus a lot of people who like I just I just don't see a lot of people very successful in business who are not good at sales or marketing because that's how the business grows.
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
Because like end of the day, it's like you have to convince a stranger that what you have is a good business.
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
a product and like i just don't understand how someone can't be good at that even like like today for example we had this uh we were like short on staff and like i had to go in and uh message on one of our sub accounts and go high level and like i haven't done it in three years and i booked three calls in an hour and like our normal kpi 0.5 per hour so i had three i booked six times yeah
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
as many calls. But it's just so natural to me because like, hey, how's stuff going? Oh, good, great. What's your goal? Great. Oh, why are you struggling now? Oh, have you thought about getting help? Oh, and then you just offer help.
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
like sales and marketing at its core is persuasion which you're going to use to lead your team to persuade a business partner like understanding that psychology it goes into everything oh yeah 100 i mean i like i to this day i don't know why that happened but like i still think like getting my feet wet indoor door sales helped me because when i got to online sales i was so far ahead of the curve without realizing it because i had nine i did nine months
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
And it was usually like after drive time, like it was eight hours a day, six days a week. So that's 40 something hours a week of sales practice. It's like, it doesn't get much harder or better than that.
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
Sure. The best thing that's ever worked for me specifically, I don't know why it's worked better for me than other people, but it's like DNA.
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
it drove me bonkers because to this day there's people who just have better like straight to page funnels but like for whatever reason they just have not converted as well for me i don't know if it's because my bsl is like but everyone has their thing like mine was always low ticket i've done yeah everyone has their thing right and so so dm ads have been great for us because when they come in they get the link to the training and they can get their email and phone number but we then like our setters will go in and they like have a full-on conversation and if they book a call from the conversation great
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
if they book a call from the opt-in page great that's been good outside of that um we did do a lot of low ticket too but out of all the low ticket the thing i always hate about low ticket is like one and done sales right so you get 97 bucks and usually low ticket it's like 50 liquidations what you want so if you spend 100 grand you make 50 000 up front the best low ticket funnel i've actually ran i thought i was going to get massive chargebacks and disputes and so we call it forced continuity
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
and what we do is we sell a three dollars two dollars ninety five cents so it's really three bucks but it's you can sell whatever and but we sell my book on the front end of the ebook so we actually make a little money and not just like waste 20 something dollars on shipping And then we put them into a seven day free trial in our community. We call it forced continuity.
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
And for whatever reason, we don't get a lot of cancellations or upset people. And so what's happened is what we've seen on average is usually for about every $10,000 we spend, we get $25 increase in MMR. Wow.
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
and it's worked great and so it's kind of nice because you get those low ticket buyers you can still send them but you get them in a 97 a month continuity and like that makes it feel more worth it to me yeah than just like trying to like sell a low ticket buyer and then try to get them sent because it's like sometimes that's really difficult yeah we we attracted over
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
thousands of clients tens of millions and we got up to seven percent would ascend which was like we started and that's like even crazy we started at two percent and we got up to seven even that's like crazy to think of like how many buyers you have to go through to get them to buy i would say i'm one of the best in the world at right and so and so i would say like out of the best funnels like that got the most money like the quickest add to dms was the best then there was probably that forced continuity funnel
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
and then there was like very it was always variations do you ever do much with webinars ever crack that really like we did like in the beginning i did automated webinar but like i didn't really i don't really view that as like a legitimate webinar it was more like a vsl yeah i was i never did like i did you know a few mil with webinars but never like tens i never it's funny how everyone has their thing and i think that's important if you're listening like
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
like i think the way he describes it the best is it's not necessarily you need a bunch of funnels selling the same thing it's like you need to have different products and like really what he talks about in that book just scales he says you get something working and then you scale it and then you create a different variation and and sometimes it's not like a completely different product but like in his his book he talked about newsletter business so he created a new newsletter but it was still a newsletter and that's how he really scaled his company and i think that there's a lot of wisdom in that than thinking
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
all right like we got it working with a webinar now we got to get it working with this it's like whatever works the best is fine but i think ultimately when you run into scaling issues it's because like people are just seeing the same stuff over and over and like they've decided like i'm never gonna buy that i don't need it so i need something else to buy
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
Right. To make more money. What else can we sell? And my team's like, well, let's we could test out selling a done for you VA service. I was like, OK, like, let's send an email and let's send them to a type form. And the team says, like, dude, we're getting killed with like applications. I was like, cool. And if it works and we can scale it up and if it doesn't, no big deal.
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
yeah right and they can learn so just if someone doesn't know do you mind just recapping yeah so so quick recap about me uh my name is sarah chister i grew up in a family seven kids so pretty big family religious family uh four sisters two brothers dad was a teacher mom stayed at home so wasn't a lot of money growing up and because of that i wanted to get rich you know make a lot of money
Living The Red Life
How Tanner Chidester Scales Businesses Without Burnout
But like, it's the same buyers that we've already had. Like, it wasn't like we ran a new ad. We like no one even knows about it right now. We just ran it to our email list. I do that and Instagram poll too is a great way to test. Yeah. And like there's like I think a lot of times we just get stuck in a rut of like doing the same thing over and over.