Chapter 1: What is the main focus of The Top podcast?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per top. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark.
And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Yesterday, you heard from Jay Papasan, number one best-selling author of The One Thing. He walks you through the three things he did to sell 20,000 books in one week. Okay, Top Tribe, as you know, every month we give away business prizes ranging from 100 bucks to 500 bucks.
This month's winner is Michael Kawula, who will take home a brand new GoPro and Bob Berg's top business book. Michael, I'll reach out to you in a second to make sure you get that prize. Now, if you want to win coming up, text the word Nathan, N-A-T-H-A-N, to 33444 for your chance to win a prize on an upcoming show.
The next prize is a pack of 14 business books valued at $250 if you bought them on Amazon. And these books are the ones that Mark Zuckerberg thinks every entrepreneur must read. Okay, Top Tribe, our guest today is Scott Gerber. He is a serial entrepreneur, internationally syndicated business columnist, and best-selling author of the book, Never Get a Real Job.
He's the founder of the Young Entrepreneurial Council, YEC, and an invite-only organization comprised of over 1,000 of the world's most successful young entrepreneurs. Scott, are you ready to take us to the top?
Absolutely, Nathan. Thanks for having me.
You bet. And I got to tell you, you know, Kevin Lovell in episode number seven gave you a ton of love. He's part of YEC. You guys featured him in your last magazine. You're really changing the world of this organization. Walk us through what YEC is and what it does.
Sure. As you mentioned, it's an invitation-only group that really provides a trusted space that highly successful entrepreneurs that are real and out there and doing it every day can connect with one another and best-of-breed services that we can help them to grow their businesses.
So to date, we've had roughly around 16,000 people attempt to join the organization, and we've accepted just over 1,600 as of today.
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Chapter 2: Who is Scott Gerber and what is his background?
It's just the idea that we're curating the virtual or the physical, and that's really our claim to fame with this.
So if you're going to an event, we know you're going there because you've told us, because we interview our members once per quarter to find out all the different things that we need to know about them, from where they're going to be going, to what kinds of questions they may have, to what kinds of services they may need. That way, as we sort of
build their individual playbook for success within our group, we can help to hyperconnect them when it makes sense.
And so, for example, if we know you're going to, let's say, be at a conference like in New York or Las Vegas or whatever the case may be, and there's another member that we feel that you would make a very valuable connection based on something you've told us or the other parties told us, we do that in a very personalized way. We also do standard events.
I certainly don't want to make it sound like we don't get together The key is when you get people in the room to ensure that not only do we know who's there, but we know who should be connecting prior so that our community team, when they're in the room, can really be working the room in an efficient way. So it's not just some like, hey, here's my name tag, go introduce yourself around the room.
And of course, there's always going to be some, you know, what I'll call natural networking of just, you know, organically people meeting because they want to connect in general. But our goal is to say, okay, we know who's in the room. So yes, there might be 50 of you, but you and you should meet and let's get you two in a corner to talk about that business thing that you were telling us about.
So it's really about curation at every level of the experience.
And help us understand, again, the tribe listening right now, they're either jogging and they're working up a sweat by now, or they're enjoying their morning coffee on their front porch. And a lot of them are SaaS entrepreneurs. So they're thinking about things like lifetime value, retention, churn, average revenue per user.
And he and Sean, episode number 34, really dove into that for the mega success Kissmetrics SaaS company. But you articulated that you guys are seeing stellar retention rates, especially... I don't want to use the word membership site because you're way more than that, but we have people on all the time doing membership sites and retention is like shit on all of theirs. So you're at well over 90%.
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Chapter 3: What is the Young Entrepreneurial Council (YEC) and its purpose?
And we say, what can we do?
Scott, what does a mess up look like?
You know, it's not like there's anything ever that's been catastrophic. I mean, I would say, listen, there's always going to be somebody, for example, that is a wrong fit, that joined, that we thought would be a great member, and they just simply weren't membership organization, you know, already. It's just not a need they had. In that case, it sort of is what it is. Everybody's happy.
Bygones be bygones. You let go. And then there's some times where, you know, somebody feels like we dropped the ball because maybe we didn't do an introduction in as timely a fashion as they expected, or an expectation was set or not set, and it didn't get met or delivered in the way, again, that the party decided was fashionable for them. So I think it's the reality of just, again, being human.
I think what you mentioned earlier about this idea of SaaS and conversion, I think we have ended up in this world where metrics and numbers and Moving growth hacking percentages a quarter of a quarter of a quarter of a point is more important than realizing that those quarters of a point represent human beings and actions that they are going to take influence other human beings.
And when you fundamentally understand that everything you do is human, whether it's because you're coding a product or ultimately because you're a restaurateur, a bar for max efficiency in a physical location, there's always going to be human interest involved in every aspect of that. I think that's where most people get lost.
because they think scale, scale, scale, and not scale with intention and scale with personalization.
So Tribe Listening, especially if you're a SaaS entrepreneur, taking what Scott is telling us and teaching us about the human nature of retention is valuable. I'll summarize it in three. The first, email, phone, letter, communication whenever possible. Scott, I've received many of your letters. They're handwritten.
I would love to dig into more about the process you have to do that, especially with 1,600 members. We don't have time to do that. So maybe I'll post that as a comment on the show notes at nathanmacka.com forward slash the top 45. But the second thing you did is, which I think is genius, is you'll use current events.
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Chapter 4: How does YEC determine membership and what criteria do they use?
If you're loving this episode, text the word Nathan, N-A-T-H-A-N, to 33444. for your chance to win a prize on an upcoming show. The next prize is a pack of 14 business books valued at 250 bucks if you bought them on Amazon. And these books are the ones that Mark Zuckerberg thinks every entrepreneur must read.
So Scott, one of the things, this is my favorite part of the show we're coming up to, and you're not allowed to say your book for question number one, but do you know what time it is? I think it's time to get fast draft and fire. Let's see. That's a damn good guess for making it up on the cuff. It is time for the famous five. Scott, number one, what is your favorite business book?
Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi.
And we'll link to that in the show notes. I also agree. Great book. Number two, Scott, which CEO are you following or studying right now? You know, it's interesting because I have 1600 of them.
I'm often wowed by many of them, but actually. Yeah, pick a child, right? Yeah. It's hard for me to say this one or that one is better or I'm studying. What I'll say is I'm very intrigued by the WeWork business model.
I think Adam Newman is a very smart genius and I've been really understanding the WeWork model and how they've built that business and how they continue to build that business as both a friend and an admirer.
Number three, Scott, what is your favorite online tool like Evernote?
Yeah. It sounds funny. I'm really starting to love Sunrise, but I'll also throw in a bug for mailbox. I mean, it just, it blows me away that something like mailbox exists and Apple still hasn't figured out how to make iPhone mail actually work efficiently.
It is a little mind boggling, isn't it? So number four, Scott, you're building an empire. Help people understand. Are you doing this in a really healthy manner? Yes or no. Do you get eight hours of sleep every night?
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