Unlock the Secrets to Scaling Your Business: Ryan Deiss Shares his Expert Advice

Today’s episode of the podcast is an interview with Ryan Deiss, where we are talking all about how to scale your business for true freedom and growth. Ryan kindly shares his very honest stories of scaling his own businesses to achieve huge success, how he had to get out of his own way, and the conflicts he experienced between building a business and sacrificing family time. Ryan Deiss is a serial entrepreneur, author, and investor, and according to Shark Tank star Daymond John, “His companies practically own the internet.” He is the Founder and CEO of The Scalable Company (Scalable.co), DigitalMarketer.com, and a Founding Partner at Scalable Equity, LLC, an equity accelerator that builds, acquires, and invests inB2B media, services, and software brands. Ryan is also the founder and host of the Traffic & Conversion Summit, the largest digital marketing conference in North America. He also quite literally wrote the book on modern marketing, Digital Marketing For Dummies (Wiley), which is now in its second edition.   KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST The evolution of online marketing and adapting to changing times The key differences between growing your business and scaling your business How to define your target audience for effective marketing If you enjoyed this episode then please feel free to go and share it on your social media or head over to iTunes and give me a review, I would be so very grateful.   LINKS TO RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY’S EPISODE Buy Ryan's Book, 'Get Scalable: The Operating System Your Business Needs To Run and Scale Without You' Connect with Ryan on Twitter, Instagram or LinkedIn Connect with Scalable.co through their website, Instagram or Facebook Connect with Teresa on Instagram, LinkedIn or Facebook   Transcript Teresa: Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the Your Dream Business Podcast. I hope you're doing well. So this week I have another interview and I'm very excited and honored to do this week's episode. It's always lovely when I get asked to interview someone when I've not reached out to them and their name is pretty big and I know it and I'm like, Oh wow, they're asking to come on my show. And this week's guest is exactly that type of person. This week I'm interviewing the amazing Ryan Deiss. Ryan Deiss is a serial entrepreneur, author, investor, and according to the Shark Tank star, Damon John, his company practically owns the internet. Ryan is the founder and CEO of scalable company, digitalmarketer. com. That's probably where you know his name from. And the founding partner of Scalable Equity LLC, which is an equity accelerator that builds, acquires, and invests in B2B media services and software brands. Ryan is also the founder and host of Traffic and Conversion Summit, which I've attended and seen him speak at. The largest marketing conference, digital marketing conference in North America. He's also quite literally wrote the book on modern marketing, digital marketing for dummies, and which is now in its second edition. He is a sought after speaker. Ryan has shared the stage with top business leaders and celebrities like Sir Richard Branson, Gary Vaynerchuk, Sarah Blakely, Martha Stewart, Tim Ferriss, Damon John, and Dave Ramsey. I mean, that is a hell of a like bio. So I am super excited that this week I get to bring to the podcast, the amazing Ryan Deiss. I am so very delighted to welcome to the podcast, Ryan Deiss. Ryan, how are you doing? Ryan: I am doing amazingly well. Thank you so much for having me. Teresa: I am very pleased. I was just saying that in the intro that it's so lovely when I get, I get lots of requests to come on the podcast, which is awesome. And then when I see a name that I'm like, Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah. No, this person is definitely coming on. So it was great to speak to your team and get you on. It's been, it's been something that I'm really, really pleased about. So I'm excited about today's conversation. Ryan: Yeah. Likewise. And it's an honor to be here. So thank you. Teresa: So I want to start with where people, certainly where I know you from. So I know you from digital marketer, trafficking conversion, but I want to go back a bit because I'm not sure that I've ever really looked into or found out how you got to do that. And then we can talk about what we're doing today. Ryan: Aha, it's not a story I tell very often, actually, and not because it's like a bad story. It's just I've been doing this now for 25 years. It just winds up becoming a long story. So I'm going to try to give you the short, short version if that's okay. But let's go all the way back to 1999. I was a freshman at the University of Texas. In Austin, so my 1st year at university and and the Internet was brand new and that year I met the spring semester. I was always entrepreneurial. I always wanted to make money. I didn't have any of it, but I was in college. You're supposed to be broke. It's fine. You know, it wasn't that big a deal, but kind of towards the end of my 1st semester, I met a girl. And I, I knew in my heart of hearts, this is the woman that I'm going to marry. I like to say I didn't tell her that because I knew that that was creepy, but I just knew I really did. And, and so in that moment, I was like, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm broken. That's bad. I need to figure out a way to make some money. And, you know, at the university of Texas, people told stories about Michael Dell. Who started Dell computer out of his dorm room, which was literally his dorm room was across the street from my dorm room. And so I'm like, I could be the next Michael Dell. I'm going to start a business. And I had no idea what I was going to do, but I figured I could teach myself web design. So my actually, my very 1st company was a web design company. I was terrible at web design. Absolutely completely terrible, but I had, a student version of Adobe go live and Microsoft front page. People now have no idea what those even were, but that was how websites were built 100 years ago. And I marketed myself as a web designer, and the only client I got, and this is a bit funny, was a lactation consultant. Now, I have 4 kids. And my wife, you know, nurse breastfed all of our, all of our kids. So I have nothing but love for lactation consultants. I can tell you at 19 years old and building a website for a lactation consultant was a bit awkward. But built a website and it was, you know, it was going okay. And but unfortunately her husband wound up losing her job. We had a bit of a recession, husband lost, lost his job. She had to go back to work. She had to. You know, shutter her lactation consulting business, and she no longer had a need for a website, and she no longer had the ability to pay me. But this one was really, really sharp. Because she did something that I bet a lot of your other listeners have done. She wrote an ebook. She was smart. She realized as a lactation consultant, her clients, if she did her job, were eventually not going to need her. You know, they were going to figure it out on your own, then eventually the kids would wean. And so she actually said, I don't want to just be about lactation consulting. I want to expand my niche into overall childhood nutrition. Really, really smart, right? Incredibly smart. So she wrote this ebook on how to make your own baby food. And because she couldn't pay me, she said, look, I've got this ebook on how to make your own baby food. I want you to have it. Maybe you can sell it and make some money since I can't afford to pay you. And I'm thinking at the time, the heck am I going to do with like a 38 page PDF on how to make your own baby food? But again, back then, 1999, the, the cop, there was no Amazon. Google is a science fair project. And I did some research and I found, you know, there's actually a lot of people searching for how to make your own baby food and there's nothing out there on it. So my very first business was selling an ebook on my very first online business was selling an ebook on how to make your own baby food from a simple one page website. I charged $17 for it, which, and I remember I came up with the price because. It was basically less than 0. 50 per page. And I marketed that and for me, for whatever reason, that seemed like a deal. But a few years later, everybody told me you can never sell an ebook online for $17. Nobody will ever buy it. Thankfully, by the time people were...