The One Percent Rule for Profit, Scale, and Long-Term Growth with Sabir Semerkant

What if the real key to explosive growth was not a viral hack or a new ad strategy, but a relentless commitment to improving just one percent every day? In this powerful conversation, Dionne Malush sits down with e-commerce growth strategist Sabir Semerkant, the creator of the Rapid Two X system that has helped over 150 brands scale with precision, including Canon, Tommy Hilfiger, and Sour Patch Kids. With over one billion dollars in generated revenue and endorsements from leaders like Gary Vee and Neil Patel, Savir shares the raw truth about what actually drives sustainable growth in today’s economy.

Together, they break down why most businesses fail at the foundation level, how ego quietly destroys profitability, and why data must always lead emotion in decision-making. Savir reveals his sprint-based scaling framework, the danger of founders being emotionally attached to marketing, the massive losses caused by poor systems, and how simple daily improvements can compound into life-changing results. This episode is a wake-up call for entrepreneurs who are tired of guessing and ready to build businesses that last.

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Chapters

• 0:02 Bold Promise: 2X In 21 Days
• 0:43 Who Is Sabir And Why It Works
• 1:46 Obsession As A Competitive Edge
• 2:28 From Hacker To Revenue Leader
• 3:32 Marketing Is Mathematics
• 4:08 Fix The Store Before The Ads
• 6:59 Who Qualifies For Rapid2X
• 8:19 Foundations Beat Fancy Tactics
• 10:07 Sprint One: Performance Optimization
• 12:15 Know Your Customer Beyond Transactions
• 14:12 Hygiene, Segmentation, And RFM
• 16:18 Compounding 1% Daily Improvements
• 18:10 Document Everything To Learn Faster
• 21:05 Cut Tool Waste, Track What Matters
• 24:28 Ego, Attribution, And Cash Flow Truth
• 26:55 Detach Emotion From Creative
• 29:27 Depth Over Dabbling: One Thing Now
• 31:44 Contextual Advice Beats Generic Tips
• 34:05 Reallocate Budget To Proven Winners
• 36:41 Community Accountability And Audits

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:02

What if you could double your business in just 21 days? Today's guest has done exactly that. Not once, not twice, but hundreds of times. Severe Summerkant is an e-commerce expert, growth strategist, and the mind behind Rapid 2X Program. A proven system that's helped over 150 brands skyrocket their sales, including Canon, Tommy Hilfiger, and Sour Patch Kids. Endorsed by Gary V, Neil Patel, and Shark Tank's Matt Higgins, Sevier has generated over 1 billion in revenue by helping businesses master the art of scaling with precision. We're diving into what it really takes to thrive in today's economy, the mindset, the method, and the moments that tested his resilience along the way. Welcome. How are you doing today?

SPEAKER_01: 0:44

It's great to be here, Dion.

SPEAKER_00: 0:45

I'm so excited to have you on here. I've been listening to your YouTube videos and learning about you, and it's very interesting. And I always like to start with this one question. What's the one thing you want people to know about who you are behind the titles and accolades?

SPEAKER_01: 0:59

Uh I have a very obsessive personality. So that that's what makes me uh actually successful. You know, when when uh when people talk about uh I guess their flaws, they consider them to be a negative thing. In my case, my flaw of being having this obsessive behavior uh has helped me tremendously over my career.

SPEAKER_00: 1:19

I'm sure. And I think I have a little bit of that myself. I I really do believe I love working so much that I am obsessed with it. I love it.

SPEAKER_01: 1:27

So that being said, I think that's a No you you have to, you see, the thing is you have to love what you do, right? And and if you don't love it, then it's a job. And I believe I have never worked a day in my life, you know, because everything, everything that I do is is like uh if I'm not doing it for the 200 brands that are have gone through uh my program and especially the 90 plus that have gone through in the past 18 months, right? Even if I was not getting paid for it, I would be I would be tinkering with something on Shopify. I would be doing something on meta ads. I would be, you know, once I learned something from that, I would be posting on social media. And that's why you said that you have consumed some of my YouTube videos and stuff like that. You know, it it's that, you know, it's the it's that passion. Like when you have passion for what you do, you you never work a day in your life.

SPEAKER_00: 2:17

I love that so much. And you've built some pretty successful brands in your day, right? What is your very first breakthrough moment, the one that made you realize you had a gift for growth?

SPEAKER_01: 2:26

Actually, I'll I'll give you my background. Uh, this was more than 25 years ago. My background is in computer science. I'm a computer scientist, coder, hacker. That's that was me, right? And oddly enough, accidentally, I got put into this role of handling revenue and handling profitability. Mind you, when in college, I had taken all engineering courses. I had never taken a single business class, marketing class, accounting class. By the way, there's a lesson in that too. Sometimes when you when you are completely foreign to a topic, right? Oh, or a subject or whatever, uh, you are in a great place. Because one great thing about it is you're not coming up, coming in with uh all sorts of a notion or uh expectation of what should be. Because it's a blank slate, it's completely empty. Yeah, you figure it out. And being an outsider, complete outsider to this world, gave me that sort of uh uh unfair advantage that I did not see marketing the way marketing people who went to marketing school and business school saw it, right? I did not, right? To me, uh since the day I started with this, uh you know, to me, marketing is mathematics. If you have if you understand that if you can turn it into data, you can scale it. And I've done that successfully. So the 90 plus brands that that are going through the program uh for the past uh 18 months plus now, right? Uh in the first uh 12 weeks, 108% on average for an average brand, uh increase in revenue year over year, right? If you compare the same period. So this is this is why, like if I was a marketer, you know, your expectation would be oh, 10, 15 improvement. Oh, we we scored amazing 30 percent. To me, I would not wake up to fool or get up or waste my time for uh 10, 20, you know, because the thing is uh the e-com businesses, the way from the way I see it fun foundationally, they're extremely flawed, right? So a lot of businesses they spend a ton of money on meta ads, and they've all like, you know, and and you've heard those things. Well, what are some of those things? Oh, my my ad agency said that my creative sucks, so I need to work on that, right?

SPEAKER_00: 4:39

Right, for sure.

SPEAKER_01: 4:40

Yeah, but I I just pulled up your site, your your on mobile, on my phone, on my iPhone, which most of your customers are using. It's it's taking eight seconds, 12 seconds for your page to load. That's you're not but look on on my phone, on on the founder's phone, look, it comes up pretty fast. It's not it's not slow. Yeah, you have iTun 20, uh you have iPhone 26, you know, your consumers have iPhone 12, right?

SPEAKER_00: 5:05

So I never heard anyone say it that way. That makes a lot of sense.

SPEAKER_01: 5:09

And you you are on a FIOS network, Wi-Fi, that's giving you a gig up and down. Your consumer is on a 4G network, so you cannot compare what's how it's running your experience. Your experience means shit. It doesn't mean anything, nothing, zero. Your opinion and your experience of how you experience your site as a founder means nothing, right? No, it matters what the consumer experience is at the end of the day. So before you start blaming, like so many people, you know, so many founders are it's it's an easy blame game, right? Nada sucks because the algorithm, something's going on with the algorithm, Dion, right? Oh, I was reading on Reddit, somebody said that, oh, this hacked, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, but your site sucks right now. So let's fix that before we blame other people. Let's get our own house in order, right? Let's get our, you know, when when I come to your site, my consumer attention span, I care about the consumer 100% in this journey. I care less about the founder, I care less about the brand, I care less about what you're trying to sell, right? If the consumer is not serviced properly, you're you're gonna lose money. And how are you losing money? Low ROAS means that you're overspending on ads and you're not getting uh any kind of profitability out of it, and there is no cash flow. On the others, and ultimately it also means that you're not getting enough revenue, right? So, all in all, you're you're you're not profitable. If you continue this insane cycle and think that, oh, it's the ad creative, I need to get it better. Oh my god, Chat GPT now does this new incredible AI video and Gemini, whatever. Yeah, it's great. You're not a professor yet, you're in kindergarten, right? How about we learn our ABCs first before you even start forming words or sentences, right? And now you're talking about PhD level shit. You know, that's doesn't that does not apply to you, you know, at all.

SPEAKER_00: 7:03

So when the struggling company comes to you, how do you what's the first shift that you would give to someone? And and are you using doing startup companies all the way to very experienced companies? Can you tell me a little bit about that journey and and what you do to help them get started?

SPEAKER_01: 7:18

So the common thread across whether they're coming to me at zero, right? Or even pre-launch, we have had uh in Rapid2X, that's our program, right? We've had brands that come in and they they were at uh they were in pre-launch. So after being in the program for 12 weeks, then they launched it during the program. I mean, we we have a criteria for entry for into the program. Those examples that I'm using, this this specific example I'm using, uh, is typically a serial entrepreneur. They know what they're doing, but they just want to do it correctly this time around, right? So we put let them in. But most most of the time, our our minimum criteria is a minimum of 100K in a year. So people who do drop shipping and side hustlers, we don't want them in the program because you you really need to be invested. If I'm if I'm wasting and putting my time into your brand and this is a secondary thing for you, you you don't belong in the program, right? You can go and buy a course and uh watch some YouTube videos or TikTok or something and learn from that. And then when you're ready and serious, then you start uh applying to this program. So whether they are at zero or uh they are a hundred million dollar canon that's stuck in e-commerce at 100 million, right? And it doesn't matter. And fundamentally, if your foundation is not sound, whether you're building a private home that's single-story ranch, or you're building a uh, you know, 150 uh floor building, right? If your foundation is not sound, if you don't have, if you didn't dig deep enough, or you did not uh you did not pour enough concrete or use the right metal, what happens to that building? It doesn't matter if it's a ranch or a 150-floor building, it's gonna collapse. It's gonna eventually collapse. Sometimes even a little wind is gonna make it collapse. What is that wind in case of e-comm? iOS update. Boom, hundreds of Shopify stores went under, you know, and that was just a tiny little wind, you know. So that's the thing. Like foundationally, uh e-com businesses are not sound. And in the Rapid2X program, what we do is it's very methodical, very systematic, right? Like literally, opinions of whether it's the uh entrepreneurs or it's the uh YouTube videos that they have watched, or even my opinion, even though I have had pretty deep scars generating that a$1 billion incremental revenue for over 200 plus brands over my career, right? My opinion doesn't matter, right? It doesn't matter. Gary V's opinion doesn't matter, Tim Ferris's opinion doesn't matter, right? Because the thing is, your brand is unique, your story is unique. The way you want to approach the consumer is unique. The the consumer, the way they consume your product is unique, also, right? So you cannot take generic things and and say that that belongs to me. You really need to build this stuff out from the ground up so you have a strong foundation. So we start with the first uh what I call sprints, right? This comes from my from my computer science background. A sprint usually runs about six weeks, right? So in those in that six weeks, we focus on one thing, right? And the first thing that we focus on and the first sprint is performance optimization, right? Performance optimization literally means that let's clean up the shop, right? There's a lot of things wrong with it. There's something wrong with the speed of the site, there's something wrong with the with the consumer journey, there's something wrong with the way you're expressing your pricing, your promotion. Why are you overpromoting? Yeah, because all my competitors do, right? I'm gonna play your mama if everybody jumps off the cliff with you, right? Unless it's bungee jumping and fun, I'm not gonna do it, you know. So that's the that's we go through all this for six weeks. Everybody does that, right? Uh, every break. And what's great about it is I'm leading it, I'm leading those uh uh what I call prescriptions, and I give you those prescriptions in the program, you do it explicitly, and what entrepreneurs find that initially they kind of uh start with half-assing it, right? Meaning that, oh, I belong to the program, oh I I only got 20% on, 30% done. But when they hear the guy who just completely blindly followed and they just implemented 100% of it, and in the first week they saw 70% increase in their revenue, then what what what do the other entrepreneurs do? They drop everything else. Nothing else is important. Nothing else is gonna give you in one week 70% increase in in your revenue, right? That basically means that you're not wasting your time. And by the way, you're not doing too many things. The prescriptions are per week. So there are six weeks uh in the first uh sprint. Every week you're doing between three to five prescriptions, and each prescription takes between 15 minutes to 90 minutes if you have the expertise. That doesn't mean the entrepreneur doesn't necessarily have it. Maybe they have somebody on their team that's technical, they could do that. Or when I say technical, it could mean clavio, it could mean Shopify, it could mean HTML, liquid code, whatever. That's what I mean by technical. I don't mean just uh developer, right? That's what they do for six weeks. We go one by one. Like for example, uh in week two, uh, we look at getting to know your customer. Okay, you'll be surprised, Dion, that so many, so many entrepreneurs they don't know their customers. They know transactions. If you ask them how many orders do you get in a day, that's an easy answer. Go like, oh yeah, usually during the week we get five to ten orders, and on the weekends it it goes up to 12 orders, right? What about your Black Friday? It goes to 25 orders, right? So they know orders, right? Transactions. That's what they're treating that relationship with the consumer, with a human being, as a transaction, right? Right. And the consumer, because you're treating them like a transaction, they treat you back like a transaction. And the data shows actually over 200 brands. I can tell you, uh, most of the CRMs, 92% of them, 92% of your customer database on average for Shopify stores is one hit wonders.

SPEAKER_00: 13:00

92.

SPEAKER_01: 13:00

They sang to you one time, they gave you one transaction never to be seen again.

SPEAKER_00: 13:05

And that's a huge area. That's huge.

SPEAKER_01: 13:08

That's the the you know, the whole garbage promise of a lot of agencies, like, oh, we acquired the customer, but you're gonna retain them is garbage. It's 92%. What are you doing actually? Tell me actually what you put into the play in place to have a life cycle marketing going. There's a whole practice of life cycle marketing that's missing from all of these Shopify stores. So in week two, we focus on getting to know your customers. So when they see that 92% on average, uh their cut it's one hit wonder, one transaction, only eight percent, that's their retention rate. Eight percent of their customers come back and buy two times, three times, four times. That's it. Eight per eight percent. So when when you say that, oh, you know what, we will break even on the second transaction, you're doing nothing to make that happen. What what magically fantasy? It's gonna Willy Wonka is gonna come and give you that. That's not gonna happen, right? Unless you you put in the right things in place. And also, together with that, because we're doing performance tuning, we also clean up and do hygiene in in the second week. And and uh the hygiene basically is like, you know, because email providers like Outlook and Gmail and Yahoo and all these guys, they penalize your brand if they see that you're sending emails that are bouncing. They see that uh you're sending emails and people are not opening it up because it's inactive inboxes, right? So things like that. So we go through that first before we even do segmentation, we clean that stuff up and then and then and then we do the segmentation to understand what is our RFM value, basically recency, frequency, and monetary value. And a lot of brands, Deion, I can tell you that they don't they they have never heard of RFM before, they have never heard of life cycle marketing, right? When they actually do that number, when they come up with this number, they go like, oh my god, you know, 92%. I'm a transactional business, right? And yes, it's good. Now we know, you know, yeah. Knowing is half the battle. You didn't even know.

SPEAKER_00: 15:04

Because even operating a state race, there's a huge opportunity.

SPEAKER_01: 15:08

And by the way, this is not, this shouldn't be I I don't want the brands to take this the wrong way. I can tell you that when I even did Canon, the camera company, that's not a small company, right? Yeah, multi-billion dollar company, knowing your data and knowing your customer was was the was the roadmap I created for them. Pay attention to your analytics, pay attention to when I say analytics, it's not just Google Analytics, right? It's also your customer analytics, it's your campaign analytics. Understanding analytics is really important. And that analytics, that just one that focus on data, put them on a path to one billion dollars. They're more than halfway through that right now, right? It's knowing your numbers. When you put a marker on the ground and you say that, oh, my ROAS is 2.1. Okay, now it's another week. Can we move that to 2.2? That's it. Or 2.15. You know, make one percent, one percent improvement. If you ups, you know, when I said uh earlier on when you when you told me what one thing you I should tell you about myself, right? About being obsessive. This is the obsessive behavior that I'm telling you. I'm gonna give you the solution for it. 1% improvement daily. I don't care. You pick on one important KPI in your business. I don't care what it is, it could be email open rate, it could be more clicks on a product view. This product I'm viewing, I want more people to click on that add to cart. That's it. 1% more. I'm not looking for 10%, I'm not looking for 2%, I'm looking for 1% today. In the morning, obsessed about it, eight hours later. Let's see, can you get the right? Are you on the right path to the right answer? You not that you have the right answer, on the path to the right answer because it's a journey, right?

SPEAKER_00: 16:43

It's a journey, yeah, it's incrementally, right?

SPEAKER_01: 16:45

Yeah, can you get that one percent? Do you know what how that compounds over time when you're working on foundational things? In a year, that's 36.5x, 30 almost 37x. Then you go, like, oh, you know what, Sabir, you might be a robot, but we're not, right? So let's put a margin of error. All right. So let's put a this do 6040. Let's say 60 of the time you're gonna be wrong, 40 of the time you're gonna be right.

SPEAKER_00: 17:09

Okay.

SPEAKER_01: 17:09

Actually, less than that. Let's make it so because it was 37, right? Let's make it less than 10 percent. Yeah, let's less than yeah, let's let's make it 10, you know, like 30 percent, right? So that's gonna bring you down to like 10 uh X.

SPEAKER_00: 17:20

10x.

SPEAKER_01: 17:21

You can, if you obsess about these things and if you can do it five days a week or seven days a week, right? Only one percent improvement, you can 10x a business in a year, right? You can definitely, even if you go slow because you don't have the expertise, because you're not a clavio guy, you're not a insert the excuse. I've heard plenty of it. Actually, I should write another book about thousand excuses entrepreneurs make not to do things, right? That would be an amazing title, right? It would be as famous as that book that I've read, right? That's behind you, Think and Grow Rich. Fabulous book, by the way. Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_00: 17:56

I hope they're well, but I think you should write it because there's more excuses in business as a business owner myself, and having a 200 plus people company, I get a lot of excuses.

SPEAKER_01: 18:06

Yeah, the the thing is it's easy to make excuses. I mean, you make excuses. I I'll tell you the reasons why entrepreneurs make excuses, right? Getting exposed is a big, big issue for them, right? Being exposed, I made a bad decision, right? Also, what would people think of me because they think I'm smart? I I made this meh mistake, they would think less of me. I can tell you that if I make a mistake, as soon as I find out, I tell the world that I made that mistake.

SPEAKER_00: 18:31

Yeah, I was just saying, and that was something I was gonna ask you. Like, have you ever had a setback or made a mistake?

SPEAKER_01: 18:35

In nature, I mean, by the way, this this Dwayne Johnson haircut is not because of a fashion. This is the this is pretty deep scars. I lost all of it, you know, going through these experiences. There are pretty pretty pretty deep lashes on my back too from those scars, too, you know. Yeah, I'm with that. The thing is, you you have to once you own up these mistakes, and most importantly, you document them, right? There have been so many entrepreneurs, and and and uh what's interesting is for some reason I've gotten to be known as this kind of a person, right? Uh in the community, in the community of venture capitalists and angel investors. And I work with sharks on Shark Tank, right? And and Gary V and stuff like that. I've been known as this person you you you know, most people send uh entrepreneurs to when entrepreneurs have failed miserably, right? And it's interesting, and because the thing is, I I call myself a business therapist, also, right? I don't have I don't have a psychotherapy degree or anything, but I understand to ask the right questions, right? So they send me, and the number one advice I have for and any entrepreneur when you're going through the journey, and the journey starts before you even start selling that first unit of your product, right? As soon as the idea came to you in your head, right? Go buy this thing. Forget about notion, forget about all those things. Buy a nice, I mean, if you're listening to it on uh listening to this podcast on audio. I'm showing a very thick notebook, right? Really pretty sturdy notebook, right? Buy one, get a pen, because you can run out of battery, you can run out of those things. So no need for a Kindle or remarkable or iPad or whatever. Those are all fancy tools. A nice pen, even if you run out of pen, somebody can somebody can give you a pen, right? You could even find it in a bank for free, right? So get that, write down everything, right? When good happens, write it down. When bad happens, write it down. Write down the results you're getting. Make this your notebook. And if you run out of this notebook, buy another one. And and say this was book one, this is book two. And then, you know, once a year, at a minimum, once a year, when it's nice and quiet, right? December 26th through December 31 is pretty quiet. August 16th through August 31, pretty quiet, right? For most brands, it is, right?

SPEAKER_00: 20:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 20:50

Or if you're going on a cruise, take that notebook with you, right? When you're sitting by the sun, so that this way there's no anti-glare bullshit that you need to know worry about because your Kindle glares because of the sunlight. It's it's a notebook, it's with writing on it. You could open it up and read it, right? Open it up, read it, and on the sidelines, make some more notes, right? And believe me, you you would have you would have written so many things in there at the time when you were going through the pain, you're written things down. When you reflect back on it, you go like, oh, you know what? I need to really work on that thing. Because you forgot about it, right? Because you get distracted so easily thanks to 1.7 second attention span that you have, you know, and then that's a real number, by the way. That's a real statistics in consumer attention span. And and if you are not, you know, i if you forgot about something, you're gonna come back, go like, oh yeah, you know what? I really need to work on this. I wrote it down, I forgot about it totally, right? Let me come back to it. Or you'll come across a mistake that you had done already, and something is going on right now that you couldn't cannot put a finger on it, but you already did this mistake. Therefore, why are you repeating it? Right.

SPEAKER_00: 21:52

You know, I think that's one of the greatest pieces of advice I've ever had on this podcast. And I wished in 30 years of being an entrepreneur that I had that. Because if I had a book for every year, I would have made every mistake 20 times. But you're right, I don't remember, you don't remember all of them. And so I am so excited for all of you that are on here that heard that because what great advice that is to document your journey, and then from that, you you can do a lot of things from that journey. You can teach, right? You can have social media posts, you can write a book, you can you can manage a few things, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 22:25

You can do so many things from or or for the least, you could be on a panel or uh speaking or do a keynote speech, you know, based on it's based on just the five mistakes I learned uh doing XYZ, right? That could that could be it. So this is one of the reasons, Dion, in the program, uh, you know, people are so obsessed with very, very fancy tools, right? And they spend a lot of a lot of money, by the way. On average, this this is this statistics is gonna is gonna blow your mind. An average entrepreneur wastes about$847 per day on tools that they don't need per day, not per month, per day. That's a lot, and and that comes in two forms. One is absolute number that's getting charged on their Amex card that they're getting points on and they're very happy, right? That's waste. Number two, waste of using the wrong apps that's costing them revenue on a daily basis,$847. And this is not some arbitrary number, by the way. This is actually from 200 plus brands. Uh, and if you multiply that out in a year, you're looking at$47 million being lost.

SPEAKER_00: 23:28

That's a lot.

SPEAKER_01: 23:29

And that's that's a sample size of 200 brands, right? And that's an average. So that there are ones that are losing$9,000 per day, and then there are some that are losing$250 per day. But average is about$847, right? And the reason I bring that up is in the program we focus on two things. That's just two things. The one document is called Rapid2X tracking document. It's a Google doc. That's it.

SPEAKER_00: 23:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 23:54

And for the 90 plus brands, uh, you know, there's there's a bulk of them. That document is well over 400 pages. That's the narrative. The narrative goes in there. The all the quantitative, some of the quantitative stuff, but mostly qualitative stuff that's going on with the business. What did they work on this week? Uh, what what what what was the test that they set up? What was the A B? What what why did it make sense to set it up that way? That narrative is going into that Google Doc. 400 pages, right? Wow. That's their that's their business journal. That's what they do. The second document is called uh Rapid2X tracking sheet. Tracking Sheet is multi-tab Google Sheet, yeah, Microsoft Excel, think of it that way. So Google Sheet is publicly available so that you can you can use it. You don't even have to spend money on that. Yeah, you keep track of all of these systems throw so much data at you because it's of an avalanche of data. What do you do? You fold and you ignore it, right? Because you don't pay attention to it. On a weekly basis, every Rapid2Xer documents the data in their Google Sheets, in their Rapid2X tracking sheet. And more importantly, every tab is a platform data that they're getting. And when they're doing it at 9 30 a.m. on Monday morning, they know exactly what happened up to last week. Absolutely. Yeah, right. The whole thing is no, there is no like, oh uh last year we were doing so I there are so many entrepreneurs I meet, they talk about what happened during the pandemic, how business grew during the pandemic. That had nothing to do with you. So if you patted yourself on the back as an entrepreneur, going like, oh wow, how smart am I? I grew this thing from zero to a million, it had nothing to do with you. Right. Pandemic, people being locked down inside of their houses, getting bored, they did two things. They either bought stuff so that they can cook, you know, right, or they consumed a lot of Netflix, right? A lot. Yeah. So if they were consuming things and buying things and you did e-commerce, uh, if you didn't grow during that time, you should shut down your business because you should be growing, right? At that time, everybody grew. In fact, Amazon during their boring quarter outgrew their prior holiday season uh Q4 of 2019. They beat that in Q2 of 2020 when the pandemic happened, right? Yeah. Uh so that that's a signal.

SPEAKER_00: 26:08

Right, so you'll clap ourselves on the back about it. You know, we had good years too, but it was. I don't like we're never gonna see that again. It's an anomaly, it's not how business works, right? You still have to work, and so I will give you credit.

SPEAKER_01: 26:18

Like, it's not like I'm I'm some sort of a tyrant that doesn't give credit. I give credit where credit is due. And if something you because the thing is, here's the problem with with wrong attribution of things you accomplished, right, as an entrepreneur. What does that lead to, Dion? That leads to a lot of ego trips, egos, yes, and and ego starts writing checks. Your bank does not have the cash flow to you know allow withdrawals, you know, at all, right? You really need to be like basically remove the emotion and the ego from that equation completely. I park my ego every single morning outside my door, right? I don't let it in. I look at the data, the data let let's tell me what's going on, and I obsessively keep on improving it. And the rule is to do it by one percent. That's it. At the end of the day, if I if I succeeded in setting up that test or I started seeing some early results, even in within a day, because you there are sometimes you see between one to three days, you will see uh results off of your labor, right? My rule is at the end of the day, did I do a great job? Would I hire myself again tomorrow morning, or would I fire my ass because I did not do a great job that day? You know?

SPEAKER_00: 27:25

Yeah. So let me ask you this last question because I think this is you know kind of ties it all in. What kind of mindset shift do entrepreneurs need to make right now if they want to stop surviving and start scaling in any industry?

SPEAKER_01: 27:35

Forget about scaling, it's thriving. You you want to thrive because scaling could come at a cost of spending lots and lots of money with nothing to show for it. Your bank account is the source of truth, right? And if your bank account says that you you're not scaling in a smart way, and you're you're buying a lot of marketing from a lot of agencies or whatever gurus or experts or whatever, whatever, you are going to fold because you can only take out so many loans, so many lines of credit, so much you could put up on your credit card, right? Uh, you cannot cash flow this. You need the cash flow, that's your lifeblood, and you cannot do that, right? So the biggest advice I have for entrepreneurs is that, right? Pay attention to your numbers, let park your ego, focus on data. Data tells you there e-commerce. If you're in the e-commerce game, everything, everything gives you data, and that's the pulse. It's telling you it's working or not working, right? Yes, don't associate your emotion with the piece of creative that's not working. For example, right? I I see that you you that's your husband, boyfriend, husband, husband, yeah, husband. Okay, husband. Okay. Let's say you run a man's brand, right? And your husband is the model with that hat. Then that's that's the hat that you're trying to sell, right? And now you're spending and spending and spending money on Mac ads and Google ads and YouTube video, the ones that are featuring him.

SPEAKER_00: 28:58

Okay.

SPEAKER_01: 28:59

And it's bombing. It's not working, right? It's not working. What do you do? Oh, you know what? I I think we need to have him shave his beard. Maybe that's the thing. Versus you didn't even pay attention, but somebody in your on your team took a UGC, a user-generated content, off this guy who's not so attractive, as attractive as your husband back there, right? Uh, but the thing is, he's working on the farm, he has the hat on, sun is growing, he's he's doing, he's moving the bushels and working hard and stuff like that. And that ad, that ugly ad that's horrible, that's not even on your brand, is actually generating a 6x row as. You didn't even pay attention to that.

SPEAKER_00: 29:37

Because you're slow-attached into the ad, right?

SPEAKER_01: 29:40

I was a personal attachment. Imagine if if if that was a candy brand with your daughter in it, or your dog, right?

SPEAKER_00: 29:47

My dog.

SPEAKER_01: 29:48

You're you have when you attach, because that an emotion is going to is gonna dictate your opinion, and that opinion is gonna be wrong. Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_00: 29:57

That's gonna cost you a lot of money.

SPEAKER_01: 29:58

Yep, it's gonna cost you a lot of money, a lot of money because and and worse, you're gonna try to make it work. We're gonna make it work. We're trying. Sabir, we're trying. I hear so this is my favorite phrase from entrepreneurs. We're we tried everything. We are trying everything. No, uh, you shouldn't try everything. Tell me the one thing you're doing right now and and go pretty deep into that one thing. Explain every part of it, right? Why why do you have that thinking grow rich behind you, right? Why is there a Christmas thing over here, right? Why is the lighting this way, right? Tell me, tell me the reasoning behind it. Give me all the whys. Give me all the whys that why you decided to do it this way, right? The thing is, most entrepreneurs would not have the answer to that. They they would just stick to like a very surface level, artificial, some sort of something, some kind of a marketing speak that they heard on on a podcast or TikTok or whatever. They'll feed me that. Go, like, oh yeah, you wow, you listened to Tim Ferris, huh? The thing is, I consume a lot of content. So I know where that content came from. Yeah, and I know that, you know, when when and this is not koo pooing on on my contemporaries like Tim Ferris and uh Gary uh Vaynerchalk, and Gary Vayner Vaynerchuk is my brother from Another Mother. I co-founded an agency with him, right? So it's not that. It's like his advice might be specific to a specific group of people. But when it comes to you specifically, does that thing pertain to you? Nothing to do with his advice. His advice is a thousand percent. He he is he's done this as long as I have been doing this. He's been doing uh, you know, social media, social content, he's he's phenomenal at branding and everything. So he's right. Like, even I don't hear his statement, I'll tell you he's right, right? But the thing is, does that pertain to you? Does that does that apply to you, your situation? Two brands you mentioned in my bio, right, when you were reading it off, Tommy Hill figure and Perry Alice, both of them men's brand, they focus on men's fashion, right? Do you believe I I worked with both of them intimately, right? Do you believe that those two brands are the same? The answer is no, completely different. Complete yeah, the demographic at the base is is uh focused on men, but what type of men? One is you know, positions itself as like a high-end luxury, the other one is fun, very different positions, definitely different, right? Yep, the way you sell to them, to these audiences, very different. The way you tell your stories is very different. One you you have them on a yacht, the other one is going to a nice meeting or having a casual date at a coffee shop. Very different. Finally different the way the way you sell it. So that's the that's the key thing that I want entrepreneurs to take away from this, right? When you hear a piece of advice, the best thing you could do is don't act on it. You know, because when you act on it as an entrepreneur, you're wasting time and you're wasting money, right? And you're wasting even derivatively revenue, possibly, you know, because you spend money on something an idea like meta ads that didn't work, right? That means that you lost on the ROAS also. Would you have put that money into in that incremental money that you wanted to spend on the best ad that has been working for you to get 10% improvement on that ad, right? And 10% more more revenue from it. The answer is that's what makes sense, right? Not on something that just an idea that sounds good, it sounds sexy, right? But but what's the proof that it's gonna work, right? Well, why are you wasting time or money on on that stuff, right? And and uh yesterday actually we had in our in our program, I do four live sessions. These programs, by the way, are not courses, to be clear, right? They're not buying a digital course, they're part of a community. Uh and I do uh two live sessions uh every single week uh for 48 weeks. We take four weeks off, uh two weeks in summer and two weeks in winter, uh, because the entrepreneurs asked me to give them time off. I don't know, I'm not their boss, but they asked me to give them time off. So I ended up deciding on the a summer break and a winter break. But uh that's what we do, and it's these are live sessions. And and uh, you know, an entrepreneur shared their meta-ads uh dashboard. And what's funny about it is during that session, uh, one of my other Rapid2X members started auditing this other member's uh dashboard.

SPEAKER_00: 33:57

Wow, that's cool.

SPEAKER_01: 33:58

And within it, go like, why are you spending money on this? And after going through the audit for the past uh from January 1st through yesterday was November 6th, right? So uh it's it's more than 10 months of data. There they're basically 30 more than I would say maybe 20. I'm being kind, like 20 to 25 percent of their ads were getting any results, any not profitable, but any results close to 80, 75, 80 was not working. It had not yielded anything, nothing, zero. So I I wanted the other uh other member to who has who is much further along to actually see what kind of advice he would give. He goes, like, I will shut these down asap right now, like right now, as we are auditing, you should shut these down, and the money that you're gonna save from that put it into the is 30 percent that is you're starving them, even though they're giving you results, you're starving the things that are working, and the other ones you're hoping, you're hoping and praying it will work, right? So that was great advice, right? And and there were some other additional things I I told them, but this is what happens in when you belong to the right uh community, to the right tribe, right? And it gets pretty lonely when you're an entrepreneur. When you ask your team, are they giving you their their response because they want they want to still keep their paycheck? So they're they're biased, right? They're not gonna give you a. Are they are they blowing smoke up your butt because you're in a loss, right? You have to be careful where you're getting that from. But when you are part of a tribe, that kind of uh blatant uh uh feedback, you're not gonna get it if you ask your team, especially if you ask your agency, they'll go like, oh, they want to blame us for this, or they're gonna cancel our contract. Let's straddle them along, let's tell them that this is what you need to do, right? This is what's happening, the fault is theirs. They need more ad creative. The product, the description is bad, or the photography is bad. They need to do another photo shoot, right? And they make you run towards the wrong thing. I can tell you that there are so many ads, I've I've replaced it with an iPhone shot ad.

SPEAKER_00: 35:58

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_01: 36:00

Costing zero. Basically, the founder did it themselves. They went into their parking lot. This is an actual example. It was it was a B2B brand, right? They sell uh like a tent type of material, drapes and stuff like that, for for you know, for like expos and stuff at Javit Center and things like that, right? They went out to their parking lot in the backyard, they took their uh the iPhone from the founder, gave it to their assistant. They were shooting on that iPhone, and the guy just went through and showed how easy it is to put the drape together for for this uh thing. That ad is outperforming anything they have spent money on in the past.

SPEAKER_00: 36:35

Amazing, right? So that we're I think you said something about you had a special link for our guests today.

SPEAKER_01: 36:41

So if they want to know, because there this is a pretty rich program, they should actually uh check out uh check out uh the program and learn about it to see uh you know where they are in their journey because we our rejection rate is pretty high, like I said earlier. Like we want to make sure that it's the right brand, right entrepreneur that's joining the program. Because one of the things that we preach is not to waste your time or money, right? So why would I even take your money? So the link that we have set up for your listeners with a special offer, it's uh growth by severe.com slash shine on, just like the name of the podcast. Uh and you can include that link in the podcast description uh or wherever you're displaying this, so they they can click on it and get there, and and we'll give them a special offer for your listeners.

SPEAKER_00: 37:22

Great. Thank you so much. I really appreciate your time today. It was so fun, and I love that piece of advice you gave to all the entrepreneurs. And that even though I have 30 years in, I think I'm gonna go buy a new notebook and get a new pen because writing down or Amazon.com has it. Amazing. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you being on here today.

SPEAKER_01: 37:39

It's great being here and sharing with your audience. Thank you, Dion.