Clate Mask calls Joe Polish “one of the best marketers” he’s ever met, and in this podcast, you’ll get a glimpse into why. Tune in to tap into Joe’s expertise as he shares the importance of relationships to help you grow your business and solve problems and why changing your relationship with money is so crucial. You also get tips on how to do more of what’s easy, fun, and lucrative in your personal and professional life.
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Transcript
[00:00:23] Clate Mask: Welcome, everybody, to this episode of the Conquer the Chaos Podcast. I'm your host, Clate Mask, cofounder and CEO of Keap, and today, I've got a longtime friend, somebody I'm so excited to introduce you to. Many of you probably already know Joe Polish, but he's somebody who goes way back with us here at Keap. In fact, I credit you, Joe, for turning me into a voracious reader.
[00:00:46] Joe Polish: Oh good!
[00:00:46] Clate Mask: Because you are the one that just every … In fact every time we get together, you give me a bunch of books. So I'm really excited for you all to get to know Joe Polish a little better if you don't know him. Some of you probably do, but Joe Polish is an amazing marketer, an incredible marketer, one of the best marketers I've ever met.
[00:01:04] Clate Mask: And he also is our second customer at Keap. And so that's always a fun thing. And he’s just a friend and a great entrepreneur. So Joe, why don't you give a little bit more overview of you and who you are to the audience?
[00:01:16] Joe Polish: Great to be here. So, yeah, I'm an entrepreneur. I have a lot of varied interests and I’m incredibly curious. So that means … You can call it ADD or distractibility, or just be curious. And so I help,
[00:01:28] Clate Mask: I like the curious part. That's good.
[00:01:29] Joe Polish: Curiosity is what allows me to constantly look at how to make things better, figure out why things are the way they are, why humans behave the way that they behave. Because, you know, look, marketing at the end of the day is applied psychology. It's not just understanding behavior but figuring it out. I always come at it from the frame of asking what's in it for them. What does the person want? How do I deliver that in a way to where I actually want to deliver it? Because even if you try to give someone what it is they want, if you don't like doing it, you're not going to bring good energy to that level. So, I have sold courses. I mean, I learned marketing from being a carpet cleaner. That's sort of my origin story. And I turned my carpet cleaning business around, taught thousands of people in the cleaning and restoration industry and that led to developing coaching groups.
[00:02:18] Joe Polish: I had my first coaching group back in 1998. I'm like one of the OGs of masterminds. And so I have a group called Genius Network. I really refer to it as a connection network. It's just bringing people together to connect them with ideas and with other individuals. It's like a tribe of tribal leaders.
[00:02:35] Joe Polish: And so that's one of my core businesses and it’s one of the highest-level marketing groups in the world, but it's more than marketing. It's health, mental and physical, and wealth, not just making money, but not losing it — two different skill sets that you know … And then, what I call ELF — doing things that are easy, lucrative and fun versus HALF, which is hard, annoying, lame and frustrating.
[00:02:55] Joe Polish: So I'm constantly in search of helping myself and my clients and other people to be like, “What in your life is ELF? What is HALF? What's causing it to be hard, annoying, lame and frustrating, or hard, annoying, lucrative and frustrating? And what do you need to do differently? Oftentimes that's changing the messaging, changing the direction, changing the target market.
[00:03:13] Joe Polish: Sometimes, it's looking at your addictions, looking at your workaholism, looking at the food you're eating. And so it's a whole variety. I also own a ghost town. We currently also … We have a 2,500 acres of gold, silver, copper mine claims that we just recently … we're going to start mining. I read a bunch of books, you know, a bunch of stuff.
[00:03:37] Clate Mask: So if you didn't get from that the full picture of who Joe Polish is, I don't know how you're going to get it. Because Joe's, like you said, not only an amazing marketer but probably the best connector I've ever met. You are world-class at recognizing people in your network who would benefit from getting together and making the connection.
[00:04:00] Clate Mask: I've been the beneficiary of that many times going back, I think, to Dan Sullivan, the strategic coach, which I did for years. And there have been many people you've connected me to, and I see you do that extraordinarily well as part of Genius Network.
[00:04:15] Joe Polish: Yeah, I mean, I do it all day long. I try. It doesn't matter if there's money involved in it or not. I think I'm wired to … I think any problem in the world can be solved with the right Genius Network, and even if someone's not in my group Genius Network — I think of a Genius Network as a group of people who have skills and capabilities — everyone has it … Do you want to be a better parent? Who do you know that's a great pair?
[00:04:37] Joe Polish: If you want to be in better physical shape, who do you know that could help? Do you need a nutritionist? Do you need a personal trainer? Do you need a yoga instructor? A massage therapist? I mean all the different varieties of things that would help you … And so for instance, let's go to Keap. If you want to put your business together, if you want to integrate all of the different operational things, you can find these sorts of solutions. I'm always looking for how to connect to people with solutions to their problems because people talk about thought leaders. Well, if you're any … Result leaders are valuable. So, how do we produce a result? Oftentimes, that's a connection.
[00:05:13] Clate Mask: Yeah, I love that, so you've been an entrepreneur in so many different ways. I mean, I look at all the different things you've done from carpet cleaning to your Piranha Marketing business where you taught people how to do cleaning businesses more effectively to all the things you've done around easy, lucrative and fun.
[00:05:31] Clate Mask: And by the way, this is the first time I've heard you say that health, wealth and ELF That's the first … But I've heard you talk about easy, lucrative and fun versus, HALF, which is hard, annoying, lame and frustrating. I've heard you teach these things. But when you think about life as an entrepreneur and you look at all the different kinds of things you've done in entrepreneurship, not to mention now, coaching, masterminding, and leading Genius Network, which is an amazing group of entrepreneurs who perform at a really high level … When you look at that, we have entrepreneurs who are listening to this …
[00:06:07] Clate Mask: What is it about entrepreneurship that causes you to … You've done so many different flavors of this. You don't need to keep doing this. You could be done, but you keep going at new things and different types of entrepreneurship. What is it that attracts you to entrepreneurship so much and makes it so satisfying?
[00:06:26] Joe Polish: Well, to me, it's a business of solving problems for a profit. Most opportunities and most solutions come from seeing the pain in the world and figuring out how to minimize it and reduce it. Some people, some industries, some that are very corrupt actually make money by creating more pain, not by solving it. You know, they sell crappy food or you get hooked on certain drugs or they try and pretend like they care about them, but they really don't. So, an entrepreneur is a problem solver in many ways. They're also artists. See, I look at everything through the lens of trauma, through the lens of addiction.
[00:07:18] Joe Polish: And into the lens of connection and disconnection … And entrepreneurs, they're often misunderstood because many people think they're doing it just for the money. And certainly, you're not going to have a successful business if you don't make a profit. If you want to just break it down to money, we're all in the arithmetic business.
[00:07:40] Joe Polish: I have an addiction recovery foundation, Genius Recovery, and so that doesn't make me any money. I've never paid myself anything for it, but I get a tremendous amount of joy by immersing myself in very painful situations, but seeing the healing that comes out of it … I know the suffering of being an addict because I've been in recovery for over 20 years. So why I keep pursuing stuff, I'll tell you like you … We can have the psychological reasons like, “Oh, it just allows me to make money. It allows me to do cool stuff, have great experiences,” but it's also a healthy form … If managed right, it's a healthy form of biochemistry.
[00:08:21] Joe Polish: Dopamine is an example. People think that's a pleasure neurotransmitter. It's really not. It's anticipation. And so, so much of the world is driven by FOMO. So, every person who would be watching this who has a goal, a dream, an aspiration, if they didn't have dopamine, if their serotonin, if their biochemistry was off, they may not have the motivation to build a business. And for me, constantly focusing on challenging things and solving things and figuring it out just keeps me … To me, that's my artistic flow. So what I was going to say is it's expression. Everything we do is expressing ourselves. When you wake up every morning and you drink water and you work out and you say you love your wife and your kids, I mean, all of the things that if we were to follow you, you being kind, you showing up …
[00:09:09] Joe Polish: As CEO, you have your forms of expression, right? And some people's forms of expression are constant stress and constant chaos. So you go back to conquering the chaos, right? How do you conquer the chaos? You find solutions, you find people, you find methodologies. What is the chaos? What's causing the chaos? And how do you dance with it?
[00:09:29] Joe Polish: People want the chaos to go away. It's not going to go away. The treadmill of crap as an entrepreneur or a business owner or as a human, never goes away. What changes is your ability to resource yourself, your ability to look at it, your ability to solve it. I say to young entrepreneurs all the time, “If I would have known being successful was this much work, I would have … You have no idea.”
[00:09:54] Joe Polish: You have no idea about the things that you don't even know that you don't even know are going to happen. But it's with those challenges that you'll have the biggest breakthroughs. If people were really great at follow through, if they were really good at doing all this marketing stuff, what we do and help people with? We wouldn't have careers. So, thank God.
[00:10:17] Clate Mask: That's right.
[00:10:19] Clate Mask: So you said so much there to a simple question of what drives you as an entrepreneur. I want to just hit a couple of the things that you said. I love your point that it's problem-solving for money. And there's a dopamine hit that comes from that that's not just the money. And when you start, you think it's the money. That's the dopamine hit. And it is at first. It's like, “Hey, that was really awesome.” But what you don't realize is it's actually the problem you solved and the validation that's coming from your customer and the market that's saying, “Yeah!”. Dave Ramsey, we both know Dave..
[00:10:58] Clate Mask: Dave calls when you do a job done well as an entrepreneur, you get certificates of appreciation with president's faces on them. That's what it is. They appreciate you. They're appreciating and you get paid. You get paid money to do that. So the dopamine hit that you're calling out is as you called it, it's the expression. You're expressing yourself and it's being valued and received by the market in a way that just feels really awesome because not only are they saying, “Hey, great job,” and giving you this appreciation but you get the thrill of being able to, as you call it … I call this out in my book. I quote you as calling them fun tickets, right?
[00:11:39] Joe Polish: That's right. People say money can't buy happiness. And I'm like, “Well, it's silly because I buy happiness all the time, but there are certain contexts of what you can do with money. Both of us know people that have a lot of money. They aren't having fun and frankly, the more money people have the more often they worry about the money. So money is really important. I would never poopoo money.
[00:11:59] Joe Polish: Because people will kill other humans in order to get their money. That's why there are crimes. That's why there's so much stuff … In the same token, though, it is a tool like anything else in how you utilize it, how you express yourself with it, that has everything to do …
[00:12:18] Clate Mask: Well, I remember you told me the fun tickets quote 20 years ago. It was early when we started working with you. And when I wrote the book last year, I was talking about money because so many times entrepreneurs have a really, almost an impossible relationship with money. It prevents them from being successful, especially early stage entrepreneurs if they didn't come from families with money. It's a real challenge.
[00:12:42] Clate Mask: And so just getting your mind right around money and that it's a great thing and that there's nothing inherently evil about money. It's what we do with it and how it drives us and how we get into the comparison and putting people down and all that stuff. So I really appreciate your perspective on that years ago. And it is fun. It’s a lot of fun.
[00:13:00] Joe Polish: To the point too, if someone's watching this and you have a dysfunctional or confusing relationship with the making of money or somehow … I have a genius I work with, Dr. Don Wood, and this is usually a statement related to trauma. Although I think it applies here, he said, “If you understood the atmospheric conditions of somebody's life, it would make sense why they are the way that they are.
[00:13:28] Joe Polish: So I can look at almost anyone doing good stuff or bad stuff. How did they turn out that way? Well, if we will go back and watch their life, it would make sense. So if someone has some sort of weird relationship with money or they feel guilty, you can trace it back to your parents. You could trace it back and believe me, we live in a very anti-capitalistic right world.
[00:13:48] Joe Polish: There are many people …
[00:13:49] Clate Mask: And it’s getting more and more so.
[00:13:50] Joe Polish: Yeah. And I think it was Hayek who wrote and assertively said the biggest problem with capitalism is it was named by its enemies and that capitalism in its purest form is simply collaboration between individuals exchanging goods, products, and services for value.
[00:14:07] Joe Polish: Be it in the form of money or whatever. And so don't get hung up on the word because some people are like, “I don’t like the word capitalism,” or whatever, but ultimately, the making of money if you are creating value, reducing suffering, expanding the lives of your community and individuals, not contracting them, why would you have any issue with doing that if that was actually happening?
[00:14:34] Joe Polish: And sometimes people have a guilt trip with money because they have learned how to make money from people who are unethical or there's some sort of taking advantage, right? And frankly, not all money is created equal. I also look at HALF as not just hard, annoying, lame, and frustrating but hard, annoying, lucrative, and frustrating because some money you have to bleed for. It's painful. You made money … And I will ask successful entrepreneurs, “How many of you ever made a lot of money doing something you absolutely hate with people that you despise and who didn't like you and were completely unappreciative?”. I mean, of course everyone, if they think about it, go, “Yeah.” You realize it's not the money with the printed dollar signs or the cryptocurrency or whatever form of value that you're Capturing it in. It's doing things right versus doing the right thing are completely different things.
[00:15:27] Joe Polish: And if you do the right thing, create value for people, you deserve to make whatever amount of money you want. And there's this whole notion of … I've probably raised more money for foundations and charities and stuff than I've ever paid myself, and having said that, that doesn't mean that I want to “give back.”
[00:15:48] Joe Polish: I don't like the term “giving back.”
[00:15:49] Clate Mask: I don't either. I’ve never …
[00:15:50] Joe Polish: It's like, if I take your shoes, I should give them back. If I've not taken anything, there's nothing to give back. And so a lot of people want to guilt someone because they've had success. So I'm all for giving. You know, I wrote a book called “Life Gives to the Giver.” I am a giver. I like giving. I like helping people. That being said, it's not because I'm obligated.
[00:16:09] Clate Mask: Yeah. Giving back implies that you took it in the first place. And there's no taking. It was a valuable exchange. I'm an economics major and you learn in Economics 101 that when someone trades dollars for the thing they're getting in exchange, they value that thing more than the dollars they’re trading, right?
[00:16:28] Clate Mask: They're partying with dollars because they like that thing more that they're getting in exchange. So we're adding value. We're literally creating value when we do an exchange because, on the other hand, the person on the other side values the dollars more than the thing that they're giving up. So both sides are getting a benefit of the bargain and yet somehow that's bad?
[00:16:52] Joe Polish: Exactly. All day long, every day … And it's like how do you get food? How do you get medical care? How do you get fuel for your automobile if it's electricity or it's gas? This is all a constant exchange.
[00:17:04] Clate Mask: Conquer the Chaos listeners, let me talk to you straight for just a minute. You're running your business, and it dominates your mind. It can be very difficult to take a step back and see what's needed to create balance in your business and your personal life, and to create great growth and development and progress in your business and personal life.
[00:17:23] Clate Mask: One of the most powerful ways to gain the perspective that you need is to get away from things and immerse yourself in an environment where you're going to be inspired, where you can see possibilities, where you can create connections, and where you can learn and grow and develop. And I know of no better place for entrepreneurs than Keap’s Let's Grow Summit. For years. We ran this conference as just an amazing mecca for entrepreneurship. And then, truth be told, for a few years, we didn't run it. We got back to it last year, and this year, we're putting it on and it is going to be awesome. I am so excited about this.
[00:18:01] Clate Mask: And I want you as our listeners to not miss out on this event. It's going to be November 20-22 in downtown Phoenix with the main days being the 21 and the 22. You can register for it by going to keap.com/letsgrowsummit. That's https://keap.com/letsgrowsummit. And you can take advantage of our early bird registration pricing, which expires at the end of July.
[00:18:24] Clate Mask: So if you are needing a reflection time, an opportunity to take a step back, gain greater perspective, inspiration, and most of all, see what automation — the fifth key to success — can do for your business, then make sure that you attend the Let's Grow Summit. Keap.com/letsgrowsummit, November 20-22 in Phoenix. I look forward to seeing you there.
[00:18:47] Clate Mask: Thanks so much for listening. Subscribe right here on YouTube or in your favorite podcast app to make sure that you don't miss a single episode of the Conquer the Chaos Podcast. And hey, if you liked this episode, let's get this out to more entrepreneurs. We all know that it is not easy to grow a great business and a great life, so let's get this message out to others. Make sure that you hit the like button, comment and share it with others so that we can help other entrepreneurs build a great business and a great life as they conquer the chaos. Keep going, keep serving and keep growing.