Stop Racing to the Bottom; Joel Miller | With Amb. Elisha

0:00Hello, Joel. It's so nice to have you on a show today. How are you doing? Doing great. We're looking forward to a weekend. Yeah, I really do. I think we're fine and met. And thank you so very much for being here. You see, I truly appreciate you. And you see Joel oftentimes, I love to thank my guests for two things. And I do really so often to the point where it has become my aunt. So firstly, Joel, I want to say thank you so very much for investing in yourself. You see, you are on this platform right now because you did invest it in yourself. And oftentimes, I love to make a reference to you. The amazing mango tree. So, a couple of months back, Joel, I was on a particular road. And just by the road side, there was this very tall, unattractive mango tree. And I used to work unattractive because

1:06the mango tree's got no mangoes on it. And the leaves, they were whole dry, you know. So I just walked past it and I went my way. But you see, Joel just recently, I was on that same road. And they stammered around, hmm, a lot's changed about the mango tree. You see, the mango tree caught my attention pretty good from the distance. And immediately, I got the hardstone of so close to it, of which I did. And it wowed me. Because now, the mango tree's got a lot of mangoes on it. Beautiful green leaves and LSE branches. And not just mangoes now, Joel, I've talked about ripe mangoes. It was such a lovely experience that day. And I was so, so excited. Yeah, it was my point. The fact that you dedicated your time, energy and resources to becoming

2:08the amazing Joel that you are today, that loneliness made it impossible for me to skip you. And that's why you got the request from me to be on the show because I was attracted to you, the fruit of all that you're doing, your philosophies, your insights, your work, the impact your work is having. And how you are offering your solutions, my man, this stuff, so beautiful. And just before I sent you the request, Joel, I said to myself, I've got to benefit from this beautiful themes. Joel is doing it. And not only me now, because you know, I don't want to look selfish and even with the audience. And here we are today with the amazing Joel. So thank you so very much for being at yourself. And secondly, thank you for saying yesterday, invite, because if you had said nope, there was nothing like you could do about it. Thanks for watching, man. Yeah, you're welcome. It's great to be here. Yeah, awesome. So let's get right into it. You see, I am quite excited to have you on a show today, Joel,

3:11for some reasons. Firstly, my interest in knowledge, second, I believe in in order for one to transition from a terrible situation to that of a beautiful wanderer, I believe it takes the application of knowledge, quality information, and not just knowledge alone, but the application of it. And you see, Joel, ever since I discovered their light in the ebber of mixed knowledge and darkness ignorance, I've been so keen to knowledge seeking. Why? Because I do not want to remain in the dark. So that's going to make our conversation today. Very important to me and even to the listeners. And the second reason why I'm excited to have the incredible Joel and the show is for the sake of the audience. You see, my man, living in the nature where information is as important as screens of sand. We've got lots of information flying out there. So this folks trust me for

4:13quality and very important information of which I am totally convinced, Joel, that our conversation is going to be insightful and impactful. So for that reason, my man, let's get started with introduction. Talk to us about your personal or your professional journey. Because right now, we are so curious. We want to know how Joel got here. Then afterwards, I've gotten some beautiful questions for you. Okay, Jim, a man over to you. Yeah, sure. I mean, we run a business called the Sky Floor. And it's my identical twin brother and I. And we were born on leap day. So we're really coming around to 10 and a half years old. We only get a real birthday once every four years. And I think we always wanted to work for ourselves to kind of look at the world and provide some kind of value. I think it was always like intriguing to think that you could come up with something that people will pay you for and you help them, right? Everyone kind of wins in that situation.

5:16And so we do digital marketing, which is a very broad thing. But really at the end of the day, we try to help our clients solve problems. Like, where do they want to be? What goal do they want to achieve? And if we can figure out a way to help them achieve that, then it's going to be a good fit. And we do all kinds of things for that. We build websites. We run ads. We sometimes do sales enablement and help their sales team figure out how to be more consultative and help their clients more because good sales is helpful. And so we've been doing it for 17 years. We love a room in it a bit. And for us, it's just really about serving people, actually. Tell you, that's amazing. 17 years. And you see, marketing is very, very crucial, very, very important because it's not just about creating the product or the services. You must

6:17also understand how to put these before it's potential customers. That's why what you're doing, it's so important. I tell you. And I love it. So on the subject of marketing, I'm going to pick the first question from there. So what is the difference between a marketing project and a marketing partnership? Yes. I mean, basically to us, a project is fine. It's great. It can help get someone where they're going or we can work together. But the reality is this day and age, things are so fluid, right? I mean, it's changing so fast with AI, for example, right now. And we're seeing that that has impacts has impacts on where you show up in search for results on the web. It has impacts on where people are getting their information from. And so that's picking AI is just a way of me saying, like, if you just do a project,

7:20well, what happens in six months? What happens in a year? We like to come on like an external team member and really partner with our client, with the company or the organization. We work with a lot of churches and nonprofits too. And be there, be along for the ride together so that we can look for the new challenges that are going to come up because new ones always do and then and then find solutions for them. And if you once you gain that, like, it's like any relationship, once you gain that history and that backstory and the knowledge of who the client is and vice versa, who we are, there's a trust that grows that just can't be forged in a single project. And I think you used the right key well, external team member. I got that. I got that. So I want you to still talk more than that. So why does that distinction matter? It matters because if if you, I think you absolutely have to have that trust level in order to get a good final product.

8:24And even at the lecture, the most cursory level, if you're just hiring somebody for a project and they're going to help you, maybe they do achieve the one goal, the one thing you have. But they're not going to know you like a partner well. Again, exactly. I'll go back to the, I've been married also for coming up to 18 years. So we got my wife and I got married right around the time we started this business. And you just cannot trade that level of knowledge and intimacy that comes from all those moments you spend together. And that applies to in a business relationship. So like when a client comes along, I think of one that we've been with for 10 years, they no longer have to describe every last detail of what they want. They can give me a very broad idea. And I can bring it to life for them because I know their DNA. And then they also know that they can trust me with, you know, the the admin access, the logins, they can give me the credit card number. And I'm not going to go run away with it because because we have that that level of

9:28of trust in partnership. Yeah, that level of trust. I got that. So what about this one? And I find interesting. Why do most business or businesses waste 80% of effort on 20% of results? Well, I'm going to answer that immediately by tying it back to the idea of partnership and trust because I think we all have this in in a we know that we can spend a lot of time on something with a little result. So like that number can go both ways, right? We've seen it so often where a client comes in and they're like, they do spend 95% of the time on a pick a new number, but they spend 95% of the time getting almost all the way to the finish line. And then the last 5% they're nitpicking all the little details instead of shipping something out there. And it actually hurts them because in the long term, they're not getting that thing online. So I think you need that partnership and that trust means that we can come in and say, not a real slap,

10:34but we can give them a little, you know, hey, I think we're missing something. Let's get this online. Let's get it out into the world. We'll shape it and morph it and get the feedback and and make sure that we're not getting hung up on the last 20% when you've already done 80% of the work. Now, that also means that sometimes we spend 80% of our time on the noisy 20% clients, you know, who aren't actually aren't the biggest part of our business. So sometimes we have to do some pruning so that the mangoes can grow right. I tell you, that was insected perfectly. Awesome, man. Awesome. You know, you know, while we didn't about you, I came across a spot where you said that, um, fail, hurry, fail often is a bad advice. Why do you say that? Because

11:35who plans to be a failure? I don't do. Now, I think what we have to do is take that to the core. Why? Why did we come up with that? Right? I think it's because what people are trying to say is there will be failures and we need to learn lessons from them. But I think instead, because that like phrase lives so large in the Silicon Valley mindset that at the end of the day, it's like, it feels like almost like a race to fail to learn the lesson. Now, I think we're just short-cutting ourselves sometimes by not admitting that you can learn a lot without having to fail at all. And you can learn through your successes too. So to me, it's just more like, let's reframe fail early fail often into a mindset and a mantra that says, we're going to persevere towards our goals. And so it's not as focused on the failures come we

12:36learn from them. But, but we're not like, hey, I must fail in order to learn things. Otherwise, I will learn nothing. That is, that is not true. There's other ways to learn and we should be success-focused and not failure-focused. You know, I feel like one of the things that mantra already turned to the mindset of a lot of people is now people anticipate failure more often than they do, which success. And that's really terrible. I got your point. It gets into your psyche. There's already enough. We know that being in business can be difficult. We all have the stats, nine out of ten businesses fail after the first year, whatever the thing is. And it's like, well, okay. And you, again, if you fail, it's not something to be ashamed of. Yes, learn from it. Bring that iteration to the next thing. But, but don't just don't plan on it.

13:40Don't look at all that and get in dwell there. I don't really believe in like, personally, I don't think like there's anything true and just manifesting things into the world. It takes our action to bring things to life. But our mindset matters. And so don't have a failure mindset. And if you're letting that become your mindset because, yes, you will learn a lesson. Well, you're just kind of being more likely to fail. That's so true. Okay, let us stick about competitors. So how do you compete against cheaper competitors without racing to the bottom? Yeah. I think it has all everything to do with how you position yourself. I don't, I think a lot of people get distracted about what they get distracted by the nuts and bolts of what they're offering, right? So like, yes, if I'm going to just sell, I'm going to sell a cup. This is not going to be a good example. But if I'm going to sell a cup, like, if I just need a

14:42vessel to hold some liquid, then of course, someone can make that infinitely cheaper, probably, than I can. They can do it at scale, whatever. There's, we can all race to the bottom if all we're selling is the cup. Now, if this thing is has my brand on it, and you spend $300 on this, it still holds water as well as another one. But if I have positioned myself in the market because everyone knows when they buy a Joel Miller mug that people know you're doing well, right? That's how Rolex works. That's how luxury cars work. You get away from this idea of just the commodity of what you're selling. Then, then you can have bigger, better prices that also deliver something. It can't be fake, right? It can't be. We still at the end of the day have to deliver for our clients. But if you want just someone to go make website for you, you can go on Upwork and you can find someone who will do it for $300. If you want, you can just run up a start up a Squarespace account. And

15:44sometimes I try to convince clients they might need to start there. They might not need our services yet. But because we're not, I'm not pitching that I can just bring you a website. I can solve your problem. I can help you achieve your goal. And when I actually demonstrate that understanding, there's no race to the bottom required because they know they're not just paying for that nuts and bolts output. They're paying for my worldview, my experience, my brother and I's synergy or twin energy, if you will. And that allows you to charge a premium price, but also to deliver on it. Amazing. In other words, position in my, what is one mindset shift most entrepreneurs miss when scaling? Well, I think for us, I can only tell our own story. It is that success isn't the same for everyone. And we can't let other people's definition of what success looks like

16:45and form how we operate in the world, even though those voices can be so loud. I mean, I think we've all been on, I don't know, Forbes comes to my answer. They're going to have a million articles about, you know, the top 30 under 30. And they were the first self made billionaire who is 24 or whatever it is, you know. And so we, I think those stories contend us to make us feel like we're not achieving what we want to. But that's without ever having to find what we actually want. We're just heading towards some arbitrary success goal, but it's just more and more and more. And maybe it's not that for you. So you have to figure that out. And, and then apply that to your life. So for us, we haven't scaled by hiring people, even though we could afford to. And maybe we could grow the bottom line through doing that. But it's, that's not how we want to run our business. And so it's a success looks like a thing small. It might, it hasn't yet, but it might eventually cap our potential of full earnings. I don't know. But that's fine with me. I don't, that's because

17:49the life I want isn't being in people management or selling other people's time and hoping I can charge enough for it. And I'm just basically like a person warehouse. You know, I don't want to be that. So, so you got, you got to define success for yourself and then and go seek that. Yeah, because success is different for everyone. I got every, every person. Yeah, I got that. So to bring this to an end, you know, what will you like to lift the audience with like a final thought to those folks who like to reach out of you? Let them worry about the wonderful stuff you do it. Or maybe they require your service. How can that be possible? Yeah, I'll start with that. If you come to the Skyfloor.com, I actually just launched a brand new version of it. And it really kind of gets into who we are and how we see the world more than any website we've ever had up. And if you go into some of the blogs where I write about some of these ideas occasionally, I want to do it more frequently, but we've got about over 300 posts there. You can subscribe there. So if I can leave

18:54you with one thing though, I think my kind of like the drum I've been beating lately because I'm telling myself it as much as anybody else is that when there's a new goal you have or a new thing you want to do start now as soon as you can because every stage I'm about to turn 42 next week. And every stage of my journey, there's more responsibility. The business is bigger. I have more clients. I've got two kids who are getting older. You name it. Things get added on. And I look back and you go five years ago, I had some margin actually. I had some time. And it started to occur to me that today is going to be some tomorrow. So if I'm constantly going, oh, I had margin back then or I could have made room, I can do that now. So do it now. If you're on the fence about starting a thing you want to do, do it today. It doesn't get easier. It's that there's not some magic formula

19:56when I have a certain amount of money. When I, if I'm not married, when I get married, if I, whatever it is, if I move to that city, then everything's going to be different. Guess what? You're still going to be there. So you need to start making the choices today to change the things you want to change. You understand making the choices today to change the things you want to change. Got it. So that's going to be the number show. You really thank you for coming and thank you for sharing this lovely stuff with us. It meant a whole lot to me. Thank you. You're welcome. Thanks for having me.