From the Military to Winning at Business, with Patch Baker

[Music] charging 50 grand for the day actually makes me look like a legend because they just do the steps that i tell them to do when they get an outcome and they're like man we've moved faster in the last 30 days than we had in the last three years it's because you were actually moving you had skin in the game right [Music] you're listening to business lunch with roland frasier this is your seat at the table thank you for listening in this is the producer of the show darren clark and patch baker is with roland today patch is a renowned investor serial entrepreneur with multiple ventures and exits as an expert marketer he impacts fortune 500 clients with veteran-owned startups showing them how to lead with tenacity discipline and grit and you'll hear that in today's conversation and so much more but before we begin would you please take a moment to subscribe to the show on apple podcasts or wherever you listen and go to businesslunchpodcast.com for show notes and to sign up for our emails alright so let's get stuck in hey everybody roland fraser here welcome to business lunch i'm very pleased to have my friend and guest today patch baker coming to you live from a virtual setting in florida how you doing today patch what's up buddy how are you i'm doing fantastic just enjoying the good things that san diego has to offer so i'm kind of excited to have you here we've been doing a couple of things together just did the first ever paid online event with facebook and uh in a partnership with them that's kind of cool and all playing around with deals and all kinds of other stuff so would you just kind of give everybody an idea of who you are and what you're doing right now and then we'll dive into your entrepreneurial journey basically where to start is i did the the military i was in the marine corps for 14 and a half years so i did that thing and then i got out and i fell on my face and could not figure out the civilian world so i went back working for the state department and secret service and overseas as a contractor and did did that because i liked being in the team room and i like you know i knew that world really well and then in january 2015 i got shot in the chest standing outside the baghdad embassy and uh that makes it i got shot twice blown up six times if you're doing math that's eight out of nine lives like time to find something new and make sense yeah so i had a buddy of mine that was uh doing videos and he was just really having a hard time selling video he he's a really good content creator just couldn't sell them so he said look man you sell it i'll make it we'll make a bunch of money together well the problem with that model is if people don't know what to do with the video you can't sell them another video because if they don't know how to get traffic or you know any of that kind of stuff basically the video goes on their website and then on their youtube and neither one of those get traffic so they don't see the value in the video right so i started jumping into youtube originally trying to figure out how to rank the videos so that i could get more traffic on them so they would buy another video and i actually got really good at it like i i started really like figuring that whole thing out and then i was like well man if i could rank it there i could probably rank it in google so i started doing you know websites and started really trying to figure out you know how to you know score and rank websites and next thing you know i was like you know facebook man i bet you i could get a lot of views on this stuff and then you know what if we did them in segments and what if we had you know multiple videos that were short that we could then run to a longer video and keep them on the site longer and the longer you keep them on site the higher the ranking would go and i started going down this path well the crazy thing is and i know this sounds really really bad but up until 2015 facebook was not a part of my world i missed the entire myspace age so many really poorly designed websites that you missed out on it was the it was the one like it was the one myspace was the first one which i didn't even understand until later on so you were never friends with tom i was never friends with tom bro never myspace is so big i know who tom is and i never had a myspace account like just think about that so and the reason being was because during the time when those were coming up you know i started deploying in 2003. i was never allowed to have myspace or facebook or any of that kind of stuff i was never allowed to have any of that because of the military and then you know from then i have basically 10 years of my time during a 13-year stretch was spent overseas iraq afghanistan horn of africa so like i would come back but i never you know never got a facebook account never like it was just not a big part of my world and what's funny about that is there's lots and lots of people that are like dude how can you be doing what you're doing now five years after getting a facebook account for the first time and a great question yeah and it's it's kind of a strange path that i took but the path that i took was one that if you wanted to do what i wanted to do it's really the only path that you could possibly take so it was pretty simple you know i kind of already knew the seo area and i already had some people that i was you know using his client you know they were my clients for seo and i was like oh by the way i could start running your google paid ads and google shopping and google shopping wasn't even out yet so i i knew i had to get to facebook but i wanted to get past just the boosted post because that was like it seemed pretty easy and you'll find this funny but i got on a plane and flew to facebook and i was like knock knock on the security gate and they were like dude you're not coming in here and so i said well who do you have that hires veterans and that was it they they let me in and he's like i don't really have anything for you but you know and he was an army guy so you know anytime two veterans get together like you can at least you can at least have a conversation like that's gonna get it that's gonna get started and so you know i was i was there for you know five six hours i mean i flew across the country and then you know on the way out the door they were like hey is there anything else we could help you with i had a blast while i was there by the way and i was like yeah who do you know when was that that was 15 yeah 15. so did they have the new building with the park on top at that point i don't think they did yeah that's a cool place but basically the thing that i told them was i'm the best marketer that you've never heard of i just need you to teach me everything you know about marketing that was my whole my whole deal and that's really what happened i mean because of that want to be the best and i didn't want to go like if you right now to this day if you google how to facebook ad how to google ad how to youtube ad if you do any of that you're going to get 3 000 pages of different information you just can't get it from you know in in a sequential this is how you start this is where you're trying to go and you know these are all the stuff together you just can't find it and i i knew that i had to get practitioners to teach me and not a course i wasn't going to learn from a course so what i really wanted to do because i wanted to be the best i just started finding people like you and ryan and perry and you know i just started finding the guys at the top and i was do i would do anything i needed to do to you know get in the same room with them so that was like buying masterminds buying island trips buying destination location mastermind trips like i would do whatever it took to get in the room because i knew if i could get in the room i would not put my foot in my mouth long enough to get another conversation and you and i share that philosophy it's i think if you have the wherewithal to do it there's no faster way to connect with anybody you want to connect and find the paid channel of access that they've created which in our world is frequently a mastermind what if you didn't have that money and you weren't a veteran so the army guy at facebook says uh you ain't coming in what what would you tell somebody to do i'd find a way i don't care if i had to go down and start mowing every grass for you know a craw i would mow every yard of grass all the way across the country to get to facebook i'd figure out a way i think it's all mindset if you put your mind to doing it you'll figure out a way and i wanted it stove addicts to this day i still want it so badly i want to be the best marketer on the planet i want to be the guy that can walk into any business and make that thing go right and that doesn't mean that i have to be a technician on every new piece of software that comes out on every you know i'm not running every single ad but strategically i am placing myself in the right spot with the right people to do big stuff you know whether that be on the facebook side and they allow us to do uh a beta version of something or that be on the mastermind side or the you know my internal network of friends like you and i mean the list goes on and on of people that just the two of us know that we could access to i don't know build a like we could build up another podcast tomorrow you and i could start another one and have boatloads of people lined up to do that but you don't get there you know you can't lock into everything most of the time you pay to open doors right don't say something stupid when you're in the room with them get them to know like and trust you just like you would any other customer journey right and then hopefully you find some common ground where you can meet in the middle where it's both beneficial it's beneficial to both of you and i think that's the part that a lot of people miss is they want to go in and ask you know day one hey roland will you help me do this hey patch will you help me do this hey will you have 150 000 you're going to love this program that i have 150 grand i could go build something 30 times faster and launch it way faster than you could ever even think about going to market yeah so exactly but if i come to you and i say hey roland i've got this really cool thing going on and it's going to benefit you in this way and this way and this way and this way and this way i just need to put your name on it will you do it i'll give you 50 well that's that's a different conversation that we're having yeah and i agree people forget that so you were at facebook and then you kind of surrounded yourself with the people would you tell us a little bit about when you were building pages and things like that when did you kind of find the thing that you thought you wanted to do and what was it and and what is that still doing i'm still doing it i know but everybody else doesn't know that so you got to share that no i mean i i'm still i'm still trying to find my path like i'm not i i wouldn't say that i have it all figured out yet as a matter of fact every single day i'm trying to surround myself with smarter people than me so every single day i'm learning something new right a lot of people won't know this but i'm a client of yours and in some cases you're a client of mine i've paid for your courses but we've also launched stuff together we have both paid to be in other masterminds together so there's money flying back and forth a bunch of different ways but it's healthy for both of us to have that if our relationship is going to be you know peer-to-peer if that's the kind of thing that we're both shooting for that also means that i have to be learning from you and the things that you're smarter than me and you have to be learning from me and the things that i'm smarter about than you and that is that's the relationship that really grows and does really crazy cool stuff i didn't like that as a topic to explore a little bit is how do you move from new intro and to peer because that's something that i think a lot of people have a real hard time with and i have and i know you have experienced also that there are people who think they've made that jump before they have and over step and then it can really damage the relationship and and then they didn't really mean to do that they just didn't know so what what is your take on that i can literally use our situation this is it's it's perfect so so i've been following you for years i knew you from tnc and i mean i didn't know you know you but i knew who you were you didn't know who i was then we have the same mastermind together we go to that you're in the same room i'm in the same room you know we get introduced mutually again i say things like oh yeah man i saw you at tnc and you don't care because you don't know who i am and that's okay but then you know we get to sit down at the same table and have lunch together now we're in a conversation and then i i seem to remember there was a time where i think everybody was on a break and you happened to be on the phone finished up a phone call and then you were there by yourself and i came up and i talked and i think that i don't even remember what that conversation was about but it was just a conversation then you know skipped three or four months we didn't so let's let's go let's go back to that for a second because i i think this is this is important so i spoke at that event you spoke at that event and after you speak a bunch of people will always come up and and it's nice to talk with them but you can't have a meaningful conversation and so i think the first thing is you want to be you want to present yourself as a peer not as a i don't want to say fan or follower but not maybe not as somebody who's looking to get something for nothing or something out you're you're like yeah i'm not ask not asking for a handout yeah not yeah exactly so like like when you go and you hear somebody speak that per and i happen to like people and i know you do too i know a lot of my friends who speak like people but don't like people they don't know it's like they don't want to you know they don't like strangers so the very first thing i think is is figure out what's the personality of that person and and find out from other people you know if they really like hanging out and talking or they don't and if they don't then definitely don't go up there because that's when that's the worst time because you're trying as a speaker you've got 8 or 10 or 20 or however many people around you you're trying to give them all a little bit of help which ought to only be clarification it could be a quick two second introduction and then hey i liked it when you talked about that can you help just it was did you mean this or what did you mean by that that and then 30 seconds to one minute tops conversation has to happen there because you've got too many people as a speaker to take care of so for everybody that's listening i'd say that's step one is don't rush up after to quote unquote pick the brain of the person that just spoke because that's not the place for that then what you and again analogizing to the situation that we had i think is is great is so you know you like we met at a peer event not you know it wasn't one person is positioned higher than the other so that's good so you come together as peers the next thing is that that neither of us was trying to get something for the other from the other person there it was let's just have a conversa what do you do this what i do oh cool what are you doing that's great and you know both of us are always like you know is there anything i can do to help you and you're like kind of good for right now yeah and then that's it and then you are now connected so if you have a purpose for reconnecting then you can do that but it doesn't make sense to you know to try to force it so quickly i think that's something that a lot of people make a mistake with especially the kind of pick your brain people right it's it's just not it's not the time for that when you first meet and you and i both you know we sell our expertise and we use our expertise to get into deals so it's pretty valuable and therefore we don't just give it away and something i've really had to work on and anybody that's listening should think about too is don't you don't want to just give away your time for nothing you want to help people but if it gets past something that you can do you know hey yeah i mean if you want to be introduced to so-and-so and i can do it on my phone and i know you enough to make a connection i'll do that or if you have a quick question i'll answer that but if it's you know hey i'm trying to you know fix this thing about my business and you know so i'd like to let you take a look at my ad account and then maybe tell me you know what yeah that's what we do right so i think that's the first thing right until you follow me on social because that's exactly what my post was two days ago i'm getting tired of people say getting past all the the zombie aspect of let me pick your brain yeah getting past that part there is a point where you're asking me to do free work so just for the for the context of the audience i told you that i had something that i wanted to run by you you said 18 grand i said roger that it's in the mail yeah i told you i needed an hour you said look it usually takes four i said i'll take one i paid whatever that one hour cost me it could have been a hundred thousand dollars i don't care 18 was the down payment and so the other 88 just definitely right just send me that off now yeah and that's that's a good point and and i've had to learn this and this is you know for time management for everybody that's listening or watching as well your time is the most precious thing you have and it's very easy to give it away especially when you want to help people which you do patch and i do and you know a lot of the people that i know they're very generous in that you know we all want other people to succeed but because time is limited you you have to guard it and you also use your you know your consulting or your fee you know to me it's like it's not going to change my life to have a consulting fee but it's going to screen out a lot of people who have not got the commitment or resourcefulness or dedication or belief to invest in themselves enough to do it right so listen i've done this i've done this several times so my daily fee if i come if i fly somewhere and i go to your business for a day it's 50 grand and most people like man how do you ever sell that because the people that buy that they know like they know and i know when i come in there i'm gonna do crazy move the needle type stuff and they're going to listen but if i showed up and i was like ah you know don't worry about it i'll come down we'll figure it out you know just pay for my hotel or something like that you can yap for eight hours straight and nobody's gonna move yeah there will be no needle moving but when you put 50 grand on the line they will move one step after the next after the next or the next and what happens is charging 50 grand for the day actually makes me look like a legend because they just do the steps that i tell them to do when they get an outcome and they're like man we've moved faster in the last 30 days than we had the last three years it's because you were actually moving you had skin in the game right right yeah i think that's that's that's really helpful and then after that it's okay you've got now you've got a relationship you know the other person is serious you've taken the time to get to know each other and then you know it kind of evolves from there so i i think that's a kind of an interesting evolution of of how to get from not knowing anybody to knowing everybody is that you you take paid channels of access and you provide value you know as as you did you were like you know yeah we can do this and we can do that i don't care and it's really funny the people i think that are the most successful are are care the least about like they're not fighting over a couple thousand bucks it's just you know yeah man whatever you want to do it's like well how much should we spend i don't care what do you you know it's that is how i find everybody that i know who is successful is you know who i like is is like that because if you're trying to split up money that you don't even know if it exists yet i think that's just a kind of a fool's errand that's really cool i like talking about that any other thoughts on networking or getting close to the people that you want to get close to so you're surrounding yourself with the smartest people in the room yeah usually i just try to i try to be as helpful to them as possible because most of the time everybody's asking them for something of their time like everybody thinks that their project is the smartest and the greatest and helps the most people and most profitable and you're literally in the same boat with everybody else that talk to them but i watched this happen i'm actually going to mention his name just because i know you like him i like him we're good buddies with so naveen jane i was watching him at a vip private event that somehow got leaked like it was at somebody's house and it got leaked the the location like random people started showing up and they let them in just because like there wasn't security there wasn't that kind of thing but and they didn't want to cause a scene so they just kind of let like i don't know a dozen extra people or so come into this thing and he's speaking there and anybody that knows naveen like this dude wants to change the world he wants to like end all disease mind on the moon like he wants to do big stuff and i'm watching naveen talking about you know changing the world and really like like thinking bigger and and you know a lot of the systems that we have need to be not just overhauled but like a new system needs to be born and grown and he's given like this massive you know powerful speech that could have been a ted talk that you know it could have been just amazing and the semi host was like thank you so much i mean that was amazing he started getting claps and this dude you know jumps up and he's like basically raising his hand like little johnny in the back of the classroom you know and she gave him the floor and this guy proceeded to pitch naveen on his you know little app that he had and you literally could look around the room and feel people cringing as this guy is you know doing a terrible pitch naveen in all of his like just who he is he basically said something like i'm sorry that i didn't deliver a you know better message to you tonight but if you give me a minute to finish this conversation i'll meet you you know afterwards and it was kind of like a really classy dig at the same time taking away you know and giving it back to the rest of the the the room but that's the way i i just want you to think about if you're going to talk to the number one guy that you want to talk about like you want to meet or you want to you know whoever that person is that you really feel you need to get in contact with the best way to do it is one you can buy your access but don't buy it in a way where he has to be the top level like for example if you're gonna if you're gonna buy a workshop where he has to remain at the high level and you have to remain the subordinate based off the relationship of that workshop that's not gonna work find another group that he's in where you can be at that peer-to-peer level is be helpful to them in a way that nobody else is being responsible enough to see so i'll give you i'll give you an example that's gonna completely spoil something for you but it's okay so i want you did something nice for me and so i went around to mutual friends that we have and i was like hey what is something that would really knock roland socks off as just a gift well that is a really good way to get somebody's attention and also be doing it in a way that they know it's thoughtful it's not just sucking up to them you know that's not right and i've always wanted a boeing business jet and i will the first trip on it when you deliver that to me i am coming to see you to thank you personally so thank you it's on the way um but yeah so be helpful in ways that they don't necessarily see coming or just be helpful in a way like i've seen people do this with me i absolutely love it some people don't like it but i've had people say hey look i really want to spend some time with you i don't have the money to spend time with you but i really want to see how you do what you do can i intern with you for a month you can give me you know if you give me one hour you know for me to ask questions i'll do anything you want me to do for 30 hours a week right and you know that's that's a winner in my book all day long yeah as long as you're not gonna waste my time right so let's hop to the second thing i'd love to chat about if if you're open to it and i know it's totally cool if you're not but the business model that you have is a bit unique because you've got a really cool skill set and it allows you to get into a lot of different deals would you mind kind of breaking that down for everybody during how that works so a 30 000 foot view it's fairly simple i learned everything that i needed to do to speak intelligently to whoever i hired or brought onto my team to do whatever task or tour that i needed them to do whether that be you know seo website design facebook google instagram youtube you know whatever i needed them to do i just got smart enough on it to where they couldn't snow me if they were goofing off right that was it and then from there i was able to build a really successful marketing agency and i realized i mean i kind of went through the you know we started out we were at the fifteen hundred dollar client and then we went to the thirty five hundred dollar client and then we went to the fifteen thousand dollar month climb then we went to a hundred thousand dollar a month client we just kept going kind of going up but what i realized was that is never i'm never going to have a happy client like that there's only a certain amount of time that you can be a rock star before they're like you know you really should have gotten me a 14 to 1 return on ad spend on that program i don't know why you didn't do it you know they start getting unrealistic yeah there's a there's a hockey stick of growth but at some point unless you drastically change things there is going to become a plateau it doesn't matter if you're talking about digital marketer or traffic and conversion or any business that i've ever had or boeing or fedex it doesn't matter who it is unless you do something drastically different you're going to eventually find a plateau well that led me to well why am i doing that because now if they decide they don't want to keep growing or they don't want to do something drastically different or worse this is the worst let's say i make them 10 million dollars and they decide to sell the business and i don't go with it my services don't go with it so the natural next progression the progressive step was acquire equity in it so that i get to go with the sale too or i get to exit and have dollars like everybody else and so you know slowly we started building our own stuff and of course we already have our internal marketing i was doing like not drop ship in like from china but like drop ship of we would find local businesses that weren't doing well and we would feed them a lead sheet and you just mail it wherever we tell you to mail it and that was an easy you know win for us it's like you know we just kind of bolted on this online business that they had really no concern on having and didn't really care how it worked and that was easy and then you know the next progressive step of that is okay well there's a million dollar business or there's a three million dollar business out there that is okay at marketing but they're not great and it's probably because they're you know they got some 1500 a month dude that's you know running ads but doesn't really know how to sequence ads or you know all the fancy stuff that we can do on the back end they're not building communities and cross platform and all that kind of stuff so it was easy for me to go in and say hey look i'll save you that and i won't charge you anything for 90 days if we hit 20 increase in growth over the next 90 days you give me 25 of the company and you can use this service forever and ever and ever and they were like man that sounds great because they have no no risk i'm flipping them for 90 days and you know it's super easy there is a progressive step like at some point you you know depending on how big the business is there's some businesses that you're never going to get in zero money down like they're too big for that to happen it's like you could bring you know a fleet of 100 people with you and it wouldn't matter you're not getting into nike for zero down or apple or you know there's well interestingly enough you you might because they're most of those companies have access to what they call s8 stock which is registration which is different yeah so you won't own a percentage like i mean you will own a percentage it will be point zero zero zero zero whatever because they're worth so much money but it is actually kind of a cool way that a lot of people don't know about it's some of my favorite deals that i've done is to get stock in a public company that you can sell tomorrow that costs them nothing so they're willing to give you more of it because it's not a cash transaction for them it doesn't adversely impact their income statement it's a balance you know sheet transaction so it is kind of fun to be able to do those deals too but yeah i totally get what you're saying yeah you're not you're not going to go to nike and say you know so for 25 run your facebook ads right that is the gist of what i was able to do and a lot of people have said this even within the epic group a lot of people have said well yeah but you own an agency so you're different than me i built it like i built it to do this and importantly you're not the guy running the facebook ads i mean you know how to do it but you that's not what you do you run your business right you run your businesses not just like so you've got you've hired people to do those things and so now you've you've leveraged that as well right other than a other than a morning meeting mobius is the only business that i touch every day and typically that is a morning meeting meeting up with my team just you know figuring out what's going on today and just literally saying hi because we're all good friends but i i do very little in each one of my companies i have 29 of them and i do there's some businesses that i have that i don't touch for i don't know months i mean it's it's working when i when i talk to the cfo like i know the dollars are still flowing through it but i'm not actually touching it you can't scale like that like it's too much that's awesome i love that before we head out and i want you to let people know how to get a hold of you and follow up if they have questions and would like to avail themselves of all the cool things you do what are your top three books resources things you read blogs newsletters whatever for finding out new breakthrough kinds of things to be honest with you i'm not i don't do any of those things i this is not a plug but i do listen to business lunch well i mean it's a fantastic i hear the guests you know the guests are insanely great dude and every once in a while he really gets a rock star on there but uh no i don't i don't really i don't i try really hard not to take up my time with content that is just you know for the sake of generating you know taking up time or any of that kind of stuff i don't do that i would rather grab a guy like you or somebody else that i know and have a very specific conversation about a very specific project that i'm working on and gain information that way i don't need busy tom type stuff so let me ask this can you think of somewhere between one and three significant mindset shifts that you've had that you would say have been really impactful in your success yeah this sounds really cliche because you know it it's asked so many times but i don't like i think i can win everything now when i you know when i break that down i know that i can't win every single minute of every single day i've written extensively about this i don't you're not gonna win every battle and all of my businesses are built on what i learned in the military and so i'm not even trying to win every battle i'm just trying to win every war that i have and that war can be hour to hour it can be day to day it could be month-to-month quarter quarter year to year doesn't matter i just want to win and winning doesn't necessarily mean more money it doesn't necessarily mean more impact it doesn't necessarily mean more people in my network it can be as simple as just being better tomorrow at something than i am today by a fraction of a percent so i think mindset to me is one of the easiest ones because i will do whatever it takes to win as long as it's legal and it's ethical and both parties are winning and there's some kind of impact beyond financial gain after that like i just want to win and how do i help as many people win as possible and then the second thing is i'm like the energizer bunny but i'm not like it like i run sprints like i will sprint for and depending on what i'm trying to do i'll sprint for three days sometime and won't sleep but four hours in three days and i'm totally cool doing it i mean i had no problem doing it when i was overseas and i couldn't sleep for four longer than four hours because there's bad guys around right so i didn't have a choice then i can at least do it for my business and i think the number one mindset that i have that puts me above a lot of other people that are trying to do similar things to what i'm doing is that i believe that businesses are lives and you have the responsibility of the livelihoods of the people in your that are on your team sometimes people call them employees i only do that on tax records because that's what they make me say but i have a team and i'm responsible for their livelihoods through a paycheck and i believe that you know i would do anything in the military to make sure that this dude's life is taken care of why wouldn't i do the same with people's livelihoods so if i treat a business like it's a living breathing thing like it's something that you have to keep alive and you have to keep nurturing it and growing it and teaching it new tricks if you treat every business like that and not like bottom line on spreadsheet bottom line on spreadsheet is so small-brained like it's that's like tiny brain stuff yeah but if you treat your business like a living thing and you you truly try to help it grow the best to be the best adult that it could possibly be then you'd be surprised what you can pull off for that the same way you work for a kid you know i agree awesome well thanks for taking the time to hang out and share with us today what are the best ways that people could get a hold of you to find out more about patch yeah patchbaker.com you can find me on social you can find me patchbacker.com takes you everywhere so

just go there awesome thanks again really appreciate you coming in and hanging out thank you brother i appreciate it man [Music] you've been listening to business lunch we're rolling frasier if you're enjoying the show let us know by subscribing and leaving a review and for more information go to businesslunchpodcast.com thank you for listening

2021-01-28 22:11

Other news