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Nov. 9, 2021

How Zander Fryer Wants to Help 1% of the World Live More Purposefully Ep. 43

Five years ago Zander Fryer was stuck in a 9-5, single, lonely, bored, and lost. He was unfulfilled and unhappy and getting paid a quarter-million dollars a year to stay that way. But, after losing his best friend to suicide and struggling with depression for months he knew something had to change.

He quit his corporate job in his late twenties, with no idea what he was going to do and only 3 months of living expenses in the bank. Fighting for life, for time, and in honor of his fallen brother, he embarked on a new journey. Despite the harsh criticism of those around him, within 3 months, he replaced his former 6 figure salary, and in 1 year he built a 7 figure business from the ground up.

Zander is now a best-selling author, internationally renowned speaker, and host of the iTunes top podcast – Sh*t You Don’t Learn In College and is happily married to the woman of his dreams.

He's been featured in TIME, Forbes, Inc., and TEDx, and his company - High Impact Coaching - serves over 50,000 people in 27 different countries and at more than 700 organizations. 

He is praised as the "next generation of leaders," by Chicken Soup for the Soul author, Jack Canfield and regarded as the "coach of coaches" by many top industry leaders like Craig Ballantyne and Bedros Keuilian.

>> 02:20 How many full-time employees do you have and how do you keep them engaged, happy, and productive.

>> 04:35 Where are you taking this business in revenue?

>> 06:15 The podcast in itself, the podcast and the book are completely non-profit.

>> 08:05 So how do I go create an impact with all of them?

>> 11:00 It's much harder for a podcaster to become successful

>> 13:31 So our metrics for profit or how we measure profit is

>> 14:26 Our goal right now from a profitability standpoint is

>> 15:07 But what do you do when you don't have someone that is meeting their

goals?

Where to Find Zander Fryer


SPONSOR

This episode is sponsored by Entire Productions- Creating events (both in-person and virtual) that don't suck! and Entire Productions Marketing- carefully curated premium gifting and branded promo items. 

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Transcript
Zander:

For our organization to continue to grow and scale, we really value radical honesty and just very straightforward conversations in a way that people have to be open to the idea that it's nothing personal. This is just facts. This is data. This is what's going on. And once we get real on the data what's really going on, then we can work on a solution.

Natasha:

Welcome to FASCINATING ENTREPRENEURS. How do people end up becoming an entrepreneur? How do they scale and grow their businesses? How do they plan for profit? Are they in it for life? Are they building to exit these and a myriad of other topics will be discussed to pull back the veil on the wizardry of successful and FASCINATING ENTREPRENEURS.

Zander:

Hey,

Natasha:

Can you tell me a favor? While you're listening to this podcast. Can you open a web browser and type in officialnatashamiller.com. Yes, this is my brand new website that I built for you, entrepreneurs that want to scale and grow their businesses. It's packed full of information articles, blog posts, podcasts, and also you can download the Free Profit Finder guide that helps you find more profit in your current business.

You can get on the waitlist for my digital course and be the first to know when my book Relentless is up for pre-sale.

Today, I talked to Zander Fryer, a very successful young entrepreneur, making his mark in the coaching industry. We talk about his approach to profit, how he's supporting veterans and his current business challenges among other things. Now let's get right into it.

Zander:

Number one thing that I love the most, I would probably say getting to coach and lead my team.

That was an air force ROTC in college and getting to lead. Other leaders was something I've always been passionate about. And it's why I became a coach to begin with. That's why I got into the coaching space. So obviously first started out like coaching people then started coaching other coaches. And now I get to coach the leaders within my organization that now go coach other coaches and other leaders.

So, you know, it's kind of been this like every time I get to Uplevel and coach and lead, cool, cool people.

Natasha:

That leads me to a next question that I'll ask you later, but how many full-time employees do you have and how do you keep them engaged, happy, and productive.

Zander:

That's a great question. We have 20? 19? or 20 right now. We're bringing on a couple of more, so it'll be over the 20 mark. How do we keep them engaged, productive, and happy? A combination of different things. I think like the first thing that comes to mind for me is my goal as a CEO, as a visionary, as a business owner, is to have my vision encompass the vision of everybody else's right. So, I want to make sure that I'm creating a culture and a community that is helping everybody within my organization accomplish their dreams, not just career dreams and business dreams, but life dreams. So that's a big and important piece for me. And essentially the way that I do that is whenever I come up with a role or whenever I come up with that position that we need to fill the three questions. I always ask myself when we're filling that and we're interviewing candidates and things like that. It always starts with that point is you want to find that right person and get them to sit on the right seat on the bus. Like a Jim Collins would say, number one, I asked myself if I believe this person can do the job? Then I asked myself if they we'll do the job? And then I asked myself, do they actually want to do the job? Like, is this their dream job? Is this something that they will wholeheartedly put all of their heart and soul into to actually make it happen? And that third one is actually the most important question, because I could hire someone that actually can't do the job right now and won't do the job right now.

But if they really want to, I could teach them how. So that's probably one of the most important things for me is really making sure that whatever we do as an organization, the people that we find to fill those seats, there's a ton of alignment. And when you have that and you have, you know, there's all the other things that good cadence, open communication, all of those things.

But when you have that stuff, you end up with a team that doesn't need to be managed or led because they are self motivated.

Natasha:

I am a hundred percent with you on that. I have that too. Finally, do you use anything like US traction or Scaling Up as a -

Zander:

I'm a big fan of Scaling Up? I don't know why we've implemented EOS for a little bit.

And then for whatever reason, Vern just gets me. So, Scaling Up the direction we're on.

Natasha:

Vern is awesome. I'm going to see him next week. So where are you taking this business in revenue? Like long-term?

Zander:

Longterm, it's so funny because when I first got into the coaching space, it was so hard for me to see longterm because coming out of the corporate world, everybody talks about like, oh, you got to have your 10 and 15 and 30 year visions.

And I'm like, guys, I don't even know what is possible right now. Why don't I get my feet under myself a little bit first. So when I first started my business, it was so funny because as a coach, I was like, I just want to make six figures, right? And then I ended up getting to a six figure mark in about three months.

Okay. Maybe I'm setting myself a little bit short and then we got to like the seven figure mark in about 12 months. And so for me right now, I can concretely see how we'll get to about the 12 million revenue mark within the next two years or so. Seeing beyond that, I still have trouble actually doing, because I don't know exactly where I could go.

I would personally love to take this business to 50, to 100 million doing exactly what we're doing right now. It's probably going to have to change a bit, but that's about as far as I can see. Right.

Natasha:

That makes sense to me, why you would be attracted to Vern and scaling up versus EOS traction, which is amazing as well, but with your vision and where you're going, it makes more sense.

So the podcast, The Sh*t You Don't Learn In College, which I love you started it, it looks like in March of 2021, is that right?

Zander:

Not long ago, April 1st was when we launched. Yeah.

Natasha:

So I want to know the following. I'm going to give you all the questions and then you can just give me all the answers. How are you using it? Is it a funnel to your services to buy your book? Are you banking on sponsorships? What is it? What's your plan?

Zander:

Yeah, so right now, the podcast in itself, the podcast and the book are completely non-profit. So we have our The Sh*t You Don’t Learn In College podcast and we're actually launching the book in two weeks actually,

really my goal there was to just bring a lot more value to a lot more people, any revenue that we bring in from the whole The Sh*t You Don’t Learn In College brand actually goes back to feeding children in Kenya and an organization here in San Diego called Shelter To Soldier, where basically they take shelter dogs, and they train them to be psychiatric service dogs for veterans with PTSD, so they're saving two lives at the time.

Natasha:

I'm all for that. That's amazing. Let's just pause there for a moment. Of course, what an incredible initiative. And it's really nice. So we'll make sure that that's on the show notes, keep going.

Zander:

I appreciate that, so just so you're aware my best friend committed suicide after suffering from PTSD. About 10 and a half years, he committed suicide about four years ago.

And he was a Marine veteran and so ever since then we've been supporting that organization. So every dime that comes in profit wise from both the podcast and the book goes to that. So really to your question, what are we using? The Sh*t You Don’t Learn In College for a, it's actually not business at all. It was kind of that like, non-profit of like, you know. I've learned so much in my

life over the last five years of becoming an entrepreneur coaching, hundreds of other entrepreneurs to become six figure and seven figure business owners. And I had to find some avenues to get it out to more people that did not have access to this information. I think the lack of availability of good information.

Is what causes some of the biggest discrepancies in our socioeconomic world. Right? And so there's a lot of people that can afford to work with me directly. And when they can afford to work with me directly, I'm going to take them to the moon. But there's a lot of people that can't afford to work with me directly.

So how do I go create an impact with all of them? And that's really what the podcast, so people can listen to it for free and the book people can buy it for 20 bucks or whatever. Like they can get access to a lot of this information in a much more cost effective way.

Natasha:

I asked this because you're a very vibrant, very well spoken, thoughtful person. And you're also a business person and you're going to go into business to not make money, but I've just realized that podcasts are named John Lee Dumas is publishing his profit and loss for his podcast online, which you've

Zander:

He's been doing that for a while.

Natasha:

2013, yeah, he'll be on the show soon, but so I'm looking at the various reasons people do podcasts. So another question about the podcast, how are you marketing? And what is your subscriber goal? Now? You just related that it really pushes toward nonprofit and you want it to be sort of a nonprofit entity, but you've also noted that it's in like the top 20. So you are not thinking.

Zander:

Yeah, not thinking small here.

Natasha:

So give it to us all the stuff. What are you doing?

Zander:

The big thing was The Sh*t You Don’t Learn In College. The big mission behind what I'm doing, both in our high impact coaching company and The Sh*t You Don’t Learn In College is my goal is to help 1% of this world live their lives from more of a place of purpose and love and less from a place of fear.

That's it. If I can get to 1% of the world, then I truly believe I can help 1% of the world live more purposefully and more from a place of growth and love and less from fear, we might actually solve all of this world's problems, right? 1% doesn't sound like a lot until you factor in, you know, 7 billion people in the world and you got to get to 70 million people.

So you're asking my goal from a subscriber standpoint. Well, subscribers is one thing, but we want to get to at least 70 million downloads. We want to get to the point where 1% of this world's population has actually been touched by the word, the message that we're putting out there. So how we're marketing it, how we're growing it right now, we're growing it by word of mouth.

All the network and all the influencers that I've connected with over my last five years as an entrepreneur. And then we're starting to put some financial dollars behind it. We're going to start doing some advertising so that the money coming in is going right back into pushing it to more people.

Again, the goal there not to cause I make enough money with high impact coaching. I don't, I don't know.

Natasha:

What kind of advertising like on podcast players or?

Zander:

Podcast players, Facebook ads. One of the things that we're looking at in the near future, I don't know if you were aware of this, but, and I'm still not sure exactly what's going on, but Facebook getting into the podcast space.

Natasha:

They got to have their hands

into everything.

Zander:

Yeah. Well, so I think personally, I think that that is actually going to be really big for podcasters. I think the podcasting industry itself is relatively small compared to where it will be. Cause it just, it grows slower. But it has steadily grown year, after year, after year.

And it's much harder for a podcaster to become successful because they have to be so consistent for so long. You mentioned JLD right. He's been doing a daily show for like 11 straight years or something like that. Right? Like it's no wonder he's got the place that he's, that is because when you do it, that consistently for that long.

Natasha:

Yeah, he is hammering it.

Zander:

You're going to be great, right? Yeah. So for me, I personally think that Facebook getting into the industry while it may shake things up a bit, I think it's going to provide a great opportunity to open up the world of podcasting to a lot more people. There's something like 2 billion Facebook users, right?

2 billion people use Facebook. Whereas I think there's only something like 400 million regular podcast listeners on a monthly basis. Well, now you're opening up podcasts to a market that is five times the size and on top of, you know, there's going to be opportunities for people like us that are not like media companies, whole wide media companies to actually start advertising and growing our scale podcasting wise a lot easier.

So I think that'll actually be really helpful. Cool.

Natasha:

And back to your impact for 1% of the world's population, how are you measuring that? How are you going to keep that on the forefront. How are you going to prove that to yourself, to your team, to your follow-up?

Zander:

I think the first step that we're shooting for is 70 million in terms of downloads or book buys or anything like that.

And I think that's the first step. So 70 million is our goal from a download perspective. So it's not going to happen this year. Now it's going to happen next year. Now it's gonna take some work. Right. But our initial perspective is can we get directly, our word, our message into the hands that years, the eyes of 70 million people.

Now what's really interesting is specifically at high-impact coaching. There's a whole slew of unmeasurable impact that we have as well for every coach that we work with, every coach that we help get to six figures, well, in the course of their career, how many people did they then go touch in the books that we teach?

And when they go help people, how many people do they then go help? Right.

Natasha:

You can count on your numbers, but how are they really going? You know?

Zander:

Exactly. So we know that on average, One of our clients who make six figures, we'll work with, you know, maybe 50 to a hundred clients over the course of a year. Well, if we have a thousand of those, well, we're already at a hundred thousand just directly from that for the year.

And if we can continue to do that, you know, we start to scale much faster, so.

Natasha:

Okay, so I've got you warmed up. I'm going to ask the question that a lot of people may or may not be comfortable answering.

Zander:

Sure.

Natasha:

And I'm going to make it easy for you. So how do you define your metrics for profits in your coaching of coaches business and what is your net profit goal?

You can say it in a percentage or if you're super brave, you can use a number.

Zander:

So our metrics for profit or how we measure profit is, I mean, I'm not a financial advisers, or I won't be able to get the exact details of the verbiage, correct. But basically revenue minus all of our operational expenses, including, and I think this is where a lot of people mess this up is including my salary.

So I do not include my salary and. The profit of the business. I think that's a big mistake that a lot of business owners make is they include their salary as part of profit. And it's not right. I always think of my business as like, okay. If I were to hire out myself, if I were to hire somebody into my role, that's what you're actually looking at from a profit perspective.

Our goal right now from a profitability standpoint is between 20% and 25% or this is terrible because I should know this number. We're somewhere around three and a half to 4 million revenue right now. So whatever 20 to 25% of three and a half to 4 million is, and that somebody can calculate that and let us know.

Natasha:

Awesome. Thank you for answering the question. Now, if you're doing US Traction or Scaling Up, or even if you're not. Hopefully you've broken down the goals and there's metrics and KPIs and meeting those goals of course is cause for celebration. And it's not that it's easy to compensate people with time rewards or money, but you can figure that out.

But what do you do when you don't have someone that is meeting their goals?

Zander:

You have a real conversation with them. I think one of the things, and this kind of comes back to the importance of number one, having the right people on the right seat on the bus, but also having the right culture and the right energy.

One of the things that we really focus on in our organization is two things, something, number one, we call radical candor, so anybody in any seat in the organization can have any form of open and honest conversation with anybody else. And that takes a special type of person to be able to sit there and listen and take harsh feedback.

But the more that you do it, and this is how we find out, like there's a lot of people that are not good for our bus, because we are so open and honest that some people, it just rubs them the wrong way to hear harsh truth, right? But for our organization to continue to grow and scale, we really value radical honesty and just very straightforward conversations in a way that.

People have to be open to the idea that it's nothing personal. This is just facts. This is data. This is what's going on. And once we get real on the data, what's really going on, then we can work on a solution. Right. So that brings me to number two, one of our cultural values that we really focus on is celebrating and appreciating big wins or little wins even, right.

We do it on a daily basis. In our meetings, we celebrate and appreciate little winds. We have something called shout outs every day. Everybody gives a shadow to somebody else on the other team for something they did. So we're constantly appreciating tiny little. So we appreciate and we celebrate, but we always look forward to the hard times too.

And I think that's something that is missed, right? It's like every single organization is going to go through hard times. Well, what do you psychologically tie yourself to during these hard times? Are you saying that the business is going under? Or are you saying that this is a bad thing? Well, the reality is like, and we all know this as people, right?

Like if you want to build a muscle, what do you have to do? You have to put the muscle under tension. You have to stress it to grow. Like growth hurts. Growth is painful, but we all want to be part of a growing business, but none of us want to go through the growing pains. Right. This is the stupidest shit I've ever heard.

Sorry. I'm not sure if I'm allowed to say that, but we're saying, oh yeah, absolutely. All right. But yeah, like, so we want the growth, but we don't want the growing pains. So really helping everybody understand that, like, if you want growth, you're going to go through uncomfortable, difficult times, because if you want it easy, you're never going to grow. So when the entire team is on board with this principle of growth and discomfort and having an uncomfortable conversation and embracing tough times, you start to realize like, oh, that's actually the fun part is like digging in and figuring out these problems to get to that next level.

Natasha:

Okay. So you said you look forward to those tough times. I'm wondering if you really mean you embrace them or do you really mean?

Zander:

Yeah, that's the thing. So people want to embrace them. Right. And here's the truth. Nobody likes the tough times at first, but if you start to realize what comes after the tough times, you can actually like the tough times you can actually look forward to them.

I truly look forward to the moment that we go, oh, We're stuck here at first. It sucks, you're like, oh man. But then you go wait, this is a good thing. We found the ceiling, we found the sticking point. Now let's go figure out what gets us pass this thinking.

Natasha:

I wonder if my team, when I say to them, because I've been in business for 20 years, we'll go through a tough situation.

Somebody is like, "oh my God, I'm so sorry." Or whatever it is. And then I'm like, you know, We learned from it. We're going to move on. This was a learning teachable moment and I'm sure they're like, "oh my God, seriously, how many of those can we do?" The truth is, it does catapult you forward. It's just very uncomfortable.

Which brilliantly brings me to my next question is right now, today, what are you as a CEO working on that's a challenge that's kinda rubbing?

Zander:

I'll tell you right now, our biggest thing right now is scaling our, and we in the middle of solving this section being solved as we speak, but scaling our sales team.

So that's been the biggest thing for us and that's been the biggest with that. She just figured it out. So I'll let you know, as of this month, we're busting through that sticking point.

Natasha:

Are you looking for inbound sales people, which we consider farmers? Are you looking for outbound hunters or?

Zander:

Right now we're looking for inbound sales people. We've got plenty of leads, we've got a phenomenal system. So we just made a couple of changes. That really opened that up for us. So right now we're actually literally just bringing people on. So that would be -

Natasha:

I'd like to know more about like how you're going to train them on that. I'll tell you why. I have had conversations with a staff of incredible coaches, incredible opportunities.

And there are so less than to the point where I'm like, oh my God, I really need to call the CEO and let them know about my experience because that is not how it should be translated. And I mean, some really big organizations, like huge organizations, big names, first of all, they're not getting trained very well, clearly. Yeah, so do you have a system for that?

Zander:

I think that's one of the problems is once you get into that bigger organization, right? It's like, how do you actually make sure that everybody's getting trained for when you're my size, right. When you've got a sales team of four, five, it's not that difficult. When you've got sales teams of dozens or hundreds, that's a whole different story, for us, it's pretty straightforward simply because our organization actually does sales training. So we do a lot of sales training for, obviously we teach coaches how to do sales. I've taught a lot of different organizations how to do sales. So for us, it's pretty easy to train them and it's been a bigger issue of finding the right people that can do it and are willing to do it. And we've kind of shifted that a little bit and made that happen but the training -

Natasha:

Is the shortage of labor, right?

Zander:

Absolutely.

Natasha:

Not having the skills to, I talked about this recently with someone not having the skills, to know how to write a great job description with not only the duties, but what the outcomes are, and then not having a templated way of interviewing like a scorecard that really

Zander:

Yeah, like being able to quantitatively actually take someone through that process. So that it's templatized. Yeah.

Natasha:

That's a lot. I think I wanted to ask you this earlier, but do you have a human resources department? I mean, usually companies don't have one until about 150 people.

Zander:

Yeah. We've done a little bit of like HR outsourcing to companies like Bambi and ADP works with us. My wife does a lot of the HR handling, so we don't have an official HR organization yet.

Natasha:

Too soon, too soon.

Zander:

Too soon for us, but definitely something that we do kind of fractionally if you will.

Natasha:

And the last question I wanted to ask you is have you been thinking about what your exit plan might be from this endeavor?

Zander:

It's a great question and a question that I have personally struggled with for probably since I started the business, right? Because as a coach, the business is your baby, right? It is my passion. It is my dream. So there's two minds that I always have about this. Number one, I always want to build my company to sell. So that is how I am building the. But number two is why kill the golden goose. Right? So the way that things stand right now, if I were able to sell my company, let's say it was like a 10 X multiplier. If I were able to sell my company for a 10 X multiplier, I would. And the reason why is people ask me that they're like, well, why?

And I'm like, well, because what would I do afterwards? I'd probably just go build it again.

Natasha:

Zander just walked us through his podcast, marketing monetization plan, coaching coaches, and his exit plan. For more information about Zander, please go to the show notes where you're listening to this podcast.

Want to know more about me, go to my website, officialnatashamiller.com. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you loved the show. If you did, please subscribe also, if you haven't done so yet, please leave a review where you're listening to this podcast. Now I'm Natasha Miller and you've been listening to FASCINATING ENTREPRENEURS.

Zander FryerProfile Photo

Zander Fryer

CEO/Coach/Author

Five years ago Zander Fryer was stuck in a 9-5, single, lonely, bored, and lost. He was unfulfilled and unhappy and getting paid a quarter million dollars a year to stay that way. But, after losing his best friend to suicide and struggling with depression for months he knew something had to change.

He quit his corporate job in his late twenties, with no idea what he was going to do and only 3 months of living expenses in the bank. Fighting for life, for time and in honor of his fallen brother, he embarked on a new journey. Despite the harsh criticism of those around him, within 3 months, he replaced his former 6 figure salary, and in 1 year he built a 7 figure business from the ground up.

Zander is now a best selling author, internationally renowned speaker, and host of the iTunes top podcast – Sh*t You Don’t Learn In College and is happily married to the women of his dreams.

He's been featured in TIME, Forbes, Inc., and TEDx and his company - High Impact Coaching - serves over 50,000 people in 27 different countries and at more than 700 organizations.

He is praised as the "next generation of leader," by Chicken Soup for the Soul author, Jack Canfield and regarded as the "coach of coaches" by many top industry leaders like Craig Ballantyne and Bedros Keuilian.