Combatting Ageism: Transitioning Executives into Coaches

Chris (00:00.98)

Welcome back to another episode of the Pursuit of Purpose. My name is Chris Kieffer and today I am joined by Jesse Hopps, who is the founder and CEO of Demand, Demand Metric. And I almost said Centric. we're going to try that one more time. Welcome back to another episode of the Pursuit of Purpose. My name is Chris Kieffer and I am here with Jesse Hopps, the founder and CEO of Demand Metric. Thank you so much for coming on Jesse and taking the time to talk today.

Jesse (00:14.382)

You got it.

Jesse (00:28.974)

Hey Chris, thanks for having me on the show today.

Chris (00:32.341)

So let's dive into demand metric. You're helping, if I'm telling you if this is the correct words, but combating ageism and helping these executives with lots of experience take on big strategic consulting companies like McKinsey, is that right?

Jesse (00:50.127)

Yeah, in a nutshell, you got it.

Chris (00:52.884)

So tell me like, how did this come to be and what have you learned in the process?

Jesse (00:58.638)

Yeah, so this is a story that's about, I guess, wow, 23, 24 years in the making. I was working at a IT research and advisory company. They're a competitor to the Gartner Group, if you're familiar with Gartner and Forrester, those kinds of companies. And I was working my way through university, working in sales. And my dream in life was to go to like the top business school here in Canada. It's called the Richard Ivey School of Business.

And I'm working at this company and the founder and CEO there, a great friend of mine still. He taught at the school, you know, he graduated from this business school and I'm learning all this stuff with him. And I didn't get into the business school. I applied and I didn't get in and I thought I was a shoe in. And my whole dream in life was to get into this business school and then get into consulting. And I told my mom, I'd be a millionaire when I was 25. That was my goal. And.

One day my boss's boss, the guy that owned this company, said to me, Jesse, you're a good guy, but I hate to tell you, you're just not McKinsey material. And that was kind of the start of, I guess, the kernel of where my story kind of started. But fast forward 18 years after that, I had founded a company doing research and advisory for marketers. We kind of built this out to be kind of the world's leaders of business and consulting tools and templates and playbooks.

And for a long, long time, we just sold directly to enterprises and did the work ourselves. And a couple of clients over the years told me, Hey, I took your playbooks and I did coaching with my clients. They did the work and they had a great outcome and they paid me all this money, like over a hundred thousand dollars to do like eight weeks, an hour a week type of deal of coaching. So I'd heard about this concept from some of my clients who are consultants.

But I never really pursued it as a business. You know, we were doing our own subscriptions and licensing and consulting work ourselves, but I'd heard about it. And, about, I guess it was February of this year, we decided to cannibalize and shut down four companies. Basically we're operating inside of this little company and completely pivot to helping people get into a coaching, a strategy coaching business model for themselves. because I just heard over the years from so many executives that.

Jesse (03:19.886)

After about 55, it's almost impossible for them to get a job. And I thought, you know, why? You know, these are the people that have the most knowledge, the most experience, you know, in the world, we need a generation of problem solvers. The world's got a lot of issues and they can't find work. And so you've got this huge population of very, very talented executives from the best companies in the world that literally can't even find jobs.

And they're not ready to just go play golf every day and retire. They don't want to buy groceries at Walmart, you know, and so they want to work. They still got 15 years of runway in them. And it's this discrimination, right? That, you know, at a certain age, they just can't get hired. So I thought, well, I got all these great playbooks and tools. I've done a lot of work with enterprises myself, but I can't scale me. So there's this huge labor pool, millions and millions of these boomers that are, you know, not quite ready to retire.

I have all this knowledge, but they can't get work. And so that was problem number one. And problem number two was, you know, the strategy consulting model, you know, the McKinsey's, the Baines, the BCG's of the world. they've been doing it for a really long time. And I, I just don't think that their model's working very effectively. You know, you get a partner that goes in, they saw the work, they send in some 27 year olds from the business schools to go do the work and they don't really motivate and energize the people to go and execute the strategy all that well.

They keep doing it over and over and over again. So my whole brainchild was, why don't I take my playbooks and tools, take these people that are having a hard time finding work at this point in life and teach them how to be coaches instead of consultants, coaches that can go in and work with teams in these companies for them to develop the strategy. Teach them the analytical critical thinking kind of skills, transfer their knowledge across. It's a win for the coach, right? They can't find work.

to win for the company, they get a much more practical, experienced person in the trenches working with their team. And their team is much more accepting of this because they're learning. They're not just being interviewed by the consultants and then having this regurgitated back to their management team and it's kind of pissing them off in the process. They're actually engaging. And so you got this big employee engagement problem, this big ageism, discrimination problem. I thought I could maybe try to solve for both of those by putting this group of people into that type of work.

Chris (05:34.236)

So the ageism is just define that term for everybody, just to make sure we're talking about the same thing.

Jesse (05:41.934)

Yeah, so ageism is basically, it's a form of discrimination where if you're too young or you're too old or, you know, based on your age, people don't think you're qualified or the right person for the job anymore. And so I experienced it as a young guy. I don't know if you've experienced this yourself, Chris, but I was a very young enterprise consultant and this is before the zoom days, right? We were just on the phone. So they didn't know how old you were. If you could talk a good game, they'd maybe think you were a lot older, but I remember being in my early twenties.

selling consulting to huge companies. And if they only knew who they were talking to, they wouldn't buy it probably, right? But I felt like I had to be kind of careful with showing just how young I was because it would have been ageism at the young end. And then I experienced it more with a lot of clients. I've worked with probably 10 ,000 senior executives over the past 18 years. And it really became apparent that, especially in a tough economy,

Chris (06:15.86)

Mmm.

Jesse (06:37.422)

they want to bring in, you know, with succession planning, right? They need to bring in the jobs for the younger people to move them up. They got to push the other guys out. And so now you've got ageism on the top end where they have a really hard time finding salary jobs.

Chris (06:44.468)

Yeah.

Chris (06:49.94)

Is it still, or I guess I'm thinking like strategically for a business, it wouldn't be ageism if they're firing or letting go of a senior person to have a younger person do the same job for half the pay.

Jesse (07:05.454)

I mean that's just business.

Chris (07:07.38)

Right. But your ageism would be like, you're old and because of your age, purely, we're going to have someone else that's not old, get paid the same amount and has more or less the same qualifications. It's just like the it's ruling. Like you said, if you were, if you, if it were possible to hide what someone looks like and they were working virtually, would you keep this person if you didn't know that they were old basically as well? Yeah.

Jesse (07:32.814)

I think so. It's kind of like, you know, women in childbearing years, right? Are you going to get the job? Are you worried they're going to take a big, you know, time off because they're going to have kids? Like there's a lot of women that get discriminated against around that age in life, right? And so it's a matter of when you lose an opportunity because of who you are. And in this case, it's around their age. I think it's in some cases, you know, yeah, they think they can find someone.

to do the job for maybe less money that's just as qualified in their opinion. And so I think that's the justification that, you know, the people that are making the hiring decisions have. They're like, well, we've got a younger, cheaper person that's better than you at this. They're just the right person for the job. On the other hand, I think there is some discrimination to think you're also didn't grow up with the internet and you're in this generation where you're not as tech savvy and everything's moving to software tools and all of that. And so...

You're a dinosaur now and we're going to bring in 45 year olds or 51 year olds rather than 62 year olds to do complex jobs that are requiring more and more software and things like that.

Chris (08:30.356)

Hmm.

Chris (08:34.516)

Right. Interesting. So how do you like, I'm not an expert in the like the McKinsey's of the world. But what is the, how do you go about, I've heard of that's kind of like the Charles Schwab's just it's the, it's a mega companies, right? The wall street strategists and all that stuff. How do you, how do you take on a company like that?

Jesse (08:56.078)

Yep.

Jesse (09:02.766)

Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, you know, strategy is, it's an interesting thing. when you go to business school and I never, I never got into business school, but what I understand is that there's sort of a stratification of the students in terms of their capabilities and the absolute like top, top students in business schools, like the best business schools, they usually get into investment banking or they get into strategy consulting. If they're like the top, top one, like top 0 .1%. Okay.

The ones that are not quite there may get into consulting in general. So there's kind of like this like strategy consult things like the Pinnacle. And then you got like, you know, general business consulting, marketing, technology, other types. And then you have kind of like accounting. And so a lot of the business students kind of get into some sort of a consulting firm. But the one that everyone wants to get into usually is unless they have a passion for some other functional area.

it's sort of strategy. And then within the strategy world of all the consulting firms that do strategy, McKinsey is like the pinnacle of that one, right? So world governments, the largest companies in the world, they've all worked with McKinsey basically over the years. So it's a sort of kind of clicky, you know, known to be the best problem solvers. And in fairness, they've got some of the smartest people in the world working there, no doubt.

Chris (10:13.3)

Hmm.

Jesse (10:24.366)

But I think the way that a small guy like me can compete with a McKinsey to do and deliver strategy work is, A, you've got to have the right talent on the team, right? And you've got to take something that, and this goes for strategy anywhere, you've got to take something that they would never ever consider doing and make that your strategy. So I got to apply my strengths against their weakness. All right. And so their weakness is because there's, there's so many employees there.

They have so much overhead, they're so expensive, they don't wanna bring their prices down. Like McKinsey will charge like 500 ,000 to a million dollars to make a strategy plan, right? Like it's very, very expensive to do work with them. But they've got all this overhead, they got all these partners that go out and sell the work, and then they have to bring in more junior people that will work 100 hours a week trying to make partner, and they'll leverage these younger kids to do all the slugging, right? All the hard work to get the work done.

But what that means for the customer is the customer is going to get a real hot shot that's going to sell them the work, but then they're going to get this kind of team of more, much more junior people that don't understand the intricacies of the business. Maybe they've worked in the industry and consulted for other companies, but they haven't been there, done that as the employee and built a business in that industry ever. And they're never ever going to send in people to work with the teams to do that. More importantly, they don't want to coach and teach how they do what they do because that's, that's what that's their IP. That's what they want to hold.

Chris (11:30.004)

Hmm.

Chris (11:43.764)

Hmm.

Jesse (11:50.35)

tight to the vest around, that's what makes them unique. We're just democratizing that. We've always been the ones building the playbooks, the tools, people can do this themselves. And so my whole philosophy of how to beat them is, A, let them do the corporate level work at the highest levels, right? The corporate strategy, but at the division levels inside these big companies, those companies can't afford to put a million dollar plan together for all their product lines and divisions, right? It's just not affordable.

And so can you get the same or a better result, right? Where the people are bought in, they understand the strategy, they think they can go and win there, they understand their role in it, they're not rolling their eyes when they see the strategy. Can you get a better result than what they're getting today working with these big consulting firms? And I think the answer is absolutely. The whole concept is strategy shouldn't be some like black box art. It's easily teachable. And so...

Chris (12:16.596)

Hmm.

Jesse (12:43.534)

If you just teach the people inside the company how to do what McKinsey consultants have been trained to do, they are smart people. They know their business, they know their customers. They just don't have maybe a lot of experience in the tools to articulate their thoughts and communicate them. And we've spent 18 years building out those tools. And so we've got all the tools, but they need more than just the tools. They also do like, you know, one of the strengths of the consulting firms is the outside guidance.

having looked at a lot of different companies, right? Or been in an industry for a long time. So you retain that value by bringing in these people that are normally being discriminated against, these coaches who have been CEOs, chief marketing officers, you know, on the board of companies in these industries. But instead of them going in and doing the work for the company and just leaving them with a plan, they go work with their team.

and they ask the team, hey, we're gonna do a workshop, we're gonna do an accelerator. Here are the exercises, here are the tools, here's how to think about it. You guys go do the work, come back to me, ask me questions along the way, but you guys are the stars of the show. You're gonna have to execute this plan, so you need to design it. You need to actually build it yourselves so that you really get it and you really wanna go do it. And so that's something I don't think, I can't see McKinsey ever doing is sending in 55 year old executives to go work with the teams. It just doesn't really work with their business model.

Chris (14:02.836)

yeah, that's interesting. I'm thinking the, the consultant, you said one thing there that's intriguing because we, our company does, automation consulting and implementation. So for, and we're super nation painting specifically, which is kind of funny painting residential and commercial painting businesses. but one thing that I've noticed is, as we work with more and more clients,

Jesse (14:19.79)

Painting, wow.

Okay.

Chris (14:30.292)

And these are large consulting packages that we're selling as well. But the value of like, we've seen a painting business operate 15 different ways and everyone's a little bit unique, but you can go to the next client and be like, I bet I bet you got a problem. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And that, that is tremendously valuable. and I've seen that. Yeah. Just firsthand. That's like, this is like another, like obviously when we worked with the first company,

Jesse (14:44.078)

Let me guess, here's your problem, right? Yeah. Yep. Absolutely.

Chris (14:58.676)

I didn't know that and there wasn't value there. But then as we continue to refine and stuff, there's, we're able to move faster and be more confident in like what the structure should be of their data and their business and stuff like that.

Jesse (15:13.87)

I like to say you've had a lot of looks, right? And, when you've had a lot of looks, you, you develop expertise, right? It's kind of like any artisan, any trades person. If you're a plumber, if you're a roofer, if you're anyone, and you've had a lot of looks at a lot of roofs, you're like, I, I've kind of, I've seen this before, you know, that's, that's just expertise being developed over time. And when you're,

Chris (15:33.204)

Hmm.

Jesse (15:34.958)

Even in sales, sales is a great place to develop expertise because you talk to so many people. With us, because we didn't do deep consulting for like 15 years, it was mainly developing the content based on requests from our members. We talked to like literally probably we sold 8 ,000. We must've talked to, I don't know, 20, 30, 40 ,000 people.

Chris (15:40.98)

Hmm.

Jesse (15:55.278)

that are doing these jobs. And so when you talk to that many people about how they approach their work, what are their challenges, what are their problems, what are they looking for, what tools do they need, you develop a whole different perspective around what good looks like, what are the people that are succeeding doing differently from those who are not doing so well. And then if you can transfer that knowledge, I'm sure that the value of your consulting practice has only gotten better over time, right? You're much more valuable to your clients at this stage.

Chris (16:24.948)

So I'm curious, your model, like demand metrics specifically, I might not use the same word that you would, but I'm trying to understand. You guys are like the in -between of the executives that have the experience that aren't necessarily consultants yet or don't know how to go that route. And then you're also collecting or identifying companies that might hire these people. So you're kind of like the agency in between more or less.

Jesse (16:52.558)

Yeah, I mean, that's a good way to look at it for sure. It's sort of a two -sided model, right? On the one hand, we've got people coming in that are looking for tools, looking for help, right? On the other hand, we're training and coaching these coaches up, right? A lot of times they're executives looking to, maybe they just got recently laid off and they're like, I got all this knowledge, but now I can't find work. And then they stumble across our program and they're like, yeah, I'd love to do workshops and help coach and train these people up. I'm born for this.

how do I do it? I don't know how to get my clients. I don't have playbooks. I don't know how to deliver the work. So it's easy to teach the people how to kind of do it conceptually, but where the rubber hits the road is, can you help them actually go and get some customers? Because if they're unable to sell and get the work, they're going to have a really, really hard time succeeding with it, right? They're going to give up on themselves pretty quickly. And so we've found that we've actually got an interesting, we call it a flywheel. And it's a model where...

The same people that are interested in learning about this are often executives in companies still. They haven't left their organization yet. And so we'll tell them before you leave, before you, you know, cut off your benefits, your salary, all of that.

Why don't you practice doing what you'd be doing out in the field as a coach at your company, right? Why don't you just do it right here, you know, leave them better off than you found them, get some experience, get your first case study, your first testimonial, you know, your own company. And you start doing that and you teach them how to really drive growth in their company. And all of a sudden they're kind of stocking and the company really starts rising and the company looks at them a little bit differently. They're not like, you're just kind of here doing your thing. Like you're really driving change and transformation and growth.

you know, and right when they're like, maybe thinking about maybe not laying them off, maybe promoting them into another role or who knows, I tell them at that point, tell them you want to change your relationship. You don't want to be an employee anymore. If they want your brain on the problem to continue doing the work you're doing there, you should flip into a coaching or consulting relationship with them. And if then they want to scale across multiple divisions and you want to get some backup, you've got all the people in our program.

Jesse (18:55.758)

So I say, buy this for your company first, if they lay you off or you know, you want to change your relationship, then come and join our program at that point, once you've got some experience. And often they'll say, well, I like that idea. I want to stay here, but I do want to get into this at some point in my life. And I say, well, great, buy the program and I'll send in a coach who recently came out the other side, who was in your position before, got some experience. Now they've joined us. They're looking for clients that they can go train on the job at work. And so often they'll,

They'll hire us and bring in one of our coaches and then do the work, be part of that team. And then they'll come and join us later on so they can do the same thing afterwards. So we call it kind of a flywheel.

Chris (19:34.192)

Yeah, that's awesome. I was going to say that it sounds like you kind of answered that, but my mind was thinking, companies that come to you looking for help, they hire one of these coaches. And then how often does the, do those lead to, or what percentage do the, does it lead to that person then getting hired by that company?

Or is that maybe rare because of the people that our coaches are like, no, I'm not looking for that anymore.

Jesse (20:02.574)

Yeah, they, they don't, most of those people at that point in life, don't, they don't want to go back to a job. I mean, they, they want their independence. Yeah. Once they know that they can make, you know, imagine if you could make, you know, some of these guys make 25 grand in a day. And so they used to make that in a month at a job before. And so you get a taste of that and you can live the lifestyle you want to have, have the time back, you know, have the contribution you want to have and be adding value. they, yeah, they're, they're not usually looking to go back into the corporate.

Chris (20:08.532)

Once they taste the coaching, it's like, this is.

Chris (20:31.156)

Yeah, interesting. So you also had mentioned to me before this that you have gone the zero to a million in 90 days. Is that your own business or are these?

Jesse (20:44.014)

Yeah, that was this pivot. That was this transition. So it was, yeah, I think we're up to like 1 .4 million in about four months in new sales. It was a radical pivot, I would say. I've been an entrepreneur for 18 years. How long have you been in business for, Chris?

Chris (21:01.428)

So I started my first business, which is technically the one I'm still running, 10 years ago. And then I left and worked in the, like took a different job, because I didn't know what the hell, I didn't go to business school either. And I took a different job for a regional painting company. And then I did that for three years and then realized, my gosh, there's a huge opportunity for this automation component that I had mastered at this company.

Jesse (21:07.982)

Okay.

Jesse (21:13.166)

Yeah? Sure.

Jesse (21:29.838)

Yeah.

Chris (21:30.036)

and basically my employer was my first client. And then, yeah, so it's kind of a weird analogy of the, yeah, but I'm not, yeah, I'm not the ageist target, like you had said, but I feel like it's the same exact thing where I would tell people, like my current thought is, if you're working in a business, like,

Jesse (21:33.486)

Your first client. Okay. Yeah. You could have been in my program. 100%.

Jesse (21:43.662)

Yeah, I mean.

Chris (21:54.004)

just get really, really good at whatever it is you're doing and start paying attention to what problems does your business have. And the other thing that looking back, it was just like, this was so perfect. I wish I could say I architected this, but our business was in a mastermind with like a consulting group of a bunch of other painting companies. So I'm just the marketing director, but I'm trying to network and learn how to be a better marketer with all these other marketing directors around the country. So then when I realized,

Jesse (22:10.19)

Okay.

Jesse (22:17.582)

Right?

Jesse (22:21.486)

Yep.

Chris (22:23.252)

I could just consult and do automation specifically. Guess what? I have like a 20, 20 lists, 20 lists of people that I have relationships with that trust me and know me. And I'm like, Hey, I'm doing my own thing now. You know how you want to help with this tool? Well, if you want, we can chat about how that could look. And it's like the most efficient way to switch and transfer as opposed to, like you said, people that are out of work.

Jesse (22:28.334)

You found your spot, you got your network and yeah.

Chris (22:51.06)

it's always harder to find a job when you don't have a job, right? And having a plan or, you know, starting to develop a roadmap. And again, the funny thing to me is like looking back, I didn't, it wasn't like a, there, it was a very like relatively slow, but also fast, faster than I thought it would be. But it was, I could have been even faster if I would have known the path, if that makes sense. Cause it was kind of like, Ooh, I wonder if this will work. And for the first three to six months, I was like,

Jesse (22:53.582)

Agreed. Yeah.

Jesse (23:13.93)

Absolutely.

Chris (23:19.348)

I wonder how long I can keep this going for. I have to get a real job again, you know? And then it just kept snowballing. Yeah.

Jesse (23:21.198)

You

kept going. Well, there's a few things there. I mean, one is, you know, we, we do certainly work with these, kind of 50 to 60 year olds and we call it the escape artist program because we want to teach them how to escape the corporate life and get into something else, but you gotta be methodical about it. You gotta have a plan. Like you said, we teach them, you know, stay employed, maybe other practice in your company. Like you said, start creating value, start learning, start.

you know, applying yourself a little bit differently and you'll have new opportunities within your company, in your career, or look at your employment agreement and see if you can do a side hustle and maybe, you know, work your network and see who you know, you know, figure out who's in your social circles that you can maybe practice with them, offer a free thing, like just get some reps in so you've got more confidence that you could actually make a go of this if and when they decide to lay you off or you decide to go. So we call it the escape artist program, but,

You mentioned masterminds and I wanted to give some credit where credits do. This zero to a million bucks in a short amount of time, it definitely wouldn't have happened had I not joined and invested in some personal development and some coaching for myself, right? I did, you know, Cole Gordon, have you heard of Cole Gordon's program? Closers IO, yeah. So I joined Closers IO and I followed Cole's program.

Chris (24:39.484)

yeah, closers .io.

Jesse (24:45.934)

And I really learned about doing direct response advertising. I'd always had organic SEO. We built, I don't know, 270 ,000 members and 8 ,000 customers all pretty much on organic SEO over the past 18 years. And we never did ads and maybe it was crazy. Alex or Mozzie would be telling me I'm nuts for not doing ads, but I went and saw him a couple of weeks ago in Las Vegas, actually at his workshop there.

great time, you know, great, great show. But anyway, I took Cole's program. I looked at the ads that they were doing. That's why I joined it as I saw his ad and I was like, this is really direct and really good. So then I jumped on a call and I really just wanted to learn how to do what he did. And then the program was great. It had all the videos, all the content. And then I started thinking.

If I'm going to build something like this, I got to learn from some of the guys that are really successful at their doing it. And so I went pretty deep with them. I started working with an account manager, you know, we just followed the instructions. We just, we actually executed the advice in the program. What I've learned about masterminds is you got people that join them and just sit there and hope that, you know, it's going to happen for them and they don't do anything.

And then you've got people that go in and they actually execute what they're told to do. And some people get great results if they actually apply themselves, right. And it all kind of comes down to what you put into it. But I did one more thing too. And it was, I was about, I don't know, a couple of months in Nicole's program, I ran my first ad, I had some, some ads coming in, some leads happening. Our calendar was just peppered all of a sudden. And,

Chris (26:00.66)

Yep.

Jesse (26:14.862)

I had previously, I thought about joining like Dan Martel's program, SASS Academy. Have you seen that one? You're, you're in that. Okay.

Chris (26:19.508)

We're in that. Yeah. I'm at, it's funny. I didn't jump in before, but we bought closers IO and signed up, did that for three months. there's some interesting, like it, I would say we, I heavily use the sales tactics and his strategy for sure. But then we ended up, the way that we've evolved, we're not like, we tried to direct response direct, like for the review software and,

Jesse (26:25.422)

Yeah.

Jesse (26:35.79)

That's right. Great for sales. Yeah.

Jesse (26:47.15)

Yep.

Chris (26:48.596)

Looking back, I still think that the sales knowledge from Cole's thing was worth it. Just that, his sales training is fantastic. We ended up joining SaaS Academy with Dan Martel about nine months ago, and that has been so, so good. It's hard to explain. I'll let you continue, but you looked at it, you didn't join.

Jesse (26:54.158)

Absolutely, absolutely. It is great. Yeah.

Jesse (27:00.942)

Yep. Okay. Unbelievable. Yeah, Dan's great. Yeah.

Jesse (27:11.15)

It's so well, I looked at it a while ago because I had a SaaS. So I had built a SaaS kind of like a sauna, Trello kind of deal. And I bootstrapped it and made all the, all the SaaS founder mistakes, right? I didn't join SaaS Academy back then. I probably, I probably should have, and it probably would have been different story. COVID hit, we kind of panicked. We probably should have raised money. Anyway, we decided to shutter it and then kind of wallowed around for a little while.

I bought a different program, actually, Sales Process IO. I don't remember that one. Nick Cosman had this one, great little program. It was also competing with SaaS Academy for kind of SaaS founders, but I joined that one, got some one -on -one coaching with him and he told me, make a VSL. And so I made this VSL and then I had that going, landed a big client with Mitsubishi. I did about a million bucks of consulting with them as a result of they found my site, they wanted a playbook. I did a workshop, I did some coaching.

And then it kind of just snowballed into this big deal, but it would never happen if I hadn't made this master class thing. And so, you know, I was looking at a lot of Russell Brunson stuff, reading expert secrets, you know, got into Cole's thing, worked with Nick Cosman for a bit. And then I wanted to get SaaS Academy, but they're like, well, I'm out of SaaS now. Like, can I just join anyway? I'm sure there's some great stuff to learn.

And they're like, nah, not really. And so I was like, okay. So I did one of Dan's like growth stacking summits. It was like a 5k deal or something for this summit. It was awesome. He did put on a great show. But then I reached out to his sales guy. It was Jay, I think. And I said, Jay, Dan went from coaching, doing about 2 million bucks a year to building SaaS Academy. That's exactly the transformation I'm about to do. I want to do this new coaching program thing.

And Dan knows the content model, right? Dan's great in content. And we had all kinds of content. I was like, if there's one guy in this world who knows how to do exactly what I'm trying to do and has done it successfully, it's Dan Martell. And I've been following Dan's content for a long time. And so I reached out, I was like, Hey, like, can I just get, you know, some time with Dan? Like, I'll just do like a workshop or something. And they're like, yeah, his coaching is very, very expensive one -on -one. Like, I don't know if you're ready for that. So I was like, well, I don't know, maybe, maybe he'll.

Jesse (29:20.878)

just offer me and they're like, you know, we got this other thing kind of going on, but let me talk to them and we'll see. So then he goes back and talks to Dan and they're like, okay, Dan wants to talk to you. And I was like, shit. So he books his call and it's like six o 'clock at night. Right. And it's like, I'm in London, Ontario, and it's like, the sun's going down. It's the winter. And I'm waiting to pick up my kids from gymnastics. I got my wife sitting beside me in the front of the car and the sun's going, it's getting dark, right? It's getting dark. And I jump on the zoom call damn, Martell.

And it's sort of like, I'm like this creepy guy in this dark car all of a sudden, like the sun had just gone down. And he's like, kind of looking at me and he's like, listen, and Dan's all business, right? And he's like, you're talking to me because you're qualified to do something here. He's like, what do you want help with? And I was like, well, I'm trying to go from here to there. And he's like, okay, I done that, I can do this.

We don't really do this very often, but we have this thing that's a VIP day. You can come out to Kelowna. I spend a half a day with you. We go out for dinner or for lunch and you just, you get to work with me and I was like, perfect. And I was like, how much is it? And he gives me the price and I'm like, Gulp. It's like, you know, I charge a lot of money to do this myself. I charge 25 grand a day. I'm not going to mention his price, but it was a lot of money. It was more than I've ever paid for a half a day of anything. And, and he's like, sorry, Ian. And I'm like,

well, you know, here's my, and I started giving him objections, right? I'm like, well, I don't want us to just do this one day and then have no other way to like work with you, contact whoever I can't join SaaS Academy. Like, is there anything else you can offer me? Like on the back end so we can stay in touch. And he's like, yeah, you know, we do have this other kind of thing, but, and now I know why he didn't bring up what that other thing was. It's his elite program that I'm in now as well. but he didn't let me like down sell and buy his elite thing.

He was honing in on this workshop because I was there, I needed it. And he knew he needed to push me to buy it. And I needed it. I needed to push. And so my wife's sitting right beside me and I'm a driver. Like I'm a closer, I'm a driver and I'm getting closed hard by Dan. He's just like, I'll make this decision for you right now. If you're not in, you're out. And he just says, take away clothes, right? Great clothes. And I was like, no, I was like, you're right. You know?

Chris (31:19.412)

Mm.

Jesse (31:38.446)

You got my sales guy to tell them you wanted this special thing. I'm here, you're here now. You want it, you need it, do it. And I was like, all right, I'm in. So I buy it. But I knew I wasn't ready to go talk to him because I didn't want to get the Dan Martell six out of 10 level entrepreneur advice. I wanted like the good stuff. So I said, let me book this out like two months. Cause I've just ended this pivot. I'm just getting started and I want to, I want to make sure I get the goods for me. I got real good problems to work on. So they gots fine. Whatever, book it, whatever you want.

So he booked this workshop like, I don't even remember six weeks, eight weeks out. And, and now, now I realized the real value of investing in yourself. The advice I got from Dan in the workshop, Chris was like, it was outstanding. You know, he called me an amateur. He's like, you know, you've been in this business 18 years, you're an amateur. You got four little things going, pick one thing, scaling credo, you know, like one thing, one market one thing. And he gave me great advice, but the real value I got was the lead up to that workshop.

I busted my ass in those two months, Chris, like you wouldn't believe because I didn't want to walk in there and embarrass myself. Well, it would just, yeah, be like, you're, you know, you're not even any good, you know, you didn't even try. You're going to tell me the stuff I already knew to do. So I worked so hard to get this thing going. And I think I pulled up my growth stacking summit workbook from the last experience I had, and I'm studying the Cole Gordon stuff and, and I executed, man, I did the ads, we did the finals, we did the VSLs, we had the sales calls, we did all of it.

Chris (32:40.756)

Waste your money.

Jesse (33:03.438)

And, yeah, we got the deals. We, we, we closed, you know, I think 500 K in our third month. And so, going out and telling him how much traction we were getting was awesome. But then he's like, look, you're still distracted. You're still making a bunch of mistakes, dial this in focus. And, to this day, I'm still repeating some of the same mistakes. He told me about then that I got to remember back to that workshop day. And so I started working with, with Renee, actually, Dan's wife on PR and she's helped me get on the podcast tour and all that.

I've got this book coming out. And so I really liked Dan. Dan's an amazing influence. If anyone is listening to this podcast and isn't in Dan's world, go listen to Dan. He's got amazing free stuff. And if you can get into his elite program or SaaS Academy, you won't regret it. It's, it's unbelievable. Cole Gordon's great. Alex Ramos. He's great. I mean, Russell Brunson, all the old G's Sam ovens. you've, you've seen it, right, Chris? I mean, you've, you've, but you've invested in yourself, right? How much have you spent on personal development? You know, coming up on.

Chris (34:00.436)

A lot more. Yeah. And I, I've, I, it's funny that as you get into it, it's like, you realize that a lot of times, like you said, it's the writing the check. All right. I think he might even say the transformation happens at when you, when you sign the check, because you're just like, it's real now. Yeah. The transformation happens at the transaction. That's what the, that's what the, the Dan word is. Yeah. that's awesome. So.

Jesse (34:10.35)

That's it.

Jesse (34:14.542)

Yeah, yeah.

You pay attention to what you pay for, right? Absolutely. Yeah.

yeah, he's got a million one liners. I love the damn one liners. So yeah.

Chris (34:29.108)

To make sure that we wrap up on time, can we shift to three book recommendations?

Jesse (34:35.949)

well, since we're talking to Amartya, I'll throw out by back your time. You know, if you're an entrepreneur and you don't want to build a business you hate to own and you're worried about an exit, exit, exit, it's probably because you don't have a business you want. you got it signed. There you go. Definitely get Dan's book.

Chris (34:40.372)

Great book. Yeah.

Chris (34:46.484)

Here we go, right here. Got the Dan signed copy.

Jesse (34:53.39)

You know, I'm just going to go with the OGs, man. These are the guys that influenced me. I was an entrepreneur for a really long time, but I didn't really start scaling until I really studied this stuff. So I'm going expert secrets. I'm going a hundred million offers. I'm going buy back your time. They've been the in the last, in this season, those have been the ones that I've had to dial in. if Cole Gordon had a book, I'd, I'd throw a prop out to him too. But, but those are my, my top three. Yeah.

Chris (35:16.468)

Awesome, and what is your favorite movie?

Jesse (35:19.534)

That's a tough call. Favorite movie, like, you know, I always go with Shawshank. You know, like I always go with Shawshank. Yeah, you know what? I don't know if you can beat it. You know, it's just, it's so good. So I think that's Shawshank corruption.

Chris (35:25.748)

it's a classic.

Chris (35:35.508)

It is, it is the, I don't know if you're an IMDb guy, but it is the number one rated IMDb movie of all time. So yeah.

Jesse (35:41.55)

It may be the best there ever was. Yeah, I mean, I got a lot of favorite movies, but that one's gotta be the best of the best.

Chris (35:45.972)

The backstory of that, there's a podcast called rewatchables. If you've heard that it's, it's a by, Dan Simmons or Simmons is the guy's name. I can't remember the he's, he's like a ESPN or like a sports writer, but he also has this podcast that's just called rewatchables. They go through different like classic movies that you can watch again. And they did a breakdown of the Shawshank one. So if you look up rewatchables, Shawshank,

Jesse (35:49.678)

yeah? No.

Jesse (36:02.03)

Yep.

Jesse (36:11.758)

Yep.

Chris (36:14.228)

the backstory of like, it was just like a, it did nothing in good in the box office. It was like basically nobody even noticed. And then it just secretes like the backend sales of that were is where it made tons of money.

Jesse (36:21.102)

yeah. Yeah.

Jesse (36:27.438)

Well, the story is just so good. It's got a real solid and story is a great book. Robert, I think it's Robert McKee wrote story. If you ever want to get into the film business and do good copy or a good story writing, the story is just more of a textbook though. But when you look at the principles of great story writing and Russell Brunson talks about this and expert secrets, right? Story's key. You know what I mean? And I think that's why Shawshank is so good is the story is just so well done.

Chris (36:35.636)

Hmm.

Chris (36:50.26)

And how do you recommend people get in touch with you?

Jesse (36:53.678)

Yeah, so I mean, if they want to check out just all the playbooks and tools and all the content we've built for, you know, consulting, coaching, all that stuff, the website's demand metric, just singular, not metrics, demandmetric .com. Everyone's confused it for 20 years. And then if you want to find my personal stuff where I'm talking personal development, it's just at Jesse Hopps is my Instagram handle. And YouTube's got some long form just at demand metric.

Chris (37:20.788)

Awesome. Well, Jesse, it was a pleasure talking to you. I'm glad that Renee connected us and yeah, it's excited to, it's always cool meeting people that are, you know, absorbing and digesting all the same information. So it was fun.

Jesse (37:34.734)

Well, it's great to me as well, Chris, you know, congratulations on all your success and finding a spot. I love meeting entrepreneurs. I didn't go through business school and made it happen. So I feel like we're, you're an engineer. Yeah.

Chris (37:43.348)

That's right. I'm an engineer. I'm just an engineer in my mind. And then like I only, I always joke that at one point in college, I was like, Ooh, I should minor in business. So I signed up for an accounting class. And I, I remember it cause I'm an engineer. I'm taking like multivariable calculus. I'm like, I'm counting. What do you like add five plus five is to be easy. And it was basic. Like we had our first test two weeks into the semester and I got a D cause I did no studying. It was literally like a vocab test.

Jesse (37:54.126)

Good idea.

Jesse (37:59.438)

It's easy.

Chris (38:11.028)

And I was like, debits credits, like, what are we talking about? I thought it was positive and negative, you know, whatever. So I fit, I got a D and then I was like, I had the drop date was coming up for to not have a job on your transcript. And I was like, I'm just going to stick to engineering. So I took two weeks of accounting and that was it. But.

Jesse (38:11.21)

yeah.

Jesse (38:28.302)

You can't, well, listen, here's a piece of advice for you and Dan would back me up on this. And my billionaire buddy Joel McLean would tell you the same, okay? Management accounting, not like debits and credits and counting the money. Management accounting for decision -making will make you rich, okay? It's a different science altogether. It's all about cashflow. It's all about predicting the future based on the variables that you've got in your business. It's taking like an engineering approach to like financial architecture of your business.

Chris (38:41.716)

Mmm.

Jesse (38:53.39)

Management accounting is a whole different science. And so for an engineer who's good, you can do the math. Most people can't do the management accounting well. And that's the top McKinsey guys, the top guys that go to the accounting firms and do strategy level consulting. They're doing heavy duty management accounting. So, you know, it's not true.

Chris (39:09.3)

What's a book for that topic or a video or?

Jesse (39:12.59)

Honestly, man, I'm not an expert in it. I've got a team that does it for me, but I know that I need to get better at it. So if you find a great one, let me know. But I know any good business school, they'll give you a textbook, just chat GPT it. But yeah, management accounting is a lot different than cost accounting.

Chris (39:29.46)

I'm wondering, because Dan Martell recommends a book that's by Peachtree or Greg Crabtree. Is that in the world of management? Simple numbers, simple numbers, 2 .0.

Jesse (39:36.27)

Yep.

Is that the cash flow? Yes, yes, yes. That's 100%. It's looking at cash flow and management accounting. Definitely. Simple numbers. Yeah. I'm just trying to remember the name of that book and to recommend it to people. Simple numbers. Got it.

Chris (39:45.396)

Yeah, great. Crabtree.

Yes. All right. Well, thanks so much, Jesse. Appreciate having you on.

Jesse (39:54.126)

Hey Chris, good to meet you man, we'll see you soon.