00:00 - 00:11

Eric Siu: So the Winston Churchill quote that I like is if you're going through hell, keep going. And I think resilience would be 1 of the top traits you need. Just not even about through business, but through, through life.

00:12 - 00:39

Intro: Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I am CEO podcast.

00:40 - 00:48

Gresham Harkless: Hello, hello, hello. This is Gresh from the I am CEO podcast and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Eric Sue of Leveling Up. Eric, it's awesome to have you on the show.

00:49 - 00:50

Eric Siu: Thanks for having me, Gresham.

00:51 - 01:19

Gresham Harkless: No problem. Super excited to have you on. And before we jumped in, I want to read a little bit more about Eric so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's doing. And Eric is the CEO of Content intelligence software, Click Flow, which helps you grow your traffic while looking like a genius. He also owns an ad agency, Single Grain, and has worked with companies such as Amazon, Airbnb, Salesforce, and Uber to acquire more customers. He has 2 podcasts, Marketing School with Neil Patel and Leveling Up, which combined have over 30 million downloads to

01:19 - 01:41

Gresham Harkless: date. He also speaks frequently across the world on marketing and SaaS. He's also the author of the book Leveling Up and it's about playing the game of life. Eric, are you ready to speak to the IMCO community? Let's do it. Awesome. Let's do it then. So they kind of kick everything off. I wanted to rewind the clock a little bit here a little bit more on how you got started. Could you take us through what I call your CEO story? We'll let you get started with the business.

01:41 - 02:12

Eric Siu: Yeah, totally. So let's start with my ad agency single brain. So that's, that's a funny story because I was 27 years old. I had no idea what I was doing and I actually took over the business. So it was a failing SEO agency and the 4 other co-founders decided that they wanted out And I had come in about 6 months earlier and I said, hey, why don't I give it a shot? And so I basically negotiated a deal where I bought, I paid $2 out of pocket to acquire the company. With the contingency of if the

02:12 - 02:40

Eric Siu: company failed, I would not have to pay out the rest, which is through the profits of the company. So that's really how the entrepreneurship journey got started. And I would also say that we, it was a lot of struggles, but the whole thesis was, you know, take this failing company, if I could turn it around, I would have asymmetric upside. So the upside would be uncapped and the downside would be very limited and I would learn a lot. So that the whole thesis was, hey, if I can take this thing and make it work, I would

02:40 - 02:46

Eric Siu: take the cash flows and reinvest it into more durable or exponential sources of revenue. And that's what happened.

02:46 - 03:07

Gresham Harkless: Nice, absolutely love that. And I feel like at the heart of entrepreneurship and business, all about minimizing risk. And sounds like you've been able, you were able to do that to minimize your risk. And as you said, maximize that upside that you had in building the company. Yep, totally. Awesome, awesome, awesome. So Could you tell us a little bit more about what you do to kind of help support clients and how exactly that process works? And I want to hear a little bit more about your book as well too.

03:07 - 03:37

Eric Siu: Yeah, sure. So, you know, what we've kind of narrowed down is, you know, everything we do is around marketing, right? So the podcast, we have marketing school, we have leveling up, we have the ad agency, we have Clickflow, I invest in other kind of marketing related businesses. So we will continue to grow our audience and then we'll kind of build or buy whatever makes sense. So we think of ourselves more of like a product studio now where we're just, you know, continue to build enterprise value. And, you know, we the tagline here is we level up

03:37 - 04:07

Eric Siu: marketing businesses. So everyone knows when they come into any of the companies, that's what we're trying to do. And my personal goal is to level up the world. And What do I mean by that? I love learning and I love teaching because it reinforces what I learn. And largely the way we built our audiences, whether it's me speaking at conferences, throwing events, or that type of stuff, or joining these different peer groups, it's all about leveling up. It's all about growing. And leveling up, Why it's phrased like that is because I, life is basically, it's an

04:07 - 04:29

Eric Siu: infinite game. You don't want to end business, right? I don't have an end in mind. I just want to keep playing and I want to keep having a beginner's mindset and all that. So that's what it is. I just want to keep teaching and I'll never accomplish that mission. But you know, it gives me a reason to wake up. But you know, the reason I did the book was because I used to do esports before it became popular. And it was looked down upon, my parents are like, what are you doing? I never went to class

04:29 - 04:54

Eric Siu: in college, wasn't interested in school. But you know, I was pretty good at games. And I was like, you know, people respect sports, why don't they respect games? And I learned teamwork, resilience, I learned how to steal ethically, right, all these different types of things. And it basically is geared towards the 3 billion gamers in the world saying, Hey, you know what, this gaming thing, it teaches you to build the right habits and it actually leads you into playing the game of life. And to me, the ultimate game is business and you can just keep leveling

04:54 - 05:14

Eric Siu: up, getting the right habits, you know, you know, starting a job and then going into consulting, starting your own agency or starting a drop shipping business, then you can go all the way up into building like a SpaceX if you want to be like Elon Musk. But that's the whole thing. Like we're just human beings and you know, we get to play at the level that that that we that we've defeated, right? If we don't get to move to the next level until we beat the boss.

05:14 - 05:39

Gresham Harkless: So Yeah, absolutely. I love that. And so funny, I want to say a couple weeks ago, I was reading, I do a gratitude journal at the end of every day. And 1 of the prompts talked about how if you approach your life or as we talked about approach your business, like a game learning, Like even if you have those setbacks, you learn more so that you can come back stronger so that you can level up your skills and be better so that you can beat the boss. As you said, we have that mindset then that increases

05:39 - 05:48

Gresham Harkless: our likelihood of being successful because you automatically know you may never reach that goal or the mission that you have but you're constantly understanding and respecting the journey.

05:48 - 06:02

Eric Siu: Yeah, it's very much an active journey, right? I think if you have no end in mind, it's not like you want to, like I want to make a billion dollars or something like that. No, it's just, you're going to keep playing. You're going to become the best version of yourself and you're just going to keep improving. And we all have, we're all different people. You should just be competing with yourself.

06:03 - 06:28

Gresham Harkless: Yeah, absolutely. And I almost feel like a lot of the frustration and kind of disappointment comes about by thinking that the journey is some type of a destination when really the gift is the process that it takes to get there. And I think if we change our mindset or understand that, that allows us to really enjoy the gift of life to try to get the best out of ourselves and continue to kind of make an impact. 100%. Awesome, awesome, awesome. So would you consider that to be what I would call your secret sauce? Or it could

06:28 - 06:36

Gresham Harkless: be for you or your business or a combination of both. Do you feel like it's that ability to be able to respect the journey, but also, I guess, in part to others, how they can do that as well?

06:37 - 07:02

Eric Siu: I think, I mean, ultimately, it's that beginner's mindset every day, right? I try to go into meetings or I try to go into things where I'm the most naive person or the dumbest person in the room and I just want to learn better or get better. And I think it's for me, it's about connecting the dots. So, you know, when I look at this business and I look at other businesses, like where's 1 plus 1 equals 3. So for example, right now I'm trying to buy this, this agency in Europe right now. And I'm looking at

07:02 - 07:23

Eric Siu: it, I'm like, okay, sure, it's this agency, we can plug it in, we have the revenue source and all that. But they actually have a good engineering team that we can plug in with our software. They have a customer base where we can plug in with the software as well. And then also we can plug it in with our email list over here. So 1 plus 1 equals 3, right? I think it's very hard to be able to find people that are able to connect the dots. And so, you know, that's something I think is, those

07:23 - 07:48

Eric Siu: people are very, very rare. And this is the analogy here is that you have, you know, ammunition in a company and there's a lot of ammunition, but you can have all the ammunition in the world, but if you don't have barrels, people that will make the things happen, then you're not gonna be able to, you can only do like, you know, 5 initiatives at a time or 1 initiative at a time based on the barrels. So I think that's being able to connect the dots also is able to, means being able to recruit the best people,

07:48 - 07:55

Eric Siu: right? Who do I need to plug in here to make things work? So I think that's generally been what I've been good at.

07:55 - 08:17

Gresham Harkless: Yeah, that's huge. And I was thinking, and I had a visual of kind of like the, I guess the parts store, so to speak, where you have a car and you have certain pieces that fit certain molds, but you can see the gifts kind of within the business as a whole, but also the people within the business. And you understand how they can make an even bigger impact. As you said, 1 plus 1 doesn't equal just 2, it equals 3 because you're able to put it in the right place, the right butts in the right seat,

08:17 - 08:32

Gresham Harkless: so to speak, and really have a huge entire impact. Yep. Awesome, awesome, awesome. So I wanted to switch gears a little bit, and I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an Apple Book or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

08:33 - 08:54

Eric Siu: Yeah, I'm sure a lot of people on this podcast, say they meditate or they work out or something like that. So I'll try to go in a different direction. I actually just got this this 8 sleep pod. So basically, it's a pod cover that I put on my bed. I used to have this thing called a chili pad, but it just got too loud. But the pod will measure my sleep and then it will also cool the bed. And I also have an oral ring as well. So sleep is, I'm really big on sleep. And then

08:54 - 09:15

Eric Siu: I actually, probably the biggest thing that's made an impact this past year is that when I go to bed now, I wear a piece of tape on my mouth. So there's sleep tape. And that actually has extended my deep sleep by about 30 minutes every day. So, you know, between that taking a CBD pill before I go to bed, and then there's, there's also gratitude journal as well. I think you combine those things and it's a nice habit.

09:15 - 09:26

Gresham Harkless: Awesome, awesome, Awesome. So now I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO nugget. And this could be a word of wisdom or piece of advice. It might be something you would tell a client, or if you have to do a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.

09:27 - 09:57

Eric Siu: Yeah, I think it's so that the Winston Churchill quote that I like is if you're going through hell, keep going. And I think resilience would be 1 of the top traits you need, just not even about through business, but through life. And so if you're going through hell, keep going. I think most people, their threshold for psychological pain and also physical pain is it's too, I think I don't like physical pain, right? So let's leave that out of the equation. So, but psychological pain is, you know, you're going through distress, of, you know, your business right

09:57 - 10:18

Eric Siu: now or life, like there's a lot of things coming at you and, and, you know, you can either feel sorry for yourself or you can take some action around it. Right. And it's not saying go, go, go all the time. I think you're going to need some time to wind down as well. But I think when I think about all the things that have worked out for me, it's, you know, when I think of the leveling up podcast after the first year, I was only getting 9 downloads a day. And after the second year, only 30

10:18 - 10:42

Eric Siu: downloads a day and I was spending, you know, 6, 7 hours a week on it while I was trying to save single brain. So, you know, but that, you know, that podcast now is about 80 to 90,000 downloads a month. And that's led to marketing school, which gets about 1.6 million downloads a month. And so same thing with our blog. When I first took over 4,000 visits a month, now we're at 350,000. And that's good, but that actually led to my other blog, which we took from 0 to 5 million visits a month. Right. So it's

10:42 - 11:07

Eric Siu: a lot. You got to think of your life as an investment and you're constantly compounding and the best investment you can make is in yourself, right? Warren Buffett said that, said that. So it's you're constantly compounding, you're constantly improving. And Tony Shade, late Tony Shade said, you're just trying to get 1% better every single day. And. You know, I'll use another quote. I just gave 2 quotes. Here's Bill Gates. Most people underestimate what they can do in a decade. They overestimate what they could do in a year. So I think it's just resilience and sticking to

11:07 - 11:27

Eric Siu: it in the very beginning. When I used to play games, by the way, I would get pretty good. And I was trying to preserve the record more so than trying to get better. So I'd go to like 32 and O or whatever. And then all of a sudden I started losing to higher, higher ranked people. And I just go and make another account. Right. But I was playing for the wrong reasons. I think if you play for the right reasons for me, I was optimizing for learning. You just keep playing that way. I'm optimizing for leveling

11:27 - 11:32

Eric Siu: up. The game will never end. And I'm just, the resilience is kind of built into that. So that's what I

11:32 - 11:57

Gresham Harkless: would say. Nice, I absolutely love that nugget. And I think it's so powerful because I think so many times, like you said, like you talked about with the game, a lot of times you're trying to get to a certain level and you're not trying to get better. And when you start to get better, you kind of welcome challenges, you welcome those things that maybe don't go the way you want them to go because they allow you that opportunity to get better. It kind of sounds like a lot. That's a lot of what you cover as well

11:57 - 11:58

Gresham Harkless: in your book, if I'm right.

11:58 - 12:22

Eric Siu: Yeah, I mean, the book is inherently about it's about collecting power-ups and building the right habits. I think, you know, as a gamer, I didn't know that I was building a lot of these habits. So again, teamwork resilience and all that and joining the best team, right? You learned that you need to be part of the best team to get to do the best stuff. And there's a lot of these things and it forces you to reframe your mindset into, sure, you have a lot of people, friends and family that maybe disrespect what you're doing as

12:22 - 12:42

Eric Siu: a gamer, but as long as you know that you're building the right habits and power-ups and you can actually translate that into real life, then you'll be unstoppable, right? So it's really, you know, I actually talked about the book with parents. They're like, oh my God, my kids need to understand. They need to reframe their mind, right? The gamers themselves need to reframe the mind too. But once they make that tweak, it's really the world's their oyster.

12:43 - 13:08

Gresham Harkless: Yeah, absolutely. And I think so many times, as you said, sometimes the noise can get in the way of you understanding what you're doing. And I think while you're playing the video games or you're understanding all those aspects of life, sometimes we can ignore the kind of work and the, I guess, progress that we've made within our business or in our lives. And we can sometimes listen to, oh, you shouldn't be doing that, or that's the wrong way. And a lot of times that can stop you from being as successful as you ultimately could

13:08 - 13:09

Eric Siu: be. Totally.

13:10 - 13:19

Gresham Harkless: Awesome, awesome, awesome. And so now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And we're hoping to have different quote unquote CEOs on the show. So Eric, what does being a CEO mean to you?

13:19 - 13:44

Eric Siu: Yeah, I think a good CEO knows how to let go. I think a good CEO knows how to delegate. It's not about, you know, fame, glory and all that. A good CEO knows how to support their team, get the hell out of the way. I mean, the CEO really has 3 jobs, right? It's recruiting, it's the vision, and it's financing, whether financing from getting getting money from your customers or trying to raise money. Those 3 things are the CEO's job. Other than that, get the hell out of the way. And, you know, for most companies, it's

13:44 - 14:08

Eric Siu: what they I think it was Vern Harnish that said this, it's the CEO's strength is the company's weakness, right? So you gotta keep thinking about how to make yourself obsolete and find talent that's better than you. Cause ultimately, like I used to think with a marketing background, oh, my job is to be the best marketer. I'm sure I know a lot about marketing, but I want people that are better than me than that. And so I can go focus on getting the best people and growing the company that way.

14:08 - 14:33

Gresham Harkless: Yeah, that's huge. And I think so many times, as a especially if you're a founding CEO, or you take over a business that you've been able to do so many times, you have to have an ego thinking that you can, you know, make things better, you can improve things, create a better mousetrap, whatever we created. But you also have to have that ego in the back burner, so to speak, because you have to be able to have and not be the smartest person in the room. So you want to have talent around you because that's going

14:33 - 14:42

Gresham Harkless: to increase your likelihood of success and allows you to focus on the things that really move the needle for it, not on the things that we want to do or think is our zone of genius sometimes.

14:42 - 15:05

Eric Siu: Yeah. I mean, CEOs need to be thinking about, and just anybody in general needs to be thinking about, you know, what are the tasks that are worth, you know, a thousand dollars, $10,000 an hour or $100,000 an hour and stop doing $10 an hour tasks, right? So as more stuff piles on your plate, you got to think about what can I offload? What responsibilities can someone else take over? And that becomes what do they call it? A job, right? And That's why you hire people because you need help. So that's what it is.

15:05 - 15:21

Gresham Harkless: Yeah, absolutely. Well, Eric, truly appreciate that definition. And I appreciate your time even more. What I wanted to do is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional you can let our readers and listeners know. And of course, how best they can get a review, subscribe to the podcast, get a copy of the book and hear about all the awesome things you're working on.

15:21 - 15:28

Eric Siu: Yeah, I mean, if you want to, I mean, I've got a podcast called Leveling Up and if you want to learn more about the book, you can go to levelingup.com or

15:29 - 15:29

Gresham Harkless: you can

15:29 - 15:36

Eric Siu: just go to your favorite online retailer and other than that socials, You can find me just type in my name on the socials and that's it.

15:37 - 15:49

Gresham Harkless: Awesome, awesome, awesome. We will definitely have the links and information shown us as well too to make it even easier to find you. But I truly appreciate all the value that you gave today. Appreciate the value you give in general to so many people. And I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

15:49 - 16:18

Outro: Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.