Neil Patel: From Crushing Failures to Building a Global Marketing Empire

[00:00:00] [00:01:00] Ilana Golan: Neil Patel, entrepreneur, marketing guru, been recognized by the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, even President Obama and the United Nations. Like, come on. You've helped companies like Amazon, NBC, HP, and more in marketing and growth. And you've seen yourself 10 million visitors a month from 180 countries on your site. And you're helping others do the same through your agency and Ubersuggest. But in your book, Hustle, you want to show that success is for everyone, not just the rich club, not just the Harvard graduates. Why is this important for you, Neil? Neil Patel: A lot of people believe that you need to start from a certain area to do well, like going to a good college or [00:02:00] having parents who have money. And don't get me wrong, going to Stanford or Harvard does help because it opens up networking, even potential money. I have a friend who created a hedge fund right out of graduating from Harvard Law School because his buddies went to Harvard as well and a lot of them had rich parents and were in finance. And his fund did extremely well. This was before the. com boom. He cashed out right before the. com crash and he retired And if having rich parents also helps because you can end up getting cash to start a business or maybe they open up their network But you don't have to have any of that to do Well, a lot of the entrepreneurs out there has started from very little and have done Well, a great example of this Steve Jobs didn't come from much Musk. Don't get me wrong smart kid It's not like he grew up with a dad who has hundreds of millions of dollars or anything like that A lot of it was self earned and you have countless [00:03:00] examples of this Mark Andreessen, right? The creator of the internet or Netscape, not really the internet, but he was early on when it came to browsing. AOL, I believe, was the one who bought his company back in the day. It's not like he went to Harvard or Stanford and grew up with really wealthy parents. Now, for all of those examples, I have countless examples of people who have also done well, who went to Harvard or Stanford. And funny enough, Elon did go to Stanford, but I also have examples on both sides and it doesn't make or break you. My mom was a teacher, my dad worked for a bank, not as an executive as a bank. He worked as a loan processor and started at the bottom and never really got anywhere to the top, never even to middle management. And I did okay. You know, I'm living in Los Angeles, California in a nice affluent neighborhood and my first job was cleaning restrooms and picking up trash because that was the circumstances I was dealt. Ilana Golan: To me, that's really important. Like you said, there's going to be people that ticked all the boxes and [00:04:00] studied in every university possible and they're stuck. And there's going to be people that came from nothing and look what they built. So there's both, But for me, I love what you said in your book, Hustle, that it's You can do whatever you want and it's really more about the hustle. Yes, some people it will be a little easier for them, but guess what? It's going to be hard for them too. So now the only question is, are you willing to continue when other people stuck? So for me, that is the big thing, but take us to your young age. Yes, you didn't grow up necessarily with this, but you were also entrepreneurial from a very young age. Take me there for a second, Neil. Neil Patel: When I was around 15, I shouldn't have been doing this, but I was selling music to kids, music CDs, I was helping people with televisions, I was helping people with cable boxes, I was selling stereo equipment that are car parts, I was selling whatever I could [00:05:00] to make money, and I had a reseller's permit. From the state board of equalization and Southern California, I would buy things from stores for cheaper price because the business buying as a business, a lot of times they'll give you discounts and then I'll sell it to people for a more expensive price and it worked out really well. And I made some money from that combined with working nine to five jobs, although they weren't really nine to five. They're more so like four to. 7 p. m. jobs, like working after school and weekends. Combination of both of them gave me enough capital to really get a kickstart into whatever I really wanted to do. Ilana Golan: I need my kids to listen to that. But tell me a little bit, so you decided to start your own venture, but you also realized then how important is marketing, right? Neil Patel: Yeah, so when I started my first website, I was looking for actually a job. My sister at this time, I was young in high school, 16. She worked for Oracle Financial Consulting. So, to give you an [00:06:00] idea, imagine a grocery store. this was quite a while ago, this was more than 20 years ago, 23, 24 ish years ago, somewhere around there. And he would end up telling him what to place where to maximize the revenue. And at that time, he was getting paid a few hundred bucks an hour. Imagine getting paid 250 bucks an hour. In today's world, that's a lot of money, but 23, 24 years ago, that was definitely a lot of money. So I was like, huh, I want to be this Oracle financial consultant. I started going online and I started searching for these jobs on sites like monster. com. Keep in mind back then, I don't even know if LinkedIn existed. But when I was searching, there were requirements. There were no kids who were just graduating high school and making tons of money. Most of them had college degrees, which were prerequisite for most jobs. And to be an Oracle Financial Consultant, you need all these Oracle certifications. Keep in mind, I didn't even know what Oracle was, other than there was this rich guy named Larry Ellison. So, once I realized I didn't qualify for any of the [00:07:00] jobs, browsing these jobs, I realized they were making millions of dollars. So I'm like, you know what? I can create a job site like Monster. com or CareerBuilder or HotJobs. And if I make 1 percent of what they make, I'm gonna be a millionaire, right? Because if they're making hundreds of millions a year, take 1%, that's rich. Little kid doesn't understand the concept of there's revenue and profit. I just look at it as I'm collecting money if I can make 1%. And I paid someone to help me create a website. And I launched it, got little to no traffic. And I learned you need to do something called marketing. And that's how I got into it. And I realized you can build whatever you want. But if you can't market, you can't convince people to come to your site. You're not going to make any money. Ilana Golan: for the listeners, I want you to realize the level of curiosity that is needed here, Sometimes we let life pass us by, right? And you just see these opportunities and you're just not going to jump on them. But that curiosity of saying, wait, what is that? Can I get it? Is actually really fundamental. So [00:08:00] you jump on this. You do try to find some marketing agencies. They don't know what they're doing. So take a stare at you. Neil Patel: Yeah. So then I found a marketing agency, one in Canada, one in California, paid both of them, didn't get any results, lost my money. And I didn't have a ton of money. Maybe I wasn't paying the right marketing agencies, got little to no results, had no choice, but to learn it on my own. Got decent at it. My site started getting really good traffic within six months. I still wasn't making any money, but I was like, huh, I can do this marketing part. I'm terrible at this revenue generation part. And at that time I really wasn't thinking about entrepreneurship. I was like, you know what? I was a little bit of a book nerd. I'm like, I'm just going to go to college, get a degree and go get a job at Microsoft or something. But I started college early with nighttime classes while I was in high school. So I did a class on speech 101 when I was around 16 at a local community [00:09:00] college. And my first speech was on how Google's algorithm works. And someone in that class worked for a power supply manufacturer. None of us were really think power supplies, big industry, but there's power supplies in everything. Heart resuscitators, Boeing airplanes, and the company I was working with provided the power supply. So a lot of these corporations and through digital marketing or SEO, I was able to drive them around 20 to 25 million worth of additional revenue. And it wasn't all me. Cause you had the sales team who had to close the revenue product had to fulfill, but they're just paying me five grand a month. We were barely spending money on ads. It was mainly SEO. And they were just like, we're really happy with you. the owner of the company, his son owned an ad agency called tonic LA at that time. I don't think they exist anymore. And he introduced me to BlueCross BlueShield, Countrywide, and ING Direct. And what he was doing is closing the clients on his end and just being like, Hey, my dad pays you five grand a month. So we'll just give you five grand per [00:10:00] month for a client. Right. And I was like, sure. So being 16, making 20 grand, not having tons of overhead, I was happy. And that's how I really got started. Ilana Golan: Wow. So you're 16, I mean, you're already getting these opportunities, which is incredible. Tell us about college. What did you decide to do and what's your thoughts around college overall? Neil Patel: My parents told me if I don't get a college degree, no good Indian girl is ever going to marry me. So I went to college because they wanted me to. I didn't want to myself. And my parents weren't making much. And I'm not saying I was making a lot of money or anything either. I'm not saying I'm well off, but at that time I was making more money than they were on a monthly basis. combined. So I didn't want to go to college. I went to the local college called Cal State Fullerton because I just didn't care to do anything. I didn't even take my SAT 2s, which were required for a lot of colleges. And I was like, I don't care. I don't want to go to school. So I was [00:11:00] making it hard to get into any college that was somewhat decent. Got into Cal State Fullerton. Of course, it wasn't hard. I had good grades until I started making money, good SAT scores. And what ended up happening was. I didn't want to finish graduating. My sister did a lot of my online classes because my parents wanted me to get a degree and going into school. I took enough AP and IB classes where I should have been able to graduate in two and a half years, but it took me five and a half years if I'm not mistaken. And my sister did quite a bit of my classes. I know I shouldn't be saying that, but it's just the reality. Fast forward to the future, didn't get married to an Indian girl. The college degree didn't help with marriage because over time people didn't care. And my parents eventually were like, we don't care who you get married to, just get married. And uh, eventually I did get married and had kids and my parents were happy. Ilana Golan: I love that story. And I think there's something that you talk a lot about in terms of the [00:12:00] practical work will actually eventually and the experience will eventually be so much more important, which is exactly what, you know, eventually you prove that you are a marketing genius and it has nothing to do with what you actually study. So take us there a little bit. There's a 10, 000 hour rule that usually gonna say, Hey, you're gonna need to work on 10, 000 da da da. But actually, that really scares most people because they don't even know if they can afford 10, 000 hours. So how do we shorten the cycle? Neil Patel: Doing something long enough really helps. I'm not saying college is bad or good, but sometimes doing certain things helps kick people in the butt. You mentioned you were in the Air Force? I don't know if that was here or overseas. Being in the Air Force gives you regimen. You're gonna have to wake up. You're gonna have to do certain things at certain times. You have no choice. It makes people understand how hard life can be and how you have to [00:13:00] do things whether you like them or not. So I think that's really good for people, but spending 10, 000 hours on something I think is a little excessive, especially at the beginning because most people don't know what they want to do in life. And what I recommend to people is just go try a lot of things, spend an hour, spend five hours. What you'll find is a lot of the stuff you suck at, you won't like a lot of the stuff you're naturally decent at or good at you'll like, and you'll be willing to spend more time on. And you'll naturally spend a thousand hours and get better and 000 over many, many years, but you'll spend the time and energy you needed because you want to, because you're enjoying it and you'll get really good at it and it makes it easier to monetize. But you can be in the biggest industry ever. And if you suck at whatever you're doing and you don't enjoy it, it's going to be hard to make money. You really want to try a lot of things, use process of elimination and double down on the stuff that you're naturally good at and you love, and they tend to go hand in hand on what you love and what you're naturally good at. Ilana Golan: I'm very big on an [00:14:00] experimentation and you're right. A lot of it is coming either from the Air Force or startup ways. Right. But you want to experiment because at the end of the day, the clarity comes from action, not just thinking about it, dreaming about it. You need to get the momentum and then guess what? The hours somehow add up when you are in the momentum. But so you co founded multiple companies since Crazy Egg and Kissmetrics, and now you have Ubersuggest and you have your own agency. Walk us through a little bit of how this all started and some of maybe the hard moments, but also the learning. Neil Patel: started one too many companies when I was younger, had ADD and most of them did not work out. The venture funded one, Kissmetrics, didn't work out. We had bad luck with class action lawsuits and FTC investigation. We passed the FTC investigation with flying colors. The class action lawsuit. I learned a little dirty secret about the US and how US laws work. Sometimes it's cheaper to settle because the insurance company pays it versus fighting it in [00:15:00] court and winning, but you're out so much in legal fees that you've lost more than if you just settled and leverage insurance dollars. So for me, the Kissmetrics would have been sold. We had a few people circling to buy the company if it wasn't for those two things, but eventually the company didn't work out because it really derailed the trajectory and the growth with the lawsuit and the FTC investigation. Ilana Golan: Let me stop you for a second because what you're sharing right now is one of the scariest things for every founder. How do you get up in the morning? How do you continue taking the steps forward? How do you not just put a blanket on anything entrepreneurship after that? Neil Patel: We were really lucky in which we had good investors for that business. There was a gentleman named Phil Black who was on our board and he was with the Venture Fund. He still is, I believe, with True Ventures. And they've done some really cool companies like Peloton, their stock boomed early in the day. They were early investors, they probably made a [00:16:00] killing or Blue Bottle Coffee, Automatic, which is WordPress. And when you have investors who have just been through so many of these things before, they're just like, oh, don't worry, you should talk to this lawyer. As part of this law firm, one of their partners was the ex deputy director of the FTC. They'll help guide us through it, and they just make things much more easier to deal with. So it's a lot less stressful. It's much more stressful in the heat of it, but looking back on it, it's not bad at all. I remember I probably smoked a cigarette for the first time when I was going through that, just to try it out. I'm like, give me that. Let's see how that tastes. I'm not saying cigarettes, people should or shouldn't smoke them. It's just more so. That was my first experience. yeah, you just get used to over time of dealing with the stress and the ups and downs. Funny enough at our ad agency, NP Digital, I don't remember when we weren't in a lawsuit. And like it's over little things, right? Like once you have a scale, we're in, I think, 19 or 20 countries. We [00:17:00] have a good amount of employees. We're small considered to like a Microsoft based on the classification of the U S government. We're considered a large business. Although I still look at it as small compared to like a Microsoft, you're going to run into silly little lawsuits and a lot of them aren't necessarily lawsuits, they're just legal issues. I've had people They show up to the office one day, we're mainly remote now these days. And after one day they have some health scares. So they're not in the business, but we're still paying them. They have their time off based on their condition. And then three months later, when they have to start coming back and working, they'll be like, ah, I had sexual harassment. I'm going to see him like, whoa, you're in the office for one day for like six hours. What was the harassment? Oh, people were really mean to me on Slack. And I'm like, we keep all the logs. I'm like, where is it? we have in house counsel and of course we pay law firms, but like, sometimes it's just cheaper to be like. Here's a thousand dollars, goodbye, then it is to like fight things because fighting [00:18:00] it, whether you have in house resources or external, it still costs money. Everything costs money. So it's an equation and you're dealing with a balance and it's non stop. The horror stories that must come out of a Microsoft or Apple. When you have 300, 000 employees, I don't know what companies go through. It must be crazy and not necessarily painful because a lot of the people at the top are not dealing with it. But like even this example. I didn't know about it until six months later, and they were just like, yeah, the person couldn't prove anything. They said they had screenshots. When we asked them for the screenshots, they came up with nothing. And when we went back, because you can see history in like Slack and stuff, they're like, We found nothing. We showed them all their conversations. They couldn't point out anything. They still said they were going to sue. They had a contingency based lawyer, and they're just like, Like it was cheaper to give a thousand dollar check than it is to deal with anything. And yes, sometimes it's principle, but do you want to spend 10 grand fighting anything? Or do you rather just pay the thousand [00:19:00] bucks and move on? Ilana Golan: And I think it's really important. And I appreciate your sharing that because I think it's really important for the listeners to. See the journeys and see the real truth. It's really fun and exciting when things happen and it's growing and, Oh my God. And I'm hiring and ah, this is so cool. But in the day to day, there's also a lot of crap that we need to go through as you're growing something. Okay. So Kissmetric had a lot of issues. And then tell me more because Crazy Egg went actually really well. So talk to me about how do you decide to continue going to the next entrepreneurship versus saying, okay, nevermind, let me just hang on something safe. What made you continue? Neil Patel: Kissmetrics was a spin out of Crazy Egg, and Crazy Egg is a much older company, I don't know how old it is now, maybe 16 ish years I'm guessing, maybe more. What I ended up learning over the years is if you do something long enough, in a decent enough market, like a [00:20:00] big enough market, You can grow. Just most people don't pick a big enough TAM. Crazy Egg has a OK TAM, but it's not the biggest TAM. And people don't do it long enough. And when I say OK TAM, I'm not saying Crazy Egg is really tiny, but it's not a big TAM like CRM, or operating systems, or mobile phones, or electric cars. Those are like really, really massive TAMs. Even my ad agency, NP Digital, it's in a, Big TAM, but it's not a, as big of a TAM as housing, you know what I mean? Everyone needs a house or electricity. Natural resources is a much bigger market. And what I found is if you just do something long enough and decent enough. You can actually create a big enough business. You look at most large corporations, they don't do everything perfectly. Microsoft for the longest time had the blue screen of death with their windows operating system. The younger generation doesn't realize it, but as older generation, you're young, but I'm old and we realized the blue screen of death. Cause that was just ingrained in our [00:21:00] head, Salesforce, great product, but you got to pay consultants to help you use it and developers to help make it work right. And it's not the most usable product, but it's just a big enough market. And you end up learning that not everything has to be perfect. You look at Tesla, the company's worth our arm and a leg. Go sit in a Tesla car. We have one. So I, you know, I'm not trying to knock everything about tests. I think Elon's an amazing job with technology, but go sit in that car driving from Los Angeles to San Francisco. The seats are extremely uncomfortable. If you sit in a Mercedes seat, it's five, 10 times more comfortable and your back is less likely to hurt on the journey. Well, in a Tesla, It's almost guaranteed to hurt for most people that it's going to hurt in that six hour journey, but in a Mercedes, you're usually good. And it doesn't mean you have to do everything perfectly to build a big company. Does it mean Tesla's bad? No. Does it mean Mercedes bad? No. There's different products for different people. Ilana Golan: And that to me is really interesting. We do have two Teslas and I love them, but [00:22:00] maybe I don't drive so much. I admit everything is over Zoom now. Neil Patel: What's the longest journey you've done in a Tesla? Ilana Golan: Um, probably four hours to Tahoe, but not much. I probably done it like twice ever. And you're usually going to need to charge anyway on the way. So at that point, by the time you go get coffee and dinner, it's like, I'm okay now. Bye. Nothing is perfect. Even, you know, we were just moving to HubSpot. That's been a nightmare. So it doesn't matter what the size of this, oh, it's going to be issues. And I think that is really important to not be hard on yourself as well. So you're continuing this entrepreneurship endeavor. Your agency is growing like fire. But I think one of the interesting things for me, Neil, is that you had the intention. From the get go and the realization how important it is to build that personal brand for yourself and how that will be a big portion of what's actually going to create [00:23:00] marketing for yourself, for the business that you are in. And unfortunately for me, I did not realize it until about a few years ago, and now I teach in Leap Academy, but it took me a few decades to learn that. First of all, what made you realize it? And how do you continue to cultivate that personal brand that you built for yourself? Neil Patel: Funny enough, when I first started out, I had no intentions of building a personal brand. I just created content. And I did that because I don't have the money to spend on advertising. So it was my way of marketing without having the big budgets of the larger corporations. And over the years, my personal brand started building because I was speaking at events, creating content online, then leveraging social media. Social media wasn't as popular when I started and it just all started adding up, sending out email newsletters, doing in person networking events and the list went on and on. What I found over the years is you can build a company through a personal brand. It helps, but it's hard to build a really large corporation from a personal brand. The [00:24:00] biggest companies are not personal brands. You look at Kylie Cosmetics. I'm not trying to knock her. Kylie Jenner did an amazing job, but it's nowhere near the size of L'Oreal or Estee Lauder. Again, she did an amazing job with a personal brand, way better than I did. Not trying to knock her. I'm just trying to compare the size of a personal brand versus a corporate brand. I think Nike's done it the best. We're gonna leverage Jordan. We're going to leverage Kobe Bryant, you know, who sadly passed away a while ago. We're going to leverage LeBron James and all these athletes to help them promote our corporate brand. And that's been extremely well for them. Heck, even Salesforce, you know, I watched CNBC every once in a while when AI started really coming out. You would see Salesforce commercials with Matthew McConaughey talking about Salesforce and AI. And these corporations leverage personal brands all the time. But the key is if you want to build something big, build a corporate brand. It just makes more than personal brands, but there's no reason why you can't have both. And I think the best [00:25:00] combination is both versus one. And if you don't have the time and energy to build a personal brand, leverage a lot of them to promote your corporate brand. And that works as well. Ilana Golan: Incredible because I think it did help in the beginning for sure. I think when you don't have a lot of budget, it does help. And then once you have the snowball and you have the employees and you have the marketing, now you can start creating and delegating and bringing in people. So when you continued. And now you have UberSuggest in your own agency. How do you see the difference of what you're building now versus what you built earlier on with Crazy Egg and Kissmetric? Neil Patel: Honestly, at this point, we don't really build anything. We just buy. The team does, can just add features and maintain the companies and try to grow them. But we spend more of our money on M& A. I'm just buying up competitors than anything else because it just tends to be more efficient and a better use of [00:26:00] money than trying to create things from scratch. I honestly believe entrepreneurship is one of the hardest things to do. Going from zero to 10 million is really hard. It's much easier to go from 10 to a hundred in a big organization or a hundred to a billion. And I think starting it up and getting to the first 10, most people don't hit those milestones. So what we just like doing is we just like finding the companies that have built something we want, buy it, and then we approve upon it and scale it. And that's the model we've been leveraging for quite a few years. And we like it. There's no right or wrong playbook. People like Apple, like building things from scratch, creating even new markets or reinventing existing markets. I believe entrepreneurs and owners and leaders need to play on their strengths. I'm really good with finance. I'm really good with marketing. It's easier and a more efficient for my co founder and I, who's really good at sales and recruiting to just go buy [00:27:00] something that is great. But they haven't got enough traction and just give it the traction it needs with sales and marketing. Ilana Golan: That's such an interesting model. Do you know how you got this? Which one was the first time you bought a company and you just realized, you know what, there's something here. Neil Patel: Yeah, we bought many companies over the year, but like, never created it. Bought it for 120, 000. I think we put maybe 3 million into the product. I'm taking a rough guess and we made our money back fairly quickly. It makes more than that in profit a year of whatever we spent. Another one that we did was we bought a tool called answer the public for 8. 6. They said it was doing around 120, 000 a month in profit. It wasn't because it said 120, 000 in profit. Our only expense is servers. Well, what about employees for support? What about people to refund unhappy customers? Like, oh, we don't have any of that. You don't really need to do it. I'm like, yes, you do. So true profit was probably call it six, 700 grand a [00:28:00] year. So probably paid closer to 12 ish times. 12, 13 ish times profit on the business. But when we took it over, we were able to provide really quick growth and within six months of spending time on it, you know, we bought it and we let us sit there cause we didn't have time for integration team and some of our development team, but just in the first six months, we've owned it for quite a bit longer now and we've seen good growth even after, but in the first six months, we were able to take it from call it. 60 a month in profit to 200 plus grand a month in profit, literally in just a six month time. And then we were able to see more growth after that. A lot of times there's just little things that you need to adjust and tweak to get more growth. And one of the biggest problems with answer the public was they had a 99 plan and we already knew the market for their product with the features they had. People would love it at 9 a month. So we created a 9 plan and that changed the business. [00:29:00] Literally that one change. And instead of saying you got to pay up front, we did a free trial cause we knew free trials in this space convert better and just do seven days. And we knew if they took more payment options like PayPal, they would see another 16 to 18 percent lift for new revenue on a monthly basis. So there's just a lot of small things that they were doing wrong that we knew were easy fixes. And when I said the first six months, it was really only like two and a half months of change, but it took six months to really see. All the results from those change. And then after that, we were able to see a lot more progress, but it required much more work to see the future growth, but we knew going into the business, okay, we can get it to a real 200 a month in profit really, really fast. And if you're buying something for 8. 6 and you're doing 2. 4, you're paying less than four times profit. It's not hard to arbitrage it. And we knew there was a path to getting to three, four, five, [00:30:00] 600 grand a month in profit and the steps we needed to take to get the product there. So it was a really easy math equation for us. Ilana Golan: Amazing. you know, and I think I'm hearing a pattern, Neil, of when you needed to find the right mentors, you knew how to ask the right questions And now you become that expert in your field and you can move the needle on a company. Because you've seen so many of these patterns of what's going to actually make it work. And that's an incredible shortcut for people. Neil Patel: I just done it long enough. I done marketing for so many businesses and so many different verticals. You kind of figure out what works. I'm not saying cause I'm smart or anything like that. I'm not saying cause I'm a better marketer and none of those are true. The only reason I'm saying it works is I just have done it for so many years and so many industries. not being smart, you know, Elon Musk is considered smart in my book or Bill Gates, me on the other end of not knowing much and having [00:31:00] a low IQ. You just learned what works and what doesn't by just doing something long enough and making enough mistakes. Ilana Golan: Well, I would challenge you on that one, but it sounds like you're doing phenomenally well. And you talk a little bit about, and I love the phrase, I think you call it renting your dreams. And sometimes you say to people that it's okay sometimes to compromise or to decide that you want to do corporate or you want to go to a specific role or you want to do something specific as long as you have a plan, it's all about being intentional about. What it is that you want to do, and if you need, we call it a mini leap, if you need a mini leap right now in order to stabilize, great, but as long as you understand what you're doing. Talk to us a little bit about this concept for you. Neil Patel: Jack Ma said it best, he would recommend someone who's young to go work for someone else, learn from all the mistakes, build a network, learn on their [00:32:00] dime, and then once you have the experience, maybe 7, 8, 10 years later, go start your own business. And a lot of times just going and doing something on your own right away isn't necessarily the best choice. Reason being is there's a lot that we can learn over the years. There's a lot of things that other people have done right that can help us in our future. There's a lot of networking opportunities that you can use in your future from the relationships you build from working for others. And if you have this end goal, the quickest path to getting that end goal isn't necessarily to go from where you are to just try to do that. Sometimes you need to go in between and take a few extra steps to really accomplish what you're looking to do. Ilana Golan: That's exactly it. But again, as long as you know why you're doing why you're saying yes to things, why you're saying no to things, which I unfortunately had my eyes shut for about two decades because I was just all I knew is to work harder and harder and to hope that that's gonna be it. That's gonna be the thing that will take you to the [00:33:00] next level. And as long as you're more intentional and strategic about every move you make, all good. Just know why you're doing what you're doing. And I think that's a big lesson here. Neil Patel: You hit the nail on the head, right? In which you have to be intentional with your decisions. You're going to have opportunities that arise in between. If that opportunity can make you more money in the short run, but it's going to derail you from your goal, a lot of times you're going to have to learn to say no, and it can be painful, but you've got to think very long term. Ilana Golan: Now There's a lot of people that will get various awards but awards from Obama, the United Nation, like you got some things that nobody else does, or at least it's very, very rare. How do you create your own luck or create that to even be a thing, Neil Patel: You work hard for a long time, and you continually network and put yourself in a lot of different rooms and places, and you'll get lucky. People think luck happens from just people [00:34:00] randomly, but what they don't realize is they're trying and they're in so many different places that good things just happen because of hard work. And what ends up happening is a lot of people, are just stuck in their ways and feeling like they're unlucky so they don't do much. Well if you don't do much, you're not giving yourself the opportunity to get lucky. But if you keep going to meetings, and you keep speaking at events, and you keep creating content and marketing your business, and you keep trying to sell, eventually you'll get lucky and things will start going your way. Assuming you're learning from your mistakes and continually improving. Ilana Golan: Absolutely true. What do you think is something that you went through, maybe that people don't necessarily know about, that you went through that built you to the Neil that we're seeing, that is willing to hustle, getting out there? What do you think is something that built you to what we're seeing today? Neil Patel: I think one of the things that's built me is not growing up with a ton. My parents provided as much as they can. Amazing parents. [00:35:00] But when you want more and your parents can't provide it, it gives you a drive. And that's when people say like, Oh, you need to go to Harvard to do well, or you need to grow up with money. Well, I think it's just as powerful to not have those things because it really gives you that drive that some of those other people. May have or they may not have and usually in many cases for MC They usually don't have that drive compared to that person who has come from very little and They want it really badly. Now. I have seen people who are super successful and went to Harvard ex Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates who have that drive as well. So it doesn't mean that having a great degree or having well off parents means you won't have a drive. It's just usually you see a lot of hunger from people who don't have it yet. Ilana Golan: What are some decisions that maybe you made recently that you feel like they completely changed something in your life or changed a big aspect of your life? Neil Patel: [00:36:00] The latest big decision that I made, it was a few years ago, but it took me a long time in my career to be okay with this. I just started growing in head count. You know, get to a hundred people, get to a thousand plus people. You can't always do everything your way. It's not about micromanaging, but sometimes entrepreneurs have this notion that their way is the right way. If people have KPIs and goals and they're hitting it for the business, it's okay. If they do it in their way, like if it's not going to harm the business in the long run, there's many ways to skin a cat. And your way in your eyes may be the best way in someone else's eyes. Their way may be way better than yours. And if they both hit the goal and similar manners and similar efficiencies and cost structures, it's okay. If someone chooses a different route, as long as they hit the goal, they hit the goal, they're not breaking laws and they're being ethical. Not hurting the company in the long run, you're okay with that. And that's helped a lot because you're empowering people to do it their way versus not necessarily micromanaging, feeling [00:37:00] that things should be in a certain way and trying to persuade people to do it your way, waste a lot of hours. Ilana Golan: So give them the independence to think the way that is right to the company and that keeps them more motivated and more all in basically. Neil Patel: Not just the independence to think the way they want to more so hold people to the fire on the KPI, their feet to the fire and not try to tell people how to do it. If they need help or they need guidance by all means, but don't try to critique someone's way. If it's possible for them to hit the goals in a different way or manner than you would choose. Ilana Golan: which makes so much sense. So now that you're looking at everything that you achieved, Neil, what would be some advice that you would give to your younger self, but also to our audience who are all very driven, usually high achievers, Just trying to figure out, what do I want to do? How do I create [00:38:00] more for myself, for my family, for impact in the world? What would be some advice that you would give them? Neil Patel: The best piece of business advice I ever got was from a guy named Phil Black. He was one of my investors at Kissmetrics. And it took me six plus years to realize this after he told me the advice. And he says, Neil, as a founder or co founder as entrepreneur, your only real job that you got to do is hire the right people who you have been successful at accomplishing that one thing that you're trying to solve. And if you're trying to solve 10 things, you go find the 10 people that you know can solve it and have a proven track record and you let them go do their thing. So it took me six plus years to really understand this. And in my ad agency, NP Digital, when we got it started. We hired people who have done it before successfully. So for example, our CEO, Mike Gullickson was a president of our competitor called I prospect and globally, I think, I don't know how many people they have. Now, my guess is [00:39:00] 15 plus thousand people, but maybe at the time around seven ish thousand people. So he's ran an agency successfully and not just once before that he was the CEO of Cabario. Did well, sold that. He was head of sales and then a COO of iCrossing, which sold to Hearst. So he's done it three times in our space for companies that aren't identical, but do exactly what we do and they're close enough to identical, So having him do it the fourth time reduces risk. Having someone who headed up sales for Europe for iProspect, which is one of our competitors head up sales for us in Europe is usually low risk. Oh, what'd you do before this? I had up sales for this other competitor and I did great there. And when they work for your competition or multiple competitors and they continually got promoted within those organizations, it means that the organization found them valuable. When you interview someone, everyone says they're the reason that things happened great and the business boom, but you don't really know. But if someone keeps getting [00:40:00] promoted with an organization, it usually means that company found them valuable. So if someone stayed at a company for a while, kept getting promoted and they worked at a few of your. Competitors, then they got promoted at both of them. The chances are when they come to you, they're going to do well, assuming they're a cultural fit. Ilana Golan: And how do you afford them? Like if you're the small and the underdog, how do you afford the big shot? How do you afford the ones that you really want? Neil Patel: You work your way up to them. So there's a person who worked for your competitors, who was great at growing them from zero to a million or 2 million in revenue, or even 5 million. There was another person who's great at growing them from five to 10 and another person from 10 to a hundred, another person from a hundred to a billion, go find the people in different roles that helped them throughout different stages. And get them for that stage at your end. The people at the earlier stages are much more affordable. Sometimes they're going to be expensive, but you can compensate them through equity or you can raise money, There's many ways to convince people. Ilana Golan: if our listeners here are [00:41:00] curious about what Neil is doing, all this SEO secrets that he has, first of all, I will just say, just go to his site, we'll have it all there. And you have all these like really cool funnels and things for SEO, but what would you say to people that are debating? What does Neil provide? Neil Patel: We provide anything when it comes to digital marketing and we teach people how to just get more traffic and grow faster. Our ad agency, NP digital, just does it for companies on a global scale. But if you want free advice, you know, neilpatel. com all my social handles are Neil Patel and teach marketing every single day. Or if you just want us to do it for you, check out NP digital. Ilana Golan: Thank you so much for the time, for just being so humble and honest with our audience and I'm sure, you know, it's just incredible to watch you grow. Neil Patel: Thank you. Thanks for having me. [00:42:00]