How do you build a company? The main thing is to create a product that will help people. Susie Carder introduces Tom Gaddis, the Co-founder of Offline Sharks. Tom talks with Susie about how people are willing to buy products to help them. Your next step is to focus on marketing. Find out how you can resonate with people. As long as you keep working and you never let failure go to your head, you’ll succeed. Don’t miss this episode!

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Actionable Strategies On How To Build A Company With Tom Gaddis

You’re going to love my next guest’s bio. Tom Gaddis has always wanted to be self-employed and free from the butt-smooching of the corporate world. He wanted success bad enough that he stuck it out to follow the entrepreneur dream. He’s going to talk about the ins and outs of what it took to build that company. Please welcome my guest, Tom Gaddis.

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Welcome to another amazing episode where I bring you my badass friends that are going to give us tools, solutions and amazing stories of their triumphs and failures. Welcome, Tom. Thank you for being here. I’m so glad that you’re here. I feel like you’re my brother from another mother.

Thanks so much for having me. I was talking to my business partner, Nick, and the team like, “I did this thing with Susie. She’s so awesome. She makes it fun.”

Business is supposed to be fun. This is what’s right to do, so let’s make it fun. Tell us in your words, what’s your magic? What’s your sweet spot? What’s your secret sauce? What do you do in the world? How do you help us, the entrepreneur?

If you know how to succeed at something, you must show other people how you did it.

There’s a couple of things. One is I started with a service business, but I teach other people how to grow their businesses because I had some success over the years and was able to do a few things. My big thing is I believe what Jay Abraham said like, “If you can do something and have some success with it, it’s your obligation to show other people how to do that.” I don’t feel like I’ve done anything special. All I’ve done is I’ve taken some action, put some effort into some things, had some success and then I want to share what that process was like for me.

I was not born an entrepreneur. I’m not like Gary V that at seven years old, was entrepreneuring everybody else around me, making money and knowing how business works. It’s been a hard-fought process for me and required me to change a lot of habits and the way I do things. I’ve had to learn a lot of stuff along the way. There are steps along the way that I struggled with. I was like, “I have to figure this out. It would be nice if there were somebody out there that had done this before and was sharing what that process looked like.” What I like to do is show people the real work behind it.

It’s not the fantasy, sprinkle or fairy dust. This is what goes into. I have an online business. We sell courses and products online. We do product launches. I had this fantasy that you start an online business and sat around in your pajamas all day. The money comes in. You don’t have to talk to anybody. The reality is that’s not the case. There’s a lot of stuff that goes into it. It’s still a lot of the things that you do on a regular business that you still do in an online business.

My goal is to share that with people and show them. There’s what you hear the “gurus” talk about and then there’s the reality. Let’s talk a little bit about the reality. I still think having an online business is probably one of the best ways to go. I don’t think anything about it is particularly hard. It takes some effort and focusing on the right things.

It knows what to do. I always tell my clients, “It doesn’t have to be hard. It has to be strategic and systemic.” It becomes fun. You can sit back a little bit. It’s not the everyday chaos. You’re not firefighting when you put systems in place. Unlike you, this didn’t come naturally. I had to figure out how to do it. I didn’t do well in school. I’m like, “I need to figure this out because I needed to make money.” That’s why I need to figure it out.

A lot of times, people look and hear some of the things. They go, “You’re so smart. You know all the stuff.” Everything that I say that’s a smart idea came from a mistake I made. The minute you make that mistake, you go, “I’m never doing that again. I don’t want to be in that position again.” Down the road, you spring forth with all this entrepreneur knowledge and business. That hasn’t been the case for me. It’s been some hard lessons learned but it’s all been worth it. Keep moving forward and being consistent is a big secret to all that.

You didn’t give up. Many people hit that brick wall and go, “I’m done.” You can’t give up and quit. I have clients who were like, “I need to put this program a break.” “That’s not how it works. You don’t get to tell me you’re quitting. I think not.” It’s standing for people like, “No, this is entrepreneurship. You’re going to fall and get up. Who’s there to pick you up?”

For me, I was on the other end of entrepreneurship. I desperately wanted to start a business. I wanted to break out of the norm. I felt like there was more than having a job. I was a restaurant manager, so working a gazillion hours a week and did not have control of my schedule. I knew there was a better way. I went on this journey to try to figure that out. I got caught up in all of this. I was buying a lot of stuff and courses, trying to figure out like, “What’s the secret? What’s this thing that everybody knows that I don’t know?” It turns out there’s not a secret. You have to do it.

I spent a lot of time spinning my wheels, buying stuff, trying to figure it out but not taking any action. It wasn’t until I started taking some action that it was like, “There’s no shortcut. You have to do it.” You can’t get to a business that sells thousands and thousands of products every year without first selling that first one. You can’t have a service business that has 100 clients until you get that 1st one. I talk to students a lot about that. You’ll give them a suggestion on how to get a client and they’re like, “How do I scale that to 100 clients?” I’m like, “How about we get one first? Then we worry about what we’re going to do when we get 100.”

Tom, share with people your badass list. In this show, I’m bringing my badass friends. You’re very unassuming and such a humble man but there’s such badassery behind you. Even if I live behind you with that award on your wall, we’re going to measure it. If you’re in the club, you know what that award is. Share with people because that’s important in the credibility of going, “I can be humble and it’s not bragging. Here are the results that I produce in the world.” Share a little bit about your badassery. Be bold. Don’t be shy.

I was a restaurant manager. I got fired from my job. I thought, “This is my cue.” I moved my family from Oklahoma to Maui, Hawaii. It’s a super expensive place. I’d never even been there before. I had this job for eight months. I get fired. I’m like, “This is my chance to start a business.” I started trying to get a service business off the ground. I wasn’t having any success. I was taking unemployment at the time. I started doing this direct mail thing.

It was a simple idea. It’s like a jumbo postcard. I would sell ads on it. I’d start mailing it out. I was able to get 16 clients in 7 days with this process. My agency was starting to grow. I’m starting to get some clients but I’m not making any money. I was a terrible money manager. I didn’t have any money. I thought, “I have this way. I can show that I can get clients. How about I put a little course together about it?” I put a course showing what I was doing. I didn’t have the money to buy the ClickFunnels account. It was like $1,000.

A friend of mine loaned me the money. He used his credit card to buy me this ClickFunnels thing. Four years later, I got this Two Comma Club Award for doing over $1 million in a funnel. It was a big moment for me to come from that spot of not having the money to do this, figuring out a way to make it happen and then making it happen.

Over those few years, I had to restructure my service business, get good with the financial aspects and figure out how to manage the money. As I started getting more clients and traction like that, the agency grew to over six figures. I thought, “I want to share this process with other people.” I partnered up with another guy who had an agency in Maui. We started a little company called Offline Sharks and taught people what we were doing.

We tried to do it from an authentic place. Everything that we teach and talk about there are things that we use in our actual agency. We’re not just making things up to put products out and stuff like that. Over the years, that company has grown. In 2020, we did about $2.2 million. That’s all with low-ticket product sales.

We were launching front-end products that were $27 with some funnels on them. We started a monthly membership and some other things there. We’ve rolled out other things, higher-end coaching programs, more done for you stuff and things like that. It’s been a whole process. We started with nothing. We had no connections in the industry. It was just us. We’re one of the big market leaders in our space, teaching people how to start and grow their digital agencies.

Build something you think will help people, and they’ll buy it.

We all experienced this and had to pivot because of the pandemic. Even if you had an online business, you still had to pivot. It was different. I don’t know if you find this but every month, there has to be another pivot because what got their attention last month is not getting their attention this month. What’s been your secret sauce in growing and staying in action?

The pandemic was an interesting situation for us. When the pandemic hit, we were on Zoom team huddles every single day for hours at a time discussing like, “Where do we go? What do we do? What do we talk about?” Figuring out a strategy to still bring in clients when all this was going on. Luckily for us, we had a program where we built these community websites that we’d been doing before. They got okay traction. When the pandemic hit, they started to get traction. We pivoted to this model of, “We can set these sites up but we can tell people what’s still open. Who’s still doing business?”

We can help the community relay information. In the process, that’ll set us up as an authority. We can talk about our marketing services and things like that on the back end. That whole process took off during the pandemic. We have some sites set up for Hawaii that got a lot of traction. We started showing people how we were doing that.

We said, “This pandemic, we’re facing it too. This is how we’re dealing with it. These are the results we’re getting.” We shared our successes and struggles. It’s like, “We tried this. It didn’t work.” That resonated with people. We doubled down on building our community and being there to support people trying to do this. That’s how we pivoted during that time.

One of the gifts that you have and your badassery is about product launches. What would you say is the most important thing, looking back, doing it for years and coming from nothing? I love that you say, “This wasn’t my deal. I was a restaurant manager.” To go, “I had to learn this in a quick amount of time.” You moved your family to Maui, got released from your job, still have bills to pay, overhead, and your family still relying on you. Many people use the back door if they have a significant other. I’m like, “If I made $100,000 this month, I could make $10,000.” What would you say in a product launch for those things we have to put in place to make it a win?

There’s a couple of things. One is you need to get something out there first. Your first and foremost thing is getting something finished that you can bring to the marketplace. It’s something that you think will resonate and help people that are going to buy it. Once you do a launch, a big part for us has constantly been looking at everything that happens during a launch and then making adjustments for the next one.

Two is starting to build those relationships as early as you can. We do all of our product launches through affiliates. Affiliates promote our products. They do all that stuff. When you’re first getting into something and don’t have a lot of connections, how do you get that traction and get going? One of the things that I did was to become a good customer first. I was in the market that we eventually started selling products in.

I was an agency owner, trying to grow agencies and buying a lot of products from people on how they were doing it, starting in that process of talking to those people and asking them intelligent questions. If I was having success, sharing it in their communities. It seems like such a small thing but when it came time for us to put out our first product, I was able to reach out to some of those people like, “I don’t know if you know me. I’m in your community. I bought this and that. I’m putting something out. Would you be willing to help me out in support?”

A couple of guys who didn’t know me but recognized my name from being involved were like, “Sure. I’ll mail for you.” They turned out to be some of my biggest affiliates. They were big players in that space. Being a good customer and participating in the marketplace helped me to break through that and start to get those affiliates. The other side of that game with affiliates in the launch is being a good vendor to work with. We’re super above board about everything, try to go out of our way to help our affiliates to make sure everybody’s taken care of and all of that stuff.

That’s served as well. We put out a ton of products. Put our heads down. We’re going to churn out. We did 5 product launches in the 1st year and then 4 the next year. It’s a lot. There is a lot of work. There’s a couple of things that happen when you start doing that. It’s been a process. You do five product launches in a year. The first thing you think is, “This is a lot of work. I don’t want to keep doing product launches to keep revenue coming into my business. What can we do not to have to do that?”

Webinars are a good thing. We developed some software, built a webinar and started webinars for our community. It’s getting cashflow coming in outside of the product launches. The product launches are still our main traffic source but we’ve built out a whole other area that happens after that. I call it our funnels and the funnel strategy. The product launch is the start of something bigger. It’s the thing that brings all the people in. We have webinars, do community building and have all this stuff that happens after to keep the cashflow coming in. That way, we don’t have to start from scratch.

We only do 2, 3 product launches a year but we’ve been able to grow our revenue exponentially because we’re maximizing that activity that happens from every launch. It’s not just a one-and-done thing like it is for most people. The flip side of that is it’s a lot of work. You got to spend a lot of time building your community and be committed to showing up every day, every week. A lot of people, when they do a product launch, get caught up in the money that it generates right off the bat. It can be a way to generate some quick income. They do it. It’s a lot of work and then they want to go, “Product launch is over. Let’s sit back.” You can’t do that. You have to keep the momentum up.

Looking back on what we’ve done, building those relationships as early as you can, constantly trying to figure out ways to improve what you’re doing and build out that back-end process. The third thing is the recurring revenue. One thing that we didn’t do from the get-go was building recurring revenue and we should have right from the get-go. You’re going to ask me a question about a failure and I’ll tell you about the recurring revenue part when that comes up.

You don’t get here without having some humbling moments, brought to your knees and wanting to light a match like, “I quit. I’m going to go get a job.” We do all feel that way at times. It’s like, “Let me go work for Tom.” Share one of your biggest failures. What did you learn from that?

We’d done a few product launches and realized, “We need to do this webinar on the back end because we want to increase our cashflow. We don’t want to be stuck doing these all the time.” We had decided, “We’ll get some software developed.” It seems easy enough. Everybody does it. Whatever it is, it’s like, “Other people are doing it. We should be able to do it.” We hire some developers and have the software built.

We do a whole launch that we’re going to do and do this webinar on the back end. We were doing the launch already and had been working on the software. We’re trying to make it better. It’s not working right. We do the product launch because we have deadlines and you have to hit your deadlines. Another thing we’ve stuck to is when we set a deadline. We’ve never changed. No matter what happens, we find a way to make the deadline work.

We’re doing the launch and are still trying to get the software working. It’s two days before and I’m on a Zoom call with my partner, Nick. We’re looking at the software. I’m like, “We’ve created this Frankenstein monster and it doesn’t work right. We cannot get on this webinar and sell this. If we sell this, we’re going to get killed. It’s not working and where it needs to be. We have this webinar we have to do. What are we going to do?”

You can’t reschedule. They’re already in. I told Nick, “Let me get off this call, put something together, and we’ll get going.” I got back and was like, “Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to start a monthly membership. We’re going to do two live trainings a week because we didn’t have anything. We’re going to have this monthly membership.” We called it the Shark Alliance.

I wrote this webinar all around like, “Join this monthly membership. Here’s what we’re going to do and what we’re going to give you.” We didn’t have any of it yet. It’s all stuff that’s going to be created. That’s the webinar we did two days later. We got 400 members into this monthly membership. First of all, we’re stunned like, “Why didn’t we do this before? What were we waiting for?” That started a whole another process of, “How do we build this membership out? How do we make it more effective?”

This is another important point. It’s this ready-fire-aim thing with the membership. We had skin in the game, so we’re like, “How do we make this better? How do we grow this thing? How do we bring more value to the people that come in?” That humble little beginning has grown into this big thing. We have different levels, a free, plus and an elite. We have this huge training library that we’ve built up over time. We did two live training calls every week for a long time. Eventually, we have this huge amount of prerecorded training that we could put into sections.

We didn’t have to do those training calls every two weeks. We were able to restructure things and say, “When you join, you’re going to get this vault of information. Plus, we’re going to do these additional coaching calls.” We built it from scratch while we were getting paid to do it, which was a real eye-opening thing for me like, “This is a good way to do it as well.” It was a scary moment because we didn’t know what we were going to do but we didn’t quit. We figured out how to make it work.

I do that all the time. In my younger years of business, we would make it up, sell it and then figure it out on the back end. It’s a lot of work but it’s a way to make revenue.

You continue to move forward. We’re the same way. We don’t do that now. Things are much more planned out, orchestrated and all that stuff.

You got to do that stuff to get to the plan that I’m orchestrating. Every failure led you to your success.

No matter what happens, find a way to make the deadline work.

My favorite saying is, “Never let failure go your head.” My dear mother used to tell me that. I’ve found that to be the case. Regardless of what’s happening or what little traction you’re getting, getting good traction is amazing. It changes over time. I look back at some of the first launches we did that we thought were so amazing. Compared to what we’re doing, they’re nothing. They were the stepping stone to get to where we’re at. No shortcut. You can’t go to the multiple six-figure launches without first doing a launch that generates a few thousand bucks. It’s part of the process.

That few thousand bucks, in the beginning, was so exciting.

You feel like you made money from nowhere. To me, it was a magic trick. I shot these videos, shared this information and made this course. All of a sudden, a few days later, there was a few thousand dollars. It was crazy. It’s a little addictive.

That’s why I always tell my clients, “Math is money and money is fun.” It becomes fun once you realize it’s the process, the highs and lows. There will always be another high. Don’t own real estate when you’re in the low. Don’t stay and camp there. Go, “I’m learning from that. What did I learn to move?” For you as a man, business owner and dad, what do you want to be remembered for?

If I could help one person or a couple of people to get out of this idea that they can’t do it. For a long time, I felt like I couldn’t do this. I looked at everybody who was having success and they were different. They weren’t like me. It even sounds weird to me. To say that I have a $2 million business seems crazy to me. I go, “This can’t be right. This can’t be me. I’m still me, the same guy but we’re in this position.” Trying to show the way to people like, “You don’t have to be a super entrepreneur or on this stuff to do it.” If you take some action, move forward and don’t give up. Keep going. I feel that anyone can do these types of things.

I hope most people look at me and go, “If that schmuck can do it, I can do it.” That’s what I’m going for. That’s the reality. The reality is that most people have the skillset and intelligence to be able to do it. They just don’t feel like they can. I’m hoping that people look at what I’ve done and say, “That’s amazing that he’s done that but I think I can do this too.” They go out and try to do it.

What I love in the transparency in your heart is to go, “If I can do it, you can do it,” which is what I share with my students all the time. It’s not sprinkled fairy dust. It’s hard work, commitment and being willing to find the answers that you don’t have. Sometimes you don’t even have the question. You just know. Finding those mentors and people who can handhold you through that process and won’t give up on you. What I love about you is you don’t give up on people. You’re like, “Not on my watch.”

You’re the type of person that’s out there who sees an opportunity and feel like, if you can create something and put it out there, to you that seems the smarter way than getting a 9:00 to 5:00 job or doing these kinds of things. I had that thought process before I ever had success. I would tell people like, “Money is all around us. It’s everywhere. We have to figure out how to get in front of it.” My family and friends thought I was nuts. It’s hard. How do you say that’s true when you’re not having success?

“If that’s the case, then why aren’t you doing better? Why aren’t you doing this and that?” I had those same thought processes and all that stuff before the success came. If you’re out there and starting to learn the stuff about how money flows, entrepreneurship and how to become a producer instead of a buyer, shifting that mentality from somebody who buys things to somebody who produces things that other people buy, cultivate that mindset, even if you’re not having success because it will eventually pay off in the long run. You have to keep studying and looking around. Marketing is such a big key to it. Focusing on how to do the marketing, resonate with people, present your idea and this thing you’ve created in a way that people go, “That’s exactly what I’ve been looking for.”

We love gifts. I believe you have a gift or something that you can give us to test, see and experience that our audience can use or implement to solve their biggest challenge or this opportunity that you have.

I do. If you head over to TomGaddis.com, which is where my podcast, What’s The Secret is, I have an E-Guide on there. It’s called The M.I.L.K. It Method. It’s the strategy that I’ve used to grow this business. When I say the strategy, it’s the way that I’ve grown all of my businesses. I start something. It has had some success.

I teach people how to do that thing. I started this direct mail thing and had success. I taught people how to do it. Once I was selling those courses, I’ve had success with that, then I showed people how to do that. How do you put a course around a skill? That’s what the M.I.L.K. It Method is. It’s how to turn any product idea or skill into a huge cash cow.

When you download it, there’s no funnel and nothing to buy. It’s something I put out there to get it out. M.I.L.K. stands for Market Idea Launch and Cha-ching. In each part, I talk about how to identify your market, get your ideas or what to produce, launch them and maximize your cashflow and profits on the back end of that. It’s a quick read. It’s a bigger strategy-type thing.

There are some specific tactics in there but it’s mainly a strategy that you want to look at. What’s great about it is that when you know that, you always know what to do next. If I don’t know who I’m going to sell to, I need to know that first. Who is the person that’s going to buy this? What is it that they’re struggling with that I can help them with? You go from there. You’ll always know what to do.

Never let failure go to your head.

Tom, thank you for being here, sharing your wisdom, always being a yes, which I love about you and spending your time with us. If you love the show, please like and share it. Please share Tom with everybody and get the M.I.L.K. It Guide. You can only get the terminology cha-ching on the show.

Thank you so much for having me, Susie.

You’re welcome.

Important Links

• Tom Gaddis
• ClickFunnels
• Two Comma Club Award
• Offline Sharks
• The M.I.L.K. It Method
• https://Twitter.com/gaddis_tom
• https://www.Facebook.com/tom.gaddis
• https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/tomgaddis/
• https://www.Instagram.com/gaddistom/
• https://TomGaddis.com/secret

About Tom Gaddis

Tom always wanted to be self-employed and free from the butt-smooching of the corporate world. He wanted success bad enough that he struck out to follow the entrepreneur dream.