Michael McNish: Welcome Ben Simpkin to Balls Deep. How you doing, Ben?
Benjamin Simkin: doing well. Michael, I am a little bit nervous. Like this is your your podcast. It's just, I mean, I've known you for for 11 years. So it's exciting to be here.
Michael McNish: I'm actually honored. to have you here because I've known you for well over a decade now, which makes me feel old for starters, but your experience, your expertise, your marketing knowledge, your business acumen has helped me get to where I am today. So I, I'm the one that's honored, mate. I'm really excited to have you here and have a really deep discussion about some of the topics that really important in the world of business and the ones that you're particularly passionate about. Cause I know that you've got some gold nuggets.
Benjamin Simkin: you Mm-hmm.
Michael McNish: that you're going to be sharing today. I don't know what they are yet but I'm sure we'll find them.
Benjamin Simkin: No, I'm not sure either.
Michael McNish: so maybe what I think we should do to start ⁓ I know you very well, but the people who are listening probably don't. So maybe we could just start a little bit about who is Ben Simkin? What's your background? Who are you?
Benjamin Simkin: Yeah, I mean, so I was a very small baby and then I'll start a little bit further down.
Michael McNish: Hahaha!
Benjamin Simkin: So I it's kind of pertinent to go back to, you where we are ⁓ now the timeline ⁓ of, know, life, the world, business and marketing and everything else. I think it's pertinent to go back to this little boy at the age of 13 and ⁓ got first computer. And I'm enough to have lived through ⁓ a time we didn't ⁓ computers were not very, very prolific. didn't exist at that point. And so I got my first computer and I so by this machine. I went down to the library and wanted to learn everything there was to know about ⁓ computers. And I all of these old, really dusty, smelly... ⁓ textbooks from like 1970-ish era of like how to do programming, how to do this, how to do that. And that age, I got in straight away into the ⁓ real deep of computers and you know, I'd go to school, do my school stuff. At lunchtime, I'd like, you know, read some books on computers or take some home. then all night long, I didn't sleep, would write software, I'd make like computer games and other things stuff for my friends at school. And really getting into that, it was such a obsession of mine that I wanted to learn absolutely everything there was to know about this stuff. And so I got there, it a number of years later when I was 16. got into computer hacking, you know, just for just for fun, right. ⁓ then and it's, ⁓ lucky I'm not, you know, behind bars, because I was, ⁓ know, ⁓ wonder if I can get into this company, I wonder if I can hack into that company, and, and so on. And then eventually, you know, hey, the schools have these computers, let's see what we can do. And I'm going there to muck around in there, I got caught. I got caught red handed, actually. and got sent home from school on an indefinite suspension. So basically they didn't know if they're to let me back in. ⁓ My dad thought it was a joke. My mom was very upset. So I had this kind of like contrast of reactions. But then, that kind of led on to other things because ⁓
Michael McNish: Hmm.
Benjamin Simkin: you know, getting into business, which I can share with you is like I got into business very early on. But when I straight shortly after that, my parents got a very strange phone call from a local business owner. And said, can you assign hack into our computers for us? Very, very strange, right? So so what happened was this company he had an IT manager with, you know, their networks and their computers and something happened. I'm not sure what happened, but the IT manager was like, he quit, he left and he locked the whole company out of their entire infrastructure. So out of their entire system. And they had to do these like, these financial reports and all this kind of, they had these legal obligations for the running the company every month and they couldn't do it. So basically it was like, they were going to be you know, they had to find someone to help them get back in because otherwise that would have been toast, right? So they got me in, I went in over a weekend because I was still at that stage, they'd let me back in. Long story short, principal came back from where he was and said, ⁓ no, no, let this guy back in, it's okay. But I went in over the weekend and restored access to the entire system. And the paid me like $2,000. But what was interesting then, he also said to me, he made a comment that kind of stuck with me for a while. And he said, hey, you you should, you should start your own business one day, because I think you're smart enough to do that. I had no idea really anything about what a business really was at that point. So I kind of didn't do anything with it. But it kind of had a seed or an idea that later on kind of came back to me and I was like, I could do this. So that's how I got into business very young. ⁓ yeah.
Michael McNish: Right, so from computers, particularly your passion for computers, to then realize when you can monetize that passion, is that the connection that you made?
Benjamin Simkin: Um, so, well, I mean, in a way, so, um, I ended up getting some jobs at some pretty high level corporate it gigs, um, where, you know, I would go into, these, I remember one time went into this massive stockbrokers office, um, on the ASX, right. And, um, they needed this, this computer needed fixing. And I was the only one in the company that I was working for that knew how to fix it. I was the youngest by far, but I was the only one that knew how to actually fix a specific issue. And the computer they sent me on, cost $1 million. And that was around 22 years ago. So this was, you know, super expensive computer that they unleashed. I think it was around 17 years old doing this. And now like, they saw this little kid come in, obviously, there's millions of dollars of transactions flowing through and all this kind of stuff. And then one of the brokers is like, Do you even know what you're doing kid? And I'm like, I took great offense. I'm like, Yes, of course I know what I'm And yeah, so I went in there and fixed it. It was like, pretty, pretty easy for me to do. So took like five, 10 minutes. And, and now like, but I think that like, weirded out that there was like this little kid basically.
Michael McNish: Hahaha
Benjamin Simkin: I mean, I didn't see myself as a kid. I was like, ⁓ yeah, I'm a young adult, right? But I had these kinds of experiences ⁓ I actually helped build a lot of the, well, not a lot of, at least some of the internet infrastructure in the country as well. Cause at the time internet was very new. So I was helping build things like internet servers, DNS servers and things like that. Very mission critical stuff. Stuff that you, if they went down, ⁓ would cause a lot of costs to the companies. So I had this kind of like, you know, mindset of making sure that everything was stable and stayed up forever.
Michael McNish: Did you love what you did back then?
Benjamin Simkin: Oh, it was it was a dream job. I mean, at 17 working at that company, I was getting paid $8 an hour. But and no overtime. And I just absolutely loved that job. And I would even stay till like nine o'clock 10 o'clock at night. And the boss would come back later and go, What are you doing? You should be at home. Like I wasn't even getting paid from anything from five o'clock onwards. But I was like, Oh, yeah, I'm just making this software. I'm doing this thing. ⁓ you know, whatever. So it was just absolutely fantastic time.
Michael McNish: Are you any different today from like working overtime and doing extra hours because you're so excited about the coding work?
Benjamin Simkin: ⁓ I didn't think I'm any different. I mean, now I get paid more money than I get paid more than $8 an hour, but I definitely have the passion. I mean, I'm a big believer in like, should only do stuff that you that fires you up. You know, ⁓ some people kind of have a different opinion about, know, you should you should chase the money and all this kind of stuff, which is true, you do need to make money. But that's only one side of the coin. I think the other side of the coin is it needs you need to do something that really fires you up and you have a passion for because
Michael McNish: Hahaha
Benjamin Simkin: The difference is, I don't know if you've ever had this situation is when you're doing something that you don't enjoy, but you kind of need the money because you need to pay the bills and so on. It's like the energy and that you bring to it, it's not very high. Whereas ⁓ you have something you're doing that, you know, maybe initially doesn't make a lot of money, but you know it could in the future, but you jump out of bed, you know, like you jump out of bed at like six o'clock in the morning and you're like, damn it, let's go. ⁓ I love this. You are actually going to succeed way more than if it was just, know, hey, I'm getting big money, but I hate it.
Michael McNish: Is that based on your own experience or have you noticed other people demonstrating that?
Benjamin Simkin: I think it's definitely true for me. I don't know if it's true for like absolutely everyone. But I think if that resonates with you and you, if you've listened to this and you think back and say, yeah, you know, like when I did that job, I didn't really like it. And it was a real grind versus, you know, when I did the other thing, jumped out of bed, I was just, couldn't stop thinking about it. I loved it. I think if you have, it's like an energy source, like you have this energy source that pushes you. that should inevitably help you create that success.
Michael McNish: So everything that you've been doing, if you think about the highest highs of your business career, do you think that you were aligned the most with passion in those moments?
Benjamin Simkin: Yeah, every every time that I did well. Absolutely. Absolutely.
Michael McNish: Yeah. What about when you didn't do well? Were you still passionate or do you think was something else? ⁓
Benjamin Simkin: well... ⁓ So I remember some times when I was doing it, I kind of fell out of love with some of the things I was doing. You when I was running my first company towards the end, I fell out of love with that. Some of the marketing stuff I was doing in the past, I I love marketing, but some of the projects I was doing fell out of love with, because it just felt like they weren't aligned. And it's hard to push yourself to... to do a great job if you're kind of like, if it feels like physically painful, like it's, it's this emotional It's hard to do. And I think if you find yourself in that position, I think you're not only you're doing everyone, including yourself with disservice. I mean, that's what I believe for myself, I should say.
Michael McNish: So you've set up the Mastermind. You've also the founder of and you've been doing a whole heap of brand new AI projects. You've been positioned ⁓ as Australia's, if not the world's number one Facebook marketer across all...
Benjamin Simkin: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Michael McNish: countless media outlets and I believe for the people that I know in Australia specifically you have been the guess the mentor ⁓ some of the best and most successful marketers in Australia and people would know that. So ⁓ achieved ⁓ of these things of all the things that I've just mentioned what are you most proud of?
Benjamin Simkin: Mm. a tough one, man. I like I'm proud of all of it. And know, it's funny because the mastermind actually started off as a passion project. And that has been hugely successful. Like I was already I mean, I've been running my my agency, we were doing, ⁓ you upwards of $10 million a year in the agency. I didn't do the mastermind because I need to make a a little bit extra money. It wasn't like about the money, right? It was like, no, I want to do this thing where I bring a bunch of people, you know, great people together. I want to build a tribe business owners that are all like minded and ⁓ I get to help them and they get to like, ⁓ know, help everyone. So I launched the mastermind. It was just I kind of called it a side project at the time. But it kind of it took on a life of its own. And now it's like, it's, ⁓ 12 years old now. So, yeah.
Michael McNish: I can't believe it's gone that long. It's amazing. you've got the mastermind and the of the mastermind from when I joined back 12 years ago, now I feel really old, thank you, ⁓ was were focusing on learning lead generation and how to use Facebook advertising, how to do it the right way. Do you think everything that we were going through then is still relevant today?
Benjamin Simkin: Hahaha Yeah, I absolutely do. I think that it is fundamentally one of the most critical things that you as a business owner need to have. You need to have leads qualified people coming to you. You need to have sales order to get clients. And fundamentally, if you don't have clients, you don't have a business. Because you could actually have, you know, ⁓ you know, we've got our operations going and we got, you know, I'm working on my website and I'm doing this other stuff and I'm spreadsheets and whatever. If you do not have clients coming to you and you're and you do not have a business. So I think that hasn't changed at all in terms of how to do lead gen, how to get clients. I think that's changed materially. But in terms of like, what is, you know, one of the most important things. is the ability to acquire customers and clients.
Michael McNish: do you think are the key requirements or the key skills in for someone to generate leads ⁓ today?
Benjamin Simkin: Uh, well, I don't think it's changed for like, you know, a thousand years. I think it's the fundamentals of the same. It's just the method of doing it. It's kind of like, you know, maybe a thousand years ago, we would use a shovel or whatever to dig a hole, but now we have machines, right? Same kind of principle where fundamentally what we're doing is we are with marketing specifically in acquiring customers and clients. we are fundamentally required to deeply understand, you know, ⁓ marketplace, the target market, we need to have we're going to provide that they want, or need, or both, and be able articulate that or be able to communicate that in a way that they can instantly understand. that is like the words, the language, the communication, because when you're, when you're thinking about, say, for example, Facebook ads, you have you use text and you use creatives use images, videos, whatever. These are all just forms of communication. Right. And then if you're on a sales call using primarily you're talking, right. And it's just all forms of being able to explain something that can be received. by that person that they recognize as something that they want to That's the basis.
Michael McNish: So of those steps, deep understanding of their customer, creating an office, creating something that they want and articulating that and creating messaging that resonates ⁓ with and compels them essentially to take the action that we want. Where do you think people struggle the most with that process?
Benjamin Simkin: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Hmm. Well, of it ⁓ different ways. So, mean, the common things are people have never really. ⁓
Michael McNish: ⁓ everything.
Benjamin Simkin: really deeply thought about target market, what's going on in their mind, what's going on in their lives, what are their emotions, what are they feeling? What are the frustrations and fears and wants and aspirations that that target market has? And what do they actually want? So when it goes to the offer is like, what do they actually want? See, a lot of people will do this. They go, have this offer, I have this product or service or I am a insert. you know, identity, I'm a technician, I'm a painter, I'm a marketing guy, I sell cars, whatever it is, right? Which they don't actually, you know, they're not, they're not the thing they think they are, right? I won't go down that rabbit hole. But basically, they go, okay, I have this thing. Now, I'm going to try and make people want it. I'm going to go, hey, everyone, you need to buy this. Because I want to sell it. What if you had, what if you could figure out what it is that they actually wanted first? And they, and, and, and, know, through your market research, they go, you know what? I'd really love it if I could solve this problem or this frustration. And you go, well, Hey, do you want to solve this frustration? Here's the solution. finding out what it is that they want. Right. ⁓ first, ⁓
Michael McNish: How do you do that? Like how, like, cause I know that some people think they know what their customers want. But when they speak to a marketer or they do a little bit further research, they realize that we're completely wrong. I don't, every business owner isn't a professional marketer, nor are they experienced ⁓ this research. How do we actually know?
Benjamin Simkin: Mmm. Okay. Well, the other thing. Yeah. Well, the other thing is you could be selling something that people want, but then the market changes. Things happen. The world changes. And all of a sudden, they don't want that anymore. So a lot of people, a lot of people find themselves in that, in that where they're like, Hey, you know what, how my marketing used to work so good, we were making so much money, but I don't know what's going on. It's getting harder and harder and nothing seems to be working. Well, it could be the market has moved on.
Michael McNish: Like blockbuster video, right?
Benjamin Simkin: It could be that you're still selling records when people want to, you know, Spotify, know, ⁓ it can be very subtle ⁓ the shift and people don't realize it. ⁓ that. Gary Halbert, great quote. The best thing to sell is what people are buying.
Michael McNish: Mmm.
Benjamin Simkin: So when it comes to how do you do that, there's a lot of different ways and you can sort of all of them. So one way ⁓ you can ⁓ as simple as surveys. Hey, what is it you want? What is it you need? Right. Have real communications with your prospects, with your clients and try to get information out of them. And sometimes you have to be a little bit smart because they might not always be able to give you ⁓ Exactly what it is. You have to kind of read between the lines. You have to figure out, okay, no, that's he told me he wanted X, but no, actually he wanted the other thing. Right. mean, Henry Ford.
Michael McNish: Do you think it's curiosity, isn't it? It's being deeply curious and fascinated with the people that you're trying to get.
Benjamin Simkin: Henry Ford, he said, if I asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.
Michael McNish: What did Steve Jobs say about what people want? Didn't he say that people don't know what they want?
Benjamin Simkin: Well, they I mean, generally, if you if you take the Henry Ford examples, like, you know, what do you want? Well, I'd to get a faster horse. Okay, well, what can I I can't make a faster horse. But what else could I do? I could make a car that would be faster than a horse. So you got to use your brain, right? Go, okay, well, okay, he said this, maybe I could do that.
Michael McNish: So if you've got multiple services or products and you've got a brand new offering compared to an offering that the marketplace knows has demand for and wants to buy, you're suggesting that it'd be far better off for them to focus their marketing efforts on the in demand rather than trying to get them to buy this new thing.
Benjamin Simkin: Yeah, I mean, you can't you can't actually generally a business owner does not ⁓ demand. They tap into it, they channel it into their business. We're not in the demand creation business, we're on the demand channeling business of where's the demand? Okay, let's go there. Right. Whereas a lot of people when they're getting into marketing, they're like, ⁓ the purpose of marketing is to create demand. No, it's not.
Michael McNish: I think a lot of people go into business for lots of different reasons. And I think some of us are because we're really good at what we do. Like it's almost like the skill we think about to when you were young, you discovered that you're really, really good. And you enjoyed the computer hacking and programming and technology. You love that. And so therefore, it's almost like the business fell into your lap. Almost you didn't go seeking the business. You almost came to you and just and you fell into it. ⁓ I know a lot of people sort of fall
Benjamin Simkin: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Michael McNish: into this into business where it's just their identity is like that's what I do but they've never learned I guess the principles of marketing or they wouldn't see themselves ⁓ marketer would they?
Benjamin Simkin: Mm-hmm. You know, it's interesting you bring that up because when I was in my first, my first company was software and IT business, computer business. And I was, you know, I'm the computer guy. I'm the computer guy. when sold that company, it's still running today, by the way, 26 years later, without me, because sold it. After I sold that business, something shifted in me, where I realized I was not my business. It wasn't my baby. You know, a of people think like, ⁓ you know, this is my little baby. And you kind of like, you have these emotions, these emotional attachments, which can some sometimes prevent you from seeing things a bit clearer, more objective. But when I saw that there's something that made me realize actually, this is what it is. You, own an operate or you own a business. You are not the business. That's a big shift.
Michael McNish: So who are they?
Benjamin Simkin: Who are the people?
Michael McNish: If they're not their business, then who are they?
Benjamin Simkin: Well, they're just people experiencing, experience on the planet. Like it's all they really are. It's like we, we create identities ⁓ they can be useful, right? Identities can be very useful. It's like, if you want to achieve a goal, first of all, set the identity. For example, if I want to be ⁓ ⁓ fit and healthy and I take on the role of athlete, for example, you know, I'm an athlete. Okay. What would an athlete do? Well, he would eat this. He would go to sleep here. He would go to the gym. So taking on identity is very powerful way to achieve a goal. But when it comes to things where, ⁓ I'm a business coach or I'm a plumber or whatever, these can hold us back from achieving a lot more because they, they cut us off from seeing other opportunities of other ways of doing things or seeing things.
Michael McNish: The I am statement right like it's like Yeah That's really interesting and you're right because a psychological point of view fight anything after an I am statement is final. It's a closed statement. It's not open It's not negotiable. It's ⁓ am so ⁓
Benjamin Simkin: It's a thought terminator. It terminates any other thoughts that you could be open to.
Michael McNish: And so rather than being closed thinking we you're we want to be open thinking right? We want to have an open mind in terms of possibility so in terms of even like So than identifying us of what we do That's the trap because what you do isn't you?
Benjamin Simkin: Hmm. Well, I like to, kind of phrase it like this. Like, my name's Ben. I liked, you know, I like to go to the gym and I like to play, you know, at the moment, I like to play paddle on the weekends. and I so happened to do marketing and I so happened to make software and do, and I make AI solutions as well. So like, is my identity any different from the guy who plays paddle on the weekend to doing, you know, building AI solutions, for example, it's kind of like.
Michael McNish: Mmm.
Benjamin Simkin: I don't, if I go to a party, which I don't do, but if I went to a party and say, what do you do? Well, I play battle on Sunday. we usually default like our occupation. Why do we do that?
Michael McNish: Yeah. think it's because of how we've been trained in society in terms of like, what do you want to be when you grow up? That question as a kid, like, and then I want to be a fireman. I want to be a lawyer. I want to be a doctor. And that becomes the goal.
Benjamin Simkin: Yeah. You know, that's a, yeah, that's a really interesting, kind of thing. something I learned maybe a year or two ago is like a lot of times when you ask, you know, what do you, what do you ask you if you have a child, right? It's either, know, what, what do want to be when you grow up or what do you want to do when you grow up? Right. But nobody ever asks, what do you want to have when you grow up? What would you like to have? Because if you know what you want to have, that can inform what you want to be and do. Right? I want to be a firefighter. Okay, cool. What do you want to have? Well, I'd like to, you know, I'd like to work, you know, four days a week and I'd like to have a motorbike and I like, whatever, whatever it is, right? But the have will inform what it is that you actually want to do and be.
Michael McNish: me of that model, the B do have model. Who do you want to be? What do you want to do to what you want to have? And it's almost like the B and the do are fused together. Like if you, because what I do is therefore who I'm being.
Benjamin Simkin: Yes. Yeah, and therefore it's what you're having as well. It's all the same. Yeah.
Michael McNish: Yeah. And so that becomes that becomes the goal which keeps us stuck. So if I say to I'm an accountant, that's my identity. How much more difficult would it be for me to be good at marketing then with that identity of I am an accountant? Because doesn't that shut off the possibility that I could be good at marketing?
Benjamin Simkin: Mm-hmm. It's better to ask yourself, what is it I want to have? Because if I'm an accountant, as an example, man, I love, you know, I love accounting, blah, blah, blah, but I'd love to have more clients. Okay, cool. Who do I need to be? What do I need to do? I need to be marketing guy.
Michael McNish: And how is that just the decision to be the marketing because you weren't the marketing guy when you were younger. At what point did you decide that you were the marketing guy?
Benjamin Simkin: well, I sold my first business. actually didn't know what I was going to do because I kind of still had my identity as well. ⁓ was, you know, early 20s. I was like, I don't know what to do with my life now. I lost and ⁓ my, my coach at the time, I'd done a little bit of marketing for a company. And I quite liked it. And I did actually a really good job and made them like a few million dollars as well with the marketing I was doing.
Michael McNish: I only made them a few million dollars. I love how nonchalant you are about, but I just made them a few million dollars. That's all in a day's work, really.
Benjamin Simkin: Well, obviously I had some sort of knack for it or just a bit of luck, but, um, cause he had a good offer, but,
Michael McNish: Hahaha!
Benjamin Simkin: my coaches like, oh, you you liked, you did that marketing thing. You, you liked that. Why don't you do that? I'm like, yeah, you're right. I did like it. That's when I kind of got into marketing 20, 21 years ago.
Michael McNish: That's probably what you connected with like what you said, like what you're passionate for. Like if you're not passionate about something or you don't enjoy it, you that's, that's the issue. But you found you really like technology and so you did it. And then you discovered that you really liked marketing. So you did it. And do you think you love them both equally? Is it, is it an equal love or do you have a favorite?
Benjamin Simkin: Mm-hmm. Plenty of things I don't like. Well, I don't think I would want to be, I mean, I, there's a, probably a lot of roles that I wouldn't want to do that I wouldn't enjoy. So I wouldn't even think about those, but I love marketing. I love business. love technology. I actually feel like very, ⁓ crazy because I feel like it's all converging a lot more than it has in the past because now we have AI. And because of my deep background in technology, like, you know, I was programming things at a very low level with like, you know, unique, was, I used every Unix platform, Linux platform. I was building internet servers, I was doing a lot of stuff. And then I got into Mark with, with the marketing. And then obviously I've been a business owner because I've been doing businesses. All these things kind of like I feel like converging into this, this thing where it's like, ⁓ now I can do the AI technology marketing business. It's, it's just, and it's, it's so exciting and a lot of fun.
Michael McNish: It's really like the evolution of all ⁓ all the types of industries that you've been in. It's almost like we're in the era where those skills are the most essential to succeed.
Benjamin Simkin: Yeah. And if you think about like a lot of people who are doing, doing things out there, say it's with, I don't know. I mean, that's why I had an edge with marketing as you know, Jeff Moore, one of my mentors, he was like, you get it because you get the business side and the marketing side. Whereas, you know, lot of marketing people, they don't, they've never run a company like a proper big company and they don't get that enterprise idea. But when I was doing marketing, I understood like the whole chain, marketing, sales, business.
Michael McNish: So this is a question that I'm really curious of your answer to. is what do you think the difference is between therefore business and marketing? Because, you know, to go to market with your product at the right price, the right place, the right promotion, like traditional marketing 101. And to say that, you know, to be successful in business, we all need to be marketers. We need to be successful. Like if you can't market yourself, you probably don't have a business. So what's the difference between marketing and business?
Benjamin Simkin: Okay. I'd say there's a lot of differences, but to keep it simple, I think that there's two sides to a coin. And I think those two sides are supply and demand. generally are working on the demand side. You know how to tap into that demand or bring it to your business. Business is ⁓ of like this manage. You have to manage and balance out very well supply and demand. So bringing in the client customer. doing, delivering the product and service and obviously administration as well. But sort of like B you have to have this balance. Cause if you, if you're not, if you're not balanced there, if you have too much supply, not enough demand or too much demand, not enough supply, you're in a bad position. You have to know how to constantly keep those balls in the air or spin the plates across whole thing. like every single area, like this 21 different generally in a company. You have to know how to manage it all.
Michael McNish: That's all the many hats of the business owner, right?
Benjamin Simkin: Yeah.
Michael McNish: So all hats, there's finance, there's operations, there's recruitment, there's marketing, there's sales, there's all these different elements. And every specialist in particular areas is gonna say ours is the most important. Like ⁓ if you the wrong people, like Richard Branson would say that the people make your success. If you don't hire A players, you don't get the right people, then you're never gonna build the successful business or the culture of your organization becomes your competitive
Benjamin Simkin: Thank
Michael McNish: advantage. Whereas then the market will say, well, your ability to generate leads and convert them and position your brand and all that is the most essential otherwise you're a nobody. And then the operations guy is going to say, well, that's all well and good. But if you don't have systems and operational process, then you're never going to be able to deliver it you're to fail. Are they all equal?
Benjamin Simkin: Heh. Hmm Yeah. think it all comes back down to ⁓ what do they all have in common? People. So what is the most important thing? If, someone says operations, okay, that requires people marketing. Okay. That requires people. It requires people coming in. It requires team. It requires the market is there all people. so comes back down to people. That is definitely the thing.
Michael McNish: Does it. But what about with AI now? Like we know organizations like Atlassian are letting go hundreds of employees. Woolworths and Coles are removing checkouts and making it all self-serve. Same with McDonald's. The idea of starting as a teenager learning how to do customer service is kind of like a dead art. It's basically, can you call out a number, yell it out, and that's you've done your job, as opposed to actually getting to know people. With AI call centers and AI bots,
Benjamin Simkin: Hmm.
Michael McNish: Is people, are we shifting away from that people being the center of the organization?
Benjamin Simkin: in Good question. You're still going to have to have people, right? I mean, across different things that we've been doing in a number of different business ventures, you know, we've been able to replace up to 80 % reliance on people. but who's creating that? Who's ⁓ those AI processes? So think you might less people, but you still need to have the best people.
Michael McNish: But the skill set of those people now is learning how to manage AI now, isn't it?
Benjamin Simkin: learning how to manage the AI and understanding probably the fundamentals that. Yeah.
Michael McNish: Because we're in an era now that the business landscape is changing so rapidly. It's actually hard to keep up. Like literally in some of the groups, they're following all the updates with Claude, the AI, and just can't keep up with all the updates. And it's almost like the horse is bolted. job ⁓ to run to try to keep up. Like I've just got to try and keep up.
Benjamin Simkin: Mm-hmm. Mm. Mm-hmm. Run after the horse?
Michael McNish: You know the dot com you're aware. Do you have a website? ⁓ I better have a website Well now it's a case of do you have an AI? ⁓ Assistant or you better help you better get one better get us know ⁓ then you see people on social saying ⁓ built my entire team with ⁓ AI agents But you look behind it and you realize that ⁓ they're of just doing automation. They're not really Independent thinkers, but I know it's moving in that direction
Benjamin Simkin: Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Michael McNish: It's a scare. It's scary. I gotta tell you, like, you know, particularly for the business owner who's used to the way things have been. How do you even adapt to this this new way because it's and it's going to keep changing, right?
Benjamin Simkin: Mm-hmm. It's going to keep changing. Definitely. think you need to be plugged. I think you definitely need to be plugged into the right people who have a handle on it. I'm very lucky enough to be one of those people because of my background. Like it's kind of like I've got a 30 year headstart on this because I understand deeply fundamentally how it works. Where I'm building my own like AI platforms, like for example, memory systems I'm building. I, I installed open core. I cracked it open and started rewriting half the code. We're not half of it, a lot of the code. So being able to do that without having, Oh, how do I, you know, what is, uh, where do I start? It's like, I already know instantly like where to go with it. So having the right people, think plugged in to. going, hey, Ben, you know, I want to be able to do X. Okay, cool. Here's what you do. And I keep on top of what's going on.
Michael McNish: Is mastering AI the new hat or is AI just a tool to support the main functions of business like marketing and sales and operations?
Benjamin Simkin: Yeah, well. See, here's the thing. You can get overwhelmed with if you're on social media or if you're on something, it's like, there's always something new. Like I'll have a look every day and like, Claude released this, you know, while this new tool, while I was sleeping or this new thing came out overnight or whatever. I'm like, okay, I'll check it out. But I check it out because I want to be at the forefront. I want to create technologies and different, because that's what I want to do. But as a business owners don't need to do that. They don't need to know everything that's come out because what you really, what you really want to do. And it comes back to this, ⁓ this like acronym in engineering, which is the purpose of a system is what it does. ⁓ So what does that mean? It means if we work backwards. So going for those ⁓ you that know theory of constraints model, the theory of constraints model is finding the one thing right now that's holding you back from achieving your goal, right? And so if we think about the theory of constraints model is like this week, know, my constraint this week is I'm not getting enough leads or I'm not getting enough sales or ⁓ ⁓ I have a lot more customers, but my operations is not being able to keep up with that. Okay, cool. So what is my issue? I came, my issues here. How can I use AI to solve that constraint? Because knowing some new technology does X, Y, Z. If it's not going to solve your constraint is completely irrelevant to you right now. You don't even want to waste your time looking at it because if you're solving a non-constraint, it's not growing your business.
Michael McNish: Got it.
Benjamin Simkin: So I always think of it from, and this is what I do as well. I mean, I do a lot of development and experimentation and things like this, but when it comes to the actual business, we go, okay, well, our current constraint is X. Okay, which tool is gonna be the best solve that constraint? And you go to the next one. So always think in terms of what is the thing that we need to solve right now, only do that and use, if you can use AI to do that, that's great.
Michael McNish: So AI is that plugging tool to a fundamental area of business. So the pillars of business haven't changed. It's just we're plugging AI into overcome constraints in those particular areas. Is that right?
Benjamin Simkin: Yeah, exactly. I mean, let's, take a scenario where, know, you're getting all this demand for your product and don't have enough people in operations. Like say you're selling a widget and you're sending them out, you know, you don't have enough people to pack the boxes and send them out in the mail. Traditionally, you had many more people, right? But when you have a at the ⁓ constraint that you have now, Maybe traditionally you'd be like, we need more people. But now you might say, hey, is there an AI that could do this? Right. Or we're not getting enough leads or we're not getting enough sales or whatever it is. It's okay. How can AI support that constraint to improve it?
Michael McNish: Cause what I've... known and seen of what you've been doing lately is you've been an inventor and creating tools specifically for what you just spoke about it, plugging in AI technology into an area of business. So do you want to just maybe talk through some of the things that you've created that, I mean, I've never seen this stuff before, like Leafish, for example, like what that does and other tools that you've, tools that people have absolutely no idea that you've made because aren't they exclusive to the
Benjamin Simkin: Mm.
Michael McNish: mastermind?
Benjamin Simkin: Yeah. So exclusively mastermind tools, because, because they're so powerful that they, they give you such an edge in business and I, and we're really building them out. And I'm actually just, what I'm doing is I'm building them for myself because we go, okay, you know, we have this constraint. Okay. What, I could make this kind of tool and actually lead fish came out of that where we wanted to get a bit more efficient on. our sales team on calling leads because we had, couldn't get, we couldn't get, we had to get more people on the sales team. was the con, that was, well, that was the, the, that's the way we would have solved it in the past. You know, 20 years ago, we would just hire tons of salespeople, but we had this problem where we get, we getting too many people, you know, signing up? ⁓ and then, you know, you have to call, sounds people have to be on the phone for 30 minutes on each lead. X of them, you know, they're either not qualified or, know, or if you know, they're financially qualified, but not a fit for some specific reason or what it like, it's kind of like manually going through this process. So we had that constraint. So was like, ⁓ I'm going to do this. So I built. ⁓ an AI tool called Leadfish where as soon as the lead comes in, even if you only have the email address, we can through the proprietary system that I made, it basically gives you 55 data points on that lead. Companies, how long they've been in business, revenue, ⁓ size, what do they actually do? You know, what products and services they sell. There's 55 different things that we find on each lead before. before we even speak to them. then it'll tell us, okay, no, this guy, know, we get the leads where it's like, you know, Jeff from Telstra. ⁓ No, guy is just an employee. Okay, cool, it's not a fit. Okay, yeah, guy's a high priority lead. Okay, get onto him. So we have a way with the sales team, they look at the list every morning, go, okay, I'm gonna call these six people, whatever it is, because they're our people. They're the people that... you know, match our ICP, our target market. And so we, instead of hiring more people, we were able to make that process more efficient because the constraint was leads come in, we don't get to call them quick enough. Right. So I'm just solving my own constraints. And then what actually happened was one of my sales guys, he messaged me at like, I don't know, five o'clock in the morning. He's like, Hey, this is really cool. You could sell this. And I'm like, it didn't occur to me that this would be something that we could provide to other people. I'm like, ⁓ yeah, good point. So we built it out for Mastermind.
Michael McNish: That reminds me of the story when you were a kid, know, like paying you $2,000. ⁓ I didn't realize we'd get paid for this. This is cool. It's almost like the, it's the same thing. It's so cool. what's something else that you've made? Like what's another constraint that you identified and what's the AI solution that you built for it?
Benjamin Simkin: Yeah. So, ⁓ I mean, there's so many we can go on forever, but, ⁓ yeah, maybe we talk about, ⁓ I made an AI sales coach and sales manager. So we have the team. It's incredibly hard to manage a big sales team. I mean, it's incredibly hard to manage one salesperson because you have, and I was speaking to one of my clients yesterday, you, you, rely on self reporting. You know, you, don't have much visibility about what's doing sales coaching is kind of like, it's very expensive, very kind of difficult to do. Even if you only had one, but when you start to grow teams, it's very difficult. Sales managers ⁓ great, but they're, only have so many hours in the day. So I built an AI sales manager that, that manages all the reps. listens their calls, gives them feedback on what they did well, what they should, what they could improve upon. Gives us a close ability score. So it tells us out of 10, how likely that person is going to sign up as a customer or client. Yeah, ⁓ just whole lot more stuff. So it's basically replacing the sales manager who does sales coaching as well. So it's an AI one. So we put that in there. Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's amazing. So that the constraint was, okay, how do we manage these people? And how do we even like improve sales coaching? Cause a sales coach can't even listen to every single call and go, Hey, you know, Hey, Tim, I listened to your call, you know, that you had this morning and you could do, you hear some tips for you or whatever. He can't actually listen to like 6,000 calls or 600 calls a month or whatever, but this can't
Michael McNish: sounds like you're unfair advantages for you. Like you're creating these tools that just give you such a heads up ⁓ over everybody else ⁓ you're taking advantage of what AI can do.
Benjamin Simkin: Plus I think it helps that it's kind of like, because I've been doing it for so long, it's just something that I can just sit there and do. You know, I'm not like, I'm not sweating out going, oh, how do I do this? I'm like, oh, we have this constraint. Okay, yeah, let's do that, you know? So I'm solving my own constraints, but at the same time, like, okay, cool, I wanna use these to help other people, because I wanna give these people unfair advantage as well.
Michael McNish: Do you think? Do you think that the business owner, you we talked about, you know, they're good at what they do. So they're passionate about the doing of their business or maybe their skill or whatever they do. And then we talked about the identity of like, need to be the marketer. You know, if I'm the marketer and I'm driving my business, then I'm gonna generate leads and sales when I have...
Benjamin Simkin: Mm-hmm.
Michael McNish: the power to scale my business to wherever I want it to go. Do you think that the business owner today needs to learn how to use AI or do you think they just need to find the right tool or person or group to just tap into it? Like, do they need to know it or do they just need to find it?
Benjamin Simkin: That's a good question. I think it depends on, I think it depends on a lot of things, but I think that, I think fundamentally it's something you should understand. If you look at any great successful person. Pick one, pick anyone. You will see, okay, they're great at great communicators, great marketing, great at sales. Right? and AI is the next thing where if you, if you don't understand it enough to know know enough about it to either get things done or to effectively delegate it to the right person, like even being able to choose who to work with, you have to know how it works. It's one of those skills that you're going to now have to have. I mean, it's kind of like, if you go back to the days when the internet started coming out, you had to learn how to do email. you have to learn how to do website, like, visit the internet, you know. And it you imagine someone right now starting a business and they don't even know what the internet is. So ⁓ one of those skills. Okay, now it's ⁓ the past, maybe not so mandatory, but now it is. ⁓
Michael McNish: So what's the problem? Let's say we're gonna use AI to improve our marketing because I think lot of businesses want more sales and more leads. That's a fundamental ⁓ for most companies ⁓ to achieve ⁓ million dollar, two million dollar plus company. What's wrong with just asking ChatGBT or Claw for the marketing copy and the marketing plan straight out of the box?
Benjamin Simkin: Mm-hmm. Yes. What's wrong with it? It doesn't have it doesn't have the the kind of the knowledge and the experience. I was just speaking to a friend of mine yesterday he he advises on property like investing in property. And he's done it for 30 years like ⁓ he property blindfolded. And, ⁓ and he said, he recommended the specific property to the client. Cause he's like, okay, this is a growth corridor. This is what, you know, what I see from the data is going to be a really good area for like capital growth. he gets an email back. He knows this, this clients have done chat GPT or chat GPT said this was a bad area to buy a property. And he's like, the difference is that it can get data, but it doesn't have the life experience. It doesn't have the reality. It's kind of like, you know, book smart versus street smart. It's like you can know you can read all the business books, but if you've never run a business, or do a business degree, and you start a business like, ⁓ nobody ever told me about told me taught me like how to overcome this problem. It's having that real that real knowledge and experience. And so if you're asking JGT, I think can be very helpful. I also on the other side of the coin, I think it can be very dangerous to if you've never run a business, or do a business degree, and you start a business like, ⁓ ever told me about told me taught me like how to overcome this problem. It's having that real that real knowledge and experience. And so if you're asking JGT, I think can be very helpful. I also on the other side of the coin, I think it can be very dangerous to ⁓ because I think it tends to hallucinate sometimes in terms of like, yeah, you are correct. ⁓ Where are you going to get the advantage in the tools that I create have proprietary data? Like I literally sit there for three days and I literally go back and forth training the ⁓ model.
Michael McNish: You're absolutely right, Ben Simken. That's what JTPT would say. You're absolutely right. You are correct. I was wrong. will never do that again.
Benjamin Simkin: on the knowledge. For example, the sales manager, we have, you know, 15 years worth of, of calls, we have sales training, we ourselves managers have done. We have coaching training, we have, we have all the data. So I'm able to go back and forth, back and forth and reiterate on the training. And it's basically replicating our specific knowledge. If we just said, If you went to Jachipi and said, tell me, you know how I can be a better at sales, they would go, well, number one, you first of all, you have to listen, you have to ask questions and ask for the sale. It's like, okay, that's very ⁓ useful, but it'll give you the nuanced stuff. When it come to the AI copywriting tool that we made for the mastermind, we put in 20 years worth of winning campaigns, funnels, copywriting ⁓ and trained it and I was going back and forth and then and then at the end I was putting in bad marketing because I needed it to know both sides of the coin. So I was putting, went bad, good, bad, and then I would make sure that it was figuring out what was doing. ⁓ I got it to a point where it was like it knew that it was going to create this. And we actually tested it. So I created, we had a client and he needed to have a brand new funnel, be yourself.
Michael McNish: Sounds like. You're teaching it.
Benjamin Simkin: a video sales letter, whole thing. I was like, I'm gonna test this out for real. So we put in everything, comes out the VSL, the funnel, everything else like that, we launched it. He's generating many leads and getting so many sales like from day And you know like how rare that is usually when you launch a campaign, you got to like optimize it, improve it, tweak it, go through a million creatives to get it to a point where you're like, Yeah, I'm happy with the performance. This from day one just started performing and I was like, ⁓ wow, this is great. And you know who that client was, so you saw it.
Michael McNish: Hmm. Yeah, it was incredible. And when you told me that, that I mean, it's easy to say that AI did it, right? But it's not just that as simple as like asking the question into chat GPT or Claude or whatever.
Benjamin Simkin: Ha ha ha!
Michael McNish: It's like you've worked out how to program it in the sense of like a human being. you, if you onboard an employee into your organization, there's an onboarding process, right? And you've got to train them and watch the training videos and certify that they know how to do what they do. So you're effectively you've actually learned the skill of how to train AI into becoming a master with the 2030 years experience on a particular topic to then actually give better quality advice as opposed to
Benjamin Simkin: Thank Mm-hmm.
Michael McNish: surface level ⁓ out of the box which could take you in the completely wrong direction.
Benjamin Simkin: Yeah. On the tech side, yeah, but if you think about it, it kind of models a human, because if we hire a salesperson, we put them through the training, we get them to listen to, you know, we would always get our salespeople to listen to a whole bunch of successful sales calls to know what a success sounds like. Then we would coach them, okay, no, that was a bad call because you did this and that. Okay, that was a good call. Yeah, this is what you did really well. So we were manually doing this with human beings. It's the same kind of thing that we're doing with, that I'm doing with AI is like, here's a good thing, here's a bad thing, here's why.
Michael McNish: Do you think you're now the AI, like are you the AI wizard, the AI marketer? I you were the Facebook ⁓ You were the guy that people went to to learn Facebook ads. Are you still that today or are you something different?
Benjamin Simkin: That's a good question. mean, I think, I mean, obviously we still do a lot of Facebook and a lot of marketing. Um, like I said, it's a primary driver for a business, right? But the AI is kind of like another layer. And I think you're like, I think I'm any unique and lucky, a lucky, um, position that I do have the background because you have people that are, um, you know, started to jump on AI, don't have technical bone in their body just because they've never done it. Right. Or they're doing AI, jumping on that, but they don't have any business or marketing experience. So they don't have the other pieces, which I think is super important to have. And especially when it comes to, say, AI and not understanding the business, you're going to be, it's going to be a waste of time. You're not going to be driving real outcomes. Whereas if you know how the business works and you use AI to solve constraints, that's when you see it grow, right? When it comes to AI, I mean, I was a computer hacker when I was 15, 16 years old. So my mind when I'm doing this is like security first. So a lot of these, a lot of these people, I got hacked into overnight and they stole my API keys and they did this and did that. It's like, yeah, like you got to be very, and especially especially for a company, have to like that security is like the most important component because imagine if you had a company of, mean, it doesn't matter what size it is, but you you have your client's confidential data in there or something like this and it gets hacked and leaked. It's like, that's probably one of the worst things that could happen to you.
Michael McNish: And that could have been you when you were 16 hacking into the system just for fun.
Benjamin Simkin: Well, I never did anything malicious. I was playing pranks on people, but I never deleted any. It pretty much was. I just do stupid things. Like I'd like open and close their like CD-ROM drives, or I would like change their wallpaper, change their background wallpaper to like something funny. never did anything like, what's the word? Like,
Michael McNish: It's like Bart Simpson calling up Moe at the Tavern going, I'm looking for Amanda Huggenkiss. Ha ha
Benjamin Simkin: I never damaged or just damaged. I never deleted any or did stuff like that. It was always like harmless pranks. that's the kind of stuff that I was doing. Cause like, what's the point of like ⁓ a computer or deleting a file? Cause it's like, it's not very funny.
Michael McNish: Nah. It's funny for you when you're the person doing it, but...
Benjamin Simkin: Well, no, because it's not funny because I'd rather like get them to giggle on like or freak them out, know, freak him out like, ⁓ what's going on? Like, Whoa, who changed my wallpaper to like Lego or whatever?
Michael McNish: Exactly, So really are the master of sort of combining technology with marketing. I think that's probably like your greatest gift and your skill and realizing that they're...
Benjamin Simkin: Thanks, Yeah.
Michael McNish: I mean, right now they're essential to work together to achieve success. If you do one without the other, you're probably going to be left behind. If you're really good at AI, but you're not very good at marketing, you're probably struggle still. But if you're really good at marketing, you're not really leveraging or understand how to tap into what's happening with AI. You'll also probably not, you may not be left behind as much, but like you'll eventually be left behind in your competitive advantage the other companies will be able to move fast to do more ⁓ understand more of it. Is that right?
Benjamin Simkin: Exactly. So I mean, when it comes to a business owner, if they don't know AI, they definitely need to get onto it. Because what I was thinking about was like, you know, when you're solving constraints, when you because you're solving problems, right there, it's like, okay, we want to get to this goal, we have, you know, we're not able to achieve this goal because of x, okay, how do we solve x? What I'm thinking about AI is kind of like it, it kind of solves it permanently. If you think about it, if you think about a lot of the problems that you have, they kind of come back and forth and they're generally because they rely on people. know, know, Jenny wasn't stopped checking, you know, that spreadsheet. And then we realized six months later that we, you know, we had this problem. Well, with AI, it's like, okay, once it's in, you're probably not going to have that constraint anymore. And it's infinitely scalable as well. So it's really interesting because it's kind of cool that, we can probably solve this constraint either forever or for a very, very long time and not even have to go back to it.
Michael McNish: Constraints really is your thing at the moment, isn't it? Like how do we use these tools to overcome a constraint as opposed to let's just use AI because it's there. So it's being able to identify that constraint, isn't it?
Benjamin Simkin: Yeah, that's always what business has been is solving constraints. Right? It's always been you wake up, you go, okay, let's look at all the data. Okay, we have a problem over here. Like, for example, we don't have enough people in in operations, we don't have enough salespeople, we don't have enough leads, or it's taking too long for a client when they get signed up to ⁓ the product, you know, It's taking you three weeks instead of one week. Okay, cool. that it's always been that way. It's just how you've solved it's been different. And I think that's where AI will come into play with a lot of this stuff.
Michael McNish: That's amazing. think just that thing about identifying a constraint and solving it probably the biggest takeaway that anyone could probably get from this entire ⁓ Because that's a system.
Benjamin Simkin: That's good.
Michael McNish: You know, it's a system that you can replicate and not get overwhelmed in all the distractions that occur with all the messaging that we're seeing on social media and advertising right now about feeling left behind and you need to do this and you need to do this and you need to do this. But breaking it down to the simplistic, simple method of what's my constraint? What am I gonna do to overcome it? And then identify the next constraint.
Benjamin Simkin: Absolutely right. Because yeah, because you don't need to. And in fact, if you jumped on every single tool that came out every 24 hours, you're actually ⁓ actually doing you going backwards because you're ⁓ your time and energy on things that are not relevant to the progress of the business. Like the only thing you should ever be working on is the thing to ⁓ that business move one step forward.
Michael McNish: That's amazing. Ben, I want to thank you for sharing your wisdom today. Like that was freaking amazing. And if someone wants to learn a little bit more about you, get in contact with you or out about AI or the mastermind or anything, what's the best way for them to get in touch? ⁓
Benjamin Simkin: Thank you, Michael. Well, you can follow me on our Instagram, Benjamin Simkin. can go to them, themastermind.com.au or .com as well. Yeah, it's probably the two best ways to do it.
Michael McNish: Awesome. Ben, thank you so much.
Benjamin Simkin: Thank you, Michael. It's been fantastic.
Benjamin Simkin: doing well. Michael, I am a little bit nervous. Like this is your your podcast. It's just, I mean, I've known you for for 11 years. So it's exciting to be here.
Michael McNish: I'm actually honored. to have you here because I've known you for well over a decade now, which makes me feel old for starters, but your experience, your expertise, your marketing knowledge, your business acumen has helped me get to where I am today. So I, I'm the one that's honored, mate. I'm really excited to have you here and have a really deep discussion about some of the topics that really important in the world of business and the ones that you're particularly passionate about. Cause I know that you've got some gold nuggets.
Benjamin Simkin: you Mm-hmm.
Michael McNish: that you're going to be sharing today. I don't know what they are yet but I'm sure we'll find them.
Benjamin Simkin: No, I'm not sure either.
Michael McNish: so maybe what I think we should do to start ⁓ I know you very well, but the people who are listening probably don't. So maybe we could just start a little bit about who is Ben Simkin? What's your background? Who are you?
Benjamin Simkin: Yeah, I mean, so I was a very small baby and then I'll start a little bit further down.
Michael McNish: Hahaha!
Benjamin Simkin: So I it's kind of pertinent to go back to, you where we are ⁓ now the timeline ⁓ of, know, life, the world, business and marketing and everything else. I think it's pertinent to go back to this little boy at the age of 13 and ⁓ got first computer. And I'm enough to have lived through ⁓ a time we didn't ⁓ computers were not very, very prolific. didn't exist at that point. And so I got my first computer and I so by this machine. I went down to the library and wanted to learn everything there was to know about ⁓ computers. And I all of these old, really dusty, smelly... ⁓ textbooks from like 1970-ish era of like how to do programming, how to do this, how to do that. And that age, I got in straight away into the ⁓ real deep of computers and you know, I'd go to school, do my school stuff. At lunchtime, I'd like, you know, read some books on computers or take some home. then all night long, I didn't sleep, would write software, I'd make like computer games and other things stuff for my friends at school. And really getting into that, it was such a obsession of mine that I wanted to learn absolutely everything there was to know about this stuff. And so I got there, it a number of years later when I was 16. got into computer hacking, you know, just for just for fun, right. ⁓ then and it's, ⁓ lucky I'm not, you know, behind bars, because I was, ⁓ know, ⁓ wonder if I can get into this company, I wonder if I can hack into that company, and, and so on. And then eventually, you know, hey, the schools have these computers, let's see what we can do. And I'm going there to muck around in there, I got caught. I got caught red handed, actually. and got sent home from school on an indefinite suspension. So basically they didn't know if they're to let me back in. ⁓ My dad thought it was a joke. My mom was very upset. So I had this kind of like contrast of reactions. But then, that kind of led on to other things because ⁓
Michael McNish: Hmm.
Benjamin Simkin: you know, getting into business, which I can share with you is like I got into business very early on. But when I straight shortly after that, my parents got a very strange phone call from a local business owner. And said, can you assign hack into our computers for us? Very, very strange, right? So so what happened was this company he had an IT manager with, you know, their networks and their computers and something happened. I'm not sure what happened, but the IT manager was like, he quit, he left and he locked the whole company out of their entire infrastructure. So out of their entire system. And they had to do these like, these financial reports and all this kind of, they had these legal obligations for the running the company every month and they couldn't do it. So basically it was like, they were going to be you know, they had to find someone to help them get back in because otherwise that would have been toast, right? So they got me in, I went in over a weekend because I was still at that stage, they'd let me back in. Long story short, principal came back from where he was and said, ⁓ no, no, let this guy back in, it's okay. But I went in over the weekend and restored access to the entire system. And the paid me like $2,000. But what was interesting then, he also said to me, he made a comment that kind of stuck with me for a while. And he said, hey, you you should, you should start your own business one day, because I think you're smart enough to do that. I had no idea really anything about what a business really was at that point. So I kind of didn't do anything with it. But it kind of had a seed or an idea that later on kind of came back to me and I was like, I could do this. So that's how I got into business very young. ⁓ yeah.
Michael McNish: Right, so from computers, particularly your passion for computers, to then realize when you can monetize that passion, is that the connection that you made?
Benjamin Simkin: Um, so, well, I mean, in a way, so, um, I ended up getting some jobs at some pretty high level corporate it gigs, um, where, you know, I would go into, these, I remember one time went into this massive stockbrokers office, um, on the ASX, right. And, um, they needed this, this computer needed fixing. And I was the only one in the company that I was working for that knew how to fix it. I was the youngest by far, but I was the only one that knew how to actually fix a specific issue. And the computer they sent me on, cost $1 million. And that was around 22 years ago. So this was, you know, super expensive computer that they unleashed. I think it was around 17 years old doing this. And now like, they saw this little kid come in, obviously, there's millions of dollars of transactions flowing through and all this kind of stuff. And then one of the brokers is like, Do you even know what you're doing kid? And I'm like, I took great offense. I'm like, Yes, of course I know what I'm And yeah, so I went in there and fixed it. It was like, pretty, pretty easy for me to do. So took like five, 10 minutes. And, and now like, but I think that like, weirded out that there was like this little kid basically.
Michael McNish: Hahaha
Benjamin Simkin: I mean, I didn't see myself as a kid. I was like, ⁓ yeah, I'm a young adult, right? But I had these kinds of experiences ⁓ I actually helped build a lot of the, well, not a lot of, at least some of the internet infrastructure in the country as well. Cause at the time internet was very new. So I was helping build things like internet servers, DNS servers and things like that. Very mission critical stuff. Stuff that you, if they went down, ⁓ would cause a lot of costs to the companies. So I had this kind of like, you know, mindset of making sure that everything was stable and stayed up forever.
Michael McNish: Did you love what you did back then?
Benjamin Simkin: Oh, it was it was a dream job. I mean, at 17 working at that company, I was getting paid $8 an hour. But and no overtime. And I just absolutely loved that job. And I would even stay till like nine o'clock 10 o'clock at night. And the boss would come back later and go, What are you doing? You should be at home. Like I wasn't even getting paid from anything from five o'clock onwards. But I was like, Oh, yeah, I'm just making this software. I'm doing this thing. ⁓ you know, whatever. So it was just absolutely fantastic time.
Michael McNish: Are you any different today from like working overtime and doing extra hours because you're so excited about the coding work?
Benjamin Simkin: ⁓ I didn't think I'm any different. I mean, now I get paid more money than I get paid more than $8 an hour, but I definitely have the passion. I mean, I'm a big believer in like, should only do stuff that you that fires you up. You know, ⁓ some people kind of have a different opinion about, know, you should you should chase the money and all this kind of stuff, which is true, you do need to make money. But that's only one side of the coin. I think the other side of the coin is it needs you need to do something that really fires you up and you have a passion for because
Michael McNish: Hahaha
Benjamin Simkin: The difference is, I don't know if you've ever had this situation is when you're doing something that you don't enjoy, but you kind of need the money because you need to pay the bills and so on. It's like the energy and that you bring to it, it's not very high. Whereas ⁓ you have something you're doing that, you know, maybe initially doesn't make a lot of money, but you know it could in the future, but you jump out of bed, you know, like you jump out of bed at like six o'clock in the morning and you're like, damn it, let's go. ⁓ I love this. You are actually going to succeed way more than if it was just, know, hey, I'm getting big money, but I hate it.
Michael McNish: Is that based on your own experience or have you noticed other people demonstrating that?
Benjamin Simkin: I think it's definitely true for me. I don't know if it's true for like absolutely everyone. But I think if that resonates with you and you, if you've listened to this and you think back and say, yeah, you know, like when I did that job, I didn't really like it. And it was a real grind versus, you know, when I did the other thing, jumped out of bed, I was just, couldn't stop thinking about it. I loved it. I think if you have, it's like an energy source, like you have this energy source that pushes you. that should inevitably help you create that success.
Michael McNish: So everything that you've been doing, if you think about the highest highs of your business career, do you think that you were aligned the most with passion in those moments?
Benjamin Simkin: Yeah, every every time that I did well. Absolutely. Absolutely.
Michael McNish: Yeah. What about when you didn't do well? Were you still passionate or do you think was something else? ⁓
Benjamin Simkin: well... ⁓ So I remember some times when I was doing it, I kind of fell out of love with some of the things I was doing. You when I was running my first company towards the end, I fell out of love with that. Some of the marketing stuff I was doing in the past, I I love marketing, but some of the projects I was doing fell out of love with, because it just felt like they weren't aligned. And it's hard to push yourself to... to do a great job if you're kind of like, if it feels like physically painful, like it's, it's this emotional It's hard to do. And I think if you find yourself in that position, I think you're not only you're doing everyone, including yourself with disservice. I mean, that's what I believe for myself, I should say.
Michael McNish: So you've set up the Mastermind. You've also the founder of and you've been doing a whole heap of brand new AI projects. You've been positioned ⁓ as Australia's, if not the world's number one Facebook marketer across all...
Benjamin Simkin: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Michael McNish: countless media outlets and I believe for the people that I know in Australia specifically you have been the guess the mentor ⁓ some of the best and most successful marketers in Australia and people would know that. So ⁓ achieved ⁓ of these things of all the things that I've just mentioned what are you most proud of?
Benjamin Simkin: Mm. a tough one, man. I like I'm proud of all of it. And know, it's funny because the mastermind actually started off as a passion project. And that has been hugely successful. Like I was already I mean, I've been running my my agency, we were doing, ⁓ you upwards of $10 million a year in the agency. I didn't do the mastermind because I need to make a a little bit extra money. It wasn't like about the money, right? It was like, no, I want to do this thing where I bring a bunch of people, you know, great people together. I want to build a tribe business owners that are all like minded and ⁓ I get to help them and they get to like, ⁓ know, help everyone. So I launched the mastermind. It was just I kind of called it a side project at the time. But it kind of it took on a life of its own. And now it's like, it's, ⁓ 12 years old now. So, yeah.
Michael McNish: I can't believe it's gone that long. It's amazing. you've got the mastermind and the of the mastermind from when I joined back 12 years ago, now I feel really old, thank you, ⁓ was were focusing on learning lead generation and how to use Facebook advertising, how to do it the right way. Do you think everything that we were going through then is still relevant today?
Benjamin Simkin: Hahaha Yeah, I absolutely do. I think that it is fundamentally one of the most critical things that you as a business owner need to have. You need to have leads qualified people coming to you. You need to have sales order to get clients. And fundamentally, if you don't have clients, you don't have a business. Because you could actually have, you know, ⁓ you know, we've got our operations going and we got, you know, I'm working on my website and I'm doing this other stuff and I'm spreadsheets and whatever. If you do not have clients coming to you and you're and you do not have a business. So I think that hasn't changed at all in terms of how to do lead gen, how to get clients. I think that's changed materially. But in terms of like, what is, you know, one of the most important things. is the ability to acquire customers and clients.
Michael McNish: do you think are the key requirements or the key skills in for someone to generate leads ⁓ today?
Benjamin Simkin: Uh, well, I don't think it's changed for like, you know, a thousand years. I think it's the fundamentals of the same. It's just the method of doing it. It's kind of like, you know, maybe a thousand years ago, we would use a shovel or whatever to dig a hole, but now we have machines, right? Same kind of principle where fundamentally what we're doing is we are with marketing specifically in acquiring customers and clients. we are fundamentally required to deeply understand, you know, ⁓ marketplace, the target market, we need to have we're going to provide that they want, or need, or both, and be able articulate that or be able to communicate that in a way that they can instantly understand. that is like the words, the language, the communication, because when you're, when you're thinking about, say, for example, Facebook ads, you have you use text and you use creatives use images, videos, whatever. These are all just forms of communication. Right. And then if you're on a sales call using primarily you're talking, right. And it's just all forms of being able to explain something that can be received. by that person that they recognize as something that they want to That's the basis.
Michael McNish: So of those steps, deep understanding of their customer, creating an office, creating something that they want and articulating that and creating messaging that resonates ⁓ with and compels them essentially to take the action that we want. Where do you think people struggle the most with that process?
Benjamin Simkin: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Hmm. Well, of it ⁓ different ways. So, mean, the common things are people have never really. ⁓
Michael McNish: ⁓ everything.
Benjamin Simkin: really deeply thought about target market, what's going on in their mind, what's going on in their lives, what are their emotions, what are they feeling? What are the frustrations and fears and wants and aspirations that that target market has? And what do they actually want? So when it goes to the offer is like, what do they actually want? See, a lot of people will do this. They go, have this offer, I have this product or service or I am a insert. you know, identity, I'm a technician, I'm a painter, I'm a marketing guy, I sell cars, whatever it is, right? Which they don't actually, you know, they're not, they're not the thing they think they are, right? I won't go down that rabbit hole. But basically, they go, okay, I have this thing. Now, I'm going to try and make people want it. I'm going to go, hey, everyone, you need to buy this. Because I want to sell it. What if you had, what if you could figure out what it is that they actually wanted first? And they, and, and, and, know, through your market research, they go, you know what? I'd really love it if I could solve this problem or this frustration. And you go, well, Hey, do you want to solve this frustration? Here's the solution. finding out what it is that they want. Right. ⁓ first, ⁓
Michael McNish: How do you do that? Like how, like, cause I know that some people think they know what their customers want. But when they speak to a marketer or they do a little bit further research, they realize that we're completely wrong. I don't, every business owner isn't a professional marketer, nor are they experienced ⁓ this research. How do we actually know?
Benjamin Simkin: Mmm. Okay. Well, the other thing. Yeah. Well, the other thing is you could be selling something that people want, but then the market changes. Things happen. The world changes. And all of a sudden, they don't want that anymore. So a lot of people, a lot of people find themselves in that, in that where they're like, Hey, you know what, how my marketing used to work so good, we were making so much money, but I don't know what's going on. It's getting harder and harder and nothing seems to be working. Well, it could be the market has moved on.
Michael McNish: Like blockbuster video, right?
Benjamin Simkin: It could be that you're still selling records when people want to, you know, Spotify, know, ⁓ it can be very subtle ⁓ the shift and people don't realize it. ⁓ that. Gary Halbert, great quote. The best thing to sell is what people are buying.
Michael McNish: Mmm.
Benjamin Simkin: So when it comes to how do you do that, there's a lot of different ways and you can sort of all of them. So one way ⁓ you can ⁓ as simple as surveys. Hey, what is it you want? What is it you need? Right. Have real communications with your prospects, with your clients and try to get information out of them. And sometimes you have to be a little bit smart because they might not always be able to give you ⁓ Exactly what it is. You have to kind of read between the lines. You have to figure out, okay, no, that's he told me he wanted X, but no, actually he wanted the other thing. Right. mean, Henry Ford.
Michael McNish: Do you think it's curiosity, isn't it? It's being deeply curious and fascinated with the people that you're trying to get.
Benjamin Simkin: Henry Ford, he said, if I asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.
Michael McNish: What did Steve Jobs say about what people want? Didn't he say that people don't know what they want?
Benjamin Simkin: Well, they I mean, generally, if you if you take the Henry Ford examples, like, you know, what do you want? Well, I'd to get a faster horse. Okay, well, what can I I can't make a faster horse. But what else could I do? I could make a car that would be faster than a horse. So you got to use your brain, right? Go, okay, well, okay, he said this, maybe I could do that.
Michael McNish: So if you've got multiple services or products and you've got a brand new offering compared to an offering that the marketplace knows has demand for and wants to buy, you're suggesting that it'd be far better off for them to focus their marketing efforts on the in demand rather than trying to get them to buy this new thing.
Benjamin Simkin: Yeah, I mean, you can't you can't actually generally a business owner does not ⁓ demand. They tap into it, they channel it into their business. We're not in the demand creation business, we're on the demand channeling business of where's the demand? Okay, let's go there. Right. Whereas a lot of people when they're getting into marketing, they're like, ⁓ the purpose of marketing is to create demand. No, it's not.
Michael McNish: I think a lot of people go into business for lots of different reasons. And I think some of us are because we're really good at what we do. Like it's almost like the skill we think about to when you were young, you discovered that you're really, really good. And you enjoyed the computer hacking and programming and technology. You love that. And so therefore, it's almost like the business fell into your lap. Almost you didn't go seeking the business. You almost came to you and just and you fell into it. ⁓ I know a lot of people sort of fall
Benjamin Simkin: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Michael McNish: into this into business where it's just their identity is like that's what I do but they've never learned I guess the principles of marketing or they wouldn't see themselves ⁓ marketer would they?
Benjamin Simkin: Mm-hmm. You know, it's interesting you bring that up because when I was in my first, my first company was software and IT business, computer business. And I was, you know, I'm the computer guy. I'm the computer guy. when sold that company, it's still running today, by the way, 26 years later, without me, because sold it. After I sold that business, something shifted in me, where I realized I was not my business. It wasn't my baby. You know, a of people think like, ⁓ you know, this is my little baby. And you kind of like, you have these emotions, these emotional attachments, which can some sometimes prevent you from seeing things a bit clearer, more objective. But when I saw that there's something that made me realize actually, this is what it is. You, own an operate or you own a business. You are not the business. That's a big shift.
Michael McNish: So who are they?
Benjamin Simkin: Who are the people?
Michael McNish: If they're not their business, then who are they?
Benjamin Simkin: Well, they're just people experiencing, experience on the planet. Like it's all they really are. It's like we, we create identities ⁓ they can be useful, right? Identities can be very useful. It's like, if you want to achieve a goal, first of all, set the identity. For example, if I want to be ⁓ ⁓ fit and healthy and I take on the role of athlete, for example, you know, I'm an athlete. Okay. What would an athlete do? Well, he would eat this. He would go to sleep here. He would go to the gym. So taking on identity is very powerful way to achieve a goal. But when it comes to things where, ⁓ I'm a business coach or I'm a plumber or whatever, these can hold us back from achieving a lot more because they, they cut us off from seeing other opportunities of other ways of doing things or seeing things.
Michael McNish: The I am statement right like it's like Yeah That's really interesting and you're right because a psychological point of view fight anything after an I am statement is final. It's a closed statement. It's not open It's not negotiable. It's ⁓ am so ⁓
Benjamin Simkin: It's a thought terminator. It terminates any other thoughts that you could be open to.
Michael McNish: And so rather than being closed thinking we you're we want to be open thinking right? We want to have an open mind in terms of possibility so in terms of even like So than identifying us of what we do That's the trap because what you do isn't you?
Benjamin Simkin: Hmm. Well, I like to, kind of phrase it like this. Like, my name's Ben. I liked, you know, I like to go to the gym and I like to play, you know, at the moment, I like to play paddle on the weekends. and I so happened to do marketing and I so happened to make software and do, and I make AI solutions as well. So like, is my identity any different from the guy who plays paddle on the weekend to doing, you know, building AI solutions, for example, it's kind of like.
Michael McNish: Mmm.
Benjamin Simkin: I don't, if I go to a party, which I don't do, but if I went to a party and say, what do you do? Well, I play battle on Sunday. we usually default like our occupation. Why do we do that?
Michael McNish: Yeah. think it's because of how we've been trained in society in terms of like, what do you want to be when you grow up? That question as a kid, like, and then I want to be a fireman. I want to be a lawyer. I want to be a doctor. And that becomes the goal.
Benjamin Simkin: Yeah. You know, that's a, yeah, that's a really interesting, kind of thing. something I learned maybe a year or two ago is like a lot of times when you ask, you know, what do you, what do you ask you if you have a child, right? It's either, know, what, what do want to be when you grow up or what do you want to do when you grow up? Right. But nobody ever asks, what do you want to have when you grow up? What would you like to have? Because if you know what you want to have, that can inform what you want to be and do. Right? I want to be a firefighter. Okay, cool. What do you want to have? Well, I'd like to, you know, I'd like to work, you know, four days a week and I'd like to have a motorbike and I like, whatever, whatever it is, right? But the have will inform what it is that you actually want to do and be.
Michael McNish: me of that model, the B do have model. Who do you want to be? What do you want to do to what you want to have? And it's almost like the B and the do are fused together. Like if you, because what I do is therefore who I'm being.
Benjamin Simkin: Yes. Yeah, and therefore it's what you're having as well. It's all the same. Yeah.
Michael McNish: Yeah. And so that becomes that becomes the goal which keeps us stuck. So if I say to I'm an accountant, that's my identity. How much more difficult would it be for me to be good at marketing then with that identity of I am an accountant? Because doesn't that shut off the possibility that I could be good at marketing?
Benjamin Simkin: Mm-hmm. It's better to ask yourself, what is it I want to have? Because if I'm an accountant, as an example, man, I love, you know, I love accounting, blah, blah, blah, but I'd love to have more clients. Okay, cool. Who do I need to be? What do I need to do? I need to be marketing guy.
Michael McNish: And how is that just the decision to be the marketing because you weren't the marketing guy when you were younger. At what point did you decide that you were the marketing guy?
Benjamin Simkin: well, I sold my first business. actually didn't know what I was going to do because I kind of still had my identity as well. ⁓ was, you know, early 20s. I was like, I don't know what to do with my life now. I lost and ⁓ my, my coach at the time, I'd done a little bit of marketing for a company. And I quite liked it. And I did actually a really good job and made them like a few million dollars as well with the marketing I was doing.
Michael McNish: I only made them a few million dollars. I love how nonchalant you are about, but I just made them a few million dollars. That's all in a day's work, really.
Benjamin Simkin: Well, obviously I had some sort of knack for it or just a bit of luck, but, um, cause he had a good offer, but,
Michael McNish: Hahaha!
Benjamin Simkin: my coaches like, oh, you you liked, you did that marketing thing. You, you liked that. Why don't you do that? I'm like, yeah, you're right. I did like it. That's when I kind of got into marketing 20, 21 years ago.
Michael McNish: That's probably what you connected with like what you said, like what you're passionate for. Like if you're not passionate about something or you don't enjoy it, you that's, that's the issue. But you found you really like technology and so you did it. And then you discovered that you really liked marketing. So you did it. And do you think you love them both equally? Is it, is it an equal love or do you have a favorite?
Benjamin Simkin: Mm-hmm. Plenty of things I don't like. Well, I don't think I would want to be, I mean, I, there's a, probably a lot of roles that I wouldn't want to do that I wouldn't enjoy. So I wouldn't even think about those, but I love marketing. I love business. love technology. I actually feel like very, ⁓ crazy because I feel like it's all converging a lot more than it has in the past because now we have AI. And because of my deep background in technology, like, you know, I was programming things at a very low level with like, you know, unique, was, I used every Unix platform, Linux platform. I was building internet servers, I was doing a lot of stuff. And then I got into Mark with, with the marketing. And then obviously I've been a business owner because I've been doing businesses. All these things kind of like I feel like converging into this, this thing where it's like, ⁓ now I can do the AI technology marketing business. It's, it's just, and it's, it's so exciting and a lot of fun.
Michael McNish: It's really like the evolution of all ⁓ all the types of industries that you've been in. It's almost like we're in the era where those skills are the most essential to succeed.
Benjamin Simkin: Yeah. And if you think about like a lot of people who are doing, doing things out there, say it's with, I don't know. I mean, that's why I had an edge with marketing as you know, Jeff Moore, one of my mentors, he was like, you get it because you get the business side and the marketing side. Whereas, you know, lot of marketing people, they don't, they've never run a company like a proper big company and they don't get that enterprise idea. But when I was doing marketing, I understood like the whole chain, marketing, sales, business.
Michael McNish: So this is a question that I'm really curious of your answer to. is what do you think the difference is between therefore business and marketing? Because, you know, to go to market with your product at the right price, the right place, the right promotion, like traditional marketing 101. And to say that, you know, to be successful in business, we all need to be marketers. We need to be successful. Like if you can't market yourself, you probably don't have a business. So what's the difference between marketing and business?
Benjamin Simkin: Okay. I'd say there's a lot of differences, but to keep it simple, I think that there's two sides to a coin. And I think those two sides are supply and demand. generally are working on the demand side. You know how to tap into that demand or bring it to your business. Business is ⁓ of like this manage. You have to manage and balance out very well supply and demand. So bringing in the client customer. doing, delivering the product and service and obviously administration as well. But sort of like B you have to have this balance. Cause if you, if you're not, if you're not balanced there, if you have too much supply, not enough demand or too much demand, not enough supply, you're in a bad position. You have to know how to constantly keep those balls in the air or spin the plates across whole thing. like every single area, like this 21 different generally in a company. You have to know how to manage it all.
Michael McNish: That's all the many hats of the business owner, right?
Benjamin Simkin: Yeah.
Michael McNish: So all hats, there's finance, there's operations, there's recruitment, there's marketing, there's sales, there's all these different elements. And every specialist in particular areas is gonna say ours is the most important. Like ⁓ if you the wrong people, like Richard Branson would say that the people make your success. If you don't hire A players, you don't get the right people, then you're never gonna build the successful business or the culture of your organization becomes your competitive
Benjamin Simkin: Thank
Michael McNish: advantage. Whereas then the market will say, well, your ability to generate leads and convert them and position your brand and all that is the most essential otherwise you're a nobody. And then the operations guy is going to say, well, that's all well and good. But if you don't have systems and operational process, then you're never going to be able to deliver it you're to fail. Are they all equal?
Benjamin Simkin: Heh. Hmm Yeah. think it all comes back down to ⁓ what do they all have in common? People. So what is the most important thing? If, someone says operations, okay, that requires people marketing. Okay. That requires people. It requires people coming in. It requires team. It requires the market is there all people. so comes back down to people. That is definitely the thing.
Michael McNish: Does it. But what about with AI now? Like we know organizations like Atlassian are letting go hundreds of employees. Woolworths and Coles are removing checkouts and making it all self-serve. Same with McDonald's. The idea of starting as a teenager learning how to do customer service is kind of like a dead art. It's basically, can you call out a number, yell it out, and that's you've done your job, as opposed to actually getting to know people. With AI call centers and AI bots,
Benjamin Simkin: Hmm.
Michael McNish: Is people, are we shifting away from that people being the center of the organization?
Benjamin Simkin: in Good question. You're still going to have to have people, right? I mean, across different things that we've been doing in a number of different business ventures, you know, we've been able to replace up to 80 % reliance on people. but who's creating that? Who's ⁓ those AI processes? So think you might less people, but you still need to have the best people.
Michael McNish: But the skill set of those people now is learning how to manage AI now, isn't it?
Benjamin Simkin: learning how to manage the AI and understanding probably the fundamentals that. Yeah.
Michael McNish: Because we're in an era now that the business landscape is changing so rapidly. It's actually hard to keep up. Like literally in some of the groups, they're following all the updates with Claude, the AI, and just can't keep up with all the updates. And it's almost like the horse is bolted. job ⁓ to run to try to keep up. Like I've just got to try and keep up.
Benjamin Simkin: Mm-hmm. Mm. Mm-hmm. Run after the horse?
Michael McNish: You know the dot com you're aware. Do you have a website? ⁓ I better have a website Well now it's a case of do you have an AI? ⁓ Assistant or you better help you better get one better get us know ⁓ then you see people on social saying ⁓ built my entire team with ⁓ AI agents But you look behind it and you realize that ⁓ they're of just doing automation. They're not really Independent thinkers, but I know it's moving in that direction
Benjamin Simkin: Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Michael McNish: It's a scare. It's scary. I gotta tell you, like, you know, particularly for the business owner who's used to the way things have been. How do you even adapt to this this new way because it's and it's going to keep changing, right?
Benjamin Simkin: Mm-hmm. It's going to keep changing. Definitely. think you need to be plugged. I think you definitely need to be plugged into the right people who have a handle on it. I'm very lucky enough to be one of those people because of my background. Like it's kind of like I've got a 30 year headstart on this because I understand deeply fundamentally how it works. Where I'm building my own like AI platforms, like for example, memory systems I'm building. I, I installed open core. I cracked it open and started rewriting half the code. We're not half of it, a lot of the code. So being able to do that without having, Oh, how do I, you know, what is, uh, where do I start? It's like, I already know instantly like where to go with it. So having the right people, think plugged in to. going, hey, Ben, you know, I want to be able to do X. Okay, cool. Here's what you do. And I keep on top of what's going on.
Michael McNish: Is mastering AI the new hat or is AI just a tool to support the main functions of business like marketing and sales and operations?
Benjamin Simkin: Yeah, well. See, here's the thing. You can get overwhelmed with if you're on social media or if you're on something, it's like, there's always something new. Like I'll have a look every day and like, Claude released this, you know, while this new tool, while I was sleeping or this new thing came out overnight or whatever. I'm like, okay, I'll check it out. But I check it out because I want to be at the forefront. I want to create technologies and different, because that's what I want to do. But as a business owners don't need to do that. They don't need to know everything that's come out because what you really, what you really want to do. And it comes back to this, ⁓ this like acronym in engineering, which is the purpose of a system is what it does. ⁓ So what does that mean? It means if we work backwards. So going for those ⁓ you that know theory of constraints model, the theory of constraints model is finding the one thing right now that's holding you back from achieving your goal, right? And so if we think about the theory of constraints model is like this week, know, my constraint this week is I'm not getting enough leads or I'm not getting enough sales or ⁓ ⁓ I have a lot more customers, but my operations is not being able to keep up with that. Okay, cool. So what is my issue? I came, my issues here. How can I use AI to solve that constraint? Because knowing some new technology does X, Y, Z. If it's not going to solve your constraint is completely irrelevant to you right now. You don't even want to waste your time looking at it because if you're solving a non-constraint, it's not growing your business.
Michael McNish: Got it.
Benjamin Simkin: So I always think of it from, and this is what I do as well. I mean, I do a lot of development and experimentation and things like this, but when it comes to the actual business, we go, okay, well, our current constraint is X. Okay, which tool is gonna be the best solve that constraint? And you go to the next one. So always think in terms of what is the thing that we need to solve right now, only do that and use, if you can use AI to do that, that's great.
Michael McNish: So AI is that plugging tool to a fundamental area of business. So the pillars of business haven't changed. It's just we're plugging AI into overcome constraints in those particular areas. Is that right?
Benjamin Simkin: Yeah, exactly. I mean, let's, take a scenario where, know, you're getting all this demand for your product and don't have enough people in operations. Like say you're selling a widget and you're sending them out, you know, you don't have enough people to pack the boxes and send them out in the mail. Traditionally, you had many more people, right? But when you have a at the ⁓ constraint that you have now, Maybe traditionally you'd be like, we need more people. But now you might say, hey, is there an AI that could do this? Right. Or we're not getting enough leads or we're not getting enough sales or whatever it is. It's okay. How can AI support that constraint to improve it?
Michael McNish: Cause what I've... known and seen of what you've been doing lately is you've been an inventor and creating tools specifically for what you just spoke about it, plugging in AI technology into an area of business. So do you want to just maybe talk through some of the things that you've created that, I mean, I've never seen this stuff before, like Leafish, for example, like what that does and other tools that you've, tools that people have absolutely no idea that you've made because aren't they exclusive to the
Benjamin Simkin: Mm.
Michael McNish: mastermind?
Benjamin Simkin: Yeah. So exclusively mastermind tools, because, because they're so powerful that they, they give you such an edge in business and I, and we're really building them out. And I'm actually just, what I'm doing is I'm building them for myself because we go, okay, you know, we have this constraint. Okay. What, I could make this kind of tool and actually lead fish came out of that where we wanted to get a bit more efficient on. our sales team on calling leads because we had, couldn't get, we couldn't get, we had to get more people on the sales team. was the con, that was, well, that was the, the, that's the way we would have solved it in the past. You know, 20 years ago, we would just hire tons of salespeople, but we had this problem where we get, we getting too many people, you know, signing up? ⁓ and then, you know, you have to call, sounds people have to be on the phone for 30 minutes on each lead. X of them, you know, they're either not qualified or, know, or if you know, they're financially qualified, but not a fit for some specific reason or what it like, it's kind of like manually going through this process. So we had that constraint. So was like, ⁓ I'm going to do this. So I built. ⁓ an AI tool called Leadfish where as soon as the lead comes in, even if you only have the email address, we can through the proprietary system that I made, it basically gives you 55 data points on that lead. Companies, how long they've been in business, revenue, ⁓ size, what do they actually do? You know, what products and services they sell. There's 55 different things that we find on each lead before. before we even speak to them. then it'll tell us, okay, no, this guy, know, we get the leads where it's like, you know, Jeff from Telstra. ⁓ No, guy is just an employee. Okay, cool, it's not a fit. Okay, yeah, guy's a high priority lead. Okay, get onto him. So we have a way with the sales team, they look at the list every morning, go, okay, I'm gonna call these six people, whatever it is, because they're our people. They're the people that... you know, match our ICP, our target market. And so we, instead of hiring more people, we were able to make that process more efficient because the constraint was leads come in, we don't get to call them quick enough. Right. So I'm just solving my own constraints. And then what actually happened was one of my sales guys, he messaged me at like, I don't know, five o'clock in the morning. He's like, Hey, this is really cool. You could sell this. And I'm like, it didn't occur to me that this would be something that we could provide to other people. I'm like, ⁓ yeah, good point. So we built it out for Mastermind.
Michael McNish: That reminds me of the story when you were a kid, know, like paying you $2,000. ⁓ I didn't realize we'd get paid for this. This is cool. It's almost like the, it's the same thing. It's so cool. what's something else that you've made? Like what's another constraint that you identified and what's the AI solution that you built for it?
Benjamin Simkin: Yeah. So, ⁓ I mean, there's so many we can go on forever, but, ⁓ yeah, maybe we talk about, ⁓ I made an AI sales coach and sales manager. So we have the team. It's incredibly hard to manage a big sales team. I mean, it's incredibly hard to manage one salesperson because you have, and I was speaking to one of my clients yesterday, you, you, rely on self reporting. You know, you, don't have much visibility about what's doing sales coaching is kind of like, it's very expensive, very kind of difficult to do. Even if you only had one, but when you start to grow teams, it's very difficult. Sales managers ⁓ great, but they're, only have so many hours in the day. So I built an AI sales manager that, that manages all the reps. listens their calls, gives them feedback on what they did well, what they should, what they could improve upon. Gives us a close ability score. So it tells us out of 10, how likely that person is going to sign up as a customer or client. Yeah, ⁓ just whole lot more stuff. So it's basically replacing the sales manager who does sales coaching as well. So it's an AI one. So we put that in there. Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's amazing. So that the constraint was, okay, how do we manage these people? And how do we even like improve sales coaching? Cause a sales coach can't even listen to every single call and go, Hey, you know, Hey, Tim, I listened to your call, you know, that you had this morning and you could do, you hear some tips for you or whatever. He can't actually listen to like 6,000 calls or 600 calls a month or whatever, but this can't
Michael McNish: sounds like you're unfair advantages for you. Like you're creating these tools that just give you such a heads up ⁓ over everybody else ⁓ you're taking advantage of what AI can do.
Benjamin Simkin: Plus I think it helps that it's kind of like, because I've been doing it for so long, it's just something that I can just sit there and do. You know, I'm not like, I'm not sweating out going, oh, how do I do this? I'm like, oh, we have this constraint. Okay, yeah, let's do that, you know? So I'm solving my own constraints, but at the same time, like, okay, cool, I wanna use these to help other people, because I wanna give these people unfair advantage as well.
Michael McNish: Do you think? Do you think that the business owner, you we talked about, you know, they're good at what they do. So they're passionate about the doing of their business or maybe their skill or whatever they do. And then we talked about the identity of like, need to be the marketer. You know, if I'm the marketer and I'm driving my business, then I'm gonna generate leads and sales when I have...
Benjamin Simkin: Mm-hmm.
Michael McNish: the power to scale my business to wherever I want it to go. Do you think that the business owner today needs to learn how to use AI or do you think they just need to find the right tool or person or group to just tap into it? Like, do they need to know it or do they just need to find it?
Benjamin Simkin: That's a good question. I think it depends on, I think it depends on a lot of things, but I think that, I think fundamentally it's something you should understand. If you look at any great successful person. Pick one, pick anyone. You will see, okay, they're great at great communicators, great marketing, great at sales. Right? and AI is the next thing where if you, if you don't understand it enough to know know enough about it to either get things done or to effectively delegate it to the right person, like even being able to choose who to work with, you have to know how it works. It's one of those skills that you're going to now have to have. I mean, it's kind of like, if you go back to the days when the internet started coming out, you had to learn how to do email. you have to learn how to do website, like, visit the internet, you know. And it you imagine someone right now starting a business and they don't even know what the internet is. So ⁓ one of those skills. Okay, now it's ⁓ the past, maybe not so mandatory, but now it is. ⁓
Michael McNish: So what's the problem? Let's say we're gonna use AI to improve our marketing because I think lot of businesses want more sales and more leads. That's a fundamental ⁓ for most companies ⁓ to achieve ⁓ million dollar, two million dollar plus company. What's wrong with just asking ChatGBT or Claw for the marketing copy and the marketing plan straight out of the box?
Benjamin Simkin: Mm-hmm. Yes. What's wrong with it? It doesn't have it doesn't have the the kind of the knowledge and the experience. I was just speaking to a friend of mine yesterday he he advises on property like investing in property. And he's done it for 30 years like ⁓ he property blindfolded. And, ⁓ and he said, he recommended the specific property to the client. Cause he's like, okay, this is a growth corridor. This is what, you know, what I see from the data is going to be a really good area for like capital growth. he gets an email back. He knows this, this clients have done chat GPT or chat GPT said this was a bad area to buy a property. And he's like, the difference is that it can get data, but it doesn't have the life experience. It doesn't have the reality. It's kind of like, you know, book smart versus street smart. It's like you can know you can read all the business books, but if you've never run a business, or do a business degree, and you start a business like, ⁓ nobody ever told me about told me taught me like how to overcome this problem. It's having that real that real knowledge and experience. And so if you're asking JGT, I think can be very helpful. I also on the other side of the coin, I think it can be very dangerous to if you've never run a business, or do a business degree, and you start a business like, ⁓ ever told me about told me taught me like how to overcome this problem. It's having that real that real knowledge and experience. And so if you're asking JGT, I think can be very helpful. I also on the other side of the coin, I think it can be very dangerous to ⁓ because I think it tends to hallucinate sometimes in terms of like, yeah, you are correct. ⁓ Where are you going to get the advantage in the tools that I create have proprietary data? Like I literally sit there for three days and I literally go back and forth training the ⁓ model.
Michael McNish: You're absolutely right, Ben Simken. That's what JTPT would say. You're absolutely right. You are correct. I was wrong. will never do that again.
Benjamin Simkin: on the knowledge. For example, the sales manager, we have, you know, 15 years worth of, of calls, we have sales training, we ourselves managers have done. We have coaching training, we have, we have all the data. So I'm able to go back and forth, back and forth and reiterate on the training. And it's basically replicating our specific knowledge. If we just said, If you went to Jachipi and said, tell me, you know how I can be a better at sales, they would go, well, number one, you first of all, you have to listen, you have to ask questions and ask for the sale. It's like, okay, that's very ⁓ useful, but it'll give you the nuanced stuff. When it come to the AI copywriting tool that we made for the mastermind, we put in 20 years worth of winning campaigns, funnels, copywriting ⁓ and trained it and I was going back and forth and then and then at the end I was putting in bad marketing because I needed it to know both sides of the coin. So I was putting, went bad, good, bad, and then I would make sure that it was figuring out what was doing. ⁓ I got it to a point where it was like it knew that it was going to create this. And we actually tested it. So I created, we had a client and he needed to have a brand new funnel, be yourself.
Michael McNish: Sounds like. You're teaching it.
Benjamin Simkin: a video sales letter, whole thing. I was like, I'm gonna test this out for real. So we put in everything, comes out the VSL, the funnel, everything else like that, we launched it. He's generating many leads and getting so many sales like from day And you know like how rare that is usually when you launch a campaign, you got to like optimize it, improve it, tweak it, go through a million creatives to get it to a point where you're like, Yeah, I'm happy with the performance. This from day one just started performing and I was like, ⁓ wow, this is great. And you know who that client was, so you saw it.
Michael McNish: Hmm. Yeah, it was incredible. And when you told me that, that I mean, it's easy to say that AI did it, right? But it's not just that as simple as like asking the question into chat GPT or Claude or whatever.
Benjamin Simkin: Ha ha ha!
Michael McNish: It's like you've worked out how to program it in the sense of like a human being. you, if you onboard an employee into your organization, there's an onboarding process, right? And you've got to train them and watch the training videos and certify that they know how to do what they do. So you're effectively you've actually learned the skill of how to train AI into becoming a master with the 2030 years experience on a particular topic to then actually give better quality advice as opposed to
Benjamin Simkin: Thank Mm-hmm.
Michael McNish: surface level ⁓ out of the box which could take you in the completely wrong direction.
Benjamin Simkin: Yeah. On the tech side, yeah, but if you think about it, it kind of models a human, because if we hire a salesperson, we put them through the training, we get them to listen to, you know, we would always get our salespeople to listen to a whole bunch of successful sales calls to know what a success sounds like. Then we would coach them, okay, no, that was a bad call because you did this and that. Okay, that was a good call. Yeah, this is what you did really well. So we were manually doing this with human beings. It's the same kind of thing that we're doing with, that I'm doing with AI is like, here's a good thing, here's a bad thing, here's why.
Michael McNish: Do you think you're now the AI, like are you the AI wizard, the AI marketer? I you were the Facebook ⁓ You were the guy that people went to to learn Facebook ads. Are you still that today or are you something different?
Benjamin Simkin: That's a good question. mean, I think, I mean, obviously we still do a lot of Facebook and a lot of marketing. Um, like I said, it's a primary driver for a business, right? But the AI is kind of like another layer. And I think you're like, I think I'm any unique and lucky, a lucky, um, position that I do have the background because you have people that are, um, you know, started to jump on AI, don't have technical bone in their body just because they've never done it. Right. Or they're doing AI, jumping on that, but they don't have any business or marketing experience. So they don't have the other pieces, which I think is super important to have. And especially when it comes to, say, AI and not understanding the business, you're going to be, it's going to be a waste of time. You're not going to be driving real outcomes. Whereas if you know how the business works and you use AI to solve constraints, that's when you see it grow, right? When it comes to AI, I mean, I was a computer hacker when I was 15, 16 years old. So my mind when I'm doing this is like security first. So a lot of these, a lot of these people, I got hacked into overnight and they stole my API keys and they did this and did that. It's like, yeah, like you got to be very, and especially especially for a company, have to like that security is like the most important component because imagine if you had a company of, mean, it doesn't matter what size it is, but you you have your client's confidential data in there or something like this and it gets hacked and leaked. It's like, that's probably one of the worst things that could happen to you.
Michael McNish: And that could have been you when you were 16 hacking into the system just for fun.
Benjamin Simkin: Well, I never did anything malicious. I was playing pranks on people, but I never deleted any. It pretty much was. I just do stupid things. Like I'd like open and close their like CD-ROM drives, or I would like change their wallpaper, change their background wallpaper to like something funny. never did anything like, what's the word? Like,
Michael McNish: It's like Bart Simpson calling up Moe at the Tavern going, I'm looking for Amanda Huggenkiss. Ha ha
Benjamin Simkin: I never damaged or just damaged. I never deleted any or did stuff like that. It was always like harmless pranks. that's the kind of stuff that I was doing. Cause like, what's the point of like ⁓ a computer or deleting a file? Cause it's like, it's not very funny.
Michael McNish: Nah. It's funny for you when you're the person doing it, but...
Benjamin Simkin: Well, no, because it's not funny because I'd rather like get them to giggle on like or freak them out, know, freak him out like, ⁓ what's going on? Like, Whoa, who changed my wallpaper to like Lego or whatever?
Michael McNish: Exactly, So really are the master of sort of combining technology with marketing. I think that's probably like your greatest gift and your skill and realizing that they're...
Benjamin Simkin: Thanks, Yeah.
Michael McNish: I mean, right now they're essential to work together to achieve success. If you do one without the other, you're probably going to be left behind. If you're really good at AI, but you're not very good at marketing, you're probably struggle still. But if you're really good at marketing, you're not really leveraging or understand how to tap into what's happening with AI. You'll also probably not, you may not be left behind as much, but like you'll eventually be left behind in your competitive advantage the other companies will be able to move fast to do more ⁓ understand more of it. Is that right?
Benjamin Simkin: Exactly. So I mean, when it comes to a business owner, if they don't know AI, they definitely need to get onto it. Because what I was thinking about was like, you know, when you're solving constraints, when you because you're solving problems, right there, it's like, okay, we want to get to this goal, we have, you know, we're not able to achieve this goal because of x, okay, how do we solve x? What I'm thinking about AI is kind of like it, it kind of solves it permanently. If you think about it, if you think about a lot of the problems that you have, they kind of come back and forth and they're generally because they rely on people. know, know, Jenny wasn't stopped checking, you know, that spreadsheet. And then we realized six months later that we, you know, we had this problem. Well, with AI, it's like, okay, once it's in, you're probably not going to have that constraint anymore. And it's infinitely scalable as well. So it's really interesting because it's kind of cool that, we can probably solve this constraint either forever or for a very, very long time and not even have to go back to it.
Michael McNish: Constraints really is your thing at the moment, isn't it? Like how do we use these tools to overcome a constraint as opposed to let's just use AI because it's there. So it's being able to identify that constraint, isn't it?
Benjamin Simkin: Yeah, that's always what business has been is solving constraints. Right? It's always been you wake up, you go, okay, let's look at all the data. Okay, we have a problem over here. Like, for example, we don't have enough people in in operations, we don't have enough salespeople, we don't have enough leads, or it's taking too long for a client when they get signed up to ⁓ the product, you know, It's taking you three weeks instead of one week. Okay, cool. that it's always been that way. It's just how you've solved it's been different. And I think that's where AI will come into play with a lot of this stuff.
Michael McNish: That's amazing. think just that thing about identifying a constraint and solving it probably the biggest takeaway that anyone could probably get from this entire ⁓ Because that's a system.
Benjamin Simkin: That's good.
Michael McNish: You know, it's a system that you can replicate and not get overwhelmed in all the distractions that occur with all the messaging that we're seeing on social media and advertising right now about feeling left behind and you need to do this and you need to do this and you need to do this. But breaking it down to the simplistic, simple method of what's my constraint? What am I gonna do to overcome it? And then identify the next constraint.
Benjamin Simkin: Absolutely right. Because yeah, because you don't need to. And in fact, if you jumped on every single tool that came out every 24 hours, you're actually ⁓ actually doing you going backwards because you're ⁓ your time and energy on things that are not relevant to the progress of the business. Like the only thing you should ever be working on is the thing to ⁓ that business move one step forward.
Michael McNish: That's amazing. Ben, I want to thank you for sharing your wisdom today. Like that was freaking amazing. And if someone wants to learn a little bit more about you, get in contact with you or out about AI or the mastermind or anything, what's the best way for them to get in touch? ⁓
Benjamin Simkin: Thank you, Michael. Well, you can follow me on our Instagram, Benjamin Simkin. can go to them, themastermind.com.au or .com as well. Yeah, it's probably the two best ways to do it.
Michael McNish: Awesome. Ben, thank you so much.
Benjamin Simkin: Thank you, Michael. It's been fantastic.
