Episode 82: How to Make Amazing Social Media Content That Keeps People’s Attention

0:00:11.5 Mike Vacanti: Hello, Jordan.

0:00:12.9 Jordan Syatt: What’s going on, Michael?

0:00:15.0 Mike Vacanti: Not much my man. Our last non-video podcast, and we can’t even see each other right now, so it’s perfect.

0:00:23.3 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, I gotta restart my computer. Wait, is this the last one where it’s just audio and then after this people are actually gonna be able to see us?

0:00:31.4 Mike Vacanti: That’s the plan.

0:00:33.3 Jordan Syatt: Man, I really hope that works ’cause I think that’s gonna… It’s gonna be a huge shift in the mood of the pod. People are gonna be able to see your facial expressions. And your facial expressions, I think, are gonna be the best.

0:00:45.3 Mike Vacanti: Why do you think that?

0:00:46.9 Jordan Syatt: Because sometimes you’ll say things with a more serious face, but you’re also smiling and it changes the mood.

0:00:55.2 Mike Vacanti: It doesn’t come through on the podcast?

0:00:56.9 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, it doesn’t come through. Yeah.

0:01:00.4 Mike Vacanti: I think I’m probably less aware. I have less… Not control, awareness of how my facial expressions are being perceived than you do, because you’re the number one seed out a seven plus billion at understanding humans and I’m in the 6.4-6.6 billion range. If we had official rankings.

0:01:24.1 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, we’ve all got strengths and weaknesses, and I’m not gonna argue this anymore.

[laughter]

0:01:33.3 Mike Vacanti: Wow, I was not expecting that.

0:01:36.0 Jordan Syatt: I was giving up arguing now.

[laughter]

0:01:41.4 Mike Vacanti: That’s amazing.

0:01:42.5 Jordan Syatt: But I’m not that good at judging people the first time I meet them, you’re really good with that.

0:01:49.3 Mike Vacanti: Your first impression… Yeah, in fairness, I think first impressions are hard, I think you actually have to spend some time with someone to get to know their character, but there have been a handful of instances where you had a really good first impression of someone and it went the opposite, or someone really might have rubbed you the wrong way or you had a bad gut feeling and they ended up being amazing.

0:02:12.0 Jordan Syatt: I literally have gotten to a point in my life where whatever I think my gut first impression is, I have to go the opposite way, and literally no matter what happens, what are my first impression is if I’m like, “Oh, that person’s awesome,” I’m like, “Fuck, they probably suck.” [laughter] And if they’re bad in the first impression I’m like, “You know what, I should hang out with them again, they’re probably really cool.”

[laughter]

0:02:34.1 Mike Vacanti: But at least you learned that and have adjusted.

0:02:37.2 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, yeah, actually, I did that the other day. My wife and I we went out to dinner with a couple from our synagogue, we went out to eat with them and I didn’t get the best vibes at first, and then we went out to dinner with them again, and it was actually way better, and then I ended up-coaching the guy, the husband in-person. I did an in-person training session with him just for free, he was like, “Hey man, I really wanna get into fitness.” I was like, “Yeah, come by tomorrow, I’ll take you through a whole workout,” so I put him through a whole work out, which was… It was fun to do that, but yeah. At first I was like, “I don’t know if I like these people.” And then by the end of the workout, I was like, “I like these people, they’re cool.”

[laughter]

0:03:18.6 Mike Vacanti: He’s listening to it right now like, “This guy, he didn’t like me in that first dinner.”

[laughter]

0:03:26.3 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, but overall, overall, that’s part of life, learning, figuring out your strengths and weaknesses and first impressions are not my strength, that’s for sure. But reading people in general, reading their mood is something I’m pretty good at.

0:03:42.4 Mike Vacanti: Yeah, you are… You really are. If this needs to be cut, this can be cut, but you had a really funny statement, probably a week or two ago, I don’t know. I was in a bad mood for whatever reason, and [laughter] for an entire afternoon, I really don’t… There wasn’t anything specific, but I guess I just was and I guess that was coming off, and then the next morning we talked, I was like, “I’m in a better mood,” and you’re like, “Thank God, I feel like I was talking to my dad for a minute, there,” [laughter] I just lost it.

[laughter]

0:04:18.2 Jordan Syatt: Oh, man. Yeah, I forgot about that. No, we don’t need to cut that, it’s true I was like, “Oh jeez, this is a terrible conversation.”

0:04:28.3 Mike Vacanti: “This guy is just so short and snippy and angry, what’s wrong with him?” You know what we should… What would be interesting to elaborate on that we’ve been talking about for the last day or so, and we don’t really have any strong takes because it’s so new, but just the observation that for some search terms or people, we’re now seeing Google go directly to TikTok or Facebook, in that short video section, which is… Who knows what it means, but it’s kind of a crazy potential beginning of a shift.

0:05:07.0 Jordan Syatt: Man, when you sent me that screenshot of your Google search and the first thing popping up being these quick, reel-style videos, my stomach plummeted.

0:05:18.3 Mike Vacanti: I had scrolled down for whatever it’s worth, that wasn’t the top of Google, but… Yeah, it’s very interesting.

0:05:29.3 Jordan Syatt: I think this is the one of the first… ‘Cause when you get older, as you get older, throughout your life like, “Oh, I guess I’m old now, I guess I’m old now.” This was the first real experience in my life where I was like, “Oh my God, I’m getting older,” because I was truly upset at this shift for Google, I was really angry and I still am. I’m really upset that they’re now starting to show short form content on a Google search and not just short form content, but it was directly leading to Facebook, and it was directly leading to TikTok, and it was directly leading to these social media sites that they usually… Not only do they not really favor them, they don’t show them at all in search terms, but now it seems like they are. This is the first time I was really angry about it, and I was like, “Man, I’m just getting old. This is what happens when people get older that as things change, they get super upset about it.” I was like, “This is it. We’re going down as a society,” it’s like, “No more… “

0:06:32.5 Mike Vacanti: I want you to elaborate. Why did it make you angry?

0:06:36.7 Jordan Syatt: Obviously, the whole… I still very strongly believe in long-form content, but the more Google… ‘Cause it doesn’t come up for every term now, but I’m sure eventually will, where the more Google begins to favor short form content, the less long form content is going to be… Not gonna say it’s less important, but it’s not gonna be as easy to find, it’s already difficult to rank for long form content, so it’s just gonna make it even more difficult, it’s gonna be even more challenging, which is disappointing.

0:07:12.5 Mike Vacanti: And it upsets you because you know that objectively, for certain subjects and more complex subjects specifically, that long-form content is the only way that it can be properly taught or articulated, and in a 60-second video or 90-second video or three-minute video, you can’t fully… No matter how good the video is, it isn’t sufficient to teach that subject.

0:07:36.4 Jordan Syatt: Correct. Because people who really want to learn something can’t learn enough nuance in a three-minute video, they need these longer form, whether it’s videos, whether it’s podcasts, whether it’s articles, books, whatever. You need long-form content to really become a true master in that subject, to actually really learn it and learn the whys and the hows and the what and the wheres, a three-minute video, which by the way, three-minute videos, they’re not created with intent to give all nuance. You can’t give all my once in three minutes and oftentimes so much of that three minutes is done specifically with the intent of getting your attention and keeping your attention, not with the intent of educating, that’s one of the benefits of the long-form content, it’s far less about grabbing attention and far more about let’s dive into the specifics of this topic so you can truly understand it. So to see that now Google is so jumping on that I’m like, “Oh, this really sucks.”

0:08:39.8 Mike Vacanti: I’m not hesitant to go that far just yet, only because the search term, I was searching for Gunna, who’s a hip hop artist who was arrested recently, and I came… On a random Spotify radio channel during my workout, I came across a song he was featured on and I was like, “Oh, what happened? What’s the deal with his case? What’s going on?” I didn’t even know what he was arrested for. And so I just typed his name into Google, Gunna, expecting something, and there weren’t any… I don’t even think the news section was there on Google, it was… His Instagram was up there, and then something else, but then that it was a section titled short videos that had four videos, a couple of short Facebook videos and a TikTok in there, but then I googled after that, I googled how to lose fat, and it was all links to long-form articles on page one of Google, so I don’t know that the assumption that that is, that short videos are going to take over all of the attention is one that we can jump to just yet.

0:09:47.7 Jordan Syatt: I was really surprised when YouTube came out with the Shorts, I always thought YouTube would be like, “Hey, we are a long-form content platform,” but now with the short, it’s just…

0:09:58.9 Mike Vacanti: They have the Shorts tab, crazy.

0:10:00.8 Jordan Syatt: I didn’t know until you told me that yesterday, I didn’t realize they have an entire tab for it. I really think what it’s coming down to is advertising, ’cause that’s what these platforms are, whether it’s Instagram, whether it’s Facebook, whether to Google, whether it’s YouTube, they’re not social media, they’re not search engines, they’re advertising platforms, that’s what they really are. And I think they’re realizing that they’re losing advertising dollars by not having these short-form pieces of content that keeps people’s attention for a much longer period of time, so they added it in just so that they can continue to make money, which is their business. Totally their right. It’s just for me, it’s both disappointing, disheartening, and I don’t know if I should say worrisome, but more just, I think more disappointing, to be honest.

0:10:56.6 Mike Vacanti: You know What’s insane is that for TikTok to have TikTok acquired Musical.ly, is that what happened several years back, I don’t even really remember. But it was Musical.ly then TikTok. And TikTok has not been around very long before Instagram made Reels copying that format and YouTube, I don’t remember if it was before or after Shorts, which are all basically TikToks, that style of content. It must be such a… The difference in time on app must be so drastic between that style of content and long-form YouTube video or an Instagram feed post or even the normal Instagram video that was in the feed for all of these social media companies to just be making the exact same style of content, highly prioritized, people must be spending so much time scrolling through whatever, we’ll call it Reels. We’ll call it TikToks, but that style.

0:12:00.7 Jordan Syatt: Oh, absolutely. I remember when I first got on TikTok a couple of years ago, I would easily easily be on for 30 minutes without realizing it, and I was like, “This is a problem,” and that’s why I ended up getting off ’cause I was like, “I can’t be doing this,” but now it’s every platform, it’s so easy to be sucked in. And there are so many different aspects on, especially Instagram, where you have… You can look at your feed, you can look at Reels, you could look at people’s Stories, you could go to DMs, there’s so much within that single platform is you could spend so long on it without realizing.

0:12:41.1 Mike Vacanti: And I get different subject matter on each of the platforms, which is really interesting, and I don’t really consume much on Instagram still, but my Shorts on YouTube are chess, random chess finishes or openings, random poker hands or lifting stuff. And then my TikToks are all just funny, just a random assortment of funny stuff, but it’s all that same style, there’s something really interesting and fascinating about it, and I don’t think your worry is completely misplaced. I don’t even know how to articulate the idea of if your mind skips… Rather, let’s say you spend an hour reading a difficult book, let’s say you’re reading not even a difficult book, let’s say you read an hour reading, Mark Rippetoe’s Practical Programming, and so you’re literally consuming one “idea”, you’re fully focused and engaged on learning one concept. Your mind might wander a little bit, but that’s your focus for the hour. Now, let’s pretend that you spend… People aren’t consuming whole TikToks or whole Reels if you’re not into it. After five seconds, you’re swiping up, so in one hour, let’s say you average 60 seconds each or 30 seconds each rather, that’s 120 different shifts to different subjects in your mind. What is that doing? And I’m worried about this for myself from a consumption perspective, what is that? How much of that am I retaining? How much of that is useful? I don’t know, it’s…

0:14:21.9 Jordan Syatt: And what habits are you developing? Where it’s sometimes in a book, using Mark Rippetoe’s book, which is an amazing book, by the way, it’s… Using that as the example, sometimes you have to read 5-7 pages before you get to a point in which, “oh, now everything I just read and make sense,” and this one tiny paragraph is now brought it all together to where this… Okay, now, everything I just read for the last 40 minutes makes sense, it’s like, that doesn’t happen in a TikTok or a Reel or a Short, and if you’re training yourself to just, “Okay, well, I’m not gonna finish watching this ’cause right now it doesn’t make sense to me.” That’s concerning as well, just for the consumer, for the habitual, your habits that you’re creating in terms of learning, and if you’re not understanding it within the first five seconds, you’re just gonna leave and I know I sound like an old curmudgeon, I get it. And this is the most old curmudgeonly I think I’ve ever sounded. But that now I’m like, “Fuck man, this is bad.”

[laughter]

0:15:35.7 Mike Vacanti: Let’s not get it twisted though you might as an individual, have your perception and opinions and thoughts on how this will influence future generations in society, etcetera, etcetera, but as someone who is interested in helping people grow their business, there’s a reason that we launched a new challenge in the mentorship, literally yesterday with… It was going to be a short-form content focus regardless, but without divulging too much detail, a hyper-emphasis on this style of content because we see it working for so many people. We might think, “Oh, I wouldn’t want my eight-year-old spending four hours a day-swiping through these things,” however, for someone who’s trying to put food on the table for their family and wants to do meaningful work and wants to grow their online fitness business, it’s you’re going to go to where the attention is and you’re going to create good useful, helpful content there, obviously, in addition to long-form, and that’s always been something that we’ve talked about here on the podcast is do both. You should be making long-form content and you should be making short-form content, but there’s a reason that we’re taking this knowledge and using it.

0:16:46.9 Mike Vacanti: And who knows, maybe… Jordan, where would you assign the odds that I’m making five TikToks a day at some point in the next nine months?

0:17:03.1 Jordan Syatt: Zero percent.

0:17:04.7 Mike Vacanti: Oh, so how much would you be willing to… It can’t actually be zero, ’cause nothing’s divisible by zero, if you divide by zero, that doesn’t work. So what kind of odds, would you give me 100 to one odds?

0:17:18.7 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, I’ll give you 100 to one odds.

0:17:20.9 Mike Vacanti: And how much can I bet with you on this?

[laughter]

0:17:24.7 Jordan Syatt: For… well, how long? Let’s talk about for how long is this duration of five TikToks a day going for?

0:17:29.8 Mike Vacanti: Five TikToks a day for… You tell me.

0:17:33.3 Jordan Syatt: No. [laughter] You tell me. [laughter]

0:17:37.8 Mike Vacanti: Okay, for 30 days.

0:17:39.9 Jordan Syatt: And this is going on Instagram, TikTok is it also YouTube Shorts?

0:17:43.9 Mike Vacanti: Yes.

0:17:45.5 Jordan Syatt: Five a day, for 30 days straight?

0:17:48.4 Mike Vacanti: I think you’re in your mind right now, you’re like, “It’s worth it to lose money to him to make him do this.”

[laughter]

0:17:58.2 Jordan Syatt: There has to be context given to everyone listening ’cause it’s funny, but it’s also like for everyone who’s listening, you wouldn’t believe the number of conversations that Mike and I have had privately, especially in the last year, where Mike has been like, “I really need to get on social again, so I can push the book and do all this stuff.” You wouldn’t believe how many of these conversations that we’ve had here, he’s like, “I’m gonna do it, I gonna do it.”

0:18:26.7 Mike Vacanti: A few. A few.

0:18:28.8 Jordan Syatt: And a few… [laughter] And now, we’re literally five days out from the book being launched.

0:18:33.5 Mike Vacanti: The book hasn’t even released yet. [laughter] You just wait. You just wait for the banger of a post on release date, “book is released. Go buy now.” Right hook. “Link in bio.”

0:18:46.8 Jordan Syatt: I can’t wait, I can’t wait.

0:18:48.8 Mike Vacanti: Gimme these odds, bro.

0:18:51.2 Jordan Syatt: It’s 100 to 1 odds for 30 days. So let’s say I put a 100 bucks on that?

0:18:56.4 Mike Vacanti: You would owe me $10,000 if I win.

0:19:00.0 Jordan Syatt: No, I’m not doing that. That’s real money.

0:19:04.6 Mike Vacanti: What if… Hang on. What if I put $10,000 on it, and then if I did it… Oh and for a year…

0:19:13.0 Jordan Syatt: For a year, I would definitely do that.

0:19:14.8 Michael Vacanti: You’d do it and I could put $10K down? So if I lost, I owed you $10K, but if I won, you’d owe me a million.

0:19:22.6 Jordan Syatt: No, I’m not.

0:19:25:0 Michael Vacanti: You said 0%, like, you set these odds.

[laughter]

0:19:28.8 Mike Vacanti: You can adjust the odds. You could… How about 30 to 1?

0:19:31.9 Jordan Syatt: Mike, you know, I’m not good with math. You’re really just playing on…

0:19:37.5 Mike Vacanti: No, I’m not. I’m helping you. I just made the odds more in your favor.

0:19:40.5 Jordan Syatt: Alright, 30 to 1. What would that be?

0:19:42.5 Mike Vacanti: 30 to 1, if I put $10K down, you’d have to give me $300,000 if I did it.

0:19:48.7 Jordan Syatt: I’m not doing…

[laughter]

0:19:51.5 Jordan Syatt: Just ’cause the crypto market is down does not…

0:19:55.7 Mike Vacanti: So you have a lot of faith in me.

[laughter]

0:20:00.9 Mike Vacanti: Sounds like you have a lot of faith in me.

0:20:01.7 Jordan Syatt: No, just… You know how my mind works. It’s not that I have a lot of faith in you, it’s that the idea of losing that much money scares the shit out of me.

0:20:14.9 Mike Vacanti: Well, then it sounds like you’re pretty confident. I would be too. How about 20 to 1?

0:20:18.7 Jordan Syatt: How about… How about this?

0:20:21.5 Mike Vacanti: We don’t need to make this bet. If anyone else out there is a real gambler and wants to make this bet, email us at fitnessbusinessmentorship.com.

0:20:27.7 Jordan Syatt: That’s a good idea.

0:20:29.5 Mike Vacanti: I actually, I don’t even know if this is legal, to be honest, so actually don’t email us about making the bet, just continue listening and enjoy.

0:20:41.8 Jordan Syatt: Anyway. I don’t even know where we were. I just kept thinking when…

0:20:45.4 Mike Vacanti: Shorts, TikToks, Reels.

0:20:48.4 Jordan Syatt: When you said don’t get it twisted, I was like, that is the most Gary thing I’ve ever heard you say. Don’t get it twisted, ’cause we’re doing it too. We’re giving the mentorship this challenge, which is true. Oh, and that’s what I was gonna talk about was, for example, I made a Reel yesterday, which by the way, Instagram recently changed their Reel length, so now it can be 90 seconds, which I find interesting, this is an interesting sort of spin. I’m gonna go back to what I was saying. So TikTok used to be like… Well, actually, if we’re gonna go really far back, remember in the OG days of Instagram, there were like 15 seconds, like a video could only be 15 seconds on your feed. Do you remember that?

0:21:28.0 Mike Vacanti: Vaguely, yes.

0:21:31.1 Jordan Syatt: If you go back to like the OG Instagram days, videos were like 15 seconds, and they couldn’t be more than that, and then they went up to 30 seconds, and then they went up to a minute and then they added the slide feature, so then you could add multiple one-minute videos next to each other, and so then sort of skipping around TikTok, it was… I think at first, I don’t think it started off as a minute, at first, I feel like it started off with 15 seconds, 30 seconds, a minute. Now, TikToks are all the way up to three minutes, and Instagram just recently increased their Reel length to 90 seconds. I’m sure it’ll probably increase up to three minutes at some point, depending on how the three minutes do on TikTok, but this is actually interesting because they started off really short, but now they’re trying to increase the length, I would assume, based on the data they’re seeing or well how long are people watching for and maybe do creators need a longer amount of time in order to get their message across, which is interesting because they’re sort of unknowingly going towards longer form content, but…

0:22:35.9 Jordan Syatt: So I made a Reel yesterday, a 90-second Reel with 30 of my favorite high-fiber foods, which interestingly, that could easily have been a long-form website article, the top 30 high-fiber food, and that could have been a 2500-word article easy, but I fit all that in 90 seconds. And it turned out to be really good. It got a lot of saves, a lot of shares. It was actually a very, very popular piece of content, and it was interesting ’cause people were like, this is super helpful. I didn’t know about these different types of foods or oh, I didn’t… I eat these foods. I didn’t know it was so high in fiber or oh I didn’t realize these foods had high fiber, so it is interesting because it is an opportunity to educate the masses just without nuance, there isn’t as much nuance, and if you watched the video, I was wearing a wig, I was wearing my doctor uniform. I was chugging water and then burping. I was wearing the stethoscope and doing funny stuff with that.

0:23:37.1 Jordan Syatt: So clearly doing things to get and keep people’s attention, there was really not much nuance in there at all, as much just like an informative, hey, here are 30 foods with high fiber, but I don’t even know where I’m going with this, but there is an opportunity for more informative posts as the videos get longer duration, but sort of the crux of that is as your videos get longer, especially on a platform, and in a type of content that is specifically… It requires a tremendous amount of attention. If you’re going to do longer form content on that style platform, you need ways to keep their attention that you need to do things that are weird or odd or shocking in a way.

0:24:21.7 Jordan Syatt: Even something as simple as jump cuts can be very, very helpful, but you need to do things to keep their attention on, especially when it’s on a style of content that is specifically made for short form content.

0:24:33.8 Mike Vacanti: What are… Because this is something I have not historically thought about, what are some strategies other than humor, which is one that you use very effectively to maintain attention that aren’t just like, that are separate from the actual content that’s being delivered.

0:24:54.2 Jordan Syatt: So there’s a bunch. So I think the most important is jump cuts, and this has nothing to do with humor or anything, but by having quick jump cuts where there’s no pauses, there’s no uhhs or uhms or hmms, or having quick jump cuts is I think the most universal way to keep people’s attention and just help to keep them watching, so that’s number one, you don’t need humor or anything for that, just take the extra, I don’t know, 10, 15 minutes to jump cut the video in an app and it’s easy. So that’s number one. The next thing is captions. Now, captions historically take longer just because of you have to write out the caption by hand, recently, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, and even Instagram now auto-populate captions if you want. Now, for whatever reason, Instagram has not auto-populated captions on Reels, but what you can do is you can upload the Reel to your story, auto-populate the captions in your story and then save that story to your phone and then upload that story as Reel with the captions auto-populated. So that way you’ll have the captions there, if you don’t wanna do them by hand.

0:26:08.8 Mike Vacanti: You don’t do that because they’re not that accurate.

0:26:12.2 Jordan Syatt: No, they’re actually unbelievably accurate. It blows my mind at how accurate they are, I don’t get it. They populate within five seconds and they’re like 98% accurate. It’s ridiculous.

0:26:24.3 Mike Vacanti: Weren’t you testing doing them on InShot though. Or was that just for a different style?

0:26:28.9 Jordan Syatt: It’s a different style and I like… And that was actually what I was gonna talk about next, because the way that Instagram does it, and the way that TikTok does it, and the way that Facebook does it and YouTube does it, it’s just… It’s a long line of caption, and I know Instagram has several different options, but they’re all longer and slightly slower with when I do it myself and the videos that I notice getting the best engagement, each caption line is only like one or two words, so you see not only the jump cuts, but the words changing super quickly as well, and that is another way to keep people’s attention because if you just have a full sentence and it stays on the screen for three to five seconds, it’s gonna sound crazy to us, but that will lose people’s attention more quickly than if you have two words on the screen for an eighth of a second, and then two words and two words and two words and one word and two words. It’s harder to do that, it takes more time in the post-editing process, but that is another way to keep people’s attention is for when you’re doing your captions and you can do it on InShot very easily.

0:27:42.7 Jordan Syatt: It’s just time-consuming and tedious, but it is a really good way to keep people’s attention, changing the size of the words throughout, so it’s not just like one continuous stream of the same size and same font. It’s like changing the size of the fonts. This is something that I’ll do as I’m talking, I’ll change the canvas of my video, so sometimes it’s a normal distance away, then I’ll zoom in on my face, and then I’ll zoom back out and then if I’m saying like, “Just. Do. This” like, on “just,” I’ll zoom in little bit more and then “do” I’ll zoom in a little bit more, and then “this,” I’ll zoom in even more, and then boom, I’ll come back out to the end. These are all things that help keep people’s attention, keep them involved within the video, it almost seems as if there’s movement with the camera, even though the camera is still… It creates this false sense of movement that keeps them engaged more and almost like they’re speaking directly with you, so these are all just simple editing tips.

0:28:38.6 Mike Vacanti: You’re doing those… You’re doing all of those edits in InShot.

0:28:40.6 Jordan Syatt: Dude, InShot is amazing. I do all of this in InShot. I can do so much with it. Even the free version is fantastic, the paid version is like 20 bucks for a lifetime, it’s not 20 bucks a month, it’s 20 bucks for a lifetime. I’m not sponsored by them at all, they don’t even know who I am, I recently followed them on Instagram because their Instagram is amazing, they have tons of helpful tips on how to use InShot for editing and it’s super, super helpful. That’s actually where I learned how to do the captions on InShot. They made a simple, simple, easy tutorial on how to make them way easier. Again, it’s tedious and it will add… For a 90-second video, it’ll probably add about 25 to 30 minutes before I publish it, just ’cause it’s gonna take that time to do all those captions, but worth it for the engagement, if you’re gonna spend time making a video, you might as well make it so that more people see it and watch it the whole way through. But yeah, InShot does all of that, and I can do re-winds on it, and I can do zoom-ins and I can do slow emotions and I can change the color of it, make it black and white…

0:29:46.6 Jordan Syatt: There’s so much you can do. It’s actually, it’s amazing. I’m sort of pissed off that I spent a couple of thousand on a video editing software on my computer several years ago that I used like four times, because InShot is so easy.

0:30:00.4 Mike Vacanti: Yeah.

0:30:00.5 Jordan Syatt: Obviously, it is an exaggeration, I used it more than that, and I still use it for Inner Circle videos and stuff. But… Yeah.

0:30:05.7 Mike Vacanti: And that was for longer-form videos, right?

0:30:10.0 Jordan Syatt: Correct. Yeah. I wouldn’t wanna do it on a 30-minute video. That would suck.

0:30:14.4 Mike Vacanti: Yeah, and you also learned that editing a 30-minute YouTube video is tedious and hard, and not something that you wanted to be doing constantly.

0:30:23.5 Jordan Syatt: Correct. Yeah, yeah, but these 90-second videos or 60-second videos on InShot are super easy, very helpful. So yeah, those are all just like, you don’t need any humor or any redeeming qualities for that stuff, that’s just learning video editing on the app. I think another way to keep people’s attention is… This is actually something that I’ve been doing. So for example, if you watch the video I did yesterday with the 30 high-fiber foods, within the first, I don’t know, 10, 15 seconds of the video, there’s a shot of me using my stethoscope, but tapping on it, I was tapping on it and trying to hear myself talking to it, that was not done for the video, that was literally in between shots, so I was like, “oh, I wonder how well this works,” and I was just tapping on it, and I put that in the video, just because that was actually what I was doing… And it was funny, it was just a funny shot of me doing that, so sometimes, for example, let’s say I’m doing a video and my wife started talking to me and I’m like, “what did you say?” And some people would get mad or they would be like, “oh the shots ruined.” Put that in the video. It’s funny, it shows you’re real… It shows what the process of making the video was like, it actually adds humor to it, literally without you trying.

0:31:47.7 Jordan Syatt: So sometimes just taking random shots of you while the video was running is super helpful to break it up and make it really quick. There was one time I was gonna go take a sip of water, so I just chugged water, and I put the video of me chugging water… That 1.2-second clip of me chugging water in that video as well. It had nothing to do with it and I didn’t plan it. It’s just I drank water in the middle of it, so I put that in there, so sometimes just having it broken up with things completely unrelated to the video is enough to keep people’s attention.

0:32:18.1 Mike Vacanti: Did you know that in ‘Wolf of Wall Street,’ when Leo and Matthew McConnaughey are sitting down to lunch and McConnaughey is doing that thing on his chest…

0:32:28.1 Jordan Syatt: Oh, I love that scene.

0:32:29.8 Mike Vacanti: Did you know that he was actually doing that between scenes because it’s like some practice that he has, and Leo was like, “what’s that thing you’re doing before every take? What is that?” And he was telling him, “it calms me down,” or I don’t remember what it was, but he was like, let’s… ‘Cause they already had it, they did four or five takes, they had what they needed of that scene, and Leo was like, “let’s do one more, but do that,” and they turn the cameras on and he just did that, and it was this amazing like moment…

0:32:58.7 Jordan Syatt: Shut up, I did not know that.

0:32:58.7 Mike Vacanti: That… Yeah, yeah.

0:33:01.8 Jordan Syatt: That’s one of my favorite scenes of all time.

0:33:03.5 Mike Vacanti: It’s literally what he was doing between scenes. Yeah, let’s hear it.

[vocalization]

0:33:10.0 Jordan Syatt: I didn’t know that. That’s so funny. And he improv’d that whole bit?

0:33:14.8 Mike Vacanti: Yes.

0:33:15.5 Jordan Syatt: Wow, that makes it even cooler.

0:33:18.2 Mike Vacanti: Yeah, yeah. Cool. I also like two very simple ones are good lighting, so have the light coming toward your face and smile, like if it’s a normal educational video on any platform where you’re delivering information, smile while you’re talking rather than just be completely stoic is gonna help, not only the time on video, but also just the way that you are perceived by the person watching.

0:33:51.4 Jordan Syatt: Yeah. Yup.

0:33:53.1 Mike Vacanti: Do you ever… Do you ever…

0:34:00.1 Jordan Syatt: Are you laughing?

0:34:01.6 Mike Vacanti: I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m trying to think of what I’m trying to say. Basically, I would imagine that the humor you put into your videos is the humor that you expect to get the best reaction, and if so, are you ever disappointed in the average humor level of the average human being on Earth?

0:34:21.4 Jordan Syatt: Yes, absolutely, ’cause there’s a lot of times where I don’t wanna wear a Kenzie wig or do any. It would be way easier for me to do a technique video where it’s just me explaining it way easier, way less time, and honestly, probably more effective from a teaching perspective, but I know that people are going to have a way better, a way more fun and enjoyable time watching Kenzie try and do an exercise and then me explaining it, but the unfortunate part of that is that means there’s less time for me to actually explain things and it’s not as in-depth as I would like it to be. But yeah, sometimes disappointing because I’m like, you guys fucking are really just gonna enjoy this way more with her in there, so I’ll put this fucking wig on and I’ll make some mistakes and I’ll correct them, but it’s not gonna reach nearly as many people if I don’t do that, so yeah.

0:35:15.7 Mike Vacanti: Yeah.

0:35:16.0 Jordan Syatt: Absolutely.

0:35:17.1 Mike Vacanti: It reaches more people, probably better engagement on average, and if more people still get the general takeaways, the two or three things they need to change about RDL, even if it wasn’t as technical of a video, it’s probably better that you’re reaching more people.

0:35:35.5 Jordan Syatt: Correct. The whole old adage, “you have to give them what they want in order to give them what they need.” If I didn’t do that, they probably wouldn’t have seen the video at all, or they wouldn’t have made it even a quarter of the way through, so at least they have a little bit of something now to like cool… So now they know their foot position, where they should be driving from, maybe they don’t know all of the nuance and details, but they’re not gonna get that even on the best of days and the best of videos, we’re not gonna get all of the nuance and all… Even if I was there with them in person, they can’t get every single thing down, so at least they’re getting a little bit… They’re enjoying themselves. Honestly, that’s one of the things that I’ve realized, that’s part of my job on social media is if I could just make someone laugh or smile, then I did my job for that day, it doesn’t necessarily have to be like I completely changed your perception of health and fitness, if I could just brighten your mood so that you feel a little bit better, so then you can go on a walk, maybe you can eat a little bit better, you can be a better spouse, whatever it is.

0:36:35.0 Jordan Syatt: Like, Cool, I did my job today. And that’s not only for a fitness and health perspective, it’s also a branding perspective as well. I think one of the best ways that I could describe brand, ’cause we… A lot of fucking business gurus and masterminds always talk about brand, brand, brand. And I’m always like, “what is ‘brand’? Define ‘brand’.” And they never know how to explain it in a really definitive way, and the best way that I figured out how to explain brand is… How do people feel when they think about you? That’s what your brand is. When they hear your name, what emotion comes up? And so for me, if people can immediately smile or just feel good at the thought of my name, that’s a good brand. That’s sort of where I think about that.

0:37:25.0 Mike Vacanti: I like that. Should we dive into some questions?

0:37:29.7 Jordan Syatt: Let’s dive into some questions, brother.

0:37:32.7 Mike Vacanti: We got Nick here saying, “Question, based on your urging, I have,” and this is a… He was on the email list and sent in an email. “Based on your urging, I have three times attempted to train friends for free, but each time they stop responding to my messages and do not continue with the program I create for them. I would like to know if this is common or not for aspiring trainers to face. Is it a case of me training people who are not ready for behavior change? Can I continue my communication and accountability… Can I improve my communication and accountability strategies? I know you need more details to confidently answer these last two questions.” We can definitely give some good answers based on this information.

0:38:15.8 Jordan Syatt: This is great information. Starting off, just number one, it’s completely and 100% normal for that to happen. Not just with someone who you’re coaching for free, by the way, that’ll happen even if people are paying you $300 or $400 a month. There are still people who do that. So that’s… It’s not really something that coaches share on social media. Coaches aren’t being like, “So I just have a client who’s been paying me for four months who’s ghosted me, isn’t replying or not doing anything.” They’re not saying that. What they’re doing is they’re showing you the top 1% of their clients who are making amazing progress and for them, it’s a marketing strategy, it’s also they’re very proud of those clients which is great. But it’s a marketing strategy. But they’re not gonna show off their business and how great their coaching is by saying, “Yeah, my client ghosted me.” So yes, this is very normal, very common, unfortunate, very unfortunate, and honestly, quite frankly, mind-blowing in many ways that people would do that.

0:39:13.7 Jordan Syatt: But I think we all do that in areas of our life. I think we all have our strengths and weaknesses and it all… It happens for sure. So that being said, it is more likely with clients who you’re training for free. I think it’s also more likely when you’re at the beginning of your career than once you established yourself as a legitimate professional, because usually when you’re at the beginning of your career, you’re working oftentimes with friends or family, people who’ve known you for a while, and by nature, it’s gonna be harder for them to take you seriously ’cause they’ve known you forever. It will be more difficult for them. But even if it’s a legitimate client, someone that you met because of your work, when you’re not as fully established yet, there is a greater likelihood that they’re not gonna be following through, they’re not gonna… That they will ghost you, which is… As you become more and more established and more well-known, I don’t mean famous, I just mean more known for what you do and you get more referrals and people coming to you, you’re gonna get more people who are less likely to drop off and ghost you.

0:40:17.7 Jordan Syatt: So I think it’s very common for coaches to be like, “Yeah, don’t give coaching away for free, you devalue your service and they’re not gonna follow it.” Some of my best clients I coached for free, and literally, like I said at the beginning of this podcast, I coached someone for free the other day. So I’m a big fan of coaching people for free, especially when you haven’t build your business yet, but it is important to understand that this is normal, it’s common, it’s going to happen, and as you grow and improve as a coach and as a business owner, it will happen less, but it will always happen.

0:40:47.9 Mike Vacanti: Yeah, yeah, hit the nail on the head. And it’s still… It’s a win-win when you’re starting your business. It’s a win for the person who is getting free coaching, whether or not that person is utilizing the service you’re providing them. And like Jordan said, someone who is paying for something is far more likely to implement it, not always, but far more likely than someone who doesn’t have any skin in the game. And the win for the coach is you’re just getting started, maybe you have some in-person training experience, maybe you do not, but whether you’re in-person or online, when you’re just getting started, coaching people for free is going to, one, help you become a better coach, it’s gonna help you technically become a better coach or you’re coaching people for free in person, and it’s gonna help you build your systems and understand how online coaching works if you’re coaching people for free online. The other thing that that’s going to do is Jordan just mentioned, coach is not showing off the bottom third of their client roster, people who maybe haven’t responded to an update in a month and a half, but that top few percent who are really killing it are really good marketing.

0:41:55.0 Mike Vacanti: And that’s why coaches use those progress pictures as marketing because it’s very effective. And so through coaching people for free, so let’s say you just… Let’s say you get started in your first year of coaching, you don’t get any paid clients or maybe you get one paid client. I didn’t have any paid coaching clients in my first year of coaching. But let’s just say you get one paid client. Compared to if you worked with 15 or 20 free clients during that time, you’re going to much more quickly build up testimonials, whether those are just purely written or written and photo, which is going to lead to you getting more paid clients faster. And so, yeah, working people… Working with clients for free early on in your career is a very, very good idea. Don’t listen to the gurus. And Nick, yes, it’s very common for both paid and free clients not to have an incredible adherence and that’s okay, it’s part of the game.

0:43:00.1 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, and I can’t go forward without saying this, we have an entire course on how to improve client adherence and motivation and client psychology, all of that in the mentorship, so if you still haven’t joined the mentorship, I’m not really sure what you’re waiting for, Nick and everybody else, but you can join at the link in the show notes if you’d like. This is what we talk about all the time. So we have two live Q&As every month. We have tons of courses and in-depth video courses, not 90-second fucking clips, like hours on hours on hours courses. So if you’re really looking to be an expert in this, join the mentorship, we’ll help you there.

0:43:36.2 Mike Vacanti: 100%, we would love to see you on the inside. Our guy, Jeff here, had a question about the best way of…

0:43:45.6 Jordan Syatt: Our guy Jeff.

0:43:46.9 Mike Vacanti: Our guy Jeff, JJ.

[laughter]

0:43:51.1 Mike Vacanti: He emailed. He listens to the pod. He’s our guy. I’ll take it from the top just so you can have… I was gonna jump to the question, but I’ll give you context and why he’s our guy. “Hey guys, my name’s Jeff, I’m from Arizona, and I found your podcast a little over a month ago. I just wanna say thank you for all the advice you gave, especially with finding an apprenticeship, as you mentioned in one of your older episodes. After taking your advice and by the grace of God, I was able to find a job as a personal trainer within just a few weeks.”

[overlapping conversation]

0:44:18.4 Jordan Syatt: He’s our guy.

0:44:19.3 Mike Vacanti: He’s our guy.

0:44:20.5 Jordan Syatt: He is our guy.

0:44:20.6 Mike Vacanti: “I’ve been avidly trying to finish my certification for a couple of months now, but it’s difficult due to my full-time job, but I just recently found this job as a personal trainer, which is what I’ve been wanting to do for a few years now, and it was partly due to the advice that you two gave.” And then he went on to say, “I wanted to ask you what you would say from experience the best way of setting up rapport with clients. For context, the gym is starting me off with 13 different clients whose trainer just recently left and I’m the trainer stepping in to pick them up. How would you recommend setting up a firm foundation for my relationship with each client so they don’t quit at the beginning? I fear that I won’t be as good as their previous personal trainer and want them to trust that I will do my best to help them. What are both of your thoughts?”

0:45:04.5 Jordan Syatt: Man, Jeff is our fucking guy.

0:45:07.2 Mike Vacanti: Jeff’s our guy. He is.

0:45:09.5 Jordan Syatt: I love that. I love all of that. What a great, great introduction. Great question, very thoughtful, very kind. I like that a lot.

0:45:17.4 Mike Vacanti: Me too.

0:45:18.8 Jordan Syatt: So… [overlapping conversation] what’s up?

0:45:20.9 Mike Vacanti: Continue.

[laughter]

0:45:28.2 Jordan Syatt: There are a number of ways that you can build a rapport with your clients, but honestly, where I’m gonna begin is this, everything that you just said, I think you should say to your clients the first time that you meet with them at… I don’t know if he’s met with them yet, but I think you should say exactly what you just said to us to them. You should say, “Hey, listen, I’m super excited about this. I’ve been wanting to be a coach for several years. I’ve been studying a lot and this is my passion and I’m so excited to be here. I know I’m the replacement and I know that your previous coach left. I’m very worried that you’re not gonna like me and that you’re gonna leave because I’m not as good as your last coach, and I wanted to tell you this just because I wanna start off by being fully honest and open with you. I want you to know you can come to me for anything you want, anything you need, I’m here to help.”

0:46:18.6 Jordan Syatt: “I’m not looking to try and be a replacement of your last coach, but I do want to be… I wanna be the best coach for you that I can possibly be. So if there are things that you like or things that you don’t like, please tell me. If there’s anything I can do to improve, I’m all ears. Any constructive criticism is always welcome. And I just wanted to be upfront with you from the very beginning.” I think if you start off like that with your clients, they’re gonna be like, “This is our fucking guy.”

0:46:47.9 Mike Vacanti: 100%. I love that. It reminded me of Gary’s “Say That.”

0:46:52.2 Jordan Syatt: Yes, “just say that!” [laughter]

0:46:58.9 Mike Vacanti: There are people who have preyed on the trend that authenticity does well on social and in life, and so probably we probably have a surplus of “authenticity” and vulnerability on the internet right now which is really just people sharing, over-sharing personal details for heightened engagement and contrived online relationships. That being said, being authentic and being honest and being open and being vulnerable is still… I don’t wanna say strategy. It’s just like a really good way to approach new relationships and human interactions and… So I love everything you said, Jordan.

0:47:42.2 Jordan Syatt: People can tell when it’s real though.

0:47:45.2 Mike Vacanti: Some people can.

[chuckle]

0:47:49.4 Jordan Syatt: That’s true. It’s like, for example, the people sitting down with their roles on social media and being like, “Look, I have fat too,” like, “All right, we fucking get it. We know that this went viral and we know this is a really good way to get followers. We get it.”

0:48:05.8 Mike Vacanti: You get it. You get it. I was literally this past weekend, I was at a friend’s wedding and there was someone who was like, “I just love when these influencers post when their body doesn’t look perfect. That’s just so real and I just crave that.” And in my mind, I’m like…

[laughter]

0:48:29.8 Mike Vacanti: So it’s played out for you, but it’s still like…

0:48:33.7 Jordan Syatt: They love it.

0:48:33.9 Mike Vacanti: It still hits with a lot… Yes, people love it.

0:48:38.6 Jordan Syatt: They love it. “Oh, man. I was just like…” [laughter]

0:48:47.1 Mike Vacanti: I mean I don’t know how to reply in situations like that, like, “Oh good, I’m glad you like that. That’s so cool.”

0:48:53.3 Jordan Syatt: “You’re following some real influencers.”

[laughter]

0:49:00.9 Mike Vacanti: It’s like, “those aren’t fat rolls, that’s your skin.” And…

0:49:03.0 Jordan Syatt: Exactly. [laughter]

0:49:07.5 Mike Vacanti: The thing is though, I distinctly remember like… I don’t know if I actually ever posted it or not, we’d have to scroll back, but definitely 2014 range or maybe even before, having that thought like, “Let’s show them… Let’s show them what it really is,” but it’s like, “Nah, that’s skin rolls. There’s… “

0:49:25.0 Jordan Syatt: Man, you started that trend?

0:49:26.0 Mike Vacanti: No, it existed before then.

0:49:29.6 Jordan Syatt: But you started the infographic trend.

0:49:31.7 Mike Vacanti: I did start the Equals and Alternatives trend. I just executed it poorly, gave up too early and burnt myself out. Candle doesn’t burn at both ends.

[laughter]

0:49:42.0 Jordan Syatt: Well, it does, it just burns really fast.

0:49:45.6 Mike Vacanti: Yeah, it burns fast. You need a big candle. But no, real authenticity is still severely lacking, and so I completely agree. I think that’s great advice for our guy, Jeff. We got one more cool question here, which is from Shivam. Shivam says, “Hi, Jordan and Mike.”

0:50:11.8 Jordan Syatt: From our girl Shivam, let’s go.

0:50:13.2 Mike Vacanti: Let’s go, let’s go. “I’ve been listening to the podcast for a long time now, I love it. Listening to you guys is like having a virtual mentor. Also, I love it when you guys dive deep into a topic and keep going on while sharing personal experiences, like when you spoke about performing lat pull-downs.” Oh, alright. More of that to come. We’ve actually been talking about that on the side bar recently. “I had one question for you guys. Since a change in both building a business and health and fitness… Since changing in both building a business and health and fitness is so similar, what would you say would be the best way to track progress for building a business? Just like clients, it would be regularly tracking weight, girth measurements, photos, and how do you compare the process versus outcome? I know it is probably more than just one question, but it would be great to have some clarity on this. Thank you.”

0:51:11.5 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, great question. What do you think about that, Mike?

0:51:15.4 Mike Vacanti: I think that… I think that being process-oriented, so are you executing on the tasks that you’re supposed to that will lead to the outcome that you want? I think that in the short term, it is by far the better strategy to focus on how adherent you are to the process. Like your client would focus on, for nutrition, for one example, how close they are to their calories or their macros on a day-to-day basis. They’re not gonna focus on the outcome, that scale going up and down and bouncing around, but they’re gonna focus on how close they were to hitting their targets. That’s a process-oriented goal.

0:51:57.2 Mike Vacanti: For business, it would be, if your goal is to be posting three Reels a day and doing two long-form articles a month, I would evaluate my business progress based on how close I was to my goals, not to how many new clients I get, not to how many likes my stuff’s getting, not to… None of the outcome, but the process in the short term. Because you could be doing an amazing job with the process in the short-term and the outcome, new clients, isn’t happening. But that doesn’t mean you’re doing anything wrong. You’re still on the right track, you still should be following that process. Now, in a five-year window, to say like “just be process-oriented, don’t be results-oriented,” or “don’t be outcome-oriented,” like let’s say you go five years, you post five Reels a day for five years and you get zero new coaching clients. You’re doing…

0:52:57.7 Jordan Syatt: You need to find a new career. [laughter]

0:53:00.6 Mike Vacanti: You’re doing something wrong. You can’t… At that timeframe, you can’t just look at the process and be like, “But I haven’t missed a single day except for Christmas 2018, but I had to visit my grandma and blah, blah, blah, I didn’t have internet. But every other day I posted five per day, I’m nailing it, like, process-oriented.” It’s like, no, in a longer time horizon, you can evaluate the success of your business based on the result, based on what you are trying to make happen. But in the day-to day, week-to-week, even month-to-month, evaluate yourself on how closely you’re… On how adherent you are getting to the gym, on the intensity of your training sessions, on how close you are on your nutrition. But over a five-year window, you’re gonna assess, “Okay, my goal is to be able to do a chin-up. Did I accomplish that goal? My goal was to lose 50 pounds of body fat and get into a healthy weight range. Did I accomplish that goal?” Over a long window, we evaluate based on results. In the short term, we evaluate based on how adherent we are to our processes.

0:54:03.4 Jordan Syatt: Yeah, I like that a lot. I’m gonna say one of the best things I learned from Louie Simmons, rest in peace, was learning how to always find a way to find a new personal record. And so in the gym, with Louie, what we would do is every single week we would go for a new personal record, and actually, basically every single day. But it wasn’t in the sense of like, “Okay, we’re gonna do a regular squat or a regular bench press or regular deadlift,” and he we hit a new personal record. It was always with a different variation. So it was like deficit deadlift, one-inch deficit deadlift, a half-inch deficit deadlift, a two-inch deficit deadlift, a one-and-a-half-inch deficit deadlift, one-inch deficit deadlift versus chains, one-inch deficit deadlift versus bands. You have all of those different variations and for each individual variation, you have a new personal record. And just by changing a variation ever so slightly, you’ve established a new record. So literally, every time you go to the gym, even if it’s a bad day, you’re still gonna hit a new personal record. And I’ve carried that over to a lot of my life in terms of always being able to find, “Well, what did I do really well? What did well here? What did I hit a new personal record on?” and sort of looking at your business in the same way can be very, very, very, very helpful.

0:55:23.6 Jordan Syatt: And so, I 100% agree with Mike in terms of… Especially at the beginning, being more process-oriented. But I remember when I very first started my business, before I knew that it could be a business, if I got one person liking my Facebook post, which by the way, if you scroll down my personal Facebook page, you’ll see posts from 2011, 2012, 2013, with maybe one or two likes on it, they were fitness posts, if I got one person liking it, it was like, cool, done, awesome. That was my win for the day. Had nothing to do with followers, had nothing to do with making money, it was just cool. Someone liked it. If someone messaged me and said, “Hey, this was really helpful,” boom, done, accomplished, that piece of content was worth it, things are going well. And in today’s world, I think sometimes people are too focused on comparing themselves to others and looking at followers and looking at all these other metrics, which frankly, they do matter, I’m not gonna say they don’t matter, but they’re not the most important, especially when it comes to you staying consistent and doing what you need to do for the process along the way.

0:56:29.5 Jordan Syatt: So for me, getting a like from someone, getting a comment, getting a message, these were all records for me, these were, “all right, awesome. That whole piece of content was worth it now.” So when you’re sort of analyzing the success of your business, you can look at likes, you can look at comments, you can look at shares, you can look at followers. These are all valid metrics, but they are by no means the most important metrics at all. Obviously in terms of true business growth, the most important number realistically is how much money are you bringing in annually? That’s really the most important number in terms of purely business growth. It’s not number of clients, because you could have 100 clients paying you $7 a month, but you might be making way more money if you have 25 clients paying you $50 or whatever, $200 a month. I don’t know the actual math.

0:57:27.2 Jordan Syatt: So it can’t just be total number of clients, because there are many ways to manipulate that so it actually wouldn’t be better for you. It can’t be total number of followers, it can’t be total likes, it can’t be total comments or total shares, just because none of those are definitively you making more money annually every year.

0:57:45.7 Jordan Syatt: So I think looking at it from an annual perspective, year-over-year income, that’s what’s really gonna be the best way to tell if your business is growing outside of that process-oriented goal. There is always going to come a point where eventually it will stop year over year, where you’re… Generally from what I’ve seen is, for the first seven years, you can see growth year after year after year, and then after year seven, it’s very common for people to see a bit of a dip or a drop-off or a plateau, whatever you wanna call it. But year over year over year for the first five, seven, 10 years, it’s very common, very normal to see that growth and that is a really good number to shoot for. The only way you’ll achieve that though is by focusing on those process-oriented goals. So I do like that annual evaluation just to see rather than looking at total number of… ‘Cause you’ll lose clients. You’ll lose clients in a day, in a week, in a month. You’ll lose income in a day, in a week, in a month. But it’s not worrying about what’s going on right now. It’s about what’s going on at the end of the year.

0:58:47.4 Mike Vacanti: I love it. Let’s dive in further on something. I’m gonna push back. Jordan, so you only care about making money and that should be the goal?

0:58:58.8 Jordan Syatt: I knew that was gonna come up.

0:59:00.0 Mike Vacanti: You greedy capitalist, pig, filth.

[laughter]

0:59:05.4 Jordan Syatt: It’s sort of like, I would say, when we’re looking at numbers that matter, I think every single person would agree that body fat percentage is more important than weight. Your body fat percentage is a more important number than your weight. It’s not to say that weight doesn’t matter, but your body fat percentage, if someone’s trying to lose fat, that is the number, that is without question, the most important number for fat loss. Without question. ‘Cause you can lose weight and lose muscle mass and your actual… Your body composition could have a negative result on it. You could gain body fat, lose muscle mass, cool, you’re less healthy, you’re not going towards your goal ’cause your goal is to lose fat, not muscle, and not just simply weight. So you could do the Keto diet and lose a bunch of water weight, but you’re not actually losing fat.

1:00:00.2 Jordan Syatt: So again, we know fat percentage, your fat number is the most important number in terms of assessing progress towards this specific goal. So progress towards your business goal, if you really want to assess the success of your business, not the success of your coaching, not the success of your client, the success of your business, then we’re going by the number, amount of money you’re making every year. And if you get to a point where you’re like, “I don’t wanna make any more money,” then cool, that’s fine. Then you’ve reached ultimate success in that one area. But if we’re looking at business success, money annually is the most important number.

1:00:37.5 Mike Vacanti: We need to drop this caricature of the greedy capitalist, like steps on any throat, crushes any person for personal gain, which does exist, but in a huge minority of the population, for most people, especially in our industry, there is a massive overlap between doing good in the world, helping people with their goals, helping people become healthier, and the success of your business, AKA making more money. So there shouldn’t be any shame about wanting to make more money as a goal of your business because that is very much aligned with also doing good in helping people. A lot of people think of them as separate things and think of one is good and one is bad, but that’s absolutely not true.

1:01:38.9 Jordan Syatt: 100% agree. Yeah, that’s exactly right. And by the way, you can make more money in your business, but have a really bad business and not be a good coach. That’s not what we’re advocating. You could make a ton of money and sell bullshit and it’s still, from a business perspective, you’re evaluating the success of the business based on the money. But we’re not saying that’s a good thing to do. We want…

1:02:02.2 Mike Vacanti: Who was the guy who… I think it was 2015, some just shredded, PEDs out the gills, like Instagram 2014, 2015, massive following, had, I don’t remember if it’s like 500 or 1000 one-on-one private coaching clients, and the entire time it was… And I think it came out because his assistant, this woman who was like “him” was… She might have actually… They might have had a dispute and she came out and was like, “By the way, anyone who was his client, it was actually me and… ” Yeah, so that got 1000 clients times whatever a month, your business is doing really “good”, if we were on video, but you’re doing a terrible job as a coach, helping people of being honest and forthright and ethical. So there can be a… It’s a Venn diagram. Make more money, help more people, it’s a Venn diagram. You can do both, you can be in the middle, but you can also be on either side. You can also help people and not make more money, you can also make more money without helping people and doing the right thing. We’re aiming for the middle.

1:03:16.7 Jordan Syatt: Boom.

1:03:17.3 Mike Vacanti: Boom.

1:03:17.4 Jordan Syatt: Done.

1:03:18.0 Mike Vacanti: Great episode. This was…

1:03:20.4 Jordan Syatt: Great episode.

1:03:21.3 Mike Vacanti: Yeah.

1:03:21.4 Jordan Syatt: This was a banger.

1:03:22.0 Mike Vacanti: Yeah, non-video might be the play.

1:03:25.6 Jordan Syatt: I feel like your sound quality was better today.

1:03:26.9 Mike Vacanti: Is my sound quality usually not that great?

1:03:29.3 Jordan Syatt: No it’s always great, but there’s… Maybe it’s just ’cause I can’t see you so my senses are like…

1:03:34.2 Mike Vacanti: Heightened.

1:03:34.4 Jordan Syatt: Maybe a little bit…

1:03:35.7 Mike Vacanti: Yeah.

1:03:36.1 Jordan Syatt: Heightened, yeah.

1:03:36.7 Mike Vacanti: Interesting. Well, like Jordan said earlier, if you haven’t joined the mentorship, you can right now, today, we would love to have you.

1:03:45.6 Jordan Syatt: You should.

1:03:46.8 Mike Vacanti: You should. [laughter] You should.

1:03:50.9 Jordan Syatt: That’s it. I got another podcast in two and a half minutes.

1:03:56.5 Mike Vacanti: Oh get ’em. Everyone, have a great day. We will see you very, very soon. Thanks for listening. Bye-bye.

1:04:00.0 Jordan Syatt: See ya!