Dennis Yu – On a Mission to Create 1 Million Jobs (364)

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Episode transcript below:

SPEAKERS

Dennis Yu, Mike Malatesta

Mike Malatesta  00:06

Hey, Dennis, welcome to the podcast.

Dennis Yu  00:13

What’s up, Mike, good to see you again.

Mike Malatesta  00:14

I am so happy to have you here. So, Dennis and I had a call maybe a week or two ago, we got introduced by a mutual friend, Justin Breen, and we just kind of chit-chatted a little bit to get to know one another. I’ve been really, really looking forward to this podcast ever since, because I had no idea how powerful this guy is, and what he’s doing and the movements he’s creating, and all that. So, we’re all just people, right? But some people make things happen a little bit more than others. You’re one of them. And I want people to understand how and why you do it, which is why you’re here. If you’re watching, I am wearing sort of like a shawl around me, a pair of socks that have my image on them that Dennis gifted me, I got yesterday, I think from our initial conversation and I had no idea anything was coming, and I got these socks with my face all over them. And it was just amazing, s different, memorable gift, and I thank you so much for it, along with the note that that came with, but I’ll stop blabbering about Dennis now and I’ll tell you a little bit about who he really is. So Dennis Yu is the CEO of Blitz Media, and the co-author of the number-one best-selling book on Amazon in social media called The Definitive Guide to Tic Tok Ads. He has spent a billion dollars — that’s B-billion — on Facebook ads across his agencies and agencies he advises. He is a guy on a mission to create 1 million jobs via hands-on social media training, partnering with universities and professional organizations. He’s been quoted in major publications and on TV. He’s been everywhere, CNN, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, NPR, LA Times, his clients have included big names like Nike, Red Bull, Golden State Warriors, Ashley Furniture, Quiznos. But here’s what I really like. He is committed to bringing good marketing resources and good marketing strategy to real life every day. Businesses. bricks and mortar businesses, service businesses, the kinds of businesses that typically don’t, they’re not very skilled at that. So I love that he’s bringing it down. I mean, this guy doesn’t need to do that. But anyway, he’s spoken at over 750 conferences in 20 countries. He’s, for the last 30 years, he’s been all over the world, training up young adults and business owners. And here’s the thing, as long as your organization has a job-creation mission, and covers, you know, his reasonable expenses, Dennis gives himself to people. That’s very unusual, very unusual. So, you know, if you have that mission, you know, take him up on, you know, contact him at least, right. And when he’s not doing that, you can find him hiking tall mountains, eating chicken wings taking, is it Kaqun baths?. It’s spelled K-a-q-u-n but it’s pronounced “cocoon” so taking Kaqun oxygen baths. And if you’re like me, before I read that I ,had no idea what a Kaqun oxygen bath was, so I looked it up and watched some videos for the very first time today, Dennis, and I definitely want to get into that because it’s something I’m not acquainted with. But it feels like it’s one of those things that’s kind of like, you know, the sauna, the cold plunge, the type of thing that really is different maybe for a lot of people, but it wakes you up and opens your mind to something you wouldn’t ordinarily have, is how I’m going to say it and then you can say it better.

Dennis Yu  04:38

Just what organ uses the most oxygen? Your brain, your brain is number one, how about number two? Your heart, your heart, right? And so if you get more oxygen to your brain, you’re going to think better, you’re going to be more alert. You don’t need caffeine. And so I’ve moved to Vegas because I wanted to do these Kaqun baths. I did three of them yesterday. Every time I’m in Vegas. I do like to have them every day, I do zoom calls from inside the bath, and people say, are you going to the bathroom? Like no, I’m taking an oxygen bath.

Mike Malatesta  05:08

So as long as we’ve opened that door, I usually go to the “How’d It Happen,” but as long as we’ve opened that door, it’s oxygen infused water as I understand it, but your personal experience, what is it? What does it do for you, tell me why.

Dennis Yu  05:24

Long story short, I met the founder, Dr. Lyons. Dr. Lyons created this technology 22 years ago as a physiologist, and he found that getting oxygen into the body, not my breathing it through the Krebs Cycle and Redox Reaction, but physically forcing the oxygen through tissue could help the body, the immune system, the mitochondria, help the body heal itself. And I didn’t really believe any of that. So I spent 1000’s of hours researching this. I talked to doctors, I talked to other patients, I flew around the world. I was with the Queen in Malaysia. You ever been the Malaysian? Like a weird Muslim country. There’s a few of these countries where they’re basically like dictator countries where they’re technically a democracy. But there’s a few people who just own everything.

Dennis Yu  06:14

So imagine, have you ever met leaders from another country, like sitting presidents and kings and queens? I got to meet the Queen, and I got to meet these leaders of other countries because the queen, she had a stroke. And she wasn’t able to walk or talk, all the doctors weren’t able to do anything about it. But she did this treatment. And six months later, she had this miraculous recovery. So he invited all these other kings and queens from other countries in Southeast Asia and Africa, to this party to celebrate, and I was there for a whole week, because I was a friend of Dr. Lyon’s. And I got to meet all these really incredible people. I met the guy who owns the coconut processing plants. It was Richard Ling, and he had stage-four lung cancer. And he was able to go through — I’ve met a bunch of people who were billionaires, I wasn’t doing this treatment to meet billionaires. But I met a bunch of really successful people, where they were given the prognosis of ‘you have three months left, you need to wrap up everything.’ And then a lot of these folks came through with flying colors. And they wanted to understand what it was. So I’m not the kind of person who goes out there and promotes other people’s stuff unless I know about it. But my mom got diagnosed with stage-four ovarian cancer a couple years ago, she’s 80 years old. And I sent her to the baths in Vegas, they have them in Asia and other all over Europe, but to Vegas, take these baths and she’s drinking the water as well. And she’s been in remission for 18 months. So, I make no money on this. I have no ownership, I spent six figures, just sending my friends to these baths, I shipped water to my friends. In fact, Mike, I’m going to ship you some of this oxygen water, drink one bottle a day. And I think that, you know, if you’re a busy entrepreneur, and you’re tired, you want every advantage you can get. So take the cold plunge, you know, do your lip liposomal vitamin C, do your you know, gene expression, epigenetic testing, do all the things that you do, but try to get more oxygen in your system too.

Mike Malatesta  08:12

So describe the experience. You mentioned the tub, and you mentioned that you know the water but yeah, how long are you in there? What are you doing? What’s it like?

Dennis Yu  08:21

So the protocol is they give you your own room, because I was thinking, Oh, we should just have a party like a hot tub. And all of us can get in there like No, no, no, don’t do that. Because when you’re in there, and the toxins are coming out of your body, because when your immune system is stronger, all sorts of nasty things will come out of your body, you don’t want to be in the same water as your friend, you get your own tub for 50 minutes, and you just sit there it’s like a Jacuzzi. It’s not a float tank. It’s not, you know, cryotherapy, or one of those. It’s not, you know, kangen pH alkaline water. It’s oxygen, water, and it’s at 99 degrees. So it’s one degree above regular body temperature because it opens your pores. And that makes it easy for the oxygen to come in. Because when you sweat, the pores open, then it comes in. And people ask well, how does it feel you have to try it to see I’ve had hundreds of my friends go through it. Some of my friends are very sick. And they’ve had reactions like flu like symptoms, because their body just can’t handle it. If you’re, for example, on organ rejection medication, you shouldn’t do this. Because when you’re fighting organ rejection, the organ rejection medication is takes your immune system down. And Kaqun is taking your immune system up. So it’s fighting. So your body doesn’t like that. If you have Crohn’s or a couple other, you could still do it. But it might be tougher, because you might break out. So I’m not saying this happens all the time. But I’ve seen friends of mine have different reactions, the majority of my friends, like 95 plus percent are entrepreneurs. They’re athletes. They’re like 95% in terms of like wellness and they’re like doing testosterone replacement therapy. They’re like doing everything to try to and so those people when they emerge from the bath, they feel energized, because two things are happening. One is that when your mitochondria are getting more oxygen, the immune system starts to work and starts flushing out the toxins. So your body gets tired slightly because your body’s going to work flushing out toxins. But because you have the extra oxygen, your brain, your focus, like this is what I do before I get on a zoom call, this is what I do before I speak. Because what I do before I have an important negotiation, is I’ll drink a ton of this water, right? Because it just, if you’ve ever been to an oxygen bar, have you ever done like a hyperbaric chamber. So you know, that light, that very light head rush that you get like right up here in the top of your forehead, you get, you get a little bit of that. So people who are very sensitive to oxygen, they recognize the effect, even if you drink just a cup of the water. Okay, so this is my hack, I got a bunch of friends who are very successful entrepreneurs. And at my cost, I ship them water every week. I think it’d be made illegal because it does the equivalent of blood doping. So I was just gonna say, for two hours, and that only lasts for two, well, two and a half hours, your oxygen level’s elevated and then it starts to go back down. But I don’t see how the NCAA or the Olympics are going to be able to rule this as being illegal because you’re not injecting anything. You’re not taking other chemicals. It’s just oxygen.

Mike Malatesta  11:25

Yeah, so it’s a natural. Yeah.

Dennis Yu  11:27

So if you come out to Vegas, or you go to any of the facilities, before you go in the bath, I’d recommend that you get hooked up to one of these sensors. And it’ll measure your tissue level oxygen, so you know that the thing you put on your finger, which is a pulse ox, a pulse ox, that’s your blood level oxygen. But if you measure your tissue level oxygen, you know, instead of being like a 95, it might be like a 32. And if you have a tumor, it might be like a three, right? So what I want you to do is go to one of the facilities get an oxygen test. And it literally will tell you right away, they have a little sensor thing and they have to buy these machines from Germany. And then drink a full cup of water. And within two or three minutes, you will see your oxygen levels climb. And it’s crazy. And then you’d like I’ve done this before because it’s so much fun. Like here, I’m drinking some San Pellegrino. So I’ll take the sensor and I’ll stick it in the San Pellegrino. Then I’ll stick it in a cup of tap water. And then I’ll stick it in the Kaqun water and you’ll see the number just jump, you’ll see it go back down. It’s just super cool to see as you do this. I’ll tell you one last thing, I don’t want to geek out.

Mike Malatesta  12:31

Just geek out, man. I’m learning.

Dennis Yu  12:35

You know, when people have type two diabetes, and they lose circulation, eventually they just start like cutting off your ankle and knee and pretty soon it’s horrible. Those people eventually die because there’s you know, you can’t cut anymore at a certain point, right? Because you lose your circulation. Do you know how the hospitals determine where to draw the line on amputating? Let’s say we’re going to amputate below the knee. Right? How do they how do they draw that line? And when they’re going to amputate?

Mike Malatesta  13:01

I’m gonna just flat-out guess that it’s they take that oxygen level in your tissue.

Dennis Yu  13:07

Yep, that’s how they measure it. But you could also see it as well, because the tissue that turns dark is not getting circulation. Think about all the things, Mike, in the last three years, all the things that have come out about health, and health is a much broader spectrum than just pills and surgery. Right? I mean, for sure if you had a car accident, okay, they need to do like surgery or whatever. But there’s so much health that is not in traditional Western medicine. I’m not saying it’s, it’s one or the other. We need both. And that’s what functional medicine is. It’s, you know, how do we bring together, you know, Eastern/Western medicine and all this science. It’s not like voodoo and chakras and prayer. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with prayer. But there’s real medical science that has proven that out and I’m not one of those like Big Pharma conspiracy people, but there’s a lot of stuff that people don’t know about being healthier.

Mike Malatesta  14:06

Like I’m reading Tony Robbins book Lifeforce is Fantastic. Is that lifeforce? Did he write that with Peter Diamandis? I think I did. Yeah. Okay. So okay, there you have it, folks, Kaqun baths, so when you go to Vegas, it’s not all about just taking toxins in.

Dennis Yu  14:26

I actually abuse it because a lot of people will come in on Sunday morning and take a bath. So some people do a vitamin C infusion where you know, you’d like a Myers cocktail, like the morning, you know, after the hangover kind of thing. And they do have vitamin C, they have the IV infusions, they have hyperbaric chambers. And there are a lot of people taking bouts on Sunday because they went out a little bit hard the night before, and it will help. But a lot of people that are going there are going there on a regular basis. They’re flying in because they’re entrepreneurs and they bring their family, or they stay there for a week because they have a wellness retreat. So it’s not just one of those things that you do once in a while, and there’s a lot of people that have late-stage cancer, and it’s very serious. So they’re there. They’re doing three baths a day, on the cycles of 14 days, on 14 days, on 10 days, off 14 days on until they’re in remission.

Mike Malatesta  15:15

And you haven’t seen that, you know, the medications that they’re on being impacted negatively? You had mentioned that earlier.

Dennis Yu  15:26

My mom, she had ovarian cancer. And so she went through nine rounds of chemo. And so we’re not saying stop chemo, stop radiation, don’t do surgery. We’re not saying that. We’re saying that it isn’t an adjuvant. So you do it in addition, so you know what happens when people do chemo? They get weaker, their hair falls out. All these sorts of, they turn pale, they get anemic because it is killing your cells. So what causes a lot of people, I’m not an oncologists, I’m not a doctor, so don’t sue me. But a lot of cancer patients they are physically not strong enough to continue to do the chemo. And that’s when they just That’s it. They die. Right? Yeah. Like with my mom. She was doing the chemo. And she was doing the baths and drinking the water. And you know, most chemo patients, they do the chemo, and then they just, they’re flat-out spent, they can’t go anywhere, right? They just have to lay down because it just took everything out of them. Right? Yeah, my mom’s 80 years old. She goes in, does the chemo, and then she’s out running errands. She’s in the backyard cutting down fruit trees with a chainsaw. She’s doing all this kind of stuff while she’s on chemo. Because she’s not losing any of her energy.

Mike Malatesta  16:43

All right, well, I gotta be like your mom. I gotta get into one of these..

Dennis Yu  16:48

From from now on until, you and I, we just have to stay alive another 20 or 30 years until this new technology comes in, which is another whole discussion. But send me your mailing address, and I will ship you at my own cost as much water as you want. My cost. I never want you to pay a dime. That’s my promise difference.

Mike Malatesta  17:08

Can you tell me? I mean, you already sent me socks. You really don’t need.

Dennis Yu  17:12

Socks are fun. But how about, you know? How about a Mike Malatesta? That’s 10 years younger?

Mike Malatesta  17:17

Yeah. The world needs that. I think for sure. Yeah.

Dennis Yu  17:21

I want good people to live longer. I’m selfish. Yeah.

Mike Malatesta  17:23

Thank you. So am I. “How getting selfish got me unstuck.” It’s the subtitle of my book. So 20 minutes in, I’ll finish up. Dennis knows a little bit of what he’s talking about. Because he’s been a college-level athlete at SMU, completed over 20 marathons, including a 70-mile ultra-marathon. And you can find Dennis everywhere. He is very easy to find, Dennis Yu. But otherwise, Dennis, I start every podcast, usually, with this question. How’d it happen for you?

Dennis Yu  18:17

Well, for me, nothing ever. I mean, it wasn’t like this one magical moment where the clouds opened and the angels, you know, sung and the light came down. I had a mentor 30 years ago, who was the CEO of American Airlines. And he said, You’re a bright young boy, your smile is so good. You could probably sell toothpaste, but you don’t understand about how to build relationships, and how to scale businesses and how to operate. Because I was one of those Asian kids that would, I would you know, I had a near perfect fit. I was good at math. I did all these things. But I didn’t have basic interpersonal skills. I was what was called a paper tiger. Have you heard of that? Someone who’s really good at turning in papers and doing tests. But when it comes to the real world, they just don’t know how to relate. They don’t know how to behave at a dinner for example, right? And so Al Casey, who is the CEO that put in place Bob Crandall, who was probably the most notorious CEO of all time, he taught me about how he scaled multiple businesses. He scaled American Airlines, back in the CR Smith days to what it is today. And he ran, he was the Postmaster General, so he had 200,000 employees driving around mail carts and things like that. He ran the resolution trustee, he had a bunch of businesses that have over 100,000 employees. And I remember asking him one time. So actually, I was I was at lunch. It was Al Casey, Dick Haney who’s the chairman of Allstate Insurance, and me. We were at lunch, and Dick Haney, you know running Allstate Insurance, I mean, they’re also 100,000 employees as well. And what is it about that? How does someone like that get to the very top versus Just be like a manager or regional director. And so I said, “How do you get to the very top like that,” and I put my hands like this in a pyramid. And he took my hands, and he flipped them up, and he said, Son, I sit at the bottom. I’m a servant leader, the 200,000 employees I have, and their family members, if you count all that, that’s like a million-something people, all of them depend upon me for their livelihood to make the right decision when to raise the price of the stamp by a penny. And so when you’re a servant leader, and you’re an entrepreneur, for example, then, you know, it’s like the whole like the leaders eat last thing, if you’re an asshole, people are not going to want to join your team. I had this mindset. And the reason why they they told this to me was I said, Well, in order for me to ascend the corporate ladder, because I was gonna go to Goldman Sachs, right? And just because my, on my mom’s side, there’s a lot of my family members or you know, investment banking, and I thought it’d be this ruthless, ruthless thing, like you see in the movies, where people are constantly trying to, like, beat other people out to advance and do cutthroat kinds of things. And they said, no, no, no. And these are two of the most successful people ever in the world of business. He said, No, no, no. I know, in the movies, and in middle mat, you know, management and corporate America, that’s the idea. But if you’re an entrepreneur and you own a business, you have to be a nice guy. And you have to have systems to create opportunities for other people to advance. Because people who are really good they, they could work anywhere that they want, and they may have to quit an existing job to come work for you. And so I was like, God, it makes so much sense because Dick Haney was one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. And I thought, how can this guy who’s so nice, be the chairman of Allstate Insurance? I mean, cuz, I mean, wouldn’t you expect that the guy at the very top is like the most ruthless, most savage guy with like, the biggest muscles?

Mike Malatesta  21:46

Yeah, like I’ll run over everybody to get what I want.

Dennis Yu  21:49

Like the Always-Be-Closing Alec Baldwin or whatever.

Mike Malatesta  21:53

Glengarry Glen Ross. Yeah, nice reference.

Dennis Yu  21:56

I thought the CEO is gonna be like this dude who’s on stage, and he’s wearing a nice suit. And he’s just like, really tough and snappy. And Elon Musk’s super God, whatever. And then I realized, Wait, I’ve met a bunch of these CEOs, and they’re the nicest humblest people. And minutes ago, or 20 minutes ago, I was with Darrell Isaacs, Darrell Isaac’s has done a couple billion dollars as a personal injury attorney. He’s the nicest guy on the planet. So anyway, that’s what got me going. That’s what shifted my mindset. And then I thought, wait a minute. So my growth happens only when I help other people first, which I know for like you is something you already know instinctively, because you grew your trash business and sold it. Because you took care of other people. And that’s how they did good work for you. Customer service, right. But I didn’t know that, I was just this Chinese mathematician kind of guy. I didn’t understand the aspect of human personality and behavior and relationships. So I was doing things like tutoring. I was known as like the guy if you had a math or a calculus exam tomorrow, when I was at SMU undergrad, I was known as the guy that you go to, like, Dennis is the guy like, you’ve got a paper due tomorrow. Dennis is the guy. But I was just one guy. I mean, I charged $500 for a couple hours, because I was good. But how do I scale that, there’s so many other people that need help. And I had a friend, John Jonas, who started online.ph jobs in the Philippines. And since then, he’s grown that to be the world’s largest site for virtual assistants. There’s 2 million VAs on that site. And a couple other friends of mine, they started this site called Fiverr. And Fiverr is where six and a half million people are doing all sorts of random tasks. And I started doing training for Fiverr for online jobs.ph. I started working at Yahoo just over 20 years ago. And I was training, I would like this whole thing was around in order for us to grow Yahoo was a search engine. In order for us to grow any other company that I was able to work with, it was actually a training issue. It wasn’t a “how do you acquire new customers” issue, it was “our ability to grow and service was based on our ability to deliver value.” And based on SOPs, you can break down the value into incremental tasks. So when I look at where we are today, where we’ve created a quarter million jobs across a whole series of industries, I break it down to individual tasks, like can you edit a one-minute video, using our tool D script, and be able to push that out to a podcast, push out to YouTube? Push it to Facebook, Twitter, whatever it is, can you do that? That’s worth $5. Right? So let’s say this, this podcast, “How’d It Happen?” And let’s say it’s an hour-long podcast, a VA could take this and transcribe it and clean up the sound and put in a bumper and add these different effects and pull out the highlights and write an article from it and create other kinds of content from that. And that’s worth $5, right? So the more content we can process, for example, the more value you were creating, and therefore the more money we can make. So, Mike, I had this wrongheaded idea 30 years ago, that, you know, because I want to be a millionaire, right. And because I’m a millionaire, I can buy a Ferrari or whatever it is, Lamborghini, that’s what they want today. But then I didn’t realize, wait a minute, the way I create value, the way I get value from me is, so if I want to be a millionaire, I’ve got to create $100 million of value. If I want to be a billionaire, I’ve got to create $100 billion of value. So where can I create value? For example, I know how to run Facebook ads, I know how to build websites, I know how to do whatever, can I package it up, and then turn it into training that other people in the Philippines, Pakistan, Kosovo, India, and a few other places where we have these relationships with the universities in the countries where we can train those people up. And they can do many versions of what I do, just for five bucks a pop, right, because you have me edit this podcast, I mean, I wouldn’t even do it, but I would charge you $10,000 to do that. Because it’s, you know, an hour or two of my time I’m, it’s I’m not going to do that for $5. But someone else who goes to our training, they can do that. And they can make $5 You know how much life changing money is in Pakistan per month, how much money you have to make per month, life changing money,

Mike Malatesta  26:16

how much less than 100?

Dennis Yu  26:19

Well, they’re making 80 to 100. But in order to live, I mean, I’m not saying like live like a king. But to be able to have a good middle class income, maybe have a servant, you know, be able to take care of a family $500 a month, 500 $500 a month is three bucks an hour. So what we’ve been guaranteeing, and this has been working really well. And I hope to scale it even further in other countries is these virtual assistants these people in I won’t call them third world countries, developing countries, if they can go through our training get qualified, we guarantee them a job at $3 an hour. And then us as American business owners, we have doctors, lawyers, real estate agents, garage door repair people, mortgage brokers, dentists, that want to hire someone from our program to be able to build their website or make them rank better on Google or do their social media or process their podcast or transcribe their thing into a book or like whatever it is. So now we have this thing we call the 1000 tasks library. And it’s 1000 tasks, where each task should take about 15 minutes. And that means the task is worth about $1. So we can pay $1 per micro task and we can sell that task for a couple dollars. So we’re able to make money and create jobs. It’s kind of like what Uber has done for cars, but we’re doing it for marketing. Okay,

Mike Malatesta  27:38

so let me get into a couple of things here and then get right back to that. Because you set the stage really well. First of all, I want to go back to owl and American Airlines. You came out of SMU I’m assuming directly into that job or was there another place you stopped first?

Dennis Yu  27:54

I went to the London School of Economics.

Mike Malatesta  27:57

Okay. And where did you grow up? Dennis? I don’t think I’ve asked you that.

Dennis Yu  28:01

La but I was born in Ohio. So I’m an American just like everyone else. You’re

Mike Malatesta  28:06

a Midwestern er, look at you. Yeah. So when you so you out of graduate school, you got a job at American Airlines. And you happen to as part of this job you happen to, you know, be close to owl is what you said, right? And this whole thing about? Not, you know, being good with relationships being a paper, paper tiger was that just because you actually mentioned that you’re related to you know, not not having good dinner manners or not knowing you know, how to eat Did you were you aware of that? I guess were You were you aware of I had?

Dennis Yu  28:53

I had complete ignorance. I had Dunning Kruger I mean, I knew so what I thought. So when I was six, I didn’t speak English. And I was made fun of by all these other kids, you can imagine how mean these kids were and I was put in the class for the retarded children because they thought I was retarded. And I just thought, you know, I’m, I’m kind of mad at these other kids from making fun of me, because I know I’m not stupid. But I’m also kind of jealous because all of them are hanging out. And they’re playing dodgeball during recess, and I’m sitting by myself, and they seem like they’re having fun, and they’re trading cookies at lunch. And they’re just and I’m just a loser. And I just and I thought you know what, these people maybe it’s because they’re American. It’s because I’m Chinese and I’m just down they’ll never accept me because I you know, I’ve slanty eyes or maybe it’s because they have charisma and charisma is something that you’re born with. And I just don’t have it, you know, just like if you’re tall or not tall, like you know, you weren’t born tall, so Okay. So I just thought like being able to relate to other people, being able to speak on stage, being able to communicate clearly was something you either had it or you didn’t.

Mike Malatesta  29:55

Okay, so you can you basically convince yourself that you didn’t have it and perhaps needed it?

Dennis Yu  30:01

Yeah, I thought you know what, screw these people. They’re watching TV and having a good time and talking about what happened on Friends or whatever the thing is, I’m visiting the library reading books, because I’m getting ahead of them. I’m gaining more knowledge. And me as a 14-year-old, I figure, I actually had to stop multiple times. This is how crazy I was. But just imagine like, if you were me, like 30-some years ago, and I thought, I can’t imagine there’s another 14-year-old, that has studied as many books and done as many math problems as me. Because physically wouldn’t have been any more time I had no friends. I just spent time in the library I was studying. I was doing calculus when I was eight years old. I just wanted to get so far ahead while these other kids were having fun and watching TV. And, you know, going to the football game, I did not I had no entertainment. I thought you know what, those people are just wasting time. I’m getting it. I’m just gonna keep accumulating more knowledge and I’m just gonna blow them out of the water on test scores. In fact, that was when I decided like in sixth grade or so, because they you know, people made fun of me for not speaking English, and I was a loser and I was an introvert too, which made it worse. And I was a little chubby, so no one wants to hang out with me. I wasn’t cool in any way. My parents bought clothes from Kmart that didn’t fit me there on the discount aisle. But I like everything stacked against me. But I said you know what? Screw these kids. I’m going to speak English better than them. And so I studied the English dictionary, the Oxford unabridged dictionary for a couple hours every day. And I studied and studied, and I eventually made it to the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee in Washington, DC, and I represented California in 1988. The spelling bee is a way of like, I’m going to show you guys I can speak English. You know, how dare you make fun of me. I’m going to speak English better than all you guys.

Mike Malatesta  31:45

And you remember what word you didn’t know? You didn’t win it. So what word didn’t you know?

Dennis Yu  31:50

When I went to the quarterfinals, it was cynodont. That was what I got out on.

Mike Malatesta  31:55

Cynodont. Yeah. Is it s-y?

Dennis Yu  32:01

No, and the minute you misspell you can’t You’re out? Yeah, it’s a dinosaur tooth. So let’s c-y-n-o-d-o-n-t, and I missed it. I just missed the T. Because I was thinking like this Mastodon, so I spelled that “cyn-o-don.”

Mike Malatesta  32:18

That’s so funny because I had it spelled right. Except for the C. I knew it was a C or an S. But I guessed wrong.

Dennis Yu  32:25

Imagine that you’re a kid, you’re in eighth grade. You’re there. It’s this huge auditorium. And off on the side here like glaring at you are all these lights. And there’s 50 Teens, right. And you know, like one goof up and you’re out? Yeah. And each time you’re wearing a placard around your thing with your number and where you’re from. And it was just so horrendous. I just couldn’t even deal with the pressure. And I thought, Man, I don’t, I would never want to do public speaking. I can’t even spell one word, how am I going to give a speech?

Mike Malatesta  32:57

And how was it afterwards? Like, did you feel relief? And did you feel like, oh, I can do this? Or were you like, I’m never doing that again?

Dennis Yu  33:07

Well, I mean, I have success. I kind of wanted to win, but then there’s hundreds of kids. So you know, and they’re all smart. And some of these, you know, like, it’s just really tough. But I didn’t get out in the early rounds. I mean, that would have lost and imagined, like your first word, you get out on that? That would just be rushing, you flew all the way out to DC, your parents and all these other people. Like I didn’t have any friends. So I didn’t have pressure of like friends asking me, so how’d you do? You know? But it got me thinking, you know, I think it was net positive, because I thought you know what, I studied really hard. I prepared really hard. I did Okay, maybe if I studied a little bit more, maybe if I was luckier, because some of the kids that made it all the way that they didn’t like some of the words were so hard, and thank goodness, I didn’t get that word.

Mike Malatesta  33:52

Oh, right. Yeah, because you hear like some words.

Dennis Yu  33:55

I think it’s sort of like lucky in a way if you could just make it there. I think you’re right. It made me feel that you know, I think I can achieve, I think I can achieve in America. Because even though there is some luck, it ultimately is a meritocracy, where if you achieve in you can do the thing you will win and in other countries you don’t have that opportunity. Right.

Mike Malatesta  34:18

Well, congratulations on that. That’s amazing. And you also mentioned that you’ve created a quarter, helped create a quarter million jobs so far, and I as I said in your bio, a million-plus is your mission. When you tally those jobs, what are they all VA jobs? Are that any? How do you, I guess I just want to make sure I understand how you build that number.

Dennis Yu  34:42

The majority of those are VA jobs. And they’re from the Philippines and with our friend, John Jonas, who created online jobs.ph, But we also train a lot of agencies through the Videasta, through a digital marketer ,through Josh Nelson’s Seven Figure Agency Yeah, we’ve done training together with Instagram, with GoDaddy with Fiverr. A lot of these organizations. And so we’re, we’re tracking how many people are taking these courses, how many people are getting certified, how many virtual assistants are getting hired, but it’s mainly virtual assistants. But, you know, for agencies to grow, our ratio is like for every four virtual assistants that we hire from the Philippines or Pakistan or other places, you typically need one more person in the US. So as we see agencies in the United States scale, that means they have to hire more VAs to do the work, not because the VAs are cheaper, not because we’re not, you know, American, and we want to hire American, it’s that when you have a virtual assistant, they stay in that role. So, if we hire someone in the US, like, let’s say some college dropout, to be a video editor, how likely, Mike, are they going to stay a video editor six months from now, once they’ve learned how to edit basic videos, right? They don’t stay, they start their own agency, they want to do something else. And so that investment that you made in training up that American goes poof, and it wasn’t because, we’re not hiring VAs because they’re cheaper. We’re hiring them because they are loyal, and they stay in that role.

Mike Malatesta  36:12

Plus, as I understand it, you’re hiring different VAs for different, you know, tasks or whatever, you’re hiring one person who has one particular skill set, right? And then you’re flexing right? Because as you need more help, you can, like you said, the agency if I hire someone new, that might mean for do VAs because that person brings a skill set, and then it’s complemented by the VAs, right? And then when you lose a project or something, you’re not like, Oh, I gotta go lay this full-time person off and have that difficult conversation or whatever, you can just flex down if I’m getting it, right.

Dennis Yu  36:53

Yeah, we can. But what we’d like to do is dedicate a VA, so if a VA is okay, it’s not a project basis, they’re there in a role. So I say that projects cost you money. And processes make you money. And the companies we were working with, they’re all in growth mode. So none of the companies are laying people off. Oh I mean, we lose, you know, agencies will lose clients as part of natural churn. But the typical churn that we see is five to 10% a year on the digital agencies that we coach, because they focus on a particular vertical, they just do dentists, they just do garage door companies, they just do whatever it is. And so it’s repeatable, general agencies or social media agencies, or PR agencies, you know, what the average churn rate is for the average social media agency? 300%.

Mike Malatesta  37:40

It’s got to be high.Yeah, I wasn’t sure if it would be that high or not. But I know, I knew it had to be high, because it feels to me, and with my own experience, that there’s a lot of people who say they can do it, but the needle doesn’t move. And then you’re like, Do I really want to be spending, you know, X number of dollars a month and more. I mean, yeah, I get posts, but it’s nothing, you know, I don’t get sales, right. You really want sales.

Dennis Yu  38:07

It’s just a cost. Yeah. So imagine we put measurement in place. So we can see inside your Google business profile, which used to be called GMB. How many phone calls you  getting? How many times people that come into the website, how many of those turn into leads, how many of those turn into clients, and we can tell and then if we start doing these social media things, like making posts, and running ads, and we can say we’re spending this much on making posts and doing ads and regenerating this many new calls, which turned into this many clients. Now they can see the ROI of this. But in order to put in place that system, one VA or one freelancer or one person you hire on Fiverr, isn’t gonna be able to do that. You can have the best workers in the world. But if you don’t have that overall process for them to be working within, then everything you have is just a cost or it’s just a big black box. You’re throwing money into the black box, you have no idea what’s actually happening.

Mike Malatesta  38:57

Or it’s disconnected, right? You got people doing different things, but there’s no strategic connected plan.

Dennis Yu  39:05

Yeah, so we put measurement first. We measure everything. Before we do anything we measure. It’s like the doctor has to do the X ray and MRI before they do the surgery. And we want to make that completely free to every business owner.

Mike Malatesta  39:17

Okay, can we walk through an example. So I’m part owner now in a landscape supply business. We sell material to landscapers. Business has been around for 75-plus years. It’s got a well-known name, good yard, all that stuff.

Dennis Yu  39:46

You want to do a five-minute audit where we actually break it down based on your actual stats. Yeah, I’m going to share my screen. What’s the name of the business?

Mike Malatesta  39:56

So it’s, it’s called Full Cycle Enterprises. Okay, we don’t have our new website up. So it’s directed to the existing website. So here’s where we’re starting right now, we’ve got to build in the background. But this is where we are right now.

Dennis Yu  40:19

This is an old website, I can tell, because it doesn’t do well on mobile, right? Because I can view the developer tools. And I can this is in Chrome. So I can look at it as an iPad, I can look at an iPhone, whatever, 12. Right.

Mike Malatesta  40:36

You can do that. That’s cool. Developer Tools.

Dennis Yu  40:40

Yeah, then then I’ll come to the timeline. And I’m going to reload it. And what I’m going to see is that this site is heavy, because the images aren’t optimized whatnot. You can see down here at the bottom and note small it says 120 requests. Yeah, I see that. So this payload is 4.4 megabytes. And full load is 10.9. It takes three seconds. But it’s when a web page loads, it’s not just the web page, there’s 120 things that have to happen to be able to load the web page. Okay. So when we look at this page in a little bit more detail, Google has a tool they call PageSpeed Insights. So they give us a mobile score, and they give us a desktop score, I’ll bet your mobile scores 35, and your desktop scores of 50 is my guess, maybe slightly higher? I don’t know. Just, that’s just my rough guess. And that looks like you put this on Squarespace.

Mike Malatesta  41:27

It was yes,

Dennis Yu  41:31

Google’s going to give us a score. And this is not my score. This is Google score. So if you want to rank in Google, you have to go by Google score. And all the people that build websites want to argue with me about this, but here’s what it is, okay, actually you scored a 19 on mobile, and they tell us why, all the things are wrong. And I told you, right, these things, JavaScript to make the images, right. And you can see the timeline of the load desktop, I’m gonna guess you are slightly higher, 76. And there’s lots of other things that we can do. On looking at this site. This looks like a very thin site, where there’s just a few, it’s basically a brochure site. But let’s take a look at it from an SEO standpoint and see, the site’s got a DR .2, it really should be like 20 or 30. And so you rank on 53 keywords, you know, what keywords you rank on in the first 100 positions, meaning the first 10 pages, you rank and position one for Del Sievert Trucking. You rank the position 11 on traffic bond. Interesting. Topsoil Milwaukee. And looks like the city names. Mulch delivering Milwaukee, you’re in position 30. You see that? Okay. You know the joke, Where do you hide a dead body?

Mike Malatesta  42:44

Yeah, second page of Google.

Dennis Yu  42:46

So anything 11 or higher doesn’t count. See? So Topsoil Waukesha. It’s crazy. I don’t even know where some of these cities are, Madison. So you have all these city names plus soil, trucking, what you know these things. And so some of them, like Topsoil Milwaukee, there’s 150 people a month that are searching on that you see that? You’re getting four. So then the question is of the four, how many of those are turning into customers, right? Are they repeat? Who are these landscaping companies? Now, I can’t tell from looking at the site here because I don’t have your analytics. But I can tell you that you don’t have any analytics here. You don’t have Google Analytics. I’m using Tag Assistant, you don’t have Tag Manager, you don’t have pixels in place, you’re missing Facebook’s pixel, you basically have no tracking on this site. So you have no idea where the traffic is coming from. I can tell you have no idea. Okay, you can’t fool an analytics person. This is what I do for a living. Okay, so let’s see what your site is built with. Okay, well, it’s based on Squarespace and you have a couple of these other things. But let’s take a look at what Google has to say. Okay, so I’m going to do a bunch of these different searches. So the first one I’m doing is a site colon search. And Google says there’s 21 pages on your website. And here they are. And so you have almost nothing on your website, which you know, even though technically have a blogging platform called Squarespace, we recommend WordPress for many reasons.

Mike Malatesta  44:21

Yeah. Are you one is in WordPress,

Dennis Yu  44:23

Good. I’m gonna say something harsh might go for. There is no reason really for Google to send anyone to your website. Because it doesn’t have much content; it’s basically a brochure. So like let’s say you have these stone products, okay. Limestone chips and all these different things, clear limestone. I don’t know anything about this, but okay, this is different kinds of like dirt and sand and gravel. Okay. So, okay, well, let’s say I’m looking for half-inch limestone chips. Well, there’s no information about it. All you have is this picture and everything’s off this one page. So what Google is looking for is if someone’s searching for limestone chips Waukesha, Wisconsin, then there should be a page talking about what this is. And there’s just not. It’s all on one page, it needs to be broken out. And it needs to say more stuff about you, more stuff about your customers. And so, the chicken and egg is because you don’t have content here. When I look at the links that you have, you have these 248 links that come from 16 domains. Your site has a DR .2, which is zero. Yeah. Because so that’s like a voting mechanism, it’s the amount of juice that’s being passed between different sites, your juice is so low, because you don’t have high authority and local sites that are linking to you. all the sites that you have linking to you are all directory pages that are no follows. These are directories. So if there’s other contractors that you work with, landscaping companies, maybe write a guest blog post, maybe you honor a favorite restaurant, maybe you talk about a nonprofit you’re part of, like there’s other ways where you need to get other Wisconsin businesses, organizations, nonprofits, whatever to link to you. And so these are the links that you have to you. None of these links carry any authority. Because these are yellow page links you have. Okay, you have a couple of garbagey sorts of links here. Like this one. Christian crest two P J. Six Squarespace. Yeah. So I think someone might have just copied your stuff. I think these this is a spam site. I see. And these are all directory pages. Yeah, these are directory pages. So yeah, super pages. Verizon, it’s all directory pages. So your SEO is garbage, because there’s no one linking to you. But there’s no reason to link to you. Because you have no content on the site. Why would anyone want to link to this?

Mike Malatesta  46:47

Yeah. So let me let me interject here. So for everybody listening, once Dennis made this offer, I did this intentionally because I wanted to do two things. One, I wanted to see him go through it, which I’ve never seen him do before, by the way, which is awesome, how fast he’s going through it. If you’re watching the video, you can see him doing this in real time. I know it’s a little bit more difficult to listen to. But the other reason I did it is because we bought this company because of what it was, and the opportunity to take it somewhere else, including to take the, you know, the marketing to a new place. And as you’re listening, you’re thinking about, just listen to Dennis talk. And you think about well, why would I want to update my website? Or why would I want to do this to attract more attention, I have plenty of attention. Now we’ll look at what he just said. He just went through these tools that are available to anyone I mean, you’re using a ***, but there’s these tools are available to anyone. And now of course you have to know how to use them. But the point is, in five minutes, he basically he basically did a complete analysis of our existing website and said, this is the opportunity. He didn’t say that, but this is the opportunity, you have nothing. You have no traffic, Google’s actually sending nothing. Yeah, it’s factual and it’s n its N It supports. What I was saying is that that’s the opportunity in this business, or at least one of them, right? get noticed. And here are the things. I’m imagining that through your program, you’re going to get connected with people who are able to optimize that site or help you optimize that site. Am I thinking along the right terms? Exactly.

Dennis Yu  48:30

Right. So what’s the difference between a witch doctor versus a modern hospital? The witch doctor is, you know, using lychee boars and voodoo dolls and all that information, not based on any sort of measurement here. When you come into the emergency room and you say, Dennis, I have chest pains, can you give me some heart surgery? Well, we’re going to first scan everything and well, it turns out, Mike, you actually just have heartburn. So we’re not going to do heart surgery, Okay, gotta scan everything. And so in the world of modern marketing, there’s so much, so much data, so many tools that we need to scan, and then we will find particular things with your site, with your business that need to be fixed. And we’re only going to fix the things that are for your site. You would never want to take someone else’s medication, right, or have someone else’s surgery. And a lot of people think well, it’s because, you know, Dennis has access to these magic tools. Do you think surgeons at, you know, Harvard Medical can buy scalpels that we can’t buy? We can go to go to Amazon.com and buy all the same scalpels, all the same, you know, fancy chefs that cook whatever it is, I can buy the same pots and pans, you can buy all the stuff they use; it is in the skill and the process of whoever’s using it. So we’ve done 1000s of these audits. We have a whole course on how to, so all I was doing just now, you’ve never seen it before. I was literally going through our checklist of what we do when we audit a website and then we will find certain things that are wrong and they’re easy to fix. Then it’s like you know what, I’m going to convert my site from SquareSpace to WordPress, I’m gonna have sitewide SSL, I’m going to try to get more reviews for Sievert Trucking, I’m gonna try to get better images, I’m going to record a one-minute video on each of the services, or each of the kinds of gravel that we have. I’m going to talk about how our trucks are different and how we show up on time and how we’re a family-run business and how our whole story, I’m going to do all these different kinds of things. And then when everyone’s following the process, the business owner, and the VAs or the marketing staff, we repeat the measurement again. And we look inside the Google Analytics, and we see how many visits are we getting? Are we ranking better on keywords? How many more calls are we getting that are turning into more jobs, and we’re selling more gravel now? Right? So we can measure, we can repeat the same thing again. And that way, there’s no need to hope and pray. There’s no need for someone to be magic. It’s not like, oh, we need Dennis, because Dennis is magical. Dennis is here, like, No, I’m freaking using the recipe for chocolate chip cookies. And I’m sure, Mike, if you had the same ingredients, and you had the same oven and knife, and whatever mixing thing, you could make the same chocolate chip cookies, right? If you follow the recipe, right? Yeah, that’s all we’re doing. We’re trying to follow the recipe at scale. I mean, you have a great underlying business that you bought, I’m sure these guys are great at, you know, whatever they’re doing with the gravel and delivering it. But the marketing is horrendous. As you know, most business owners, they suck at marketing, you know, they’re good at the thing they do, but they suck at the operations and scaling and the marketing and those sorts of things. Right. So we’ve turned that to a process that we’ve published together with Google, and Fiverr. And all these other guys to say, this is the standard you can choose to do. I mean, you don’t have to hire us. You can hire anyone that you want. We’ll do your scan for free. But you take the output and say, go back to the person who built your website saying, You know what, I got the site audit done. And it pointed out these eight things that are wrong, it said that our website doesn’t load on mobile. Well, what are you going to do about that? Well, you can’t argue because it’s Google’s standards, right?

Mike Malatesta  51:55

Because Google is telling me Yeah, right.

Dennis Yu  51:59

Don’t argue with Google? Right? Don’t kill the messenger. Right? Go to whoever built your website, go to your consultant. Go to like whoever’s supposedly doing all these things for you, and say, what’s up?

Mike Malatesta  52:09

So, people that are listening that have companies, how do they get connected with you? And what’s the reason you did this audit on our site right now live? That was very valuable. But what do people do to want to learn more or want to, you know, well, they want to grow their business and they don’t know how?

Dennis Yu  52:33

Easy, you can Google me, we have audits every month that we do for free to the public, it’s the way we donate. We’ve done this in conjunction with the Small Business Development Centers, which is funded by the government, it’s by the SBA. Okay, so we do this for free. We’ve been doing it for a year and a half. I post that on LinkedIn, and Facebook every month when we do it. And we try to go through every one we can, as you can see, I can do an audit in five minutes. We have other people that are trying to do the audits, there is no charge. There’s no catch. We just want everyone to understand that analytics are important. And you have to measure your business. Like for you. I would have stopped the audit once I realized you didn’t have any analytics, because then I would have said, Well, are you tracking how many phone calls you get? Or people filling out a form requesting that they get some gravel or you know, a new landscaper that wants to be a customer? I would ask you things like what’s the LTV of a landscaper? So let’s say that I’m making stuff up because I have no idea. But let’s say they order gravel? Well, the average landscaper, maybe they order gravel six times a year and on average, you know they they’re with you for five years. So they’re worth $500 to upi, let’s say gravel is 3,000 times however many jobs over the course of lifetimes. They’re worth $100,000 and we’re willing to pay $2,000 to get a new client. Okay, now we have some math we can back into on what’s an acceptable customer acquisition cost. All right. But the math, the math on this has to work before we start doing all these things, right?

Mike Malatesta  53:58

Yeah, of course. Yeah, makes sense.

Dennis Yu  54:02

But most business owners don’t even know the math of how much can they afford to pay for a new customer? Like I don’t know. Okay, well, how much money is a customer worth? $10,000. Okay, well have a new customer. How much money would you pay to get this new customers? Who gives you $10,000? Oh, I pay 1,000. Okay, well then that’s what we’re going to work with.

Mike Malatesta  54:23

Okay, so the first step in learning more is for someone to just go to go to . . .

Dennis Yu  54:29

Yeah, they could reach out to me they could reach out to us, anyone on our team will do these. The audits take five minutes. It’s kind of like our donation that we do for people they can come to my Facebook page. Just Google Dennis Yu, or just message Stephanie@Blitzmetrics.com and say, Hey, I was on Mike Malatesta’s How’d It Happen Podcast, and I want an audit for my business.

Mike Malatesta  54:50

Okay, there you go. There’s an exclusive offer. Stephanie@Blitzmetrics.com Thank you, Dennis, I want to end with this thing that I wrote down when you and I first talked, that has just been a, I don’t know, I guess I’ve just been thinking about ever since. And that is, for entrepreneurs or for leaders you talked about your approach is always honoring other people like your gift to a relationship is to honor the other person. At the beginning, I had my socks on that you had sent me and then we talked about the water and shipping the water. And you had taken me through some relationships that I won’t bring up now, but you know, as examples of how you sort of do that, why is that important to you? Why is that your sort of modus operandi?

Dennis Yu  55:51

Well, first off, from a selfish business standpoint, I’ve discovered that the more you help out other people, the more it comes back at you. So it’s either karma, or the secret, or manifesting or whatever you want to call it, just being good to other people. I don’t know exactly where it’s going to come back. But it comes back in terms of referrals, or just good things happen. And I used to consider it lucky. But in the last few years, I’ve discovered that this is a this is like a mathematical principle, is putting stuff out there, like honoring other people is a good thing. Number two is that I quickly ran out of things to say about how much I knew. And it was just so much better. Like when a friend, a friend of mine just sold his business for half a billion dollars. And I saw the money get wired into his account two weeks ago. And I’m really happy for him. And I’m celebrating, right, and anytime I see a friend, when I see someone else, instead of getting the younger Dennis that was made fun of as a school kid, he’d be jealous of other people, because I felt like that was something that opportunity I didn’t get because they would. But now it’s the abundance mentality. And it’s easier to elevate other people because then I don’t have to come up with things to say. So every day I’m posting things and I see someone has a win or someone’s done something great. Or they’re you know, they bought their house or you know, now they’re able to state some kind of win. And I celebrate that. And I’m like, you know, hey, congratulations, right, and you’ll see all my posts on Facebook and Twitter and whatnot. They’re really just honoring other people. And so I don’t have to carry the burden anymore of trying to be clever or trying to say something new. There’s nothing new I can say. I’m honoring my mentors. I made a post yesterday about how my bike got stolen yesterday morning. And I was sad about that. And then I remember a mentor told me, Dennis, anything, any problem you have, that can be fixed with money. It’s not a problem. It’s an expense. So just don’t have any sort of like, angst over it. It’s an expense. So I went out and bought a new bike yesterday. And I went out on a ride and it was awesome. I had such a good time. And I didn’t have any extra, you know, I needed a new bike anyway. So whoever stole my bike, they got my old bike, right? So instead of like the old Dennis would have gotten all angsty about it. But, you know, I remember what a mentor said. So I wrote a post saying, This is what my mentor told me. You have problems. And you have things that you think are problems, but they’re really just expenses. So that’s an example. I’m just always trying to tie it back to them, and plus, when I tie it back to a mentor, or I tie it back to someone that I’ve learned, like, I love Ray Dalio. He wrote this book called Principles. And I constantly quote him. So instead of like, well, Dennis Yu says this, I’m quoting and this is what Ray Dalio said. So that way, there’s it’s not relying upon my authority. So it’s just way better to honor other people, to quote other people who have done the thing that you want. Because then I never want to be a Dunning Kruger pompous, chest-beating asshole. Where I’m talking about me, me, me and how I know everything. When I was a 22 year old know-it-all. I thought that I could beat anybody because I could study harder, you know, you know, these, like 22-year-old life coach, social media people. Yeah, sure. I never want to be like that. I’m almost 50. And the more I’ve learned, and the further I’ve gone, the more I realize I don’t know, every time I learned one new thing, there’s 10 things I don’t know, I probably buy five books every week. Anytime a friend comes up with a new book or whatever, I just buy. I just one-click Amazon. Right. So it’s just so much easier this way it but I find the further I go, the further you know, if I’m buying five books every week, and I read only one book a week, I’m getting further and further behind.

Mike Malatesta  59:38

You’re honoring the other person anyway. That’s so interesting that you say that because that’s become a phrase that I have no trouble saying to myself or to others now, but before I had a lot of trouble saying that, and I think it’s a good evolution in my life, because I don’t have to know everything. There’s people out there who know what I need to know. So why pretend? Or why even work super, super hard to understand something that someone else can understand for me and help me, at least to the level I need it. Right? So I don’t know. It’s very powerful.

Dennis Yu  1:00:20

Yeah, it’s just easier knowing that you don’t have to be everything to everyone all the time. A lot of people think, oh, Dennis is like so knowledgeable. I’m one of the most ignorant people on the planet. But if I have a question about, you know, how to read an ECG, I know the top doctors that can do that. I know some of the top cardiologists on the planet. And if I have a question about email marketing, I know who to go to. If I have a question about whatever, like, I know who I can call and they will answer the phone. And they will give me an answer right then. But they also know if they have a question about digital marketing or hiring VAs, they can come to me, right? It’s not even fair. Like I used to think that Google was the answer, that you just Google. I mean, yes, you can Google it. But there’s so much garbage out there that I just like to go straight to the source of whoever actually is an expert, who’s actually done the thing that I care about, and they tell me what the answer is, right?

Mike Malatesta  1:01:08

And that’s a great place to leave it, Dennis. Thank you so much. If you want or need, which you probably do, a virtual assistant, check out Dennis Yu. Y-U. Stephanie@Blitzmetrics.com, you can email her and learn more. You’ve seen what he can do. You’ve seen how smart he is. You’ve seen how willing he is to help people and help companies. It’s impressive. It’s been a really great conversation, Dennis and I’m grateful for having had the chance to have it.

Dennis Yu  1:01:43

An honor. My pleasure spending time together and I can’t wait to ship you some water to thank you.